Summary of Proposal
A working room for people who run local Ethereum communities in India, especially outside the big metros. Four days to compare notes on talent pipelines, campus groups, and the work that keeps open-source culture alive between events.
Motivation and Rationale
Devcon is strong on talks. It is thin on the people who run rooms back home.
Meetup organizers, campus leads, and city operators do the unglamorous work: finding talent in smaller cities, keeping a meetup alive after the first 30 people, turning a student workshop into actual contribution. That work rarely gets a dedicated space. In India it matters more than usual, because a large share of new builders do not come from two or three metros.
A one-off session cannot hold this. The useful part is four days of mapping who does what, solving live problems, and leaving with people you can keep working with.
We have not run a Devcon hub before. We have run local rooms, campus circuits, and multi-city operator work. The format we would bring is the one that already works: short sessions, long open hours, no pitches.
Implementation
Standard Devcon kit is enough.
Optional extras: printed city maps, extra whiteboard material, local network support. No heavy production.
Programming
Leads, by the work they already do:
- Rishav Goyal (Bunny): builder rooms, working introductions, and keeping operator networks useful without turning them into a sales floor
- Punit Pal: campus pipelines and first-time student builders
- Siv Ram Shastri: city community infrastructure that lasts longer than one event
- Rohit Purkait: technical onboarding and workshops that teach people to build
- Anirudh Singh Chouhan: university circuits and multi-city student coordination
- Bhupalam Venkata Datta Sai: standing up a room in a new city and getting people to return
- Madhav Bhola: long conversations between operators that stay useful
Topics:
- How a local meetup survives after month three
- Getting people from smaller cities into real contribution
- Coordinating across cities without one group owning the map
- Running a community when grants are not the plan
- What students need after the first workshop
Day 1. Map the room.
Who runs what, where, in which language, with what problem. One working session on what is breaking locally. Rest of the day open so people can find each other.
Day 2. Campus and first-time builders.
Led by Punit, Anirudh, and Rohit. The gap between a workshop and a contributor. Afternoon reserved for campus leads to bring live problems.
Day 3. City operations.
Led by Siv Ram, Datta Sai, Bunny, and Madhav. How a city room stays alive, how to open a new one, and how operators help each other without a centre. Roundtables, then working time.
Day 4. What leaves Mumbai.
No new theory. Each person writes down one collaboration, one city-to-city link, or one practice they will take home. Short close.
Hours: 9:00–18:00. Mornings structured. Afternoons open on purpose.
Audience
Primary: Indian meetup organizers, campus leads, and grassroots operators from Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities.
Secondary: builders who want to support those rooms without turning them into marketing channels.
Team
Rishav Goyal (Bunny) — X · Site
Runs Web3 Adda, an invite-only builder room across India and APAC. Has spent years putting operators, founders, and working introductions in the same place. Previously COO at CPG Technologies. Founded BGDC. ISB IVI Top 50. Kolkata.
Punit Pal — X · Builder Base
Built Builder Base from zero to 3,500+ members across Delhi NCR, Noida, Kolkata, Indore and more. Lives in campus rooms. Ships tools like PyVax so students can get onchain without waiting for a perfect Solidity class.
Siv Ram Shastri — X · Hyderabad DAO
Co-founded Hyderabad DAO and has been holding that city room open for years. 100+ events. Taught 10,000+ developers. Hyderabad.
Rohit Purkait — X · Web3 Kolkata
Founder of Web3 Kolkata. DevRel who actually teaches. The person you want in the room when a local builder is stuck between “I attended” and “I shipped.”
Anirudh Singh Chouhan — X · HackTour India
Co-founder of HackTour India. 15x hackathon winner who takes Web3 into campuses instead of waiting for campuses to come to Mumbai. Rajasthan.
Bhupalam Venkata Datta Sai — X · 99th Floor
99th Floor operator. Good at opening a city, filling the room, and making people come back. Andhra / Telangana.
Madhav Bhola — X · Desi Crypto Club
Founder of Desi Crypto Club. 350+ conversations hosted. Keeps operator rooms human when they start turning into performances.
This team already runs the rooms the hub is for. It is not a brand invented for Devcon.
The space stays educational. No project pitches, tokens, or company demos. Affiliations stay outside programming.
Languages: English, Hindi, Telugu, Bengali, Rajasthani. Operators can work in the language they actually use.
