Mary Hubbard & Matt Mullenweg WordCamp EU 2025 Fireside Chat
Download MP3Of questions submitted. People are very curious and some really good conversations and debates that are happening. And so I asked if I'd ask Matt these questions directly today, he's willing. So let's start off with some easy things if that'd be okay.
Speaker 3:Let's Let's do do
Speaker 1:it. So in general, we're in we're in Europe, the beautiful city of Basel. There's been a lot of conversations about EU compliance regulation. How are you thinking about this for the project?
Speaker 2:Regulation, real easy.
Speaker 1:Yep. I wanted to I wanted to just get right into it, you know?
Speaker 2:I will say that y'all raise it to an art. So there have been you know, EU, I think, some fairly and unfairly, is seen as a place where some is very forward from a regulatory stance, and sometimes those regulations don't necessarily have the hoped for impact. Although I feel like my index finger is much stronger here clicking all those accept cookie things. It's funny when Americans come to Europe, they're like, what is happening to the web? Has anyone had that experience?
Speaker 2:We have some folks who came. And I'm also curious for the folks in the EU, do you feel safer, more secure, more private because of these cookie acceptance things? Okay. I heard some yes. Let's let's I wanna see hands for the yeses.
Speaker 2:So that's you feel also more secure for
Speaker 1:Yes. The I feel more.
Speaker 2:I feel man. That's more than I would have expected. So for those who can't see wait. Go back up. I'll do, a quick kinda 15%, maybe 20.
Speaker 2:Wow. Well, y'all won. These banners are everywhere. I don't know if I feel as strongly because I feel like people just click through them. This sort of reject all can be built in the browsers like Brave and other things.
Speaker 2:So there's other ways to address some of that, but unintended side effects of some well meaning regulation. There's lots of going through the various parts of the EU right now. There's a cool initiative called the Open Webinar Alliance, which I believe is what? Type o three, Drupal, and Joomla. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And and it's nice because a lot of those are a bit more EU centric
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Than us. But we're in touch with them, we're following it, and we want
Speaker 4:to support whichever way we can. I feel like that organization and these fellow open source GPL projects with similar usage characteristics to us are very, very aligned. So it's sent that we can bring our weight and our market share to bear. I think
Speaker 2:they already have the right policies and the right suggestions and feedback to these groups. I would also use this opportunity to suggest with this some fantastic European continent hosting companies, like SiteGround hosting Germany more. I feel like those being very large tax paying businesses with hundreds or thousands of employees are very, very well suited to influence their legislators, their politicians, even their country leaders to advocate for their users as well because it's all users of the hosting companies could be affected by some of these regulations if they go through as currently written.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And another topic specific to the EU which I'm really interested about this because this has been brought to my attention multiple times and with WordCamps and then the more localized local WordCamps. It's whether WordPress foundation or the WordPress community support should establish a legal presence in the EU. And so it kind of tailors or dovetails from there but given our global reach, what is the complexity and the complexity of running events like this? Like is this something that we should prioritize or even be thinking about?
Speaker 2:It's definitely something I think we should consider periodically, and we've done some experiments here. I think it was in Nepal. But there's, you know, there's some downsides to this as well, largely from admin overhead maintenance. We try to keep the WordPress Foundation and the WordCamps subsidiary fairly lightweight, so we can focus as much time and energy on the good stuff. The things that we all come to work camps for and bringing new people into the community and do actions and all that sort of thing.
Speaker 2:So I would say that right now, I believe our current analysis is that the cost benefit is not worth setting up more local entities in the various countries that the work can't happen, which by the way is different for work camp EU every year. I don't wanna give away where the next one is, but perhaps a different country. Hopefully, not not ruin any surprises there.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And and yeah. So I would say right now, no. But we can always readdress that, and there might be some countries where the overhead is lower than others.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:You know, if they have, like, a really good, like, e company creation thing, like Estonia, I believe, does. So there might be some that makes sort of some of the remote stuff easier.
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:We don't need, like, to fly to the country and notarize 50 forms or
Speaker 1:Or or good partnerships or good relationships that we might be able to forge or see something to expedite some of these issues.
Speaker 2:If there's existing organizations, I think partnership is the best way to go with it. Yeah. And there's many, many organizations that are very aligned with us. It's not unlike actually a charity water. And I actually just met with the founder there the other day, but it's a fantastic charity.
Speaker 2:They but they now have his company of the charity only has a 100 something employees, but they've now got, like, I wanna say it was, 9,000 on the ground in Africa through partner organizations. And that scaled up from a tenth of that, you know, five or six years ago, drilling wells and things.
Speaker 1:Okay. That's great. So still a part of the EU, of theme based because I'd like to hit all of the EU things today. So yesterday, at a site event, the announcement of Project FAIR came out. There's highlighted interest discussions that are happening.
Speaker 1:How do you see initiatives like this coexisting with WordPress? Dotto is the infrastructure, etcetera. What would be your ideal outcome?
Speaker 2:Well, it's open source, so everything can coexist with WordPress. And I think that's part of the beauty that, something like this can be written with the APIs that WordPress has. I don't know if I wanna comment too much further on it just because kinda just found out about it last night. There hasn't been that much time. There's a lot of code and and complexities.
Speaker 2:You know, I do wish if the team did wanna collaborate or the team says we wanna be transparent and everything, but it did sort of drop as a surprise or was worked on in secret for six months. But we can work past that and look at it. I do think things we need to keep in mind are, you know, what are users asking for? What are the challenges they're facing around finding the right things, knowing it's secure, getting updates, the stats around how many sites that are hacked are from out of date plugins. Those are things that are top of my mind Mhmm.
Speaker 2:For a plugin directory and sort of the trust and safety elements of that. For the .org directory, I think it's actually a super exciting time. If you haven't been following the the plugin scanner improvements, check it out. I think we're approaching a point where we'll be able to scan not just new plugins, but plugin updates. If you can imagine the way that'll increase security.
Speaker 2:It's also fantastic work happening, not just from companies like PatchStack, but also just with applying the frontier models, which of course are getting better every three or four months to find new vulnerabilities. And they're gonna find a lot. So we're gonna need to apply them to fixing the vulnerabilities as well and figure out a method there for older or abandoned plugins. We can't just close the plugin because we're still gonna leave thousands or tens of thousands sites insecure. But we don't wanna, you know, break any plugins.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I think we need to figure out something like if a plugin hasn't been updated in a year or two, it's abandoned but still active or like some sort of way to, again, make the plug in directory like the most safe, trusted, and performant place for WordPress users. And I actually got some cool stats around this from our systems and plug in team because I haven't heard it recently. So we're now up to 72,000 plug ins and themes. This is about 3.2 terabytes of zip files.
Speaker 2:That's not counting all the SVN history and everything like that. So there's a lot of data there, which also we need to make sure if 500 mirrors are set up and they're all sucking down the directory, that could DDOS us. And in the last twelve months, we had 630,000,000,000 requests. Yeah. With 17,500,000,000 downloads.
Speaker 4:Unreal.
