Episode 22: The WP Community Collective  Hey, welcome back to Community and Code, the podcast about the human beings behind the commits. This episode is a little bit different. The timing is different. This is coming out on a Friday and we just had an episode last week on Wednesday. So FYI, the next episode will be in a week and a half instead of next week. Uh, and I've got not one but three guests on the show today. And full disclosure, I'm not really just the host this time. I'm also one of the people we're talking about because this episode is happening in the context of Podcastathon, a global event where podcasters release episodes to raise awareness for nonprofit organizations. And the nonprofit I'm spotlighting today is one that I'm personally involved in, the WP Community Collective. The WPCC is built around a pretty simple premise. The way WordPress or honestly all of open source has funded or maybe more accurately hasn't funded its contributors is broken and someone needed to try and fix it. So Seed and Courtney Robertson started talking and the WPCC was born. In this episode, you'll hear from my fellow members of the WPCC board of directors. Courtney Robertson, who you might know as a developer advocate at GoDaddy and one of the most dedicated contributor advocates in the ecosystem. Save Reed, CEO and co-founder who's been doing this work since before before the org had a name. And Jonno Alderson, a technical SEO and web performance nerd, former Yoast and someone with a gift for saying uncomfortable true things out loud. We get into the origin story of the WPCC, the structural problems that made it necessary, some personal war stories from the contributor trenches, and what the WPCC is actually trying to build. If you care about the future of WordPress, this one's for you. Welcome to community and code the podcast where we talk to the human beings behind the commit. I am here for a I don't know community and code first because I have more than one human on the screen today. Um this is >> allegedly this is a bit of a different uh show uh today because we're doing it during the week of the podcastathon. Um, Podcastathon is a sort of global podcasting event where uh podcasters can talk to nonprofits or about nonprofits to raise money for said nonprofits. And I just happen to know some folks uh that are involved in a nonprofit, including uh myself. So, uh I'm here today with the WPCC, the WP uh community collected collective. Um and I'm just going to go. >> We're also collected. We're collected here. Uh so I'm just going to let you all introduce yourselves rather than giving you an introduction. Uh I'm going to go down uh around in the circle and then I'll introduce myself last because I don't know uh I'm also on the screen and I'm also uh in the board of directors. So topping starting at my top right I see Courtney Robertson. >> Hello everybody. I am indeed Courtney Robertson. Courtney R.ev. Uh these days you'll find me as a developer advocate at GoodDaddy, a longtime WordPress contributor, one who is active in multiple open-source communities, and I really care about sustaining the open- source communities and the pipeline of contributors. >> Yes. Yes. And then we have Se say, introduce yourself. >> Get me. Hi, I'm Seed and um I am the CEO, part-time CEO of the WPCC, also a board member as a CEO and um gosh, I don't that's all I got for the intro. >> I feel like I feel like you have the more storied at least podcasting career than some of the rest of us on this show. >> Yeah, I had that podcast for a while, but you know, here here we are. No podcast, >> but all podcast. >> Yes, all all the podcasts. And then uh directly underneath me, Jonno, introduce yourself. >> Hi. Yeah, I'm increasingly concerned about identifying as a human. Like every time I have to do a capture and it asks, I'm like, at what point am I sufficiently augmented to cross the line? Anyway, yeah. Hi. Um, I'm Jono. I'm a technical SEO and web performance nerd and a deep deep WordPress nerd. Um yeah, I've got a background in all sorts of kind of WordPressy stuff and consultancy and enterprise spaces and worked at Yoast for a little bit. Um give or take five years. Yeah. And recently joined the WPCC as a board member to try and work out how on earth we wrangle this ecosystem to make it I want to say functional as a kind of aspirational starting point. Sure. We can get into more of that later. >> Uh and I'm Chris. I'm the host of this podcast. uh in the hat that I am wearing today. I am also uh the interim president of the WPCC. Um I have been in WordPress for 20ish years, I guess. Um I have done all sorts of things in the WordPress ecosystem. I freelanced for a long time. I uh did online developer training. Uh I worked at agencies and now I'm a uh developer advocate at Pantheon. Uh Courtney and I share uh the developer advocate uh hat among the hats that we wear. Um so we're here to talk a little bit about uh the WPCC uh and I mean also like about ourselves and how we got involved in in our our own paths uh here. But because we're doing this special thing uh with all the board of directors on uh I kind of want to talk about the WPCC. So uh I will will turn it over to probably Courtney or say or perhaps both of you to talk about sort of the origin story of this community collective like what was sort of the idea uh besides [ \_\_ ] be broken yo um that that led to the the organization >> I didn't say it quite like that >> say could you take us back to work camp us in San Diego Go. >> Yeah, exactly. Um, well, once upon a time there was a thing called word camps. Just kidding. >> Once upon a time. Oh, no. What happened? >> Oh, yeah. No. Um, so the, uh, the problem of sponsored and volunteer contribution has been on my mind for a very long time. Uh, prefounding the WPCC. Um, basically ever since I I was involved in in WordPress, it it there there was a power imbalance. Um, there was a a volunteers were always bringing their passion, but they could never be the leaders in the community that the people who were being paid to be there could be because they just had another job. And it was it was difficult to watch volunteers who were there with their own for their own heart for people to be um not not totally sidelined but just be a little bit diminished versus the folks who were being paid to show up there. And not that those folks were not also full of passion. a lot of times they were but it's a just that that it's it's a weird tension. The other issue that was clear um even at that time was the issue that other than companies who are strictly uh basically WordPress companies um they have they they have normal rules and in the capitalism rules uh you have employees and you have those employees work on things that make you money generally that's the general idea. So hiring an employee to then go send them off to work on something that you don't really have