"LibreOffice mini Conference 2013 Tokyo/Spring" report from a staff's perspective

We, Japanese LibreOffice community, are happy to done first (and not last, maybe) whole day LibreOffice event in Japan; the name is "LibreOffice mini Conference 2013 Tokyo/Spring"; here is a short report and our special guest, the calc hacker Kohei-san also wrote very nice report in his blog.

So I don't need to write a report one of attendee, but I'm a staff of the event.  And our community has less experience to have a big event yet, so I, as a member of LibreOffice Japanese team, have to record what we thought, what we decided and what we done; and share our (still small) knowledge with any other local communities.

The trigger of this event

I'm not sure but the seeds are put our mind in Open Source Conference (in short, OSC; Japanese most famous FLOSS event series) Aizu-Wakamatsu in last fall.  Aizu-wakamatsu is a symbolic local government for us because they had migrated MS Office to OOo, and now they use LibreOffice whole of their work, and they provide lots of administrative forms in ODF format.

Three people (Takizawa-san, Enoki-san and I) had been back from Berlin, so we had been little excited; we told.

"How about hosting LibreOffice Conference in Japan in the future?"

"Yeah, but we have less experience, so we should start from smaller events."

"Debian-JP people now start to grow their experience with annual whole-day event to have a miniconf in the future, and to host a DebConf.  We should follow their way."

"I hope we'll have Japanese ODF plugfest in here, Aizu-wakamatsu. Because here is a special place.'

Or something something... We had been dreaming.

I forgot detail, but at the end of last year one of our member wrote an event plan of LibreOffice: it describes how we'll get sponsers how we promote to media, etc. At first it might be a "small start" event but the dream had been grown, it's too big for us.  So we decided the plan should be postponed when we have enough experience.

The e-mail had come

 Some winter day, we got an e-mail from OSC organizer; they said:

"Meisai Univ., the place next OSC Tokyo will have, have enough space to do something each communities separated by OSC.

No rent fee is needed.  You need nothing about venue because everything about venue is by OSC organizer.  But you have to gather attendee by yourself and OSC organizer have no responsibility to advertise your event, because your communities events are totally different event with OSC itself."

This proposal seems have pros and cons both.

Pros.

• OSC is most famous event series in Japanese FLOSS world, so lots of people come here.
• We had attended OSC Tokyo at Meisei Univ., so we already know how about projection system, power sources, and so on.
• Nothing contract, nothing fee we need.  It makes entry level low.

Cons.

• OSC always have lots of very nice tracks.  OSC itself is our event's really strong competitor.
• Meisei-Univ. is little bit far from center of Tokyo.  It's very hard to come from outside of suburb of Tokyo, e.g. Kansai-area, Tohoku-area.

But we decided we accepted their proposal.  Because it seemed a good "small start" event for us.  Some problem might be cause, but they might change our experience.

My work ... publication

I wasn't a leader of the event. So I can't tell everything of the event.  However I can tell what I did ... publication.

Frankly to say, my work was not good.  We can't beat our competitor; OSC.

Someone said; "I want to join LibreOffice track, but I can't find in the OSC's program,"

or "Finally I found LibreOffice name! I wondered why this year LibreOffice has no booth in OSC?"...

They don't thought we have our own event, not OSC itself but same place.  It's my fault.

Yes, right now I know my mistake.  My main field is:

• Document Foundation Wiki
• LibreOffice ML
• Twitter / Facebook (via Event-support web service)

You already understand... All of above are for people already know LibreOffice and Document Foundation (About a Twitter and Facebook, most of posts are on my timeline, not a worldwide...).

I tried to use payed advertise service of Facebook; but it was not so effective to reach new of LibreOffice people.  But I'm not familiar of Facebook so I might made something wrong.  I need to investigate Facebook (or anything else SNS) feature.

We succeeded or ...?

However, every tracks were really interesting (especially special guest Calc Hacker Kohei-san's "LibreOffice Development FAQ" (in Japanese, sorry!)), and about 20 people were there in each track.

Some small mistakes we had, but totally it was a nice event I believe.

And the mistakes let grow our community.  If we'll have next opportunity, we will do better.

It's a small step, but great start for us.

At last, thanks for global community people, especially in marketing-ML.
Italo, your video is very good gift for Japanese community!