Courtney Robertson: Is on. Hello, folks! Welcome for Project health hangout number 3. This has been going so very well, and we've had such great feedback coming in putting out a couple of posts that are full of lots of information doesn't always lend itself to comments when it's perhaps new information.
Courtney Robertson: So to set the context for what we're looking at and where we are today. I'm going to read a statement from the top of the team's website, and then we'll dig in. The, this is part of the sustainability team. It's a newer team in wordpress and the sustainability team focuses on 3 pillars of sustainability, what that looks like for the wordpress project
Courtney Robertson: option, one social sustainability, finding ways to increase the diversity and well-being of the wordpress community.
Courtney Robertson: second, environmental sustainability, reducing energy and waste consumption in the development and usage of the Wordpress software and its community activities. And then the last one is economical, finding ways to economically support contributions to the wordpress project for those that need it.
Courtney Robertson: So I think that the work that we're looking at right now is probably twofold, and my dog has left the room. So now sorry if you heard her barking. So we are looking at ways to improve
Courtney Robertson: largely
Courtney Robertson: social sustainability. But also this can impact a couple of secondary areas. So we've identified before I start digging into the kinds of tools. And why we're looking at all of this, we've identified people that could be interested in having more data than the props list that we see at releases, which is a good list.
Courtney Robertson: However, it may not be the most comprehensive option, as I've seen some comments already commit on some posts, there are different things for us to explore and to look at. And this is really going to be a brainstorming session around that we really value having lots of input from different parts of this project.
Courtney Robertson: So the 4 areas that I I started thinking about team health. Max presented stats, dashboard initiatives. I asked him about it at EU last year Andrea and I spoke about it in 2,020, I think. Kareem asked him a question about it nearly a decade ago. So
Courtney Robertson: people have been talking about stash dashboards. It's a long time, and it's time that we
Courtney Robertson: see a little bit of progress with that. So from the lens of teams 1st and foremost, how would teams know? Here's the work that needs to get done? What's actually getting done? How do we better communicate that
Courtney Robertson: to ourselves.
Courtney Robertson: to others in the project to others that wish to contribute to the project. How do we help break some of that information down?
Courtney Robertson: Individual contributors are in that mix. Some of them may be
Courtney Robertson: I am sponsored by Godaddy, where I work to contribute to the project, but for
Courtney Robertson: I think about 13 years of contributing to wordpress. I was not sponsored at all, and I did it
Courtney Robertson: while also running a business or teaching, or a few other things. Some people do it as a hobby because it helps them between trauma surgery. Thank you, Dr. Andy Fragon. Then there are others that are organizational stakeholders, and we have at least 2 of us present that represent organizational stakeholders, those that perhaps work in organizations that either wish to send staff to contribute and or sponsor
Courtney Robertson: contributions and or perhaps other expenses. So they would be, submit people that might want some data to help make some good decisions. And then, finally, of course, Wordpress Project leadership might want some data. And right now, the main data that we see during state of the word addresses are beautiful bubble charts about contribution, but that is largely focused around releases. And even that may not be
Courtney Robertson: totally fair as we'll dig into. So that's what brings us to wanting more metrics and looking at? What does health in the wordpress project actually mean? What does that look like broadly? What does that look like for these different stakeholders to assess. And for some context.
Courtney Robertson: this is something that a few of us have met a couple of people in other open source projects that start looking at data which is great. A year ago I had the opportunity to attend Open Source Summit, North America.
Courtney Robertson: and from that I introduce Nyoco to one of my contacts. Diane Diane used to be the community manager for redhead enterprise, Linux before Ibm brought it in house and also some of the folks in the chaos. Community chaos is such a fun word. And Ben had the opportunity recently to travel to
Courtney Robertson: this year's version of Open Source Summit, North America. Unfortunately, it did not work for me with my kiddos schedule, but the chaos, group community health analytics and open source software.
Courtney Robertson: They've been a phenomenal resource for some of us to learn about how other open source projects approach some of these things. Thank you, Nayoka, and they have
Courtney Robertson: all kinds of great resources on their site. They are part of the Linux Foundation, so you could dig in and read about their charter and what that looks like it means. But also you could see that they that this organization exists essentially to create software to help open source projects.
Courtney Robertson: Consider what metrics might be important as well as drafting examples of metrics. This is not the only group, but I would say that this is probably the foremost group that has everything so tidy and organized that we could consider. But there are other ones out there, and certainly we could do our work to go looking at other kinds of open source projects and learn what has and has not worked for them. What were the wins and losses from that?
Courtney Robertson: You know, one on my radar is looking at how drupal has handled some of these things, and where could we make use of how drupal has done something similar?
Courtney Robertson: so that's kind of the context for the framework, and out of that has come. Let me make sure that the right screens are showing. I think I'll pull slack back off my computer and share. Now, every time I go to share
Courtney Robertson: every time without fail, zoom will
Courtney Robertson: reorient which window you all are in.
Courtney Robertson: and
Courtney Robertson: that's weird. So so just a moment to share my screen and find you again. There you all are. You're beautiful, you're wonderful. Thank you. So here you go. You see a little bit of what I drafted for an agenda, but what I want to do, and we don't have to cover any or all of that. I really just want to hear from you after I show you where we started. So we have Wp, org the
Courtney Robertson: and when I get through this login.
Courtney Robertson: do do do do when I get through the log, and you'll be able to see that we have connected Wordpresses, Github.
Courtney Robertson: So this is a tool that can connect Github.
Courtney Robertson: It can connect a number of things.
Courtney Robertson: Wordpress work happens in lots of different places, and I shared this post, which I know, Ben, you saw and and
Courtney Robertson: enjoyed quite a bit. There's some more in there that I need to update, but this is just a spreadsheet that I keep for myself of
Courtney Robertson: our project is huge.
