My name is Andrea.
I've been overseeing and supportingWordPress community programs, uh, since
2011, so a little over eight years now.
Which is approximately twomillennia on the internet.
Um, my work on the WordPress Open Sourceproject is sponsored by Automatic,
the company behind wordpress.com,WooCommerce, and a bunch of other brands.
So we're gonna get startedby going back in time.
Hop in my tardis, and we're gonnago back to the year of 2003.
Finding Nemo is popular.
In the theaters, Arnold Schwarzeneggerhas just become your governor,
and Apple just launched iTunes.
Another little technology projectalso launched, which is WordPress.
WordPress was born as a fork ofanother software called B two Cafe Log.
It was released on May 27th, 2003.
A bunch of people were using a software.
It seemed like the person who wasbuilding it no longer was maintaining it.
So a bunch of people took a copy.
And started and renamed it and thenstarted developing off of that, and
people liked using it and changingit so that it worked better for them.
And then sharing those changeswith everyone else, which is
the beauty of open source.
WordPress brought people together and thepeople who were attracted to the project
and stuck around mostly stayed becausethey shared a lot of the same value.
These are five of some kind of corevalues among open source enthusiasts and
therefore WordPress community members.
For those of you who are new, these willstart popping up more, obviously, as you
kind of get farther in to our organism.
Our organization, for those of you who'vebeen around a lot, um, or for a while,
these should look somewhat familiar.
First and most important autonomy.
No one shows up to open source softwarebecause they like being told what to do.
We have an unusually large componentof people who value their independence.
That's why they are here.
They're here so they can take the softwareand do whatever they want with it, right?
So autonomy is huge for us.
Another very important value in opensource is that work equals merit.
We have this, uh, saying inWordPress that we are a cracy.
The more you do, the more you getto say it's not always the truth.
It does, uh, show up as an anti-patternwhen someone works for like three years on
something that nobody else values, right?
That's where we get into trouble.
But generally speaking, the moreyou contribute back to the whole,
the more merit you or statusyou have in the organization.
Third, we really careabout things working.
We're able to sacrifice a lot of ourother values if it just gets done right.
So utility is really important to us.
Fourth skepticism.
We are a community of criticsand about 50% of the audience
is like, mm are we though?
And you just proved my point,because you're skeptical, right?
We don't have a lot of eager believers.
We have a lot of people who want toquestion everything and make sure
that before we go forward, we havethought about all the possibilities.
And then finally, open source depends.
On crediting the people who do the work.
One of the primary ways that youbreak our system is by not is
through erasure, is by pretendingthat someone didn't do a do a job.
So we care about that a lot.
They also had a lot of shared tools,in my opinion, are technological
choices, whether we use React orview, whether we tab or space.
That's something that developers careabout, I guess, um, matters a lot less
than the open source tools that we use.
Our most powerful tools in opensource are these things, access this.
None of this works unlesspeople can get to the core.
People can get to the core, to thesource and do what they want with it.
If you restrict access, thewhole system breaks down.
Transparency.
No one can help work on our sharedtools unless they understand why we made
the decisions that got us here, unlessthey understand why we are making the
decisions that are taking us forward.
Right?
Transparency is, I think, really ourprimary superpower in open source.
Altruism.
We consistently and um, frequently makedecisions based on the group's benefit,
not on one particular person's benefit.
And we really hate it whensome, when we think someone's
trying to do it the other way.
It's a good way to get opensource people very mad.
Collaboration.
We can't do this alone.
The only way to get it doneis to bring people with you.
Right.
And then finally, and another huge,huge superpower that sometimes we don't
use as well as we could is iteration.
Small changes frequently made thatactually reinforces the open access
part, and it allows us to make.
The change that we need to see.
When we iterate large things,we destabilize the organism.
So those small iteration componentsare really, really important.
All right, so we've got our values.
We've got our tool set in theintervening 16 years since 2003,
we have built and argued and built.
And celebrated andargued a little bit more.
