WordCamp Tokyo 2015 Recap

As the saying goes, “WordCamp isn’t over until you blog about it” – so let’s properly wrap up another successful event by the Japanese WordPress community.

WordCamp Tokyo 2015 was a two-day event on October 31 & November 1. The second day was the contributor day — the first in Tokyo! Tickets were sold out, and a total of 750 attendees participated.

For three years since 2012, PHP Conference and WordCamp Tokyo held the events at the same venue, splitting the cost and sharing some logistical tasks. This year they stayed in the same location (I wrote a photo report on PHPCON this year) and we sort of “grew out of our nest.” It no longer made sense to share the venue because of the number of sessions/tracks both events wanted to host, so we decided to try a commercial conference hall, Bellesalle Kanda.

Sessions

There were 33 sessions (20-30 minutes), 5 workshops, and about a dozen of flash talks (5 minutes). They covered a broad range of topics including security, WordPress as an ePub generator, GPL, CI, REST API, wp-cli, WooCommerce, growing a media site, open data, writing, and marketing business with a WordPress blog. Among 33 of the main sessions, 6 speakers were female.

I presented a session on why you should choose WordPress over other CMS/blogging services/site builders (slides in Japanese).

基調講演 #wctokyo pic.twitter.com/bFX06L9cgW

— ichi (@ichi1984) October 31, 2015

This year, the organizing team tried something new, an English-only track. Jordan West from Automattic, Noel Tock from HumanMade, and Ipstenu (Mika Epstein) from Dreamhost either presented a session or did a Q&A, and three Japanese speakers gave their talks in English.

You can view (almost all of) the session slides on this WordCamp Tokyo post. Most of them are in Japanese, but glancing over 40+ slides should give you some ideas on the current interests of the Japanese WordPress community!

Jetpack + WooCommerce Booths & Tattoo Station

Nick Hamze, Jordan and I set up and staffed Automattic’s Jetpack and WooCommerce sponsor booths (tables). Nick brought us T-shirts with “We’re hiring” written in Japanese!

We also had great help from Benson (from WordPress Meetup Tokyo) at the Jetpack table, and Shohei Tanaka with the WooCommerce table. Shohei has been localizing WooCommerce for Japanese users, and it was great to get to know him and learn more about the trend of eCommerce websites in Japan.

I think people had fun putting on the gold temporary tattoo 🙂

Swag & Visual Design

Just like the past years, WordCamp Tokyo had cool special Wapuu stickers for everyone, and as different levels of fancy prizes for those who turned in the event feedback survey. The design team is planning to open sourcing their designs again.

Yasushi (he also designed the Wapuu for this year), natsumiine, and Hamano worked on the main visuals and swag. Megumi customized the website.

Feedback

The team already published the results of the post-event survey, and people seemed to have received the event well. Some interesting facts:

The ratio of the men and women who came was about 2:1.
The top 3 job titles were 1) web designer, 2) programmer, and 3) web director.
The top 3 sessions they want to attend in the future WordCamp were 1) theme development and customization, 2) hardening security, and 3) plugin development and customization.

I was happy to read these write-in answers:

It was an incredible experience to participate in a large event like WordCamp Tokyo. I have been learning WordPress all by myself until now, but I now want to expand my view by meeting/hearing others.

I enjoyed the great community. Looking forward to the next time.

I felt that everyone who put together the event really loves WordPress ♥

The teamwork of the organizing team (main organizer Susumu, co-organizer Yutaro, 11 committee leads, and about 70 other volunteers) was especially good this year, and together they did an awesome job. I look forward to being a part of WordCamp Tokyo again next year!