 All right. Hello, everyone. All right. Who's having a good time at WordCamp Asia? Oh, come on. Come on. Who's having a good time at WordCamp Asia? Yes. Thank you. And that's fantastic because in addition to these big flagship events, we have, last I checked, 784 local WordPress communities across 115 countries. Pretty cool, huh? And it's each of these local communities that have the potential to go on to organize WordCamps and work together to create regional WordCamps and come together to create events like these. Who here knows about their local WordPress community? All right. For those of you watching from home, that was about, like, 50% of the crowd here. And that's fantastic because anyone who is enthusiastic about WordPress can get involved in their local community or if there isn't one already, start their own. And if that sounds really exciting but also kind of scary to you, I get it. This is a fantastic community. And with that comes great responsibility. And so we've gathered this panel here today because every one of our panelists has at one point or another built their WordPress community. And so let's get to meet them. If you'll join me on stage. Oh, we're getting mic'd up. Okay. Fantastic. Thank you all so much for joining me today. I'm going to ask you all to introduce yourselves if you don't mind. We'll just go down the line here. And if you can share your name, your company, where you call home, and one unique thing about your local WordPress community. Yeah. My name is Amit. I'm from Nepal. So I would say I'm from WordPress Nepal. So one good thing about the WordPress Nepal is we've organized 16 work camps so far. That's a really good point. Hi. My name is Miram Schwab. I'm from Israel. I have been in the WordPress industry for a long time, about 15 years. I founded an agency. Then I founded a company called Stratik, which was recently acquired by Elementor. So now I work at Elementor. I'm head of WordPress relations there now. This is a new role for me. I love being part of the community locally. And I think it also gives me an opportunity to be part of the community globally. And I'm just really, really excited to be here. So thank you. Hi. My name is Megane. Thank you. I want to read my script, right? Yeah. I'm running a WordPress community agency, a WordPress agency, MGM. We are sponsoring WordPress Camp Asia as a sim pack. I'm a previous WordPress Camp Tokyo organizer. And I also participate as a volunteer staff and speaker. Can I make sense? Like this? Thank you so much. In Japan, WAPU was born in Japan and almost meet up groups and almost every WordPress Camp have each origin WAPU. My country have a lot of WAPU's country. Thank you so much. I'm so excited about joining. Thanks for having me. Hi. My name is Asif. And I see a lot of my team members. I'm from Bangladesh. This time, we are actually over, I think like close to 250 or 300 people from Bangladesh attending. And all of them needed a visa to come here. So they put a lot of energy. And when we are talking about community, that's the kind of ecosystem we are actually building. I am with WordPress since 2004. I'm a core contributor. I'm also a work camp organizer and trying to help as much as possible. And my company, WP developer, that I co-founded work exclusively for WordPress. We have several plugins and solutions for WordPress. Thank you. Namaskar everyone. My name is Rahul and I'm from Kolkata. I'm one of the organizers for work camp Kolkata. Professionally, I'm a content marketer. And very humble and like happy to be here. Thank you, everyone. All right. Well, let's get started. I'm really excited to be here with all of you today. And we talked about something unique about our communities. And, Miriam, if you don't mind, I'd like to start with you. What is something unique in your community that has either helped to propel community growth or has been a challenge for it? So, I would say that the Israeli WordPress community is pretty evenly divided between very hardcore developers, people who are technologists, and they do not want to hear content or learn anything about marketing or SEO or that's so not in their wheelhouse. They just want to know about the latest innovations in terms of how you can develop and deploy WordPress website. And that's always exciting and I think it keeps a high level of content in our community. And then there are the people, I guess I would say an equal amount of people who are interested in using WordPress as a marketing tool. And then you have a lot of those within companies who are using WordPress. And you have the technologists and the content creators and the marketers who are working together to use that WordPress site to achieve business goals. And those are the types of people who were attending our meetups and our WordCamps. COVID, of course, did not help with that, but we're really hoping to reinvigorate because it's a very interesting and colorful community and I think we can learn a lot from each other if we can get together again, which we hopefully will. Fantastic. And yeah, we do have a lot to learn from each other. I know you all travel to a number of meetups and WordCamps. What has, beyond the things that make our communities unique, what have you observed that brings us together? Anyone like to start? This conference. Meetups and WordCamps around the world. What brings us together? I think in the case of Nepal or Nepalese, let's say, I cannot say in general for the communities, the life has changed because of the WordPress for the Nepalese as a whole who are into WordPress because Nepal has this, people still don't know Nepal that we are also into tech. People know Nepal for different reasons for tourism for other factors. But because of the tech, because of the WordPress, we've been able to identify ourselves, our talent throughout the world that we also keep people on many things because if you see the WordPress theme directed, there are 30% of the contribution from Nepal. So