AWS Student Community Day is a one day, student led conference, organized by AWS Cloud Clubs for the community. It is a great way to bringing an AWS conference into your university.
AWS Student Community Day Sri Lanka 2026 was co-organized by AWS Cloud Club at University of Kelaniya and AWS Cloud Club at ITUM. The event had 14 speakers and over 200 student attendees. It was a full day of community building and learning for the students.
I created this article based on how we prepared to host this event.
The approach I took was first I made an organizing committee of student enthusiast who would like to work towards this event. The first OC meeting was taken 45 days before the planned event day.
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.
Call for speakers and sponsors
We used two google forms, one for speakers and the other for sponsors to call for them. We attached the sponsorship prospectus in the form calling for sponsors.
Based on my past experience hosting events, I learnt that each member in a team needs to know their responsibilities clearly. To ensure this, I created a document laying out the responsibilities that each role would have before I called in for applications for the OC. In this way every team member was aware of their responsibilities.
We took meetings each week and made a plan for the following week.
Free or paid
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.
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 - by all means we say Yes, go for it! 😉
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