Courtney Robertson: Where did the teams work? What are they doing there? This was updated as of 3 weeks ago, but there is more even yet to add to that. So I need to swing back around with the media core information I've since realized I have an account for help. Scout I don't know how to get data out of Sigma for the design team and what they work on and then pointed to a couple of areas with training that overlap with Wordpress, TV. And
Courtney Robertson: right? So
Courtney Robertson: this is like every Github repo, every github, discussion, space, every
Courtney Robertson: track, every all the things. And as soon as a new repo gets added. This sheep is now outdated.
Courtney Robertson: There are ways to kind of work through that. So we have hooked up just Github. And right now, we're trialing batura as software. And it is a Sas offering. So software is the service. What they have done is taken some software that chaos group has created, which is called Gromaria Lab.
Courtney Robertson: They've brought that in among a couple of other open source tools and then synthesized it to all work, together with a couple of extra goodies thrown in. I'll just make it simple like that Broomori lab. It turns out as I've started doing. My research is under things like Linux version of their insights. The Linux Foundation itself has insights. And so they're using grammar lab under the hood there. So it makes sense to explore what a lot of the open source projects
Courtney Robertson: already have set up.
Courtney Robertson: But that doesn't mean that we're sold on this. There is a for context, a $1,000 a month expense right now, and all we have hooked up is grow more lab, and automatic is covering that expense for us if we choose, not if we choose to go with.
Courtney Robertson: but her, Jack.
Courtney Robertson: correct myself. If we choose to go with Patricia, there'll be an additional
Courtney Robertson: expense incurred to hook up additional things. What what Baturga and or Gomorai lab can hook up sort of depends on a lot of things it can actually ingest it used to be able to do. Meet up that Api, I think Meetup itself has changed so it can't, but it can pull in slack. It could pull in Rss.
Courtney Robertson: What it can't do, really, that Wordpress might find valuable is someone that's revised something and wordpress like
Courtney Robertson: a team handbook
Courtney Robertson: or learns website, or what's going on inside of glotpress or if we forego, meet up and go with gather press.
Courtney Robertson: that's something that might be greenlit soon, it would behoove us to explore ways of getting some endpoints that say anything on the wordpress network.
Courtney Robertson: This piece has been revised by this person to attribute all of that effort I think about Andy when you were doing all the posts that eventually came up to the rollback, Plugin.
Courtney Robertson: Not only were you doing the code work, but also writing those posts on to make sites and then handling the comments. And it wasn't just one final announcement it was years of. Here's a little more information and a little more, and so to me, that all is part of that contribution, and measuring that. So if we were to explore that, we could either
Courtney Robertson: with some of these tools we might be able to build, because Gramori under it is open source. We could either
Courtney Robertson: get some talent to build it, or we could pay for it to be built. There are some options Georg has mentioned. Georg is our contact at Baturga, and also part of. He founded the chaos group. So
Courtney Robertson: that's kind of context. But let's look at what this tool can do. Just so we see we see that there are companies listed
Courtney Robertson: the work of associating that
Courtney Robertson: Ben Evans is also this user in Github is also this person over here. Isada has largely handled, matching our identity together, and then looking at our profiles, if it matters for who is sponsoring our time? So there are ways to synthesize that together
Courtney Robertson: we can see that this is showing me the last 90 days.
Courtney Robertson: But I can do things like. Say, show me all the way back in time. Let's go to years, 21 years ago, since we're now
Courtney Robertson: 21 years old.
Courtney Robertson: and I could see that the information changes. Sergey, who many of us know, touches almost everything that merges into core. So Sergei has
Courtney Robertson: definitely a lot of commits. When we look over historical data. So this is only going back as far as the project to use Wordpress and github at this time, like it's only connected to github
Courtney Robertson: additional kinds of data that you see in here. I could go through and look at Github Prs. We could set up lots of different types of dashboards with this tool.
Courtney Robertson: and if we find the tool itself insufficient, there are lots of Apis off of this that could work with open search, which makes dashboards possible. So we could.
Courtney Robertson: We could really get wild with the kinds of things that this does this just
Courtney Robertson: funnels the data into some nice Apis and gives us some visualization on it. But I can look through all of this and see things like submitters over time.
Courtney Robertson: Who submitted? What information? There's my coworker, Georg.
Courtney Robertson: I could go in and filter down and look maybe a little more specifically at any one organization. There are some spots that have repos in particular. So if I wanted to dig in and say, Let's go into the Github repos overview, and let's filter down to
Courtney Robertson: search. Add a filter.
Courtney Robertson: let's add a filter for repo.
Courtney Robertson: and we'll put on there.
Courtney Robertson: Does it? Want to learn.
Courtney Robertson: I don't know if it's gonna let's try Gutenberg
Courtney Robertson: learn. Oh, I'm sorry I see what I'm doing, repo. So a lot of what we have in the software. So far.
Courtney Robertson: Isada has set up
Courtney Robertson: repo is, that's what I need. And then we'll put in learn.
Courtney Robertson: except that my L is being sticky value
Courtney Robertson: value. Let's see. Dropdown. Oh, no, I don't want to fuss with the numbers.
Courtney Robertson: Value is, let's hit, save here
Courtney Robertson: and filter to
Courtney Robertson: get is Github repo edit, and then I could start getting in and saying, You know, if I wanted at the moment I'm having a bit of a
Courtney Robertson: demo, malfunction will say, but I could start filtering it down and look within. So if I were to pick any one of the repos that are here.
Courtney Robertson: not sure if I could bind. Learn right off the top.
