 Hello, everyone. Thank you so much for spending your time and coming here. I will be talking about how rejections can make you a better community leader. My name is Ashwin Kumar Uppala. I am a pre-final year undergraduate student from Sydney Institute of Science and Technology, Hyderabad, India. I'm also an intern at AdSign Company. I'm a GitHub Campus expert, a Microsoft Learn Student Ambassador, co-founder of my own student and open source community called Hack Club Hyderabad. In the past 12 months, I have done over 57 global hackathons, winning 12 of them. All of that means I am extremely passionate about open source and student-run open source communities. Now, when I started my journey as a community leader, it was full of rejections. I got rejected in almost every known student leadership program that I applied to. And for the next few minutes, I'm going to talk exactly about how I use those rejections to my own advantage. Now, although I am a student, I want to let everyone know here that this talk is for everyone regardless of who you are and all the trips that I share right now can be applied everywhere. Now, the first thing that comes as a community leader when you're trying to take the first step is applying to programs. And that is one of the biggest hurdles I have seen One of the biggest blockers that restrict people is what others will think about me if I get rejected. So that blocker is the first step they have to cross. This so often prevents them to even get started despite of their talents. So my first advice is apply. Go ahead, apply to those programs. I wasn't prepared for open source summit, honestly, but I simply applied anyway with no expectations whatsoever. So if you want to be a better student leader, go apply for those programs. If you want to inspire your community, go apply for those conferences. If you want to promote a certain open source technology or best practices apply for ambassador programs. All of these programs are amazing and you will never know until you tried. Now, once you have done that, it's all right. If it's your first time, get rejected. At least it is better than regretting of not trying in the first place. I'm not sure if how many of you have been in that place that you procrastinate so much that you regret that oh no, the deadline is over and I missed it. And then you see other folks getting in and then you're like, I wish I had applied before. So it's all right. If you are new to any program or any process, go ahead and apply and get rejected. What happens? What to do after get rejected? Well, here's something that I do. I keep a track of my rejection. So use anything you like sticky notes, hard copies, notepad. I use Notion. Keep a track of your application. It's even better if you keep a record of each responses of how things are going. Once you have a couple of responses, you can then use a bit of statistics to evaluate what is working for you and what is not. Let me give you a bit more example. This is exactly what I do. This is my Notion list. So this is a Kanban style. I hope it is big enough. It is readable enough. So you can see I have not started Open Source Summit Europe application. Something is in progress. Couple of applications has been completed. Some are accepted. Some are rejected. All right. This is pretty straightforward, but it helps me get a clear overview of what's happening around me and what's working out for me and what's not. If I click on any one of them, let's say this summit itself, I have even kept a track of what exactly I submitted in that process. So you could see this in my talk description actually. So this really helps me to know that if the talk is accepted, I'm going in the right direction. If the talk or if the application is rejected, there are some parts that I need to change or improve upon. And that takes me to the last step is take inspiration, but don't copy. Now, if you're keeping track of all the applications, let's say you're trying to apply for multiple conferences. Don't try to put the same answer in every conference. Take inspiration. If it's accepted, how can you reapply that concept, that mindset into the different conference or a different program? Now, there is so much that you can do alone. All right. Keeping track of applications is fine, but it is so much easy when you have extra pair of hands. And this is where feedback comes in. Feedbacks are crucial as they provide you a fresh pair of eyes to your actions and your result. We all are humans and it is natural for us to look at community from our perspective. This is where feedback tells us what the community expects from you and which helps you better understand them. Feedback also saves you a lot of time in identifying the changes that you need to make as a community leader, which often is hard to detect by yourself. For example, you are the lead of your community or you are in a team of your community and someone new joins the community. And they see a couple of documentation and they ask, Hey, I don't understand what's happening here. I'm not here. That is a good feedback saying that your documentation needs some work for new bees or for beginners. So feedback is extremely crucial when you want to improve yourself as a community leader or if you want to improve yourself after getting rejected from a program or any event whatsoever. There are certain instances when you can use feedback. This is pretty crucial for your community growth and your own personal growth. If you're organizing an event, dedicate some time at the end of the event for feedbacks, but not later, not after the event. In that case, the results will plummet. So for example, this talk, and if you're applying to, let's say, some programs, you're applying for some summer of code or some leadership programs, if you get rejected, feel free to ask for feedback. How did I do? What are the things that I can improve upon? Most of the, a lot of programs provide you feedback. For example, GitHub Campus Experts does, MLH Fellowship does, but if not, you can definitely just reach out to the program managers. They would love to give you the feedback because at the end, they just want you to become a better leader. It's also a great idea to have internal feedbacks in your own community team. I do this quite often. I tend to have a one-on-one chat with the own team, making sure that they are comfortable with whatever the work they are doing. After all, it's all voluntary, right? The community is open source. So making sure that if they need any change or not, most of the time, the changes are not required, but it gives the core team a sense that there is someone they can reach out to for any changes that is required in the future. Now, there is a slight thin line between feedback and opinions. If you are new to feedbacks, it is important to realize that it takes a bit of practice, but in simple terms, feedback is someone who has been part of the process, who has been part of the program, and someone who is out of the organization might give you an opinion. So you have to be wise and mindful to absorb what is feedback for you and what is opinion. Now, after all of that is done, make sure to implement that feedback. A lot of folks tend to skip this part, which is the most important aspect of my whole talk here. So keep implementing the feedback. It's usually quite straightforward. And even if you get rejected after that, it's all right. Try again. Incorporate the feedback. I mean, just ask yourself, if you apply for a conference, if you apply for a program, just keep asking yourself, what's the worst that will happen? You're going to get rejected. Nothing more than that. So yeah, with that in mind, I also have created a quick overview of something I called as feedback-driven approach. You can take a photo of this if you want. It's a quick overview of what I just talked about, documenting all the events, everything that you work on, taking a vocational break if it works. Keep track of it. Make sure, keeping track of what's working out for you. These are your strong points. I mean, if it does not work, if you get rejected from a program or if the event goes wrong, these are the pain points that you need to work on to become a better community leader. Now, since we're talking about feedback, I would love to have some. So if you want to connect with me, you can connect on Twitter or GitHub or you can scan this to connect with me on LinkedIn. I would love to have feedback on how I do it, how can I improve and anything like that. Apart from that, since it's a lightning talk, I don't have time for questions, but I'll be around here so you can ask me questions or just reach out on that. That's totally fine if you don't have questions right now. I talked about a lot of programs in such a short time, so these are the resources. The PDF, the PowerPoint is on the schedule, so you can find the link to all of these resources. With that said, this is how you can turn rejections into your own superpower of becoming a better community leader. My name is Ashwin Kumar Upalayan. Thank you so much for coming to my talk.