because of those life-changing moments, because of those impact that WordPress has given, we all feel like giving back to community and that's when we're attending WordPress, not just in Asia, we also have participants in Bangladesh. We also attend WordCamp in US. So that's like giving back to community. Yeah, and it can be life-changing. In fact, I'd love to hear a few stories of your first experience with WordPress events. I think Megan, you and I were just talking about your first experience. What was that like? I understand you agree, I'm sorry. My first WordPress event was WordCamp Tokyo 2008. I have joined WordCamp held near Tokyo or in Japanese every year. One quote inspired me then, first time. I remember vividly the quote that was used in speech, standing on the shoulder of Jayam. It means Jayam equals WordPress. This quote opened a new chapter for me. That meaning is we can use the power of Jayam and we can spread the power of Jayam. That's so great and it inspired me. Then I started WordPress blog community called WPD in 2012 when I became freelancer and I was CEO and registered after a company. I want to learn from others in the community and also wanted to help others by written in WordPress blogs and web. The WPD finished updating but our connection and hard of friendship continue today like this. Thank you. I think everyone who comes to this community, they have such a different experience. As if you also had a really interesting first time in this community, what was that like? For me, the first time I attended WordCamp, it was in Australia. It was also for the first time I was traveling out of my own continent and in Australia, no disrespect or anything. The way they speak is very hard sometimes for us to actually add up the accent. I was one of the speaker and it was before like 2010 or something. When I was asked to speak, I was speaking so fast and I completed my lightning talk in five minutes. Then I realized nobody understood anything. I spoke too fast. Then I completely resumed the whole session again. Something very strange happened on the very fast experience for me in the WordCamp. I fall in love with WordCamp and that changed my life. I have attended like over 100 WordCamp so far and only one actually happened in my country. Hundreds of WordCamp is all through the world. For a lot of us, the community people or the people who love WordPress, a lot of things are not directly rational to the financial aspect of life and everything. For me, it's kind of a joy that I find with people. I would call WordPress and WordCamp people are my people. A lot of my best friends are actually made from WordPress community or the WordCamps. You see WordPress have developed so much. Now we see a lot of companies investing a lot in WordPress and we have a lot of different programs like 545 or a lot of different things. I feel like if you could give someone the joy of WordPress, the joy of the community, he will actually do a lot of contributions by their own. You can't actually pay someone and ask like you have to contribute. If you could actually make them understand the joy of WordPress and the open source community, then probably it's easier to develop the community. This is actually an example like WordCamp Asia is probably one of the finest community event because we gather around from all around the world. I think we have more people from our local community in Thailand than we have from all around the world this time. This is a really special event and I would like to thank everyone who actually traveled to the time to call the energy to actually attend and express the same kind of energy for all of us. It's that sense of belonging is so important and I think our community does a really wonderful job of trying to lower the barriers to participate and to make it as diverse and inclusive as possible because that diversity does make us much stronger as a whole. I believe you've done some diversity work in your community. What does that look like? For us, diversity and inclusivity was always a priority and although we are named as the WordPress community, but it's just in the name, we believe that it is for everyone, not just for the local people. I just want to share the experience that I have in last WordCamp that happened just very recently on December. We have audience from Bangladesh, Nepal and we have speakers from Europe, the US and every time we do a WordCamp, we get huge support from all our neighboring countries and we all represent Kolkata and Kolkata, if you go with the history of Kolkata, like people all across the subcontinent, they came and settled down so we tried to follow the same philosophy and try to make it comfortable and inclusive so that anyone from anywhere can come and join and be a part of WordPress Kolkata community and I think that what makes WordCamp Kolkata also unique that we are local but not local. Everyone is there and slowly we are trying our best to build up the community much more in terms of number and also much more in terms of inclusivity. One priority that we have right now to balance the gender ratio, which I think is a common challenge between all the, you know, Indian subcontinent WordCamps when meetups so that's something where we are working on and also we are working on to increase and welcome more students because today or tomorrow we will be too old to, you know, represent so we need young people to come up and step up and take the responsibilities so for as a community our two goals are to balance the gender ratio and to include more young stars on the group. Fantastic. All right well and our hope here today is to inspire you to get involved with your local community and so I do want to make sure that we have time for some questions. If I believe somebody has mics out in the audience if, right over here, if you have questions could you just raise your hand or wave or something and we'll run the mic over to you while you are getting, well that is