any control over that you can't uh really judge there's no metrics we don't know how productive people are being there's no standard there I saw company and I talked to a lot of companies who who couldn't contribute who couldn't find a way to contribute and you know we even this week there's been just a lot of talk about the will to contribute And I think that it is difficult to say definitively that there is no will to contribute or there people don't want to contribute when there isn't a clear way to contribute. If there was a clear way to contribute and no one was contributing, you know, company-wise, then that would sure make that conclusion. But until we make something that makes sense, um I it's not the conclusion that I would draw. So, this is something that I tossed around in my head for a long time. Courtney and I of course uh have known each other for a long time in the word press world and uh would talk about this. Um Courtney's worked for the big companies and has seen firsthand that struggle of contribution versus the business model of the actual business. Um, and I was really of the mindset that there was uh an a nonprofit organization that could do this. I've worked in nonprofit for basically my whole career um with nonprofits. So, I know that they're capable of managing a space, hiring staff, etc. Um, so in uh that word camp San Diego in 2022, I think it was 2022. >> Yeah. >> Um, familiar. >> We uh were at a Q&A. Courtney and I were at a Q&A with Matt who was doing Matt Mullenwig who was um speaking and um someone asked a question. I actually don't recall at the moment who asked that question. Wasn't me and they said you know what's something something the foundation going to do about this and uh Matt said clearly and without any qualifications that the WordPress foundation was never going to hire someone. they were never going to fund the contribution. And up until that point, I had been reluctant to do anything about this problem because I thought that would be step overstepping that that would be stepping on the boundaries of the where the foundation was. Learning this that it was not going to happen. Basically, after that meeting, Courtney and I were like, well, I guess someone needs to do it. >> Yeah. I was on the flip side of this. >> Um >> I had asked Matt a different question kind of related to this. I should go back and look at that video. Um it was one of the first camps right after the pandemic lifted travel regulations and things. And so um you know on my end there is a challenge. GoDaddy does sponsor several individuals. We have two full-time staff. We have one uh engineer that puts 10 hours a week into the plug-and review team and then we also sponsor two other folks. One of them being Joe Doulson um part-time uh just for a certain amount for contract hours. And I was looking at all of this from the internals of how hard is it to explain exactly why we need to do this, how to do it. And then at the end of the day, I can't shove money into envelopes to get it to people to do the work. We need to have a proper process that accounts for things, I don't know, like taxes envelopes. >> Yeah. Can't put cash in envelopes to give to contributors. Um, and also wanting to make sure that the the funding went to kind of specific areas in particular. So, what are the spots? You know, we have sort of two different needs going on in the WordPress space. Um, and I've done some looking beyond the WordPress space to see how others sort of solve for this and different projects have different ways. But, uh, we have people that are really passionate about doing a thing that can't get the funding to keep doing it. And it may not be critical to what's coming in the next release or you know what's good for the entire community and also um a struggle to perhaps see what is going on throughout the project that needs some funding like if we spot that the docs team I just saw that very recently I was so glad to see this that the uh parser tool was broken to get dev docs done. So being able to spot what are the big needs of a project. >> I was happy to see that the parser tool was broken. Right. >> No, I was I was happy to see it got fixed. Right. And so >> there you go. There you go. >> Being able to spot some of those areas across all the teams and identify and what does having the dev docs mean to devs mean to contributors, mean to AI, mean to general search results? It's it's kind of an important feature I would think, but it wasn't deemed a priority enough to get fixed in a timely manner. And so we're sort of going back and playing catch-up on these things. So these are bits of the project that are critical infrastructure. One would argue and clearly needed some reinforcement and some advocacy work of like who can do this part. >> Interrupted by dog. Um >> sorry, no worries. Um >> kind of interruption. Let's let's I want to take a step a little bit back and talk about like we tal say you were talking about like the things that the WPCC stepped in to fix for for people that don't that are outside the WordPress community um who might not know what the contributor model that we all because we've been in this uh this place for a long time uh do know like what does it look like for like how does how does the existing status quo really work in uh I I'll I'll toss it to you, Courtney, because like you said, you you have some folks who actually are paid staff um who who work on core and there's some other organizations, some agencies and stuff that that sponsor development. Um but like really like you said earlier, that's like we have somebody on staff who's doing this thing, but like it's basically like they're not an employee anymore, right? They're just working on this other thing. Um >> so it kind of depends. Um, so in our context, Kira Schroeder, who has been with the project, uh, oh gosh, I want to say 20 years as almost as a sponsored contributor at various organizations. She has done amazing work, but her work is often hidden because it's security work or it's research work that involves reading over really old track tickets to understand why people came to conclusions they did and use that as a decision maker moving forward. So, it's not obvious work, but it's important work. Um, I believe that came about when Aaron Campbell was still at GoDaddy at the time. And Aaron was able to express to executives, here is the real need and what and why. And Kira and our other contributor, George Madame, goes by the handle Maduka. Um, George works on specifically Gutenberg projects. They both live in nations that GoDaddy doesn't actually even technically hire in. So, uh, in both of their cases, they are contracted staff, which is slightly different if you get into human resources and knowing our companies can be open. So, that's another headache. Um, there are plenty of them. And what budget does this go to and who are they reporting