Speaker 2:So the scale of this is yeah. Thank you. Round of applause for the plug in team, the systems team that keeps us going. And thank you to Barry for getting that to me while you were under the weather.
Speaker 1:Well, it's it's funny because it kind of all tailors into one one another, even the plug in reviews. Because, like, I met with that team today. They are doing phenomenal things in how they're incorporating AI and how they're looking at what the long term to long term success of that team will be is gonna be great.
Speaker 2:Thank you very much to the plug and review team. It
Speaker 1:is Thank you very much. Unbelievable. And we do talk a lot about the future, future WordPress. There's been a lot of conversations around five the future and what that will look like. So the landscape of contribution is changing and we're seeing more companies exploring how to sponsor maintainers directly.
Speaker 1:Not just in a way that you check a box and that hey it's five in the future, I'm putting my hours up but understanding how critical work gets done. And so at the same time conversations are heating up around how we balance this. With all of these proposals on the table, how do you see Five for the Future evolving? You know, maybe some short term I'd I'd love to hear your perspective short term, what we can do now as we push forward and then your vision of the long term Five for the Future plan.
Speaker 2:I think we made a classic mistake. Actually, that's a lot of managers do, a lot of companies do. And it's funny because I actually talk about this a lot, which is we were measuring input, not output. So I think an interesting way for Fire for the Future to evolve is not just showing the pledge or the commitment, but then also putting right next to that, like what are the results? At least that are legible to us, which most things are.
Speaker 2:Because work generally involves a change somewhere on wordpress.org that's in a database. It's in SVN, it's in a ticket, it's in the form, it's in a translation, it's in a something. And I think it would actually be really cool to enhance the badges. You know, there's the badges on profiles, put some stats in those. It'd be kind of fun.
Speaker 2:So some rolling stats, GitHub like stats. So I I think just putting a lot more analytics and stats in there would just kind of make it more fun. And I'm curious about that myself. Okay. Also just comparing like input to output.
Speaker 2:So I think that's where we can go a bit with it and it will tighten it up quite a bit. You know, one frustration I've heard from from some people sponsoring Fire for the Future folks is how do I know they're working on the right things? Or what's the impact of this? Or is it even aligned with the roadmap? Or is this just kinda in some corner somewhere and it's never going to go to core?
Speaker 2:So, you know, for at the the sponsoring level, I think people also wanna have the highest impact per dollar.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. And and understanding where that money is going, how they're sponsoring, and then on top of that what you can actually work on and deliver which is great. And so a little bit about five to the future, it's it's more tangible execution of WordPress Campus Connect. So we've recently the rise of WordPress Campus Connect, think we recently expanded it. Do you see similar opportunities in universities or students?
Speaker 1:What are your thinking or what are your thoughts around WordPress Campus Connect? And how do you think that's gonna reshift the project?
Speaker 2:We have a little bit of an announcement there, which is pretty exciting. So it's a hundred and fifty hours. Mary's actually the expert on this. You should really talk about it.
Speaker 1:I'm not the expert. I didn't do it. I'm just here to denounce it. So there's been a program that we recently went into a pilot for, and it started in use at the University of Pisa, but EASI has gotten a signed agreement where a 150 contribution hours will equate to six credits to graduate college.
Speaker 4:And so she yeah.
Speaker 1:It's actually a
Speaker 2:I'm gonna jump in. It's required, isn't it? It's required
Speaker 1:for the degree, but it really is one of these pet projects that she has been working on behind the scenes for quite some time, brought it to the forefront, and it really does interconnect. It's it's there is opportunity for a feeder program. There's an opportunity for internships. There's opportunities to get people, younger generations in and looking. And because it's a part of an educational system across Europe, there is not only interest to expand different majors, but there's interest to go to other universities.
Speaker 1:So she's been driving this. I'm not taking the credit, but I'm very excited about it. And, Matt will go and speak to the chairman of the board and the board to try to get this to expand, but the pilot will actually launch June 25. So
Speaker 2:Think about that for a second. 5,000 students.
Speaker 1:And a hundred and fifty hours mandated for six college credits. And so if you think about all of the individual pieces that are going on with education, we know that a lot starts with education. But Anand who's launched Campus Connect and we've expanded that and that's all over Africa and that's in The EU and India obviously. As he's working through that and that program starts to develop and and develop into something larger, we have the ability to tie these in. We can take Campus Connect to kick off the WordPress credits program.
Speaker 1:We can actually get people aligned. The endowment from Automattic actually enables people once they're in these programs, they can apply to come to a WordCamp and meet with all of you wonderful people and increase that community vibe. Right? Like, like being here. So we're hoping to create a flywheel.
Speaker 1:Right? A flywheel of new ideas of younger people, which means we need a stronger stronger or a more elaborate larger mentorship program.
Speaker 2:Also, can go to them, which I think would be pretty exciting. When I first heard this, I was like, oh my goodness. What are we gonna do with that many people? Like, that's too much. Then I started to think, wow.
Speaker 2:The opportunities for mentorship. The opportunities to also, you know, convert people to be contributors in other areas. If even 1% of that per semester or per year per graduating class becomes a long term member of the WordPress community, that would be very incredible. Yeah. Also, sometimes a question that's come up actually, it's comes up in Europe more than anywhere else is like, oh, our work camp's getting older.
Speaker 2:Where are the kiddos? And so we have programs obviously in schools, including as young as like elementary school and everything. But I think this is very much has the opportunity to just blend our demographics a bit more. And again, so many opportunities for mentorship and growth.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So many.
Speaker 2:And for us to learn.
Speaker 1:And for us just for us. That is great. Now with that, we talked a lot about AI with we recently announced the AI team and it's a combination of different companies have come together within the project shift to to push AI forward. And so
Speaker 2:Who's here from that team? Can you stand up? Here we have James.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Pascal.
Speaker 2:There he is. Pascal. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Of course, he's here. He's an organ Oh,
Speaker 2:there we go. There we go. Thank you. We've got 75% of the team here.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So I I mean, I think I think everybody is really interested in understanding, you know, what what your vision is not only for that team, but AI within the project. And and then I'll let you answer that one, but then I wanna go a little bit more broad with AI and vision of AI and your opinion on it in general. Yeah. Send my girl back up.
Speaker 2:Well, it's hard to drink the water and yeah. It's okay. It's okay. It's think one of the things the team's gonna be doing is figuring out where we're gonna apply our initial efforts. Where is the biggest bang for the buck?
Speaker 2:Generative AI has an opportunity to influence a lot of things that we do. And I'm sure it started to affect many people's lives in here already, especially if you listened to me a few years ago when I said to learn AI deeply prior to the launch of ChatGPT. The areas I'd be most excited about are sort of plug in scanner type things enhancements, particularly perhaps applying and testing, writing tests for possible fixes and things. I think there's a lot that could be automated with agents there to allow our our volunteers, our our members of those teams to scale. Within WordPress, it's hard to imagine a screen that couldn't be or an area that couldn't be enhanced.
