Joomla!Day Germany 2011 Report: Lost in Translation

September 4th, 2011 at 9:35 PM CEST in Events

In the 2003 movie 'Lost in Translation' the main characters are lost in an enormous city of which they don't understand the culture or language. Walking aimlessly through Hamburg with the Dutch delegation present at the Joomla!Day Germany last night reminded me of that movie. Rather than doing the usual recap of the event, I'll just give you a short summary of the highlights. In the remainder of this blog I will then describe our adventures of last night and how I think this relates to projects and organizations like Joomla!

Short report of Joomla!Day Germany 2011

This Joomla!Day was pretty much like most of the other Joomla!Days I visited. It featured both a business day and a community day, in which several tracks were offered for visitors to attend. In a central area sponsors were displaying their goods, food and drinks were present and people were networking and discussing the event. One of the most intriguing things about this event however was the apparent obsession of the Germans with apples. Apple pie as 'Kuchen' to go with the 'Kaffee', apple dessert, (several kinds of) apple juice and last but not least: apples. It's almost as if the organization feared there wouldn't be enough Apple laptops present at the event and decided to step in pro-actively by increasing the amount of apples that were present.

To be honest I didn't attend any of the presentations in this event except for the two I hosted myself, so I won't be able to present you with description on the other presentations. Regarding my own presentations I would like to advice the organization to be slightly more 'there' for the speakers. A simple gesture like a bottle of water on the presenter's table or a helping hand present when the projector wouldn't accept input from my laptop would be greatly appreciated, especially by less experience speakers who'll have to deal with enough stress from the presentation itself already. In summary: Joomla!Day Germany 2011 was a well-organized event (with the best WiFi support ever at a Joomla!Day) that - with some polishing, for example by improving the prize giveaway and by having a program folder that showed the room assignment for talks - could have been one of the best Joomla!days I visited.

Finding the subway

Brave explorers as we Dutchmen (and women) have always been, we decided to head into Hamburg after the event had ended. Instead of taking the safe route and order a taxi to bring us to the city center, we decided to take a walk from the hotel to the nearest subway station that was located at the airport. This 5 minute walk (which Tom Janssens had traveled by taxi when he arrived, after being laughed at by the taxi driver for requesting a taxi for such a short ride) turned into a 15 minute walk because we couldn't quite locate the entrance of the subway. Another curious thing about the airport was that we never actually saw a single plane ascend or land there. Strange things are happening in Germany as it seems.

Deciphering the Hamburg subway ticket system

After having found the carefully hidden entrance to the subway, we took the surprisingly big elevator down and walked up to the ticket machine. Let me remind you that at this point we were standing there with eight educated, fairly smart and sober (yes, even Ruud - one of the Dutch party members - was sober at this point!) individuals. It took us approximately 10 minutes of joint effort to figure out how many 'rings' we had to order on our ticket. While this effort obviously brought us closer together as a group, I doubt that creating improved group cohesion was what the city of Hamburg had in mind when they designed this failed piece of usability. After having worked out that we needed only one 'ring' on our tickets, we proceeded to purchase tickets with three rings, because that was the minimum amount of rings you had to take. During our ride on a ridiculously fast subway train we picked up (Beez template designer) Angie Radke and her intern Lisa. At this point in time I was convinced that Lisa didn't understand any English and considering my German isn't exactly top notch we didn't spoke a word to each other. More on this later.

Wandering the streets

After leaving the subway train and walking up the stairs, the confusion started. Had we taken the right subway exit? Did anybody know a good place to eat near this exit? How does the navigation on an Android phone work? Given that our group had already increased to the substantial number of ten members by the addition of Angie and Lisa, we had trouble finding a restaurant that could seat us without a reservation. Having neither a chosen leader nor a natural leader in our group, people were walking rather undecided around the small square. After a couple minutes of wandering, somebody had the brilliant idea to ask some locals for directions to a good restaurant. After getting these directions, we moved - with what seemed like a pretty clear direction - on towards one of the better parts of town (with shops like Bvlgari, Chanel and Hugo Boss).

