howdy.
Howdy, everybody.
My name is Matt Mullenweg.
These are some of my, blue sky
or the web. You can find me. Matt.
Matt dot blog.
Oops. We've got a G there.
And then, photo
Matt on Tumblr, X, Instagram, etc., etc..
Howdy.
Portland's.
It is good to be back.
You know,
WordPress is so unique because,
we're not just a product.
We're a movement
where people who come together
because we believe in something.
Actually, we believe in a lot of things.
Not always the same things,
but some of the same things
we have, basically,
like we believe in
democratizing publishing
as one of our core movements.
We have like
the GPL is like our constitution,
the kind of fundamental document
underlying the code
that gives fundamental
the four freedoms to everyone
the freedom,
the use, the software for any purpose,
the freedom to see how the software works
for to modify
it and freedom to redistribute it.
That's the four freedoms.
But we also rise
beyond just that document,
and we kind of think
about things in a positive some way.
We think about ecosystems,
we think about how we come together
and what the results are.
Iterations are our actions.
You know,
there is a little
bit of an elephant in the room
that's not just PHP
or Aaron Jordan's tattoo,
which is also an awesome elephant.
If you haven't met Aaron Irving yet.
And that is last year,
you know, on the stage,
highlighted some, ecosystem members
and it's kicked off a whole media thing
and everything like that.
I'm not going to talk about that today.
So if you're looking for that,
that's not what today's presentation is.
The quick update is it's working its way
through its the legal system.
We trust in the fairness of the courts.
If there's any commentary,
I'll just say that
there was a settlement conference
I showed up. The other CEO is not.
But it is working its way through that.
And that's,
my only comment on that whole rigmarole.
But it did get us, like,
kind of more press
than we've ever had in a while.
So that was interesting.
Being a WordPress
being the main character
on the internet for a little while.
People hopping on, like making themselves
trying to get in the middle of it.
Everything like that.
It was,
it was a pretty interesting process.
And also
since then we've had two flagship events,
so it's actually not the first time
I'm getting in front of y'all for this.
We had an amazing work
camp in Europe, in Basel,
and then Work Camp Asia,
which was in Manila.
So who was that? And we're camp.
So here's a nice. And how about Europe?
Nice.
That's very cool.
Yeah, those were excellent.
The organizers had an amazing job,
and we actually have some announcements
for Asia, coming up at the end of this.
So,
there was a request,
and we put out some questions like,
what are some stats people want to hear?
And sort of like, so like,
what are some things that happened
since last year, since the last time
we were here together in Portland?
We made the stats.
I was like, before the work camp after,
because it hasn't been exactly a year.
But one exciting thing
that's actually been interesting because,
you know,
there's been some questions
like, is WordPress our traffic
going down or something
like that is actually
we've got traffic up over 10%,
new visitors up over almost 20%.
So WordPress.org
that's a plugin directory.
That's everything.
Across our socials.
We added,
just about over 124,000 followers
on our different social channels,
and we're trying to get more
active on social channels.
We actually have some folks from TikTok
who drove in from Seattle,
so that's another channel
we're going to keep working on.
I met with some YouTubers
earlier in the week.
You know, we want to be present.
We want to be multimodal
and just where the people are.
So we can, like, bring,
you know,
the knowledge of WordPress
and the ability how to use WordPress,
which is one of the
most incredible skills
you can have in your life
because it enables you
to do so many other things,
to everything.
YouTube in particular, we,
we basically like,
almost tripled, our YouTube subscribers.
So good job to that team.
Events are up 32%.
You know,
we're we're finally getting over that
like post Covid bump
with some a lot of new first timers
and organizers.
Now WordPress campus connect to you
probably heard about a good amount
during this conference.
But basically this is like
the idea that now universities
are running formal programs
where they're doing
like teachers are mentoring people,
they're bringing people into WordPress.
Some universities are going to make it
a required element
of getting certain degrees.
Others are making it often.
But this is very, very exciting because,
we've never really
had like formal certification
or been involved in education.
And so this is spinning up
all over the world.
We've already had 570 students,
and,
two completed events, this nine going on.
So it is, come along.
Also,
an exciting thing for me,
is we've had some work camps
started to spring up in Africa.
We've had five events in Uganda, two
in Nigeria.
And when one coming up in Kenya, there,
Finally, plugins
when, you know,
I got on stage last year,
one of the things I did talk
about was also how,
the plugin plugin
directory was in kind of a rough spot
at that point.
We had
I think, you know,
the queues were months
long, three months long.
There were hundreds and hundreds.
I am proud to say that
now we have over
60,000 plugins
and 73,000 total plugins and themes.
The plugin submissions
have almost doubled
year over year, yet
the queue is now basically
down to under a week.
So there's a very it is incredible.
This has been one of the teams
that is doing
some of the best work across,
the whole Docker
ecosystem that both with the plugin work
and the manual labor
and the coaching people
and mentoring it, all the things
and leveraging AI,
to automate a lot of things.
It's been very cool.
And so, let's give
if you are on the plugins team,
do you mind standing up really quick
so I can give you a round of applause?
Here we go.
Yeah.
There's a
few kind of new
things I want to talk about as well
before we got to the Q&A.
So, like, there's been a lot of launches
over the past year.
It's actually been a very,
very exciting year.
The good news is
we were able to
although it took a lot of honestly time
and energy in the beginning.
All the stuff that started
Last Word Camp,
we're able to get by it and like, ship
a lot of stuff and do a lot of stuff.
So some things I want to show you.
This is actually live in the Gutenberg
as a Gutenberg experiment. Stay.
This is block. Comments.
So this will be shipping in 6.9
a little preview here
of, part of phase three of Gutenberg,
which is like, the collaboration
part of a good.
You can see we're adding comments,
right in line with our WordPress.
It's attached to the users.
You can go back and forth.
This is also I'm very excited about.
So, we're going to be shipping in 6.9
and this is also an experiment,
a command palette.
So think of this
as like a keyboard shortcut. Like on Mac.
You can press command K
that allows you to hot jump,
throughout the whole,
you shortcuts throughout the whole app.
