WordCamp Europe 2023 - Track 2, Day 2  [[3. Resources/Readwise/Full Document Contents/Articles/WordCamp Europe 2023 - Track 2, Day 2|Full Document Contents]] ## Document Notes (8) WordCamp Europe 2023 - Track 2, Day 2 - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LV-d7Cs-ovM Transcript: (08:09) okay let me pass sorry okay or me oh it's you yummy Callisto say something hello hello foreign (13:58) you here yesterday yeah in the afternoon there was still not like full but like more yeah yeah I I heard the guy saying that they were gonna do like a improv thing with the Unicorn at nine o'clock but it wasn't in the schedule so maybe that's why everybody's yeah I only saw him at the beginning yeah I messaged I messaged you guys uh update yeah well see now people are coming in it's still it's not hot outside yet that's how early it is so maybe I will go out at like one more (15:16) minute and I'll do my stocking and then yeah that way you can have a little you have many announcements I have a lot hello hello hello hello hello oh picture time can I be in it I'm just kidding I don't know what was (16:21) happening so we're trying to take a selfie oh sure sorry guys smell me breathing if you can hear me breathing I'm sorry okay good morning everyone how are you guys doing on day two oh thank you is everyone a little tired partied a little too hard last night okay so I will start off with a few General announcements and then I will pass the stage over to the awesome speaker uh so uh if you didn't hear these announcements yesterday or if you did I'm sorry I'm going to repeat them uh there is uh a lost and found and swag (17:07) table and info desk in the middle of the Expo so if you lose anything find anything or you haven't got your swag bag head over there so you can get your t-shirt bags and WordPress postcards um also we do have a community Booth that's where you can ask even more questions trade in the postcards for other ones and just talk to some of the volunteers um there is also the wellness track uh so we had yoga this morning at three we have Tai Chi and then at the end of the day after all of the festivities are (17:41) over uh they will go on another hike there was one yesterday I think they left around 6 20 so there'll be another one today if you guys missed the one yesterday um and then also don't forget that today we have Matt's q a it's going to be on track one so you can submit questions online as well if the lines with the microphones are too long and there's the after party tonight so it's also wordpress's 20th birthday so it's going to be a lot of fun uh so uh it's at the Lohan I think I said that right low head (18:10) nightclub yep okay so just bring your badge so you can get in and you'll get some food and drink tokens and uh yeah and then we'll have a fun party tonight uh so now what you guys are all here for I'm gonna make a very short introduction so she's gonna introduce herself so let's give a round of applause and welcome to the sage Anna [Applause] hi everyone thank you all for being here I know it's too early in the morning so thank you more for being here so I want to start with a question (18:45) how many times have you seen no actually have you at least seen once in your life in your career a big traffic drop in Google analytics and you get panicked with if yes I want you to raise your hand perfect okay I see you I feel you and I promise you by the end of this talk I will make my best so you have all the tools that needed to deal with any traffic drop coming your way so allow me to introduce myself consultant I have seven years of experience in SEO and I'm founder of search magic and I see your boutique (19:26) agency based in London so let's give a context first Google has a dedicated team working on their algorithm to improve the quality overall experience and relevance of the research results so every three to four months we release a big algorithm update and once in the year they release the core algorithm update and it changed a lot the SEO landscape now a brief of History these are some of the most important Google updates happened over the past decade and more uh we had Panda update which was about identify low quality websites (20:09) then we had penguin update which was about to identifying blackheads signs of a link building then we had medic update which was emphasizing on the authority expertise and trustworthiness of pages that were affecting the well-being and happiness of a person and then the most recent one we had helpful content which was about to identify if the pages have actually helpful content for the users and a small note here is that actually we don't know what an update is when it's released there is a lot discussion (20:46) and research from seos all over the world to identify what's going on and a fun fact here is that we give the names so that's where you see all these weird names about panda penguins and all these animals so a good point is um why should I care about an algorithm update and I know you're right um there are three ways to get affected by an algorithm update you might not affect it at all you might affect it in a good way or it might negatively affect it and that's the point that you care about because you're actually losing (21:23) rankings so what this means it means that simply if you lose rankings you get lower positions in search results for specific keywords and when this happens you get lower visibility less people see you and actually you get less traffic in your website and that of course means you get Less sales that's why you should care about so if organic search is among your three to four top traffic sources of your website it's definitely going to be an issue so os are really good guys we're a bit with those a little bit we (22:01) love devs they make our life much more easier but at the same time we are Really Brave you can't scare us very easily until we see now feed this later today we're releasing a broad algorithm update oh my God it actually feels like this it's like the clown from eat in our living room saying hi I'm here for you oh my God and I have to admit that even though I have worked in many traffic losses every time I see this announcement I'm like okay okay here we go again we're going to deal with this (22:41) so what we should do if we hit by an algorithm update what can be done and I'm afraid you're not going to like the answer you can do nothing and there's nothing you can do about it if it's about to get hit you will hit anyway so at this point you'll probably be like okay we wake up too early in the morning why are you even here why we even do this talk but I'm like wait guys I need a moment to to make my point give me just some minutes so what a Google update an algorithmic update actually means (23:15) it means that Google has rethinked a search intent of a specific page and you're simply not relevant anymore meaning that based on the user's data and user's Behavior they tend to search different kind of information or what they use to search so yeah simply as that you're not relevant anymore and if I want you to keep one thing from this presentation is that Google is not like the big punishing guys try to find website owners that don't comply with their guidelines they're more like the (23:48) guys that they want to serve the best search experience this is what they're working on this is what their mission and Google updates are simply part of the job and to better understand this I have a couple of examples my favorite one is this one it's about a huge publishing website based in UK they lost over 70 percent of their traffic overnight it was huge at this point and this makes actually creates a lot of questions but if we look closer to their page this is actually one of their top ranking Pages for there used to be top (24:32) ranking pages but if we look closer to it we will see that in the same page they're talking about politics gossip and fashion so my question is what is the point of this page what the what the what is what is serving what is the main target what why should even exist and more than that why you should even rank anyway we if we look even more closing closer we will see that the core web vital scores each one uh it's 11 out of 100 which means that probably a page take a thousand years to l > [!note]+ Document Notes > (8) WordCamp Europe 2023 - Track 2, Day 2 - YouTube > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LV-d7Cs-ovM > > Transcript: > (08:09) okay let me pass sorry okay or me oh it's you yummy Callisto say something hello hello foreign > (13:58) you here yesterday yeah in the afternoon there was still not like full but like more yeah yeah I I heard the guy saying that they were gonna do like a improv thing with the Unicorn at nine o'clock but it wasn't in the schedule so maybe that's why everybody's yeah I only saw him at the beginning yeah I messaged I messaged you guys uh update yeah well see now people are coming in it's still it's not hot outside yet that's how early it is so maybe I will go out at like one more > (15:16) minute and I'll do my stocking and then yeah that way you can have a little you have many announcements I have a lot hello hello hello hello hello oh picture time can I be in it I'm just kidding I don't know what was > (16:21) happening so we're trying to take a selfie oh sure sorry guys smell me breathing if you can hear me breathing I'm sorry okay good morning everyone how are you guys doing on day two oh thank you is everyone a little tired partied a little too hard last night okay so I will start off with a few General announcements and then I will pass the stage over to the awesome speaker uh so uh if you didn't hear these announcements yesterday or if you did I'm sorry I'm going to repeat them uh there is uh a lost and found and swag > (17:07) table and info desk in the middle of the Expo so if you lose anything find anything or you haven't got your swag bag head over there so you can get your t-shirt bags and WordPress postcards um also we do have a community Booth that's where you can ask even more questions trade in the postcards for other ones and just talk to some of the volunteers um there is also the wellness track uh so we had yoga this morning at three we have Tai Chi and then at the end of the day after all of the festivities are > (17:41) over uh they will go on another hike there was one yesterday I think they left around 6 20 so there'll be another one today if you guys missed the one yesterday um and then also don't forget that today we have Matt's q a it's going to be on track one so you can submit questions online as well if the lines with the microphones are too long and there's the after party tonight so it's also wordpress's 20th birthday so it's going to be a lot of fun uh so uh it's at the Lohan I think I said that right low head > (18:10) nightclub yep okay so just bring your badge so you can get in and you'll get some food and drink tokens and uh yeah and then we'll have a fun party tonight uh so now what you guys are all here for I'm gonna make a very short introduction so she's gonna introduce herself so let's give a round of applause and welcome to the sage Anna [Applause] hi everyone thank you all for being here I know it's too early in the morning so thank you more for being here so I want to start with a question > (18:45) how many times have you seen no actually have you at least seen once in your life in your career a big traffic drop in Google analytics and you get panicked with if yes I want you to raise your hand perfect okay I see you I feel you and I promise you by the end of this talk I will make my best so you have all the tools that needed to deal with any traffic drop coming your way so allow me to introduce myself consultant I have seven years of experience in SEO and I'm founder of search magic and I see your boutique > (19:26) agency based in London so let's give a context first Google has a dedicated team working on their algorithm to improve the quality overall experience and relevance of the research results so every three to four months we release a big algorithm update and once in the year they release the core algorithm update and it changed a lot the SEO landscape now a brief of History these are some of the most important Google updates happened over the past decade and more uh we had Panda update which was about identify low quality websites > (20:09) then we had penguin update which was about to identifying blackheads signs of a link building then we had medic update which was emphasizing on the authority expertise and trustworthiness of pages that were affecting the well-being and happiness of a person and then the most recent one we had helpful content which was about to identify if the pages have actually helpful content for the users and a small note here is that actually we don't know what an update is when it's released there is a lot discussion > (20:46) and research from seos all over the world to identify what's going on and a fun fact here is that we give the names so that's where you see all these weird names about panda penguins and all these animals so a good point is um why should I care about an algorithm update and I know you're right um there are three ways to get affected by an algorithm update you might not affect it at all you might affect it in a good way or it might negatively affect it and that's the point that you care about because you're actually losing > (21:23) rankings so what this means it means that simply if you lose rankings you get lower positions in search results for specific keywords and when this happens you get lower visibility less people see you and actually you get less traffic in your website and that of course means you get Less sales that's why you should care about so if organic search is among your three to four top traffic sources of your website it's definitely going to be an issue so os are really good guys we're a bit with those a little bit we > (22:01) love devs they make our life much more easier but at the same time we are Really Brave you can't scare us very easily until we see now feed this later today we're releasing a broad algorithm update oh my God it actually feels like this it's like the clown from eat in our living room saying hi I'm here for you oh my God and I have to admit that even though I have worked in many traffic losses every time I see this announcement I'm like okay okay here we go again we're going to deal with this > (22:41) so what we should do if we hit by an algorithm update what can be done and I'm afraid you're not going to like the answer you can do nothing and there's nothing you can do about it if it's about to get hit you will hit anyway so at this point you'll probably be like okay we wake up too early in the morning why are you even here why we even do this talk but I'm like wait guys I need a moment to to make my point give me just some minutes so what a Google update an algorithmic update actually means > (23:15) it means that Google has rethinked a search intent of a specific page and you're simply not relevant anymore meaning that based on the user's data and user's Behavior they tend to search different kind of information or what they use to search so yeah simply as that you're not relevant anymore and if I want you to keep one thing from this presentation is that Google is not like the big punishing guys try to find website owners that don't comply with their guidelines they're more like the > (23:48) guys that they want to serve the best search experience this is what they're working on this is what their mission and Google updates are simply part of the job and to better understand this I have a couple of examples my favorite one is this one it's about a huge publishing website based in UK they lost over 70 percent of their traffic overnight it was huge at this point and this makes actually creates a lot of questions but if we look closer to their page this is actually one of their top ranking Pages for there used to be top > (24:32) ranking pages but if we look closer to it we will see that in the same page they're talking about politics gossip and fashion so my question is what is the point of this page what the what the what is what is serving what is the main target what why should even exist and more than that why you should even rank anyway we if we look even more closing closer we will see that the core web vital scores each one uh it's 11 out of 100 which means that probably a page take a thousand years to load which okay leads again to the question why this > (25:13) page should be in the top search results and at this point I want to tell you most of the pages most of the category Pages were like that so it makes totally sense why they lost their traffic another example Coke up food and by the way Cockapoo is a dog breed on April 2022 it was a full it was a keyword leading to a full informational search results it was about research it was about at least but some months later April 2022 it was leading to full transactional results people they just want to buy the cocoa food > (25:53) so that's why it makes sense to to you know not be relevant and okay now we have a really good overview of what's going on and some more generic information about algorithm updates but at this point we need to to see The Next Step which is what I'm about to do with my manager or the stakeholders that once they found out this drop they're about to get mad and this is not you if your website doesn't have is not related to any business goals you have a big competition you don't have a bigger > (26:29) competition or in your industry doesn't go a lot of things this is definitely not a point of interest if this is you I'm jealous of you I want your job but for everyone else we have a lot to talk about here so first of all we need to be transparent meaning we have to address the issue very early on and make sure they know they are aware what's going on because if they found themselves well it's not going to be a good uh next step and also make sure you have some solid next steps and actions to to tell them > (27:03) so that will make them feel secure that you know what you're doing and you have it all under control next up you need to manage expectations because a traffic laws might happen overnight but it's not going to get solved overnight it probably it's about to get months to recover from this so you need to make sure they are aware of it and the last part is to educate them what happened why it happened and that it's not your fault or the entire team's fault it can happen it can happen to anyone and actually it happens to a lot > (27:42) of websites so okay how can we avoid get hit by an algorithm date and to be honest you can't avoid it at all it's part uh it's part of life let's say there's no like a specific checklist to go through and say okay I'm done with Google updates but there is some side some some kind of factions you can take to eliminate the chances so first of all you need to be proactive of course so that means you have a really good SEO strategy in place that it's going to help you a lot you can read Google's guideline updates > (28:22) to make sure you comply with them this is also going to help you and this is especially helpful if you have like a new client you can review their backlink profile what we're doing here is to actually search if they have any signs of black hat strategies or they have a poor backlink profile also we can check if there is like any manual actions in the Google search console because all of these could be three years for a traffic loss and my favorite one is to create content across the buyer's journey in order to > (28:58) cover all search intent so for the Cockapoo food example what you can do is create content not just the product page create content for all stages of the funnel to make sure you are covered in case you lose some ranking so for the cocoa food example instead of just having the product page you could also have reviews page video content guides recipes and any other kind of content formats it's going to to help so we are done with the first part and we're going to the juicy part which is how to deal with this traffic drop and > (29:37) what you can do to go over with it and at this point I have another question how you're about to deal with a Google with a traffic drop or any algorithm update I want you to raise your hand and let me know don't throw the to throw you the laptop out of your window is not an option I've tried it's not working so don't try it at home okay is anyone would like to to speak and tell me how it's going to deal with a traffic drop okay okay let's go through the presentation then oh yes perfect any other ideas > (30:37) I can see you by the way very well so okay yes sorry updating Oh by updating yes really good one good idea okay any other ideas anyone wants to search something okay let's go through the presentation then I created a spreadsheet that is going to help you to analyze any traffic drop even if it's from an algorithm date or not I was actually creating the spreadsheet during I was creating the presentation at the same time so to make sure that you I have detailed out all the next steps so the goal is to study the best period of traffic and > (31:23) rankings and compare it to the worst period of ranking and traffics and to do that we will need two tools Google analytics and semras or any other SEO tool that can provide historic ranking data it's going to help so for this example I'm about to analyze an actual website with an actual big traffic laws like really big It's mighty moms. > (31:53) club and it has again a big loss out of 70 more loss so what I'm about to do first is to open semras at the website go to The Domain Overview at the website and go to the big traffic Trend graph and I'm about to spot the big uh the best period of time and I'm about to click this period getting a period of like a month it's like a good amount of time so once I have the list I'm about to get a full report of keywords rankings I'm going to get tons of keywords especially if the website is really big so I want to do some filtering at this > (32:34) point to make sure that I don't go to analyze thousands of keywords manually that wouldn't help so the filtering that I'm suggesting is a following keep only the top 20 keywords so they have a minimum search on my search volume of 100. and also sort the list by estimated traffic so at this point you will get all the best Pages by traffic that they have a proper amount of searches and now it's about to export the list I'm going to get a thousands of metrics that I don't need that I don't care > (33:09) about them the only metrics that I care about and they want to keep is the URL of course the keyword the position and the estimated traffic somebody to create a spreadsheet create the seat one which is semorous data and this at this Matrix I'm going to call this spreads it's xamaris data and um I'm keep forward so the next step now that I have my two SEO tools let's say data it's to look on the real data and to do that I need to cross check my data with Google Analytics so I'm going over Google analytics > (33:46) changing a big amount of time around two years um I'm going to find again the spot Peak period of time hopefully I've done correctly from semrs and it's the same period of time with semores and if that's correct good news so I'm going to click the period of time again a month go to the landing pages report sort by sessions not users and Export the list and for this example the website that we were looking for I want to tell you that 75 of the entire organic traffic was focused only in one page a category page > (34:30) and that was really bad it put you in terrible position very vulnerable position mostly because if this page happened something to it you're done you have lost most of half of your traffic so again I'm going we're going back to the Google analytics list and now I have export the list again I'm going to get a tons of metrics and things but I'm not the I'm not I'm not need anything I need only landing pages sessions and bounce rate so I'm about to create a second seat Google analytics > (35:09) data best period of time and adding only the three columns that I need and the tip here is from Google analytics you are not going to get like a full URL so you what you need to do is to add this specific uh line that it allows you it's a like a formula to get the full URL of uh the page okay now I need to cross check what happens to the pages of the best period of time because if it's a long time away they might don't even exist anymore and it's really important to know so I'm going over screaming frog which > (35:48) is a really good auditing tool I'm going to flip screaming frog to list mode I'm going to add the urls I'm going to crawl only these urls take the status code find out if they're for example redirected either 404s and what's going on and I'm about to create a third seat with a screaming frog data so for the example that we were talking so far there was a big really big amount of pages that were 404 Pages means they didn't exist anymore and there was also many pages with non-available products > (36:25) that haven't been handled at all so that means actually that there were pages that make sense that they used to have traffic and they don't have traffic anymore so it wasn't even the Google update thing it was just products don't exist so the print spreads it looks like this now and once you get the presentation you'll probably uh can be zoomed more uh we have this semorous data we have the Google analytics data we have a screaming frog data and now it's time to combine all this data and make some > (36:59) conclusions so I'm going to need all the important metrics from both semrs and Google analytics States and what I'm about to do is create a new sheet which is called combined data I'm going to keep all the data from semrest and I'm going to extract automatically the semra's data in order to do that I'm going to use a via lookup formula you don't have to go through and find BL via lookup how it's working I have it right there exactly the formula that you need to use and you're going to extract all > (37:36) the data for Google analytics automatically this way but we're not done yet we have more uh the next thing is to check either any landing pages that exist in Google analytics data they have big amount of traffic but I didn't extract them so far from the combined data so I'm going back to the Google analytics data create a new column again at the Via lookup formula to save time and I'm going to extract the data and check if the URL exists or no if your news are good I'm totally caught up with > (38:14) both seats so I don't need to do something else and the last piece of this Excel is to get the current ranking position or the worst ranking position for these keywords