Recap WordCamp Asia 2024 in Taiwan: As an Organizer in the Sponsor and Local Teams Behind the Scenes

A meeting or a story has a beginning, middle, and end ¹, not to say a recap of an organizing period across more than half a year. Furthermore, it’s an epic event to me therefore it deserves a bit longer. Someone said “Let’s do three!”² because the original story of “LOTR” was written in three books, but this article won’t take more than two hours per episode, that’s for sure.

Foreword

WordCamps vs Flagship WordCamps

WordCamps are volunteer-organized and foundation-sanctioned conferences, for the free and open-source publishing content management and application framework system that powers over 43% of the web.

WordCamp Asia, as one of the 3 flagship WordCamps(US, EU, Asia) in the world, represents the largest gatherings organized by the WordPress community. – via WordCamp Asia 2024 – Celebrate WordPress, Experience Asia.

Why did I choose to apply to organize WordCamp Asia 2024

1. It’s a precious opportunity to have a flagship WordCamp hosted in Taiwan. It’s even rarer if compared with a country to host the Olympics more than two times.
2. To see something different. To learn unexpected stuff, work procedures, remotely, and collaborate ways by working and communicating with various people from various countries without spending much money or many years.
3. To seek some methods of finding sponsors and maintaining sponsorships when I was under pressure trying to upscale our local Taoyuan WordPress Meetup | Meetup for the increased demands, attendees, and venue fees.

I’m an organizer in the sponsor team and also the local team. The duty of the local team is the same as important, however, this article focuses more on the perspective of the sponsor team rather than the local team since it’s one of the global teams that can provide insights into more general situations. The situations related to a local team may vary depending on the host city/country. Let’s start!

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How did the missions/tasks work inside? – Some examples

Naming sponsor tiers after iconic mountains in Taiwan

When we started making the draft of “Why sponsor WordCamp Asia 2024?” and all the details of available sponsor packages, there was a little but a bit important task to us – Naming the unique sponsor tiers for this year like every flagship WordCamp.

Concept & proposal

I’ve written two options with “Sort type A” / “Sort type B” into all five tiers.

• Sort type A (Yushan, the highest mountain in Taiwan for TOP TIER) is according to the Five Greats: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100_Peaks_of_Taiwan#Complete_listing_of_Baiyue
• Sort type B (Yushan Range for TOP TIER) is according to the five mountain ranges: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mountains_in_Taiwan#Mountain_ranges

Anyone could realize the means and differences for each sort type through Wikipedia.  The count numbers of both sort types added into Sponsor Packages are exactly 5, the same as the original tier counts.

by Green Yang, July 4, 2023

Shaping into a more complete

“Shan” just means mountain 山 so if it’s not unusual or disrespectful, we could shorten the names to something like “Mt. Yu” instead of Yushan, for example.

by Destiny Kanno³ – Sponsor team lead

Love the concept, but yes it would be hard to pronounce, Mt. would be totally ok I think LOL.
A lot of mountains name actually have a meaning for each letter so it would also be ok to pick ones that are easier to transcribe, for example, “sun moon lake” is actually pronounce “riyuetan”, this is my thought

Yushan would be Jade mountain

by Calvin Ho⁴ – Attendees experience team lead

Final version & symbol of design

I really love this angle, Green! Maybe we can also work with the Design team to create simple logo images of the mountain to display on the package page 🙂

by Destiny Kanno

Then, we’ve presented the 5 mountain names for the 5 sponsor tier names.

1. Jade Mountain Sponsors
2. Snow Mountain Sponsors
3. Xiuguluan Mountain Sponsors
4. Data Mountain Sponsors
5. Xingang Mountain Sponsors

And, the 5 icons of symbolic mountains for the 5 sponsor tiers are made by Junko⁵, our design team lead. Please see them on the archived page Sponsorship Packages – WordCamp Asia 2024. After the packages had were released, the numbers and the details had been the light tower but also a nightmare sometimes to us for almost half a year lol

This is the 1st and the most impressive task my first time as an organizer at “any” WordCamp – I was a speaker at WordCamp Taiwan 2021, talking about the definitions and the practices of website maintenance (in Chinese), but had never been an organizer even a volunteer to a WordCamp. Therefore, I like how we began the works that were so impressive to me.