And so you can move between things
very, very quickly.
You could do actions.
Think of it
almost like a really quick command line
for for WordPress.
The other thing is that it
uses the abilities API,
and this is going to be exposed
to AI agents.
What I'm going to talk about now,
because there's actually
a non WordPress thing
that launched this year,
which is actually a thing
that gave me the biggest
wow moment since I first, used ChatGPT,
and that is who has tried one
of the AI browsers out there,
a couple people.
Okay, next year
I hope all the hands go up.
So, there's a few different versions
of this as, like playwright
as like Claudius.
I got something in beta.
Basically this idea where you can.
The AI controls your computer.
The one I like the best
so far is, from perplexity.
And they basically took Chrome,
forked it,
and made this thing called comet.
And you can see a little bit of it
in the screenshot there.
Basically what it does is it,
it's the browser. It has all your cookie.
When you import from Chrome,
it's really slick
because it's got like all the you're
logged into everything
your Gmail, your WordPress,
your WordPress.org, everything like that.
But you have this kind of persistent,
chat bot on the side
that's actually pretty clever.
And you can just ask it to do stuff.
And that doesn't need to be an MC server.
That has to be the anything
specifically built for this.
However, many of the investments
in where we've coded
WordPress in the past
with, semantic HTML investments
that sass ability and things,
you can actually just go into Gutenberg
or WP admin or anything
and just say, hey, you know,
move this block around
and make the second paragraph wittier
and add an image and like
and it just does it.
So I find this very, very interesting.
You know,
I spoke last year as well
about how the
some of the more interesting
AI paradigms are going to be
where it becomes more local to you,
has all the context of your logins,
your contacts,
your code, your everything like that.
So we'll have I embedded,
widgets embedded.
But I think also this
kind of like personal one
that's going to operate
more like an OS
or browser level, is pretty darn cool
and feels a little bit like the future.
The other trick
that's very neat about this
is it's amazing for usability testing.
So if you are building something,
a product or a website,
that's something I recommend
you do is get one of these browsers
and then go to your website
and then ask it to do something
that you want your customers to do,
and see if they can figure it out.
It's very cool because it
actually shows, by the way.
It messes up sometimes too.
It shows its thinking model
that you can like,
look at what it's thinking as it goes.
So you get like actually getting
the internal monologue of the AI
as it tries to figure out
how to use your website or app
or something like that.
Thankfully they put a pause button
when it starts to go off the rails.
You can stop it.
But,
I actually find this very useful
to get like
instant usability testing
because it's not dissimilar
to like, a new person
coming to your, to your site
or your application or whatever it is.
You can call it anytime.
And I think a big part of what's,
the next generation
of application builders and the web is,
is this next generation
and any solution that talked about this
in a really neat way
is also making
whatever it is that you do legible
to these AI agents.
I see I was talking to Helen,
who's somewhere around here earlier,
and do you mind if
I share that awesome thing
you said about, like. Yeah.
If you think about this,
like a junior developer
or a, like a
a person
giving it the proper
context, the context engineering,
which is kind of like what
term people use,
announced that a prompt engineering
giving it the proper context, the rules,
the setup that everything
it needs to be able to onboard
and accomplish the thing,
whether you're putting that into a ticket
or into, sort
of, cursor arc rule or whatever it is.
Or on the website itself
is very similar to what you would do
if you were onboarding a human.
So I made a talked about,
if you saw that talk this morning
about how it's like a great junior
developer and,
these are interesting frameworks
and sort of, ways
to think about these things.
And I highly, highly encourage, you know,
I said learn
AI deeply three years ago now.
You want to play with this
because I do believe
it is going to be
one of the dominant computing paradigms.
I think it's going to happen
in browsers first.
Both with kind of smart agents, remote.
And also,
there's actually some very cool
local agent stuff
being able local stuff,
being able to start to ship in browsers
and then it'll, move
to operating systems,
or maybe they'll
be entirely new operating systems,
which is operate in this model entirely.
I want to
share a little bit of something
that actually came out from just an hour
or two of work at contributor Dave,
from the AI
team, and Felix in particular.
So what you're seeing here
is this is, actually leveraging
some of the
things that I team
has created
to have, like OpenAI, etc.,
direct keys in there.
And we've got this WordPress assistant.
And if you look at what it just did,
it said,
give me some commentary on this post.
And then, the chat showed it.
Obviously, this is,
this was a contributor Day thing.
So it needs some polish, but like,
the words
command palette to go right over
and share that comment there.
And so this sort of
like built in assistants
is something that is very,
very easy to build today.
Using again, the PHP client AI
and the abilities
API that are at the AI team was created
and published on GitHub.
So please check that out
if you're building anything.
It's also been cool
if you've watched the on
the sponsor boots.
We've had a number of sponsors.
I'm sure
there's more than just these two,
but I'll call it element or the Angie.
And in hosting with Cody are shipping
some very cool agents
that allow you to manage
and automate things in WordPress.
And this is so cool.
Like, we're definitely in
like the mS-DOS
days, the early days of this,
we need to get some.
We need to see how people use this.
I'm very, very curious actually.
Just watch the stream of what
like what people type into this thing.
What do they try to do
and do as John made it,
talked about the evals I see okay.
What are people
how are people managing to use this?
How's that evolving over time.
And then what's the outcome.
Is it figuring it out or not.
And we can iterate on that,
almost like unit testing,
usability testing.
Again, for this
new paradigm of computing.
As long as something as
well that I want a soft
launch here, that,
automatic is launching
and that is called telex.
So think of telex like v0 or a lovable
but specific for WordPress and building
Gutenberg blocks.
So you can go to telex
that automatic dot AI right now
and check it out.
And you can actually type
in some pretty rich
functionality in there.
I don't have it for the video,
but someone actually asked it
to make the doom game,
and it created that
and put it in a Gutenberg block
and then ran it inside of playgrounds.
It was a mind boggling moment.
So this is, is is again very beta,
very experimental as we talk about.
But, what you get at
the end of it
is just a zip file
that you can install as a plugin
to any WordPress in the world,
or a playground instance
or anything like that.
So, these things are pretty exciting.