that I'm trying to study I have the best rankings what they used to be but I need to find out where they are today and now we're going to the big finale which means study the data we're about to create a pivot table this is going to help us a lot identify the next steps and what I want to do here is to find out for each URL what are the keywords > (38:51) and what is their ranking position trends so I'm going to use those main values the landing page and the keyword and that's some secondary values from traffic position and everything else and I have a right here exactly the steps that you need to take in order to create this pivot table and that's the correct values so once I have the pivot table I'm going to end up with a spreadsheet like this so for each keyword for each not keyword for its page I have all the keywords the rankings and the search volume and for > (39:27) each page I know exactly what are the keywords which which might be a big variety of them for a page where I might rank for like 20 keywords or more what they want to find out is for each page what keywords had a traffic laws and what they just had the Daffy close and if they have traffic or not this is the important thing here so to help a little bit the situation I'm about to sort out the Page by organic traffic so at this case I'm going to get the best pages in terms of traffic and I can be able to > (40:01) see the keyword rankings and that's it actually then we have to to find the patterns and study the data that I'm not going to do today because it might take a lot of hours but let's recap the process actually I'm about to find first a big period of time from uh some rest then I'm about to do some filtering because I don't want to go through thousands of keywords I'm about to cross check the peak period with Google analytics data after that I'm about to find the status of the pages because they might not exist > (40:33) anymore create the combined data and put them all in Excel create the pivot table and then it's time to identify the patterns and find the next steps and at this point I want you to remember we have two missions when a traffic drop is happening the one is to defend the rankings that we have today and the second one to increase the potential and traffic of the rest of the pages and here are some solid next steps that can work in any case that would be to focus on pages that they have a big amount of traffic and they have a loss > (41:12) probably in rankings and work on their content and their metadata try to identify quick wins meaning work on keywords from position four to position 30 and make quick optimization that's going to to bring a real quick boost of traffic to your website also sorry focus on keywords that are let's say they don't have such a big amount of competition but they have a big amount of searches and last but not least create content across the buyer's journey and start creating more content that cover more search intent > (41:50) and last but not least try not to panic I don't want to say don't panic because we are all humans we're going to panic anyway so probably I would I would finish this presentation with the next steps I think it makes more sense just keep the next steps all the next steps and thank you very much for your time today yes thank you and um yeah we actually have a time for some q a so I'm sure you guys have a lot of questions but we have two microphones set up um one on each aisle so if you have any > (42:29) questions head over to the microphone right now depending on how many people there are we'll just limit to one question at a time and I'll just be lingering over here hi good job hi nice presentation thank you from your experience is it better to create a 404 page for a page that does not exist anymore or redirect them to the home page I'm speaking if the page does not exist and there is no relative page to redirect the visitors uh in my opinion I would prefer you direct the page 301 not to go the home > (43:07) page to the most uh relevant category or sub category it would make more sense so you won't send other directions to to the home page thank you hi thank you very much for the presentation I just wanted to ask if a site got hit with any algorithm um will Google put the domain of that particular website into their bad books even though we are trying to match the level that Google is already asking us to do you know like as you are mentioning how will Google tackle that what will they just put us like they were the > (43:46) people whom we already hit on their faces let's put it that way and now they are trying everything to get back basically um can you please repeat because let's say that I have a URL like melapress.com and I had um we had 50 traffic coming from one page which is services for example and we got hit by any algorithm update now the URL will remain the same bellapress. > (44:17) com okay now we as a company we are taking the measure to get back our like what we lost and everything will Google keep that URL in their bad books as actual URL and like even or the domain how do they handle that so you actually have focused the traffic to one page and you hit by an algorithm date and this is gone the page is gone okay actually this is what we said before Val number position what you can do is create more content around the topic and try to recover this from uh blog posts or articles or content the domain Authority also then uh do you > (44:54) change domain or no domain will remain the same domain of domain Authority is not going to affect it by a traffic laws probably unless you're about to lose a big amount of backlinks all right anyways thanks a lot thank you hi Anna awesome presentation thank you um I would like to ask you from your experience how much time it takes to recover from a Google update and what are the factors that influence this one well uh the it's going to take a lot of time probably it's about to take more than two to three months but it depends on > (45:34) how severe you will get hit on the algorithm update and what things you have to to address what what was that the actual problem there were some slight cases that were never recovered from this especially if you do nothing about it of course you won't recover but most of the times it's going to need three four maybe months but maybe more depending the case okay thank you so much thank you so you were talking about a Google algorithm changes that were happening in the past and it looks like that each of > (46:11) them has the had the specific uh intent or specific topic uh however you call it so is Google like publishing or speaking about it or at least giving us a hint or a clue what they are working next so we can at least be a little bit prepared or know what is waiting Us in the bigger known future actually they do give us some kind of hints they never announce 100 what's going on but thank God the SEO Community is really strong and they identify almost immediately what's going on so that's the good news I think after > (46:52) some months they are going to release more details after you found out but the the first months most times they don't they're not very good place to check to find out about this to find out what's going on with an algorithm date oh well uh to be honest I never actually checked one by one to find what is causing the algorithm update what I'm trying to do is to solve the traffic laws so okay probably they are looking they study a variety of websites from different Industries and they try to find uh common things that's going on > (47:31) that would be a good starting point thank you so much thank you really I have one as well I just wanna uh no I was just wondering if you could tell us about like the coolest or like the biggest traffic lights that you found and like how you fixed it afterwards it was a directory website uh it was one of the biggest uh websites in Europe it was talking about professionals and professional uh uh Works they lost almost all their traffic more than 80 percent uh lows and actually we made up and create a different blog and some power pages to > (48:16) come up and rank the blog at least and redirect the traffic to the main website because things will be bad at this point thank you oh there's another one sorry yes hi Anna um looking forward to the future because we've seen the demo at the Google I O which is currently live in the US as in the Google Labs that Google has shown more and more content on his own search result Pages I've heard numbers like 60 percent of all searches do not result in clicks anymore what's your vision and strategy on this > (48:57) I think we are going to see a thing called on serps SEO that at this point you will try to rank on the features of Google search results and get traffic from them but we have to a lot to see from the AI and all this thank you alrighty then okay so let's get one more round of applause for Anna thank you so much thank you very much and thanks all of you the little gifts from word Camp thank you yeah thank you all right so before you guys all race off to your next one I'll just give you one more announcement and then you're free to go > (49:33) actually you're free to go now but but bear with me uh so there will be the first uh WP connect session at 10 so you have about 20 minutes um it's the developer relations and advocacy and open source hosted by Michael and it's on the same balcony the triani balcony so the easiest way to get there is to take the lift from track one to track two so if you're interested in that there will be yeah it'll be in about 20 minutes and then there's more WP connects afterwards so if not uh enjoy the rest of your day uh and eat a > (50:06) lot of food bye 10 a.m on a Saturday morning > (1:11:05) I feel like yeah yeah there we go no all right that's okay okay so I'm just gonna do some general word Camp announcements and then I'll get I will hand over to Bud for all the good stuff uh so uh if you haven't already seen it uh the center of the Expo area there is the information desk you get your swag bag uh there's also lost and found so if you found anything or lost anything or anyone head over there they will help you find it also on the way there there's the community Booth you can also > (1:11:37) get a lot of help there you can also trade in your postcards if you've been collecting those so you got four in your swag bag and you can pick up more when you answer questions to them you can also ask them what the questions were from the last couple of days so you can get extra ones um there is also a wellness track so at three sometime after lunch we will be doing Tai Chi and there's a hike after after word Camp so around 6 20 if you guys want to do that before you go to the after party um and also lunch is served in the same > (1:12:12) places level zero and minus one uh so uh that will be at one o'clock um and don't forget that we have the Matt's q a uh so you can send questions online um if the lines are super long at the mics uh and then the after party so for WordPress 20th birthday uh you'll get some drink coupons and some food so I hope hopefully we can see you guys all there uh okay so uh I won't say too much of an introduction because he has some for himself so I will just ask for a huge round of applause and welcome Bud to > (1:12:47) this stage yeah there I go yeah just stay right here good morning so how is everybody I think it's too close okay I'm just getting used to things wow okay I'm just trying to figure out where what I want to do here um okay I guess you could tell my Talk's going to be on low vision and really me and how I use it to help me teach people WordPress so let's get started uh I guess I can do that yeah uh I get you know I'm gonna stand back here I'm just trying to figure out what's the best place for me to see all this stuff > (1:13:42) and it's gonna be right over here so that's me my name is Bud Krauss I live in Nutley New Jersey United States and as you can see I do a few things with WordPress these days I do a lot of Wordpress content creation for WordPress businesses I'm also an instructor and a reluctant website developer so only if I have to will I get involved in that and let's get something out of the way real quick and that is today's talk is not going to be about these things okay this is not like a technical talk on accessibility it's > (1:14:21) not that I don't know about these things I'm not an expert I do know about these things but let other people talk about those things uh you know so if if you're wondering how come I'm not talking about these things now you know all right we're going to start off with doing an Interactive can everybody hear me okay because I sound kind of strange up here anyway um we're going to do an interactive survey I call it the IQ survey and there are four questions and you should have gotten or you can get access to > (1:14:57) the web page on your cell phone because I have a QR code that should be circulating and I hope you'll take it so it's only four questions it's not difficult or it's not very long anyway and if you don't have the QR code then you can just go to joyofwp.com survey now I'm going to take off my code because it is hot up here and we're good on my voice we can hear okay thank you all right so I'll give you a second or two to take the survey and it's funny to to do a talk without a > (1:15:38) Podium I'm not used to that I'm looking around where's the podium okay um so I'm gonna ask my wife where's my wife she is Arlene she's going to read the results of the survey and because it's hard for me sometimes to read these things being a person with low vision and have people have you have they responded Arlene no do you want to refresh the browser Maybe a few okay we'll we'll give you another minute or two you know they asked me to do something interactive I'm thinking like what can > (1:16:24) you do that's interactive for my kind of talk and I thought well let's just do a survey so we have a survey and um and we're way too more we get some more results and then okay so question number one now by the way this is my wife this is her first word Camp ever okay and you can only you can only go downhill from here right I mean when you're at Mount Olympus the rest is you know it doesn't get any bigger than this so Arlene I don't know somebody will help you turn it on I guess oh yeah here we go > (1:17:11) and she's going to read the results and I'll give you a little color commentary some of the questions were a little tricky and I had a hard time figuring out exactly how to work this without making them like ridiculously tricky because okay good the first the only thing to do for a person with low vision is to make texts larger now it's working okay so the results and this is I will tell you 26 of you responded four percent said true and 96 said false yeah the answer is false now the trick of the the question was only okay so of > (1:18:00) course there are other things to do besides make text larger but the CH they're really sort of nuanced approach to this is take my case and I'll talk a little bit more about my situation in a minute but making text larger does not necessarily make it easier for me to see in fact in some instances it makes it harder for me to see so it's counterintuitive you know you think we'll make the text larger but we'll be able to see it not necessarily all right number two which of the following present > (1:18:32) difficulties for people with low vision stairways 67 percent recognizing faces 90 percent bumping into objects eighty percent bright sunlight 63 and the answer is really all of these things can be now when you talk about vision loss it's very idiosyncratic and even within specific types of conditions glaucoma macular degeneration cataracts it's all over the map but those are some of the very big things that almost you know generally people uh like me are going to have difficulties with number three eyeglasses are used to correct vision to > (1:19:16) 2020. 23 true 77 false you guys had said true you didn't get it right so in my case I'm wearing glasses obviously but I they cannot correct my eyes to 2020. so it's just not possible um it makes it makes things easier for me to see long distance but I'm legally blind with or without my glasses so it it's just not going to it would be nice if all we had to do is prescribe glasses and we could correct everybody to 2020 but that's just not the case number four if you lose vision does your sense of > (1:19:55) smell get better 33 yes 67 percent no yeah and I think this is another one of these well it depends who you talk to in my case smell I don't think so but what did get better over time was my sense of touch touch got exquisitively better so that um uh what I started noticing when I wanted to see something what I really wanted is you to put something in my hands so I could feel it and with tactile ability I could sort of get the sense of what it looked like so thank you Arlene let's have a round of applause for the great Arlene > (1:20:36) and good luck at your next word Camp my dear it's all right so let's go on and um let me go back here so I can see this a little better all right so I have age-related macular degeneration and I'm going to give you a little warning before you see this because this is not pretty uh-huh here we go so here's what I or people generally speaking how they see with macular degeneration and it's loss of central vision as you can see the center of the face or the head is gone now it's not necessarily exactly like > (1:21:18) this for me and others but it's going to give you a little bit of an idea of how we see and this blind spot in the middle is called a scotoma so it is in the center you can see the peripheral area is pretty big it's not necessarily that well defined as you see it it can be little not as you know sharply defined and maybe not as dark either as what you just saw it can be though all right how do you how is age-related macular degeneration detected or diagnosed so they use something called the Amsler grid this has been > (1:21:54) around forever and if you if you don't have the problem you'll see a perfectly uh you know perfect Lines no waviness everything in nice square boxes you're doing good and especially that Center Point if you don't see that Center Point you really have some problems and if you do have macular degeneration the first look will be something like that so you'll see like one of the quadrants in one eye is well the lines are really wavy that's not a good sign and it's not necessarily that pronounced it could be > (1:22:30) just maybe a couple of those boxes instead of how big you see it there and then as things get a little worse maybe it might look like something like this now a little a few factoids about uh uh AMD you know uh age-related macular degeneration and it's you can tell it's a little hard for me to see some of this stuff so I have to do a little memory here but anyway there are two types there's uh the wet type and the dry type the dry type is more common about 90 of all people who have this have the dry > (1:23:02) and it's uh slower progressing uh there's no internal bleeding inside of the the macula in the back of your eye where your retina is uh 10 have the really dreaded wet type which is of course my type I have to have the wet type and what happens is that blood vessels grow and leak into the macula which is really part of the retina or back of the retina and then what happens is you lose vision very rapidly so again the dry is slower the wet is a little more dangerous and more difficult and you get wavy lines and um > (1:23:44) uh and and it really uh what the Hallmark really is rapid loss of vision some people who have dry don't even know that they have it if you have the wet form you're going to know real quick in any event it's irreversible it's not curable it's irreversible there's been a lot of advancement over my lifetime um that uh there are now uh treatments for it that didn't exist years ago that either slow down the progression of the disease or um but they don't you know cure the problem make me manage the condition a > (1:24:16) lot better and um yeah the pervade you know the prevalence uh 20 million in the United States have a condition 200 million around the world and by 2040 288 million it is the leading cause of blindness I know it said worldwide but I don't know if that's true but in the United States for sure it's the leading cause of legal blindness in the United States and as you might have you might probably know somebody who has the condition you really don't know that they even have this until you realize they can't see me > (1:24:49) they can't read they can't drive but other than that they look like a normal person and the other thing here risk factors uh age obviously is one in age-related macular degeneration uh it tends to happen more often than women Caucasian and obesity and smoking and then genetics thanks Mom that's I inherited it from her and she had it from her father too but that was uh 60 70 years ago now and they didn't even know really what the name was of this okay let me go back over here sorry uh and um so I do see things in a different > (1:25:32) way literally and figuratively and uh and here are some of the big issues that I face and I'll just go over some of this real quickly uh I do have a real problem with depth of field and if you see me you'll notice when I walk downstairs I'm holding on to a railing because I can't tell where the step ends and I just might just totally fall off so I have to be really careful with that so everything's sort of flat to me and colorblind is definitely an issue I don't drive anymore but when I used to > (1:26:02) drive I couldn't tell red and green lights I can only tell the positions of red and green where they were contrast is a very very important uh matter to me I'll get into this in a second when I do a little demo and um what I call the prism effect so I have two eyes that don't function together and what that results in is sort of a split of my vision that instead of normal vision the two eyes function is as if you just have one eye if you have a condition like I do you have two separate Visions going on > (1:26:36) um now also uh well how do I do all this how do I do what I do and they're really three different things that I do I use zoom I use audio and then touch these are all three very important factors in my life and touch I also mean well what do you mean when you use a screen how do you use Touch it's really more like um when I use a mouse I knows how far I can move something uh it's distance and so I call that touch and that's an important someone somebody changes the UI of a system that I've been using for years I say oh you > (1:27:14) know I have to now rearrange how everything works in my head now I do have this little demonstration so let me see if this will work I don't know how this will work help um that is I have a uh a movie here a video presentation and I don't know what button to press I should have asked that so can anybody help me from word camp or is it starting yeah well you have audio here hello here we go settings that I use for my computer now keep in mind everybody with some kind of impairment or disability will be using different > (1:27:56) settings if this is very idiosyncratic just for me and that's the key is that there are plenty of choices that are built into the operating system for a user to have at their disposal and here are mine welcome to my world of settings and preference changes now I use Ventura on a Mac OS it's the most recent version of mac and I'm going to take you through some of the highlights and the key settings that I use for my computer now keep in mind everybody with some kind of impairment or disability will be using different > (1:28:33) settings if this is very idiosyncratic just for me and that's the key is that there are plenty of choices that are built into the operating system for a user to have at their disposal and here are mine so the first thing I'm going to show you is display right over here and this is the display driver I use a pretty low resolution 1280 pixels by 7 20 pixels and if I wanted to change the display I would just click on that you can see the Mac OS has quite a few different display drivers which is good the bad > (1:29:08) thing is I believe it's with this operating system they no longer make it easy for you to change the brightness of your screen if I go over here you'll see the display brightness you can't do it through the operating system anymore you have to do it through the monitor itself I don't like it now if I was using a Mac monitor no problem but what apple is saying is we no longer give you the ability to change the brightness because there's so many different monitors out there do it through your monitor settings which I'm > (1:29:38) not going to show you but that's exactly what I did now honestly we have accessibility settings I think some of these settings are so important they shouldn't even put it into accessibility they just put it into all these other options over here that's just my editorial comment and I don't use everything so for example I don't use voiceover or way of listening to actions and functions taking place on the computer no I don't use that I certainly use zoom and so the way I have this set > (1:30:07) is when I press the command key and I scroll like this with my Mouse I can see this much better I can really zoom in and sometimes I go crazy and zoom all the way in and you get this effect of going back and forth a lot but at least they get the job done also there is a display area in accessibility this is different than the display driver for the Monitor and let's just take a look over here I'm going to actually zoom in and show you how I do this uh if I wanted to invert the colors now a lot of people like this it's what I call the > (1:30:42) ultimate in dark mode but I don't but many people as I've said who have Vision impairments will definitely use this reverse mode skip down a little bit over here and look at increase contrast well I definitely want high contrast because it just makes things easier if I were to turn this off yeah you can see all right it makes it hard for me to see so I'm going with that reduce transfer let's go down to over here and I have display contrast well very important again contrast is a big deal you can see it > (1:31:21) gets really washed out at least for me I pushed it way up over here now it's funny they call this normal huh so if I went all the way out to here let's see what we have well that's a little bit too hard for me to see so it's just easier if I move it back to right about where it was like this that's fine if I scroll down a little bit more the pointer and is this over here I can adjust that too and you can see I've pushed it all the way up to the largest possible size now I