Speaker 2:Obviously, a lot around the writing and creation process, brainstorming, prompting. The generative AIs are getting quite good at images and video, which is the creativity that's being locked there with some of my friends is is so exciting. A chat interface to WordPress.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 2:A programmatic way for AIs to interact. We can expose capabilities from both core and plug ins and expose them so the AI can say, hey, what can you do? It says, oh, I can do these 100 things, and it has a programmatic way to do so securely with authentication. You know, ways hooks essentially standardized ways for plug ins to hook into things. So both like all the ecommerce plugins could expose in the same way to AI, the products they offer.
Speaker 2:So those products can start to show up in answers for different questions, which by the way, these different systems are starting to actually drive a fair amount of traffic, which is nice because Google isn't sending anything anymore. They're still sending some, but it's definitely like a lot more value is going to the search result page, right? Which has been a trend honestly. It's not a new one. It's been happening since I think like 2017.
Speaker 2:And there was one last oh, developer. We talked about developer productivity. What's the one I'm missing? I Oh, project administration. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yes. Yeah. Scaling our ourselves
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:Essentially, which I feel like that that sort of center model, is human plus AI, where you're using more as a productivity tool versus something running on its own with outputs not checked is the most powerful and safest way to use it, particularly today. So but you all know if you follow my Twitter, a good third of it or half of it is all about AI. I've been very excited about this. Started to see the impact that we launched some things with Automatic, including AI site builder, our Big Sky builder. I've seen a number of hosts launch some things.
Speaker 2:Elementor has some cool stuff. There's a lot of things. Actually, you look at just AI plugins submitted to the directory, it's huge. Yes. And people are using it for translations and so so many things.
Speaker 2:So I think the open ecosystem of WordPress also where plug ins are very very free and open and the backlog's gone.
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 2:You remember I was here a year or two ago when we had like a six or eight month backlog on plug in approval? Yes. I
Speaker 1:remember that and I wasn't even a part of the project yet.
Speaker 2:So that's very generative time I think. We've we've talked before about sort of moments of like Cambrian explosions in WordPress's evolution, and I think we're in one. And in fact, I don't have the stat in front of me, but someone might know it, the increase in number of plug in submissions that's happened.
Speaker 1:It was it was it's staying at 6,000. Is David in here? It
Speaker 2:doubled from last year, and there's no backlog anymore. About a week? A week? Yeah. That's that's nothing.
Speaker 2:Cool. That that's amazing. And also, when some people are sort of like throwing haterade, they're like WordPress is dead or it's slowing down or something, think a really great counter example.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, every example you've just given, there's a ton of low hanging fruit. I think it's time that we, with the team with the AI, I think we all recognize how much can be done now. And it's all about planning it, getting it, and then assigning, I guess, was like giving visibility into where WordPress should be going, what we should be doing with all of this, letting people contribute actively. Everybody's talking about AI though, so step out of WordPress.
Speaker 1:I've had a lot of conversations around AI in general and I and I and I keep I keep saying over and over again, it's like it's time to put on your futurist hat as generic as that sounds because we're not in an area. I think a lot of companies are playing catch up and they're not at that point, but we are going through a major revolution. So I don't wanna know if you just think about WordPress at this point. There's going to be a ton of products in the ecosystems that spin out a ton of different directions. What what would you say today that you should be paying attention to?
Speaker 1:Not the prompting, but, like, AI as a futurist, what do you think is gonna be happening?
Speaker 2:Oh, well, I'm very, excited about I mean, one cool thing that when you start building this stuff, you get a tailwind of things getting better for free because the models are improving so quickly, or you can just switch between them. So if you talk to teams that have been doing this for, call it a year, almost all of them have an example of like something they built that like kind of half worked, then a new model comes out and starts working really well. So that's very cool, those tailwinds. Something I'm most personally excited about are essentially new interfaces. I feel like we're kind of in the command line stage of AI interfaces.
Speaker 2:I think chat's great. It's amazing. It's good for a number of tasks, but I'm very, very curious to see an experiment with what other interfaces could be. And I know OpenAI is working on some hardware versions of that. The final thing I would say is sort of materialized AI.
Speaker 2:So things that are with a physical presence, robots. And that could be as simple as like the vacuum cleaners getting way smarter. And there's actually one called Matic, no relation to automatic, that my friends are all raving about. So these robotic vacuum cleaners, you know, I can't imagine there's gonna be that many people mowing lawns and things in the future. It's just so much more convenient to have this done sort of every day with a robot that recharges and docks and everything, and hopefully doesn't run over your cat.
Speaker 2:You know, the bugs in this need to be when you get into the physical world, you can't have mistakes. When I'm gonna say who's taking the Waymo? Phoenix. Oh, only a few people. It's in Phoenix?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Like, so anyone can call it in Phoenix? Yeah. Think in Austin too.
Speaker 2:It is incredible. So in San Francisco, they were all there for a while. And so Cruz was there. And Cruz, you know, we know how the story ended. It shut down.
Speaker 2:But I would say that I would try them all. And being in a cruise, what felt like a teenage, it should have a student driver sticker on it. Do you all have those here? Oh, in America, people start driving at like age 15, the learner's permit, and they get it at 16. And they usually have a sticker on the car that says watch out essentially.
Speaker 2:This is a kid. It felt like that. The Waymo felt like, you know, the most professional driver you've ever been in. Like the the best London taxi cab driver who knows every turn and like is aware of everything and just confident and it's so much better. Actually, right now in San Francisco, people are paying more for Waymo's than Ubers just because of the preference.
Speaker 2:They actually take longer to come and they cost more and people are still choosing it more. They've already passed up Lyft in their usage in San Francisco and and they're catching up to Uber. It's growing incredibly quickly. And that's the thing that happens with this AI stuff. It goes slowly and then very, very fast.
Speaker 2:And then finally, the robots, whether it's humanoid robots like Optimus or other things, I think are going to be very interesting because much like the operator models for like OpenAI where they kinda use your computer and click around, The world is built for the human sort of form factor. And so when we can start to automate more of that with robots, I think very cool stuff could happen.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Well, I wanna ask one more question because I know everybody's been asking me this, I think it would be great to hear from you. We recently launched the AI team. We have an automatician that is on it and so I think it was a few weeks back now, there was an announcement about returning to WordPress core contributions. And so what does this mean in practical terms for the community as well as does it make sense to release or to have a six dot nine or another release in 2025?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Also, just realized you can't spell automatic without AI.
Speaker 5:That could
Speaker 2:be your team's new tagline. Yeah. I think we can get a 6.9 out this year. And I'm personally very excited. There's so much I wanna release, and there's so much we can do.
Speaker 2:And I think there's a pretty clear pathway to seven point o and beyond. And, we just got to get together and work on it. I think it's very easy to become distracted. And but I want us debating, arguing more about software and interfaces and code and sort of like testing things with users and shipping shipping code and seeing how it goes. To me, that's where I'd like to get like 8090% of my conversations too.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Let's debate about product features. We all we all have opinions on those too. Right? Well, that's great.
Speaker 1:And these are all of the questions that have been submitted. And so I think at this point, we have about thirty minutes left. We can turn it to the audience. And there should be some mics. Oh, there are.
