The Wikimedians of Japan User Group exhibited a booth at the Open Source Conference 2025 Shirahama, held at INNOVATION SPRINGS, run by Quality Software Co., Ltd. in Nanki Shirahama, on Saturday, May 17, 2025. This was the first time the event was held in Shirahama, and 76 people attended, including many first-time participants, including university and technical college students, and young local engineers.
The reason the event was held in Shirahama this time was because the local staff at Quality Software Co., Ltd. had enthusiastically planned it. Some of the organizers and some exhibitors were unable to attend due to bad weather, but the event was successfully held thanks to the efforts of other exhibitors and local staff.
Our purpose of the exhibit was to introduce projects other than Wikipedia, such as Wikidata, and to generate interest. We explained the Wiki-projects using a flyer listing Wikimedia projects, and as we had expected from past experiences, projects other than Wikipedia were hardly known at all, so this was an opportunity to raise awareness. People had heard of they could edit Wikipedia but were hesitant to contribute by writing a new article. We explained that small contributions such as fixing typos and broken tags are also possible. I felt it was also important to spread small ways to contribute, including through the web.
Because it was a small in the open-source conference series, booths were lined up along the walls of the session room, and participants could only visit the booths during breaks. This had the advantage that participants could experience both sessions and booths, and it also reduced the burden on exhibitors. The challenge was that the sessions were one for each group, and the content was shortened to 15 minutes, so the talks had to be short. Also, people rushed to a booth all at once, so it was difficult to listen carefully to what they said.
I became a part-time staff member of the Wikimedians of Japan User Group in February of this year. I was the sole person in charge of explaining the two booths, Wikipedia and LibreOffice, and I also gave one presentation, but I managed to get by. However, because so many people came to the booths in a short amount of time, sometimes I couldn’t finish explaining everything in time.
Personally, I participate as a LibreOffice community member, and have exhibited at various community booths, including Nextcloud and the Japan UNIX Users Group.This was the first time for the Wikimedians of Japan User Group to exhibit. We didn’t go into too much detail, just introduced the various projects we have, and asked about their impressions and involvement, while also explaining in a bit more detail. In the future, we would like to create flyers for individual projects, such as Wikidata.
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