can change that of course make it smaller it really > (1:31:56) makes it hard for me to find where the pointer is and I just found out a little bit ago that you can change the color of the pointer that's interesting now I don't use this color filters option over here so I'm going to bypass that let's go over here and look at spoken content click on that over here now this one I use all the time so in addition to zooming the other way that I understand content is to use this control right over here let me show you what I mean I'm going to move this out over here and I've got this text > (1:32:31) document over here that I am writing for a post on my website about being chosen to speak at word Camp Europe now let me just show you this right over here or you can listen to this and I'm going to select these three paragraphs and by the way if you haven't noticed the font's much bigger than it would normally be and it makes it easier for me to see and what I'll do is just press command and B a couple of years ago I was watching a live stream from Paris it was working 2017 or maybe it was Worldcraft 2018 for > (1:33:02) Belgrade or maybe wceu coming from Berlin looking back it doesn't really matter all I thought was wouldn't it be cool to go to work after that one day now when I do that you can see the visual control goes away so I can't pause it anymore and it just stops which is a little bit inconvenient because sometimes I wish there were a pause operation available it's either just start or stop now you might be wondering how do I even understand what I just heard and yes over time I've gotten adjusted and used to hearing speech at a > (1:33:31) much faster rate than most people can understand this also has the interesting ability to do the following let's just zoom in over here I sort of use a combination of zooming and text-to-speech so we've got this option over here oh yes I can change the uh person that's speaking but I've been with Samantha so long I just stay with her and for the speech rate you can see I can change it to tortoise or hair which is what these little symbols are I guess now down over here let me scroll let me push this out a little bit because even > (1:34:09) my wife always says it's too close too big too which makes it hard for her to see anyway I'm going to go over here let's see speaking announcement's fine let's this is the one I want to show you I put this on over here so this is very interesting so I don't use this as you can tell big announcements so whatever so that's very good now you might be wondering well what about like third-party applications will it work I can't tell you that it probably does but it's certainly going to work for all > (1:34:47) Apple based products now I'm going to turn this off okay I'll show you one other option here too again this is not what I use but just to give you a little touch of something that you probably don't know much about is capital h e Oh e here okay now what about if I wanted to hear the whole thing I'm just going to highlight it like so here's what I have to say all right not bad and that's a pretty good overview of the things that I use now you know I don't use dictation and there's a whole lot of > (1:35:26) other things that I could use but as I'm a very big proponent of only using the technology that you really need and what do these Technologies do they provide alternatives for a person like me so that I can access and understand information in a way that I would not otherwise have been able to and okay and just a couple little notes from the presentation that I've just noticed what I was doing this one is you didn't see the there was a demo of changing it to a a inverse a reverse black and white and it didn't work > (1:36:06) because of the way the software Works another thing too is that you can pause uh there's a little visual bar that you can click pause while the voiceover is working but I think you get an idea you should anyway the takeaway is that I use technology specifically for my own needs and everybody will do this a little bit differently and one of the really great things too is a lot of things that are built in that we call accessible they're good for everybody like if I wasn't visually impaired I would like to know > (1:36:37) that I would be able to hear the computer talk to me so that while it's talking to me I could do other things which I do all the time okay and let's go on so uh one of the ways oops I don't want to go yeah so how do I do the things that I do and what have I learned well I patterns is really important to me so I don't necessarily see things the way you do but if I recognize and see shapes and patterns that will make it easier for me to understand content and to learn and to teach and for example > (1:37:10) these are easy patterns right this is code obviously this is HTML and it's just a recognizable pattern so it was easy for me to learn here is CSS again a specific type of pattern that was reliable it was always in a certain format sort of easy to follow then we get to JavaScript and not so easy more free form more unpredictable more varied than CSS and HTML harder for me to learn because the pattern isn't there at least the way I think of his patterns okay and what about um uh I'm just I can't remember sorry what > (1:37:53) about teaching WordPress yes that's an important thing here so I do teach WordPress I've been teaching for years in New York City and online mostly online these days um so the first thing is I can't wing it so even though you think maybe I'm winging it today I'm not winging this I have to prepare for everything that I do I can't go into a classroom and not know exactly what I'm going to teach where I'm going to go with this what I'm going to show people the order I'm going to do it > (1:38:23) which is good because I'm prepared I don't go in there saying gee I'll just make it up as I go along it's not I can't do it that way so preparation is like number one not just in teaching but just like everything I do I need to know in advance where I'm going and sometimes that requires practice when I do videos I need to know everything before I do it because I can't read a script anyway the next thing is I Define everything this is like one of the principles of accessibility really is Define or > (1:38:56) describe everything so that people will understand what you're doing and when I'm when I teach I describe and Define what are themes what are plugins what's WordPress core what's everything about the WordPress world and ecosystem I like to Define and describe things in detail so that people will understand and I think that makes it for a better learning experience and then grouping content is also a standard or a practice of accessibility like navigation you know is grouping and content can be grouping grouping is a > (1:39:31) very important aspect of accessibility and I've learned that through my own experience of being visually impaired about grouping things and making that easy helping me be better at teaching and then one of the last things is you have to have patience not just with uh T in teaching but with yourself and I've learned you know that it takes me a little bit longer to learn or to do something and try not to get frustrated because you do get frustrated but try just to have some patience with yourself as you > (1:40:09) try to get over the hurdle of learning something and I with students I've always been really patient I'm not always with patient with everybody but with students they're like special to me so uh and clients try to be patient I think that's one of the things I do and finally I do get back with a Little Help from My Friends these are students clients uh that you know if I'm in class and I'll say like hey I can't see something can you help me read this or whatever or like my wife did something > (1:40:40) you know reading the survey I'm not afraid to ask anymore when I first was diagnosed and I would never ask for any help it would be like forget it and today why not so I look at low vision sort of as my special filter my own app on how I look at the world literally and figuratively and in some ways it gives me I know this kind of sounds strange but it's sort of a blessing in a way because it's taken me to places in doing things I probably wouldn't have had an opportunity to do oh yes this is I don't > (1:41:17) just teach WordPress I also teach my little Grand boy uh I will eventually when he gets older I think how to play guitar and with that let me say thank you and um that's it so yeah but but wait there's more there's always more so three reasons why uh uh being visually impaired really is not as bad as you think first you get to speak at word Camp Europe which I think is pretty good so I I like that one number two you don't see junk food in the grocery store so if you don't see it you're not > (1:41:59) as apt to buy junk food in the grocery store and one of my favorites you don't see people getting old and especially yourself so that's that's really good oh I should say there's a fourth that I didn't put up there which is you can drink as much alcohol at a party as you want you don't have to worry because you're not going to be driving all right so thank you so please ask some questions because we have some time so go ahead you could ask me like whatever you want about WordPress teaching Vision impairment > (1:42:38) uh tell me about your mother who has macular degeneration uh when did you first get macular degeneration why is it such a hard word to say you know anything you want do we have any questions go yes hello hello where are you I'm on your right side yeah yes I would like to ask you sure um what would we do as WordPress developers to make websites better for you to see and understand okay great question and I have an answer for you okay the key in this okay not just for web development and operating system is flexibility is > (1:43:17) Alternatives okay and not to lack people into no choices okay case in point you go to a website it's playing a video there's no way to stop it there's no way to rewind it there's no way to no give people Alternatives give them flexibility because everybody has different needs different ways of consuming information so you know that is such a an important thing now one other thing I have to say in general the web has become I think a more accessible world and that's because of the web it's Operating Systems and > (1:43:55) Technology and a whole series of factors that you know I'm talking about but if you're asking me if I'm a developer what's the first thing that I really give choices don't hard code us into a few things and we can't make any changes okay and and the other thing is uh and it's not really developer but it's you know the browser let's use you know the web and browsers are a user-centric world and but a lot of people don't know that you know that I can change the font I can change the second in other words > (1:44:30) it's not really it's it's an education process for the public to understand that they can change their environment of how they consume content but people just don't know that because they don't know that they can do that with their browsers so really good question I hope that helped thank you answer sure anybody else oh come on going once going twice oh hello hello yes I should say yeah hi well that woke me up I guess you know that I'm on your right side because [Laughter] by the way if I if I even if I didn't > (1:45:17) have a vision and problem these lights make it really hard to see yeah um I hear one question regarding regarding um website design what is the most frustrating thing regarding the design across the web um I I'm gonna change your question just a little bit um what's the most frustrating thing I have um getting access to information using a mobile phone because so much of our information is considered like I'm you know I'm one of them I need to use a mobile phone too and I find that uh I use a a an iPhone and the way the > (1:46:00) content is created a lot of times uh I can't I I'd use a voiceover and I can't once I have that voiceover turned on I can't go I can't use my fingers to scroll down the page it just stuck and I have to turn the voiceover off scroll turn the voiceover on listen to it and then turn it off and scroll so it's a real laborious and frustrating problem and I you know it it this is a matter of like what websites you know depends what applications it depends but it is not as smooth uh as consuming information on the web and > (1:46:41) using a desktop so but just the um I think the web itself desktop web has become much more uh accessible at least to my way of thinking yeah sure and a little one another one I should say you got to come up here and say you you got to say your name where you're from so what's your name and where are you from hi I'm Alex I'm from Germany my question is sure when you're looking at content in a way that you're trying to get an information out of it do you care about the layouts and looks at all or > (1:47:20) would you prefer having just a plain text document would be a great question uh and I was having a little chat with someone before the the talk and web uh accessible design there shouldn't be you know I I don't even like these terms accessible and not you know it it's sort of uh so artificial sort of the way I think but there is no reason why accessible sites should not be visually appealing sites I want visually appealing sites you know maybe 20 years ago if you go really back in time like 25 years ago we talked about making a > (1:47:59) separate site just for the Blind and Visually Impaired of course we don't have to do that anymore for lots of reasons and we you know but um I want there's no reason why they should not be visually appealing so now if a user knows how to use their browser they know they can turn off images they can do all kinds of things I can make um you know websites look very different than what the designer intended them to look like because remember it's a user-centric medium it's not a designer-centric medium and if designers > (1:48:31) understand that then I think they're going to be way ahead of um you know others so I hope that helped thank you yeah and come on somebody we have anybody anybody on the left there's nobody on the left anybody on the right well with that I'm probably out of time okay so so thank you all and I want to say one other thing too just in closing the fact that I am here is well I'll just tell you real quick I never expected in a million years to be speaking at Work Camp Europe it was always my dream just to come here > (1:49:14) and really I wanted you know I would be home in the United States streaming word Camp you're up and thinking like God wouldn't that be cool to come to word Camp Europe the fact that I'm talking come on now that's like I still can't believe this happened so I want to thank the organizers the sponsors and all you wonderful people for for coming because it really means it will it's something I will remember forever at least for the rest of my life so thanks again yeah thank you okay yeah I'll help you off all right > (1:49:47) yeah I'm coming back okay so um yep that's uh it for the presentation today I do have one quick announcement for the next WP connect so that will be at 11. so in about 20 minutes uh it's about demo WordPress playground presented by Adam so it's in the same place if you're interested in collaborating and talking about the WordPress playground it's pretty cool if you haven't tried it out yet um it's on the trianti balcony so you just take the lift from track one to track two and it's from 11 till 12. > (1:50:32) um and other than that uh lunch will be soon and I hope to see you guys all back bye no thanks foreign hello oh there we go hey okay I was just > (2:10:31) gonna start yelling at one point so how is everybody doing now oh thank you yeah somebody's had some coffee all right what about this side of the room yeah thank you guys okay so now everyone's starting to wake up a little bit hopefully had some coffee and snacks um okay so I will uh actually I just realized I haven't introduced myself at all in all of the other tracks so I am Emma I'll be the emcee for this track uh so just do some uh word Camp uh General announcements and then I will leave and > (2:11:04) get to the good stuff so I'm sure you guys all know now that the center of the Expo has the information center uh swag area and lost and found so if you lost anything or found anything or anyone go there and they will help you out if not just ask somebody in a blue shirt uh there's also the community booth on the way to the the middle of the Expo so you can ask questions there and also trade your WordPress um postcards if you are do doing that you will have to answer a question but I will give you the question at the end of > (2:11:41) this session so other things there is Tai Chi today at three o'clock in the wellness track and a hike afterwards after word Camp's over so the hike will leave around 6 20. everyone had a lot of fun yesterday I had no energy for a hike but I think it'll be really good if you guys are looking for some Wellness um and then the Q a it will be on track one at four so if you're interested in seeing that uh just head over there you can send questions online I'm sure the microphones will be super long lines so > (2:12:16) uh maybe if you have a really a question you're dying to ask maybe send a social media and then the after party today uh at the low hand nightclub so you'll get some tree coupons some food and it'll just be a good time so hopefully we'll see you all there uh okay so without further Ado let me uh introduce Toby to the stage so can we get a huge round of applause for him but uh thank you I will uh just quickly ask it's not really Toby is it uh well my name is too many strange sounds in that that you > (2:12:55) are hard to pronounce for non-swedish people so ever since I left Sweden some 22 years ago everyone calls me Toby and I'm fine with that even in Sweden the next time would usually be Tober with two bees but there is another reason for that I picked up this notebook here the other day it has the morse code on the cover and here you can see that b is a quite long character so if I say 2B with only one B then it is shorter and of course to be with i instead of um why because why is a long one I is did it and Y is > (2:13:43) okay well either way thank you Toby everybody thank you so yeah we have a problem or we had the problem and we will walk through it together so WordPress celebrates 20 years we made the special nice site we translated this site vp20 to 29 and a half languages the half languages Arabic but I mean they probably didn't have time to do all of it and then it suddenly occurred in the meter Channel that the Japanese site is down but only the Japanese side to me that is a clear sign that this is probably something about > (2:14:43) internationalization or and or localization because otherwise single language would be hit so I will call this the Japanese Enigma this problem will follow us today we will think a little bit about it but in the meantime I will give you some good hints about the biggest problems you can try to avoid as a developer when you're writing code for plugins and themes to make sure that it will be possible to translate this to all these 70 different languages that we maintain I mean I think this is great as a developer you > (2:15:29) can write code you do it all in English perhaps you know Dutch or Finnish and you make your own translation that's fine but then you have all these volunteers people who use your code and I think that's I really think that this plugin should be so yeah this is how you write my strange name turbion filner I'm Swedish I live in Barcelona since 11 years but I left Sweden before that I have worked in various counters in the Middle East in Russia I'm fluent in Russian as well and yeah I have a question > (2:16:16) who in this room don't speak English as your native language okay and who here has English as their native language huh okay so this pretty much matches what we have in the world right five percent of the world's population speak English as their native language then there is another 10 give or take percent who know English but it's not the native language and the question for you as a developer or Plugin owner is are you developing for the whole world or only for the blue areas right and the situation with WordPress itself > (2:17:15) we had a cut over point in 2017 six years ago where at one day we suddenly noticed that hey more than half of all WordPress sites that we know of all the WordPress sites that are constantly pinging us and asking if there are any updates to go and get are using other languages than U.S English Okay is incomplete stop help us get to 100 percent word written by contributing a translation and this last part is clickable you've got this HF some nice HTML um this screenshot I took from another language person for Afghanistan and it hasn't > (2:18:08) been translated yet but you can still see the funny thing that it is a right to left language so of course the cursor is blinking to the right but this is Powerpoint PowerPoint doesn't blink so um but you can still get the idea and now let's talk at the top five things ah also here if you already know what the problem is please I think it's better if you keep try quiet for two reasons first of all let your neighbors also try to figure because this is like a little thing to it's nice if you manage to > (2:18:48) figure it out before everyone spells it out in real time and also if you're right now already shout out what the problem is then I will nominate you to be the next Global Mentor for polygloss so number five two long strings as in if you put in the string uh the whole body of an email that explains the full process and it is like one page and a half or if you have well several paragraphs this will well it is possible to do and we do it of course but it's hard to translate in our user interfer if I'm > (2:19:36) the translation reviewer I need to see the source segment I need to see the translation segment and I need to see some references and some comments and even with my 17 inch screen that gets tricky right so it's hard to translate it's hard to review and it gets really hard to fix so-called fuzzy matches a fuzzy match is when the translation memory has a translation since before of a string that is very close to what we have now perhaps just a warm letter is capitalized or there is an yeah yeah you're left to right yeah that > (2:20:27) will be here yeah um a DOT at the end that has been added or removed and that is speaking a different string and it needs to be checked and if you need to compare a long saw string that is like half a page long and figure out what has changed can I still use this translation or do I need to change anything it's not easy and also of course the sad thing about if I have spent 15 minutes on translating this huge email and I gets credited for only one string that's not nice right so that was two long strings now number > (2:21:10) four two short strings so if here I'm thinking about like just one or two words um a good word that we could see here could be like uh clear cache yeah that's quite I mean it's an action and it's something that you're so it's good but still sir Post Yeah post is my favorite but it comes I have a on the next slide I have something about that so I was trying to figure out something else oh in the talk we had yesterday the workshop they said lead is that such a dangerous word because you don't know it is uh you can > (2:22:07) have a lead uh that you connect your dog to and then you go for a walk or you can have a lead for your hand when you're walking down the staircase or you can have leads when you're trying to sell something that is a possible future customer or also another thing let's say the string is just a capital letter t um then you start looking into the code and you see that oh yes that could be Tuesday or it could be Thursday right or something else I don't know so if in this case with post or where it's just the letter key or a letter s > (2:22:56) which could be Saturday or Sunday um you really should use underscore X in get text we use the source string itself as the database key to find the right translation but if you use the underscore X then you add a couple or more what well one word may be enough just to clarify the context and then if the support of the translation key so still don't put a lot of explanations that those who should put in a translators comment before and then you have this thing that will just indicate where this should go and the number three two short strict > (2:23:49) aren't we right so this is a different case two short strings in the meaning that you should not use short strings that you try to build together programmatically you know they say they have a string new and I'm very afraid it's new and the space and then there is another string somewhere else that says post and then suddenly I realized that oh there was a space before that word post or page or something and then programmatically they are combining this into these wonderful phrases that work perfectly fine in > (2:24:32) English but in Swedish the word new needs to be translated in different ways depending on whether it's a new page or a new post or if it is plural I mean new pages that's a different word for new right and it's the same in many languages and your European you know this I mean if you speak Spanish or French or something else then this comes quite naturally but for those of you who watch this live streamed in the US there are languages out there that don't combine in exactly the same way and in exact the same order that you do in > (2:25:19) English and this is important to keep in mind so you need to build complete decent sentences and if you need to put some variable inside this yeah you need to use printf or something like that and don't be afraid of including an HTML tag I mean the polygloss team has seen those before and we don't get too scared of them um yeah grammatical congruence word order all these things um are things that are can mess things up if you don't think carefully and also include punctuation marks in your strings don't add them separately > (2:26:17) in just the same reason that you shouldn't use CSS code that enforce capitalization because capitalization differs between languages or well if you have a question mark at the end nice but in Spanish we need to put an inverted question mark before the question or in French you need to put a space before some punctuation marks right I mean a colon Cannot just be a cool one of course you need to have an a non-breaking space before I mean that you knew that right so next thing is not really an error but something that can be made much