happening and we're getting questions ready. I'd love to know one thing that I love about this part of the world is that there are so many languages. However that does make it really tricky for us to communicate with each other. Has this shown up in your communities and how do you work across all those different languages? So in the case of Nepal even the Nepal itself has like 92 languages just one context that many languages but this is one common language that we all understand that is Nepali. So what we try to balance is whenever we do our meetups we try to conduct in Nepali language because it's very comfortable for all the audience as well as the speakers but when we do our work camps so we have participants from other countries as well as a speaker as well as a participant. So in the work camp we try to include English so that's how we balance like in terms of the knowledge sharing so whoever are comfortable with speaking in Nepali they are more like the speakers in meetups and for the people who are more comfortable with the international languages they we invite them as speakers in the work camps so that's how we balance at the same time we don't really just depending on that accent or something we make sure that we give equal opportunity for all the speakers and all the participants. Anyone else? So at the the Israeli work camps we would generally have guests that would come overseas from overseas as well and so well on the one hand the local community preferred content in Hebrew which by the way I was often surprised about because Israel is quite a tech oriented country and quite international people generally know English well still the local community wanted content in Hebrew which is legitimate but we would want the international guests to feel comfortable as well and know what's going on so first of all we'd make sure to translate all of the content the website we would translate into English as well and the schedule and the program and then what we also tried to do was that we would have two or three tracks happening at the same time and that at any given time at least one session was happening in English so that the international guests would feel comfortable being able to attend sessions as well and they wouldn't have to feel left out and then often they would be the ones giving the sessions and so that way we had content that the local community felt comfortable with our international guests would be able to attend or speak at and then also it meant that there was content going up onto WordPress TV that from Israel that people could understand as well although I remember when we started uploading the content in Hebrew I think it was Andrea Middleton she was very excited that for the first time WordPress TV was getting Hebrew content so I was excited that we were able to contribute that as well fantastic all right do we have questions from the audience I see one over there thank you thanks all for this discussion so my question is considering that assuming that the community in your country is very small that it's invisible and there are no groups on Facebook to meet with people with interests in WordPress how to go about starting a new community within your country great question how do we start a community in your country I will try I want to question today you coming here alone right okay yeah at first of all my script writing in at first please check your neighborhood community's local team or something but actually I heard from you I you don't have near neighborhood community right okay I see got it the huge and difficult complicated question but you are brave is now we can understand and maybe everyone can help you and this thing with you for thing for you improve your country's community yeah at first please I think better is yeah you want to you want to more ask question to in in our track what track yeah right yeah what's the track is best way to ask to around of something question do you have account at word track uh word or slack account it is the official word track group yeah let's try to join and complete keep conversation in track okay okay of course can I DM you on slack yeah okay great thank you yeah that's right it's okay so like if it's about like smaller local community and how they could develop you see like what happens even for Bangladesh we are mainly based in Dhaka or capital and in Dhaka is easier to do everything because we have people we have a lot of university we have companies to support sponsor but let's talk about the whole country I I'm actually very impressed about the Nepalese communities Nepal is a very distributed country and mountainous but they have grown what press community to different parts of Nepal and the the core organizer the the people who are actually pushing what press throughout the country they actually help each other so like if they are organizing like what can Nepal the nationwide event they do it like in different cities every year and I'm sure like they follow a lot of like things like how to actually have like more speaker how to have like more support what we are trying to do in Bangladesh right now in Bangladesh we have a mountainous cities called silhouette and they started what this community about like one or two years ago and now they are organizing meetups very regularly so when the organized meetup in our meetup is a little bit more driven towards like session or like networking so sometime they invite people from Dhaka community and we are seeing this train all through the country like a in a small city if they are organizing a meetup they will invite everyone from the country and it actually help each other to actually expose the community to even larger audience and just recently even select got approved for their own what camps so in Bangladesh the fast what cam we are going to see in this year will be like what cam silhouette and I feel like this is a very proud moment how a smaller city could grow with the help of like