Nashik, renowned for its beautiful surroundings and cool and pleasant climate. This city has a personality of its own due to its mythological, historical, social and cultural importance. Every 12 years, Nashik plays host to the grand Kumbh Mela, the largest religious gathering. More than 100 Million devotees visit the place in Kumbh Mela. Apart from the city of pilgrimage and Vineyards, Nashik is also a well-known education hub having number of good engineering and medical colleges. Presence of core industries such as Mahindra & Mahindra, HAL, Bosch and many more. have also contributed to the growth of the city.

Though the city has not witnessed spectacular growth in IT (Information Technology) sector, 100+ small and medium-sized IT companies are operating in the city.

My name is Sanjeev Mishra and I run a web development company in Nashik, which deals into WordPress plugin development and publishing. Checking the above numbers, I tried to find out the approximate number of web application and mobile application development companies operating in Nashik.

Researching for a year, I realized that the most of the WordPress development companies in Nashik are either involved in Theme/Plugin customization or service based work. There are some good developers as well but they are not focused on WordPress development. I also found the lack of full-fledged WordPress development in the city and it forced me to get things done by hiring people online (either on contract or full-time).

Incidentally, in 2015, Pune WordPress community organized WordCamp Pune. My company was one of the sponsor for the event, Along with Tejaswini Deshpande and Sagar Katarnaware, We went to represent our product. We found many Nashikites with whom we met first time. In virtual world, I was meeting many people related to WordPress but this time, I was amazed to see folks from Nashik who are also related to WordPress.

I met Chinmay Dingore, Chetan Mahale, Harshad Mane and Vishal Deshpande also from Nashik who came to attend WordCamp Pune 2015 event and discussed about the lack of WordPress community in our city.

At that moment, we all realized how important it is to have a community in our beloved city. So we decided to start a meetup group and organize monthly meetups, talk about WordPress, discuss ideas, share our experience and help others who are new to WordPress.

Harshad Mane took initiative and created the meetup group in September 2015 and we scheduled our first meetup.

First Meetup of Nashik WordPress Group happening at Cafe Bliss, Nashik. From Left to Right, Sanjeev, Vishal, Deepak, Chinmay & Harshad

As expected, our first meetup had very few people, Harshad, Chinmay, Deepak, Vishal and Myself. Having coffee, We shared our experience at WordCamp Pune and planned to organize atleast one meetup every month.

Second meetup was about Basics of WordPress. 10+ people attended the session and we met other like minded people Himanshu Dani, Akshay Vinchurkar, Swarup Bagul and Jai Bhagchandani.

Facebook and Twitter helped us to spread word about WordPress community in Nashik. More people started showing interest in the community and they joined the Meetup group.

Since January 2016 the group became more active having more WordPress enthusiasts pitching in. By now we hosted more than 5 meetups on different topics at different places.

As a group, We decided to host WordCamp in Nashik. It was a tough decision as you need to show a very active community and potential sponsors to host WordCamp. Pune and Mumbai WordPress community also helped us in different areas on planning the WordCamp. In meantime we approached few colleges in the city to spread awareness about WordPress and organized workshops. That helped a lot in building a better community and getting new WordPress Enthusiats for the Community.

Finally we have got the approval from WordCamp Central and the event being scheduled for Sunday, October 16, 2016. The call for speaker form is already live and we have reserved some seats for few local speakers as well. If you are interested in speaking on a topic related to WordPress, fill up the form.

With 180+ WordPress lovers in the group, the community is growing day by day. But still there’s much potential in the city and many people are not aware about this group. Through this article, I would appeal everyone to join the meetup group and build even stronger Nashik WordPress community. This platform has helped me a lot in terms of brainstorming and coming up with new ideas, I am sure it will help you in your adventure as well.