This simple task made me feel satisfied and proud when I saw the symbolic mountains in Taiwan appear with our sponsors on the posts scheduled by our communication team AKA CC team with the team lead Blake⁶.

The names and showcases of the 5 sponsor tiers

Jade Mountain

In this case, there’s a collaboration sequence that includes 4 teams ordered by

1. Sponsor Team / Local Team – initiation
2. Team Leads / AX Team (Attendance Experience) / Local Team
3. Design Team
4. Sponsor Team – Continue related tasks

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Call for sponsors

This should be the trickiest part we suffered this time in Taiwan. There are some features that I’ve simplified into a list.

• The M-shaped sponsorships – Both the topest and lowest sponsor tiers are the most popular. This means we had enough topmost-tier sponsors at maximum and way more lowest-tier sponsors than we expected, but we lacked many middle-tier sponsors.
• Some highly potential sponsors declined to apply because they were worried about the reality of arriving in Taiwan for the first time – Even though we had prepared all the eVISA methods including the special projects for this event with our government, and even though all the attendees from various countries are satisfied our eVISA support. Thanks to Yuli who had done more than an organizer needs to do and had been a kind of Custom during the application period of eVISA.
• The expected benefits and realization to the market and the ecosystem in Taiwan. Some companies might have chosen to postpone or decrease their budget for the upcoming WordCamp EU/US in 2025.

Calling for local sponsors & Conclusion

In short, let’s look on the bright side – By taking this opportunity to organize a flagship WordCamp and calling for sponsors in Taiwan, we have established a huge list of local brands/companies with detailed information that could be used at any upcoming WordCamps in Taiwan in the next years! I’m proud of it even though the timing and the energy in the local market hadn’t been strong enough yet, and even though I may not apply to organize a WordCamp for now.

The Trinity, the venue, and “Sponsor areas vs Session areas”

The Trinity of a WordCamp

From my perspective, sponsors, sessions, and attendees are the trinity of a WordCamp. Staff that includes organizers and volunteers has the role of making the Trinity work smoothly with effective benefits.

Sponsor areas vs Session areas

I only joined in two sessions – The opening remarks and the closing remarks. Ah, in this case, you can say that I joined no session in WordCamp Asia 2024, and I think it’s not a strange situation for our sponsor team lead or any teammates despite any of us who could join or had joined a few sessions.

On the other hand, I heard that our programs team lead Shusei⁷ said he didn’t stay but only walked into sponsor areas to check if almost all the people had gone to the plenary hall for the important remarks. In this case, you can say that he joined no sponsor booth or interactions in sponsor areas.

Isn’t it interesting? That explains the roles and the relations between both teams.

it is obvious that physically talking about the venue – Both teams shared almost all the main spaces from the venue. That’s the main reason that determined how the spaces were used as our venue plan besides the reasons to choose from different venues under some limitations. TICC is a venue with multiple floors which has high advantages at hosting conferences and sessions with speakers in different rooms plus the elasticity to arrange exhibitions by sizes of booths and rooms.

There were some discussions and space “grabbing” for the tricky topics and the concerns about the specifications of each room during certain periods, such a difficult time across teams and local teams. In conclusion and the end, we had created the maximum utilities we could have by using every room within four floors well in the building – See our TICC Floor Plans – WordCamp Asia 2024 designed and supported in time in the last months by Chelsea⁸.

Some good even new tries in sponsor areas

1. Combine different sponsor tiers in the same area.
   The most important of all is to mix sponsor booths of the top and smallest tier. This move showed the abilities, especially on the 1st floor AKA Moon Bear Hall because the distances there are short to double time this advantage.
2. Ensure the traffic and the average distance for sponsors to session rooms are short and equal.
3. Took care of the sponsor booth of the smallest tier by three moves since they have no custom option for their booth.
   1. Arrange them to be the positions as obvious as possible compared to the largest booths.
   2. Pick a type of chair that supports various body shapes, and lets the sponsor representatives feel better when sitting for a long time.
   3. Create and apply the loop patterns design to the backplane with 3 or 2 booths per set to make them look not boring but nice. The design matches the language of the grand design powered by our design team. It also took time to match the positions of each booth once there came an added booth or a modification about the layout of the booth area. – Thanks to Mimi⁹‘s talent and patience who was in charge of this design task and collaborated with me who tried to be a good PM between a designer and our production companies.