Speaker 2:We're a little ahead of schedule actually. So alright. Let's start over there. If you don't mind saying your name and and where you're here from.
Speaker 5:My name is Milena Tzap. I'm from Serbia. I've been contributing to documentation team for fourteen years and contributing to plug in review team for a couple of years. And my whole work in documentation was serving a user. Every decision we made, we made to serve user, and in plug in review team we also include plug in authors, so everything we do, we do for plug in authors and users to make their lives easier and better.
Speaker 5:Now, you said you didn't have time to take a look at the FEAR project. So let me give you a gist.
Speaker 2:Deeply. Deeply. I took a look at the announcement and everything.
Speaker 5:Okay. Let me just give you a quick gist of the
Speaker 2:I don't think you need to read it right now.
Speaker 5:No. No. So the FEAR project is actually federated and independent repository of trusted plug ins and teams. And it is under Linux Foundation. So that means a lot when it's under Linux Foundation.
Speaker 5:And what it means for users and plug in outdoors and team outdoors is actually making their lives easier and better and more secure. It makes all the products more discoverable. And also, developers can choose the source where are they using their supply chain from. But also it is helping wordpress.org because these are mirrors, so it will reduce the load from wordpress.org for every update and all of that. Now that you have a gist and you heard me saying, I don't know if you trust me, but it seemed to me that this aligns with the idea of having user and developers first in mind.
Speaker 5:Would you, you as wordpress.org, consider collaborating with this project?
Speaker 2:Of course, we consider everything.
Speaker 5:Okay.
Speaker 2:But even in what you said, I think there's a lot of challenges to it. Okay. So for example, right now, a supply chain attack needs to breach wordpress.org, which has never been hacked. What? What?
Speaker 2:What? Now all of a sudden there's n places that could potentially be compromised. There's ways to do that, many ways. There's n places with uptime issues. There is makes it much more difficult for I don't know if it's actually better for wordpress.org because it makes it much more difficult to do things like rollouts, phased rollouts, or let's say we get plug in authors, they will get shipped to 5% of users and then see what happens, which means we also need things being checked back and then we can roll out to the rest, which is something I've heard a ton of plug in authors ask for.
Speaker 2:It'll break all the analytics and stats that we provide and also that we currently use to make decisions. For example, which versions of PHP we support or how we do databases. So I think that it's a big part of why WordPress is where it is today is because of the infrastructure and the sort of feedback loop that we get from workbest.org. Also, trust that we're able to engender by having that be a resource. When you look at marketplaces, people aren't asking necessarily for, I want it to be downloaded from more locations.
Speaker 2:They're asking for how do I know this is trustworthy? How do I know these reviews are real? Who's moderating? Who's checking the IP on these different reviews? What's the plug in rating?
Speaker 2:What's the compatibility for it? How does it compatible with my other plug ins? These are the things I'm hearing from users, not I need it hosted in a different place. So just as one example. And again, don't wanna get too far into it because I wanna read the code.
Speaker 2:I wanna dive more into it. I want colleagues to look at it. So I think it's kind of premature less than twenty four hours in to say like, we're gonna contribute or use this or not. But I do think it's awesome that people are shipping code versus just arguing or talking or writing blog posts. And I think that's a pretty productive way to sort of channel possible disagreements or anything.
Speaker 2:And then we can see how it looks. Might be a super niche thing that a few people use, maybe one or two hosts, or it might be something that maybe there's something in there that becomes like ultra popular. But like things like, you know, something that we probably need to do in the plug in review team is something about these admin banners. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 2:How is that enforced in a distributed and fair system? Probably it's a lot worse.
Speaker 5:Are a lot of problems that you just mentioned. But if they are solved, maybe we could actually collaborate with all of that.
Speaker 2:But how would you solve, like, a plug in
Speaker 5:I I am not the smartest person here. I have no idea how. But I know that we have a lot of smart people, and, you know, if we talk to each other and collaborate, we can come. And there is AI. We can always ask Chad JBT.
Speaker 2:I actually saw someone, think it was Katie, like, what is Matt going to think about fair? Yes, chat, GBT. It was a pretty good answer, actually. Yeah.
Speaker 5:Okay. Thank you.
Speaker 3:Hello. My name is Jia Bering. I'm from The Netherlands. Tomorrow is World Ocean Day and our oceans are a danger. And they have immense influence on our world climate.
Speaker 3:The WordPress team that was working on our environmental impact of WordPress was dissolved in January, and the Slack channel was archived. But new recent leadership has come up and contributors over the last two days. We worked on contributor day on the new team for that. And we'd love to get going again. We can't do that without make WordPress, and we can't do that without our Slack channel.
Speaker 3:Mary already got a petition about it, and we have this question for you. Please, could you reactivate, make WordPress and our Slack channel, so we can make WordPress more environmental friendly? I asked you the question, Matt.
Speaker 1:Should I just drop the mic?
Speaker 2:In these q and a's, we often pass things to people that know more or are more qualified.
Speaker 3:I'm sorry, but I already know Mary's answer, and I'd like to know your answer.
Speaker 2:Well, everyone else doesn't know Mary's answer. Mary, will you try will will you repeat the answer you already told him? I
Speaker 1:believe that sustainability environmental sustainability needs to be embedded throughout the WordPress project. I think that sustainability for the WordPress project as in five for the future, what we're doing for a contributor base, how there's many different initiatives that have kind of gotten together with environmental sustainability and the sustainability of the project. One, I think, should be embedded in all teams. I think that there's a it's a much wider conversation, one of which I did sit in on for a while today. But we need to we need to start reflecting and thinking about how things get done within the project.
Speaker 1:A lot of times, people will start with a team. It's it's it's an idea and then goes to a team. And my request about sustainability was sustainability should be in everything we do. It's environmental sustainability. This is a no brainer.
Speaker 1:It must be done. And so if that's the case, let's take what we have and what we've built or the handbooks or the with with regards to events and let's plug in sustainability in all that. And let's have a team that holds those WordCamp organizers or specific teams accountable. But let's not mix sustainability of the project when there are ideas that have come up around how we're gonna contribute or reorganizing contributors or how we're going to fund or how we're going to get funding. Let's not combine it.
Speaker 1:Because as I heard Courtney Robinson say today and I heard Say Reed say today, we've been having the same conversations over and over and over again. So I have asked to switch. I've said, hey, let's rethink five for the future which is why I asked that question for you today. Let's rethink about how we're gonna move the five for the future forward, how we're going to reshape this project and reset that for how we're getting that funding and what we're thinking about contribution. And let's separate what was sustainability for environment and let's let the environmental safety or the environmental impact of WordPress go forward in all of the teams.
Speaker 1:So I actually asked for a rebrand.
Speaker 2:What's an example to something that, you know, you feel like an environmental team would focus on or hope for as a result or measure?
Speaker 3:There is a framework of subjects to think about and they already did quite good work and it was mentioned for example in how to make an environmental neutral or friendly word camps, for example. So there was a handbook for that, and it is already used. But the team already then was dissolved. And I think it's quite disrespectful to the team using it, and at the same time having the team dissolved.