We gave access to this
to our one of our favorite, spammer.
This was WordPress.
Me, if you're familiar with Nick Hamzi,
and he ends up making an advertisement
for WordPress
that was showing the block creation,
and it made this animation
of a WordPress ad.
So as
we're thinking about walking marketing,
WordPress is it was ultra meta.
So this is WordPress,
I making a Gutenberg block
that is advertising WordPress, that
that video of is a WordPress ad.
Did you get all that?
This is so exciting.
Like when we think about
democratized publishing,
like embedded in
that is very core to WordPress
as mission has been taking things
that were difficult
to do that
required knowledge of coding
or anything else
and, and brought it,
made it accessible to people
and made it
possible in a radically open way
in every language,
at low cost and open source.
We actually own it.
And have rights to it.
And at every major transition,
actually doing
this has been quite controversial.
That it's funny
because one of the, the,
I'm, I'm
a longer time contributor,
as you might be aware,
and actually one of the most
formative experiences for me,
that was like a really huge
fight in the WordPress community
and hugely controversial.
And we all got mad at each other
and like
we had to make up
later, was was bringing
the original Wysiwyg to WordPress.
So for those who were around,
they wouldn't use WordPress.
Pre wasI big.
The old timers in the room.
Okay, we got a couple,
we had a code editor,
and a big part of WordPress
is ethos at the time was that we
we were all about web
standards, clean,
compliant and clean code.
And so people
were really attached to that.
And we made the code thing
pretty slick, actually.
And we had these nice little buttons
and things and,
and all was quick editors.
We adopted tiny names,
but all of them generated, like code
that wasn't quite as clean
as if you handcrafted it. So.
But we made a commitment.
We said, well,
we want to radically
make it more accessible.
You don't
we don't want you to have to see markup
if you're doing a link.
Much like with the very origination
of my contributions to open source,
which is Texturize, it's like,
I don't want you to have to type in HTML.
Indeed,
you'd have a curly code or something.
So how have we automated this?
How can we use technology
to remove the barriers?
And I see
AI as very much like a new version
of this.
And it's controversial.
And there's parts of it that, you know,
we're like, well, what are we doing here?
And parts of there's scary
and there's like way
there's totally a bubble
and there's tons of hype and everything.
But at the core of it, there is a
like a seed of something.
What is so enabling.
So it's so much, to very much
why we exist,
that it is an incredibly exciting
time to be building for WordPress.
And I think we have a real opportunity
and to take this ethos
and this thing that we've done
that has democratized
a good chunk of the web already,
and use that to build on open
source models,
on local models, on everything,
adopting whatever it is.
So enable more people to
express their creativity online,
to have their idea to get it out there.
And particularly, you know, telex is,
I think, an early,
now prototypical version of this
and some of the other AI stuff I've seen,
but like coding on top of WordPress.
So some of these five coding
platforms have gotten a lot of,
a lot of usage
and revenue
and press and everything like that.
And there's been kind of the obvious,
you know, first
they may laugh at you,
then they make fun of you,
then you, when,
when like some of the early versions,
there's some
maybe not great at like security.
One of my favorite AI jokes right now
is that the S and MCT
stands for security.
And this is fine.
Like, yes, criticize it like, whatever.
But like,
that's this is
the worst is ever going to be
these things will be fixed.
It will work past it.
It is something you have to be aware
of using some of these things
now that it might accidentally
put like your API key
into like JavaScript
wherever we can see it.
And that's not a good thing.
So be aware of that.
But I think it also opens an opportunity
for as AI models get better and better
at building on existing
frameworks, existing open source things,
they can actually leverage things
like the very robust
and secure
and mature like user
authentication system,
content management system,
all the things that we taxonomy system
and WordPress
like the things that we are primitives,
the things that we do
really, really well,
the things that
we've devoted now
22 years in relentless iteration
and making all the education
work and making Monty Python,
Unicode and all the random stuff work
everywhere, can be leveraged and that,
not having to have all that context,
all that sort of framework,
you don't have to reinvent the wheel
to do the thing on top of it.
That's the unique thing.
And that's the beauty of open source
and why it enables
so much creativity
and innovation around the world
so that is my thoughts on AI.
We're going to get to questions
in a minute.
So what. We're not going to do them yet.
But before we do,
I did want to talk a little bit
and play some nice sizzler
reels about where
we are going to be coming up.
So we got a little announcement
here for work Camp Asia.
And we
send them by April 9th to 11th.
We're Camp Asia will be in India
next year, and it is shaping up.
The the organizers are very confident.
They're like, hey,
our city work camps have like,
2000 people each.
So they think like the
this will, work camp Asia could be
perhaps the largest WordPress
event ever in history,
which I am very much looking forward to.
We will take lots and lots of selfies,
and we do want to take a moment
to announce the, location of work camp
AWS this year.
There was a rumor going around
it was Portland.
But we love Portland,
and we've really enjoyed it.
But we do switch cities
every two years, so here
is where we're going to be.
Personally, I'm.
Just.
So congratulations
to Phoenix for winning.
Where, the next WordCamp US will be,
August 16th or 19th.
Bring a hat.
Might be a little warm.
But.
But we're pretty hot anyway,
so, you know, it'll be.
It'll be sizzling.
All righty.
Well, what? That out of the way?
I wanted to open it up.
So, hopefully
you've been thinking
of questions already.
We've got mics here
that you can walk up to.
Kind of in the front here.
They will shine a very,
very bright light in your face.
But don't feel bad.
It'll look good on the video later.
And, Yeah.
Want to open those up
to questions and answers?
And also,
if you want to tweet
me, your tag me or anything like that,
there's all my info.
Let's also, just before we do,
I just want to say thank you
to everyone for the past year
because we did some
we went through a lot of tough stuff,
but we got through
some really awesome stuff.
So thank you.
Matt, thanks for being here.
It's great to see you.
My name is Aaron Osman.
I'm the CEO of a company
called Knowledge Pillars,
and we're in the education space
for WordPress.
I love.
If you could just share
a little bit more detail
about your vision of Campus Connect
and what your team
is trying to accomplish,
where you see it in the next
3 to 5 years, and how we can engage.