Um, and we do like to argue we'reskeptics, but there's one thing
that we pretty much all agree on,which is that WordPress is growing.
Here's adoption of WordPressover the past eight years.
More people use WordPresstoday than ever before.
Way back before this chart starts in 2011.
The first WordPress communityevent Word Camp was born.
Word camps are casual, locally organizedconferences centered on WordPress that
are entirely staffed from organizers tospeakers today on staff by volunteers.
They have very cheap tickets,no more than $25 per person
per day, and that's on purpose.
The first word camp was envisioned as abar camp about WordPress, Matt Mullenweg,
little baby Matt, up in the corner.
That's what his blog looked likein 2006, organized the first event
and it was held in 2006 in SwedishAmerican Hall in San Francisco.
And that's a picture from him.
This was a big deal for WordPress.
At that time.
You had people who had been workingvery closely together for about
three years, many of whom had nevermet and had been doing this brave
and exciting thing without everhaving had a face-to-face meeting.
People flew in from all overthe world and uh, it was really
transformative for the project and.
It really caught on overthe next four years.
We saw a huge explosion in word camps.
All of this growth happenedcompletely organically.
There was no oversightand there was no support.
If you organized a word camp atthis time, this is what you had.
All of our organizers at thatpoint had a real founder mindset.
You had to 'cause you weremaking something outta nothing.
There was no definition ofwhat a Word camp was or wasn't.
You were taking on a huge amount of risk,both financial, legal, and otherwise,
and you had a lot of independence.
There was no one around tellingyou what you were doing was wrong.
We had a lot of, let's call itinconsistencies in our, uh, experience
in our event program, both forspeakers, sponsors, and attendees.
Certainly we had ticket pricesranging from like five bucks to 300.
We had events organized entirely bycompanies in order to sell their product.
We had, uh, events.
With only speakers who were good,good friends of the organizers.
We had, uh, organizers get sued.
We had organizers get audited by the IRS.
We had people spin up an event,take a lot of sponsorship money
and disappear into the night.
Right?
We had a lot of, let's say, brand riskfor WordPress and also the community, and
there were no repercussions for anyone whowas doing damage to a community either.
Because there was no one watching.
Right.
I refer to this period in WordPressas kind of the wild, wild West, which
makes people laugh as mostly Americans,um, because they think that I'm
talking about this version of the WildWest when I'm actually talking more
like this version of the Wild West.
Right?
Lots and lots of risk here.
Risk to organizers, bothpersonal financial loss and
then other kinds of risk.
Risk to communities themselveswith entrenched leaders.
People holding onto leadership in smallgroups, um, organizers, stealing or
profiteering off of this event thatwas supposed to be for the community.
And then attendee risk.
Very little consistency inthe expected experience.
No code of conduct.
These examples were not taken by accident.
It was a lot of white dudes incharge of everything for a long time.
In 2010, we rolled out afirst set of guidelines.
Um, they were fairly minimal,at least by today's standards.
As you can see, not a ton of like.
Down there, um, pretty minimal.
This is a recentscreenshot I won't mention.
Um, but, um, and they boiled down intothis, right, a fairly straightforward
set of expectations slash rules.
Short and simple, but a reallydifficult transition for the
organizer community at the time.
And looking at it from today'sperspective, you might ask yourself why.
Why, when all we're trying todo here is protect organizers.
Protect attendees, protect WordPress.
Why was this so hard to swallow?
You might wonder that if I hadn'ttold you about our values, but.
If you, if I hadn't told you aboutthat, you've been like, oh, okay.
Safety, security, support.
I get it.
That's a happy cat.
Right?
Satisfied with my life.
The reaction was closer tothis and sometimes remains so.
Because when we constrict anything,we violate one of our primary values
in the project, and that is autonomy.
Right.
Anytime we tell an open sourceperson what to do, even if they
think you're right, they're almostalways gonna be like, well, who says?
But we had to constrict theautonomy in order to better employ.
