Welcome to Community & Code,
the podcast where we talk to the human
beings behind the commits.
I am here today with Dee Thiel.
She is a project manager.
She has been in the WordPress ecosystem
for a long time, but not now.
And you are one of the mentors involved
in WP Includes, which we can talk about.
I'll let you introduce yourself more
fully, but welcome to the show, Dee.
Thank you, Chris.
It's lovely to be here.
Hi, folks.
I'm Dee.
I am coming at you live from, well,
not live probably, from Melbourne,
Australia.
I'm a New Zealander who's now lived in
Australia almost longer than I ever lived
in New Zealand.
And, yeah, I love the WordPress community.
As Chris said,
I'm no longer actually actively working in
it, though, to be fair.
I've just landed a client that has
WordPress.
But I have stayed very close to it,
largely because most of my friends are
still there.
And you never know,
maybe one day I'll be back.
So I'm keeping close just to make sure.
So I think the question that everyone is
definitely dying to hear the answer to is,
what is the difference between a New
Zealander and an Australian?
Oh, man, that is a fraught,
fraught question.
I know,
and that's why I brought it here.
You might as well ask what's the
difference between a Canadian and
American.
Ooh, yeah.
Okay.
I mean,
there's things I could name for sure.
Like, you know,
socialized healthcare for one.
Well, yes.
I mean, we both,
New Zealand and Australia,
both have that in our favor.
So there are some stark differences
perhaps between industry.
Because I would put us,
as a New Zealander,
would probably say that the analogy would
be,
I would liken Australia more to America
than
In that scenario,
not because Australia is like America,
but in terms of the personality,
maybe I'm going to get so much.
I'm sure there are no Australians that
listen to this show.
No,
I guess it's similar to the relationship
you see in that kind of big brother,
or not even big brother,
but that sibling type rivalry.
I mean, I think we, one of the,
I mean,
New Zealand is a rugby union loving
nation.
Kind of everybody in New Zealand lives and
breathes what goes on in the rugby and
very little else.
And I think our attitude is that we
will support everyone
New Zealand, above all,
and then any other country playing
Australia.
So that's kind of a little bit indicative
of how people feel.
So we know each other from a long
time ago when we both worked at Human
Made, which is a WordPress agency,
and we worked together a lot in that
context.
And, I mean...
I have always really enjoyed the few
opportunities that we have had to see each
other in person because it's quite a
distance between where you live and where
I live and where things are often sort
of organized and people gather.
But there have been a few occasions.
Most recently, though,
we were both in Ottawa for WordCamp
Canada.
That's true.
Talk about the talk that you gave at
WordCamp Canada.
So I am very,
very interested in the dynamics and
relationships about people working
together.
So I'm going to struggle, actually.
I should have actually pulled it up
because I'm going to struggle to remember
the title.
It's kind of a convoluted title,
but I was talking about the algorithms
that humans bring to the workplace.
Less so than the algorithms that we...
Right, cultural algorithms.
Cultural algorithms, yeah.
The hidden innovation multiplier, I think,
was what the rest of that...
Something very pretentious.
Well, it is really pretentious,
and it was sneaky because I read the
brief...
from the organizers to say,
this is what we wanted to talk about.
And I couldn't see the,
because innovation was,
was a primary driver, right.
Of,
of the conversations that they were
wanting to have.
And so this was a carefully crafted title
to cut through the selection process and
it worked.
And so, but the whole,
the whole theme of it was that sense
of particularly in this world that we work
in, that is,
much more remote,
much more virtual environments that gives
you access to a much greater diversity of
cultural experience and cultural
algorithms that people bring to the
workplace.
And so it was kind of a bit
of a research examination to explore what
that actually looked like and what that
actually might mean on the...
that you're on the face of people actually
working together because one of the, yeah,
it's really interesting to me to go, well,
I've got people who, um, I'm in, uh,
you know, Australia, Asia Pacific.
And so we have people working from between
Australia and New Zealand, which is, uh,
you know,
a result of colonialism and so a dominant
white culture by and large and then other
countries working alongside us are working
that we have access to that you know
there's a lot of workplaces that are
having to navigate okay what does that
look like when we've got all of these
different cultures working together.