to and what are they doing? But one of the things that we're actively doing, um, I had the chance, it's almost two weeks ago now, Matt Mullenweg did a tour of the walkthrough on WordPress 7.0 and specifically mentioned GoDaddy and Blue Host in that and um it was in the context of testing on collaborative editing and of course we're going to be testing on collaborative editing. George came back and said, "Oh, we would like to do this." And so part of my role has been internally to facilitate, let's talk to our hosting folks that can do load balance testing. And that piece of the performance puzzle is what does this look like in our page plans down to our shared hosting plans. you know, everything from an enterprise agency to a small individual person that may or may not be a business owner even um building out their websites and who's going to use this and what does it look like when we have a thousand people at the same time on many different websites but two people actively trying to edit a thing at the same time. What does that do to the hosting environments? So in a sense there are feedback loops and mechanisms but what is the struggle is that they really are primarily dedicated just to the project. So being able to say like okay now have them provide us with what we should be testing and doing um facilitate those meetings across strange time zones as one does and on top of that then ensure that we're providing the relevant feedback of our experience. Not just what's it do for our own customers, but also if we need this to be something that changes. Here's the results. Let's tell core team what we can, let's tell the hosting team what we can about that experience as well. Not giving out proprietary information, but giving out things that would help the future of the release, right? And so there's logistics that can be had to sort of interoperate between those. And I think it's up to each company. And perhaps there may be seasons where there is more of that feedback mechanism happening between the sponsored contributors and the host themselves or the plugin, the theme company, whomever is sponsoring them. There can be some of those seasons where you have a lot of internal collaboration as well. And then other seasons where there's not much of that going on. It just depends on what's going into the release and where things are. Speaking for myself, I'm not paid to be a sponsored contributor to core, but obviously as a somebody who works at a hosting company. Uh things that go into WordPress matter very deeply to the things that we work on. And uh my recent or not so recent anymore uh but a claim to fame that I wear as a badge of honor is that I was able to single-handedly mostly single-handedly uh punt uh the font manager uh out of uh a version of WordPress to a later version of WordPress because I raised the question, hey, what does this do if uh if how does this like I need a way to tell the the file system that where you're storing these files is actually someplace I need a I need a way to put these files in a different place because uh Pantheon as a host has a readonly file system on our production sites. You can't just write files to WP content. The way that we do that is we map it to a writable directory. And then the other part of that was um that there's database references uh that are made to all those fonts and we have three different environments, dev, test, and live. So which one is the canonical source of truth? Right? If we were to say, "Oh, we're going to put those in the file system and commit them in the dev environment," then it would be committed files up through the chain and then but the production environment wouldn't know about the fi the existence of those files because they're not in the database and we don't want to be like playing with database like backups from a dev environment into the production environment. That seems dumb. Um, so like because I said that this was possibly a problem, it would be a problem for us and anyone else who might have a similar sort of uh uh infrastructure like other AWS platforms would would fall into this category. Uh more discussion was needed. More stuff happened. I didn't do anything other than raise my hand in Slack and like put some comments on a on a uh Gutenberg ticket uh in in GitHub, but lots of other people that were smarter than me came in and and then came to a conclusion and basically said, "Hey, does this work?" And I'm like, "Yeah, honestly, all I need is a filter, but that's great, too." >> Um, so but but outside of that, too, like so like again, I'm not sponsored. There are companies or agencies that do have a paid staff member on on their staff. The problem that that that potentially introduces, I'm thinking very recently of uh Google had some sponsored open source contributors that were contributing directly to core. And recently Google decided that they didn't want to have open- source contributors paid that are just doing open source work that are not actually doing Google work. and they kind of got rid of that team. So like there is this economics of like does it make sense for this company? Google's a really big company. They could throw money around like crazy a lot more so than than my company or your company Courtney. And but like if it's not matching up with those those I don't know success metrics uh then it's a pretty easy thing to say yeah we're going to reallocate you to something else or we're just not going to have you do this anymore. It's it's not even just economic. It is obviously that's a huge part of it like is this com this person who's working like you know marketing is not usually although I think that it is but people look at marketing as the first people they fire because they're not producing something they're not like making the money right um again I argue that that is untrue but that is the general take right um and I think that so obviously the economics of you know paying someone to do something that's not producing a product or working on something is one thing but there's also HR are like how do you govern that person like how do you like what if that person has an issue within WordPress that never happens um and you know do they go to their company HR or what's the deal because they're a contractor and not a company and do they go to the company meetings like it it and do are they included in the all hands right like even though they don't know what those projects are because they're not even working on them so it really it creates it's just a difficult situation when you have like basically someone in a bubble that works full-time for a company, but that company has no like really say over what they're doing or anything. So, I I think it's that tension that is really the problem that that we have identified and the the the one of the values, one of the greatest values in my mind of the community is exactly