better > (2:27:02) being reachable so you have made a wonderful plugin and then there are some internationalization hiccups that the translators find and they would love to help you because when we help you you help us right I mean if you make it string translatable then I can translate it better and you can do this in various ways the easiest way that is already there is of course that if you have a Plugin or theme in the repository then you can receive input that way so I have written several posts in specific plugin and theme forums where I said dear developer > (2:28:00) here is a thing that really would be good if you could fix and that means that keep an eye on your Forum because there may be useful stuff there now and then if you Outsource your support handling yeah um remind them that if they see this kind of bike reports that they really should not be afraid of forwarding it to you but there are more ways you can do I guess most of the people here are already on slack but if you are not bring up your phone activate your QR Scanner and go and register in slack and then in your readme > (2:28:45) add a comment that bug reports are welcome via slack that's great I mean you can get very quick connections there so while you scan that I will have a sip of water okay done if you're using GitHub for your well development then by all means link to your GitHub projects in your readme because then we will happily some of us at least go and open an issue for you and some more Brave polyglots would even drop a pull request and that means that you can get some of your internationalization errors fixed > (2:29:49) just by accepting them nice right and then there is one more thing we are experimenting with feedback directly inside the translation platform still a little bit unstable in terms of yeah the platform itself works but I have a feeling that now and then messages don't get through all the way if you would like to dive into this a little bit then grab your phone again and take this or this much thing you can do is I will give you a link later on so you can download the whole presentation and I will not redact these QR codes they will > (2:30:40) be there um yeah and this bigger QR code is for this longer URL okay if I go any problems if I go to the next slide Okay so it's time for the next clue in our Japanese enigma so this is how this uh Source string was translated into Japanese I'm not going to pronounce this I don't speak Japanese but one funny thing we can see here is of course that I talked about punctuation marks and you see that Japanese doesn't use normal dots they have small circles instead I think it's really nice and beautiful but it's also a clear sign > (2:31:34) that things happen in a different way so yeah any problem if you go further and we go to number one in our list of things that bothers me as a translator I take that as a okay go ahead or if you are asleep then that's fine too but I think we should be fine so the big problem that we see all the time every no not every but a lot of Young Smart Developers or just like me lazy people they like wonderful efficient shortcuts and then at some point when they program and they write code and they feel the Poetry of this code > (2:32:39) and then they realize that oh I have this case here where I need to write something if it is singular that is Mean One Piece and something else if it is more than one I saw a case a few months ago where they had something for woocommerce where if there was more than one article then they should indicate how many articles and how much was each article in price and then the rule would give the total to the right or to the left if you were left or right or left of course um but there is a problem with that the this command underscore m > (2:33:34) is a great tool when used correctly and for the right thing so the purpose of underscore n is to make it possible to linguistically correctly translate strings that include a number that include a number so the value n that you use to steer whether it should be singular or plural must be a part of that string you can see an example here how it would work nicely so this is a correctly written thing of course you would need to escape somewhere later on but uh I'm skipping that part right now because you know that better than either > (2:34:32) and since n must be a part of the string this means that you have to use printf statement or something similar it also means that you indicate you have to include this variable n Twice first as a parameter to underscore m to select which form we should use whether it should be singular and plural actually that's what I'm coming to now it's not about singular and plural this is about getting the right form and in many languages we have three different forms or less or more and then of course you need to have n > (2:35:20) also as a value for insertion via the um printf statement so here is where it looks right nice I'm in Swedish just like English we have singular for one and we have plural for everything else be it zero or B at 25 or something else those of you who know friends know that there is already a small difference between French and English and that is for zero in English you would say zero umbrellas in French they use the singular form for zero so it's slightly different but still very much the same and it would use well work > (2:36:06) nicely in most of these cases but when we came to Japanese for instance if the number is a part of the string then nothing in other places of this string will change depending on which number we had which means that you don't have any singular or plural it's just one string so those this pair of strings in the source string will get only one single translation for Japanese although of course in Japanese you can give a generic plural it's possible it's just that if you have a number then you wouldn't do it and therefore > (2:36:51) those strings would need to be two separate strings and you would need to use your own program to specify which of these cases you have if it is a table heading or something and here is the well this is the evidence right in Arabic every occurrence of underscore M needs to be translated six times zero is one case one another two a third case three four five next one and then if it's from 11 12 and 13 and something then you have a lot next to us and then the last case is if it's 100 or more then it's the sixth so they have six > (2:37:38) even well the fingers on one hand doesn't fit for this right so again remember and tell your co-developers that if you are using underscore n then n must be a part of the string which means you need to use printf and you need to insert this variable twice in your code and it's time for our enigma so we will have some intense waiting time where you try to figure this out and I will now give you the last clue on this again once more so this is how it was translated and we will count downwards five four three two one > (2:38:29) zero here we go so the problem here is and how many people guessed this before I show this yeah that's great it took me some time also somebody else found this out before I did because in all this Japanese I just got stuck but it's good we have some people here so this percent sign here of course since it will be put inside the printf statement it needs to be escaped so how could we fix this uh various ways any suggestions yeah so one way would have been of course on the translation level you can fix this by just setting a double > (2:39:14) percent sign or you could change it to just right percent as a word like they had in the source string or actually the funny and very strange way they actually sold it in this case they changed it to a different percent sign well it looks exactly the same but the double bytes character right oh now um so the developer here they could of course have been smart he could have written something that didn't use the percent but just say fully translated and this would never have happened or they could have written percent with > (2:39:54) the double percent sign in the source then new translators would have missed this or if they would have missed it they would quickly have realized what the problem was so that was the Enigma and we are about to finalize here so we should summarize and I've got two minutes left so I will try to speak no that's okay we will manage so the international say internationalization details to remember avoid two long strings avoid two short strings don't try to combine or build sentences or words out of short strings > (2:40:39) and be reachable for feedback and make sure that you include the value of n in your string if you're using the underscore n statement that was just the tip of the iceberg there is more I have a quite long explanation and I would be happy for feedback on how I can make it uh better however can cover things that I have not mentioned there yet if you go to my site there you will also be able to find the download yeah it should be published 12 minutes ago but the first guy who gets there will just trigger the Chrome so the second guy > (2:41:24) will get the download and uh yeah so that's what I mean when if you do internationalization right then you can double the reach of your code because you make it available for all the world and most of all I would say that this is also has a deeper meaning when it comes to the mission of Wordpress we say democratize publishing and one very important aspect of democratizing publishing is of course to enable it to all those 85 percent of the world who don't know English thank you all right yeah oh nope there we go okay > (2:42:26) sweet so now we have some time for Q a uh we have two microphones set up one on either side uh in both aisles so um come on down throw some elbows if someone's in your way and ask away oh I got a shy crowd you need to walk down there and ask your question I guess yep I think we've got a taker yeah I've got some hello my name is Luigi I'm From Italy yeah uh I would like to ask you something about I I don't know if this if this is the right context but um recently we are using more and more > (2:43:08) the internationalization module uh in our scripts and everything is fine as long as we use the uh set script translations new function which loads the Json translation rather than the traditional p-o-m-o translation files what we are finding a little difficult is when we are we need to use dynamically loaded scripts like lazy loading scripts from for example react so we don't want to load our components all our components because that will impact the performance of the website so we are forced to Lazy load in some > (2:43:51) components and even though we are trying to follow the instruction from for example automatic jetpack is doing that and is giving some sort of instruction we believe that we follow what they are doing but still when some components are lazy loaded rather than loaded from the page load the translation file doesn't get picked up yeah and we find it very difficult for us because our customers always complain oh these strings cannot be translated we are trying to translate it but we are we don't manage to translate > (2:44:25) it so yeah um the I have a very easy answer to this I'm not the right person you could try to reach out to Sweet Speedy um um because he was one of the key developers of this functionality you um I don't know exactly which part of the slack would be the right place to ask about this but probably core internationalization would be a suitable Channel where you can find the right people to ask this of course I mean if if you have internationalization questions anything except this then by all means feel welcome to come > (2:45:15) to our slack Channel polyglots and ask there I mean since you are a truly Global team there are almost always some experienced people around and they will be able to give you much better answers than your traditional rubber duck who is otherwise helping you with your troubleshooting and for these props I need to give props to give because it steps I will need to give it back to their fishing poles afterwards thank you I hope I want something with my question then yeah okay thank you okay I have a question I guess while > (2:45:48) people are getting their courage to go to the microphone um I was just kind of wondering uh what you thought about Google translate like are you able to use the red or any other tool like Depot or a smartphone yeah yes it's exploding right now with a lot of different machine translation Solutions and it's a great tool it speeds up the translation process and the AI things give us every week slightly better quality but I would say one that as a developer or plug-in owner or something never try even don't try to publish uh > (2:46:34) translations that were just machine translated but not checked by a human because you will get incorrect terminology you will get awkward things that just don't fit right it always needs this lost human touch so the translation can go quicker we will be able to reuse previous translations from the translation memory more and more but uh we have that is one of our biggest rules that don't just blindly approve unchecked machine translation so very good question thank you thank you for a really nice presentation > (2:47:19) and I would just like to comment this live translation feature that is introduced for the plugins because as you mentioned especially in for instance for Slavic languages the order of the words in the sentence is different so now when you load the plugin and works on the plugin live you can see you know how often the word is in the wrong place and this thing with uh not like one has one form and then two to five two to four has another form and then five on his third form is very often in case with Slavic languages since you know > (2:48:02) Russian you probably know how that goes uh that was more of the Commendation for this live feature but I have a question are you a ham radio operator uh yeah you may have me in your logs if you were active in the second half of the 80s um Sierra my dear Roma Yankee Bravo but um I haven't been on there for ages for me uh amateur radio was very much about the combination of technology and communication and guess what the internet came around right hello yes hello thank you for a talk uh more than a question I I have another Pitfall > (2:48:50) that I would like to to tell some plug-in developers to be aware of is that don't do not assume the length of a string so oh yes do not make like oh yes that is a very good thing in your layout but first of all I have someone you always can go and ask about did we do it right when it comes to right to left languages because we mess it up all the time and the other thing is yes leave at least 50 percent extra room and perhaps even try that okay if something is double the length will it totally break my sight or will > (2:49:32) it just nicely wrap to a new line inside and everything will just adjust that is a very good comment thank you yeah well you were here before so we'll start with you and we should try to do it quickly here yep um thank you for the great talk thank you um you mentioned um that you think it's okay for um like putting HTML in in the strings to be translated I was just wondering how um you handle things like escaping like for example if you use like Escape HTML on a string and it has a link in it uh obviously that'll strip the link out so > (2:50:15) like you know what what sort of approaches do you take uh yeah that's a very good thing so if you need to put some weird things inside the string and you know that you need to escape it later on the best thing you can do is to use a printf statement and you just include it via variable and then you make sure that you escape everything else and then you put it together right so that's one way you can do it Escape it in the right place and then insert what you need to insert um or sometimes you can just try to > (2:50:47) fine-tune how you escape and what you escape but all these long escaping functions for translations is your final protection against evil translations so it's very good to have them and always have them because sometimes translate translations may come from unexpected places and you don't want that to be what breaks your side or well your users side somewhere else hi hey thanks for the representation uh what is your opinion on translating some things which are very technical or are meant for developers like for example > (2:51:29) like token or API response I don't mean maybe there are better examples but that are meant for developers and maybe if you translate them to a local language the the developer who is going to probably see this one understanding yeah so there are a lot of developers who barely know English back in the school many many years ago I did some school work about computers and this was like when computers weren't really a thing yet so yeah I was a nerd I guess because I read this full book about machine code > (2:52:15) for the microprocessor z-logs z80 and my English teacher was like wow are you able to read that and I didn't tell her the truth that you know this specific language is just a different way of coding stuff and it just happens to be kind of English but I mean I managed to understand it because it's very simple language but yes it can be useful I would say in instructions around how to use an API but I would never dare to translate the API parameters or something like that because then it will just break things > (2:53:02) I guess I don't know if I answered your question or some other question but not just not the code parameters but some technical real Goods but they're very technical yeah they're meant for developers but here as well I mean there are plugins for all kinds of people I mean there are plugins that are aimed at developers and still yes by all means make them translatable that's nice and uh polygloss I mean we have tens of thousands of polygons com contributing some of them are very technical and then of course a vast > (2:53:44) majority well not very technical and this is their way of contributing still but you translate those strings that you feel that you understand and you can handle and if you feel a bit unsure then you ask someone else to come and have a look did I translate it right or what kind of terminology should we use here so um it's still doable and as a developer yes by all means make it possible right thank you now you're going to cut me off right I will cut you off yeah but let's give another round of applause > (2:54:23) [Applause] come on keep it going guys yeah there you go alrighty uh one quick announcement feel free to walk it's okay you can still listen you can listen and walk in don't mean to call you out I don't know why I was staring just at you oh no I sat okay let me just get to it um so the last thing is um the next clue or question for the uh word Camp postcards so if you're collecting those if you head over to the community Booth you just have to answer the question when and where was the first Ward Camp so if you know the > (2:55:04) answer or you know how to Google you can go there and get your next uh word WordPress word Camp postcard and I'll see you for the next presentation thanks guys hello oh okay sorry hi that's the > (3:07:42) one way to start by cursing in front of a large group of people so how you guys all doing right now oh okay how are you guys doing all right there you go I know it's like right before lunch and everyone's just like give me the food but uh okay so we have an awesome panel for you uh in just a few moments I will just do a quick announcement uh so there will be of course there will be lunch starting in about an hour uh there is the group photo that's also at one o'clock uh it's in the outdoor Plaza I guess you could > (3:08:16) run and take the photo or it's going to be photo food I don't know pick your battle um and then yeah the lunch is going to be in all the same areas as yesterday level zero and level negative one um with the kosher and Jala meals on the negative one floor and um yeah so without further Ado they're gonna do an introduce introduction as well but I will introduce your host Siobhan can we get a round of applause for her yep we also have the panel Ben miles Carrie and viola uh and they will be talking for about 30 > (3:08:56) minutes uh then you guys will have the opportunity to ask q a questions there's two mics already set up so if you have some questions for them just hit there have fun hi everybody good to see so many of you here are you having a good time I mean this is going to be a great time talking about Enterprise WordPress so I'm excited to see so many of you I'm just going to introduce our panel before we get into it so we've got um Ben May who's the MD of the code company which is a WordPress development company that > (3:09:27) works with Enterprise globally we have Carri deals a freelancer with 20 plus years of web development experience she's worked with everyone from small locally owned businesses to Fortune 500 companies we've got vo lagrunner head of marketing at inside where she's responsible for marketing their services to the Enterprise and we have miles longer lower Craig who is currently the CEO of xwp which is Enterprise WordPress development agency and Miles comes to us comes to Wordpress via a long career in Enterprise > (3:10:03) organizations so thanks to the panel we've got really broad range of experience here so it presents a really great opportunity to discuss the issues of Enterprise WordPress not just in terms of delivery we've decided to broaden it out because of the opportunity presented and we're going to talk about sales and clients acquisition and through delivery and the whole client life cycle so to kick us off Enterprise can be hard to Define when I ask people what Enterprises I often get different answers so Miles as someone > (3:10:39) who's come to us from Enterprise can you kick us off with a definition a definition of enterprise thanks for that it's not easy an Enterprise client I feel it's just like any client the basics of the client relationship is there but it tends to differ in terms of its scale its complexity the stakeholders and the expectations that an Enterprise has that maybe will be different from a like a small to medium business client yeah if you want to delve into those things it's it's a rabbit hole of uh > (3:11:13) differences and bullet points and things so we may cover some of them but I think essentially those are the components yeah I think Carrie you work with very diverse clients from small businesses to Enterprise and what's your experience of the differences between them well I think you hit the nail on the head miles but with a as a as a solo practitioner the layers are pretty simplified if I want to decide what tech stack to do I don't need to consult anyone uh I just asked the uh I ask myself hey self > (3:11:43) what's what am I liking uh but of course a Enterprise scale you get the opportunity to work with the team and collaborate with a bunch of really smart people so the opportunity to learn from each other and work on bigger and more exciting projects than you probably would as a solo what about uh the different challenges that they face in terms of Enterprise would anyone like to go into some of those different challenges experiencing with Enterprises Enterprise versus small business well I think if I delve under > (3:12:11) though details of scale you're talking about scale of maybe internal and external users and customers scale of uh data the scale of uh maybe the number of Brands they have complexity can be around complex systems Integrations that they have with their own bespoke systems or a plethora of quite Enterprise level third-party Integrations uh the security the expectations around robustness and performance at scale and security to some of uh you know our clients have security issues against nation-state threats and things > (3:12:47) and then also stakeholders right you're dealing with very large Enterprises the cycle times may be longer you have to get through Architectural Review boards internal boards or you can make to get through procurement and legal and marketing and CEOs and things so let alone finance and uh those kind of things so it just adds a richness and we like we enjoy working with these companies but it adds a richness of uh complexities yeah a lot more Cooks involved in the back in the cake I think uh one of the uh I guess things > (3:13:22) I think about in terms of Wordpress is it's it's consumer software you know it's it's built with uh uh end users in mind it's got a mission of democratizing publishing and one of its selling points is usability and ease of installation and so the traditional WordPress user someone who's setting up their own blog or you know doing the five minute install and setting up their website uh and this is a really different target audience to the Enterprise buyer he gets different needs and as you know we've > (3:13:54) just talked about has different problems so Viola how do you approach marketing uh towards the Enterprise buyer so like first I would like to tell you a small story because before I worked for inside I worked for a logistics company and it was a startup and we used WordPress and we used it and we liked it but the thing was the founders they were not taking care of their website for around one year or two years not updating anything and then they installed some plugins and the website was crashing down and that was the > (3:14:27) moment when Insight helped me out in this moment I was like yeah what should I do and yeah afterwards we were growing a lot and then we wanted to make a relaunch and they told me the founders told me Viola now we are not going to use WordPress anymore and I said okay but it is scalable and secure and they said no we don't think so look at the old example and they said let's take type 3 and when they told me this I decided to quit and yeah I'm sad no but um so I see here a problem with scalability security it's > (3:15:08) not the problem of Wordpress because WordPress is great and it is scalable it is secure but the image so WordPress is having for the bigger companies there's not that good image and that's very sad because yeah like I said it is scalable and secure and I think we need to change this image and we used in marketing especially case studies because I see you know often this marketing tricks they are not having a good view so if we talk to Enterprise clients they want to see real case studies and often also > (3:15:44) they want to have a contact here they can contact so yeah that they know they are telling the truth WordPress is not just a block system it can be also scalable and secure and yes that's in marketing like it is and it's a little bit different so it's not about