Some disadvantage in sponsor areas

Lack of spaces with suitable equipment for sponsors and attendees to sit, have business conversations, or chill meetings on a tiny scale no matter in or out of sponsor areas.

I’m lazy and I don’t want to talk about the disadvantages that I can’t think of easily therefore that’s all 🙂

Sponsor add-ons (Experimental)

Generally, we didn’t make these items well due to a lack of human resources and time. On the other hand, there were many packages of add-ons, and every package needed enough specifications accordingly for selling. However, we still made one or two add-ons with good results, earning compliments such as the one below.

Hanning banners on escalators

Thanks to Mimi’s talent and patience again who was in charge of this design task and collaborated with me who tried to be a good PM between a designer and our production companies.

All the banners are printed on fabric materials, that’s the most tricky part for sponsors and we need to ensure the printing results will be good enough. Reasonably (not luckily), all the hanging banners earned positive feedback for the design, and consistency, and even combined the banners for the event and the sponsors into the same rows. These are the points we had focused on and took care of with both ends of sponsors and production companies, therefore it’s a reasonable not luckily result.

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Records during the event days from my perspective

Day 1 on Mar 7 for WordCamp Asia 2024

All the sponsor booths were under construction

Day 1 is the Contributor Day AKA CD and the construction day for all the sponsor booths. Sponsor areas were not allowed to be visited by attendees till Days 2 & 3.

The claw machine was “Very Taiwanese! Even the result!”

Most of us there (the sponsor team since day 1, and local attendees since day 2) loved the idea and the execution with a local vendor who brought the classic BGM powered by GoDaddy. One of the crews Auch¹⁰ supported the local preference and Chinese-speaking attendees. She studied and fully reproduced the local classic arcade elements in memory of the old times of Taiwan.

Auch mentioned there were two other ideas about the classic arcade/machine in Taiwan even in Singapore, Malaysia, and Japan. I expected to see any of them be reproduced at the upcoming WordCamps even better in Taiwan again. So, I chose not to spoil her idea now.

Day 2 on Mar 8 for WordCamp Asia 2024

Opening Remarks

At that time, we the sponsor team went back to sponsor areas to guide sponsors (and some local friends I met) to join the opening remarks in the plenary hall. I checked the area on 1F, bringing some local friends I met at once while guiding sponsors. I was sitting in the middle of the 5th row when the mission was accomplished, enjoying the show presented by the global leads and local leads¹¹ on the stage like an attendee.

Kind of a smooth day for the sponsor team

The most difficult time was the first two hours on day 2 because there were some issues that we didn’t prepare very well that need to be improved ASAP. Most were about the ways to guide the directions with signages in addition to a few demands and communication between sponsors and the venue. After the first two hours, all things went well in the result.

Special thanks to Adam¹² the representative of GoDaddy’s brands who supported the WCA by sponsoring but also providing many questions or advice based on his senior experiences in flagship WordCamps. He has never been impatient on how a thing should be handled but provided the key info that we may need to implement further in a kind and effective way with patience at the proper timings. These shares helped and even saved us from getting negative ratings sometimes.

Especially, GoDaddy was assigned to a rookie, me to be their main contact for half a year more.

A reserved meeting with WPML’s representative

Please see it in another article since it’s another complete story combined with a serious topic and a sweet short piece of writing.

Discussions and Updates of the Taiwan Flag Issue ft. Relationships with WPML at WordCamp Asia 2024

Side Events

It’s surprising to be invited to the invite-only event by Hostinger. I think one of the reasons is that Hostinger is one of my assignment sponsors and I have kept in touch with them for half a year more.

The venue they chose is one of the restaurants in Grand Hyatt Taipei which is the WordCamp Asia 2024 Official Hotel. Despite that it’s attractive to me, I declined the invitation for the idea to host a glocal meetup as a side event.

The side event is a special meetup

You can see the record on Side Events – WordCamp Asia 2024 as the 2nd one on the list, and the event page on the Meetup platform as usual – En | 中文 Glocal Dinner Meetup at WordCamp Asia 桃園小聚在台北, Fri, Mar 8, 2024, 6:00 PM | Meetup

The main purpose of this side event is to bring locals from Taoyuan, and bring foreigners to locals seize this precious chance. The photos can be seen here, mostly were photographed by Fliesyan¹³.

