Speakers Hive - Progress Report - 16-Aug-2025

It has been a month since we launched Speakers Hive. It is about 2 weeks since our last progress update. This blog post captures the progress / goals and challenges for Speakers Hive.

 

What have we accomplished so far?

1. Completed 4 online community hive meetings on Sundays between 8 am - 9 pm. Conducted 3 corporate Speakers Hive meetings at Tantude Technologies.
2. Conducting regular online hive meetings for Hive #1 has become like a clock work. Several volunteers have stepped up to finish tasks like creating agenda, creating flyers/certificates, recognising role players etc.,
3. Completed the registration of Speakers Hive Trust. Applied for a PAN card.
4. Our membership has grown from 88 members (as of 31st July) to 231 members. Mr. Mohan from the Institute of Company Secretaries of India (ICSI) played a crucial role in advertising Speakers Hive in the CS community. Nearly 100 members joined from CS network (students and alumni)
5. We conducted our first educational workshop on "How to induce Humor into your speech". The workshop was conducted by the humor champion Sriram Venkataraman from DXC. It was attended by 25 hivers. 
6. We refreshed our role player names to make them unique to Speakers Hive (specifically, Hive Talks segment and Peer-Reviewer roles are new).
7. The Speech Mastery Beginner Level 1 manual (with 5 speeches) is updated to capture the feedback from several volunteers. 
8. We are able to get the help of a number of mentors from the community to train the hivers.

What is ahead of us?

1. Start a Saturday evening online hive meeting (currently planned for 3 - 4 pm)
2. Start an offline/in-person hive meeting on Sat / Sun (timing / venue TBD)
3. Create a bank account for Speakers Hive Trust
4. Complete the members enrolment (after the bank account is setup)
5. Create manuals for "Leadership mastery" program and "Speech Mastery" Beginner Level 2 program.
6. Identify Hive Office Bearers from each chapter and support / train them to run the Hive Chapters independently. 
7. Conduct weekly educational programs to make our members and volunteers more informed. For example, there are several volunteers who are ready to mentor our hivers. However, we are not able to assign mentees to them... as they do not have any prior background mentoring people on communication skills. So we intend to conduct sessions on mentoring for such volunteers.

What are the current challenges?

1. Need more volunteers who can 'own tasks to completion'. Right now, lots of bandwidth is spent orchestrating the tasks across different volunteers. Also, the contributions are currently coming in spurts. (Hopefully, when the individual chapters are established, this overhead will be minimised by the office bearers of the respective Hive Chapters)
2. Need to identify/train volunteers from within the Hive chapters to take ownership of conducting the weekly meetings.