Khaos

YAPC::Asia - Coming Soon

I was wondering how many people are travelling to YAPC::Asia from outside Japan. There are 24 confirmed registrants from outside Japan and 497 from Japan. The biggest YAPC in the world to date seems more a Japanese conference than an Asian one as there are only a handful of people attending from any other Asian country.

The thing I wasn’t expecting to see in the statistics was how few people list themselves as members of Perl Monger groups. Only 53 confirmed attendees out of a total of 521.

This conference was sold out in just over a week. How do all these people find out about the conference? Where is all this Perl interest coming from in Japan? One thing I can’t easily tell – because lots of people didn’t fill this in – is where in Japan the attendees are coming from. Are they nearly all from Tokyo?

Hopefully next week I will get some feeling as to why there is so much interest. I may not though. This will be my third YAPC::Asia and I didn’t find out very much during the last two conferences. I have a big language barrier to overcome. At the first conference I spoke no Japanese. Last year I had some Japanese but not enough to be that useful. This year I have more but I can’t talk about technical things or anything much beyond food, shopping, weather, and other basic life things. I am looking forward to the day when I can speak enough Japanese to properly interact with people in Japan.

I also feel less comfortable than I do at either YAPC::NA or YAPC::Europe. I have heard other women say that they feel like some sort of alien when they attend a big male dominated technical conference. Well in Japan I am a card carrying alien and I do feel out of place sometimes at tech events here. Actually, I haven’t gone to some because I didn’t want to be the only Western woman in the room. This was after my experience at a Free Software event where no-one would even sit in the same row as me. YAPC::Asia was nothing like that but I can still feel out of place at times. That being said I am really looking forward to this conference.

One Response to “YAPC::Asia – Coming Soon”

  1. Tatsuhiko Miyagawa Says:

    This year we have 5 guests from Korea, which is a great improvement to call it “Asian”, at least compaired with the past conferences where Japanese, Taiwanese and American dominated.

    Shibuya Perl Mongers mailing list has 200 subscribers, so I guess at least we have like 150 people out of them, but people are just too lazy to update their profile, or they think they don’t “belong to” Shibuya.pm, just as a regular attendee to their very popular tech meeting.

    The ratio of Tokyo and non-Tokyo is like 9:1, so this popularity comes from that there are lots of popular speakers giving a talk, and also there are general interest for conferences like this and Tokyo is such a dense city to fill this size really easily.