Speaker 2:I I did I am aware of the WordCamp side, and that's when we get together in person, I think where we have a lot of opportunity, these environmental things. I also saw a lot of work around like trying to measure the carbon impact of every WordPress install and some of the things I felt like were a little more abstract. The also felt like the WordCamp guideline had a lot of contributors from WorkCamp organizers, not just people on the sustainability team at the time. But do you have any other examples besides this thing that's already been done that a new team would hope to accomplish, or we would measure its success by?
Speaker 3:That should be done a lot
Speaker 2:of
Speaker 3:research. As long as we can't communicate with each other, that will be hard. As long as we can't change the information, it will be a team outside WordPress, and I don't think that's a good thing. If you say it's rebranding, or we have to think about it, then it's a lot of talking about the team and not about sustainability. This is what I want to
Speaker 2:get going. So you feel like the people working on this need a Slack channel on the.org Slack, not anywhere else, not on the discord or anything like that, to do this research? If
Speaker 3:you put it that way, of course not. But we want to be inside WordPress, not like a group outside WordPress. Because we love WordPress and we think we can add something to WordPress.
Speaker 2:I agree, but it needs to be a more concrete proposal. And like Mary said, doesn't need a team.
Speaker 3:Why was it dissolved?
Speaker 2:So and this is gonna potentially for any team that we need to measure results. And I think that one thing that's been happening is, you know, we have teams that spin their wheels a long time, and they had a lot of people doing meetings every week. You look at what actually comes out of it. Including I talked to a number of people on the team. I've read some reports.
Speaker 2:I reviewed, I think twelve months of like blog posts. It's we wanna make sure that when, for example, volunteers come, that they're focused on the teams that are moving quickly, iterating, have a good sort of output culture. And I don't think the sustainable team had that, if I'm really candid. And so it's important as project leadership, myself and others by the way, this was not a solo decision. It came from a number of people at, hey, this might be an area that needs to reboot.
Speaker 2:Also sort of separating out this environment the environmental side of to like more like the contribution side, which really should be more in a growth mindset versus just sustainability. Right? We don't want WordPress to just sustain. We want to grow and thrive and innovate and create great software. So even that word but the word's easy to change.
Speaker 2:I think what we really have to change is our mindset. And I appreciate you breaking out the sort of environmental impact side from everything else. I think it's really helpful because again, we can embed it in everything we do. But it is tricky. It's an area I've spent a ton of time on on a number of environmental nonprofits over the years.
Speaker 2:I deeply care about this. I also feel like doesn't feel like WordPress, at least for me, is the place to have the biggest impact in the world there.
Speaker 3:Okay.
Speaker 2:Well, thanks for your answer.
Speaker 6:Hi, Matt. My name is Ujj. I'm from Serbia. This is my ninth year organizing work up Europe.
Speaker 2:Why
Speaker 6:I'm mentioning that because you said you like the QR code on back of the badge and that's not part of the data that we are getting from Comtix.
Speaker 2:What did you say? Sorry, missed that.
Speaker 6:You said you like the QR code on the back of your page going to Gravatar and all those things. And that's not the data that's coming from Comptics that we use for the events. And Comptics is getting old, let's say nine years. And can we get more wind in the back to make it better? Because all the questions that we have or PRs that we need to raise, they're going slow and we have work up every year.
Speaker 2:Were you saying Camp Tix?
Speaker 6:Yes. That's the plug in we use for the event, buying tickets, selling tickets, printing tickets. Uh-huh.
Speaker 2:And so the request is to
Speaker 6:So there is currently no one that is contributing to that project and we want to take over if there is no one from Meta Team that wants to do it, but like we need help from you or from Mary, it doesn't matter.
Speaker 2:Sure. Where is it hosted right now?
Speaker 6:Somewhere on wordpress org but we don't have access and we don't have anybody to ask for. Nobody is answering.
Speaker 4:Okay.
Speaker 2:Sure. Okay.
Speaker 6:Thank you.
Speaker 2:And also let me know where you asked so I can follow-up on like why that wasn't responded to or or where it went. What happened to it? Thank you. Hello there. Maybe we can really, I guess it's not released so other events can't use it.
Speaker 2:So maybe there's something we can open source there as well. Get in the plug and trigger. It's used for all word camps, I know. But is it released so other events could use it? Like, could Drupal Con use it?
Speaker 2:Or yeah. Yeah. Prove it first. Yeah. That would be great.
Speaker 2:Cool. Thank you.
Speaker 7:Hey there, Matt. Nice to meet you. For the guys with the transcription just transcribed, am Matt. But I'm really Mateo. Nice to meet you, Matt.
Speaker 7:Nice to see you again, Matt. Hope you are doing good and hope you'll do back in the after party. Last time, if you remember, we discussed about Meetup sites. Today, I want to ask you another question still about Meetups. So basically, after the recent acquisition of meetup.com, I, as a meetup organizer, I have found that meetup is evolving to something that tell me what do you think about, Matt, but I don't think it's what we we want to expect by, you know, the platform we are we we want to use for for for for organizing our meetups.
Speaker 7:So I have seen that some some people around here are organizing the community, are creating completely new platform that it basically replace meetup.com.
Speaker 2:What
Speaker 7:actually I have seen talking with people is it's still not really that much. So you have, for example, the fact that there is, like, legal, like, issues maybe because someone is worried about posting that on a specific owned website. And there are also issues with having in the widget of the dashboard the name of the list of events, close you have on just meetups.com. So I want to ask you, what do you think about the whole situation about meetup.com? What do you think about how meetup.com is going ahead?
Speaker 7:And well, what do you think about the future of, you know, organize or, you know, ticketing, meetup ticketing? Thank you.
Speaker 2:Sure. Well, just talked about tickets a little bit. The widget and the dashboard drives a huge amount of attendance to a lot of different things. And it's like really one of the only ways that someone can go from just a random WordPress user to part of the community. I think we actually need to look for more ways we can tie that together, not be removing them.
Speaker 2:The widget probably could use a design refresh though and be a bit richer. Also how it incorporates online events is a little clunky, And if anything, we should be doing those a lot more and exposing them perhaps in a parallel way to the geo located ones. If there's a meetup.com parody replacement that's open source, yeah, we'll totally throw it on wordpress.org and switch over. It'd be great if we could import stuff. I don't know what the rules are there.
Speaker 2:In the meantime, we got a lot of irons on the fire and maybe not enough cooks in the kitchen. So yeah. It's it's just one of those things where it's like, This is working. So we're we'll get to it later. But if some people are working on it now, fantastic.
Speaker 2:And I'm happy to evaluate it as the project evolves or support it however I can.
Speaker 7:Thank you so much. Thank you.
Speaker 2:You'd be amazed how much of the stuff we rely on today that's part of core, part of WordPress, of everything, started just so many like, man, I'm annoyed by this. I'm going to fix it. It's basically like the whole plugin system and directory. Right over here.
Speaker 8:Hello, Mary. Hello, Matt. First of all, thank you to both of you for being here. And I guess my question is going to be for the both of you I would love to hear both answers. So my name is Lily.
