My OSC2019 Tokyo/Spring experience
I always wanted to visit OSC, the largest OSS community event in Japan, since I met the staff lead Mr. Miyahara in 2011 (thanks Jay Hotta!) A few weeks ago the dream came true, my team member Tzu-yin (“ballfish”) and I had a great time there with the Japanese OSS community.
For me, an organizer of COSCUP, it would be fun to know how foreign people see us. I believe it’s the same to OSC, so I decided to have an English translation of my “observation report” for COSCUP staff — this time for friends in Japan and English-speaking people.
OSC2019 Tokyo/Spring: Basic Info
- https://www.ospn.jp/osc2019-spring/
- Held on Friday & Saturday — I was told that the Fall version will possibly be on SAT and SUN.
- My album for this event
Attendees
- The number of attendees is 1010 ppl — 420 for the first day, and 580 for the second.
- AWS Community Day was held on the same day, some people might choose AWS event over OSC, which affected the number of attendees.
- Returned attendees, which attended previous OSCs, is over 60%. (In COSCUP it’s about 50%.)
- Less than 40% of attendees are under 30yo, 20% are students (COSCUP: about 33%.)
- Staff: about 40 ppl? Not quite sure. However it seems that most of the tracks don’t have a “host,” which is good, people can help themselves.
Venue
- A beautiful campus :)
- OSC occupiers 3 floors of the building: 2F (main floor,) 5F (mainly for community booths,) and 1F (a conference hall for ~250 ppl.)
- Next to the building is a campus restaurant, which is amazingly convenient for attendees of OSC.
Transportation
- It’s a little bit far from the Tokyo city center — 75% of attendees spent more than 1 hour to get to the venue.
- However, public transportation is pretty convenient. The campus is right next to the monorail station — really, it takes only a 5-minutes-walk from the station to the venue.
Sponsor/community booths
“Having a booth at OSC” was actually not on my radar at the beginning, I must say thank you to Mr. Miyahara, ballfish, muka, and especially to Mr. Hisahiro for their help in preparing the booth. Mr. Miyahara, the almighty leader of OSC, provided help and kindly lent us a monitor so we don’t have to prepare one by ourselves; Mr. Hisahiro even spent 2 days on the booth to help us promoting COSCUP. 本当にありがとうございます！
Our main goal for the booth is to build a connection with Japanese developers and also with Taiwanese who work in Tokyo. Since it’s much easier to have chat with people in Japanese than in English (no doubt,) Mr. Hisahiro is our CCO (chief communication officer) during the conference. I believe that we will need Japanese materials (like what HKOSCon did) next time, even for a basically Mandarin / English conference like COSCUP — it would be much easier to start the conversation with people there.
A lot of communities joined OSC — 68 according to the website. Some of them only have a booth for one day, though. What did they prepare for the booth? Well, it varies. Some of them prepared a whole bunch of gadgets, and a few of them are simply people + stickers. Anyway, it seems that many of the booth-owners know each other very well. The way they chat, laugh, and share snacks, like a huge community. I like the feeling, just like what we have in Mozilla Taiwan Community.
People are not allowed to sell anything other than books at the conference. I bought these from a sponsor booth:
Talks, and other stuff…
I know a little bit Japanese but unfortunately can’t understand much of the talks (no English talks AFAIK.) However, I still attended a few sessions, try to learn the difference between the community conferences in Taiwan and Japan.
Career seminars
This is interesting, OSC prepared a few sessions to discuss issues around an engineers’ career. The number of attendees in these sessions are not many, but maybe it’s good to have a small group, so people can share a lot about their experience.
Dating coach sessions
Not sure if I used the right English words here… anyway. It’s rare to see this kind of session in a technical conference, the sponsors targeted on an interesting market… maybe COSCUP can find a sponsor like that?
By the way, this is how the sponsor Comic Toranoana recruiting people on their booth at OSC, the branding integrated amazingly.
Lightning Talks
There are 3 lightning talk sessions in this OSC:
- For the beginners, at the end of first day sessions. In a ~60 ppl room.
- For sponsors, at the lunchtime of day 2. Same room as the one for the beginners.
- The finale, at the end of day 2 sessions. At the conference hall (~250ppl.)
The format of the lightning talks is about the same in Taiwan — 5 minutes, more “lightning” than what I saw in FOSDEM (15 minutes.)
The one for the beginners is, well, for the beginners. Mr. Miyahara demonstrated how he turned a 45 minutes talk into 5 minutes. In my experience, a good 5 minutes talk needs more practices than a usual 45 minutes session, it’s great to have this kind of demonstration for newbies — it could help the community grow.
The one for sponsors worked better than I thought actually. It’s true they are doing advertisements but in a way that fit the culture. Also, since the attendees are not “forced” to join the session (there are 7 other sessions at the same time, and you can freely spend yours in the restaurant or the booth rooms,) people show up is your “real” listener, who will give a friendly feedback even if you made mistake.
In the latest session, as you might expect, the speakers are well prepared. My old friend Dynamis from WebDINO (former Mozilla Japan) did a great job to introduce their new project Web Videomark, and there’s a speaker played rock–paper–scissors with the whole room :)
And more
I’ll just post photos with a short description to show other things I saw.
Special badges for the first-timers and students
You don’t have to wear a badge (and don’t even have to register first) to attend OSC, but they prepared special badges for the first-timers and students.
Booth tour
An one-hour tour, guided by Mr. Miyahara (really, he is EVERYWHERE in OSC,) for the first-timers to enter the world of open source community.
Used books
Pay what you want for a used technical book. All the money will go to the Guide Dog Association. (I like this one!)
Self-paced hands-on
A well-designed tutorial for Raspberry Pi. I would really love to have one in COSCUP.
Notes for COSCUP booth in the future
- We did great on connecting Taiwanese volunteers who work in Tokyo — thank you all especially to Lilith, Hsiang-hao, and Toko.
- It was the first time COSCUP prepared a booth in an overseas conference. For newbies like us, I think the final result (an “observation report” like this, learned a few to improve COSCUP and have been noted on the tracking system, the number of people who are willing to get notified for COSCUP CfP…) is good enough.
- We may need Japanese materials, and how we measure the performance of the materials for the next time.
- Would be nice to have a COSCUP tablecloth.
- We use two B2 posts to decorate the booth this time and it was good enough, but still, a tablecloth will be even better.
- Prepare some snacks from Taiwan?
BTW, this year in COSCUP, we are starting a project to partner with local OSS conferences in Asia. The CfP of COSCUP special track in HKOSCon just finished last week, and I hope I can bring more good news to you guys at the end of March. Stay tuned!