Oh.
Yeah, that QR code was up there briefly,
but if you scan it,
you'll go to the web page
that has a lot of this
and including how to get involved.
There's slack
channels, everything like that.
The vision is very much one of
how do we give the best
tools, the next generation,
to not write with a borrowed pin?
Yeah. To be able to build on open source.
So that the this next, you know,
100 million websites
that created the next billions of people
that come online
and want express themselves
aren't just doing it on
proprietary social networks
where you're a digital sharecropper
and or think could be lost costs.
I was just the announcement this week.
The tight pad is shutting down,
you know, like these sorts of things,
but actually have a domain
that belongs to you,
have code that belongs to you,
that you can modify.
You can see how it works.
You can grow
and use that
to onboard people and teach them,
you know, there's potentially
going to be tens of thousands,
maybe someday hundreds of thousands
or more people going through this.
And for some of them, what they'll learn
is just how to use WordPress.
But some percentage of that,
just like there's
a funnel for everything.
It was it zaps law.
Like 90% of people read,
9% of people comment
and like 1% of people.
Right.
Like, you know,
90% of people
go through something,
9% might become like contributors
to an a casual way, and then 1%,
hopefully are going to be on stage
in these future years
giving talks and teaching us
and that we're learning
from each generations
and everything like that.
So, there's also so
the beautiful thing about this as well,
actually, I was talking to Adam Masala,
who gave a great talk keynote yesterday,
who say in medicine, there's this,
what was it?
Learn one watch, do one, see one, do one.
Teach, learn one, do one.
Teach one. Right. Thank you.
See one do and teach one.
In medicine.
And I thought, wow,
I hope I'm not
the one in the middle there
for someone new.
But I do remember
one of my best teachers,
was a guy named Scott
Roman, my economics teacher.
We did this channel competition
called the Fed Challenge.
And,
you know, my school was an arts school.
We weren't known for academics,
so this was the first academic thing
that we'd ever done.
And then the second year,
we actually won it,
and one of his tricks was
he would have us get on,
get in front of the
the small team, the class,
and teach a whole section
of this economics thing.
And at the time, as a kid, punk kid,
I was like, oh, he's just being lazy.
He doesn't want to do the work.
But what I realized
is that
I knew I was going to be
in front of my peers,
and they're going to ask me questions,
and I have to explain it
and something like that.
So I think there's going to be
a huge benefit
to people going through this.
I actually think that's
going to be a huge benefit
to the teachers as well.
And the mentors
and all the teachers
we train and mentors.
We train through that
and that whole sort of
fractal system there.
Because
it is one of the most rewarding things
in life to share the gift of knowledge.
Well, we're behind
you can't wait to see this go global.
Thanks a lot.
Thank you.
All right, let's go over here.
Hey, Matt.
Michelle Frechette,
independent contractor.
And I don't know that everybody here
is aware of the open
horizon scholarship
that began for this event.
And we had six different people
from five different countries
able to attend
where it can't be U.S
because of an automatic scholarship
that's handled by the foundation.
And so we had people
who were able to be here
in official capacities
as organizers, speakers and volunteers
and experience of work camp
outside of their home nation.
I want to know what the future looks like
for the Open Horizon scholarship,
and how can people apply
to be able to attend and future workings.
That's a great question.
And gosh, I remember well, actually,
who remembers,
like the first time they took a trip
or like how to get a passport
for the first time
or something like that.
You know,
I didn't travel much outside of Houston
for a long time.
I remember that
first trip was a mind blowing to me.
And so I do think it is very special
to be able
to provide these, like,
abilities for people,
who maybe haven't done it before, travel
halfway across the world.
By the way,
I love a lot of the people I've met
have told me how many hours
they traveled to get here.
And I think the winner or loser,
was 33 hours from Nepal. Are you here?
Does anyone have 33 hours?
Beat?
Okay, that's the winner.
All right, you won this year.
The,
So what I'll say about this is actually,
I'm going to make a meta comment
about how we should think
about all of our programs,
which is it's important
that as we launch these things
and we do them, the idea is good.
Like, just,
I'm not going to argue
against, like, hey,
we should give scholarships to people
to be able to come to things.
However, that is an input,
not an outcome. Right?
So what I would love to do
after this is actually survey
those six people.
What did you get out of it?
What did you know?
What happens.
And then also like
what are we trying to it?
What is our tell us
what is our goal with this
and how can we measure that?
Like is it that they later
go on to organize
other things in a local place,
or that they become more active
in the community?
And it's
these are somewhat measurable things.
But I think too often with,
our programs,
it's a lot easier to measure that.
That first part
than it is to one decide
what the actual end goal is
and then later follow up on it.
So what I would say
the future of this program is what I hope
the future of all of our programs
is, is that we really define
our hypothesis
that we're trying to test
by doing something,
then measure it essentially
and iterate on it
like, like, should we have 100 of these?
We probably could.
Yeah, there's there's enough
awesome companies
in the WordPress ecosystem
and everything like that.
Because
is like 13 other hosting companies
besides Automattic
that sponsoring this like,
we could definitely scale up this a bit.
And what would that mean?
What would we get out of that?
How do we balance that with,
like bringing in local people
and things like that?
So yeah, we should think about it.
Thank you very much. Thank you.
Hey, Matt.
Courtney Robertson, developer
advocate at GoDaddy.
First time you and I
chatted was in 2009 and,
it was in New York.
Yeah, we were much younger,
let's say our age.
We were both much younger
than, 16 years to be exact.
So in 2014,
the likes of Courtney,
oh, who's in the room?
And Tracy Levesque
welcomed me to the training team
table at a contributor day.
And we know that Contributor Days
sessions are great,
but contributor days are where really
the action is at a WordCamp.
And I got to see
that you were at contributor
Dave with us this year.
And I know your schedule is
probably not one
that allows you to get to
everything you would like to do.
What got you to contributor
date this year? What did you get from it?
Will we see you at Contributor Days in
the future?
But I hope so.
Yeah, I it is true.
I do wear a lot of hats.
I also run a 1400 person company
and like, all these other things.