Speaker 8:We run a web agency specialized in e commerce, e commerce automation and compliance in the context of e commerce in France based in Paris. And in the past year, I mean, it's always been the case, but in the past year we have been facing mounting and I would even say like severe competition from SaaS solutions like Shopify to the point, they're obviously very commercialized and extremely well marketed to the point that even like potential prospects that are not necessarily tech savvy, they consider Shopify even if it's not adapted to their projects. So I guess my question is, what's automatics like short term and long term plan in regards to competition with solutions like Shopify? And is there gonna be a heavier investment in promoting solutions like WooCommerce? And in general, what's Automatic's stance on brand advocacy in regards to WooCommerce?
Speaker 8:Thank you.
Speaker 2:Sure. Thank you. Yeah, WooCommerce is incredibly important at Automattic. You know, it's our it's our largest business now, I believe. And so we invest a lot in the development, the marketing, the usability.
Speaker 2:I'd say that performance is also a big gap I think we've had in some previous versions. And you've seen a lot of investment in that over the past few releases. I think there's still a ton of work to do. And also partnering with partnering better with hosts to make sure they have great onboarding experiences. I think there'll be partnerships with page builders to make Woo more accessible or customizable to them.
Speaker 2:We've had some huge improvements to checkout and Woo payments that are getting that to parity with all the Shopify checkouts, which I think are kind of best in class of Shopify Stripe. I want Shopify Stripe to all be parity on the checkout experience. And of course, we'll always beat them on customizability. There's just things you can do when you and control. You can run, you can customize things and also just know every line of code that you're running in ways that you can't with any SaaS service.
Speaker 2:So those are the main things there. I would also add that something we can do more on the community side is more work on the data liberation project. Because right now, they make it way easier to switch from Woo to Shopify than from Shopify to Woo. And so we need to work on our importers and other things there. And that's really what when I spoke about data liberation, really the things I had in mind.
Speaker 2:So it's actually not bad if someone gets started with a different platform if you make it really easy for them to upgrade to WordPress. And if you look at the early history of WordPress, including when we had some of our biggest amounts of growth, we had really good importers for the biggest other platforms at the time, like movable type, blogger, live journal, right? You don't hear about these anymore because we had really good importers. So most of their users switched over to WordPress. I think we need to do that.
Speaker 2:We don't have good importers for the current generation, the number two, three, four, five in the market, which I don't even know if we have a good importer for like Joomla. But we certainly not for Shopify with Squarespace. And so I think we need great as part of the data deliberation, we already make it very easy to get data out of WordPress. There's some things we could approve there with the WXR format or backups or things like that. Let's do that as part of data liberation.
Speaker 2:But we really need to make it infinitely easier to get data in the WordPress. And then it can become your hub for everything. Maybe even use it alongside Shopify or alongside, you know, the sort of the multi distribution thing where you're sort of publishing your products to differentiate ways to do it.
Speaker 8:Okay. Thank you.
Speaker 2:Thank you.
Speaker 4:Hi Mary and Matt. It's Courtney Robertson. I love the work around sustainability so much that I went and found an open source group that works on just sustainability. Community health analytics and open source software. It spells chaos.
Speaker 4:And the website's chaos.community if anyone wants to look at them.
Speaker 2:I love a good acronym. Yeah.
Speaker 4:This group is unique in that what they do is look at metrics and create practitioner guides for other open source projects to adopt. So we don't need to create or reinvent that wheel. Out of that, as I got involved with them I learned about a few different open source tools they made available. Gromori and a few others That led on to me chatting with Hari about this as it relates to using Vaturgia for the WordPress project. That's what we used so far for the contributor dashboards initiative that began.
Speaker 4:And some of that what you were saying about on individual contributor profiles. There could be ways to better get some of this data instead of promissory pledges, to get the data of what are we achieving, what are we getting done. Some of the tools right now, it's publicly able to scrape what's coming out of GitHub that's public. Right? We could hook more data points up to it.
Speaker 4:We have interest from folks that want to even port it so that track ticket comments could go through. Slack messages, Help Scout, FreeSouth, etcetera. The last that I touched base with Hari was before things have shifted in his his roles. But where things last stood was that we're we need permission to be able to hook up Slack or Help Scout or some of these to get some better metrics of just numbers, not so much the content of the messages but to start tracking those numbers so that we know what stories we wanna tell from individual contributors as well as from the sponsor side. Sponsors want ways to know what are we, are the people doing what we're sponsoring them to do?
Speaker 4:Is that creating a measurable result? There are other tools in the church out there, that's the first one that we selected that fit closest to our needs for the contributor dashboards. Do you feel that it would be possible to get the permission needed to hook some of these other input sources up and in addition when we first began this research the follow-up is, who covers the cost of Baturga or some of the tools that do some of this for the project. Would you be open to other organizations besides Audrey or Automatic helping fund some of that?
Speaker 2:Helping fund some of
Speaker 4:The the tooling.
Speaker 2:Oh, the cost of the software? Yeah. How much is the software?
Speaker 4:I think if we were to hook up more, it keeps scaling up. So I don't want to speak ill of the number that I vaguely remember from a few months ago. But the more connections we put into it, the more costly it becomes. But I think that the compelling data of having data informed decision making would be a win.
Speaker 1:So I I can take this because I've actually been looking into it so from the dashboard specifically because with Harry. And so you read my mind. Yes. I would love it to be funded by somebody else. Automatic currently funds it and it's very expensive.
Speaker 1:So if we were to put more data points into it, definitely I would really appreciate that and then it could be a lot more transparent. I and I shared this before when it came up. I I think it's a I think it's great to think of other data points that are gonna feed into this dashboard, but I wonder about the quality of the data points and we start entering Slack messages. What does that mean? When we're trying when we're trying so hard to think about an impact, I could text a 50 thing in Slack and I've said absolutely nothing.
Speaker 1:So as long as we balance that effectively I think it would be really good. Same with track tickets. Sure. But this came up this morning with Five of the Future as well because I do, I really do believe in the fact that we need to get to an impact and we need to have that represented in data. And we need to be able to tie that back into our roadmaps.
Speaker 1:And then it's that much wider conversation around what is an impactful contribution. How are we going to measure that? What does that mean across the teams? An impactful contribution for a developer, an impactful contribution for a marketer, very different. So I I would love to continue these conversations.
Speaker 1:I'm really excited about it which is why I came today and I've been in those Slacks. And I would love if you if others can start to fund specific things. Thank So fantastic. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Thank you. To the left or?
Speaker 9:Hello, Matt. This is Abdullah from Pakistan, and I would like to share one news about our WordPress community in Pakistan, and I have further question as following. So, basically, I'm contributing to world class community since 2017, and organized and part of team for three world camps. And recently, I led a world camp in Pakistan in Lahore, and Lahore has a very vibrant community. So one thing I have a question is like that event we organized, that was a bit different from the other WorldCamps in the world, and I would like to tell you how.