rest of the country next question all right I see I see a hand over here I can't quite see out into the audience so you might need to really wave hi thank you for coming to Thailand and welcome to Bangkok so my question is that as you can see that this event is happening in Thailand but in Thailand we also have like a WordPress community but what I see here is not a lot of Thai people coming to this event which is like one of the biggest for WordPress so how how can I contribute a wee inter of Thai people that is already existing community but not that big and it's not that popular how how can we improve this community to be a little bit more for for the local people in Thailand and make even though a lot of businesses and agency here use WordPress to do their own business and yeah and gain momentum in term of businesses so so the question is that how we can build a better and bigger community and you know more unified in in in Thailand so it's actually like a very good question and the main reason why maybe we do not see a lot of Thai people is about the community activations and also we do that what can Asia was very overhyped throughout the community in what basic ecosystem so whenever they release the ticket it run out very soon so if the Thai community is not very engaged and well informed about what's going on globally they maybe even did not actually got chance to buy the ticket because ticket run out so soon and I actually even attended like few take events in Bangkok and I was amazed to see how bigger the tech ecosystem we have in here like they have a lot of software companies they have a lot of companies influenced by Japanese or neighborhood countries and this is a good community maybe if we could engage more young people if we could go close to the university and take an institute you have in Bangkok or Thailand or other parts of Bangkok Thailand then maybe it will be easier to get more people into it and you know like in a lot of other countries when they started to have even meetups sometimes they shared it in like a global slack or other people other places so if somebody is like traveling to Bangkok maybe not from this this town but maybe traveling from Japan because I see Japan has a lot of business and other things in Thailand so that that's how probably you could get started with and I do feel like this particular what cam the what cam Asia will actually accelerate all the what press related growth in throughout the Thailand so you will probably see a lot of things happening and maybe maybe attendees like you will actually take some initiatives and start gathering like people around and have like more meetups and other things I'll add a quick bit of facts in there because we've referred to the slack channel a few times if you don't know what that is that's okay there is a slack instance where all of the contributors build wordpress together it's called the making wordpress slack instance and within that there's a channel for every single team and the community team has a channel there that supports meetup organizers around the world and in fact do we have any community deputies in here you just wave your hand real fast I see Hari and one over there too I can't quite see who you are though but these are also the people who can help you get started and answer questions about meetups globally as well so there are additional resources to you I'm sorry I interrupted you go for it thank you just just like regarding the expanding a community in Bangkok I just wanted to share experience because in the case of Nepal it started with three people actually in 2007 it's expanded to now more than thousand or let's say in our work and we get more than thousand people so the idea is to to continue even if there are few people joining a meetup so that is very important that's something that Nepal has done right let's say even I didn't I was not a part of work camp or work WordPress meetups in 2007 we were pretty pretty like we were students but it was the work camp were happening every year like they did not give up and work camp was one of the major push because we went there and learn the stories about the people that wordpress is doing something better for them so because of these stories that more people started joining these meetups and camps so today like because 16 work camp is the reason why we've been able to expand so my suggestion would be to not give up even if it's the three people or five people make sure that you continue a meetup and that that will eventually let you to expand your work WordPress community for sure fantastic all right any other questions hello you may be maybe one over there oh sorry hello so I just want to re-emphasize what you were saying I'm from WordPress community Islamabad in Pakistan so we started in 2016 and that was the initiative that we took to make a community in Pakistan so there were only two three people joining in the community so we the main goal is like even if you see there are no many no as such people joining in the community we did not give up we there was there was initial meetup where we have only four people coming in a in a meetup five people coming in a meetup but the main goal was to not give up and at the end we had we conducted two world camps there and now we have almost more than 60 70 people joining in our meetup every month wonderful thank you for sharing can I just share something about how we yeah please so when we so I actually didn't start the community in Israel it was someone else he just picked it up and he organized two word camps they were quite small he did it in Tel Aviv and then he was like okay that's enough for me because organizing word camps is definitely challenging and I was like okay maybe I should try and at the time there was less of a push for meetup so we weren't organizing like ongoing meetup so I was like okay let's try to do a word camp and it wasn't big but it started I think just having these events and and organizing