Courtney Robertson: Let's see, there's the book
Courtney Robertson: log dependencies, movie demo, so we could get in and
Courtney Robertson: we'll pick on playground for now, and I will say filter for this value.
Courtney Robertson: and show me just the data
Courtney Robertson: that's coming in from one particular repo.
Courtney Robertson: And it's going to tell me that here are the number of forks and the stars. And you know there's additional data that we could get, that one may or may not mean a whole lot to us, because playground is not necessarily core or Gutenberg. But we could start seeing some data that comes in in those ways. And then under areas like community.
Courtney Robertson: We could also see not going to go into the demographics or the contributor growth, because automatically, I'm going to say, Oh, there's part of this. I don't want to show everybody
Courtney Robertson: contributors who are no longer contributing as much as they used to, they suddenly dropped off. Why is that? I feel like that information.
Courtney Robertson: It could be useful for
Courtney Robertson: someone that in the context of I've been a team rep.
Courtney Robertson: and when I'm a team rep and somebody has been consistent, and then they suddenly fall off. I think about them as a person, and I want to know, like, Hey, if you don't wish to contribute right now. Okay, but I'm just doing a human check in you doing alright.
Courtney Robertson: or is there maybe a miscommunication somewhere? Or what do we need to like? Is there anything to communicate here? Basically and then move on right? So that's not data that we would necessarily make public. It's worth mentioning that this tool is available in ways that you could stick everything behind a hash mark if somebody is not logged in
Courtney Robertson: so that you get numbers, but no names, no identifiable information
Courtney Robertson: that can be made semi public. Which then means that we should get people that know data science
Courtney Robertson: pretty well and know how to work with big data
Courtney Robertson: to help us with the stories that we tell with that data. For sure. A lot of this data, though, is fine. I mean, it's very.
Courtney Robertson: It's open source. We work
Courtney Robertson: in the open. So there is that aspect to it. But if I were to look at, for instance, maybe I'll go into. I wanna pick maybe just one more area to kind of show
Courtney Robertson: to do data status.
Courtney Robertson: Okay? So I could start seeing that in here there is
Courtney Robertson: that tells me a little bit about some of the retrieval info that might not be a practical one, for right now not about the dashboards Github issues. Let's pick something in there. Efficiency.
Courtney Robertson: Let's look at issues that haven't opened a long time.
Courtney Robertson: How do we identify which issues are open a long time which are not. So, there's a lot of data.
Courtney Robertson: But
Courtney Robertson: even more than that, in the Chaos group.
Courtney Robertson: you can see that there are lots of different types of metrics that are available.
Courtney Robertson: and to Andy's point Andy, in the comments had left us. A comment about, you know, is
Courtney Robertson: getting a single prop
Courtney Robertson: for something that was
Courtney Robertson: lots and lots of lines of code lots and lots of effort
Courtney Robertson: is getting one of those
Courtney Robertson: on par with getting
Courtney Robertson: maybe a minor fix.
Courtney Robertson: Maybe a typo fix like how we weigh those things would be different. And so I look to other areas
Courtney Robertson: of what are some other ways that we could look at this, not just having one single number to identify what's healthy or not, but having a trajectory, a long tail amount of
Courtney Robertson: what's going on, and I could think of medical analogies here. But I will refrain myself. I'll let the good doctor tell us if he's got analogies or not, but I just think that you know, seeing something as at one moment in time is a snapshot. We see a
Courtney Robertson: period of data
Courtney Robertson: that goes back quite a ways that could tell us
Courtney Robertson: more about what we have currently happening than just what we see in that exact moment. And so when Andy brought it up about, you know. Is it
Courtney Robertson: fair comparable in the way that people are recognized? I think about? You know. It certainly wouldn't be we. I don't know that we'll ever have data quantifying every action that we take.
Courtney Robertson: and I'm not sure we should.
Courtney Robertson: but doing something like lines of code
Courtney Robertson: might be an at least a little. It's it's better than having just one number that's like on par with people that fixed that same number of typos right like that's not the same work. We know this. It's valuable work. It's not the same work. And so having different kinds of data points that can measure different types of things, I think, is going to move us in a right direction.
Courtney Robertson: The European crowd this morning, my morning, anyway, for my Japanese friends, it is morning for you. But in my morning the European crowd had expressed a lot of concern around privacy and things. And so this is built by a company that
Courtney Robertson: well, the K. Gramoring Lab, the Open Source software itself
Courtney Robertson: was built to adhere to Gdpr standards by a pile of Europeans that worry about Gdpr, so I don't claim to know all of those laws.
Courtney Robertson: But yes, these thoughts are certainly with us. Other kinds of things that I can quickly show off if you are interested in, let's see, is this one ours or no? There is one that I have for this one down here that says, Slack
Courtney Robertson: The Chaos group
Courtney Robertson: is connected to Patricia as well. I know this gets a little weird. It's like calling our Meta team Meta or something. So they have a demo version available.
Courtney Robertson: and you'll see the way that they have hooked slack up. This is taking a look at the slack interface for the chaos project, and you could see, here is some data that says, you know, this person sent this many messages.
Courtney Robertson: This person did this. So you show up to a team meeting. She wouldn't be nice to be able to attribute some of that.
Courtney Robertson: I also thought this morning with the folks that we were meeting with about the the people that do knowledge work.
Courtney Robertson: I would venture to guess that Josepha has no need to log all of the knowledge work that she does for reporting numbers. However, I would also venture to guess that one of my coworkers that often is a core tech release lead
Courtney Robertson: we have to continue advocating. For why we continue sponsoring this individual to contribute, and why this individual, the seasoned individual with this amount of permissions.