Speaker 9:So, we have raised enough money, enough sponsorships, like we don't request for a sponsored community fund from the World Press Foundation. So this is what we have done, and I think there is no World Campaign in the world that actually raised too much fund to cover the conference expense for the World Camp, and like obviously World Camps needs community funds like there are many global sponsorships out there where the funds actually flowing to the World Camps. So I think it's like that fund that was approved for the World Camp Lahore twenty twenty three. So, my opinion on that, like that's a proposal for the foundation, that budget was allocated to the World Camp Lahore team and that should be invested to that community, and the organizers who was like contributing to the communities voluntarily for many years, and they want to attend World Camp Europe, World Camp US, even I'm trying since 2018. So, 2024 was my first World Camp Europe, Global World Camp.
Speaker 9:Even before that, I I could not attend due to many reasons. It's a financial, it's about reason, and many things. So, my proposal is the fund that was allocated to that community, that must be spent over there, like if they have done a very good job with the local sponsor race. And even I tried to raise this concern, but it was not heard. And one thing I would like to say very openly, you are sitting here, WordPress is the 45% part of the internet, and that is due the community, that is due to us, that is due to all people sitting here.
Speaker 9:So, obviously, WordPress, Automatic, and other brands contributing and global sponsor are contributing, but those people who are part of community in any way, either contributing to the core, either contributing to the community, they're actually part of it. They're actually adding value to the workplace on daily basis. So, I have a proposal, so we must like spend that budget to the allocated community who have approved for this. So that's my first thing. And the second thing is about like obviously
Speaker 2:I'm sorry, Ralph. It's just it was a longer story. How about we how about And can we just cover that before I think maybe more people a chance to ask a question.
Speaker 9:Yeah. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Alright. No. It's totally fine. That is a story I haven't heard before. It sounds like one that probably is best dealt with with the WordCamp team.
Speaker 2:And I certainly wouldn't wanna override their decision on stage with thirty seconds of hearing about it. I do know that there's, you know, just things we have to navigate if sponsor funds for a camp are used for individual benefit that wasn't explicit beforehand. Like if the sponsor is saying, we're gonna anything extra is gonna like try to sponsor someone kinda like the WordCup Foundation does or WordPress Foundation does to visits, that's fine. But if it's kinda changed after the fact, that's little weird. It could be something changes going forward too, or just get the sponsors to separately do this with the individual versus it going through the WordCamp, which obviously has a lot of rules for good reasons.
Speaker 2:We have to worry a lot about misuse of funds and other things. So that's just off the top of my head and I will defer the actual answer to this and decision to the WordCamp team. So I will if you felt like I'm sure they heard you before, you might not have agreed with the answer, but you could always maybe contextualize it differently or appeal, but ultimately it is the decision of that team. They they deal with these things more closely.
Speaker 1:And and we do actually have word camps that turn a profit.
Speaker 2:Yeah. A good amount.
Speaker 1:There's a good amount of them. But it's great to hear because I'm happy that you have turned a profit but there there are many.
Speaker 2:Not a goal. It's like we should just have better food or music or something. The goal is to put it all back in.
Speaker 1:Pull it into the party. There's lots of parties.
Speaker 2:That was actually you saw that the Wordpress Foundation did a larger grant to Internet Archive. That wasn't from donations, that was from excess from WordCamps accumulated over, I think a couple of years or maybe a year or two, I forget exactly. Now we wanna keep like a little buffer there, rainy day fund, But, yeah, the whole setup of that organization is like if there's extra, ideally, it went back in at the time. And if not, we granted to other great nonprofits. Alright.
Speaker 2:Right over there.
Speaker 9:So one last question, like I have if you don't mind.
Speaker 2:No. Let's move on. Let's move on because we're we're actually over time. I wanna get two more people in line. So alright.
Speaker 2:Thank you.
Speaker 10:Thank you. Matt. Hello, Mary. First up, I want to thank both of you for taking Campus Connect officially within the WordPress project. If you remember, I asked you a question at WorkCam Asia Manila about the students.
Speaker 10:So having recognized the efforts of Puja, Anand, also there's we have Ganga, we have Shiv running GoWP initiative in Nepal. Also we're running We're also running open source next gen BD in Bangladesh, which has started six months ago. I am one of those person who's taking it forward. Now my question to both of you individually, I want to hear from you. What do you envision now that Campus Connect is official and we have smaller events running in multiple parts of different parts of the world?
Speaker 10:What do you envision now that it's official? Are we going to have possibly a bigger event which is other than WordCamp with students and involving universities and educational institutions worldwide?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, this is, I think, one of the bigger opportunities we've had in a long time because it's very, very scalable. We can train the trainers, as Mary put so eloquently earlier, And then that can scale out to a really large number of students through an existing framework, which has accountability, has testing, has all those sorts of things built in there at the university systems across the world. And again, once this works in some places, I think we have a great opportunity to get this into other majors, particularly engineering would be the one I'd be most excited about. And of course other countries, I think this could easily be a worldwide thing.
Speaker 2:And then, yeah. A WordPress accreditation, like all that sort of
Speaker 1:stuff I have I have a lot of opinions on this. I'm really excited about Campus Connect. The I've I've never actually shared this to you. But, you know, when you get interconnect all of these pieces, right, and and the reason we haven't tied them together yet is because I think it'll stall forward momentum. I think it'll stall the progress.
Speaker 1:But look at everything that is has been launching. You've got the WordPress community or WordPress credits which are actually in the university. And then you have the campus connect initiative which is live. But then you have the idea of events and I've heard multiple times the events the events we need to scale up the events from word camps to local events to to flagships. How are we changing the events?
Speaker 1:And then WordPress campus connect launches as an event. Right? And all of a sudden so much attention came to it but it didn't just come for the people who are on the ground training and exciting to engage with younger generations and teaching people. It came from companies who it's like been reinvigorated as as how they can fund it and how they can be a a participant and then how they can create that stickiness. And like I said with the the endowment around bringing people and actually getting people similar to what the gentleman had just said, like we have we have an excess amount of funds that should stay within Pakistan.
Speaker 1:It's like or we should figure out a way to fund people to come to a word camp who haven't been here and experience it. So the the flywheel that can connect here is phenomenal. It brings new blood into the project. It brings new ideas. It brings education.
Speaker 1:It brings everything that we need to make this project holistic long term. Right? And I think one of the interesting things is I've been around for the last couple of days and I've been all around talking to folks. And I don't know if anybody's here but I didn't meet anybody with less than a year at WordPress. I didn't meet anybody.
Speaker 1:Actually, the earliest I met was five years. Can you can anybody tell me that they've been here for less than five years? Or less than three years actually. It's probably a smaller number.
Speaker 2:Less than three years.
Speaker 1:Less than
Speaker 2:Here three we go.
Speaker 1:That's a problem. And it's a problem that they're not at WordCamp, so I'm not gonna say, oh, yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, but I've never been to a WordCamp, and I'm and I was at Automatic for three years, and I've never been there. It was COVID.
Speaker 1:And then I get here, and I wanna come to so many more. And then there's faces to the names, and then I understand how to interact with people because I'm, you know, I'm what you call a special type of personality. But that's the that's what gets me excited. It's like you get all of these new people in here, and then you get to connect with the community. You can hear them, you can interact with them.
