On November 27th, WordCamp Tokyo 2011 drew the most attendees in Japanese WordCamp history. The final count is about 800 — I believe it’s the 2nd largest It’s the 3rd largest WordCamps ever worldwide (after WordCamp SF & NYC).
Sessions
We had 3 tracks (users/blogger, designers & engineer) for this WordCamp. As introduced on WordCamp Central blog post, the topics were well-rounded.
Sessions include responsive publishing, mobile site development, e-publishing, performance optimization, and WordPress coding best practices.
We tried to arrange the timetable so that everyone has at least one session they are interested in. The result was a huge success I think, in fact I read several blog reports complaining 😉 that they had such a hard time choosing which ones to go!
WordPress in Japan has been growing and I am feeling that in each WordCamp. It’s showing not only in the number of the attendees, but the depths of the interests and availability of the speaker. For example, I think only a handful of people were interested in scaling WordPress, say, 2 or 3 years ago in Japan. Now there are numbers of agencies using WordPress to run large-scale sites as their CMS. In addition to topics listed earlier in this post, there were talks about contents strategy, security, blogger panel discussion, theme / plugin usage tips, analytics, and WordPress for beginners.
Attendees
I was happy to see seniors, people with kids, students, women as well as men at the event. They were amazingly cooperative in terms of operation. It seemed like a good reflection of WordPress community itself – everyone pitches in, and help each other. 80% of the registrants actually showed up, which is really amazing rate considering it was a free event.
Staff & Speakers & Sponsors & WordCamp Foundation
Just want to say they all were awesome. Thank you — even though I know whatever I say is never going to be enough. This was the first time we (any Japanese WordCamp organizer) worked with WordPress Foundation to make the event happen based on some of the new rules and process that are being set up. There were some bumps since we’ve never done it this way, but learn as we go — I think the trial and error will be useful lessons for future WordCamps here and else. I’m really happy to see the support and staff poured into the Foundation and WordCamp.
Here’s my slides from the keynote, where I talked about WordPress’ history, current status and future prospect (slides are in Japanese).
Ustream recording is already up but it also is in Japanese. John Ford of VaultPress did a session in English. Here’s his blog post (with slides) and video.
If you’re interested in seeing more feedback (maybe with Google Translate), here are a couple of links:
- Bookmarks of the attendee & staff’s blog posts
- “Togetter” Tweet collections (afternoon only, but still has over 1500 tweets)
- wctokyo2011 tag on Flickr
The photo credits goes to @odyssey, who had a WordPress baby just a few days ago 🙂 and @makegoodtime, who worked hard on the official event site. Thanks!