Thanks to five sponsors (including me, the first time to be a sponsor) who are on the event page, and our co-organizers’ support. The attendees were from across more than 7 countries including Olga Gleckler who is one of the speakers and contributors, Joy Dela Cruz who hosted several meetups with 50+ attendees in Philippine, some attendees and sponsors from Korea, and many from the Malaysia WordPress community.

Oh, we also got two attendees who stayed till the end of the night but had no experience in WordCamp (including this one) or WordPress meetup. So interesting!

Day 3 on Mar 9 for WordCamp Asia 2024 – Final

Swags grabbing and exchange!

I guided local friends especially those who were shy or not good at English to some nice booths sometimes, letting sponsors treat them. On the contrary, on the last free hours of the last event day, we (some of the organizers, and local friends) went to certain booths to do the “final check”, try some games, and grab swags in our bags. It’s a fun time!

After WordCamp Asia 2024, we local meetup members brought our trophies to a meetup on Mar 16 – 紀念品交換放送! WordPress 桃園午茶小聚 Swags Exchange Linner Meetup #34, Sat, Mar 16, 2024, 2:00 PM | Meetup

Generally, we got nice results from the exchange or giveaway. Here I want to share some feedback on these swags from different sponsors.

• The most delicate in fashion with functionalities: Hostinger, I would say “A design got Justina¹⁴‘s thumbs up. It was perfect.” as a compliment.
• The most various kinds with functionalities and localization: GoDaddy and Woo
• The most cute and warm: NitroPack
• The best t-shirt: WPML (better than the one from Google if compared two of them only from my perspective)
• The most classic, unique, localized with great design:
  The glass couple cups powered by the design team for organizers! The inspiration is based on the glass cups that used to be filled up with beer or juice at Taiwanese traditional restaurants or eateries.

After the Closing Remarks

After Party

I found I lost my voice if I tried to shout therefore I had to talk strongly. This status has continued since the first day of the event until another week after WordCamp Asia 2024. Most importantly, it’s a fantastic experience to collaborate with many extraordinary people from various countries, meet in person in Taiwan for the flagship WordCamp, and keep in touch online after the event days. Thank you all for coming to Taiwan to embark on these journeys.

See you here or elsewhere sometime in the future!

What’s next?

Circling back to myself, I’ve started to catch up on the progress of my plan which has been delayed for more than three months. That’s an exciting plan (at least in the first steps and quarter) for changing my business model to make things more international. It will be highly related to the site you are viewing. Let’s expect what I can show you within a year.

WordCamp Asia 2025

• Official site: WordCamp Asia 2025 – Let’s all grow together!
• To know furthermore what each Team does: Organizing Teams of WordCamp Asia 2025 – WordCamp Asia 2025

Credits

1. “There was a beginning, middle, and end.” a script to reply to the question “How’s the meeting?” via Hitch (2005) – IMDb ↩︎
2. Bob Shaye, the chairman of New Line Films was impressed and said “Let’s do three.” Then he greenlit the idea of filming the three simultaneously.via Lord of the Rings at 20: How Peter Jackson Trilogy Was a Big Gamble (variety.com) ↩︎
3. Sponsor team lead: Destiny Fox Kanno | LinkedIn ↩︎
4. AX team lead: Calvin Ho | LinkedIn ↩︎
5. Design team lead: 僕等は人生における幾つかの事柄において祈ることしかできない – 写真と言葉。日々。 (nukagajunko.com) ↩︎
6. CC team lead: Weichin (Blake) Cheng | LinkedIn ↩︎
7. Progress team lead: Shusei Toda | LinkedIn ↩︎
8. The design team members who saved the venue maps: 賴玥穎 | Facebook ↩︎
9. The design team members who were involved across front-end, graphic design, and sponsor banners: Yumi (mimi) Nishioka | LinkedIn ↩︎
10. GoDaddy’s support for local attendees: Auch Lim | LinkedIn ↩︎
11. Global leads: Jon Ang | LinkedIn & Andy Saw | LinkedIn; Local leads: Ya Ching Yang | LinkedIn & HUAN-YI CHUANG | LinkedIn ↩︎
12. The representative of GoDaddy: Adam W. Warner | LinkedIn ↩︎
13. Co-organizers of the side event: Fliesyan fliesyan | Flickr & 田小蓉 您好！我是田小蓉 (g618.name) ↩︎
14. The Creative Campaign Lead of Hostinger: Justina Bučinskaitė | LinkedIn ↩︎

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