Five for the Future  ## Metadata - Author: [[Crossword]] - Full Title: Five for the Future - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/6c72a58a-3b08-4c55-ac02-2897166ae164 ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Five for the Future Overview** - Five for the Future asks WordPress-related businesses to contribute about 5% of their time or money to support the project. - This encourages sustainability for the open source project that powers much of the web. Transcript: Luke Was? Hey, Jonathan. Is, yeah. Okay. I guess I would start by saying that in order to maintain this open source project, I'd start by saying, you know what? WordPress is amazing because it powers so much of the web. It is so influential and so important. It's such a fundamental component of everybody's lives, even if they don't realize it or have never heard of WordPress before. And yet it's not owned by anybody. Isn't that cool? At least we didn't think it was. John, that was switched roles. Yeah, I know. And in order to make that, that's the power of open source. In order to make that happen, one of the things that we have as a community is a bit of a campaign, which we call Five for the Future, which encourages people who make money out of WordPress To donate about roughly 5% of their time or money toward giving back to the project to make it sustainable. ([Time 0:00:11](https://share.snipd.com/snip/0ae05e69-88af-44bc-9449-514ecff6dce7)) - **Tension of Free Benefit** - Open source projects succeed because users can benefit without contributing. - This creates tension around who does the work to sustain the project. Transcript: Jonathan Like some of the details, like how do we make this less fuzzy? How do we make this more inclusive of non-code contributions, right? Like there were, that's, that's been a recurring theme for a while. How do we recognize folks who are contributing that aren't, that are doing more than just like writing code, right? But for me, where my mind went in this was taking a step above it to ask like, okay, what's the point of this? Are we clear on like, why we're even putting energy and effort into this? Like, why are we even trying to do this? And it opens up with recapping the history of it. And you did a good job of summarizing that. The intention was to bring more awareness to the need of like a project like this needs resources. There's a lot to it. And I don't know, Luke, for me, in thinking through this, I was like, OK, what's the problem that we're actually trying to solve with all this energy and effort? And at least from my point of view, the first and foremost is that within this open source ecosystem, one of the reasons why it works so effectively is that people can benefit without Having to contribute anything to it at all. Right? Like you can use WordPress. And I think that actually has to be the case in order for it to become as ubiquitous as it has. That's the whole idea of open source, right? Like you can benefit without having to like spend anything on it. ([Time 0:04:10](https://share.snipd.com/snip/95e632e5-d2fa-4977-819d-3f9bd5eef4ef)) - **Pitfalls of Requirement Approach** - Making Five for the Future a requirement causes issues with proving contributions and excludes many types. - Removing the numeric requirement and emphasizing voluntary giving could improve participation. Transcript: Luke I actually think it's good to be a bit vague about things. In my view, where Five for the Future has gone wrong is that it's turned exactly like you said, that it's turned into a requirement at some point. You're not doing five for the future. Therefore, you cannot. And when it's a requirement, like you've already articulated, when it's a requirement, now you have to prove it, right? Well, but I did this and I did that and that wasn't counted and this was and these people doing testing, you know what is that really a contribution and you know things like this is that Doesn't matter if i sponsor a word camp does that count as a contribution is it five percent ah so i think if you take away the requirement right if you just say we ask that you would consider Giving back to the project, maybe take the number away because the number is what then gets you into trouble. But would you give back to the project if you're contributing to it? ([Time 0:06:13](https://share.snipd.com/snip/1959ceb1-a3f1-4011-93ef-18e00821842c)) - **Need for Clear Incentives** - Altruism alone can't sustain contributions long term. - A sustainable model needs incentives unrelated to altruism to motivate participation. Transcript: Jonathan So I have a hard time with the it's the right thing to do because for me, I don't know. I think the heart of the problem from my perspective here, Luke, is that we're not openly tackling the aligned incentives piece of this. Like why should people actually do this? What is the – if you take away altruism, if you take away – you and I can agree that it's the quote unquote right thing to do, right? We've been in this for a long time. But if you take, if you set that aside and think about it from a purely like, how do you benefit? To me, a sustainable model should have some components of incentives that aren't connected at all to like altruism. ([Time 0:07:25](https://share.snipd.com/snip/36744977-3c5f-43a5-b94e-1809d44369c5)) - **Market Contribution Benefits** - Market the diverse benefits of contributing to WordPress to different audiences. - Show how contribution supports career growth, talent attraction, and project influence. Transcript: Luke Yeah, no, I can get on board with that. So maybe a marketing campaign is required, right? So target different people. You are a brand new developer and you've come across WordPress for the first time. Did you know that contributing to WordPress is one of the best ways of advancing your career? Like I'm sure we talked about on the last or recent episode. That's a good example. You're a business, a small business. Did you know that contributing to WordPress is a great way of attracting talent? You're a large business. Did you know that contributing to WordPress is a great way of staying up to date with where the project is heading and making sure that you've got a say in, you know what I mean, right? ([Time 0:08:09](https://share.snipd.com/snip/77bd279f-f256-4cf2-8144-6f1633336952)) - **News Corp's Core Investment** - News Corp Australia invested millions into WordPress core to reduce maintenance