Some of our open source tools by havingclosed access to leadership by having
highly expensive events, by havingevents where not all people were safe
to collaborate and take part in theconversation, we gave up a lot of
our tools in, in favor of our values.
And so in 2010 we switched it back, um,gave up constricted a few of our values
in order to free up our use of our tool.
If we look at this list again fromthat framework, we do see some
declaration of values here, right?
The definition of what the event is forthe event has to be open, easy to access.
We talk about how the trademark andthe license is really important.
Without the license, WordPresscan't exist, frankly.
Lots of constraints, right?
Lots of telling you what to do.
It's gotta focus on WordPress.
That limits what you can put on stage.
What content you can put on stage hasto be locally organized and focused.
Can't be organized forprofit, all that stuff.
And that's not all, I'm sorryto say to all of my autonomy.
Autonomy loving friends.
We limited risk inother places too, right?
We added some financial oversight.
We added an application and vettingprocess for our organizers in 2014.
This was a community idea.
We put in term limits forlead organizers of Word Camp.
I was like, y'all peopleare gonna hate that so much.
They're like, no, no, no.
It's good.
I promise.
I'm like, all right.
It did turn out to be a great idea.
Um, people still hate it, but theidea with this one is, uh, the lead
organizer of a word camp can onlyserve in that lead role for two years
in a row before somebody else in thecommunity takes on a lead position.
They can stay on the organizing team.
They can come back tothe leader role later.
But every two years we have somekind of changing of the guard in that
lead role only and only word camps.
And then for our community,we limited risk regarding like
protectivism with leadership.
By requiring that in the meetupgroups, any trusted member of a
meetup group can organize an event.
Right.
So very open paths to leadership there.
And then for attendees, we limited riskby, by providing a ticket price cap,
making sure that people of all backgroundscould afford to come to our events.
We added required code of conducts forall events, meetups and word camps.
And then as well, we decided not to holdour events in religiously or politically
affiliated venues to make sure thatno matter what your background it was.
You could feel welcome at aWordPress community event.
So let's see what happened then.
As you can see, we had a real dipthere in 2011 when I came on the scene.
I take no responsibility actually.
I take a lot of responsibility for that.
It was a tough, it was a toughsell for a while there, right?
Um, we violated some prettyserious community values and
not everyone saw the resulting.
Benefit until a while later.
You know, from a growthperspective, that looks pretty good.
Feel like pretty solid, right?
Jumps of 20.
It looks great until you look at this one.
And now in 2013 we launcheda meetup chapter program.
Um, and as you can see, the greennumbers are our meetup growth, so that's
number of meetup groups in the chapter.
It would look even cooler if I hadthrown 2019 on here where like.
7 75 now or something likethat, which is amazing.
Um, but there's a big difference ifyou, if you haven't seen it, and it's
an interesting one because, I mean,word camps are the celebration of
local community on an annual basis.
Right?
They're the conference, thelocal community organizes to
celebrate all the cool stuffthat you're doing with WordPress.
Good job, long Beach.
You did a great job.
Um, but there's a huge delta there, right?
Like why if Meetup groups understandthat Word camp is available and there's
all this support, why is it that wedon't have 600 word camps a year now?
Um, if we have 680 something groups right?
In 2018, at least what's holding us back?
We're gonna pause herefor a why though moment.
Why should we care?
What's wrong with it now?
Right.
And I'm never gonna argue infavor of growth for growth's sake.
I think that's, uh,irresponsible and wasteful.
I don't think that communityprograms should grow so that
I can make pretty charts.
I think that community programs shouldgrow because, well, WordPress is gonna
grow no matter what we do, right?
At least no matter how many meetupswe organize, let's put it that way,
WordPress is growing and if we'renot prepared to meet the growth
and the change that it could.
That it can bring, then thatchange may change us in ways
that we don't want it to.
The work that our community organizersdo is deeply important to WordPress.