Courtney Robertson: need some of that information in a data format to present to stakeholders to ensure that they can continue contributing right? So there's a lot of factors.
Courtney Robertson: and so I just present all of this to say, we need to think broadly about some things. You're welcome to take a look further over. You know the the Patricia Analytics Demo from the chaos group as well. That doesn't require a login. You all can see the information that's here. And certainly you can look through all of the different types of metrics that chaos makes available and draw inspiration from
Courtney Robertson: really, almost anywhere else that you find it. So we're open to hear some of that feedback, and to hear your thoughts or concerns. I should note with us.
Courtney Robertson: Andy is in the core team primarily, and does a lot of contributing in the form of dev work and does this without being compensated for the work that he does. I would also say that Nayoko and Ben are sponsored as am I?
Courtney Robertson: They are sponsored by automatic. Nako is working on a lot of the 5 for the future initiatives. Ben works in the training team and the content that goes out to learn very valuable work there and then. Roger is at Kinsta, and would probably represent a stakeholder in an organization looking for. How do we get involved and to contribute? So that sits the context for those of us that are here.
Courtney Robertson: And I'm going to stop talking. I want to hear you.
Andy Fragen: Courtney. You've referenced me several times for what I what I wrote there, and I'll I'll be the 1st to say I don't have the answers.
Andy Fragen: some of that data is is real interesting, and it can certainly.
Andy Fragen: I would think, help
Andy Fragen: people like Mayo and Ben.
Andy Fragen: so that automatic can look at what they're doing and say, yes, they're doing.
Andy Fragen: They're not twiddling around the bay. They're they're doing what they're supposed to be doing.
Courtney Robertson: Easier.
Andy Fragen: Big brother really is watching you. Be careful.
Benjamin Evans: Believe me.
Naoko Takano: from my standpoint. I think you know, I think it's good to focus on the dashboard. Not like it so much so I think it. What Andy say is more about like individual
Naoko Takano: visualization of individual contribution. And while that's 1 of the target, I think my my work
Naoko Takano: target or goal is to get more companies to see the benefit of the future and a confession and get someone like you know, Courtney, to say, like, I'm doing this impact for work. So I'd like to actually focus on like a overview of like creating convincingory from the data. So
Naoko Takano: I'm yeah, I'm curious. What's the you know, balance between, you know, individuals wanting to feel motivated and also accountable for the work they do. And you know.
Naoko Takano: this presentation to someone like, you know, someone like Roger or someone else in the company to see their employees impact. So yeah, that's 1
Naoko Takano: curious about.
Benjamin Evans: I think I view dashboards. I'm looking at from a team lead perspective. And so if we do something new in the team, I want to be able to see data that says whether that
Benjamin Evans: thing we tried worked or not. So like.
Benjamin Evans: so like, what if we start an onboarding program in the training team. I would expect active team members to grow
Benjamin Evans: and then that would that data would happen like a few months after on boardings done, but we don't have that at the moment. So we do these things, but we don't know if it worked, or we feel like it was good, but we're not like a feeling isn't objective.
Naoko Takano: Hmm, yeah.
Benjamin Evans: So I think I think, having dashboards so that even if we just track things
Benjamin Evans: I think would help leadership at different levels
Benjamin Evans: like, see whether what they're working on is impactful or not.
Benjamin Evans: So there's another perspective. I'm coming at this from.
Courtney Robertson: Yeah, absolutely. And I thought to Ben about a lot of the work of
Courtney Robertson: kind of the overhead when we issue badges, there's a lot of.
Courtney Robertson: Just logistical things that reps. A lot of this conversation came from Andrea and I, speaking about, what would we want? The training team's dashboard to look like.
Benjamin Evans: What kind.
Courtney Robertson: Kinds of data points do we need? And so here we are. And now you're the training team, and that's great. So the to your point, though there is a lot of administrative overhead on team reps when they wish to adequately make sure that people are attributed and accounted for, and I am delighted to see the training team thriving where it has been having been contributing to that team since 2,014. 0, my goodness.
Courtney Robertson: yeah. So I know that that's something that it is a
Courtney Robertson: trying to help the reps definitely have some some actual data to back up. This is helping
Courtney Robertson: this, calling people in and welcoming our new visitors and onboarding them all of that. That would be very compelling to know that data for sure or to know that maybe we could focus somewhere else.
Courtney Robertson: Yeah, right?
Naoko Takano: so and to and this point is sorry to speak again. But I think it. What tying to what Ben said, I think individuals can
Naoko Takano: see what is impact for all.
Courtney Robertson: Yeah.
Naoko Takano: Through this dashboard. So that's that's that's what's most important
Naoko Takano: for individuals. And and it also leads to their employers seeing them doing work. So yeah.
Courtney Robertson: Andy. I also think so to your point. Sure
Courtney Robertson: paid paid contributors and those backing the project in in a means of send staff, or send money.
Courtney Robertson: I I don't want to deny that there is some of that afoot, for sure. I'll be the 1st to say that, but also as one who wants to get people that wish to be sponsored because that was me.
Courtney Robertson: Up until 3 years ago. Today that was me, and I gave. I gave probably a lot to this project in a way that maybe in hindsight I could have
Courtney Robertson: put myself into a better financial spot before I got sponsored
Courtney Robertson: and we have contributed like that. They are so wildly passionate and great at that one thing that they do, and if they wish to be sponsored.
Courtney Robertson: I certainly don't want to say that one who has sponsored has more authority, weight, etc.
Courtney Robertson: Than one who is not.
Courtney Robertson: And so I hear your concerns Andy for sure, but I also want to acknowledge that.
Andy Fragen: Makes a lot of sense as far as for those individuals who do contribute who are looking for sponsorship. It's a great way to show the sponsors. Hey, look! This is
Andy Fragen: this is my history.