them and getting people to start being aware of it like you're saying start with a few those people tell other people and those types of activities is what ends up growing your community locally because it's also motivating for those people who are showing up they're learning from each other they can collaborate with each other and then they feel part of something bigger that first word camp that I organized I was like I want Matt to come so I emailed him and he came in these days I don't think Matt can go all over the world but one way I felt like that strengthened our local community because having people come from outside of local community shows that were connected not just like where we are but also around the world which is one of the wonderful things about WordPress that we're all connected to each other regardless of where we are and it starts almost like with the like the grain that you plant the seed that you plant in your local community and then that helps you connect and grow to the other community so by kind of cross pollinating I guess I would say having people come from outside it like gives like a invigorating type of just new faith new approach to your local community and then also all of you who are here and I know it's hard to go to international word camps believe me I would watch from Israel while the word camps would happen in US the main one and I could never go it was too far and I had babies many babies I could not travel that far but then when word camp happened in Europe it was closer and it was the first time that I could actually go and connect with all these people that I was like huge fans of online and I got to meet them in real life which also helps bring back of kind of invigoration to your local community the other nice thing about our community is that the people who were big fans of are very approachable you can just become friends with them so I did and and then that led to like this kind of you know continuous relationship between our local community and the international community and I started speaking at more international events which brought more awareness about our community and so so just it's about taking the first step and making connections internally but also outside of your country that can help you learn things that you can bring to your local community and also it helps motivate in your own local community in terms of feeling connected like on a larger scale which is I think very motivating wonderful all right any other questions right over there hello my name is Adi I'm from Indonesia so actually I share the same feeling as the guy from Thailand yeah like Indonesia is one of the most populated countries in Southeast Asia but then there are only a few of us who attended the word camp Asia um and I'm very proud that some of the countries like Bangladesh managed to bring such a huge crowd to the word camp Asia and yeah so the question is um in in Indonesia the workers community is not something new for us but then we have plenty of uh team creator plugin creators but unfortunately like not many of them was actually kind of involved in the community activities yeah like I'm considering the low left low numbers of local meetups that's happening and there was just like only one word camp happens last year it was a really good start so I would like to know I'm curious to know like what happens in each of your countries probably that was kind of the defining moment or how could you create such a consistent and persistent community uh WordPress community growth in in in your country so if you could just share some that could be like one moment or tips that how you can get this consistent growth of momentum in in the WordPress community in your country thank you I love that question what was the defining moment that uh I could take the questions so in Bangladesh the WordPress exists uh for a longer time uh my company is doing works work related to WordPress for a longer time but our community jump started back in 2013 the time we started doing meetups and uh like it's just my experience sometimes those kind of development is driven by leadership so if you have people who are dedicated who are connected and at the same time have the capacity to drive or gather people it actually helps each other and as I said like I'm very much motivated from the Nepali community at the beginning like they started even earlier than us they had really good work camps even before than us and in Nepal they actually they're also driven by a few of the leaders but they organize a lot of things very differently than we used to see in other places in the world like they used to or I heard they used to organize like workshop for younger people so they could get into theme development or those kind of things and that actually helps to draw a larger audience in Bangladesh is it also happened in the same way we started to organize meetups uh a lot of people got interested a lot of young people who are probably uh doing some work in php or wants to get into design or website or the website building kind of works they started to attain what comes to listen and do network and that's how it jumpy started like we even have a meetup that has close to 1000 people just a meetup but it's still like close to 1000 people most of our meetups is still right now are like close to 70 or 100 people so uh those kind of meetup could actually influence a lot of people and last three year was very hard for all of us like we did not have not only what camps like what what camp Asia supposed to happen on 2020 I'm very thankful for all the organizer who are keep working for nearly like four years so yeah yeah that's a very special thanks for all the organizers who are doing it for longer years and if you think about like how we are not able to organize meetup for few years it actually cost some of the damage and right now as we are able to meet physically as we are allowed to have meetups and what camps this