The work that our community organizersdo is to create a space where everyone
feels welcome and is willing to bravelyshare their ideas amongst themselves.
Our community organizers establishbehavioral expectations that follow
people from the pizza joint, fromthe pub, from the conference venue,
onto Twitter, and onto track and ontoGitHub, and you teach our newcomers
about those values and about thosetools and give them the opportunity to
succeed in WordPress and with WordPress.
And if that suffers,WordPress itself also suffers.
Also, I want to see no constrictions togrowth because this work is incredibly
transformative for our community leaders.
Year after year, I see people learningabout themselves and their neighbors and
growing their leadership skills at a time.
At a time in our world wherethat is desperately needed.
The work that we do as communityorganizers changes the life, the lives
of others, but it also changes our own.
So let's take a look at whatcould be holding us back.
So here's some real talkabout our programs right now.
We don't go out and findpeople to organize our stuff.
All community organizersright now are inbound sales.
If you'll allow me to use the businessterm, people come to us and say,
please let me organize community.
And we're like, oh, are youwilling to do this stuff?
And they're like, yes.
And we're like, okay, go.
Right.
But, and it, it's great because it, we endup with a cadre of leaders that are very
courageous and have a lot of go-getter.
In 'em, but maybe we should belooking for some other qualities too.
Maybe we should be doingmore direct outreach.
Also, all of our communicationchannels in WordPress community
programs are almost completely passive.
Like you can find anything, there'sa lot of information in there,
but you gotta go looking right.
We're not out there like saying, Hey.
Did you notice?
And ooh, here's the thing.
Um, and a lot of that has to dowith just kind of patterns and
WordPress, but also, uh, we don'twanna get in everyone's business.
And I'm wondering if maybe we mightneed to, we have no meaningful way
for our organizers to know thatthey're doing a great job, right?
Like the, the real metric thatmost organizers use in WordPress
is behinds in chairs and.
I don't think that's that valuablea thing to measure, right?
I will admit that the thingthat I think is fundamentally
important and exciting about ourprogram is really hard to measure.
I mean, if anybody can figureout a way to put a metric on
inspiration, please talk to me later.
But, um, but I, we can do better andhelp our organizers like set themselves
meaningful goals and achieve them.
Another thing about this programis it is really all of our
training is really one-to-one,and that does not scale, right?
Um, we have handbooks andwe have lots of stuff.
We have some self, self-paced quizzes.
Not a lot of people use 'em.
We don't require that you testyourself and your knowledge on our
program before you get started.
Um, we don't require thatyou actually have any event
organizing experience at all.
Um, as, uh, Jose Haydenlikes to say, we don't.
Call the qualified.
We qualify the called you come to uswith no skills and we give you all
the information to build them, whichI love about this program, but we
do it mostly on a one-to-one basisand we do not have enough mentors.
To get to that 600 wordcamps a year space.
And then finally we do limit,um, what we do for fundraising.
There are a lot of things thatother conferences do to raise money
from sponsors that we refuse to do.
We don't spell, we don't sell speakerslots, we don't sell attendee information.
Um, you know, we're, we'repretty shut down that way.
Maybe we should change that.
Maybe we to get more money in the program,maybe we should change some of that.
That would really, really get us into someconversations about some of our values.
But I think it's worthreexamining that stuff regularly.
And then some trickier questions.
Are we wrong to rely on volunteers?
Is this work?
Too complicated for volunteers.
Is this like the one place inWordPress where we should be
paying people to do the work?
Like we don't pay anybody to developpoor, we don't pay anyone to apply to
support tickets or write documentationor translate, but is this the place
where we need to start paying people?
I don't know.
Do we train people enough tofind their own successors?
Like we have term limits and stuff, right?
So like, but as anyone who's developedleaders knows, that's not easy, right?
Like we have a lot of leadership trainingas part of our community organizer
training, but we don't have any contentspecifically on, okay, so we train you.
Here's how you train your next group.
And then any WordPress personwill probably gravitate
right to number three here.