writing a thousand block articles because yeah the Enterprise um audience is a little bit different here so yeah yeah one of the things that we find at human made is uh you know we work with lots of Enterprise clients and they're sometimes a little bit they > (3:16:17) don't want their name or the logo out there and that's like a big challenge that we've got you know it really helps us and helps them if we can talk about our stories that of the things that we've built together so how do you any any of the panelists got an idea of how you tackle that challenge of getting your clients to agree to case studies yeah I think uh sometimes you just can't get a past that barrier how much you try but I think we have a um some of you may know we have a Tonight Show as part of > (3:16:46) xwp so we actually make it about the client not so much about xwp so we really try and do the mark any back and we talked about hey we can get you represented either at a personal level and get your brand your personal brand out there um or your all your company's brand out there through uh the marketing material right so I think they that's a lot easier for them as an internal stakeholder to go and Champion inside with the corporate comms Department to say hey look we want to there's a message either for myself or the > (3:17:17) company's brand to get out there so they may be in a certain industry but uh and it could be you know there might be a publisher and things but also Publishers also want to be seen as Progressive in terms of how they do Innovative storytelling and things so we kind of look for an angle for them to promote themselves right of course we mentioned HWP along the way right yeah so yeah and sometimes we find um those case studies can be sort of mentioned in commercial and confidence in discussions the challenge is we need them inside the > (3:17:46) funnel at that point about have those conversations so that really forces the marketing strategy to be around authoritative positioning um some vagueness around the kinds of work that's done but ultimately requires a little jump of Faith to have that conversation and then to try and validate some of them or nuts and bolts of projects that we can't really publish but we've definitely done and can talk about more privately in the sales process just a just a general question for the before anyone to answer > (3:18:12) um why should Enterprise clients even want to use consumer software there are loads of cms's out there or dxps that are built with them in mind like site core or adobe why should they be making the choice of Wordpress against those that are developed specifically for them and their needs okay I'll start the conversation and let somebody else take it where but I think going back to the ownership of your own content and using open source software uh both from licensing and expense for the life cycle of a project perspective > (3:18:47) can be more affordable than say maybe an AM or Salesforce type solution but also ultimately building your house on your own land so to speak yeah I'm sorry um it's also there's I guess it's not it doesn't necessarily have to be consumer software it is if we let it become super consumer software um but yeah we obviously talk about WordPress like as a Swiss army knife it can sort of do a lot of things but it's having that clear it sort of goes back to the marketing and positioning message > (3:19:18) of it being a 20 blog software or something that could be a seven figure project that powers a you know sophisticated software so um it's trying to Buck that challenge um that stigma that sort of does come along with WordPress have a sort of organically grown to date I put a challenge as a consumer software I think it's enterprise software because the WordPress ecosystem and the projects that's large enough to support multiple personas including the Enterprise persona but also I would say that they > (3:19:46) don't have to use WordPress they shouldn't use WordPress what they should be using is a integrated platform or system that achieves the business outcome and when you sell to them you should be talking about their outcomes and not WordPress right WordPress we know WordPress is a value is a valuable um you know platform and Tool uh but to a certain extent you know past the technical people don't pretty much care about WordPress they care about their business outcomes and WordPress can deliver those right so we would say you > (3:20:14) can go and use Adobe right or it's like or anything else um but you may not get those outcomes that you want now or when you scale later as well right so those are the kind of angles you would take right thanks and so uh Ben when you're pitching to Enterprise clients what platforms are you pitching against and when you lose why are you losing yeah I was thinking about like having done this for probably a decade now uh in different situations from you know publicly traded companies to government things like that > (3:20:47) um and there's sort of two buckets I could think of that were like simplified it for this purpose anyway and the first is like losing out to things like you know a sanity contentful a sort of a really technically Advanced product and those decision makers are typically CIO ctOS sometimes product people or internal engineering teams and I think that that camp is a um either an education or or poorly educated about bad um bad experiences with WordPress or or lack of understanding of where it goes and they can sometimes be brought > (3:21:18) around of of convincing that actually it can and that's where you know case studies help demonstrate scale or you know somebody says well you know our site's Got 5 000 taxonomies I don't think WordPress will scale to that and you can turn around and say well here's something with 500 000 and that scale's fine um and then the other Camp is probably the ones that go to a sort of all-in-one solution AEM kendaco cycle or whatever else and that's a I think the simplest way those ones win is because it has a > (3:21:45) really simple sales story to tell of we'll take you out to lunch we'll get you to sign the contract and it's got everything you need in the box and that's a harder one to turn around sometimes because WordPress is more of a Swiss army knife a framework or whatever else um to build you know a full experience on top of especially when you need to start talking about plugins and platforms and how it's a really complicated buy cycle so if you have someone who's making a decision who understands that and > (3:22:13) understands the context of the benefits of building on your own land having interoperability between plugins and components and various pieces and not being vendor lock-in and all this sort of stuff then you can overcome that conversation but sometimes the sexiness of just saying I can pay you know a million dollars to pentico and I just get everything is really appealing especially if the organization doesn't have that internal maturity to understand what like how to do this and sometimes even as agencies we see > (3:22:41) they don't understand what they're actually trying to do and we're going to end up being on the hook for them not understanding how what they're actually trying to do so so how do you overcome that for the latter one that's that's a harder one sometimes if it's just not the right decision makers that you just can't overcome it because if you try and if you if you promise something that's unpromisable um when the you know push comes to shove at some point and they're like well we > (3:23:05) just assumed we could do X and said well no you understood this all along it's an open source we're building we have to build the layer on top sometimes you don't want to have those conversations while WordPress is the sort of the way it is um in the terms of like the modularity of the ecosystem that is something I think will be slowly maturing and as more agencies are delivering the Enterprise having more standards in that space But it's definitely um a challenging from an education perspective > (3:23:32) so I'm miles you talked about uh the outcomes that Enterprise the Enterprise fire wants like what sort of problems are they coming to you with whenever they are sort of looking for WordPress uh uh our clients I call them Enterprise storytellers with complex needs uh because they earned the Enterprise on all the um kind of the angles we talked about Enterprise before but essentially they're trying to tell this story and that could be actually like a publisher say man bites dog type story or could be a corporate trying to tell the story uh > (3:24:05) to to an audience there but they have complex needs right so uh but if anything they want three things any any Enterprise wants three things from a solution they want to be faster better cheaper right and faster it doesn't when I say that I don't mean like pay performance I mean they want to go faster to Market they want to have faster decision making they want to have faster Roi um and better means they really want to be better than their competition and that may be better in terms of a better Innovative storytelling uh it might be a > (3:24:36) better performance on the website maybe a better proposition to advertisers and cheaper is you know pretty much they want to be able to control the cost of the solution and particularly as it scales or Peaks uh because you know some of the solutions we put in place traffic wise are fairly high right and then resources intensive as well so they really want to be able to control those kind of things so um yeah those things changed over time you know in the past sort of five to ten years uh what Enterprise buyers are > (3:25:06) looking for how have they changed anyone you think how it will change how have they changed over the past five years or so their needs to just staying the same yeah I mean what that's pretty fundamental like what Mars is talking about my business perspective I think in the WordPress context some of the barriers have come down it's definitely become easier as there's more you know um more education more agencies demonstrating this happening um government you know using it if you can point to like you know > (3:25:36) whitehouse.gov type stuff that is definitely brings down a barrier um in those conversations that helps lower some of the hurdles to cross yeah I'm Carrie from uh I just want to talk about delivery and delivering Technical Solutions to uh to Enterprise um how do you turn the pressure to problems that Miles has been talking about into Technical Solutions what's your approach uh what I think Miles used what you said I really appreciated is the clients don't care necessarily how you get there or what uh what the tech looks like > (3:26:12) um if you're a hammer every problem might look like a nail but one of the the things working in with a team of people is the opportunity to kind of bring a toolbox of solutions to this you just want to go to your plugins page select all and enable auto updates just kidding don't no please don't ever do that um yes the WordPress release cycle definitely moves at a quicker clip than an Enterprise cycle and when you're integrating with so many different components just from a level of complexity standpoint it's not just > (3:26:52) click update and you know click through a few pages and make sure nothing broke it's understanding exactly what came out in a WordPress release and how every bit of that code affects every system that you're integrating with so for example sometimes WordPress not sometimes very frequently WordPress May roll out a security update but it may also be a feature update as well um so the challenge that an Enterprise may be to you want you do want to apply the security update but you have to go through and kind of extract that bit and > (3:27:28) apply it in a way that makes sense uh for the particular application you're running go through layers of regression testing Etc et cetera it's just a much more layered process anyone got any horror stories of uh when that's gotten wrong want to share with the audience I don't want to talk about horror stories but I do want to talk about delivery because at some point you know we can talk about buying and everything that at some point you know the rubber hits the road and you actually have to yeah to deliver and uh I think one where > (3:27:58) the Enterprise uh differs is that um the they they are quite mature and actually they they they probably you know do a lot of delivery on non-wordpress stuff as well so they have mature a lot of them have mature Cycles around non-production environments and you know cicd and automation testing and things so they just expect that from WordPress as well uh but some of them don't don't and they can make it very complex so part of the role I think for an Enterprise agency is to help educate internal teams or the client of how they > (3:28:29) should be managing Enterprise software as well internally and that can be you know from someone who just I don't want to do it patch and all this kind of stuff but a true Enterprise would have an affinity with that as well um but also you do get it in complexity and an Enterprise agency needs to be handled a variety of delivery methodologies some of them you know appreciate kanban or agile or you know agile or waterfall and the different contexts of different phases of the project as well and so they expect that > (3:28:56) ability for an Enterprise agency to Pivot and also to bring in the right resources at the right time through a complex project as well so it's it's the delivery can be quite complex as well and you know requirements change requirements bubble up there's conflict between the agency and the client around um you know what we're set up front what was in set up front and Discovery as you go so uh it's the delivery is also very complicated and so you need one of the things I like to say is WordPress is > (3:29:28) great you can use it for individuals and small to medium Enterprises and things it's not rocket surgery but sometimes it is right and so you need agencies who can do that rocket surgery and bring in uh you know the ecosystem to help deliver that complex layer right because the WordPress ecosystem is not big enough for every agency to be like that but some agencies have to operate that at that level right so because there is an introduction of a higher acquisition longer acquisition cycle and you know potentially higher overheads to support > (3:30:01) that kind of organization as well all right so yeah so speaking of Rocket surgery I'd like to talk a little bit about Gutenberg uh so uh good work was developed to make it easier for users to build Pages um uh Ben what's been the reception of Gutenberg with your clients I think the idea has been great of where moving away from the classic editor and that was never going to be a competitive CMS if that was our approach to publishing content in perpetuity um so definitely it's been a um step in the right direction I think > (3:30:34) like Harry's talking about with release management of Wordpress releasing changes and things like that um it's definitely created an additional layer of managing regressions and um when seemingly small releases come out very quickly some of the things that may not be immediately obvious uh cause headaches you know in production which sometimes are the only way you know these bugs are discovered so it usually requires buy-in to sort of at least have that level setting of this is what we're dealing with um open source we can't > (3:31:05) control it at one end of the spectrum you're like on the bleeding edge and you're rolling out like releases that come out straight away at the other end you're like through major versions behind because you're so worried about uh release management um that you're now having like uh head roadblocks with uh other plugins and things like that so it creates your own New Nightmare um even if you're up to date with security patching features are starting to break or behave in ways that are really hard to manage > (3:31:31) um so that's been a bit of a fine line to to work through especially when building native blocks and things like that as the technology changes having to explain that we need to go back and refactor certain things because standards have sort of the goal posts have shifted a little bit since it was first bought um so that's always a challenge to have those conversations uh because it's out of our control not necessarily something that anyone known was coming but that also is going to happen broadly with a > (3:31:57) lot of software anyway or you're going to be using something you know that looks like it was built 30 years ago as a CMS so you kind of take that with the good of having a pretty good Rich Pages being building article building experience being able to bring in like Dynamic functionality um previewing it pretty close uh to where it's going to live you know when it's published yeah anyone making any interesting uses of Gutenberg for your clients like building any cool blocks that you'd like to talk > (3:32:23) about are we not making use of it uh yeah I'm sure my team are right uh doing a lot of cool blocks for clients and they they demoed them and they think wow that's fantastic right so uh you know we pitch ourselves as a Mastery based agency and it certainly comes through in the demos we see we all do right the opportunity that's involved there so uh and I you know you go out there just in the um the booths outside and you see so many you know the exhibiting Mastery uh and uh the work that they're doing so uh yeah cool one > (3:32:57) of the nice things about where that's going I was going to say we're building an AI block just because you are as well I thought yeah the the one thing that like the direction of Gutenberg is the ability to sort of white label custom functionality in the CMS and make it a like fluid experience that's one of the challenges of like the sort of very much the authoring experience and then all the plugins that sit next to the CMS is that it feels like multiple systems especially when some plugins get very > (3:33:26) opinionated on design Styles and things like that Gutenberg is a way of managing the site that feels very cohesive and that's one thing that like the direction of where that's going I like um because if you are using an Enterprise CMS and things like that it just feels like one CMS you're not using one CMS with 12 other subsystems inside it so that's again takes a lot of self-discipline to make sure that you don't build blocks and things like that that just turn into you know a dog's > (3:33:53) breakfast of CMS authoring it's trying to find a polite way to you don't need to be polite it's fine and so look into the future um Viola um what can we do to better position WordPress to the Enterprise so I think it should start from scratch so it's important that we get a good image here WordPress and it is great you know it's about often the user and we need to share this so instead of just making case studies we should make success stories and tell them even the White House is using it oh > (3:34:31) my God that's in terms of security you know the White House is using Wordpress and that shows okay it is secure and I think we need to come together and we need to show this to the world and I think also everyone who is using Wordpress should share this knowledge um yeah because also some friends of mine they told me also now I'm working for a small agency and their WordPress is good but if I would work for a bigger one no because of security and I say what what I know and I told them how it is and I think we should all reaching > (3:35:06) out and I think also we should bring together some case studies and yeah to work together with the others because we are a big community and we are having this great Community behind of Wordpress and WordPress is great and it is secure and scalable and that's something the world needs to know and people need to know and yeah also the Enterprise companies need to know so that my thoughts I don't know what you think yeah I don't think you want to start me on this but I'm happy to go uh WordPress does not do a good job in > (3:35:47) sending itself to Enterprise um if I have a uh when I first started HWP and it got into it uh I have a guy um called Scotty from marketing and uh you know he's not a he's not a degenerator or anything but he's got it for marketing and uh so I said to him maybe my you know CEO my third my first thought leadership piece should be uh you know I was involved in Enterprise technology for over 20 years over 30 years I built you know one of the largest WordPress instances or the largest WordPress instances in the > (3:36:22) southern hemisphere it's a long title for this article don't worry I'm still going and uh but now I'm running one of the world's largest leading WordPress Enterprise WordPress agencies if I was to go back to my old job would I still buy WordPress right and uh and then the bulk of the article which is primarily uh will primarily be uh chat gbt written Connor says uh yes I would because it ticks all these boxes it has you know controller data freedom to publish uh you know scale security all these things > (3:36:53) that are just um you know Baseline stuff but uh WordPress does not make it easy for the Enterprise buyer to buy WordPress and I think that's what um as an ecosystem and as a layer of uh the Eco the ecosystem that it focuses on the Persona of the Enterprise buyer I think that's what we need to do because actually we're behind there's an existential threat that other alternatives are doing a better job at selling to the Enterprise buyer um and I think the WordPress ecosystem needs a healthy Enterprise WordPress > (3:37:27) agency layer just as it does with all the other rest of the WordPress ecosystem needs to be healthy but there is a challenge at front now to the the layer that focuses on Enterprise buyers right so we don't make it easy We There are definitely things we can do to make it easier um and you know there's a lot of people talking about that kind of stuff right so I think we just need to get organized around um you know actually getting some attraction in that space So when you say we we is it who takes responsibility for > (3:37:57) marketing WordPress to Enterprise is it wordpress.org is it the Mac make.wordpress.org is it WordPress businesses um is it us all individually who who is responsible for making WordPress appealing to the Enterprise buyer don't take a go at that then yeah I think that is um I think the Enterprise agencies uh there's something to be had of bringing those together to sort of share the experiences they're seeing on the front of the ground um and there have been some events around that this week and uh talking > (3:38:30) about uh you know a future that could come together um because I think a lot of the top talent if you think of in the project uh a lot of that is probably coming either through or employed by these leading agencies because they're doing these big healthy projects that have margins to then support having people who can do you know to be dedicated to core and things like that so the agencies need WordPress and WordPress needs the agencies uh at this sort of scale uh for it to be healthy so I think the um there's yeah some sort of an alliance > (3:39:00) almost uh to bring people with a shared interest of uh bringing these resources together to you know Creator the good for anyone who works in this space and I think every think every word for us behind so if someone else is winning a pitch and it's for WordPress it's great so because the ecosystem gets bigger and is yeah improving absolutely uh I don't you asked specifically whose responsibility as a and I think it's important uh to say that it's not the responsibility of core uh and it's this > (3:39:39) is not about changing the actual software that we're using at a core level uh but has has been used the word Alliance and some great conversations going around this week about uh Enterprise or Enterprise WordPress agencies aligning and alliancing to I think I made a book that word um but coming together to bring uh kind of what the the common denominator of what it looks like to serve the needs of an Enterprise buyer and aligning on that um and then the the Optics of that from a messaging standpoint of I mean I'm just kind of > (3:40:19) saying what you have already said but uh and probably more eloquently and at that but uh so I'll just I'll stop there I think uh we can use an open source ethos to figure this one out because the open source esoph pretty much talks about if you care and you're passionate you stand up you put the investment in the time and the thought space to uh say yeah I'm going to help solve this problem right and uh you know got classic examples of that in the actual WordPress project of people saying yeah > (3:40:47) I'm gonna I'm gonna step up my hand up and you know solve performance right and be part of the performance team or create collaborate and that kind of thing so I think there's an example of that and we should be using open source esos of how to manage the governance of anything around um tackling the how we make it easier for the Enterprise buyer to buy WordPress and I think what we've seen probably is uh you know a kind of a gaggle of uh initial Gaggle say look you know we're we're kind of passionate we > (3:41:14) care about it we want to stand up we've put some investment of time and and you know headspace and stuff into solving what that would be and I think it's an embryonic kind of Gaggle but uh I think there's an opportunity for that you know Gaggle to get some some action and momentum and start asking questions how should we be having a cohesive narrative and a key for the message to Enterprise buyers right and I think that layer the gag order layer should really be you know the esos there should be > (3:41:41) um you know if the Enterprise buyer doesn't care about it then we don't care about it right because there are so many other people in the WordPress ecosystem who care about other personas and this Gaggle should just hear about the Enterprise by our Persona I think on that note I'm going to open up the floor to questions has anyone got a question for the panel uh we've got about 10 minutes I see a question at the back uh hand up there oh there's two mic thing here sorry you come down sorry I didn't actually see > (3:42:13) what was going on um yeah hello uh questions pretty basic how do you start how did you find your first Enterprise client the first inter how do we get the first Enterprise client right uh I think for xwp we're a bit lucky because I was the first Enterprise client on the Enterprise side and uh so I was already kind of um uh bought in and actually on that story uh you know I've been doing Enterprise cms's for