what you just said, Chris, like you weren't working on this particular issue. You weren't doing the coding for it. you just looked at it and because you're coming at it from an outside perspective, you have a different use case. You have different needs for your company and for your clients, you were able to say, "Hey, I can I can look at this in a different way." The people who were working on it, they have uh what are those like blinder things? Horse blinders like this. You're focused on your stuff. When we have the community, we're bringing in all of those use cases. It's like the mini eyeballs or mini hands make light work, you know, and more eyeballs on something means you can see more things. And that value is is to me what has created the the juggernaut that is WordPress. I I do not believe that it is because of a single person's vision or the paid contributors who have been coding like it's it's been much more than that and that is a value that is really intangible. But even like what you said, you you you probably saved like hosts the world over from mass chaos because you brought in information and sort of an innovative idea or an outofthe-box way of thinking. I don't even know what the right word for it is, but it's just a different perspective and it turns out it's valuable. >> Isn't that fascinating that >> Yeah. on an off chance somebody who happened to be already inside that ecosystem caught something that would in the grand scheme of the universe fairly minor but yeah consequential right there would have been issues there would have been overheads there would have been support there would have been time blah blah blah blah blah and then you look at the two examples Courtney and say you've raised that on one hand you've got the enthusiastic practical individuals who just want to do the thing and yet there is no clear route as to how they can do that so they're functionally blocked from contributing in a meaningful way that's sustainable. And then say at the other end of the scale, you've got one of the biggest companies in the world, Google, who are for a thousand reasons obviously incentivized to influence and shape this thing for whatever reason, even if it's something as simple as I don't know if we can shave 2 kilobytes off every WordPress homepage. That saves rainforests. And yet simultaneously, they can't develop a business case of an argument or clarity around how that should work and why they should do it and what does success look like. So at every every step and every angle and every approach to this thing there is no infrastructure there is no framework there is no standardization and the only thing that keeps us going and yeah even even keeps us moving forward which maybe masks some of how hideously broken this is is the enthusiasm of the people who are already inside that bubble and ecosystem catching things spotting things and being willing to continue but I don't see I don't see a way forward where we maintain that current enthusiasm and resourcing without improving the onboarding, the facilitation, the governance, all of those other words around how do we encourage, invite, sustain, support and yeah, so hugely excited that we might try and address some of that. >> One of my favorite words. I just want to say you just >> on boarding and like inclusion. It's amazing. I I want to I want to shift gears and and go into your uh origin or origin story into the WPCC in a second, Jonno, but like what you just said, like we are recording this the day after two very influential members of the WordPress community have uh publicly announced that they're stepping back from the fair project, which is uh federated and independent repositories, a project that started uh largely last year as a package manager for WordPress that is an alternative to the uh essent potentially single point of failure that is everything that is on the wpu wordpress.org uh infrastructure. The idea being that if there are disperate uh sources of where stuff comes from then it it spreads the load and it means that if WordPress.org goes down or if the maintainer of WordPress.org or heaven forbid does something to a plugin for example that just hypothetically that affects everybody that is a consumer of that plugin then uh then the like there's there's a a buffer there that's a supply chain issue right and so the idea was we can create this federated list of servers that then create uh that create some some distance from that from that supply chain uh security uh vulnerability um And the they're stepping back because they spent the last year going to various people, a lot of them hosts looking for funding so they could form a board so they could fund the development of this of this infrastructure package. Uh and basically the answer they got was we don't have an appetite for it because of the status quo because of all the things. So like in many ways uh the WPCC uh to me represents like okay that was that was the old model that's like the old way of of thinking about how contribution works and how community projects work. Uh perhaps perhaps the WPCC is a new way or something different that could happen uh instead. Um but >> that's the plan. >> Yeah, that's that's my plan. That's the theory of change that we are working under. >> Yeah. Um but Jon because mostly because uh we've we've heard a lot from from S and Courtney, I'd like to hear from you about like how you like what attracted you to this community collective to this project um and made you want to get involved in it to begin with. >> Well, that's big, isn't it? Um >> I I think the short version is I am driven by hope for a better web, a better humanity, a better world, etc. In the broadest possible sense, as I'm sure many of us are. And as one small and probably quite inconsequential human, the one small surface area of that that I can affect is the web where I work and I consult and I try and help businesses to take their terrible, slow, unhelpful websites and to make them marginally better in the hopes that in aggregate that has some kind of positive impact. So I've been doing that for a long time. started out in web development in agencies in SAS platforms and was continually frustrated by how poor a lot of the tech was. So they're on content management systems that that break that don't have basic functionality etc. I spent most of 2013 working in I don't know enterprise CMSs that were doing versions of what WordPress had done 10 years ago badly. And I think of all the of all the things we could be doing on the web and all the things we should be doing, I see the idea of WordPress as the operating system really resonating. I think this is as a piece of tech and a platform the right way to build the right kinds of things for what we need as a society as businesses as individuals. I think the idea of democrat democratizing publishing yeah super nice but there's a much bigger