Courtney Robertson: Yes.
Courtney Robertson: Yes, and why?
Benjamin Evans: Has more meaning than a badge.
Benjamin Evans: A badge is good, but this gives more context.
Andy Fragen: I've I've earned just about all the badges. I'm gonna end up earning crops are nice, but you know.
Andy Fragen: I look at, you know, and and and I've even, you know, had my picture in the thing for being a noteworthy contributor.
Andy Fragen: I think the 1st time that happened was around 4.2,
Andy Fragen: and you honestly, what I'd really like is some easy way to figure out
Andy Fragen: which versions of wordpress I contributed to.
Andy Fragen: There must be an Api for that somewhere. I have no idea where that is anymore.
Courtney Robertson: I think Marcus might have something on the Wp. Dot world.
Courtney Robertson: But don't hold me to that.
Courtney Robertson: The Wp. Dot world pulls in
Courtney Robertson: as many Apis as the guy can find. It is a informal method of locating where the world contributors are. It does it down to a city level. If you so desire to be on that site and take part in that, and it will connect to your.org profile and a few other things so like you could say, Here's me and.org, and from that we'll get some data. I don't know if he has those numbers, but if anyone would, he would probably have it hooked up.
Andy Fragen: But I mean, I wanna think, as far as some of these features that I've worked on.
Andy Fragen: yeah, we had. And
Andy Fragen: we had basically roll back.
Andy Fragen: all of it
Andy Fragen: working
Andy Fragen: so so they could start thinking about committing it in 5 point O,
Andy Fragen: of course, 5.0 had other priorities.
Andy Fragen: and then, after that other priorities exist. And then it was just
Andy Fragen: honestly, the project was too big for any one person to even consider reviewing other than those of us who are actually coding it.
Andy Fragen: The way we made progress is by breaking it up into 3 parts.
Andy Fragen: Yeah.
Courtney Robertson: It's very valuable, I think. Do you? Do you see that if if
Courtney Robertson: could there be data available, I guess I should word it this way? Could there be data available that would help identify
Courtney Robertson: these areas that are so close to finally shipping and what it would take to get there. So I've seen a couple of github issues recently that were, the patch has been sitting there, but the ticket just
Courtney Robertson: is is sitting
Courtney Robertson: A, and the patch is there, and it's not conflicting with anything according to tests. But yet it doesn't get merged. Do you think that we could use the data to help identify some of these common
Courtney Robertson: occurrences.
Andy Fragen: Honestly, here's here's what I think a large part of the problem ends up being
Andy Fragen: you. You sowed it when you showed some of the the historical
Andy Fragen: contributors to Wordpress. I look a lot of those lists, and I see people like Ryan Bourne
Andy Fragen: and and Roz and Mason.
Andy Fragen: and I didn't see Jake there, but I know he's there, and I know.
Courtney Robertson: Change the window of time. He's gonna be there. Yeah.
Andy Fragen: And I know Helen Sandy. These were all lead developers of wordpress. There are 2 remaining
Andy Fragen: Dion.
Courtney Robertson: And
Courtney Robertson: and Matt has even publicly said that the term lead developer on that handbook page.
Courtney Robertson: I think it was a a conversation on twitter X. But that that was more of an honorary title at this point, and not a
Courtney Robertson: functional.
Andy Fragen: It shouldn't be.
Courtney Robertson: Ignition.
Andy Fragen: It should.
Courtney Robertson: Beyond our scope today.
Andy Fragen: People who are, who, you know, like Dion and like Andrew. And
Andy Fragen: at this point, probably Sergei right been in the project and done enough things that they have the ability to make these sweeping architectural changes or or decisions that require.
Andy Fragen: I don't know
Andy Fragen: huge committees and and I and I'll honestly, I also, I think, I said somewhere, is any new feature should have a lead developer assigned to them.
Andy Fragen: Hmm!
Courtney Robertson: Yeah, I I almost think of the need of project management. But without the committee, I I understand, who wants more meetings.
Andy Fragen: Not even sometimes. It's not even about meeting more meetings.
Courtney Robertson: Yeah, yeah.
Courtney Robertson: it's I. I think of of some of those parts. Where, how do we identify, for instance, encore this idea that there are parts that are just sitting there and waiting. And let's do this thing.
Courtney Robertson: I've been hearing more of that kind of feedback recently.
Courtney Robertson: and I'm not sure if this can help solve for some of that, if
Courtney Robertson: if we see that there are some data points, certainly that would be useful. That would be great to be able to offer
Courtney Robertson: to people that are in
Courtney Robertson: authority to help make the change happen.
Andy Fragen: Matt.
Andy Fragen: yeah, yeah.
Courtney Robertson: I I mean, I've I've kept mad abreast of what's happening with this as best as I can. And he pointed me on to also
Courtney Robertson: Auto and Scott, so I am interested in seeing what they've been working on as well.
Courtney Robertson: Yep.
Roger Williams: So coming in with maybe a fresher eyes to the project. Long time lurker recent
Courtney Robertson: And Roger. I have already told Roger this
Courtney Robertson: fresh eyes don't undervalue that gift, because people like Andy and I have been around this project a bit.
Courtney Robertson: We don't remember what it's like to be a beginner as easily. So please be our beginner for us.
Roger Williams: Sure. Yeah. Well, so the things that I'm I'm dealing with right? Trying to convince an organization to
Roger Williams: allow employees to spend their working hours working on the project.
Roger Williams: Yeah, is, there's 2 things right? There's a i'm trying to convince leadership like, Hey, this is, this is a good move.