costs. - Their contribution benefits their own needs and the broader community. Transcript: Jonathan And let's just, let's carry that forward for a moment to an experience that you and I shared back in our agency days. News Corp Australia invested millions of dollars into core WordPress because they recognized that their decision to use the platform benefited from the things that they were building For their own use case being used by others. It reduced the long-term cost of maintenance for it to be open source and more widely adopted. Luke Yeah, and that's a great enterprise marketing thing, isn't it? Like you have built out this custom functionality. Don't let it just sit there and be poorly maintained by your team. Send it back into the project and let it be maintained by the entire WordPress community. ([Time 0:08:52](https://share.snipd.com/snip/f74ff093-b484-439a-81ba-75fb64794d15)) - **Bragging Rights and Ambiguity** - The core benefit of Five for the Future today is mostly bragging rights. - Unclear incentives lead to ambiguous motivations, sometimes tied to internal politics. Transcript: Jonathan If we're honest about it today, if we're honest about it today, like what is the core benefit of Five for the Future? Like if you, if you're honest, what's the benefit of Five for the Future today? Bragging rights. Luke But I don't think, I mean, maybe you had a different answer in mind, but I say bragging rights and you might think, oh, what's a big deal of bragging rights? But I think that there really is something there. Bragging rights is worth paying for. Jonathan I think that's it too. And this is going to be a bit disgenerous on my part, but I'm going to say that behind the scenes, part of the core benefit is Matt's favor. It's this idea that like- That's icky. If we, yeah, sure. And I would say that's not even an intended thing, but it's at very least a subconscious thing that's been a by-product of the ambiguity where it's like- Well, it's been a by-product Luke Of him complaining about people who don't contribute enough. Jonathan And, and one of the, some of the commenters to commentators pointed this out that I'm, I'm sad to say the, whether it's intentional or not, the weaponizing of it, right. Which is part of what we saw where it's like, Hey, you, you didn't contribute. You're not like Matt's points against WP Engine, right? So setting that aside, I think that's part of the problem is when you're not clear on the incentive, people are left to imply their own. And one of those implied incentives is like, hey, does this like Matt's asking us to do this? ([Time 0:09:40](https://share.snipd.com/snip/3da5a1bc-6611-408c-b013-b152b2cbd912)) - **Voluntary Participation Encourages Support** - Feeling forced to contribute leads to resentment. - Genuine grassroots recognition increases community support and visibility. Transcript: Luke Yeah, it gives you, yeah. And then also it just turns a lot of people right off. I'm not going to work for free for Matt. Forget about it. You know, so whereas if you take more, bragging rights isn't exactly the right word. It's not what i really want to say there's a kudos thing there but yeah it's like this grassroots style thing where you can say you know what actually that plugin they contribute back A lot to the community and that means that i'm way more likely to recommend them to my meetup group when i go and speak you know what i mean they've got more visibility in the project. They've got this like grassroots, ground level support. And I think that's a lot of what you get. ([Time 0:11:13](https://share.snipd.com/snip/49db0aef-e9ce-4373-a586-e086365b5cf0)) - **Counting Contributions Causes Problems** - Counting contributions can lead to transactional mindsets and gaming the system. - This reduces the spirit of genuine contribution and inclusivity. Transcript: Jonathan Something that I hadn't been able to quite piece through. It's like, if you just take it through a marketing lens and do, if we do a better job of articulating the actual value, because you gave some good examples. I think this is part of what's missing that people have figured out in different ways, which is why people do it. But in the mess of everything, I think a lot of that's gotten lost where it may be simpler than I'm even thinking here. Luke I think there are answers to the questions i think that there is a real answer to what value do i get from this well i think there are and i'm worried that by by like enforcing maybe it's not Five percent or whatever but by by saying look we're counting now right we're counting this contribution we're counting that contribution and some will get missed and some will get Over counted. And it's just the inevitable consequence of doing this. ([Time 0:12:00](https://share.snipd.com/snip/78eed2d3-973f-43db-9372-b4fbbcb0f5af)) - **Broad Recognition and Storytelling** - Recognizing a wide range of contributions can help solve incentive problems. - Better telling the story of value benefits all contributors, large or small. Transcript: Jonathan One of the things I liked in the post, though, is – so first, I think we can readily agree that there's a lot of different types of contributions, right? Of course. And there's some work in doing that and thinking that through? I think if we can broaden the conscious recognition of that wider range, that's going to solve some of the incentives problem right there, just recognizing it, right? So I thought that was a good byproduct. Luke Well, sorry, Jonathan, I think we do a really good job of recognizing contributions. We have like Kudos Channel, which is a great way of recognizing random little like bits of comments and questions even just in meeting participation and we have a badge system like we We do a lot of recognition what we don't do is we don't tally up the time we don't tally up generosity we don't tally up contributions all to you know, paying company or whatever, but we Do recognize contributions quite well. It, my summary here is that it seems like there are a lot of key pieces. Jonathan I liked Jeff Rose, one of his comments where it's like, if, if any, if even a good percentage of this was implemented, like we'd be much better off as a project, which I feel is the case. Like if we can just take some of the pieces that are already there and maybe tell the story better, there's, I don't know. ([Time 0:13:16](https://share.snipd.com/snip/1d6d166e-61e7-4fc0-a7c6-b64427b73d6d))