impact here about democratizing the web anyway all of that. So I joined Yoast SEO to try and do a bit of that to try and go how do we make every site 1% better in a way that meaningfully impacts the world and helps people and helps businesses and makes money and fuels the the engines of capitalism >> and saves the >> Yeah. Yeah. That too. Yeah. Yeah. Meaningful impact etc. Um and that was must have been around 2016ish I think maybe even earlier. And it was the first time that I'd gone from being a WordPress developer to really meeting and understanding the community and the ecosystem. So I've been building WordPress sites since maybe I don't know 2006ish but I hadn't even discovered the community at all and as a result having come from a background in agencies and capitalism I felt found the whole space really strange like what is this product and where is the road map and where's the governance and WordPress.org or is weird, right? operationally like this thing that sits in the middle and word camps as event weird very friendly very pleasant little bit cultish don't behave like any other normal conference that I've been to which I've been to hundreds and spoken at hundreds and this doesn't look and feel like the same thing fight for the future bit weird right everybody is lovely but underneath all of that all of these things seem to be just powered by feeding more humans into the boiler and we burn people out we upset and offend them we alienate them, we confuse them, we don't support them, we don't blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. And even over like the five years I was working at Yos, the churn I saw in core contributors, in documentation, in event attendees, in people who I spoke to multiple times a day about projects they were passionate about who then just disappeared because they couldn't handle the ecosystem, the politics, the processes or the lack of processes, etc. And increasingly it feels like to me the tech is great. Like there's some there's some interesting questions about direction and strategy and roadmap and whether Gutenberg was insane or visionary or both. Fine. But underneath all of that, it feels like we're cooking at the seams because we pretend that we have an infinite talent pool and that we can just keep feeding more humans to the boiler. And I don't think that's true. I think that if we want to survive and thrive and build this incredibly important platform and framework that powers the open web that fuels societies and economies in a way that none of the alternatives come even close to like show me a wick site that even has a correct XML sitemah no like there is nothing else close despite all of these flaws and yet the fuel that we need to make this thing work in a much nicer sense of a stable uh sustainable community of volunteers and contributors and people who actually are rewarded for their time. We don't have any posters for that. We don't have any frameworks, who don't have any platforms. And that terrifies me existentially, not least of which because my my livelihood is tied very closely to this thing. And my identity as somebody who firmly believes in understanding what good looks like in tech is very closely tied to this thing. And I'm very very keen not to look like a hypocrite and to be proven wrong. So yeah, I'm keen that we try and work out how do we reinforce, not even reinforce, how do we construct the underlying foundations underneath this thing because they don't exist and we've just pretended that human capital is an infinite resource and that goodwill is an infinite resource and recent events have I think to everyone outside that demonstrated that's not the case. Yet we continue to pretend it is. So yeah, step one, let's work out how we get people engaged and how we reward them. And then we gradually unpick all the rest of this. >> Yeah. Let's talk about that that uh even before recent events that that assumption of of infinite uh human capital. Um I will tell like my own personal experience. Uh there was a period of time when I was really involved with the docs team. Uh and one of the projects that we like basically this was back in the day WordPress used to have uh the concept of feature plugins that as a way of like oh if you want >> Wait you mean you mean canonical plugins don't you? >> No no this is this is before that. Uh the the idea was that if you had a an a cool idea for something to be put into core, you could start it off as a feature plugin and put all your development there and then the feature plugin gets evaluated and then someone from the core maintainer group or someone somewhere uh decides yes this is good or no it's not. Um, and >> I just wanna before I just want to point out at that same time there was also a theory that the things that go into core those feature plugins should apply to 80% of the people who are using that. So those feature plugins were used to sort of map out that use case and be like yes we're testing the code and everything but also is this something that 80% of the people who use this software are going to use or should it stay in a plug-in because it's only 20%. So I just that has gone far by the wayside. But I I it was that same era of feature plugins. It that seemed reasonable to me like that seemed like a reasonable way to test new features. I I liked that era. >> So So the project that that I was working on was uh to try to solve the problem of WordPress users being overwhelmed by all this stuff when they log in like new user experience basically. Um, and like the thing is that there are all these things that are built into WordPress um, that already exist that could be tools to help people out with that problem. For instance, like there is a help tab that appears on pages in the admin, but nobody clicks on that because nobody knows it exists because it's just hidden up there. There's a screen options tab up there. I knew about those things myself because I had recently recorded a course for Pluralsight that was literally going through every screen in the WordPress admin. And one of the things that I noticed when I was doing that is there's these tabs that you can click on and they do stuff. So, our theory was how can we bring people bring more awareness to the stuff that's already there, the little tab in the corner, um to get to maybe help people out or maybe there's like some sort of like guided tours that things pop up on the screen or whatever. Um, so that was the feature plugin that I was involved in working on. It involved learning about how to like add stuff into those pages and and uh it's kind of janky code because nobody's looked at it in probably 15 years. Um, and uh and building out this plugin that that tried to do something better. Um, we did we actually did user research. Um, we did a number of we like I don't like there's a user testing.com or something and we had an account that was paid for