Is there too much oversight?
Are we constricting creativityand great ideas by saying, no,
you gotta have a lean budget.
No, you can't do this.
No, that doesn't fit in the model.
Should we remove, add more riskinto the program and uh, keep.
From, you know, get, let people get morecreative or this is a very unpopular idea.
Is there not enough oversight?
I've talked a lot about what word camporganizers and meetup organizers can't do.
There's a ton of stuff he can,like nobody ever tell other than
like make it about WordPress.
Everybody, like no guidanceon what kind of content.
To, to have at our events.
No, uh, no restrictions on a lotof the things that really matter.
And sometimes I wonder as we'rebringing more and more people
into WordPress who don't have thatopen source foundation, like does
having that much freedom actually.
Stop people.
Is that overwhelming?
Do they look at an event like Long Beachand they're like, I could never do that.
What, how do they ha how do theyknow enough things to do that stuff?
Right?
Like if we made the roles more, moredefined, if we had more, uh, direction.
If we had more people managing ourvolunteers directly, would that make a
safer space for our volunteers to grow?
Would people be less intimidated andand would we lose fewer people to the
imposter syndrome portion in the funnel?
Whatever happens, and I don't knowwhat will, these conversations
will all happen right here atmake do wordpress.org/community.
When those conversations happen and asthey happen, 'cause it's not like we have
one big conversation and then we're done.
We have like a million conversationsand then we might be started.
Um, but when they do happen, they willbe open, they will be transparent,
they will be collaborative.
They will carry with them a healthydose of skepticism, and the changes
as they're made will be iterative.
And they will always be guided bythat determination that the the many
must benefit rather than the few.
Whether you are a community organizeror not, you are part of the WordPress
community because you're at our events.
So no Backies.
I recommend and invite you to joinin our conversations on our team
blog and elsewhere, because withoutyou, none of this is possible.
Thank you.
Uh, one of the things you mentionedwas about selling speaker slots.
Mm-hmm.
I feel very strongly against that.
Oh, good.
Me too.
Because I've been to a lot of eventswhere I know they've sold speaker.
And I know the only reason that speaker isthere is because he or she had the money.
And it really adds a yuck thatyuck feel uhhuh into the event
because I think, why should I sithere and listen to this person?
Because I don't know if they'respeaking because they really
have something I need to know, orit's just they had the big bucks.
Mm-hmm.
So one of the things about workcamps that are so exciting is.
When I come here, I know everybody'svolunteered and they're doing it
because they've got the passion.
And I would hate to see that disappear.
'cause then they wouldjust become yucky events.
I, I personally agree
and I think that, um, most, manypeople who are well founded in
WordPress values feel the same way.
Um, I do think though.
I really endorse, like questioningour assumptions as often as we can.
Like it is valuable to look at ideasthat you find anathema like I do with
paper for play and, and make sure that.
Your opinion is based on somethingthat's real, like a principle or a value,
and not just, oh, that's yucky people.
Um, or something.
So I, I endeavor to do that in myleadership work all the time, especially
if I find something particularly gross.
I'm like, all right, well,let's figure out why I'm having
an emotional reaction to that.
Alright, Sarah, what, uh, I, I,you, I think you've done a really
great job of outlining the various.
Sort of things that could potentiallybe barriers to further growth
and, and things that we wannasee out of the community project.
But what do you think is the greatest,I don't know if risk is the right
word, I, the, the, the one that,that might be really standing in
the way, like my favorite barrier.
Yeah.
Of all of those, of,all of my favorite ones.
You feel like, what's my boondoggle?
Pull this pin out.
Uh, I hone the thing that I ammost strongly motivated to work
on soon, the second through fourthones here are really, they're small
changes that we can make that willhave, I think, have a big impact.
Showing people how to measurefor actual, um, success rather
than, uh, vanity metrics.
And then also I would really liketo tap into a more active set of
communication channels to make sure that.
All of the wisdom.
