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The significance of offline communities, especially during the coronavirus pandemic

Summary:

  • The speaker discusses the importance of offline communities and events, especially for creators and authors to share their work. He believes online cannot fully replace the experience of offline events.
  • He explains how his event helps authors create and share technical books, providing support and community to lower barriers to creating outputs.
  • Offline events allow for serendipitous discovery of new ideas and chance meetings that online cannot replicate, leading to richer experiences.
  • The speaker reflects on how they persevered with offline events despite hardships like canceled events during the pandemic, because losing the culture would be too great a loss.
  • He concludes that online and offline both have strengths, but community management should focus on providing great experiences, sparking inspiration to take action, and fostering future creators.

Date 2023/03/10

Transcript

(00:01) [music] [applause] First of all, I usually go by the name of Ariake, but how many of you know me? I'm also a speaker at conferences and I organize my own study groups.

(01:06) I've been holding study groups to help people solve their problems, but I can't do that anymore, so I've shifted to other activities, but I'm hoping to resume this year. We have an event called the Exposition, where we produce a coterie of technical books and exhibit them once a year at work. We're going to have an event called the Exposition, where we'll make a coterie magazine of technical books and exhibit them once a year at work.

(We've held this event about once this year, and we've held it seven times so far, and we've been able to hold four of them, but three of them were cancelled, which was a bit sad, but we're going to be able to hold the eighth one this May, and I'd like to tell you what we're going to do. I think that the more technical books there are in the world, the more space will be shared, for example, if there is a book on a language or a technology that you want to know, you can read and study it on your own. I think that if productivity increases, then projects that have gone out of business will be brought back into the world, and society will become more affluent, and that will make everyone a little happier.

(03:12) So, what we're doing is we're trying to increase the output of the community, and one of the things we're trying to do is to increase the number of people who are new to writing technical books and technical fanzines, and the other is to increase the number of people who are already writing and continue to write. We want people to share what they like through the community, whether it's languages they like, frameworks they like, or AWS, for example, and we're working to output our knowledge in the form of books, and I think there are a lot of people who are interested in this medium of output. I'm also working to make my knowledge in the form of books, which is an output medium that I think many of you are familiar with, but the activity of making people aware of it is a little bit special.

(04:19) I think a lot of people who want to start studying English or a new language this year, when they want to learn something, the first thing they do is buy a book, pick it up and study it, so I think it's a great way to get information about what you need to learn in a systematic way, what you've learned and the order in which you learn it. I think it's a medium where you can get the information you need without having to go through the trouble of learning it all from a famous author, who explains everything he learned from scratch in a beautiful and detailed way, and you can use that as a guide. In addition, it's a medium where you can get information for yourself without any difficulty, and it's also a great point that you can open the book and learn from it whenever you want asynchronously.

(The most important thing is that you can learn from where you like to open a book when you like to open a book at the same time, and that's one of the main points. The first thing to consider is whether it is connected to the purpose of the participants' visit to the event. I think it's important to have a good experience and a love life in addition to that, and I think it's also very important to have a lot of passion.

(The most important thing is that the quality and quantity of the output is what makes the event exciting, in other words, if the mass of the output increases, then everyone will be happy. For example, Defrel JP, this conference, there are a lot of sessions, and people come because there are speakers who do a lot of intake, and people come because there are sessions that they want to attend. So we think it's very important to increase the output of the community's point of view, and that's why we think it's so difficult to write a book. Most of you have never written before, and when it comes to a book, you don't know where to start.

(07:32) I don't know how long it will take me to write one page and I'm told it takes me an hour, but if it takes you 50 to 50 to 100 hours, it's not easy to make that kind of time. Of course you have to pay for the printing of the fanzine yourself, and if there are any left over, you have to take the stock home in cardboard boxes and store it. That's why we organise various projects for the people who are outputting, the main actors are the writers and the shops, and we organise projects for them, such as workshops to learn how to make a book, or workshops in each region to learn how to write.

(08:36) Printing houseTour of a printing house where you can learn how doujinshi are made, for example, or to lower the hurdles, for example, handing out lunch boxes only to the authors. So the people who are writing have to sit and wait at the same desk from morning till night, so they don't know when they can go out for lunch, so they are very anxious about participating alone. If it's hard to write a book, for example, we can start with a single page, and we'll give out official guidebooks to all participants, so why don't you contribute to this one? I said, why do you do that in the event called Schaff?

(09:42) The participants read the books they bought there, and they come back to the booth and tell the authors that they enjoyed the book, so they buy another copy and come back, and that's why the price is this high. We can support people who are outputting by planning for authors, and we can support people who are outputting by planning for authors, and we can support people who are outputting by planning for authors, and we can support people who are outputting by planning for authors. I can help them with things like how to decide on the theme of the presentation, how to write the summary, how to make the presentation materials, how to design the slides, how to practice the presentation, etc. I can also help with announcements on blogs and social networking sites before and after they take the stage, etc.

(10:45) We can also help them to experience success by giving them a five-minute MT to start with, or by telling them that we have prepared for such an event. I think it's important to lower the hurdles to output and to guide the output. The key here is to lower the hurdles to output and to guide output, and I think it's good to reach out with these two things in mind. (11:50) I think it's very important to know what you've made and what you've done.