probably by the foundation or someone some someone not me um that allowed us >> that allowed us to like actually get real human beings that are just random folks that apply to to do this thing and I think they're like compensated five bucks or something to go through the thing and we asked them to go through and do a like go log in uh make a make a blog post start writing stuff whatever. And uh and then we would watch these videos and we would try to figure out like, oh, is this more helpful? And then we would make a little bit of a change and we'd do another round of of user testing and see if to see if it would get any feedback. So we put a lot of work and time into this thing. Um and then when it did come time to like actually present on the thing that we did, uh it was like nope, nope, we're not going to we're not going to do this. We're not going to pursue this. And >> and probably no path for it was just a dead end, right? like >> let's tweak it or maybe this way just like >> just a unilateral no. Um, and >> Chris related to that, I never knew that one of your early onboarding routes was a new user experience model because >> circle when I joined uh contributing to the training team in 2014, Drew James had been leading a nu exploration for what you see when you first log in. And this was the days before we had Slack. We were all in IRC and I was a very intimidated contributor. And that project also just still sits right where we left it. It's where I met Morton. >> Yeah. Yeah. Um that I mean there the good I will say that came out of that I mean uh was that I was because I was involved in that project and because I was involved in the docs team I was invited to the community summit in at Word Camp San Francisco in whatever 2015 2014 something like that. Um, and I got to meet meet Kim Parcel. And so I love her and rest in peace. She I I she was one of the first people that greeted me in in the community summit. This is total tangent. Um, she was one of the first people that greeted me and she said, "Hi, I'm Kim." And I said, "Hi, I'm Chris." And she's like, and I knew who she was because I knew her handle. Cuz her handle was probably her name or something. Uh, and mine was Jazz Sequence. And I and she kind of like gave me a look and she's like, "What are you here with?" and I'm here with the doc. Oh, and she's like, "Oh, I work on the docs team." Like, "Oh, yeah, I I know. I'm jazz sequence." And she's like, "Oh." And she immediately gave me a hug. And like to speak to to Jonno, like your comment and everybody like here knows like the community is amazing. Like the people here are amazing. Um, and that was really that was sort of my introduction to the the broader sort of contributor community. But the flip side of that is after sort of that project kind of got deadended, that really killed my desire to ever contribute anything to core ever again. Like I have zero interest uh since then. And so even even if it's not like like the onboarding process for contributors or like getting like working up this like Matt likes to talk about Mr. Melon likes to talk about how it's a meritocracy, but it can't even be a meritocracy if we are kind of stopping people at the gate and and preventing them from feeling like they're invited through the gate. >> Yeah. I mean, and the rules don't It's like this is how you get through the gate, but then you follow the rules to get through the gate and you're not anywhere near the gate. It's like So, it's actually it's it's not even just that it's like a blocked gate, right? It's that you're told that there's a gate there. you're told that if you build this feature plugin and you do this stuff like and this has been sort of the the problem to bring it back to the WPCC it's we the the individuals who experience this like you said Jonno and like you you were like oh I hit that and I hit the wall and I was like done right that's the human the human churn we've talked about that we've all seen amazing intelligent creative people leave the community um ethical people leave the community um because they they aren't just going to work for they're already working for nothing in terms of financial compensation. So to also work for work that on something that then is just literally futile and completely negated there's no benefit there. There's not like no one's coming in for that. And the the issue is, you know, when you treat I think this is a this is an entrepreneur tech bro issue, right? That um and and really more like even just big corporations, you start to treat your employees as if they're interchangeable cogs in a wheel, right? And and this is why I actually said a comment yesterday about how the the community is not valued in the way that it should be valued. Um even when we're talking about AI, right? Everyone's like, "Oh, AI is going to do everything." You know, AI is not going to pop into that tech that font manager conversation and be like, "Oh, you know what? I have this use case over here that this is going to cause a real problem and whatever." Like, AI is not going to innovate. AI is not going to make those connections of of this use case versus this use case and how those might interact because it it's not being fed that information because it's it has to come from a human. And if the human isn't there to feed it that information, it's not going to innovate. It's only going to use what it has in the past. So I I I across the tech industry right now, I think it's so funny. Everyone's like AI AI. And I'm like, what happened to innovation? Like what happened to like creating new things? Because what we're doing right now is we're just going to like, you know, just like AI and then copies AI and then copies AI. you get the copy of a copy of a copy and then you know it's like um it's almost like inbreeding at a certain point like you need but I mean it's genetics right if you have even like an animal population >> genetics Yep. >> Yeah. If you have an animal population that's just breeding within itself like it's a contained thing. It it has problems because you need diversity in order to have new ideas, new genetics, new whatever come in and create the new things. And without that input, um you you you are stuck with just the soup that you have. And because of the way that we've survived is by doing what Jonno said, which is just feeding more humans into there. And then when they've given their innovative ideas, you just they're gone. They leave. More humans come in with innovation. You know, we want to do something here about that like and then the humans leave part and also the the empowering of like what you're doing. But that not only is that not an inexhaustible source and you know goodwill has been has been spent mightily, but we you know we this it's not done like we're not done building the internet. We're not done building the web. Like, are we just like perfecting this one thing