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WordCamp Kyoto 2017 swag: Wapuu Keychain & sticker

WordCamp Kyoto 2017 Photos

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WordCamp Kyoto 2017 took place on June 24-25. Around 350 people gathered at Kyoto University and enjoyed the time togeter as WordPress enthusiasts.

Day 0: Travel & Speakers Dinner

On the day before the event, two of my colleagues and I took a bullet train from Tokyo to Kyoto. We walked around Kiyomizudera Temple and Nineizaka, then went to the Speaker’s Dinner in Sijō.

Kiyomizudrea
Kiyomizudera
Nineizaka
Totoro at Kyoto Nineizaka
Kamogawa at dusk

Day 1: Session Day

Saturday was a session day. We arrived at the venue early to set up Automattic (Jetpack/WooCommerce) tables. All went by fast – I gave a talk about WordPress.com (video/sildes), attended a session about translation, and mostly talked to people at the sponsorship table.

International Science Innovation Building
“Sponsor booth tour” flag
Automattic hiring cards
Jetpack booth
WooCommerce booth
Me during my session (Photo by Atsushi Ando)
Perler beads table
Perler beads Wapuu
Translation process session
George at the booth

The organizing team did a great job excecuting the event, closely focusing around session while keeping a relatively simple overall setup. They had beautiful and very original swag too!

Handmade Japanese Unbrella
Tea cup, tenugui, & sticker
Keychain & sticker

I received some more Wapuu stickers and postcards from Tachibana-san, who went to WordCamp Europe in Paris.

At the after party, I talked some more people… For someone who work alone for most of the days and use typed words as the main means of communication, it felt as if I was intensely training my vocal cord during these WordCamp days.

After party flash talk
Me & Nukaga-san (Photo by Atsushi Ando)

Day 2: Contributor Day

Then on Sunday, about 100 people participated in the Contributor Day. I helped as a mentor for the documentation and polyglots teams.

It was a very well-organized setup and each team got a lot of things done in a day. There were many first-time contributors — it looked like they had a good time while learning how to get involved in many aspects of the WordPress project.

Contributor Day: WordCamp Kyoto 2017
Kyoto University
Contirbutor Day staff meeting

Day 3: Coworking

On the final day, some of us met up at Tenrō-in Bookstore (天狼院書店) for a little bit of coworking. It’s a renovated old house with two floors of coworking/café space.

2nd floor of Tenrō-in
With WC Kyoto main organizer Okamoto-san
1st floor of Tenrō-in

This trip made me realize it again that the WordPress community in the Kansai region (= Kyoto, Osaka, Kobe, etc.) is very strong. With multiple local leaders that have experience in organizing WordCamps and meetups, the team is diverse and giving good infulence to each other.

I’m sure they will put together a great WordCamp next year – you should come and see it yourself, and get to know this part of Japan too!

WordCamp Europe 2016 Slides & Photos

Last Friday, I presented a talk about the Japanese WordPress community at WordCamp Europe 2016 in Vienna.

The video will be published on WordPress.tv at some point. Meanwhile, here are some points for those who had missed it:

  • Japanese is the most widely used non-English WP locale (12.3% of non-English locales)
  • WordPress is by far the most popular CMS in Japan today (78.5% share – higher number compared to 59.5% for English sites)
  • Meetups are held almost every weekend somewhere in Japan. We make it easy to see events across Japan through the WordBench website and the event calendar. Many of the chapters create unique banners for each event.
  • The online community is also active, with many contributors on translation, documentation, support, bug fix & report, and Wapuu too!
  • Show others how to get involved, recognize their hard work, and help out.
  • Your own contribution can be multiplied if you help others to contribute. It’s necessary to grow the community for WordPress to succeed.

It was a pleasure to have had an opportunity to share what I’ve seen in the local community for the past 13 years. As I said in the talk, my goal is to help others contribute to WordPress so the “small steps” of more people can build up to form a long stride. Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions!

Day 0 (WCEU Picnic) Photos

Francesca and I hosted a picnic at Burggarten near the venue on Thursday.

#wceupicnic #wceu #wceu2016

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Day 1 Photos

Petya’s opening remarks
WCEUBall wapuu
Event venue
MuseumsQuartier
Giant wapuu
Closed caption typists
Sergey
Wapuu stickers & coloring book
Matt & Brian
Kel

Day 2 Photos

The childcare support at WCEU this year was really great.

