HKOSCon Courtesy Visit to Japan Open Source community in Tokyo
Hong Kong Open Source Conference (HKOSCon) is an annual international conference that promotes the open source culture to communities of both IT professionals and the general public, including developers, users and promoters. I had the honor to present in PyCon HK and hence acquaint the organizers in the speaker dinner. Inspired, I joined the organizing committee since last year as a member in the marketing team as well as an on-site interpreter.
To strengthen our connection with overseas communities, we have been exchanging more actively since last year mainly starting from Taiwan and Japan, such as via mutual conference special tracks and participation in conferences and activities for ideas and discussion.
Over the past few days (Dec 7–9), our chairman for this year, Calvin Tsang, and I paid a courtesy visit to Tokyo to discuss on potential collaboration with open source communities in Japan.
Here is our main schedule:
Day 1: Lunch with Circle CI regional manager Kensuke Morimoto, Open Source People Network (OSPN) Year-end Party (忘年会)
Day 2: Dinner with Raspberry Pi Masafumi Ohta & Haha from Taiwan
Day 3: DevOp Days Tokyo Sato Sho, PyCon JP Board Chair Terada Manabu
After arriving early in Tokyo, I spent some time organizing slides to introduce about our conference.
Being my first time to prepare a presentation in Japanese, I got pretty excited despite my heavy eyelids after a red-eye flight Friday midnight. (Somehow not wanting to take extra leave from work. Capricornus style?)
Then we went on to meet with Circle CI Regional Manager Morimoto-san at a nice soba place (buckwheat noodles) in Shibuya. While we introduced ourselves and our vision in the coming conference, Morimoto-san filled us in with insight of open source and other technology conferences held in Japan, mostly in Tokyo, such as AWS DevDay.
Circle CI is a Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) system that develops much open source technology in itself and helps manage thousands of open source project worldwide (https://github.com/circleci). In our meeting, we also discussed about the management and support of clients especially around Asia Pacific.
Right after meeting with Morimoto-san, we joined the happy year-end gathering of Open Source People Network (OSPN). It is truly amazing how the passion to contribute the technical expertise back to society via open source technology knits up such a warm and close community.
Between snacks and drinks, OSPN members introduced us the various technology events in Japan coming, and reminded us about how Tokyo Olympics may affect the schedules this year. We also reviewed the past events organized and participated last year to exchange experience.
We sat down for a more formal meeting and discussion. Here we go for my first outside-class presentation in Japanese. I must thank their enthusiastic support!
The most exciting part comes at the free discussion, when we further talked about activities on both side, and came down to more concrete details of how we can strengthen our collaboration. I also observed their casual while structured way of task distribution for project management, which is essential in volunteer projects. We often talk about coding is not the only way to contribute to open source. We see this in action with some members not just work on the development, but also translation. Moreover, Ogasawara-san, a main organizer of LibreOffice Asia and a key person in the Japanese LibreOffice Community, proposed to offer sponsorship for students from Japan to join the HKOSCon 2020, and the idea was well supported. I can’t wait to meet these great people with the aspiring youth again soon!
Last but not least, we also exchanged souvenirs and shared about the various mascots for different community, looked at the various fun hardware-software integration creation in their office. Of course, we took lots of pictures with our cute HKOSCon mascot, Kottis.
Technology connects. “Kawaii” (cuteness) connects as well :3
(They taught us to pronounce the first “i” in higher tone for local accent haha)
The next day, we met with Masafumi-san who leads the Raspberry Pi community in Japan and volunteering at the Raspberry Pi Foundation, together with Haha from Taiwan who now works in a Tokyo startup, and is a volunteer at COSCUP, the largest open source event in Taiwan where HKOSCon had a collaboration last year to hold a mutual special track at each other’s conference. I met Masafumi-san a few times in Hong Kong events and in the last COSCUP, while it’s my first time to meet Haha. I really admire her brilliance and bright character. Here we obtained quite some insight of open source and job culture comparison in different places, and found more edges of network joining up.
On the last day, we start with a short visit to Google JP at the “Shibuya-valley” again.
Then we met Sato-san who organizes DevOp Days Tokyo, and discussed further on conference organization and community management. We learnt a lot from his experience and are very grateful for the interest raised in holding community or promotion booth at HKOSCon 2020.
As the last stop before our flight, we met with Terada-san, who is the Board Chair of PyCon JP Board Chair, Fellow and Contributing member in the Python Software Foundation and actively authors technical books for education. He brings along a very intelligent youth in his company and a couple of Python buddies met in previous PyCon HK speaker dinner, including Masako Sugita-san, an inspiring Pythonista who works in PyLadies Tokyo. It is exciting to know we will meet again soon in HKOSCon 2020! Of course, we talked a bit more about Python and PyCon alongside as well.
Overall, we had a brief but very fruitful trip. Not only did we obtain practical details of collaboration, the activeness and sense of community among Japanese developers is truly inspiring. Personally, I learnt a lot on management and promotion, and hope to contribute more to the open source community in future.
Acknowledgement: I would like to give my sincere thanks to HKOSCon for the experience and Hong Kong Creative Open Technology Association (HKCOTA) which provides financial support for air tickets and accommodation in this trip.
We will be holding HKOSCon 2020 in Cyberport on June 12–13. We will call for proposals soon.
Stay tuned & See you there!