So, why do I love contributing?
Because, as you said,
exactly what you said.
It's kind of like the core
of everything we do.
And when you're able
to see that thrill of, you know,
someone getting their first commit
to the first props or the first, like,
change the website.
I think that's really fun.
I also think it's a format
I part of why I want to go was like,
you know, to see, like
brainstorm a bit about like,
how's the format working?
What are the outcomes from it's,
are there other things
we could try, like,
automatic co-hosted,
an MXGp hackathon in our new York office
a few weeks ago with, like, anthropic
and,
summit three
and a few other awesome companies.
And, and it's actually pretty neat
to see like
there were 31 teams,
I think that competed.
And as one of the judges
and to see what people built,
it was just a one day hackathon,
versus like a whole week in one.
But like, well,
they were able to build
like some pretty impressive, like,
fully formed applications
and like just a handful of hours.
And,
it really got my mind turning about like,
wow, how could we like,
what could we accomplish
and leverage in this in-person time?
And,
could we try a format
where it's like
maybe a little competition
or something like that or some prizes or,
you know, just make it fun.
Just try some different things.
And the other reason
I went, because there's a
bug I want to fix
that did did you manage to get it in?
I heard
there was fact like that one
that was still there.
I don't want to say it
because I kind of want to fix it myself.
It's a little bit of an edge case.
It's in the edit comment screen.
It's when you filter certain things
and and I'm going to fix it.
So all right all right.
Thank you.
Hi.
My name is Beth Soderberg.
I'm the CEO and lead developer
I think studio.
This is a follow up to Michelle
for this question.
And it's about long term results.
I was
one of the
only beneficiaries of a very short
lived experimental
training program for women in WordPress.
Maybe 13 years ago,
you all paid for a few workshops
and they weren't super well attended.
But I was there.
You were one of them.
I was like one of them.
I knew nothing,
I mean, I knew stuff, but not this.
I actually do think that for these things
that even if we get one person out of it,
that makes it worth it.
So my question for you
with the scholarships,
because I learned to code
from taking busses
and sleeping on couches and
mooching hotel rooms off of places like
the Smithsonian
and Automatic.
How do you propose
taking these short term scholarships
and looking at a way
to measure effectively
how they may be impactful
in a short term way, when the real impact
may be longitudinal?
That's a good question.
Did you have anything in mind?
I did not.
This is purely a challenge for you.
How do you think we could?
I will ask you one more question.
How do you think we could have measured
that impact it had on you?
What was something that was like
six months out, 12 months out,
five years out, that
we could check in on?
I think that being checked in on me.
Yeah.
And part of
how I didn't get lost
was that I
became friends with Mika Epstein,
and I learned
who people were.
And Jen Milo checked in on me.
And other people remembered
that I existed, even though I was like
24 years old and like playing around
with a liberal
or liberal arts degree in a major city
and had no technical background at all.
So I think this
I just encourage you, if you are going
to have metrics for results,
that perhaps there is
a mentorship component along with it,
because without the dozens of people
who encouraged me to speak
or gave me a free ticket or said,
don't tell anyone,
but I have an extra bed in my room,
right?
That's what my career is built
on, and I owe a lot of people
a lot of gratitude.
And I try to tell them,
not all the time,
but each one of those people
took a chance.
And giving me a chance. Yeah.
And so how can we structure
these programs
to genuinely pay it forward
and support these people
rather than evaluate them?
Say, hey,
you didn't get enough out of this
for us to continue investing
in this program.
What can we do better?
Rather than the other way around?
Well, that's a beautiful story.
Thanks.
And I think you did answer it, actually.
So a quick show of hands
who met at least one
new person at the work camp this year.
Okay, who's not raising their hand?
Find them, meet them.
But let's let's take that.
Maybe as, like,
a little homework assignment
for each one of us, of someone you met.
What's a way you can follow up?
What's a way you can ping in later?
So, like I say, maybe
send a little reminder on your phone
one week from now,
like ping so-and-so
or something like that.
I'm doing that mentally now.
I don't have my phone with me, but,
because you're right, there is like an
at the center
of every contributor to WordPress.
His story is fundamentally
human relationships.
And so,
I don't know exactly how to measure it,
but I do know that
it is critically important
and that it's something
that each one of us can, do.
And actually,
one of the things that I love
most about this community
is how warm and welcoming,
just every single person is,
you know, it is is really something
that's been part of our ethos
and that we've demonstrated
at every side, from top to bottom,
as much as possible.
Really from the early days,
I think it's where we are,
why we are where we are today.
And,
yeah, we can always do
a little bit more of it though.
So thank you.
Hello, Matt.
Thank you for the sneak
peek into the eye transformation.
It's good to see that
you're on top of this.
I think to make this
transformation happen,
we're going to
need to run, decently powerful models.
Local models are just
like they have the way ahead of them.
And,
especially when it comes to tool
calling MCP stuff.
They're just not as powerful.
I wouldn't expect to be able
to build a custom blog,
like, fully integrated,
like purely local very soon.
So I'm a little concerned that, on the
infrastructure level,
we making ourselves dependent
on just a
few proprietary AI service providers.
So my question is, I guess,
would you agree
that it's a little at odds
with our mission
of democratizing publishing?
And is there anything in your power
to do something about it?
It's a good question.
I am an open source zealot,
but also a pragmatist,
and I don't think it's
at odds with our mission
that maybe a lot of people
have contributed to WordPress
or built WordPress on,
like windows machines
or Mac OS or other proprietary things.
So using proprietary tools
to create more open source,
I think is okay.
And I want every person
had their very best tools available.
Now, one of the things
I wouldn't have predicted
that has happened
is if
I think
when I first talked about this,
I did actually say like,
it feels like open
source is going to be like a few years
behind the frontier
models, the state of the art.
But we have even just in the past
like two months,
had two major open source
releases, both from open AI and grok.
And I know some of these things
they call open source,
like llama or actually.
But let's let's just footnote that.
And the thing I
also would not ever tasted
is the amazing open
source models coming out of France
with Mistral and China
with, deep sequin, etc..