you know over 20 years only 30 years and uh We've you know on the Enterprise side we've built our own we've got many > (3:42:53) closed sourced applications so much so the last one we did before we went WordPress uh we broke essentially we customized it so much it it was off the upgrade path so when we actually went to we had a lot of Open Source as well you know lamp stack and other stuff inside the Enterprise so we were going to go to open source and we um you know we looked at uh WordPress and Drupal but WordPress kind of uh smashed repair out of the park on that former Enterprise buyer site um but uh when we've did the implementation of it the hashtag was > (3:43:25) hashtag don't break WordPress right because we really wanted to keep keep it pure and uh so that came from an internal inside the Enterprise um aspiration to use the benefits of Open Source software so that was probably lucky um but I think that on the flip side of that uh when we were you know kind of got sold on WordPress uh you know with automatic and VIP at the time they were espousing the benefits of uh you know WordPress as an Enterprise CMS and things like that so Carrie I was wondering if you want to pick up on that > (3:43:59) as a freelancer how did you get from you know writing about Genesis to picking up your first Enterprise client well I went and worked with a renowned agency serving Enterprise clients at crowd favorite as a solo uh operator I was not in a position and probably I don't want to say universally you can't but as a single uh developer or service somebody delivering services to a client it's just not scalable uh at that level to serve the needs of a really large project so I would say most definitely needing to be part of a team > (3:44:40) let's go about four more people answering ask us any questions we're going to move on thank you uh who's next with next year um everyone's pointing well you were here first so let's go with you thank you very much uh so one of the technical issues with WordPress when you're selling to Enterprise Sciences most of the corporate clients expect you to have a development environmental staging user acceptance testing and the production which WordPress doesn't make super easy uh any good recommendations regarding > (3:45:17) this problem uh I'm not overly technical but I think you would use classic um uh you know development techniques you have to have to have multiple production environments you have to copy uh data from one environment to the other you have to have CI CD pipelines and things so I think those kind of things have been solved even if in in a clunky way for software that doesn't you know move through uh um you know path to production very well right so it's not easy and uh you know we're not new score > (3:45:50) it wasn't easy with WordPress but you had to make it work right so yeah moving data up like from developments and stagings up to production it's learning there's a silver bullet for that one I don't think anyone solved that perfectly I live in hope that one day you know we'll catch on to things like laravel and things that do database seating and and programmatic database management much easier but I don't think we're there yet so it's probably a very Niche example of an Enterprise problem that would solve > (3:46:17) on a percentage of installs fraction um compared to every other WordPress site that exists um so yeah I guess it's on the list I think you've got to remember in the Enterprise the WordPress is just one of the elements of path to production that you have to control in a uat and any non-production environment as well so some of them have you know environment managers uh test data packs and all that kind of stuff so it can get pretty complex great thanks uh over the side please uh evening or afternoon um question in the Enterprise space I > (3:46:50) was talking to somebody last night and we're talking about one of the issues with WordPress is that your client ends up with 15 different monthly or annual bills for this commercial plug-in and that um rather than one with am or sitecore and it's a much easier thing to manage how do you at the Enterprise level address that with your clients in terms of commercial plug-in licenses as well as kind of the updating of commercial licenses um are you bundling that are you packaging that are you managing it and > (3:47:17) how are you having that conversation at the Enterprise level anyone want to take that yeah I can take that one uh yet like most clients of ours they have to have you know two msas to sows and then two bills and that can be an issue for procurement and legal and in finance they would love to have one bill because what they like to do in the faster better cheaper world is to say here's a big bill from a client we talk to them and say how can we screw them down right so and part of that is even if you have a big Bill from an AEM > (3:47:50) the bill is segmented right and some of it for services and some of us for hosting costs and things so you don't really um you know you might get one build that might be good look good on the on the one budget line item but it's not too much of a hurdle it does take more line you know to get the two msas and the two and contracts and things and the two budgets over the line but Enterprises do get understandable between kind of infrastructure pricing of hosting and things as well as Services based um you know for Talent on demand or > (3:48:19) project teams and things like that so um and if anything they like to make it a little bit complicated themselves because they'll do multiple sows for phases of delivery and things as well right so and uh yeah so I don't think that's too a problem it does get more of a problem when there's a plug-in cost you know of a hundred dollars sometimes that's the hardest one then you know tens of thousands of dollars uh budget is like who's got a credit card to pay for 100 bucks right it's in an Enterprise so > (3:48:46) especially when like a plug-in expires and it was some product manager three years ago who bought that subscription and no one has access to their email address and or the credit card or they need the receipt so that is a pain constant pain um we try and like work on yeah like either agency type licenses that for some that allow that and then the ones that just don't operate that way that they have to do that and then try and Coach them in making a you know subscriptions at you know email address or some sort of mailbox to set them up > (3:49:12) so that we're not having that problem in a year that we can't update yoast because so and so who signed up for that's gone and we don't know how to retrieve it now so unfamiliar thanks we've got two questions left so uh we'll try and get through both of them so let's keep our answers there relatively short hello good evening I would like to ask how often does a an Enterprise WordPress installation become a mold rather than a puzzle and meaning that how often does an engineer have to > (3:49:45) interfere in the code to make custom custom fixes and custom applications uh in a way that there has to be a familiarity in that Enterprise with that Associated developer that knows you know the whereabouts of this exact installation how often can a network Enterprise insert Tower from Canon Enterprise site become a custom solution rather than a generic WordPress installation you know a modular kind of thing yeah I'll let Harry go first uh I mean if I'm understanding correctly the beauty of Wordpress and its > (3:50:35) modularity is that it can be extended in so many ways and there are uh different ways to customize that experience to make it into a more cohesive singular UI versus I think it was you mentioning earlier if you're managing a bunch of different plugins and each one has their own sort of interface that you've got to go through uh part of the it is it is a challenge but part of that is is figuring out what it is that the client is trying to do uh and then creating some sort of a user interface that supports whatever their particular > (3:51:12) workflows are in terms of compromising that modularity that the benefit that WordPress has in order to produce a custom solution that's that's my how often does it happen and is it a way to follow or is it I mean you say no to the customer when he says I want this but you know that it will require a building a lot of back-end code in order to accommodate their needs uh so do we draw a line or and we go the modular way or we go on with customizing and delivering exactly what the customer World wants on > (3:51:58) an Enterprise level that's I think that's one of the reasons why the uh the client looks for the rocket surgeons these are the the um kind of almost ticket by ticket spin by Sprint decisions they have to be made sometimes an Enterprise client can get a very generic solution because they have Enterprise needs that tick other things right they don't have a lot of complexity in the code but they want to have scale they want to have access to you know um you know either good design resources performance resources and > (3:52:27) things like that right so but often you do get into quite complex decisions about how you customize WordPress for the client-specific needs and uh you know that's why you get good Engineers right thank you we've got um one question left so let's try and slip it in before we all disappear for lunch thanks for all your perspectives really um miles I think you said earlier that WordPress doesn't do a good job of marketing itself to Enterprise um a question for the whole panel maybe like what do you see as the the main > (3:52:58) issues or the main hurdles there and have you perhaps got some thoughts on Solutions or what what the best Roi on that would be like in terms of uh addresses so I think when I say the word president do it you know make it easy for the Enterprise buyer to buy WordPress um when I was on the Enterprise side you had to as Amazon would come into my office Google would come to my office Adobe brideco everyone coming to my office and you know they have the brochure the um one throat to choke the Enterprise road map um and so that that is appealing to an > (3:53:33) Enterprise buyer who you know at some point is just trying to cover their ass in terms of you know making an investment decision um but uh and they and they kind of you know they they may rubbish WordPress right but most of them don't right um but when WordPress comes into the office who's that you know is that xwp is it is it VIP is it um Tim amorphous you know combination of of things right and then they go to uh research the ecosystem uh as well and they go uh okay well you know what is the WordPress ecosystem these Adobe the > (3:54:09) cycle and break over and things so I think it the elements of Wordpress as a solution for the end prize buyer are all there but at some point we actually expect the the Enterprise buyer to put those together right and I don't think that fundamentality has to change but we have to make it easier for the Enterprise buyer to put those elements together and understand how the Enterprise layer and in the WordPress ecosystem there's a benefit I think to having you know modularity because at some point um you know everyone falls out of love > (3:54:43) with their agency and we can say it needs to be great take your code right um you know go to go to um code company and or whoever right because you can but really you can't it's not that easy but it should the open source esos not only from the technology perspective from a business and the ecosystem perspective should be a strength that we're marketing to because if you go to and I don't you know I really on stage um you know he said to rubbish people but well if you go to Arc right you're > (3:55:13) lumped with the bloated code you can't think you can do right uh if you go to Adobe you don't have really control over your own roadmap uh to a certain extent if you go to a hosted solution the data is not yours the code is not yours so those are the key elements you don't always win those battles because sometimes those are things that are not a high priority for the Enterprise buyer but um as a we should be trumpeting the the benefits of Open Source as a kind of ecosystem to we don't do that well > (3:55:40) enough right so I don't have the solution you have ideas but I don't have that I'm not going to prescribe a solution for that but that's where the embryonics go and whoever wants to join the embryonicle again all right so yeah I'm gonna get my hook I just saw I think it was Knoll did it earlier in the week like even like Wix and Squarespace have like this full Enterprise section on their side it's a whole journey top to bottom I don't I didn't see that I hadn't seen it before but it was > (3:56:03) surprising to see that like something's so consumer grade historically is even like got a very good narrative around Wix or squarespa like something so simple like that um so they're they're definitely going after that as well thank you very much for your questions thank you all to the panel for joining us and sharing your experience and thanks to all of you thank you very much thank you yes thank you guys so much yeah let's give him an extra one come on guys [Applause] all right before you guys all leave > (3:56:36) there is a just a quick announcement uh so lunch is actually pushed back to 1 15. so uh yeah at one just head out to the outdoor area to take the family photo I think there's going to be people kind of ushering you in that direction sorry thank you [Music] thank you [Music] foreign > (3:57:45) [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] thank you > (5:04:44) thank you how was the Mia you're all coming in here don't be shy so my name is MC for the afternoon and we have an awesome panel to come up here but before we start that and people kind of trickling in I have a few announcements um so who's playing the the WordPress you the word Camp Europe card game who has exchanged some of the cards all right how many did you um I I think the trick I was in the community yeah she cheated no but those cons are really cool so if you haven't looked at them yet they are > (5:05:34) actually printed work from the Museum of block art and uh it's it's a really interesting project and what you can do with block patterns and blocks that are not really content related so I really like that I want to want to remind you that you visit the sponsor areas between the panel and um the next one because by six by by four when mad model Riggs event happens I think the sponsors are gonna break down pretty soon afterwards so if you want to collect some more swag talk to the sponsors that would be your > (5:06:15) opportunity um there's only two things on the wellness track left one is three o'clock Tai Chi and the other one is the group hike that leaves from the sponsor area at six o'clock or 1800. um and if you haven't yet from all the sessions please go to europe.webcamp.org 2023 slash feedback to leave your opinions about all the sessions because that helps everybody to get better um get gives feedback to the speakers they have spent quite some time to put it all together so it would be really helpful if you help them get better too > (5:07:03) um I mentioned it already Matt's q a when you are so the people watching on the live stream if you want to send in questions for Matt or Matthias or josepha you can submit them through social media through the Twitter or Instagram or Facebook of the official WordPress um or wordcamp entities or profiles then again a reminder on the after party and then I'm shut up yeah it's a happy 20th birthday party starts at 2013 well half past eight at the low hand Athens nightclub bring your badge otherwise you are not > (5:07:54) going to get in you will get a light snack and two drinks with tokens and if you need to drink more or somebody doesn't use the tokens that's okay and fine but you can also buy additional drinks so so the the panel format yeah we have a panel contributing to Wordpress without knowing how to code just because there are many women here on the panel it does not mean that women don't code there are many good excellent coders that are women but it just happened that the panel came together like that so it's a 30 minute conversation period > (5:08:47) q a for 15 minutes and then we have a 50 minute break before the next session starts I will turn it over to birgit right away um I just let you know who the other panelists are um we have birgit Olsen then Patricia um BT then jankunukaga and um Alice Oru and just say yeah from also from Japan right yes yeah all right well big and awesome is our panelists today a host of the panel today and she'll take it away thank you very much yeah um good afternoon I'm really glad to see you all here on on um Welcome to our panel discussion uh on > (5:09:49) like burger also said contributing to Wordpress without knowing how to code um my name is and unfortunately the original host uh I met kabicha and as a panelist manual who were original part of this panel uh couldn't attend to to the Visa situation and uh on very short notice I'm really glad that junko and Alicia agreed on participating on this panel and sharing their stories and I'm also very thankful for the word computer content team uh we're very responsive to deal with this uh situation on short > (5:10:33) notice and um yeah make the best of all so um now let me introduce Again Alicia jungko and Patricia I invite you could you please introduce yourself for a short I work as a Content designer in software localization specialist especially for many things and WordPress themes and plugins with a focus on inclusive and accessible writing and I started contributing in a WordPress in 2016. > (5:11:15) hello my name is Patricia I come from the french-speaking part of Switzerland in Geneva I contribute to the community team by organizing events in my country WordPress Meetup now since 10 years for 10 years and co-organizer and work games in Switzerland hi hello my name is I live on small island in Japan according with a population of 115 people yeah um I'm four years web designer and with other friends I uh reorganizer over the camp Kansai and over the camp Kobe and I'm a deputy in the world press community and one of the > (5:12:15) this year's team reviews I also do translation and Report bugs I noticed them I'm not very good at English so and today I'm supported by my Japanese friend Susie [Applause] to try to speak myself as much as possible but sometimes I may mix Japanese sorry thank you again welcome to our panel and thank you for your assistance so okay let's start with some personal experiences and our on your journey um could each of you share how you contribute to Wordpress project and what initially inspired you to get involved > (5:13:15) and by Community um what do you personally get from contributing to Wordpress and Patricia would you like to start then we move over to Alicia and then to yonko is this okay yeah do you want to introduce yourself as well first okay I call myself a Workforce veteran uh because I've used WordPress since uh the first release 20 years ago and I'm contributing to Wordpress over 13 years and I started with translating WordPress in German and then I also started managing the local uh translation platform on the ewordpress.org thanks to > (5:13:58) Robert vinish who pushed me to do so and uh that's when I started actively contributing to WordPress but I also visited webcams and now I'm focusing more on creating more awareness for diversity equality and inclusion in our in the WordPress community so that everyone feels welcome and belonging to the WordPress community okay can you just repeat the question the first question yes uh I guess why Community what do you personally get from Computing to Wordpress Community okay so the first thing is I made > (5:14:35) friends from all around the world and by organizing local meetups I made long-lasting friendship in my local community so that was the main that is the main good thing that is to contribute to community and organizing events and I get to travel to what came Europe and nearby country World camps for example from Switzerland I go to what came in France and Italy and I try to volunteer all the time because it's such an amazing experience um what I guess because every time every month when we do local meetups I learned > (5:15:13) something new all the time you know and over the years also I learned to how to organize events find sponsors and raise funds and it's good also to to have so much a diverse range of speakers we'll talk about so many topics so I learned a lot to meeting all those people thank you so in my case I started contributing in 2016 and that those times I recently joined a WordPress company WP rocket so I was already working in translations and I met Laura Sako which is who is one of the pillars of the Italian polyglots > (5:15:54) Community and she onboarded it immediately because she said you can speak languages you can speak Italian I also speak Spanish and French so being a polyglot was my thing right away and so I found the Italian Community First then the Spanish one and then I met the European one as well so I really first of all I'd say that my the main reason why I'm here is because of as Patricia was saying because of people and I met a lot of friends over the years so speaking at work camps and also contributing via slack and remotely with > (5:16:31) the community as a way to keep in touch with a lot of people scattered around the world so that's very precious for me and also professionally it's been very important to I'd say that the community has been my first training field because I learned about localization International internationalization very specific topics that it would have it would have been difficult maybe to pay maybe your online course or going to your University just to learn those stuff so the community was very supportive also > (5:17:02) in that sense so I only own a lot also in the professional thank you very much so as I understand you choose to contribute to Wordpress because of the people within the WordPress community so you found someone who had introduced you or you picked up your own profession within and on your field I would like to hear about your challenges and skills and how you overcome obstacles within um getting involved into the project what are the skills that I had you when you started contributing um when you what you learned through the > (5:17:50) process you told you you learned so much English also to contribute and what other obstacles you saw um while contributing to Wordpress at least would you like to start and we moved on to Jungkook and then to you um the main obstacles I found I think was just getting used to all the I don't know the many places where the community moves there is this lack there is the make WordPress there are a lot of places of where in channels of communication so at first maybe for me was a bit difficult to understand where > (5:18:29) my people were where the polyglots met but at the same time the onboarding process was really supportive so I always have people around that told me where to go where to find answers well to read documentation so yeah I was kind of I think it's natural when you start doing something new you feel overwhelmed a little bit by the many information and flow of information you can get but I mean the good thing of the WordPress Community is that there is a lot of people doing this for so many years and and they're very supportive so > (5:19:03) it's easy to find your way um yeah and that was the main obstacle I have to say in the Italian Community is very open and welcoming so I I've always felt at home awesome yeah yeah I think relationships can be very difficult um most of us are doing what blessings while having other jobs so Communication in a limited time for him um candidate misunderstandings but at the same time we try to make sure our honest opinions are hard [Music] some someone is surrounding struggling struggling thank you me to someone else in the > (5:20:05) community I will not be the defeating no I'm not but I will be as honest as possible about what I think yeah very important and if I am wrong I approach it I believe that even if the conflict is not dissolved I mean they really sorry no need for apologies and the most of the people were attending to Western Europe are not native English speaking Yeah I think and honest so important yes absolutely agree [Applause] thank you > (5:21:09) so first jungko your English is better than my Japanese [Laughter] thank you for contributing like this so about the struggle I faced first on my personal level I'm you know I'm used to work alone I'm a kind of freelancer or rather solopreneur so one of my struggles was to work with a team when we were organizing what can be in Switzerland so I had to learn to you know work with others and I got better at that I hope and on another level the struggle we faced organizing events especially World camps is about > (5:21:51) the multilingual um part because the world camp sites are not yet multilingual and in Switzerland we speak so many languages so thankfully this year we had the help of a great teammate marker wall Smith who used the great features of the site editor the full side editor and blogs to create a three languages working website so that was how we overcame this it's much better now with the site editorial and yeah there was there is also struggles there is no budget for meetups monthly meet up so we have to get creative to find free venues and yeah we > (5:22:44) we somehow are used to that now but it's now also because after the pandemic you know people get used to stay at home woman sometimes difficult to even have people coming to the meetups so we have to get creative and that's good because we train our creative mind you know to find Solutions yeah that would be just regular yeah thank you um what do you think are also obstacles for new contributors to come to contribute to Wordpress especially for people who are afraid or intimidated by having to know code because > (5:23:26) um as we are seeing in in the WordPress Community there is some kind of celebrity around the core committers and I feel myself or felt myself a kind of intimidated at the beginning how to contribute to a project like WordPress it's an open source project and so many talented people are also giving their time and effort and skills to it but I think we would like to have more people involved especially in underrepresented make teams for WordPress yes as you mentioned you started with a translation and organizing events you are organizing > (5:24:12) events what obstacles do you feel are there for new contributors to entry the WordPress ecosystem would you like to start [Music] um speaking English please okay um she's saying if there's