I don't think we actually ever found the restaurant we were heading to, but instead found ourselves on a square again, this time much larger. This led to more confusion and more wandering. People were waving each other over at this point, trying to get everyone to head in the same direction. Once again several minutes later (I was getting pretty hungry at this point) we found ourselves walking in a huge crowd of people, who were apparently visiting some kind of music event organized on the city center streets. Most of the people in our party were walking in small groups to avoid ended up being abandoned by the group, where people were (unintended) taking turns as the front man / woman. A couple of streets further down the center, we found ourselves in front of the restaurant where we would finally got ourselves something to eat.

The 'Restaurant'

The restaurant - which had a tough looking bouncer in front of it - was actually more like a giant après-ski-like living room, filled with hundreds of people eating meat and drinking large containers of beer (the smallest glass was 0.5 liter, with 1 liter glasses available for the really thirsty souls). After having ordered a 400 gram steak and a 0.5 liter glass of beer from one of the busty waitresses, we sat there and watched Ruud dancing with the locals on the rhythm of German schlager hits like 'Anton aus Tirol'. Alcohol was already starting to take his toll for some of us so it seemed. After missing the fireworks that went on outside and eating my (pretty nice) steak and baked potatoes, I made an interesting discovery. Lisa, who was sitting across the table from me, apparently understood English perfectly fine and spoke it well too.

Lisa the Unknown

The assumption that Lisa wouldn't understand a word I said had prevented me from speaking with her both the day before and today. Lisa actually appeared to be a really nice and funny girl, something I had never known if it wasn't for the discovery that we could actually communicate with each other. How can we apply this lesson to our daily lives and more specifically to Joomla? I'd say by trying to reach out to more people, and especially ones that don't necessarily speak English. People from all over the world can help with the project, but might not know how, because they can't understand what we're saying and write in English. Our failure to communicate with these people leads us to miss out on the awesome code, documentation, ideas, presentations, patches, etc. they will have to offer us.

Finding more beer

After stuffing our bellies with meat and beer, we went outside with a renewed mission: finding more beer. This time we had decided on a new solution which the Germans will most certainly approve of: 'immer gerade aus' (always move straight ahead). This great new strategy (which didn't really require any type of leader, so it matched pretty well with our group's composition) led us to a nice bar on (once again) a small square. We sat down there and ordered some beers, something which they actually made us really hard by asking for the type of beer, the size of the container, and one other thing I forgot. A simple lesson to bar owners anywhere in the world: when Dutch people walk in (especially when they look like they've had a couple drinks before) and they ask for 'beer', just get them any regular kind of beer in a 0.3 liter glass. If they don't like what you bring them then they should've been more specific in what they ordered.

The bar

With our current bar closing up, we needed a new place to continue our after party. By this team even more people had joined up, including Robert Deutz and others who had just arrived in town for the Nooku Jam that was held later. For the final time that evening we walked the streets with no apparent direction, taking us to one of the lesser parts of town (as judged by the increasing density of sex shops and sex theatres). After moving in to a random club, we spent the rest of the night partying there until people in small groups started taking taxis back to the hotel to grab some sleep which would hopefully counter-act some of the very likely hangover in the morning.

Lessons learned from the after party

People need guidance. Even bright people who usually manage themselves really well, in general have enjoyed higher education and in many cases run there own companies get confused when they have to work together towards a goal without any clear guidance on how to get there. My advice to the Joomla! project would be to keep providing people with (clear) guidance on how they can contribute to the various aspect of the project. Without clear guidance people will be lost just like we were in Hamburg and paralyzed by a lack of direction might decide to spend their precious time elsewhere if a more clear path is presented there.

Driving back home

Late at night in the hotel lobby I discovered that Sander Potjer had an available seat in his car back home, which would save me from a lengthy train ride through Germany. After a short night of only 3 hours of sleep and watching some German cartoons in my (pretty nice) hotel room, I took a shower and went down to the lobby to meet Sander and Martijn for breakfast. During the ride home (for which I hereby thank you once again Sander) we discussed some awesome new ideas for the upcoming Dutch Joomla!Day in 2012, more on which later.

Slide decks of my presentations

Feel free to share your adventures at Joomla!Day Germany 2011 below in the comments!