Roger Williams: And and you know, explaining that more than just saying, Hey, it's for Wordpress, right? Like trying to get more specific. And and I and I hear a lot of talk around, maybe using this data to find
Roger Williams: E areas where it's like, hey, if we could get an experienced Php developer involved on this project, we could get it done in
Roger Williams: 15 h, 50 h, something right? And
Roger Williams: and also knowing that, you know, you can't make solid estimates on development time. But just an idea.
Roger Williams: so that's on the organizational side, on the individual side. I like, it's constant. Non developers who are like, I I don't. How can I contribute to wordpress
Roger Williams: and communicating that to them? And I point them to different teams to look at
Roger Williams: but it's intimidating right like you jump into this thing, and there you go into slack.
Roger Williams: and there's just a whole history there.
Roger Williams: and just trying to get your foot in the door and just kind of grasp a little bit of like, okay, where can I get started? How can I get started?
Roger Williams: so you know. And I think again.
Roger Williams: having the data to find parts of projects, for you know I know we already do tags where it's like, Hey, this is a good 1st ticket?
Roger Williams: You know, for a non development situation. What's the equivalent of that? Do we have those types of things highlighted of.
Roger Williams: hey? If you're just getting started into here. You know, here's kind of an introduction to how we use slack right? Because there are differences. Sometimes threads get used, sometimes they do not get used.
Roger Williams: you know, here's how the make website works. Here's how to interact there.
Roger Williams: so and then the mentorship program is something that's very exciting. And the idea there's a kind of a newer idea of a
Roger Williams: more mentor on demand type program where
Roger Williams: people can just get quick help with things. So
Roger Williams: you know, I'm I'm looking at all of this data going well, this is amazing. But is it answering these kind of critical questions to get more people involved in the project, and to get more people involved who are being compensated, whether directly or through sponsorship.
Roger Williams: so that, you know, while you know, developers come and go for various reasons. And I'm aware of, you know, all types of reasons behind Wordpress, and why people might leave the project. But also people just leave it because they're tired and they need to do something else.
Roger Williams: So getting new people to come in to those areas, you know, is just I can. It's just gonna be critical for the project moving forward. And so
Roger Williams: how can organizations help with that and the 5 for the future pro project is awesome.
Roger Williams: You know. I think, that that gives those nice little stepping stones that can show leadership quickly of oh, this is what our competitors are doing
Roger Williams: right like.
Roger Williams: And and people see that right when I talk to prospects.
Roger Williams: people like they go and look@thewordpress.org website. And they see, am I involved in the project and things like that? And so.
Roger Williams: you know, using some sales techniques to convince organizations to get involved, I think, is, is definitely a valid
Roger Williams: thing to start looking at.
Courtney Robertson: I will be the 1st to say, as soon as W. Pcs and Phpcs
Courtney Robertson: with Juliet became an issue about half a year ago. Essentially Juliet needed refund it, or she could not continue working on this.
Courtney Robertson: And this is
Courtney Robertson: the code quality
Courtney Robertson: that underpins not just core, but also many of the plugins.
Courtney Robertson: I would guess themes as well.
Courtney Robertson: And that's
Courtney Robertson: what we call in the industry a bus factor of one, maybe one and a half, because dennis also contributes to that area, at least at that time. And so and we had a similar thing happen with Mika stepping out from plug and review team. Thankfully we were able to
Courtney Robertson: handle that transition as a project better.
Courtney Robertson: In terms of
Courtney Robertson: coming in to support Mika offboarding, gathering all the historical information. Mika is healthy and well.
Courtney Robertson: Mika is still available if people need to ping and ask the weird. Oh, yeah, we forgot to document the thing question to Mika, which is great
Courtney Robertson: but also
Courtney Robertson: Mika was a team of one and a little bit of autos time a half. For the entire Plugin review team, and we see that
Courtney Robertson: it just keeps ramping up. And we need to keep growing this team. And also there are seasons. I I stepped out of contributing for 3 years for having young children and some other life stuff. So
Courtney Robertson: I hear a lot of those points, and I will echo as well that when it comes to Nike well, there's probably even more that could be had here, maybe in a session for folks like
Courtney Robertson: Roger and myself, when we're going to our stakeholders internally. I had to really raise a scene to get Juliet some funding from my organization. We we sponsor at Godaddy open. Js. We were part of the founding organization that funds the Javascript project.
Courtney Robertson: People don't know that
Courtney Robertson: also. Why was it so easy to get that one approved in budget. But yet it's challenging specifically in Wordpress.
Courtney Robertson: So
Courtney Robertson: I think that's an area for us to explore. And a lot of with Javascript. It's some money, and then they help distribute the funds to
Courtney Robertson: cover travel costs for people to get to the conferences and some things like that. So
Courtney Robertson: There are ways that we can look at that. But
Courtney Robertson: I am working internally on. I look at my engineers leveling guide the thing that tells them how they progress in their career, it says, contributing to open source is part of that, however, getting their managers to give them the time to contribute is is a challenge.
Courtney Robertson: And so then I look up the ladder, and I'm like, Well, who else do I go to? Who do I go to? Who do I go to right up up the ranks and justifying that against
Courtney Robertson: ensuring the profits are there, and the slant on contributing is security, and our customer needs
Courtney Robertson: our customers need the content that's on docs and learn, and in their languages as close to release as possible. Because now we have all the support bots. And I'm not saying Godaddy does. But now we have the support bots in place that will answer the wordpress questions from the source. Or maybe we're embedding the content, like
Courtney Robertson: we need to do better at coordinating. And of course, I think Rogers like me in in being able to make some of those cases, but I also think that
Courtney Robertson: data will be more helpful, and considering how other projects secure the funding that they, whether that's funds or people power.
