On 6th of September, Johogaku.net held a medium-sized conference in collaboration with IPA (Information technology Promotion Agency). IT engineers and their potential competitors gathered in Kyoto and frankly discussed the future of the IT industry and what the role of the government should be. It was an exciting event as a whole. We’ll upload some of the videos of the sessions on the website. One who missed the conference can feel the atmosphere of it there.
After hosting three major meetings, we are having the feeling that our conferences were somewhat inward-looking; I mean the targets of the Johogaku.net conferences has been Japanese IT engineers, investors and students. We don’t have any English talks, English-speaking speakers, or English-speaking participants (actually we had one French participant). Although the Japanese engineers have the technology and people that can globally compete with and even improve the global standard, the market doesn’t recognize them as big deals.
This fact can be found with regrettable figures in the Global Information Technology Report‘s by WEF; the global (relative) competitiveness of the Japanese IT industry is getting worse. Globalization has been one of the top-rated issues for Japanese people and the government. But there’s been little fruit of the agenda.
Johogaku.net is gonna be holding next big conference in May, 2011. To fight against the closed nature of Japanese IT industry, we’ve set the slogan of it as the “global expansion.” Re-iterating the issue should convey important messages to the Japanese or international students who are going to create the better future. We’re gonna discuss how Japanese IT business can regain its appeal to the international market among other topics. We’re trying to contribute to make the situation better by offering a junction of energetic ideas of young creators and engineers and wisdom of all generations.
If you are interested, please feel free to contact me or the conference organizers. Join us as a participant, a sponsor, or an organizer. In any case, you’ll be most welcome.