(11:50) The weight of the book, its texture, its smell when you flip through the book, it gives you a real sense that you made it. I go to the other side of the participants and sit in a chair on the side of the stall holders, and more specifically, I plan the book, make the book, print it out and give it to them, and then I think about how to promote it so that they can grasp it efficiently, and I write all of that. And then I'll invest myself in printing the book, and then I'll do the accounting for all the food sales, and I'll do all of that.

(13:08) For example, one person might be visiting a booth and not have thought beforehand that he/she would like to buy the book, but by chance he/she might pick it up because of the beautiful cover and think it's really interesting, and then there would be people who would buy it. I think it's a unique offline experience to be able to tell an author you've bought a book from that you're interested in how much you've learned from them. I write BHP, for example, but I think it should be an event where people who write the same PC game can connect with each other and make friends, and more importantly, meet new technologies. It's a place where you can find technology that you've never seen on a CD, and a place where you can find opportunities to grow.

(14:13) It's a place where you can buy books and learn from them, and a place where you can meet the authors of those books, and I think that's how you support the growth of engineers. If we had continued offline for a long time, but if we had gone online, for example, if a book went from a physical book to an electronic book, there would be no weight to the book and the physical weight would not be felt, and I think that would be a bit of a barrier for people writing books. I think it's a bit of a barrier for people who write books, because they can't feel the weight of the book, the physical weight of the book, and just the feel of the book being physically here, the weight of the book, and being able to turn it around, it's a very moving thing.

(15:16) And the fact that the book is actually sold and bought is fully expressed in the numbers, like 10 books sold, and we're all caught up in the numbers alone, which is good in terms of sales, but it's a bit sad from the perspective of delivering your technology to the audience repeatedly. So, we look at the participants as numbers, and the next thing is, geographically, when you go around the booths, there are people who see a nice cover or happen to see an interesting exhibition and pick it up, but in the online market, for example on Amazon, I don't think there are many people who happen to buy this by chance. The most important thing to remember is that the book is not just a book, it's a book, and it's not just a book.

(16:21) I think people write their impressions on blogs, but they don't have the chance to tell the author directly that they enjoyed the book. We thought that we could design the best design online and we cried because we had no solution, so we kept going offline. The cancellation fee is not refundable, so we were in the red, but there were problems like what should we do? Of course, it was still very difficult financially.

(We had to keep the fire down until the very last minute, and there were times when we had to grade the co-productions, but we continued to hold the event offline. I didn't want to lose the culture of art coterie magazines because I was afraid that if I stopped writing books, I would never write again. But writing is a much higher hurdle than that, so it's difficult to start writing again, and people who want to start writing new things won't do it unless they have an existing foundation, which is why I've been writing my own books. People who enjoy what we're doing.

(And what we think is the same with this kind of law, for example, when you're talking on line, where you can see the faces and expressions and movements of the IT people, you can't see what they're doing. When I'm talking on line, where you can see the faces and facial expressions and movements of the people on the other end of the screen, it's just a computer screen, and I can't understand them because they're looking at my slides. I think it's very reassuring just to see your face and know that you're looking at me and nodding your head, and I think that's what an event is for, so I'd like you to talk to me more and more after this. I'm sure you've heard the story of the first time I was here and I'm sure you've heard the story of the first time I was here.

(19:34) I think it's only offline that you can hear the passion of the audience and the volume of the audience, and there's a reception afterwards, so it's all about communication. But with online, it's like you attend from home and then it's over and you just watch the online lecture video, so there's no communication. I think there are a lot of offline sessions because it's hard to call them online, because it's like your favorite time to listen to them. (20:39) There is a distance hurdle, for example, and a trust hurdle.

(20:39) There are some people who have a hurdle to overcome in terms of trust, and there are some people who want to change the time or watch the event more than once. I'm not saying that it has to be offline, but rather offline. The most important thing to remember when managing a community is that the two things you want to do are to design it so that people want to take action and have a great experience, and to design it so that the response, for example, is not just a nod of the head or a raise of the hand. I want to design it in such a way that you don't just learn, but you take it back with you the next day, or you have a chance encounter, or you have a chance meeting, or you have an opportunity to meet someone by chance.

(21:43) If we can do that, I think we can be very successful as a community, and also, again, it's very important to make this a community where content can continue to be generated. I think it's a challenge and a responsibility for the community as a whole to nurture the next generation of heroes, and I think that's true not only for subtitles, but for any country, so if there's anything we can do together, I'd be happy to help. I'd like to talk a little bit about the online community, the period of time when we haven't held any offline events, or when we've stopped holding events in the first place, and I think the community has been forgotten, or the community has been progressing, or the number of companies that have joined us, and the number of big events has been increasing recently. The number of events that have been held by large companies has been increasing recently, and I think it's a bit of a hurdle to study a small community nowadays.

(22:46) The management of the event itself has been forgotten by everyone, and it has become difficult for new management to increase, and it has become difficult to choose an event venue, especially for study groups. The most important thing to remember is that the most important thing to remember is that you are not alone. I'd like to participate in various events where I can speak and participate, so please let's all get together and get involved. (23:49) Thank you very much.

(23:49) Thank you very much [applause] [music].