A Mere Post-Reflection of PyCon MY Camp 2022

[James Ing Wei Tang]

Hi Members of PyCon APAC,

As I am writing this reflection which to be shared, we had successfully closed PyCon MY Camp 2022. There are few worth mentioning events happened in this PyCon:

1. Numerous calls had made through this mailing list, and @Kwon-Han Bae responded. We have good interactions with him, and hopefully he had a good time in Kota Kinabalu, Sabah.

2. We manage to meet the local community in Kinabalu Coders from Kota Kinabalu, whom we only met via online in the past two years. During our visit to their makerspace, they showed us with great enthusiasm in running an impressive makerspace, although they kept claiming that it takes great effort to obtain items for the other side of Malaysia to start the makerspace.

3. Our theme for this camp is "Community". After being experiencing lockdown in different places, be it to be Malaysia or other parts in the globe, we hope to take this camp as the spark to rebuild the community through sprint projects, and hopefully maintain the networking among members in the community.

4. @sweemeng ng is our keynote speaker for PyCon MY Camp 2022. During his keynote, he shared about what community is according to his experience, and showed some old photos of how he started the community in the early days, with the group of people that showed same interests

I shared Code of Conduct (CoC) of PyCon US for 2021 with the audience during the closing. There are rules and regulations of what you can and can't do during the event mentioned in the CoC . But upon summarising the CoC, it is about respect, helping each other and be empathy.

Hilmi and I also had a talk over the walk back to our room, and we did admit that PyCon MY will always be about 150 to 200, eventhough we had tried our best to promote the event, and both of us agreed that we should take care of our present community, rather than chasing for the numbers.

Hence getting back to the fundamental principle of having a community, what is a community? Is a community that:

1. That helps each others with the same interests

Or 

1. For pursuing own prestige, title and name, under the worship from the crowds in the community?

While we are in the middle of discussing/debating whether we should keep APAC or changing the name to Asia or whatever it is, perhaps it is a time for us to reflect upon our purpose of having this community because it seems to me that we might have deviated from the fundamental principle of having APAC pythonistas community in the beginning, which is to respect and help each others, but chasing for more members to join us, and having a likelihood of forming cliques among the community.

Do not get me wrong that I am against having new members coming to APAC. I am more than happy to have others joining, because I think apart from helping each others, we learn and respect the diversity culture in APAC.

I welcome the comment, be it to be positive or hostile, due to the freedom of speech, in accordance of the same principle in programming: there can more than one way to solve the problem, however it doesn't mean I have to respond to what you said.

PS: This reflection was composed on the aircraft due to the boredom that the author experienced on the 3-hour flight from Kota Kinabalu to Kuala Lumpur.

Attached with the photo taken at the closing of PyCon MY Camp 2022

Best regards

James