Yeah,
and maybe I warmed up that particular
subject a little bit more accidentally
than I had intended to by even just
talking about the difference of New
Zealand and Australia and the difference
between Canada and the US because
I definitely remember the...
I wouldn't say it's necessarily culture
shock,
but it's definitely a cultural adjustment
that I went through transitioning from
working at a US-based agency,
WebDev Studios.
WordPress agency does a lot of the big
enterprise-level clients.
And then working at HumanMaid,
which was largely
European based but also just remote first
much more remote first with people from
like all all across all the time zones
of the world and there is there is
an adjustment in expectations there's an
adjustment in and not like expectations in
terms of like the work itself but like
the the things that you expect
from a conversation,
the things you expect from an employer or
an employer-employee relationship.
And the things that are expected of you
as well.
Yeah.
And so I thought that like,
and one of the things that I appreciated
too about particularly as you brought that
talk to WordCamp Canada was you actually
did research on some of the Canadian sort
of cultures and things that different
cultures within Canada might bring to the
table as well.
Yeah, so when I was exploring, I mean,
cultural algorithms is kind of a phrase
that got coined through the process of me
organising this.
It's not something that you generally,
I think,
would go searching and looking for and
find a whole lot of research on.
So a lot of the research and stuff
that I was looking at was what are
the kind of underlying things that happen
in different cultures?
And the two that I really spoke to
was a Dutch one.
And then one, because I was up in,
you know, northeast Canada,
there's an indigenous people's group there
that has published a lot of information
about how they do things,
and they talked about the seven
generations.
Mm-hmm.
approach to how they plan and do things.
And what that is, of course,
even when you hear it talked about like
that, is thinking that far ahead.
What is the impact of what I'm going
to do?
Going to be on not just the generation
behind me,
but all of those to follow and planning
accordingly.
And if somebody is in your workplace and
that is the attitude that they have,
you're going to see their output be
slower.
You're going to see them be a lot
more considered in the course of a
conversation.
And so it's important to me,
we have this expectation.
Here's this company.
We have an underlying culture about how we
work,
and a lot of that will be driven
by our company values and the direction
that we're going and by the culture of
the leaders that we have in this group.
And kind of bringing people into that,
we have this expectation that,
that people will adjust themselves to fit
the culture.
And that is a natural expectation,
I think, and certainly that does happen.
Certainly know that for me,
the culture at Human Made has wildly
affected my expectations of culture in
other places,
just because it was such a transformative
workplace for me.
So, but, you know,
when you're looking and expecting people
to kind of, you know,
I heard somebody talking about the melting
pot.
You expect everybody to come in and adjust
themselves and fit themselves to what
you're in.
You lose some of the richness and some
of the opportunities for innovation that
you
um having some different perspectives and
different approaches might actually might
actually bring and so some of the things
that i talked about was when you explore
here are some ways to recognize or examine
kind of the different cultures that are in
your workplace here are some of the ways
that that might be useful to to leverage
um yeah
I remember asking the question or maybe
making the observation during your talk or
at the end of the Q&A section.
Because growing up in the United States,
it's almost part of the, I think,
academic curriculum to...
conceptualize the united states as a
melting pot where we have lots of people
coming from different cultures and
whatever and we make the thing that is
america we make this this project right
together um and one of the the the
insights that
I got from your talk was just the
idea that,
or the suggestion that maybe not.
Maybe not that.
Maybe we don't melt all of those things
in a pot.
maybe we celebrate those differences and
those voices because they bring new things
to the table.
Yeah.
Yeah,
I can't remember if this was something
somebody said in the context of that talk
or in the Q&A that we were talking
about,
but I was thinking that melting pot thing
really, really struck me.
And I was kind of, my thing is,
what if it was more like a tapestry
where you've got all these different
things that are weaving in together?
And I can't remember if somebody said
that.
I think somebody might have said something
like that.
But that sense of,
We all bring something.
We all recognize that what everybody
brings is valuable and that the picture
that we make with everything is much more
compelling than if we just... I mean,
you remember when you were playing with
Play-Doh as a kid, right?
You've got all these different colors and
you put all these things together.