that we have? We can't even do that with AI. So, the humans are are are what even drives the AI. It's like, you know, a car might be sitting there and and I guess this is a bad example now with like Whimo and the self-driving cars, but still like the self-driving car still needs a human. Like that's just all it otherwise it's literally just sitting there. Like the car is not driving itself around for fun. Like >> I thought we I thought we found out that all the self-driving cars, all the Whimos were actually controlled remotely by some dudes. >> Oh my god, them too. >> In the Philippines. >> Most of them are, but I didn't know it was the Whimos, too. >> Yeah. >> Yes. >> Oh my god. This is >> I just found this out. This is like Sage shocked face. Like I knew there was a lot of the like person in the box, you know, doing the AI, but I didn't realize that the Whimos were also part of that. Um I've never been in a Whimo. I'm never getting in a Whimo. Like I don't I'm sorry. just not doing it. Um, but the point is here is that we all all the all the powers that be are like AI. Even the companies are like AI and it's like that's just not going to be where the innovation comes from. It's just it's not >> it's a desperate push for efficiency which means removing humans and squeezing margins etc. which yeah you could make an ARY for and there's there's economic presence blah blah blah blah blah but it completely sidesteps the underlying problems that yeah where is the pipeline of contribution and new ideas and resources to do stuff otherwise what gets built and where are these new featured plugins coming from and if all we end up with is AI that summarizes the other stuff that the AI built maybe Wix is the better choice that's not cool >> we we've talked we've talked a lot about uh the problem base um why the WPCC exists um I'd like to shift focus a little bit into okay so what is the solution so by by shifting into this gear I'd like to ask uh say Courtney probably say because uh you talk about this all the time um I think I think a lot of people assume uh or put a lot of things like you do uh onto what uh onto the WPCC because they expect it to behave in a particular way or expect it to work in a particular way. Um and then it doesn't because we're actually trying to do something new and different. Um so for everyone who does who has now heard about like why the WPCC exists, maybe you've gone to the the website and like scrolled through a little bit uh while we were having this conversation or maybe clicked pause, gasp and now you're coming back. Uh how does uh the WPCC try to solve this problem? How does it work? You are muted. Say it works by being on unmute. Um the you know our organization this is I could talk philosophically about how we work or about literally like our our output like what we are creating but I just for a touch on the philosophical part this is we we've built and we are building an innovative model across the board and the foundation of that is a member organization where the members are invi not just invited but encouraged requested We need them to we want them to come and participate come and have a mechanism for giving their opinion for approving new board members for approving changes so that it's not that they have to do the the day-to-day work of the organization but they are participating in the direction of the organization and that is in and of itself an innovative model because that doesn't exist especially in tech. Um it does exist obviously in in some other nonprofit worlds but not in this tech one. Um but in terms of like our output and what we are creating um what we have essentially established are two main um two main sort of like uh uh paths for that. One is off off of the sort of more academic and nonprofit model that exists in the world of fellowships where someone is paid full-time, part-time, whatever it is, but paid to work on a topic to deepen their knowledge, to work on a specific project where they are trusted as a fellow with um autonomy in a in a in a spec, you know, they're part of a team, but they are not having to report, you their metrics. They're we're not analyzing their work based off ROI, right? This is this model exists again in other fields, usually in thought fields, but bringing we're bringing that model into um into WordPress, into tech, into open source because that model fits so much better than the paid employee model for what we're talking about doing because contributors one are usually extremely knowledgeable and expert. they are in a very diverse sort of weird field and those things can't be put into tiny metrics that can then be handed to uh a board to then judge if their you know employee production is enough right so that model is gives some freedom with also some guidelines and I think it's just a really valuable model for what um for for this for open source um and then the other model is projects and projects are essentially anything that people need to work on I time time constrained with deliverables because a lot of the things that we see in WordPress are passion projects and I understand that but it you can't fund something um just forever right without some sort of guy it just the the it gets exhausted the funding gets exhausted the people get exhausted so by having time constrained projects and the goals of each project is that the people who work on them are paid. So it's not an individual person being paid to sort of have overview of a field but instead it is people working on a specific project with specific deliverables, specific compensation, specific clear expectations. So at the end of that we can be like okay this is that project and now everyone can we can maybe we do another project but we have these tangible things that we're able to understand and and complete. I think completing those things is really important and ideally uh even if we had like say we had a project like the one you were working on the onboarding one you were talking about Chris you know ideally our our vision here is that if someone worked on that if it wasn't being worked on with core or whatnot that we would have this project and then the WPCC not one person the organization the leadership and the membership would come and be like you know then we are working as a collective together to be like we want this thing, we are doing this thing and the sort of relationship between and this is where the theory part comes in because this is you know you never know how this is going to go but in theory if we have you know an entire group of people who are advocating for a thing who are bought into a thing it's a lot easier to move that thing forward than it is for just one person to sit there and be like I really believe in this and have to rally an entire group of people around them in this frame with the organization. We are that group of people. The members have already said