If you haven't checked out
Quinn three coder
and the Quinn three image,
that is a local model,
you can run it on a MacBook
that you just run at your raffle,
and it actually is pretty darn decent.
And having that unlimited local tokens,
like moving at a pretty, fast
pace is pretty cool.
There's also,
I think, great progress
on this local stuff
with, models like liquid AI and others.
So,
I do think that this will probably be
multi agents.
So there'll be specialist agents
for different things.
If you go on hugging face
those guys I don't know
hundreds of thousands of different
like fine tuned things often
built on these open source models.
The open source models
are not that far behind
some of the state of the art.
They can be run cheaply in the cloud
and, the hardware to run them is,
I think, going to be something
I could definitely imagine
like 3 or 5 years in the future
where we have like an Nvidia box
at home or something.
I think it'd be actually pretty cool
to do more of this at the edge
or at your home.
As memory gets cheaper as the, you know,
the black
well, that's now very expensive
in a data
center, like gets to the point
when we can have one of those
in the house, in the closet
with, you know, or in the
bathtub, liquid cooled.
So I yeah, I think it will disperse
the edge a lot faster than we think.
And that's,
there's nothing wrong
with leveraging the cloud.
Got so much of it.
Yes.
Another thing that is,
something is very
pragmatist is like,
you can run WordPress yourself
on your home server,
an internet connection.
But a lot of us put it,
you know, on a web host
or a cloud provider
or something like that.
And I think that's okay.
So I think, let's try to expand
the domain
and the footprint of open source
as much as possible.
And certainly,
I love that many of us and myself
have devoted our lives
to our creative output,
being open source as much as possible.
But yeah,
if we're going to leverage
some proprietary tools so that meantime.
That's okay.
Now I use some Photoshop
to make the original terrible
WordPress logo result.
Like that's all right.
So I think of it like that.
There means to an end
I think you
what's your favorite open
source model that you've tried?
Jama free.
Cool.
And if you haven't yet,
what do you run stuff
on, like your MacBook or locally?
Yeah, yeah.
What's one of your recent
llama or LM studio or.
Yeah, it is.
Also I'm using open Web UI and and llama
and they're on gym for free on that.
Yeah.
Check out if you haven't yet.
Check out LM studio.
I found it like a little better
than llama.
It's kind of funny
because the
best tool changes
every like four weeks or something,
so you really have to like.
I'm definitely burning a lot of bandwidth
downloading these huge models and tools
and everything, but, check out that one
if you haven't yet.
We'll do. Thank you. So.
In the meantime, I have to give away
a lot more backstop MacBooks.
Right?
It doesn't make me feel better
about, like,
you know, upgrading
my laptop isn't like, oh,
I have an excuse for needing 128 gigs.
Memory.
All right, right over here.
And there.
I'm at Andrew cards from openly.
So,
the previous person
just pretty much stole my question,
but I did have a follow up.
So regarding these closed source,
very powerful, AI companies,
do you
or they're running out of data
like training data firm and like,
code to train their models off of,
and that's going to become a real problem
in the next few years.
So they're going to be looking
for new sources of data.
Now or that's going to cause
or in my opinion,
a hostility between the content creators
who are going to try to start restricting
their content
versus these AI companies
who are going to try to harvest it
and then like tools
like comment
may start collecting that data
and sending it to companies
like even Chrome,
so they may start restricting.
Hey, we
don't want you visiting
our website on Chrome or Comet
because it will send our data to whoever.
So do you think that these close horse
AI companies could actually start
harming the open web
and start kind of people
trying to defend themselves with tools
like nightshade
and other, like endless garbage link
holes to like, poison these models.
So do you think it will start an arms
race on the open air
that will hurt the open web?
It kind of has already.
Right.
So this is I'm
just going to riff for a little bit,
I'll say that this is going to play out
over the coming years,
some in the legal system
but also some of it in the international
sort of dynamics. Right.
So there's obviously a lot of cases from
copyright holders in the US who say
their works were used
without their permission
or they shouldn't
have been used at all, or
I think there was just a settlement
from anthropic with some book authors,
because they download
like a pirated books thing or something.
So there's
I think there's been a lot of,
carelessness
with some of the early versions of this.
By the way,
that's not a typical,
you remember when YouTube started,
maybe a little carelessness
with some copy written material,
and it kind of worked itself out,
and we've now got into a place
I would say today.
Yes, there's still piracy video sites
and something like that
that's still BitTorrent
or what's the one,
The Pirate Bay or something
like that out there.
But we've kind of found like a streaming
regime and way that
like some content providers make money,
sometimes more money than they made
before
with this radical sensibility
of streaming everything like that.
The additional thing
that I think is going to be
interesting is that,
particularly the companies in, in China
and actually,
I think Japan actually
passed a law around AI training
that provides a lot of latitude.
Might not have some of the same copyright
concerns for, like, us
intellectual property owners
or things like that.
So that is going to be
really interesting as well.
But you nailed
what I think is going to be
the ultimate differentiators of this.
And your question.
So, a good thing to think about
for how I could play out
is actually how the search engine
is played out.
And for those who don't
remember, kind of before Google,
there are actually
a bunch of search engines.
Lycos even remember asking Jeeves
excite at home?
Magellan.
Yahoo!
Search like
there are a bunch of different
search engines and they ran out of web.
There's a finite amount of web, right?
So they all kind of
had the same web there,
and there were
maybe some differentiations on crawling,
but at some point,
besides innovations
like page rank or something,
which dispersed pretty quickly
throughout the different players,
one of these sort of,
sort of, compounding
effects was actually the use
of search itself.
So, daily, Sullivan talked about
some of the signals,
that they use in Google rankings.
I'm pretty sure one of them that's
maybe the most valuable is
when they showed links.
What do you click on?
And then when do you come back
after that.
So you can kind of infer
like some satisfaction or something.
And that's kind of proprietary
that search engine.
So the amazing data that ChatGPT was 700
million monthly active users is getting
is its own charts.
So that's generating
who knows how many billions
or trillions of tokens all the time
and could become
a sustainable competitive advantage.