too much things to do and get worried that might be like an obstacle for the new contributors you know like we don't they don't have to be scared like I have to do this I have to do that like they can just start small so that could be one of the obstacles that she she sees so yeah what do you see that's Optical for new > (5:25:11) contributors to start years there is the space conception that I don't know to code I cannot join or I'm not a designer I'm a beginner and I constantly repeat in meetups and local webcams you don't have to be so there's so many things to do we need you um yeah I would say the first thing would be to attend meetups and local webcams and join the contributor day where there is an onboarding process which is very welcoming also have a look at make a.wordpress. > (5:25:46) org and look at the description for each team because that you might find something that appeals to you you know and at the beginning when I started organizing meetups I didn't even know I was contributing to a large-scale community I was thinking oh there is a local Meetup about WordPress so I go there and they ask me the two I mean founder of this group we are leaving the town and they asked two of us to take take it over I didn't even realize there was like 800 groups around the world and so many world camps I didn't know about so > (5:26:26) I was contributing without knowing that I was contributing you know but if uh when when I say now to people please join we need it would be a dream if every WordPress user gave like five percent of their time for to contribute to the product as we we talked yesterday about five to five for the future so it's uh yeah it's good we we have a free and Priceless solution that is WordPress so it's good if we give back by any skill that you can contribute with yeah yeah absolutely what Patricia said it > (5:27:03) all yeah but I I just wanted to add up that from my experience what I noticed is uh meet up and maybe contributor days of local work camps or even European ones um are very crowded there's a lot of people starting from they want to contribute what I noticed is that sometimes it's difficult to make people stay so you have a lot of onboarding the first day and then over time uh it's difficult to keep up via's luck or doing remote contribution so what Patricia said about finding your local places > (5:27:39) your local people is very important to keep the motivation of that first contributor day because it's easy to be on board on the first day but then when you get back home uh you get caught up with your job your family in your life and maybe the contribution is where left a bit on the side so maybe as a community we should keep on uh strongly encouraging people to keep in touch even remotely and shelons or remote places where there's not even a local Meetup so finding communities moments online and remotely it's very it's still very > (5:28:20) important um I just heard that the new Meetup group has been created in Catalunya to be a rural sorry I don't know yeah for Catalina that will go from small towns to small town because there is no meetups and that's that's a great initiative that could be should be completed yeah and also for meetup organizers if you sometimes we don't have an idea who to invite what to do what to say at next month's Meetup so we could simply do contribution so you would say um the easiest entry point Into The > (5:29:08) Virtuous contributions is going to a meet up attending to a meet-up or maybe organizing it up but what's about the other projects and teams within a WordPress Community which doesn't involve to have the knowledge about how to code as we see we have the documentation team the training team who are building large wordpress. > (5:29:36) org who want to help to to build more confidence we have also the wp diversity team who is very very passionate about to motivate and encourage new contributors to speak to be on a stage like this yes but also the testing for WordPress everything which every project which involves development with also other parts I guess no developers really fond of it of the idea to write the documentation or am I wrong so um what do you see uh are the most needed part of the WordPress Community contribution ecosystem to jump in when you are not in the developer I struggle with this word > (5:30:30) sorry I'm not an edge of English speaking person so what do you think um it's the most vulnerable part of a community where we need more active contributors do you like Maybe okay we are going around so that for example translations is one of the the polygloss group is one of the groups that really is accessible to almost anyone knowing their own language that's what Laura Sako told me when when I start I mean you know Italian you know Italian well I mean of course you have to speak the language well but there's a > (5:31:09) lot to do um even in the polygloss team without knowing how to code we translate plugins themes we translate the core but we also do a lot of documentation and have translating documentation from other teams so there's really a lot to do of what the WordPress Community as a whole produces there's a lot to translate and if you know your language well enough there's always need for a good hand to um to work on those documents and all the many things that the old Community produces and and would like to translate > (5:31:47) I started also to translate some years ago but it's not where I was the best so you know it depends what you like and you look at the list that as I said before on make.wordpress.org and you'll see the list of all the teams and what whatever sounds good nice to you to participate you just join the slack and begin to talk with people like that in the office hours on slack and read the chat maybe you will find something very exciting you will make friends as I love it and yeah um I think yeah it's up to you what you > (5:32:30) are good at what you like you know and and in Japan and original [Music] Dijon Japanese and and one week one time Gathering translation time we have and so Gathering and mentoring and so kind and so you're doing some kind of WP translation days in Japanese where you're on board new contributors and also work on the project itself yeah sorry sorry so you do it weekly weekly yes not monthly or not yearly we do 10 pm and we > (5:33:38) in Japan we welcome everybody to come in and translate plugins or themes or even the documents that's amazing I'm told I'm totally jealous yeah and whenever people come in we don't do it in zoo more and in person style we do we only do it in slack so everybody can join from let's say home or their work or maybe somewhere else and if they're newcomers coming in we always welcome them and we ask them what they want to do and we try to guide them to how they can do it like sustainably I > (5:34:18) think Alice I think you were saying that sustainability for you know onboarding new contributors is key process so that's why we've been that's what we've been doing in Japan and Duke has been part of that also so I think she said translations keep on going would be a good thing to do awesome yep um just one short advice for new contributors um what would you tell when someone approaches you I would like to contribute to Wordpress how can I get involved how can I do it what would you what would be your takeaway tip for them > (5:35:02) would you like to start and yes it's basically what I said before about looking what they like to do but I would emphasize on the fact that it's a very inclusive community that we try to to like help all diverse diversity diverse people to to join and yeah make friends and eat good food at Watkins food is always a good topic um yeah I would say go all in don't worry and for everyone who's also listening not only contribute sorry when you contribute to Wordpress it's not only about bringing in your own time > (5:35:45) and knowledge money is always welcomed so there we have some initiatives in the WordPress Community not only the fight for the future program uh where companies can pledge time or their employees can pledge time to contribute to WordPress but also we have the W uh the wp Collective um I hope I recall it right uh I will tweet about it where you as a company or freelancer can donate your money so that contributors can get funded to pursue there and continue their work in contribution especially if you are on a level with a high responsibility and are > (5:36:29) being a bottleneck because a big project like WordPress uh is sometimes really hard to stay consistent if you are working on it on your spare time and you don't have the financial backgrounds to given more time so um that's why I think it's important that we as a community also make room and say this are these are contributors who are very involved and passionate about contributing to Wordpress we need to support them uh with room or even money to help them to stay on track so yeah that's what do you think about it > (5:37:15) yes this is very important as well um my tip will be like find your people as Patricia was saying find you what you like but also the people people you like to spend time with so that's a very important part of the contributing experience and and ask a lot of questions because there will be a lot and but we have a lot of documentation and information to provide so um yeah ask questions and find find your people to I mean we try to be a very inclusive and accessible community so I feel safe in giving this tip you will find somebody > (5:37:52) you like thank you I guess there's also the mentorship program rolling in into so uh where our new contributors of Wordpress can get a personal mentor to guide them and Hari Shankar is currently hard working on it so big questions I would like to invite you and I'm really glad that you all attended to our panel and I would like to open the floor for questions from our beloved audience please well thank you so much big hand before yeah for all the panelists and when you get ready for your questions uh line up > (5:38:36) behind the microphones and then we need the microphones because the live audience will hear it and we have the first question over there Toby I'm one of the global mentors for the polyglots team so a couple of people in this room may have seen me before um wanted to ask do does the community team have any uh obvious place where you would collect good ideas about how to do things in a different way or what could be improved because I have a feeling that there are so many different things happening there are so many > (5:39:24) people involved that uh I a little bit loose track on okay if I just have some idea is there any kind of virtual box where I could just drop this ID so it doesn't get lost um first on slack on the make WordPress slack you'll find the channel to corresponding to the team you want to suggest things to and then there would be a post posted on make.waspers. > (5:40:05) org with anyone publicly can comment and bring new ideas I think in every channel there there is office hours as well so at that time there is a lot of people to reply to you So yeah thank you thank you for your question thank you also for your dedicated work as a polyglots and we worked together for a long time uh on a polyglots global polyglots Mentor team so thank you also for your contribution store any new questions please hi my name is Olga possibly some also saw me before anyway I'm wondering if you're what is your next big WordPress > (5:40:46) desire what you wish like big wish you can like accomplish with help of all this audience who is looking for us right now so what you want would you like to add I hope the camp is in Japan do you have any ideas what's your best biggest wish for WordPress in the community I would like to I mean we keep on talking about diversity and inclusion and accessibility which is the three topics that I care a lot about but a lot of people in the community care about this and we had some interesting panels yesterday and talks about this and we're > (5:41:39) talking about that it's a Hot Topic I mean it's been a hard topic for years and so I hope that this conversation keep going and we find more places and times to to speak about it like face to face or even remotely but like taking really good care of of this I would love for for what came to Europe to maybe in the future we can have like translation tool automated tools and have more yeah something more European than rather than only like an international cosmopolit uh field I think and translation is also to have some kind of entity > (5:42:29) within a WordPress Community to ensure the diversity equality and inclusion not only on webcams and meet up but also within the contributing groups so that there's a dedicated team who have the knowledge and work intensively uh to make sure that everyone despite of color or gender or sexual and orientation or skill set feels welcome and finds a place within the WordPress community thank you thank you great question Olga we have time for one more question Harry yeah hello hi everybody my name is Hari Shankar I am a community deputy and as > (5:43:21) Bergen mentioned I am trying to build a mentorship program for WordPress so my question is to all of you um Alice you mentioned about the contributor Journey about Lakes how somebody starts contributing at the contributor day then they are not able to go forward like life comes into it uh I found it very interesting and that's the problem that I'm trying to solve I'm trying to you know get first of all point one get more people to come into WordPress and point two get them to stay so my question to all of you is I > (5:43:50) mean you are you're all basically not non-code contributors I am a non-code contributor so my question to all of you is I would like to hear your thoughts on how to solve that problem how can we get somebody who comes into the project to stay based on your experiences like what based on the paid points that you've faced what are the ideas that we can do to sort of like fix that problem thank you this is to all of you um I would like first of all thank you for your question it's really a pain point to a keep contributing uh or > (5:44:23) contributors on track and keep them motivated to convey uh from my experience uh we started in Germany uh the marketing team twice and to write out because people disappeared because they couldn't stay longer on the project and I think we need more involvement and as you mentioned the mentorship program I think it's important that we stay in touch and communicate on regular basis and ask for their needs also what obstacles do they face during the journey first of all we learn as mentors and and experience contributors but also to > (5:45:10) maybe solve issues we didn't see as an experience of a seasoned contributor yeah I have the same experience in the Italian polyglot team I think we were one of the first teams to organize a mentorship program inside the translation process so every experience translator had like one of you uh new contributors to to follow during their journey in the first at the beginning of their translation journey and this worked very well because you have instantly you have a reference inside a community somebody to speak and > (5:45:48) ask questions to and that's very important for people knowing where to where to find that person that can solve the questions not maybe not in the common Channel which is we can be intimidating sometimes no posing the question in the whole group so having like a direct channel of communication with your Mentor it's very important also for operational tasks like translations do you have any I think you said it all uh yeah this and what you mentioned before to be sponsored because for independent workers it's a bit more > (5:46:27) difficult to you know to balance with your client work yeah do you have additional ideas thank you I agree you and I believe the size of a contribution does not matter everyone can contribute and let's see the speakers thank you very much folks I don't know if they have this time I wanted to ask one more follow-up question but I want to be mindful of time is it okay but gets can I ask one more question well quick okay everybody very short very quick question so all of you no one okay um so it's it's related to this > (5:47:18) many of you mentioned uh that life comes in the way that is a pain point which stopped you from converting I mean generally other than that is there anything in the project at this time that makes the process contributing slower prevents people from continuity continuously I think it's overwhelming of information we need more uh guidance on the onboarding process on a WordPress site so make it more visual because uh collecting information from every make team I feel overwhelmed and I'm a seasoned contributive WordPress > (5:47:53) um and I can't imagine how it feels for a newcomer so I think like you also did for your proposal for the mentorship program to visualize the path the contributor Journey has some visual guiding how they can start and where can they jump into the project would be really awesome and designers you don't need to have to code or a project manager you don't need to code to contribute to those user Journeys and contributive Journeys to work I'm so sorry I could talk with everybody here for another two hours > (5:57:02) session before maths session so if you are in the back of it why don't you come a little bit closer so it's a little bit more conversational and not so distant because back there the speaker won't see you so before yeah um so my name is Spirit polyhag I'm the MC here and uh I just have three announcements for you um the first and very important because this is the one of the last sessions of the two days um please give feedback about the sessions that you visited that you listen to and that you participated in > (5:57:42) go to the WordPress Europe website for 2023 slash feedback and you uh feedback and then you can fill out the form for each session that you participated in um for the live stream audience I have the if you are watching on the live stream you can also submit questions via social media for maps q a that happened at four in an hour roughly in an hour just you can submit them to Twitter and Instagram both is WC Europe is the account um and also on the Facebook page and um very important the uh for the after party it's the > (5:58:38) theme is happy 20th birthday WordPress it starts at 9 30 which is 20 30. at the Lohan Athens nightclub very important bring you a badge otherwise you will have trouble getting your snack or getting your two drink tokens and you can also get additional drinks purchased and so we can start um on time I am happy to introduce the next speaker which is Pattaya raikovska and the talk is leading with cultural intelligence strategies for breaking the invisible invisible invisible boundaries of global business petia is joining us from > (5:59:28) Bulgaria she's the director of agency Community operations at human made a globally distributed WordPress agency in 15 plus years of experience in software development industry petier Health roles in product marketing event management Enterprise media product development business operations project management and Resource Management Petty has volunteered LED and enabled Global open source communities one of which is the WordPress polyglots where we heard so so much about it in the previous talk here she played a key role > (6:00:09) in developing their passion for breaking the boundaries of cross-cultural communication give it up for better rice cover all right thank you thank you hi I'm just gonna drop this over here all right last session let's be on time first time I'm using this excuse me so let's see if it works all right starting with a story it's 903 and I'm late it's not a new thing but exactly eight minutes ago all my notifications started popping up I have all of them set calendars Apple watch phone desktop Google > (6:01:13) Calendar iCal all start popping up and yet I'm late I went to see the call agenda I got carried away I'm jumping on a call three minutes late and my colleague looks very pissed and she's right I mean I shouldn't be late but the issue is I am always late and she says that this is turning into a thing and I'm getting really that this is turning into a problem for me so what are we going to do about it I sigh and take a deep breath and I try to calm down because to me three minutes shouldn't be > (6:01:57) that big of a deal they shouldn't they really shouldn't and I know that and we're wasting time discussing something after I'm already late I try to keep composed and apologize that's the simplest way to move forward but inside of my head my grumpy Bulgarian is angry three minutes should not be a big deal the thing is my colleague is American I know I know for them being on time is important she's right I'm being disrespectful but I was born in communist Bulgaria and I spent the first seven years of my life > (6:02:46) under the regime and the rest of my life like rebelling against anyone or anything that tried to put me in a strict border so time was one of the things I was actively rebelling against in my teenage years at school trying to convince my teachers it doesn't matter I'm late for class I'm still going to be top of the class I went to an extreme where I almost didn't graduate even though I wasn't up of my class because there's something in Bulgaria called unexcusable absence and I had too many of those > (6:03:22) so yeah time is one of the things that makes a big difference between how people perceive situations and behave across cultures and for my American colleagues three minutes are a big deal so in the global world we live in work in today where people are remote and all over the world we all speak English somehow that became the language of our business but what also happened is somehow along the way Western cultural norms became the norm of the business world and even though we all speak English miscommunication often happens because > (6:04:15) of that and it happens because we have differences now cultural background when miscommunication and misunderstanding happens at work it's usually due to differences in our cultural programming in your personal and professional life cultural awareness should be the next big thing especially if you need to run and especially if you need to lead across cultures but in any role in our kind of new Global reality post pandemic I guess a lot of businesses have gone remote regardless of whether you're building a > (6:04:55) business or actively contributing to Wordpress it helps cultural intelligence will give you an edge and the ability to understand the people around you these are kind of the three pillars that are important today obviously being smart is important to run a business but not even remotely enough emotional intelligence became a thing when smart people realize that they need to work with other smart people to be able to actually achieve something how easy would it be if people weren't involved in the things that we wanted to > (6:05:28) do and today the new thing is learning to learn to work with people who are not like you and that is where cultural intelligence comes into play the Dutch social psychologist whose name I perpetually have not been able to pronounce and I'm going to try now and the Dutch people among you if there are any of you excuse me [Music] uh who is probably going to be familiar to those of you who uh have dealt with the issue of of cultural differences he introduced the cultural Dimensions many many years ago he famously said that > (6:06:14) culture is the software of the Mind it is the operating system that invisibly runs our lives and the way we have been programmed to see the world and cultural intelligence is often the missing piece when people from different cultures work together that or the willingness and ability to understand colleagues due to benchmarking your their behavior with your own culture which is where this disclaimer comes in very often when I talk cultural differences with people I get confronted with the following you shouldn't > (6:06:54) really talk about culture here you should just get to know the individual it's important to know who you're speaking to it's important to get to know the person in front of you we're all unique and speaking of culture cultural difference leads to stereotyping stereotyping is bad you should be looking and judging people as individuals not as a product of their environment which is all true it is we are all unique and this is important but understanding someone's cultural background is not about you > (6:07:32) and it's not about the person that you're talking to the issue is that if you ignore cultural context you judge everyone's Behavior with your own culture as a benchmark so your standard is what you know one of the definitions of cultural intelligence in an outsider seemingly seeming ability to understand and perceive the behaviors of others the ambiguous gestures and the puzzling things that they do similarly to how that person's co-patriates would so over the years I've held two primary jobs the past 10 years > (6:08:18) I've been a part of the WordPress community and eight years ago I joined human made both distributed global companies that give gave me the opportunity to work with people from everywhere and to be puzzled as a person coming from a specific part of the world um when human mate was created it was Tom and Joe freelancing for a British newspaper so uh the majority of the employees over the years were a part of the Anglo cluster similar to them they're both from the UK born and raised and as the company grew > (6:09:02) we acquired the small Australian agencies then they started hiring people from the Americas they started expanding the number of people almost all of us in the beginning came from the WordPress community so they were following uh kind of the model of how the open source project was built hiring the best people wherever they were working with clients all over the place and then the polyglots team is probably the biggest WordPress team it has thousands and thousands of people probably like in the tens of thousands > (6:09:36) translating into more than 200 languages and language variants also coming from all over the world so when I first started working with the WordPress polyglots team I was completely petrified because it's almost like you know being thrown into the me into a meeting of the United Nations having to be like a big representative and very quickly they gave me a lead role which also meant that I need to resolve needed to resolve conflict so how can a complete rookie that has no um understanding um of a lot of cultural differences > (6:10:10) really do that I was really really scared because I knew nothing what turned out