Speaker 1:And then you you get hallway conversations, the plug in team. Right? Like, these are all these are all conversations. And soon as soon as they told me their plans and their ideas, I'm like, you have to meet with Ryan. Where's Ryan?
Speaker 1:You have to meet with James. And all of that is exciting. It's exciting. And I guess even even the media core conversation and the marketing conversation. Met with multiple people from that at the event.
Speaker 1:And it's that mindset shift. Like, well, how do I get started? What do I do? And it's like, let's just do it. Let's just do it.
Speaker 1:And then once it gets going and going and going, let's see. It's all, oh, maybe not, maybe so, but let that's that's what it is. And we're gonna expect that. 5,000 students coming into this project, let's expect to get real bothered real quick. Cause they're gonna challenge everything that has been done.
Speaker 1:Right? You've got younger generations here. You know, like short form, like how how they even accept educational content and training. It's like, just came from TikTok, short form video. I don't wanna sit through an hour of you training me.
Speaker 2:Right? I would be disappointed if they don't challenge it. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Right? So It's exciting. So I'm really I'm stoked about this. I'm stoked about Campus Connect. I'm so glad that you guys are all doing it and launching it.
Speaker 1:Excuse me, you folks. But yeah. Heck yeah. I'm gonna take something else. I'm gonna swear.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 10:Thank you.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you. Also, you for all the early work. We are a bit over time. So do you have short questions or long questions?
Speaker 11:Short question. Raise your
Speaker 2:hand for short. Yeah? Short question. Alright. Lightning round then.
Speaker 2:Lightning round. Super fast.
Speaker 12:Okay. So hi, Mary. Hi, Matt. First of all, thank you for your time. My name is Alejandro.
Speaker 12:I am a technical student at CERN at the web team. We are now developing a custom theme and migrating around 700 websites from Drupal to WordPress. So Well, I'm very happy that you like the project. My question is not related to that but this is As a student, I'm very very interested in in learning. Well, I have learned a lot from other people here.
Speaker 12:So I expect with my question to learn a bit about management specifically to Mary the question. The question is, is it very different to manage a private company than an open source organization? If not, why not? Because my intuition would say that yes and if yes, what are the differences in in the mission, in the motivation, in the priorities, in the problems?
Speaker 2:That's a lightning answer.
Speaker 1:Lightning answer. It's very it's very different. It's very different because you need to bring a lot of people along for a journey and for a ride. It's not top down and it's not you should do this and you should do that. And so accountability is difficult when you're dealing with volunteers because it's all self motivation and so it's very different and so I'm learning to I'm learning to work with the net and thank you all for the grace while I learn that.
Speaker 1:Thank
Speaker 12:you very much.
Speaker 11:Hi, Matt and Mary. First of all, thank you so much for everything for doing the WordPress community. And I'm actively active on the training team last few years, and I'm working also a repo. I am doing the job, but I'm, know, after the job doing the, you know, providing the training for new new developer or who are interested to get the training for the WordPress, how to connect the WordPress. So last venue, pause the contribution from your team, I have lost all the plan with the team repo, but right now, you know, I feel like the, you know, very slowness based on, you know, past your contribution for the training team, especially.
Speaker 11:So what the plan for about the training team for the in future? Because I'm here because, you know, I'm just, you know, try to provide the training for the WordPress for the new users. This time also here, the 32% new users who don't know the what is the workplace and how to start the contribution.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 11:And I have shared the knowledge. So you have started w w w p connect, w p campus, whatever. You also started this, the training team, which is the learn.workplace.org. So what is the future? I'm I need to reply for you, the any sponsor or anything for your side, for the training team.
Speaker 2:I'm afraid. I think the answer is longer, and also part of my answer is I don't know. So that's just the honest one. It's not just because it's lightning round, but thank you for the question. And if you wanna follow-up by pinging me on Slack, I'm happy to look into it as well.
Speaker 11:Say, already rewarding you Slack. So of of course, I will 100% message you again.
Speaker 2:Cool. Thank you. Alright.
Speaker 13:Hi, Matt and Mary. I'm Shavrat from Ukraine. I live in Portugal on a small marketing agency. I held the same pace as you because I'm writer and musician and I started to use WordPress as a writer because I like to write. I tested Joomla, I tested Drupal, it sucked, so I went for WordPress.
Speaker 13:Yeah. But that was many years ago and now we have to keep up because there is Webflow Framework and I think there are more competitors to WordPress than like Wix and other stuff. And now everything happens and over years everything happens thanks to contributors. Big round of applause to people who organized this event, it's awesome. Another big round of applause to people who are contributing to WordPress more than twenty years now.
Speaker 13:You created this. It's awesome. And now my question is how do we make and keep Warpros sexy because we don't have like We have partners overrides, they are not finished. You started to do experiments with having interface for custom post types for fields. It's awesome.
Speaker 13:It looks amazing. It's not finished. We have AI team that starts to work on AI, but I can't change the hover state of my button and I don't have breakpoints. Let's make work with sexy again.
Speaker 2:L what is that? LMSA? Okay. First we're going have to redefine the definition of lightning. These are long rolling thunder claps.
Speaker 2:But thank you for the question. Was a great one. The quick answer is we need to roll up our sleeves and do the work. We talk a lot about meeting and we meet about meetings and we talk about which meetings we should have and which Slack channel. And like sometimes you just need to sit down and write some more code.
Speaker 2:And that is where I'm really gonna try to focus all of my contributions and automatic contributions as we restart. It's part of the reason we want to reboot actually because we felt like ourselves we have come a little diffused and detached from results and what we're seeing relative to the amount of time in people that were working full time on core. And I I wanna see a lot more. So some of the things you mentioned, you know, we'll bump those to the top of the list. Alright.
Speaker 2:Next. And make it actually quick. Actually quick. Thank you. You.
Speaker 2:Just a question. Hello.
Speaker 14:I am from Georgia. I have a very small question. I feel that it's very nice to have AI in WordPress, but I feel that it's very little bit late. My question is what is main reason for this?
Speaker 2:I do not think we're late at all. Like I said, I think we're in the command line error, like chapter one, any one of AI. And I know that seems hard to believe, but let's look back at this at WordCamp two thousand thirty and we'll be like, wow, we thought that was good. What's happening now? I think part of the reason this hasn't happened until now is the APIs are still growing.
Speaker 2:Things like MCP didn't even exist a year or two ago, or maybe it was a year, it's a lot of stuff is brand new and it's moving really quickly. So I think the most important thing is that we are reactive, that we're adaptive, and that we build the primitives that allow the ecosystem, plug in themes, and the broader people who customize WordPress to build on the rails and play with it. So that is the quick answer. I'm going to end this as well as saying like, I've actually never been more optimistic because the tools and the capabilities that this unlocked combined with the creativity in this room, the creativity of all the contributors and users of WordPress, we are in, I think, the cusp of a golden era. So thank you so much.
Speaker 2:And thank you all, WorkCamp Europe. Thank you, organizers, for the extra time. And thank you, Mary.