This is one reason as well why I think
you know,
we're doing some cool
AI stuff with Gravatar as well.
By the way, if you haven't checked out
Gravatar, Gravatar
has been completely rebuilt
relaunched, so log in
if you haven't recently,
but I wonder
if there could be something as well
that much.
Like I don't want
my music locked up
at a single streaming service,
or I kind of want some portability there.
If there is a way
to bring all the context
of my previous chats,
whatever that summary is,
that sort of intelligence
and personalization,
can I put that between
different agents as well?
And I think this is going to be
one of the most interesting
kind of areas of innovation,
particularly this year.
This is the context one does get larger.
What are we putting into it
and how are reporting?
That's
one of my favorite things to do right now
is kind of like,
look at these crazy, like, cursor
code setups
where people have like
26 sub agents, each with, like,
really detailed instructions,
and they're using it to, like,
using cloud code
to, like,
manage other things in their life
that aren't even code.
Now they use it with obsidian,
which I think ends doing
like some fun stuff for Palo,
like there's,
there's different ways
to use these tools,
and I kind of love it because these are,
again, there are
some parallels to perhaps
training an assistant
or like a person or someone on your team
providing them instructions.
But also this feels like there's
going to be a version of this
in the future that just goes with us.
Right now,
the only primitives
we really have are kind of
not great like you a mobile devices,
you get like a photo
you get easy access
to like location, address
book, photo, library, like a few things
and some amazing apps
have been built on top of that.
But what if it could also bring along
like more of your preferences,
more of like your attention data
more or something like that?
And we made that portable.
That could make it
a much more competitive.
Not one winner takes all kind of market,
but actually kind of a multipolar,
environment.
So, like,
if your iPhone would communicate
with these and other companies
and bring your data with it,
kind of like that, like, yeah.
Or just like
you could export it, download it
and then like, summarize it,
you know, put it in
kind of like something
that turns into instructions
or preferences or,
you know,
there's some way to kind of
distill it down
into like what is fundamentally
like probably all your previous chats
is not that useful,
but maybe it can infer things
from those previous chats,
run some operations.
I think it's still into instruction.
Like he doesn't like it when I use dashes
or something like
that, and
that can become something
that is personalized.
Sam at one actually
had a really interesting thing
he said recently
was that,
the personalization
is one of his favorite things
about ChatGPT.
And occasionally
he logs in an incognito window
and tries it out and finds it
not as compelling as his experience
because it doesn't have,
you know, the years that now
he has of like talking to this
all the time.
I thought that was
a really interesting point.
Thank you.
I'm Miles, I'm from Tempe, Arizona.
My question is about WordCamp US
next year.
Have y'all been to, Tempe in August?
Oh.
I grew up in Houston.
Okay, but what's that funny bank quote
like you were not survive and the
where they forged me or something.
Yeah. So
it's okay.
There's air conditioning. Okay.
Thank you.
You know,
we're on a budget.
But it will be very air
conditioned indoors.
It's actually been
very interesting to me.
Is anyone know
what the sort of founders of Singapore.
This guy Lee Kuan Yew.
Yeah. Very fascinating character.
And the story of Singapore,
I think is one of the,
the most interesting of kind of
like the 20th century.
But, one of my favorite quotes of his
is like,
it's like the most important thing.
I did not paraphrase it,
but the most important thing
I did,
for productivity
was we installed air conditioning
in all the government buildings
because Singapore actually has a climate,
actually kind of like Houston.
It's a little tropical
there and very hot.
And there's actually you can look
and they
there's been tests for this
for like students and things that like
if you change
the temperature in the room,
like every five degrees or something,
like how well people do on test changes.
This is also part of my theory
for why offices are always so frigid.
But, yeah,
the cooler is better,
but we have air conditioning,
so we'll we'll use lots of that
next year.
Hi, Matt, Christina Hills
I've been teaching WordPress to beginners
for the past 17 years, so,
I love it.
And I love how there's a place
for beginners and fortune 500 companies.
Anyway,
my question is kind of a piggy back to
his question is August 16th through 19th
to Sunday
and ending on a Wednesday, which is a,
time frame.
Is that correct?
That is correct.
Okay. Is that does that correct?
Because normally, you know,
we end on a Friday.
And so this is different.
So we've also got to make sure
it wasn't a typo.
Yeah.
So yeah let's see how it goes.
So it is starting on
I think one thing we learned
this year was
this week is not a good one.
Okay, okay.
For, you know,
whether it's back to school
or Burning Man
or whatever it is this week
had a lot of conflicts
for a lot of people.
And,
and so we're going to try
to avoid this particular one.
But that problem,
if you,
if you want to talk more about this,
I find Megan, I saw the word camp U.S.
organizers finding a date and a venue
and all the
the mixed mats
of all of our additional requirements,
which accumulate
every year, is a little tricky.
Bear Sunday to Wednesday,
I guess I actually didn't know that,
but yeah, we'll try it out.
Thank you.
Mat, my question is regarding.
For the past 22 years,
we've been building WordPress,
for the past 20 years,
building automatic,
I think the level of commitment
that you have with the company
and the open source is amazing, you know?
Yeah.
So many years on this,
I would like to see
how do you match in the next
ten years of automatic, WordPress.
The next ten years.
Well,
one of the most interesting things for me
and one thing I've had a lot of success
with.
So, like when younger people
come ask me something, it's like,
it's amazing.
The effect of compounding.
And when you work on something
even just a little bit every single day,
how that develops
your context and your knowledge
and your efficiency and your everything,
and just the effects
that you can have
for working on something
a very long period of time,
you know,
various points in WordPress is history.
I was like, okay,
it's like a ten year
overnight success now.
And when if you said it compounding,
it can start very,
very, very, very small.
But when you start to get in the year
ten, 20, 30, 40,
the effects will be quite, quite large.
And so I do study a lot of longer
term organizations
and longer term companies
to see,
like when you go to an Apple
like 50 years old or Microsoft,
what's allowing them to still be
at the forefront
of technology and innovation?
What have they done?
How have they pass the torch in culture?
How how do they leverage
the wisdom
of the longer tenured members
and always bring in fresh people
and not get too ossified
in the way they did things by,
previously?