throughout the years was this knowing nothing when you're in a position like that and being curious is way better than if you think that you know everything and you know how things should be done because you can't know all things about all people but also you don't really have to we'll repeat this quite a lot throughout this talk cultural intelligence is not how much you know about others cultural intelligence is your ability to > (6:10:50) suspend judgment based on the way that you perceive the world to accept that there is not a single normal not only in business in your communication with all types of people and have a general awareness about key differences in the way people think when they're in front of you so curiosity is the key let's start with this Theory the global cultural clusters as defined by the David Livermore in his CQ inside series highly recommended if you're curious about that sort of thing they will teach you how to behave with people > (6:11:36) while you're traveling as well as how to talk to your uh to your colleagues coming from other places they're very interesting and very American as in they were written with the American context in mind explaining cultural differences to an American audience so it's sometimes very funny to listen to that as somebody coming from a completely different culture and it's important to acknowledge that you know culture cultural clusters are can be dispersed they're not geographically necessarily um focused there are some cultural > (6:12:15) clusters that are all over the place there are some geographic regions that only have like a specific culture in the current Global World everyone is everywhere and culture is not only where you come from it's also how you were raised what religion you are in what profession you chose and how you pursue that it's important to acknowledge how high level these definitions are and how diverse and makes the world is you might be born into one cultural cluster but highly highly influenced by another just like me > (6:12:49) um I have worked quite a lot in the last 10 years with people from all over the world most of the lessons that I've learned I've learned by doing and I've made quite a lot of mistakes and broken quite a lot of relationships along the way this is the hard way to do this but I never really found a good framework to put all of my knowledge into until I read the culture my map by insead Professor Aaron Mayer uh it's great because it gives you a simple simple eight scale um 8kl to differentiate cultural > (6:13:26) differences and we're gonna go through those now now so these differences shape how people communicate make decisions lead provide feedback disagree perceive time decide and Trust across cultures and based on those we're able to create a map of Relativity that can help you navigate this complex environment and understand situation situations build strategies around choosing how to approach challenges just build a basis of what where a point from where to go so we won't have time to dive really deeply into all of them > (6:14:08) but I want to take you through some stories from colleagues and Friends through um for most of them and hopefully you will you can relate to some of these situations communication the communication scale divides into low context and high context cultures in low context cultures good communication is precise simple and clear messages are expressed and understood at face value and repetition is appreciated it helps clearly Define communication in high context cultures good communication is sophisticated it's layered messages can be both spoken > (6:14:59) and implied and body language and obviously different factors play a very very very big role and on the one end of the scale you can see the Anglo clusters and on the other end of the scale you can see the East Asian confusion Asia clusters so communication as the big big thing in the cultural differences is one of the things that gets that we get wrong very often if you think about it what remote work did did to the business people coming from high context cultures very often cannot read the cues that they are used to in > (6:15:45) day-to-day communication they can't read body language our cameras are off so sometimes you can't even read like facial expressions so they're a little bit of a disadvantage which is why remote work in remote work in Multicultural teams we need to create low context processes and non-native English speakers need to be invited to speak because in high context cultures people are used to you're reading their whole demeanor not just what they're saying sometimes that might even be a different > (6:16:21) thing you need to be able to perceive their behavior and judge about what they want to communicate from that it strips people from specific cultures remote works trips people from specific cultures being able to perceive and understand situations and you know the Japanese are famous apparently for being able to read the air in a room so environment surrounding the person is extremely important so it's important when you're creating your company coaches and culture and values and your behavioral framework to have > (6:16:59) that in mind when you're in a situation people from various backgrounds in the room defaulting to low context communication is one thing but also being very clear that that's what you're doing is the next thing that you need to do and it's not just enough to say this is how we do it now you all do it like that because some people are not going to speak unless invited and asking people whose default is to speak up when they're told to and people who need to be invited to speak to do the same thing > (6:17:31) is actually asking for a completely different level of effort if you have a cross cross-cultural team you know it will be way harder for some people to be initiative the next scale is the power distance this is where I have numerous examples but first of all let's go through what what one and what the other is so um egalitarian and hierarchical are the two ends so an egalitarian egalitarian structure means low power distance the ideal distance between a bus and the subordinate is very low the best boss is a facilitator among > (6:18:17) equals organizational structures are flat and Communications keeps hierarchical lines you can talk to anyone it's fine it doesn't doesn't really matter it's okay to disagree with your boss openly it's okay to call them out on things people are more likely to move kind of to action without getting permission um just being more and more initiative wherein hierarchical structures everything is very very defined the ideal distance is high and the best boss is the strong kind of director who leads > (6:18:50) from the front status is important extremely important organizational structures are multi-layered and very complicated communication flows a very special specific line you cannot just like jump over somebody's boss um and if you send your boss to meeting they will send theirs so uh power distance is such an interesting thing because human made is the most egalitarian company I've ever worked from nobody it would never ever occur to anyone to call our CEO Tom there he is over there Mr Wilmot that would be > (6:19:32) extremely sarcastic if anybody that did that borderline passive aggressive [Music] um Tom runs Barefoot around at company Retreats and pants we've seen him in like five years in a row and he can talk to you about Age of Empires and uh his kids and the state of Enterprise WordPress publishing in the same conversation uh you know he will dance like no one's watching in front of everyone and like you can just go to him as the last person starting in a company and start a conversation about anything as an example of our egalitarians uh > (6:20:09) egalitarian structure I once gave feedback to our CTO the other partner in the company Joe on stage at wordcamp us about a very shitty website that he built that deprived me from being able to edit the back end this is you know how open our feedback process is and when they created the company the values and the behaviors that they expected kind of transferred to everybody else so the company they built is like very low power distance very egalitarian very flat we only started introducing Iraqi the moment we started > (6:20:46) growing um very very much and um and at some point I became somewhere in the middle of that hierarchy a person that had to hire their team and I did I hired two allocation Managers from opposite sides of the world because as a global company we needed to cover three regions to be able to do that I hired Shannon from Chicago and Bonita from Bangalore both really skilled amazing women who I thought had very similar aptitude to work and were very much alike one another they were both initiative fun very outspoken very > (6:21:32) um diligent just really really both seemed really great and in terms of communication their interviews went like in a very similar way you know we were just like chatting and you know when I hired them I thought that I have a team that will be pretty easy to manage and I mean big mistake number one I approached the same had the same approach towards managing both of them the first thing that I do when I start working with somebody new especially when they're part of my team is like I talk about feedback because I I used to not receive > (6:22:03) feedback well and I know how touchy that is and it's been a point of friction for me for years so I sat them down and I told them I love feedback in context we give and receive feedback in the open you're you open to criticize me like you know and kind of contradict me in public like if I'm saying something stupid just like call me out on it it's fine that's the most normal thing um but please please just like don't wait for you know a feedback review to come in to kind of tell me uh what > (6:22:37) you're thinking and if we're working on a project we are absolutely welcome to just disagree with me and they were like oh this is amazing this is so great thank you you know you know they enthusiastically said that that was something that they loved and we started working and with Chan and I had no issues she was you know really kind of boldly kind of giving suggestions uh in discussions in public we were talking about options she was agreeing kind of contradicting and all that oh man the first time Bonita and I were > (6:23:12) on a call and I and I publicly disagreed with her and I told her that I think that there is a better way to do it we went on a 101 call after because I saw her face blank out she did not speak until the end of the common cold that we were having and we went on a 101 and she bursted and crying she was just like you're gonna fire me now aren't you I was like what I want to understand what happened you know what happened and and she said I mean she said I was wrong and you told me I was wrong in front of everyone like > (6:23:47) how can you I thought that was it she was still you know on probation so like that kind of makes sense but and I asked her but we just a couple of days ago had this conversation feedback in public you know the public disagreements all of that and she said oh you're my boss of course I'm gonna say that's okay Trust the big thing so task based and relationship-based trust and you have countries on both ends of the map uh the essence of this is that for low context egalitarian cultures uh trust is built by doing > (6:24:35) doing things you say you're gonna do what you say are gonna do you do it we trust you on the other side of that is the relationship-based trust and there are people and T people who only build trust through relationships and through doing things together and throughout my years uh in the WordPress Community traveling all over the world I guess the most valuable lesson that I've learned is you can't do business in Japan without going to karaoke you cannot do business in Portugal or Italy without overeating > (6:25:10) there's no way they just won't work Multicultural remote teams need FaceTime they need to be able to build relationships and personal relationships so getting them live in person is important and if you can't do that like we couldn't during the pandemic create an environment where these things can happen even remotely and in person the decisions the decision scale is very interesting the consensual versus top-down decision making so decisions in consensual cultures decisions are made in groups > (6:25:50) uh through agreement and in top down decisions are made by individuals obviously cultures with high power distance usually do top-down decision making and countries with low power distance do consensual decision making the worst thing you can do if you have a multicultural team is your egalitarian consensual teams to enforce a top-down decision on them oh man they will fight you on that and Trust will be broken in Multicultural things teams the first thing you need to decide how you're going to make decisions and > (6:26:28) do not apply the same approach in all your regions with all your people disagreeing confrontation confrontational versus avoid confrontation cultures we try that human made last year not we tried like we started embedding the principles of high performing teams and one of those principles is embracing conflict as a way to move past an obstacle this is a very kind of egalitarian low power distance cultural norm and it was extremely heavy and difficult for our APAC region who were concerned very silently about it at > (6:27:12) first three months later somebody raised their hand and said actually conflict is not something that we are very comfortable with and it's true where In some cultures conflict is accepted and embedded within the mindset there's no way like unless you disagree there's no way to constructively move on in others it breaks relationships especially conflict in public it breaks the harmony it's embedded in their like from their religious all the way it kind of their mindset believes shouting in public is not acceptable on > (6:27:52) the other side of that like some of my French friends and my Greek friends for that for them matter and my Italian friends will shout at each other and fight openly at the dinner table and then go dancing together if that happened somewhere in East Asia these people never speak to each other again and feedback that's a tricky one as well do you give it in public can you give it in public when you give it in private how are you supposed to give it if you're managing a team that is that that has like different culture but > (6:28:30) different cultural backgrounds if you adopt the same approach you're gonna piss off someone if you go very soft with like the sandwich approach to people that are used to being very direct they're going to piss them off if you do direct very abrupt feedback blunt to a person that is used to a soft approach you're going to demotivate them and make them cry so think about where the person uh you're talking to was born and how they were raised try and get to know them before you have to provide feedback > (6:29:09) Direct negative feedback versus indirect negative feedback frankness all diplomacy is speaking frankly a gift oh sorry speaking frankly a gift or is it a burden is it a slap in the face on the one side we have our Apec team who we have to approach everything very cautious with and we need to be very careful about offending someone on the other side is my colleague Frank who will call you an idiot in a comment in a post and then be happy having a beer with you persuading is one of my favorites but I'm kind of running out of time here on > (6:29:58) the scale which is why I'm going to tell you that it's roughly related to cow educational the educational system is where you grow up so if you were taught Theory first Theory first then you do you do principles first approach and if you were taught implementation first so like let's do and Learn by doing then that is the application's first approach but based on where you grew up and how you were taught how somebody else can persuade you is very related to that which brings us back to the time > (6:30:40) punctuality versus my slide is wrong that needs to say flexibility or how late is actually late in linear Time Project steps are very consecutive if you're familiar with the waterfall approach this is basically what linear time means everything needs to be organized Time One Step follows the other nothing can overlap the focus is on the deadline sticking to that the schedule following the schedule is a must it's very important conscious everything is conscious of time emphasis on promptness and good organization not > (6:31:17) flexibility with flexible Time Project steps are approached in a fluid manner changing tasks as opportunities arise many things are dealt with Advanced and interruptions are okay the focus is on adaptability and flexibility and that's valued so with scheduling how late is late is actually quite relative and it's probably okay that three minutes late means nothing to me but means means everything to my American colleagues the important thing to remember however is that the culture map is a scale everything is relative > (6:32:00) and you have to judge situations by the people that you have in the room and adapt and developing your cultural intelligence is actually not that difficult it doesn't mean knowing every everything about every person that's in front of you in looking for a formula for this because of course I will look for a formula a one to three step to developing your cultural intelligence I happened upon this talk by Julia Middleton who's also a professor and she talks about the two things that we have in our in ourselves which is one is our > (6:32:37) core and one is our Flex and our core is when thinking about your core you should ask yourself what is the most important thing for me what are the most important things for me what are the things that make me me what are the things that make you you what are the values and behaviors without which you're not going to be yourself anymore and that's uh that's your core and everything else if you want to develop your cultural intelligence needs to be in your Flex these graphs here um on the what is it like it's your left on > (6:33:16) the on your left over there is a person that changes their core values and behavior so often that there's no way for you to trust them that's too unacceptable on the other side of that is my grandpa who never ever changes anything that he thinks and believes and uh who until his dying day insisted that I need needed to know my place in life and how dare I deviate from that and in the middle somewhere in the middle is that flexibility that we all must have and on the borders of that are our knots at some point during your journey you're > (6:33:57) going to as you meet people and learn things you're gonna happen upon things that make you uncomfortable and maybe things that you're not very proud of in your upbringing parts of your cultural programming that you maybe question and parts of your cultural programming that are challenged by other cultures and these are your knots so that same my place in life thing that my grandfather really wanted to kind of push upon me is one of my knots it's so deeply engraved into how I was raised that I actually fight with it > (6:34:42) every day so my natural cultural programming is telling me no don't speak up don't want more know your place my knots is kind of and me questioning my notes is just telling me move on it's not you this can be in your Flex so CQ is developed by Having the courage to have those conversations that make you uncomfortable and having the willingness to admit you're not and either move past them or accept and acknowledge them because when you meet other people you can only develop the code your cultural intelligence > (6:35:25) if they decide to share with you and they will only do it if they think that you have enough cultural intelligence to accept and admit and there are some things that you can do you can listen learn to listen actively learn and show interest in others not perceive otherness as threatening can be aware of your not learn to make a fool of yourself and recognize and stand up to cultural intolerance you can tune your body head and heart towards listening and maybe you will never understand but at least you will learn > (6:36:11) because cultural intelligence starts with understanding your own culture and my all the time yeah I'm late oh I'm late okay I have two more slides all right can I do them okay okay so reverse engineer yourself and challenge your culture because apparently I am late and for at least some of this for some of you this will be outrageous thank you thank you we have time for Q a so if you took something that you wanted to ask Pattaya for about cultural intelligence about anything really or other things there > (6:37:05) are two microphones here left and right and if you want to line up there we have about 10 minutes for um seven minutes for Q a before we make everybody late for Matt okay so are there any questions Toby yes hi Toby hi Peter thank you great speech really I mean energizing okay um you said that you were you got a very rough start as a global polygous mentor okay this is an internal joke so with the other yeah I [Laughter] um threw him in the bin after I was thrown in the same it's okay I can deal with it okay now now > (6:38:02) um yeah so I I think uh one thing you should just show the public here how a typical Bulgarian will show with her head yes and no because I mean Indian is a bit separate right and Bulgarian is another place okay yeah well uh so bulgarians shake their heads for yes and not for now it's very similar to how Greeks Say ne which means yes in their language and in our language that means no so we're very close but you know it can be a part of that thanks Toby yeah hi hi first of all congrats for compliments for your Dutch pronunciation > (6:38:47) of uh yeah oh my God I am mortified three Dutch people try to teach me that in the last two and a half days and I probably don't worry about it one question I had you you talked about the values within human made and and also the differences you have with the teams in the different regions so yeah what is your number one tip to make sure that those values which are well let's say a little bit Dutch so straightforward out in the open how do they translate and how do you translate them to those teams in other regions > (6:39:20) well it's a Converse it has like the most important thing is for it to be a conversation for it to not be something that you push on them but you for whoever your onboarding into your company we have like really paid attention to our onboarding processes those values need to be a conversation these are our values not just like these are our values follow them these are our values how they how do they make you feel do you have any questions is there anything that maybe worries you and then ask those questions over and over again > (6:39:50) as you see people struggling with some of them because as I said some people will say everything is okay but maybe you can also approach those conversations a little differently by unfortunately having to use stereotypes you know knowing specifically which team you're talking to some things you can invite in to the conversation a bit more broadly but basically that just don't don't push them down just discuss them yeah well time for one more uh one last question John hi Pat yeah hi I have a question about when you know trying to > (6:40:26) have these conversations who should be responsible for initiating the conversation like if there's a group that is you know like you talk about at human made it's a very Anglo you know oriented company should it be the anglo-focused P or the Anglo people that are initiating these conversations to better understand the people that are you know from Southeast Asia or is it the people that are more of the outsider should be initiating the conversations um about their needs and how they're yeah um you know it's interesting because > (6:40:58) actually in our American region we have representatives from several clusters now which you think you know Americans can communicate and talk to each other and all that but like when the Brazilian team joined all of these things kind of became very very apparent you know people that struggle a bit without English or weren't were from a different cultural background weren't that open to speaking up Etc the great thing about human made is we are very enabled from the get-go to initiate conversations at > (6:41:27) any level who should be responsible whoever notices uh who should be responsible for embedding a culture of understanding diversity and cultural awareness and cultural intelligence that's definitely on the head of the company we need to have those conversations yeah there he is well not just you or were you raising your hand because you had a question uh but yeah I think that it should start with the company wider company values basically saying that it's okay to be different uh and uh and it should kind > (6:42:01) of cascade down um Cascade down towards everyone but we've had so many amazing examples human mates gone from egalitarian towards a hierarchical structure but throughout the years the people who have been a part of our very very flat company in the beginning have felt so enabled because we learn by doing and we copy behaviors and we like try and lead by example in the company I think people just naturally kind of soak up but they are definitely situations where you see that there's something happening or > (6:42:35) something isn't happening and that's where we question why it isn't happening and when you find the answer there you initiate the conversation and it should happen at all layers of the company I think it shouldn't be the responsibility of a single department or even a single person yeah all right that's all the time we have today okay thank you all for coming thank you thank you I'm thinking um I'll be outside if you'd like to further chat there's quite a lot to talk about I guess all right thank you so > (6:43:14) much so um yeah and that concludes the session here in track two I will ask you to all go over to track one to listen to Matthias Ventura and uh Joseph Hayden Jean for Zee talking about variations on the 20th anniversary and Then followed by a q a with Matt mullenweg for those on the live stream you can submit your questions for Matt or others um through Twitter Instagram and Facebook and Twitter and uh Instagram the account is WC Europe one word small letters and um well thank you all so much and I'll see you over there drag > (6:44:02) one ## Highlights - yummy ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h3apm42xfcbqz2wkxwsr94dg))