AWS Student Community Days are one day, student led conferences, organized by AWS Student Builder Groups (Formerly AWS Cloud Clubs). It is a great way to bringing an AWS conference into your university.
On 16th May 2026 Sri Lanka had it's first AWS Student Community Day at the University of Kelaniya. The event was co-organized by the student builder groups at the University of Kelaniya and Institute of Technology University of Moratuwa. The event had 14 speakers and over 200 student attendees. It was a full day of community building and learning for the students.
I as the Builder Group Leader from the University of Kelaniya created this article to impart my learnings to you, based on my experience in organizing this awesome event on campus.
The approach that me and Naami (The builder group leader from ITUM) took was we first made an organizing committee of student enthusiasts who would like to take part in organizing this event. Based on my past experience hosting events, I learnt that each member in a team needs to know their responsibilities clearly. To ensure this, a document was made laying out the responsibilities of each role before calling in for applications to the organizing committee. In this way every team member was aware of their responsibilities. Once we received the applications, the OC members were selected. The first OC meeting for the exco members (THe VPs of each team) was taken 45 days before the event date.
Our Organizing Committee structure was designed as follows.
I realized later down the line that it Would have been better to call the marketing and communications team marketing and production. I missed out on specifying that the designing team is also responsible for event day production visuals and other content, not just marketing.
The 2 leaders and other exco members took meetings each week to catch up with the tasks done by each team and made a plan for the following week.
Here are some important requirements when hosting a conference event.
Web page
This is one of the first things you are going to need. It's up to you whether you create your own or use some template. We used a template from AWS Community Day China and asked lovable to generate a similar one. Then we customized it to our needs.
Registation
We used to local ticketing platform called MyTickets to track registrations and generate QR codes for attendees. Yes we did issue tickets. The community day organizers are always dealing with this one... and there is no right or wrong way. Both have pros and cons.
Paid Event - Even symbolic price can reduce the no-shows (ratio between registered and the ones that actually showed-up) and increase the budget you get. But there is a chance you have to pay taxes, as you are creating the profit.
Free Event - Prepare yourself for a no-shows... 😬 It's frustrating, but it is what is is.
We decided to go with paid.
Call for speakers and sponsors
We used two google forms, one to call for speakers and the other to call for sponsors. We also crafted a sponsorship prospectus and attached it in our call for sponsors form.
The sponsorship team worked hard in securing sponsorships and we found one sponsor, WSO2 and SLASSCOM as the ecosystem partner. You should reach out to companies way before the event. Do not wait until the last moment. We were lucky to get those partners at the last moment, but could have gotten more if we planed it well in advance.
The event was a great success, 14 speakers and over 200 students, connecting over cloud computing technology. It was a fun and educational day for the students. The support from the AWS community partners, AWS User Group Colombo and the community builders have been tremendous to make the event a success.
All being said, organizing AWS Student Community Day was a lot of fun, but also lots of hard work went into it. It took us 3 months of work, from idea that we are doing that, to the actual event.
If you are still thinking if to do it or not host such an event on campus, what are you waiting for?, go for it! 😉
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