And every culture is different
and automatic is a fairly unique one.
WordPress is a fairly unique
one, actually, as well.
They're they're very related, actually.
They've influenced each other
quite a bit,
you know, being radically distributed,
being,
you know, open source at our core,
also being multi-product.
So, you know,
Automattic has our most WordPress
interest, products
like Apple and WordPress.com.
I found a lot of, fun for me as well.
Has been working on the apps
like open sourcing, Pocket Casts.
So now as an open source,
open source,
podcasting player, day one Tumblr.
Let's someday
we're going to get on WordPress.
Not not this year, but like someday
we're going to switch
to half a billion blogs and WordPress
and, yeah.
So I find a lot of fun in that.
So if I think about my next ten years,
the things I am certain
won't change that, speed of iteration,
it's going to be really,
really important. Customer centricity.
I hope I'm still doing tech support.
And I actually think I need to,
to stay connected.
And, I learn so much every time I do,
what I don't know
what it's going to look like is
how many people are at the company,
how many AI agents are at the company?
What, is the technology landscape
that we're building on?
Is there some new computing, paradigm
which, you know, isn't VR,
but maybe it's like an AR,
maybe it's a contact lens.
We or maybe like
how what's the,
you know, future APIs of the future?
Is it MCP or is it GraphQL
or is it something else?
Or like what is it
that is going to happen?
So I don't try to make predictions
that far out for those things,
but I do try to think like,
what are the fundamental building blocks
that we're putting in place today?
And some of those are cultural
and some of those are product.
So on the cultural side,
it is the things I talked about
before of really,
you know, working on communication,
performance, accountability,
energy management,
staying with people
also like being with people
through the ups and the downs
and all the beautiful humanity
that you experienced.
The longer
that you have the opportunity
to know each other.
Then on the product side, it's
things like
our investment in the Gutenberg
and in particularly
I'm inside about this,
you know, collaboration
and what that enables.
And yeah,
and a lot of ways WP
admin feels very similar
to what
it was a few years ago,
even though we've done
thousands of upgrades.
But,
when I think about that experience,
when someone logged into WP
and then like seeing the real time
cursor of someone else
logged in like that feels like pretty.
Wow. Amazing.
And when I see things like
these chat bots
that can be built out of consumer
and other things, I'm like, wow,
that's kind of pretty incredible.
And if these things are starting
to be more enabled by new APIs
in the browser
or new frontier models or whatever
it is like, what can we create?
So, I'm very much
looking forward
to co-creating with all of y'all.
So thank you.
Hi.
My, my name is Aaron Ellis.
I came with a few fellow Costa Rican,
from Costa Rica,
and my question is,
I see we have work in Asia.
We have work in the US.
Where this is going?
I mean, when we can, you know,
sponsorship.
Look at us in Latin America
because we are like a 300 million market,
and we are there.
We consume your products, but
what we can do to make it happen.
What do you recommend?
So the first thing is
you have to get everyone to agree
on where to put it.
And wherever you choose
and whatever date you choose,
someone's not going to like it.
By the way.
But I will say that
if you do it, I'll show up.
And I bet a lot of other people
in this room will as well.
And so ladder it up.
I know there's been some amazing events
in South America, Central America, Spain.
You know,
I know Latin America
also spans a lot of things.
So like start to start to build it up.
And I think, you know, we're
camps are very fractal.
It starts actually, I think with meetups
and this idea of like building
that sort of
like monthly momentum
of getting people together, building
those relationships,
learning from each other,
practicing, learning,
you know, all these sorts of things.
And,
and then the ladders up,
you know, to regional events
like Work Camp Canada this year.
And it's looking
like a pretty amazing, like, you know,
flagship events.
So, you know, flagship, I think is,
what you do with it.
It's not like something that,
that anyone bestows on it.
It's like, how awesome was the events?
That's how we should measure it.
And whether that has a city name
or country name
or regional name or whatever.
Let's just ladder it up.
And I think India has actually done
a great job of that.
They have done so many,
you know, awesome
city events, that, you know, they were,
you know, I think kind of do really cool,
you know, is that this year.
So it's cool. Thank you.
Thank you.
All right.
So maybe last question here.
You're can bring us home
I hope so
I'm going to lead us into next year.
Oh please introduce yourself.
My name is Carol
Stambaugh and I am from Mesa, Arizona.
I have been involved
in leading the WordPress
community in Arizona since 2011,
and I have also been on the WordCamp
Phoenix organizing team since that year.
So I love Phoenix.
I love word camps.
I love word camps in Phoenix.
We were so shocked
when we saw that video.
We did not have any idea,
but we are ecstatic
and I guess it's just a request.
We have an amazing community.
Please use us
because we want to welcome
all of you to our great city.
There's a lot to do there,
even though it's going to be hot,
so please take advantage
of all that we have to offer you.
Yes.
And it's wait.
Before you go.
Before you go, come back, come back.
I think that's great feedback
for the events team, so please take that.
What is one can't miss thing in Phoenix
that you'd recommend
for everyone to check out?
Oh my goodness.
Where there.
Besides that
going conditioning hard
in August is the hard thing.
Well Phoenix you all have Waymo's right?
We do have Waymo
who's taking a Waymo so far.
This self-driving car.
We it will blow
your mind is actually like
super incredible
when you when you're driving around
and there's no one in the driver's seat
and it's actually a really good driver.
So, yeah.
What's something we can't miss? Food.
Thing I was going to say downtown
Phoenix has so many wonderful nightspots,
artistic and culture.
You go to Roosevelt
Row, it's just,
and they're energetic and vibrant area.
And the sun goes down
and it's not humid,
so is definitely bearable
when we don't have the sun on us.
But we're very excited to welcome
you all.
Oh, well, can't wait to
be with you this year.
Well all righty.
I feel like
that is a good place to wrap up.
Thank you all.
I just want to say that again.
It is the greatest privilege of my life
and a huge honor
to be able to co-create
with everyone here
and to build something
I think that we can all be quite proud of
and quite excited about its future.
So thank you.
Once upon a young year
when all our shadows.