On 31 August I spoke at the Odoo webinar "Let's learn how to customize Odoo!".
It was my first time doing a YouTube live stream and personally I had plenty to be self-critical about, but I managed to get through the session without trouble.
What led to this webinar, first of all, was my own reading of the situation: that although Odoo is an open source product, there is at present almost no OSS community activity in Japan, so Odoo's potential is not being fully realised.
Talking that over with Nikaido-san and Jo-san, who handle the Japanese market at Odoo, we got onto whether we could do something to grow Odoo's fanbase at the grassroots level — and from there we decided to give a webinar a try (Nikaido-san, Jo-san, thank you for arranging everything!).
It was a big theme to cover in a limited time, and with my own delivery less than smooth, so there is no denying the content came out shallow in places. Even so, I tried to scatter throughout it the things anyone involved with Odoo should know. If you have not watched the video yet, please do.
Given a topic billed as "let's try customizing Odoo", some viewers may have felt that time went on things other than the specifics of customizing.
When it comes to talking about developing features for an open source product, explaining the open source ecosystem and its licensing is indispensable — obvious to me, at least. Yet almost none of this sort of information reaches the Japanese market from Odoo or from Odoo's partners. Odoo has one side as the maintainer of a superb OSS product, and another, naturally enough, as a company that sells products and services to make money. Given Odoo's global structure, the information that reaches the Japanese market inevitably comes mostly from the latter side, and most partners currently limit their own communication to an extension of that.
So in this webinar, partly to balance out the information available to people involved with Odoo, I spoke with an underlying aim of raising awareness in the Japanese market of Odoo's OSS-product side.
I do not think putting information out like this changes anything overnight. But if it prompts someone to notice how interesting Odoo is as an OSS product and get involved, or brings participants in OSS activity out of the existing providers, then it will have been worth doing.
What personally pleased me most was being able to run a webinar together with Odoo at all. Quartile has been an Odoo partner for over ten years, but apart from a handful of physical events, this is arguably the first time we have had the chance to reach the market alongside Odoo. Odoo only began working on the Japanese market in the past year or so, and as someone in contact with them I can feel that structure coming together. In that context, having a concrete piece of collaboration to point to — even in something as small as a webinar — felt like a bright light on the road ahead. If this webinar is the start of a trend of partners communicating openly, the chances of Odoo taking off in Japan too rise considerably. Let's enjoy it, everyone!
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What I wanted to get across in the webinar "Let's learn how to customize Odoo!"