The what's so marvelous aboutthis program is we have a lot of
people with a lot of knowledge.
We have a lot of people repeating thesame mistakes, and I think we could, uh,
do a lot if we could just kind of get ourcommunications better, um, and share like
the cool stuff that I saw happening here.
I would like every word camp organizerand meetup organizer to know about that.
Um, so those are the things thatI'm most focused on right now.
Um.
I, you know, if we ever get tolike 600, I don't know, I feel like
either one or the other of theselast ones is gonna have to change.
So.
So I appreciate the program that youall have and I think it's been a boon to
the community and I, I. Enjoy seeing thechanges in iterations to the program.
One of the things that, that wetalk, or you know, that I've had
a lot of discussions about is howto be more active in our outreach.
You know, like, uh, finding peopleto get involved with meetups or word
camps, or even just trying to reachout to other technology communities.
Uh, my question to you is, are there.
Are there any communities that youknow of or that you've heard of
that do a great job of outreach?
And if so, are there, are therethings that you've noticed in how
they conduct that sort of outreach?
And if you just have opinions onhow we can be more active in our
outreach in, in a way that's.
Effective and not really annoying orwhatever, because that's what I do.
Just like annoying people until they say,well, that is a really rich question.
Um, I do a lot of comparative analysisto other volunteer based events programs
because, um, what we do in WordPress isvery unusual, so it's hard to compare our
programs to others, but I'm constantlylooking for opportunities to steal ideas.
Um, looking at like Creative Morningsand TEDx and, uh, lots of other programs.
Uh, there, I don't see anyonedoing a job, a great job in a way
that I think we could steal it.
I'm, I'm really interested in theidea that's come up fairly recently.
Um, riffing off of the, the diversityoutreach speaker training, working group's
idea, and having a diversity outreach.
Organizer training, um, that specificallytaught speaks to the experience
of, um, people from marginalizedcommunities coming in and taking
leadership positions in open sourceand in the WordPress community.
I think that has a lot of potential.
Um.
We are getting close on time, and soI just wanna let you know I'm super
stoked to talk about this forever andever and ever, both today and elsewhere.
Okay.
Say it.
Uh, transparency is one of the core valuesof the project, which I totally agree.
Mm-hmm.
Should be, and I'm grateful that it is.
Mm-hmm.
Why do you.
You personally think that it is, thatso many people in the community feel
that decisions are not transparent.
Mm-hmm.
And, uh, especially when it comes to core.
Mm-hmm.
As opposed to community.
Mm-hmm.
When we're talkingabout word camps mm-hmm.
I think a lot of people feel like, oh,it's pretty clear how to do this stuff.
Mm-hmm.
But when it comes to core, a lot of peoplefeel that that transparency is not there.
And how can we perhaps improvethat perception or reality?
Okay.
So I have to say onequick thing about that.
Um, here's the deal.
I pushed, I was responsible forimplementing a set of rules into
this organization over the periodof 2001 through, I don't know now.
Um, but it was really hot therefor like oh one or 2001 to 2016.
Our, our organization.
Does not like that at all.
And so my personal, um, observationof a lot of requests lately for
like, can we get more establishedleadership positions in here?
Can we get, can we just have anorg chart for p for Pete's sake?
Why is everything so vague?
Um, well, it's, it's.
Because our organism really struggles withthat because our culture really values.
Uh, some of, some of thatvagueness is of use to us.
I'm not saying it's of use toour, the future us, I'm saying
it's of use to the tra the, theUS that have gotten us to now.
Um, and so I need to stop, but I thinkthat I think we will see more transparency
in, uh, leadership roles as we go.
I have seen the community team kindof leading the charge in ways to, um,
organize ourselves, and I see a lot ofthe stuff that we've been doing kind
of washing over the overall project.
So I'm quite optimistic,but there's reasons why the
organism is resisting that too.
I don't think it's justleadership resisting that.
So thank you so much everybody.
I really, your time.