Report on WordCamp Japan 2009

WordCamp Japan 2009 was held this past Sunday in Tokyo, Japan and the TechMiso Crew was there to enjoy the festivities, hoping to become more educated on the excitement the platform has to offer. The crew attended the conference portion of the WordCamp event and here are our thoughts on how things went from the perspective of an audience member.

This was the first time the TechMiso Crew has ever attended a WordCamp, so we were all n00bs to this sort of thing. Even though we are familiar with WordPress to the degree we feel comfortable tweaking the base install we thought it would be a lot of fun to attend. As a side bonus we figured we may actually learn something useful about WordPress!

If you are not familiar with WordCamp, here is the official description of the event:

WordCamp is a conference type of event that focuses squarely on everything WordPress. Everyone from casual end users all the way up to core developers show up to these events. These events are usually highlighted by speeches or keynotes by various people.

The location of the venue was fairly peculiar, with the actual building quite secluded. The event was held in a Community Center of sorts, smack dab in the middle of a residential neighborhood, making it a pretty bizarre choice of locations to hold this sort of event.

After departing Kasai train station, it took us roughly 45 minutes to locate the building. The directions to the building were lacking but when we did finally find the venue there was nothing discernible to denote this location was where WordCamp was being held. As a result, we walked out and around the building only to quickly reenter where we found a small WordCamp poster propped on the floor next to an elevator. We were not the only people who had trouble locating the venue!

Once we were in, we hit the registration desk but were promptly given the evil eye by the lady processing people. Why? Because we did not bring a printout of our registration form with a QR code and our registration information as well a nametag.

I have been to a lot of conferences before and this is the first time where not bringing a printout of the registration form and nametag slowed down in-processing. What conference forces people to bring this stuff?

After jumping through all the pointless registration hoops we were finally in WordCamp! The TechMiso Crew snagged a few seats near the front and eagerly awaited the festivities to commence.

Matt Mullenweg was the keynote speaker, both explaining the origins and history of WordPress as well as evangelizing the product. He seemed relatively calm on stage, speaking fairly eloquently and even attempting a little humor here and there. Unfortunately the latter was over most attendees’ heads since Matt spoke in English and there was no real-time translation.

While Matt did spend a fair amount of time on stage, he did use it wisely. The history was mostly a rehash for most of us who have been following the project for quite some time, but I imagine the audience enjoyed the lesson. Outside of that, if you were expecting to find nuggets of upcoming WordPress information then you were probably somewhat disappointed.

At one point during his speech, Matt mentioned WordPress 2.8 but ended the statement with, “… but that’s secret.” Matt did a good job keeping the state secrets secret but it would have been beneficial for him to provide more in-depth analysis on what the company is gearing up for with WordPress 2.8 and onward. Learning about the future roadmap would have been extremely insightful for the audience.

Overall, Matt’s speech was a lot of fun and definitely worthwhile. Regrettably, in the humble opinion of the TechMiso Soup Crew, the rest of the speakers offered very little or no value to the conference. For example, one speaker talked about nothing but a single plug-in designed to ensure the proper output of Japanese characters – was an entire presentation really necessary on this simple plug-in? I am not pointing him out to say his presentation was bad, but to demonstrate the lack of utility of presenting this information to an audience who was already quite familiar with his work.

There were no workshops detailing methods for doing cool things with WordPress. One of the Japanese speakers actually spoke about doing BuddyPress-like things with WordPress without using BuddyPress even though a mere 2 hours prior Matt had spoken about the exciting things planned for BuddyPress this year. It was quite odd to listen to two speeches that were not in sync, evangelizing similar things but with one method being far more difficult to implement than the other.

It would have really been beneficial to have demonstrations of doing cool things with the product. Presentations on building a custom theme, a how-to on using WordPress as a CMS rather than just a blog, simple plug-in development and other items like this would have been far more exciting than the lineup presented. Maybe we hit the wrong WordCamp?

I believe the TechMiso Crew anticipated more value from the conference. Maybe we had our hopes up too high, maybe our expectations were unrealistic or maybe our perception of what WordCamp is supposed to be is slightly skewed. Either way, we were pretty disappointed with the event and hope the next Japan iteration will be far more constructive.