Courtney Robertson: whichever direction that goes. How do they call in in other projects? Why is it that
Courtney Robertson: maybe Wordpress is more of a struggle than other projects?
Courtney Robertson: Thoughts? I don't know. But I I hear those those thoughts and those concerns, for sure. Some of the ideas that came up earlier.
Courtney Robertson: Virgot Olson was on one of the 1st calls, Bergett brought up her work, and Deibergate being an individual that is open to receive sponsorship for the work that she does, but also, and would need data to support this work. Another contributor told me. They manually tally the information that sits on make slash updates.
Courtney Robertson: That's why the update site is still valuable, and why we should keep that alive. That one person gets her contracts and says, Here's my data and has it to back it up. That's important. But let's maybe make it not so manual for that individual
Courtney Robertson: also.
Courtney Robertson: When I was speaking with Bierget about some of this, she was inquiring again to some privacy.
Courtney Robertson: especially when we're looking at the Eib metrics.
Courtney Robertson: and it sort of sparked a thought, Niagara, to swing by you with 5 for the future listings, whether someone signs up for 5 under individual or as an organization. Perhaps when they're in their logged in experience of maintaining their 5 listing, we could put some data that might not
Courtney Robertson: be appropriate to be widely public, but is
Courtney Robertson: just about either that individual or that organization.
Courtney Robertson: That way. It's
Courtney Robertson: somewhere relevant. Maybe.
Naoko Takano: Yeah, I don't. I don't think it so, even, you know, with the bitter information, we don't need to expose a lot of details, and I think that's
Naoko Takano: where our challenges. You know. What is these like indicators that help. But you know we don't want, you know. And they said, we don't want this data overload that
Naoko Takano: confuse people or direct people to wrong. You know, goal, which is adding more activities. We we don't want to show the amount of activities per se, we want to focus on the impact for sure. Yeah.
Courtney Robertson: Very true.
Courtney Robertson: Thank you for dropping in the stats that are in the article there, as well about Julia.
Naoko Takano: Contact. We should probably use this more often in a.
Courtney Robertson: Yeah, did you?
Naoko Takano: Presenting.
Courtney Robertson: Yeah.
Courtney Robertson: I I pinged yoast. And now that they are personal friends, and said, Please, can you write this article on Julia piece? Then I took that article to my CEO, and so we have to do something.
Courtney Robertson: So yes, those are those are things that I I so much think about. We are exploring. This is one of multiple tools automatic has shared generously at sponsoring 8,000 a month. This may be the 1st push if we decide to continue with this tool in which we take it back to the community to help get the funds to secure the tool there are others
Courtney Robertson: that are out there other tools that are already done. This one is a sas, so it is. We're paying for them already. Having set all of this up for us.
Courtney Robertson: having them to maintain it. There is concern. Will they be around? I know Berta, in terms of age is, I don't know. 15 years old. I could get some more specifics to that. But we've seen other similar options out there. Orbit is another one. They used to be at orbit love. They recently got acquired by postman post fans, been
Courtney Robertson: postman handles lots of Api data, and when postman acquired it they announced that they would be shuttering it.
Courtney Robertson: Postman has has recently come into the news in the past few months about storing
Courtney Robertson: authorization keys in the cloud and some other kinds of behavior. So maybe we don't wanna work with an organization like that. Andy hides right? So so there are. So that tool got deprecated. Linux insights has taken Remoria lab and kind of swooped it into their Linux insights. There are some additional tools out there to explore, and then Joaquin had mentioned
Courtney Robertson: there is a tool within Google
Courtney Robertson: that he was proposing a way of setting it all up. And so some of the factors, Joaquin, is
Courtney Robertson: very much a developer mindset. He also spoke about some python type of things that could be done this morning as well, and that was great.
Courtney Robertson: we have to look also, not just at costs, and maybe taking it to the community to get the costs covered. If we continue to go forward. If we add more sources to this the cost will go up if we need custom. Dev work
Courtney Robertson: to add in
Courtney Robertson: making sure that wordpress revisions are covered, not just an rss feed
Courtney Robertson: that we could either end up paying for the cost of Dev Build or not. We might have some additional factors that I'm not aware of. So at EU this year I will be doing my best to make my rounds to the tables and speak with folks to say what are the kind of data points that you need. What types of factors am I not considering yet? Let's get that documented. Let's hear really about a lot of these thoughts. But then, if we were to go the route of either
Courtney Robertson: self-hosting, some open source tools like Muromoray Lab, we could self host it and try and build out ourselves. That gives us a good start.
Courtney Robertson: however.
Courtney Robertson: The labor involved becomes more the issue, and that would also be true for something like Google as well. And then I don't know. I want to talk to more Europeans about Google concerns. They seem to be the continent that has concerns.
Andy Fragen: I'm sure I would love to to to support that too.
Courtney Robertson: Yeah, so so there are ways to build things ourselves as an option.
Courtney Robertson: we're still considering all the things. And so I think, having a good pros cons list of
Courtney Robertson: what tools we pick. Why, we pick it. Who come who has access to the data. I hear Ben's concern, and I would echo it as a team. Rep. You know, having an idea of.
Courtney Robertson: did this initiative help or not.
Courtney Robertson: does doing this thing to the Github Repo help keep contributors coming to the Github Repo or or not? Why do we think people are not contributing? There's a lot that could be done with the data. And we know that
Courtney Robertson: thinking through who gets what amount of information, how we tell the stories, who has access to raw data.
Courtney Robertson: that's all.
Courtney Robertson: Something to still consider.
Courtney Robertson: and I want to say how much I value each of you for coming and hanging out with me.
Courtney Robertson: absolutely value being able to
Courtney Robertson: hear the feedback get the word out about what we're trying to work on with this.