yes, we like this project. We want this project to go forward and succeed. Um and then when it's done, then we all are bought into that. We all are the project is part of the organization's um uh just what we're doing and it doesn't it's not at that point then we have to make a case for it or we have to explain to our members what it's doing. So this is a different model and I think it's been difficult for people in our space to sort of understand that and that's okay. We will be demonstrating a lot of that this year. >> Yeah, >> I'm really excited about it. So, because this is a podcast uh during a particular podcast Aathon that is trying to raise money for these nonprofit organizations, uh how can people either contribute or become members or where do people go to give us money? >> Um well, if they want to give us money, great. Um people are can donate. That's fine. Um it's not a tax write-off. We're not a 501c3. We're not a public charity. Um, so they would just, you know, be giving us money, not getting a tax write off, which is fine. But the way we really want to interact with people is either as members, so they join as a member and they can make any amount of membership donation they want. Um, and then we also work with people as partners. So if someone wanted to, you know, get something done or wanted to work on a specific project, we would want to work with them to do that and work with them to fund it. They can fund it. We can work on finding sponsors to fund it. We can crowdfund for it and be the financial repository for that project and be the the authority on that project. We hold the money and you know make sure that the metrics are being met and whatnot. Um so it's not so much really that we want to be like hey just go donate money to the WPCC. What we really want is hey come join the WPCC first of all and participate as a member. Right now it's $5. You can come on in and just, you know, a year, not a month. Everyone's like, "A month, right?" I'm like, "No, just a year." The members will probably be changing that fee, but it's going to be up to the members to change. Like, the members are going to decide. We're not being like, "Okay, well, now it's $100 to join. But if the members decide that that's what they think is relevant and important, then we'll go in that direction." So, we want people to join as members and we want people to join as partners and sponsors to work on things. So it is a that that is also a different model. We're not just saying hand us cash and then see you later. We it is it's really in the name of the collective um that we are a collective but this is operating with the idea that we are better together and not that a unilateral direction is the right thing. valuing the diversity of our community and the innovation and intelligence that that brings. I mean, you have all these AI agents talking to each other, right? And it's like, oh, they're so smart. I was like, have you ever seen a group of humans work on something? Cuz that's pretty cool, too. Like, if people are excited and passionate and they're bringing ideas, like that's amazing. And it is much faster than AI, actually. Turns out >> to bring it to bring it sort of full circle around uh in the in the example of of like partnering or sponsoring WPCC uh we were talking before about you know companies like GoDaddy, companies like Google or or agencies like Tennup that are actually like have a paid contributor on staff. Um instead of that model which is the existing model which our hypothesis is that is a broken model. The solution, the the the thing that is offered instead is rather than having them on file, partner with the WPCC or on on staff, partner with the WPCC. You can still have your name associated with a contribution level for whatever thing. It's now just you don't have to worry about like directing them. You don't have to worry about them being an employee of your company. Like they are you're funneling your money essentially. Funneling is probably a bad word, but you're you're you're directing your money through the WPCC to that particular thing because you want to see that done. And it's the WPCC that then says, "Hey, who's the best person to solve this problem?" And then that also means that, you know, you don't have to put out a job uh posting for a role that is going to be a staff role for something that's really not going to be providing value to your company. uh if if that's how you perceive uh an open source contributor on staff, the alternative is uh you know, oh having an open source contributor on staff. Oh, like I think that there's this idea that like uh if there if you have some a core contributor on staff, they can like direct the direction of core in whatever direction benefits the company that you work for. But the reality is that's not always true. But >> they they are alone because they don't have the business behind them. So they're even that that single contributor who's in theory sponsored and has the weight of their company behind them is in those meetings alone. They don't actually they're just it's just them. So >> unless they're not alone, unless you have a critical mass of paid uh contributors uh >> and membership behind you supporting you. Exactly my point. Yes, we are together backing these things and it's not just we're all out there fighting individual battles that are all the same battles, which is like let's work together. In all of human history, I just want to point out it's when humans work together that things get done. It's like not actually that crazy of a model. It really isn't. It just in this weird times and especially in tech, we all get very siloed. We're all at our little computers alone and we all feel alone. But you are not alone. >> Well, thank you all for coming on. Uh this is sort of an historic uh community in code. It's in an historic uh thing for the WPCC because I don't think we've been on uh on a podcast at least all together at the same time. So this is >> we're still missing one of our board members, but >> we are missing we are missing one of our board members. Um Katie uh but uh but even so uh this is it's a big deal for for all of us. It's a big deal for the podcast. Thank you all for coming on. Uh, where can people go to find out more about the WPCC? >> Well, you can go to the wp communityolctive.com. >> Awesome. >> Community >> and uh yeah, I'll I'll I'll put everyone's sort of social stuff in the show notes uh in there. Uh we've got a lot of people, so I don't want to be labor the the time, but uh thank you again for everybody for coming on. Thank you, Jonno. Thank you, Courtney. Thank you, Se. Uh thank you, Chris. Uh and thank you all of all of the people that are watching this uh in the future. Uh and uh we'll see you all on the internet. >> Come join us. >> Let's do it together., Episode 22: The WP Community Collective, YouTube, 01kn565hrw5gcq55q1gv3n38rq.