larger event I think it will change a lot of things and I even personally actually attended one what camp in Jakarta and it was a very good experience and in the same year uh Indonesia had I think like three what camps in a single year so Indonesia has a really good potentials I think like as soon as we start to have the meetups again I will see like more of the community is actually coming apart and coming together yeah I just I want to be honest about our meetups and we have struggled with consistency it's really hard um it was hard to get people to show up and we were doing them in Jerusalem which is a much smaller and less active community but I was like this is where we are we're going to make it work it was much harder I recommend doing things that make your life easier so for example if when we restart the meetups we'll probably be in the Tel Aviv area where there's just more action and I know that's not relevant for everyone but um I actually was talking to someone here who uh said something interesting which was that they moved their meetups from the evening to the morning like from at 10 a.m and I was like and he and their attendance grew like that's really smart because evening can be hard for people with families the end of the workday you're tired you're going to start driving around like who has strength I know I barely have the strength to do that kind of thing so you're like okay well especially if people are working in this field then it's you know work related a 10 a.m meetup makes a lot of sense and people still have energy to do a thing like that so uh something that I'm taking from from that conversation and I'm I'm recommending in general is to try different approaches try different frequencies so some communities more frequent works better some less uh the time the day even and um if you can bring like a local celebrity type of person like someone that people know and are excited to hear from and like push that with all your strength to get people to come to that meetup and then they'll be like oh that's a cool group of people hopefully I like they will stay engaged going forward so basically test a b testing almost for your meetup I want to say other side uh yeah we want to improve we want to enjoy all together and improve number of people yeah but uh I think uh I want to say don't be rush this is a most best Asia community event then I think I'll find your pace and keep it in order to continue contributing uh this is uh I think it's a key another key point right yeah uh Japanese culture like these consistent kids consistent work yeah it's like uh in Japanese is shokunin uh that meaning these craftsmanship yeah make it routines and participate regularly for example uh document team lips uh Akira-san Akira Tachibana-san document team rip uh open translate hour every Friday night in Japan's rock yeah it's a good experience and example for joining regularly it's keeping touch easier and easy to connecting any your local people team wonderful yeah that connection is really important Raul I I'm so glad you're gonna jump in here because India has such a vibrant community and we talked about wanting a word camp India earlier today I'd love to hear from you as well thank you so what I think uh in order to grow any community consistency is important and we also need to think like I believe you're an organizer so you need to think what is in it for the audience like if they come to your meetup what are they taking back with them it can be some knowledge it can be some value it can be good networking or it can just be in a couple of hours of you know healthy good conversation so whenever we plan a meetup we try to you know ask ourselves like if I am an attendant attendee and I want to uh you know be a part of the meetup or attend that particular meetup what will I gain from there so if we can provide a value and if uh people like get something it it's not have to be you know you need to bring world-class speakers you don't need to do that you can pick uh you know people who are doing good job uh if if someone for example someone's running a startup just you know approach them ask them invite them just you know outreach as a community organizer it is very important to communicate outreach and connect with people invite them and make it a safe place for them you don't have to be the best speaker you don't have to be you know the most knowledgeable person but you need to be approachable you need to be a good human being first and you will see automatically the things gets connected just be consistent and try to provide a value and I think that's the only thing that will help you to you know grow the community and try to network with all the neighboring communities within your country and also outside try to plan meetups or when you see you know other community members are coming to your city it helps because first and foremost you get a good speaker and first and on the other hand you have a scope of collaborating within the communities so I would again like to quote or from what I learned from Nepal community so every time I go to Nepal for any of the word camps I learned something from there and I bring it back home and try to implement that so if you really want to grow your community you also need to you know attend and you visit and see what other communities are doing try to learn from them and if you see something good just you know bring it on and implement so I think that's the three thing that needs to be done is create value be consistent be open invite like you should always have an inviting attitude that's it I think this thing will help you thank you and we have so much to learn from each other but unfortunately we are at the end of our time here however all the panelists will be around and available in case you have any other questions as will the community deputies as well thank you all so much for being here today I hope you are all very inspired to start your local community thank you