As you may know, Word Camp Asia which happened in Bangkok from 17th-19th February 2023 is the first flagship WordCamp in Asia. So far, there have been three types of flagship WordCamps: US, Europe and Centroamérica.
WordCamp Asia is a community-organized WordPress conference that brings together bloggers, developers, designers, artists, small business owners, entrepreneurs, and educators from Singapore and all across Asia. It aims to offer something for everyone, from blogging newbies to professional developers, from marketing professionals to experienced designers, and tech enthusiasts to leading technologists. And most importantly, it aims to provide a welcoming, engaging, and safe space for WordPress users to get to know one another.
The Event
As usual, the event includes the so-called Contributor day when all participants, who applied for it, could have a chance to contribute to WordPress in the areas of Core/Core Performance, Themes, Patterns, Photos, Accessibility, CLI, Design, Documentation, Training, Support, Meta, Polyglots, TV, Hosting, Test, Mobile & Openverse, Community and Marketing.
Those who attended this sub event and had contributed to which of the above team will find their profile page on WordPress.org has badges associated with the team they contributed to.
In the previous Camp, I had attended the Polyglot team, but in this WordCamp Asia 2023 I attended the Training team as a content translator.
Besides, on 18th and 19th were the Conference days. The conference day is the day when people gather to learn and share knowledge and skill together on topic basis. The topics were submitted to the organizing team prior to the event, and only those approved will be used. The process is similar to Barcamp, the most popular tech event in Cambodia.
Other than sharing sessions and panel discussions, there are also booths from various companies working with WordPress. They provide free swags, pins, t-shirts, and loads of gifts to those visiting their booth.
Learn new technologies
Even though it’s quite similar to Barcamp, WordCamp has more intention of bringing WordPress related technologies to the table where Barcamp considers technology in general.
There are interesting sharing sessions and panel discussions throughout the whole Conference day. The two most interesting topics to me are “WordPress Through the Terminal” which is mainly about WP-CLI and the “Getting the most out of the WordPress REST API”. Attending these two sharing sessions gives me more ideas about how I could save time developing WordPress projects like a ninja, and the idea to improve the performance when dealing with huge data via REST API requests.
Make new friends
Other than learning new techs and contributing back to the community, making new friends and enhancing the connection between the old ones are also the main purpose of the event.
People from most parts of the world were coming to this event and they also wish to make new friends as well.
Learn how the community works
Attending the event also lets me learn how the community strives to keep bringing like-minded people together.
I have been leading the Cambodian WordPress Community for several years, yet there have been no WordCamps conducted in the country. Therefore, having at least a local WordCamp in Cambodia is a big dream of mine.
During the event, Mardy and I attended the Panel Discussion about “Building WordPress Communities in your Country” and have learned several key takeaways which I think are worst to share:
- Start small but consistent
- Get closer to younger people
- Relationship between locals and international communities
- Quality: define the actual key takeaway for each meetup for the audience (create value for the participant)
- Be approachable to the members
- Networking with the neighboring communities
- Attend other community events to learn and bring back
