From Event Chaos to APAC Award β How ACE Pune Built Community Ops on the Atlassian Ecosystem
π Why This Story Matters
ACE Pune is one of the most active Atlassian Community Events chapters in India. Like most volunteer-led communities, we are not a full-time operations team. We plan events between customer calls, day jobs, travel, and personal commitments.
A community event sounds simple: pick a topic, invite a speaker, book a venue, publish the page. In reality, it is dozens of small decisions: which idea matters, who owns the speaker, which hotel can handle the headcount, where are the slides, who paid the AV vendor, did we send feedback, and what did attendees actually say?
For years, those decisions lived in WhatsApp, spreadsheets, email, personal notes, and memory. It worked until it didn't. This is the story of how ACE Pune used Jira Service Management, Assets, Jira Product Discovery, Confluence, Automation, and Rovo AI to turn scattered community work into a reusable operating system.
β‘ The Moment It Clicked
April Team '25 Anaheim. I'm in the audience watching a keynote about Atlassian's System of Work. On stage, someone explains how connected tools create clarity and help teams move faster.
Meanwhile I'm thinking about the WhatsApp message I sent that morning: "Hey Datta, did you hear back from the hotel? Awneet - has the speaker confirmed? And does anyone have the slides from last time?" π¬
That was the moment. We teach organisations to run on Atlassian. Our own chapter was still running on group chats, personal Google Docs, and tribal knowledge. I flew back to Pune with one idea: what if the community itself became the best example of Atlassian ways of working?
Months later, that idea ran our biggest event ever: 392 attendees, 6 Atlassian speakers, and many more event - Just using this Atlassian Ecosystem !!
π¨ The Problems That Made Us Act
Every community chapter has these. We just stopped accepting them.
π€ Ideas died in group chats. Someone suggests a Rovo workshop. By morning, it is buried. Nobody follows up.
πΆ Speaker pipeline was invisible. Speaker interest arrived in LinkedIn DMs. If one champion missed it, the opportunity was gone.
ποΈ Slides and recordings disappeared. Decks sat on laptops. Recordings lived somewhere on YouTube. Session abstracts got lost in Slack.
π Venue knowledge reset. We evaluated hotels every year because last year's rationale was in someone's personal notes.
π° Finance was archaeology. Weeks after events, we still chased invoices across email threads.
π οΈ What We Built
π A portal for everything. Event ideas, speaker applications, volunteer sign-ups, and vendor suggestions are now structured requests, routed to the right champion based on city.
π― JPD for decisions. Ideas are RICE-scored and reviewed quarterly. The answer to "why this event?" is one click away.
ποΈ Events as Epics. CLC 2025 has five Epic children: Finance (budget XXXXX), Hotel, Logistics, Marketing, and Session Tracks.
π€ Sessions with everything attached. Each session stores the speaker, abstract, audience level, slides URL, recording URL, duration, start time, and status. Three months later, if someone asks for Dushyant's Rovo deck, we open the session issue. Slides URL. Recording URL. Speaker profile. Done. π
π€ Rovo AI writing agendas. When a session is confirmed, Rovo reads confirmed sessions in that track and generates the structured agenda. Cancel a session, and the summary updates.
π§ Assets as the community brain. 34 champions. 127 cities. Hotels with ratings. Speakers with session history. Vendors rated after every event. Knowledge stays in the system, not in Downloads folders.
π What Happened
CLC 2025. June 7. Novotel Pune Viman Nagar.
π₯ 392 registered. π€ 6 Atlassian speakers. π¬ Three tracks. β Nine confirmed sessions. β Six cancelled sessions with reasons documented. π° Budget XXXXX, reconciled XXXXX under budget.
β Satisfaction: 4.6 / 5.0. π NPS: 72. How we've measured. π ACE Pune won the APAC Community Award.
π‘ The Part Nobody Sees
A new champion joined in 2026. Champion didn't need a 90-minute onboarding call. She opened the playbook, read the CLC 2025 report, browsed sessions with slides and recordings, checked the JPD roadmap, and said, "okay, I get it."
That's the real win. Slides don't disappear. Recordings don't get lost. Vendor contacts stay. The memory lives in the system.
π This Presentation Is In The System Too
The slides you just saw? Tracked in a Session issue. Speaker notes? Confluence page. Demo URLs? Linked. Feedback from this workshop? Captured the same way.
We don't just teach the Atlassian ecosystem. We run on it. Completely. Recursively. π
π What's Next
Post-Team '26 Anaheim Recap - July 13, 2026. Budget XXXXX. Already structured with 6 Epics. Novotel is preferred because the 5/5 rating from last time is stored in Assets. Every submission, slide deck, and recording will live in the system from day one.
π If You Run a Community Chapter
You need one mindset shift: treat your community operations with the same discipline you'd recommend to any team you advise.
The playbook exists. It took us ~6 months to build. It would take you a fraction of that because the blueprint is documented and shareable.
The Atlassian Community exists to help people get more out of Atlassian tools. The community itself should be the best example of what that looks like. πͺπ
π‘ Born at Team '25 Anaheim. π Presented at Team '26 Anaheim. The tools were always there.
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Piyush Annadate (ACE Pune)
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