WordCamp Bangkok 2018 Recap

On 17th and 18th February 2018, WordCamp Bangkok team, lead by Watcharapon Charoenwongjongdee, a.k.a. Amm, held a WordCamp Bangkok at Siam University. I (@shinichiN) joined the team as a translator for the mentor, @nukaga, and as a speaker and found it a very success. Here’s a recap of the event with photos and tweets.

The WordCamp was the second one for the current Bangkok team. Bangkok city has had two WordCamps in 2008 and 2009, but there were none after those. This year, it was a two days event and the first time for them to have a contributor’s day. Here are some numbers;

• 100 tickets sold and 70 contributors showed up on the contributors’ day.
• 500 tickets sold and 360 attendees showed up on the conference day.
• The organizing team was eight persons.
• They had 40 volunteers.
• 21 sessions in 3 trucks. One truck was held in English.
• The event started at 8:45. This was the earliest time for me to come to WC as an attendee.

The event was very well organized, and I didn’t see any trouble or problems with the preparation or on the day. Despite the early opening and the length of each 40 minutes sessions, people were listening and enjoying the event with enthusiasm until the end of the event.

Below is a tweet bot that tweets the twitter trends and it says #wcbkk was trending the most in the country.

As far as I could see, 90% of the attendees seemed to be local Thai people. And the others were, as far as I know, from Japan, Switzerland, the U.S., India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore, Bangladesh, Russia, Germany. The half of the non-Thai native people seemed to live in the city, and the rest flew to the event.

The contributors’ day

The first contributor’s day in Thailand was led by @l3eaver, and it had six teams; core, cli, theme review, user manual, translation, and community.

User manual for Thais

One of the most impressive outcomes of the contributors’ day is the User Manual for Thais.

https://wpman.org

• It’s a WordPress website.
• The theme is sponsored by SeedThemes, a Thailand based Theme Shop community.
  • The theme is this.
• Looks nice. Nice with Thai fonts, too.
• Incremental search. They use SearchWP Live Ajax Search. (The admin of the site mentioned that it doesn’t support Thai Language word wrapping.)
• Recognition is handled nicely that you can see who wrote which posts, and you can feel the community behind it.
• Anyone can join by logging in.

The idea of User Manual itself comes from WordCamp Kansai, Japan. While Japan is utilizing GitHub pages to avoid the workload for someone to host and manage, Thai community chose to go WordPress with the help of one of Thailand community leaders.

Session and conference day

Conferences were held on three trucks, and one of them was an English truck. The registration opened at eight o’clock in the morning, which is the earliest time for me as an attendee, but despite the very early time, the sessions were very enthusiastic and full from the beginning of the event.

サイアム大学の学長さんたち。英語でバシッと挨拶していてかっこよすぎた。

Starting from 9, ending at 5, they had 21 sessions. I went to see some of the Thai sessions as well, and the audiences were very much interested in the well-selected contents; basics, WooCommerce, Marketing, business cases, wp-api, etc.

I also gave a talk about the Japanese community 🙂

Tribe Meetup

Folks gather and talk. Tribe Meetup was held in a separate room on the session day. They got the idea from WordCamp Europe. The topics were;

• Agencies & Freelances
• Plugin Authors
• Theme Authors
• Content Creators & Bloggers
• Speed Networking (Open)

I couldn’t find the time to join but did go to see, and they looked really active.

The organizers

The team was really strong. Great team work. The days went just smooth without any major issues. The team consisted of only 8 for this big event. Great work!

Personally, I moved to Bangkok with my family in 2013 and started running monthly WordPress meetups there at a coworking space I used work at. I wished that I could run a WordCamp Bangkok, but went home after 2.5 years life there. The members of the meetup group did it, and I’m happy that I could join the WordCamp!

Blogs

• งาน WordCamp Bangkok 2018
• WCBKK 2018 – Gov Web and Accessibility Standard
• รีวิวงาน WordCamp Bangkok: งานอีเวนต์สำหรับชาว WordPress | Content Shifu

Venue and people photos

混雑なし。混乱なし。

実行委員長（左: Watcharapon Charoenwongjongdee (Amm) Meetupをずっと率いてきた。今年で二度目なのでルールにより来年は交代。毎年日本に遊びに来るがなぜかいつも冬に来る。右: 実行委員 Woratana Perth Ngarmtrakulchol、タイ語日本語英語体制でやっていたときに通訳をしてくれていた。オーストラリアに留学中でリモート参加＋直近は帰国して参加）

サイアム大学の学長さんたち。英語でバシッと挨拶していてかっこよすぎた。

こういうのがあるとやっぱり写真は撮りやすいようではある。

水重要。コーヒーもあったしジュースもあった。ランチも出て、そういえば会場で1円も使っていない。スポンサーさんもありがとう。

And the after party.

Thank you very much to the organizers, volunteers, sponsors, and attendees for this wonderful WordCamp!

Additional thanks to Joe Guilmette and Rahul Bansal for bringing me back to my hotel.

Written by Shinichi Nishikawa (@shinichiN)