Courtney Robertson: I think it takes all of us to get it there.
Courtney Robertson: Hmm!
Roger Williams: Thank you for organizing it.
Courtney Robertson: Absolutely. Yes, and I again, Hari and Azada, have done a good bit of the most recent work. But Naoko helped us kick off with a lot of this work, too, and
Courtney Robertson: I am certainly not the one pulling all of it together. I'm just here to make a space for you all to
Courtney Robertson: give us input.
Courtney Robertson: Hmm.
Courtney Robertson: cool.
Naoko Takano: So the question about the next steps. So I've been kind of away for 3 months. I was covering some of the things while Croy was away.
Naoko Takano: Back after everybody can be up in a more. You know. Powerful feature focus role. I'd like to set like some, you know.
Naoko Takano: milestones and.
Courtney Robertson: I mean my.
Naoko Takano: Or campus next this year.
Naoko Takano: What can we do? Maybe we can have a demo.
Naoko Takano: is that something you're thinking about? I mean.
Naoko Takano: you know? Yeah, based on.
Courtney Robertson: Yeah. So what I wanna bait my, my initial was, Oh, we have the tool. Oh, we've got it for a month. I don't know if we have it for more than a month. Okay, let's make sure we get some feedback in so I I've
Courtney Robertson: kicked off 4 hangouts at least to start, and I am so thankful that we've had the folks that we have had because they are very invested. Many team reps have popped in many long time contributors have popped in as well, people representing all different pockets of this project. We want to synthesize the 4 hangouts. I can get
Courtney Robertson: the audio transcripts the text, If that helps us as well. So I would like to put down the ideas that were shared
Courtney Robertson: during these hangouts as a synthesized post.
Courtney Robertson: I'm open for people that would like to help with that, because I'm going to Mont Clare on Friday. Where can't Mont Clar is happening this this coming weekend. So I will be doing that. And I'm assuming Roger is gonna be busy doing that, too. Since we're supposed to have dinner there Friday night. So not offering that
Courtney Robertson: if I can get any of that synthesized, if not, I will certainly make those files available to those of us that have kicked off where we are so far. If anyone else would like to volunteer, this work is within the sustainability team, so we can certainly make that available, and then I am also. I shared a bit of this information with yoast devalk, the the person, not the company because
Courtney Robertson: his former company. The Plugin used to contribute quite a lot and he also has the experience of having worked in one enterprise and consulting for others. So he's he's
Courtney Robertson: kind of thinking through some of this, and at Europe he will be speaking with Juliet as the opening keynote for Europe, which I'm very excited about. And then
Courtney Robertson: I'm also working on getting. I have a meeting on the books with Karimuchi, who is the main point of contact for me for scale consortium. So I want to hear from the Enterprise Agency space, too. So I am.
Courtney Robertson: Their customers. Look at open source projects from a whole different lens about. Why should we pick this open source Project and sometimes they sign up for 10 years that are stretch. We're gonna lock in
Courtney Robertson: 10 years on this one platform. So when they sign kind of contracts like that, they may have different factors that any of us are paying attention to about how they gauge the health of a project, and some of those organizations are known to back contributions in different ways. And so I think it important that we allocate some time to get feedback from them.
Courtney Robertson: Kareem being quite a busy individual, my meeting is a week from now, so unless we catch each other before then so that gets me into Europe
Courtney Robertson: doing some rounds on anyone that would like to participate with this. I'll certainly be hitting up the training team, Ben, but to ask some more detailed questions. I don't know that I want to do a demo there, but I want to say, how would you? Some questions along the lines of
Courtney Robertson: what would help automate the process for team reps. Now, what would help, you know, getting some insights like, Oh, yeah, if we
Courtney Robertson: do an initiative for our little micro community in this project. How do we know it's successful gathering that type of feedback from as many of the teams?
Courtney Robertson: Similar types of feedback would be really valuable during Europe. Coming away with a post
Courtney Robertson: about that. And then I think
Courtney Robertson: I could use some help, Naoko, on. How do we decide?
Courtney Robertson: What are the
Courtney Robertson: factors that we look for?
Courtney Robertson: In which tool, or if we decide to build ourselves.
Courtney Robertson: And how do we make the right choices from that perspective? I feel like I've heard a good bit of
Courtney Robertson: input about
Courtney Robertson: hmm
Courtney Robertson: factors like we need wordpress provisions. We need
Courtney Robertson: track. We need Github integrated. We might want slack integrated. So, looking at
Courtney Robertson: all the integrations and then some additional features, and then, knowing what are our factors for our choices and publishing that I feel like would be good to do
Courtney Robertson: after Europe, and then we begin assessing which tool.
Courtney Robertson: And then maybe by us we can
Courtney Robertson: have a more firm.
Courtney Robertson: Here is what we have selected and where we're going with it, and things like that.
Courtney Robertson: I don't know if that's a reasonable timeframe.
Courtney Robertson: I'm open.
Naoko Takano: Give it back. If it's not like automated. Maybe we can do actual like Demo Demo, which is.
Courtney Robertson: Yeah, Steve.
Naoko Takano: Even like a wordpress page with these potential featureization. So that would be exciting to have some, you know
Naoko Takano: something certainly soon. Yup
Naoko Takano: sounds good.
Courtney Robertson: Very good plan.
Courtney Robertson: Very good. Well, I wish you all either a good night or a good morning, dependent on
Courtney Robertson: where on the map you are.
Courtney Robertson: Yeah, thank you all, and I will hit. Stop.
Benjamin Evans: Thank you. Courtney.
Courtney Robertson: Absolutely. Thank you, absolutely.
Naoko Takano: If anyone.