Francesca Marano on Italian Community
Child care room
WCEUBall
WCEU banner at night

Thanks #wceu organizing team for arranging a visit to the children's museum. It was fun! 💕

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Photos: Contributor Day

Having discussion face-to-face was the best part of the Contributor Day.

Polyglots rooms
Local coffee
Polyglots wapuu
Bego
Bego and Birgit

WordPress Meetup Tokyo: November 2015

Last night, I co-organized the 24th WordPress Meetup Tokyo. This meetup group for English speakers hosts smaller and more intimate get-togethers compared to WordBench Tokyo, which is in Japanese.

Toru did a presentation on the upcoming WordPress version 4.4 with an emphasis on the responsive image feature, based on his talk at WordCamp Tokyo last month. I showed a couple quick demos on how WordPress post embed works and the new Twenty Sixteen theme.

WordPress 4.4 embed test post

A screenshot from my test site, displaying a WordPress post embed on the Twenty Sixteen theme.

Next speaker was Sarah Cada from the Philippines. I met her when I was at WordCamp Philippines 2012 and kept in touch through our mutual friend (now a coworker) Andrew. Sarah came in as a special guest to this meetup while she’s visiting Tokyo as a part of her first trip to Japan. She talked about her involvement in the Philippine Web Designers Organization, the state of local web communities, and painfully slow internet connection there 😛

Jeff Crawford shared his experience building a business site using a theme from Thrive Themes. Jeff had shown me his site Connect-Local with another choice of a theme at a previous meetup, but this time he said he’s really happy with the ease of customization.

He also mentioned other WYSIWYG customizable themes he had tried: OptimizePress and Beaver Builder.

Junko from Kagawa joined us, and Ichi from Meetup.com Japan was also there

At WordPress Meetup Tokyo with Sarah, Mayuko, Junko. なかなかない組み合わせ！

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The next meetup is not yet scheduled, but be sure to join the meetup group if you’re interested in getting a notification about it.

Gallery

WordPress Meetup Tokyo, March 2014

At WordPress Meetup Tokyo in Coworking Space Co-Edo this Saturday, we had 6 speakers present a wide range of topics from Asian WordPress communities to tips on successful web development in a Japanese work environment.

Some links:

After the meetup, we went to Taishoken Chinese restaurant nearby and continued chatting about WordPress 🙂

The next meetup will be on May 24th, and we’ll discuss different ways of building a multilingual site. Please RSVP on Meetup.com and join us.

WordPress Meetup Tokyo – March 2014: Optimization Show and Tell

We had the 11th WordPress Meetup Tokyo in Co-Edo on Saturday (almost one year since we started the group!). Today’s topic was WordPress Optimization and we had 4 speakers.

WordPress Meetup Tokyo (Photo by Koji Tanaka)
Stefan
Toru

Some links are posted on the Meetup.com event page, so I’ll post some of my own here:

Keita talked about his experience with current Nginx/HHVM/MariaDB setup (slides), Toru shared insights on the “WordPress Template” feature (pre-configured Nginx + WordPress + CentOS setup) on ConoHa VIP service, and Stefan taught us about using Google PageSpeed Insights and Charles to analyze / debug site performance.
I also learned a bit about WoodWing Enterprise WordPress connector, which is a publishing system used behind recently relaunched TIME.com).

The coworking space’s owner Tanaka-san had a big surprise for Keita and myself! He had 2 ninjas deliver wedding gifts to us 🙂 We enjoyed some wine and juice thanks to them.

Group photo with ninjas

Group photo with ninjas (courtesy of Koji Tanaka)

Next meetup is scheduled on Saturday, April 12th at 11am. Please RSVP on meetup.com event page.

WordPress Meetup Tokyo, February 2014: Plugins Show and Tell

Tokyo had the heaviest snowfall in decades yesterday. Luckily it stopped snowing today, and we didn’t have to cancel WordPress Meetup Tokyo.

For the past 2 months, we have been inviting participants to speak for 5 minutes in show and tell format. Today’s topic was WordPress Plugins. I talked about Plugin Troubleshooting 101:


WordPress Plugin Troubleshooting 101 in 5 Minutes

Although all things I mentioned were super basic, understanding what to do when White Screen of Death happens is something every WordPress users should know. I hope these slides will help you or your friend getting stuck with plugin troubles!

More Links

Here are some links from other speakers’ talk.

Mizuno-san:

Brin:

Stefan:

Keita:

Next Meetup

Next WordPress Meetup Tokyo is on Sunday, March 16th. We’ll be sharing WordPress site optimization tips this time. Come join us at Co-Edo Coworking Space Kayabacho!