And the more that you mix them together,
the more ugly it gets.
It's that...
yucky brown weird brown yeah yeah and it's
like but when when they're all when there
is that separation but they are all part
of something that's a whole the sculpture
or whatever it is that you're making it's
so much more dynamic and interesting and
bright and valuable than because you
everybody still has those pieces that are
uniquely them it hasn't just become this
homogenous lump of
I mean,
it's an interesting thing to talk about in
the current dynamic, right?
Where certainly when all of the things
that we see outside of America and what's
going on there,
it's maybe politically dicey to talk
about,
but that sense of that homogenous or this
other culture,
the white culture is so much more prime
than white.
we're losing that sense of the melting
pot.
It's like, oh no,
we absolutely can't possibly.
And so that we need to separate rather
than bring together.
And it's heartbreaking to watch.
And now I'm visualizing this idea,
this concept of the United States as a
melting pot,
as a ugly lump of brown clay.
I'm so sorry.
It wasn't real.
It wasn't my intention at all.
No, I mean, it's, it's because I,
I like, it's just,
it's interesting to think about in those,
in, in those different terms.
And even like, like,
you don't even have to like, look at,
at like this idea from like such a
sort of broad high level, uh,
like perspective.
Um, because it's,
it's most of the time it's.
the little things,
it's the little interactions that are just
things that you don't necessarily expect
or communication patterns that are
different between people.
And when you are operating at a much
more global level,
like I think you and I both were
at Human Made,
then it brings these things into the focus
more and you need to learn how to
communicate in a way that is a little
bit different.
Is that where you sort of started getting
this interest in this kind of idea is
through our work together there?
Yeah, it was.
Sorry, I've got a cat here.
I'm trying desperately to make sure she
doesn't stand on the things that will turn
off the computer.
Just sit on your bed and be cool.
Yeah,
it was the event that we were at,
the meetup that we were at,
where we did the cultural...
It wasn't cultural sensitivity training.
It was implicit bias training.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Okay.
Yeah, yeah.
Yep.
That was in Sri Lanka.
Yep.
That was in Sri Lanka.
And I was...
wildly confronted with my own racial bias.
Now, I grew up in New Zealand.
We are multicultural, mostly with,
you know, New Zealand, we call it,
the Maori word in New Zealand is pakeha,
so the white people are the pakeha.
So I am pakeha.
And
As people will know,
the indigenous culture in New Zealand or
the indigenous people of New Zealand are
the Māori,
but there are also a lot of Pasifika
people, so people from Samoa,
the Cook Islands, Rarotonga,
all of these other places.
And there is a lot of work being
done.
They are by no means perfect,
but there has been a lot of work
done there.
But what I hadn't realized is, you know,
I have a boomer dad still with us.
Love him dearly.
Has some what we would consider now very
old-fashioned attitudes.
And I recognized while we were in those
sessions in Sri Lanka was that
I was racist,
that my underlying attitudes and that my
underlying biases were very much against
me.
You know, again,
my bias was against people from India or
people from the islands or the brown
people were.
And I was horrified because that was not
what I wanted to think intellectually.
But this had been so and so deep
in me.
And so having to learn and recognize that
and then do the work around that.
confronting that and we all have biases we
all have and so there's interesting places
that you can go if you're interested to
go well what are my biases you know
I grew up deeply religious Christianity so
then of course you come with some biases
there around the queer community and so I
think in my mid to like late forties
and now here in my fifties it's like
there's just been this radical
transformation kind of inside my head and
heart about
the value of people and I think that
some of that passion that I have for
you know DEI initiatives and for you know
this kind of work and going well let's
just examine that a little bit more and
trying to show people the value of what
other people and cultures bring and and
let's just not always assume that because
we have these attitudes in our head that
our attitudes are right
And then,
so I talk like what I delivered in
Ottawa and then I've done, you know,
others as well along some of these lines
is all geared towards,
I just want to open people's eyes and
go, hang on just a second,
confront the own log that's in your own
eye and then...
And then you start to be able to
see stuff in other people that you go,
oh.
And then be able to say, oh, well,
that you bring that to us.
You bring that into our workplace.
Let's celebrate that.
And when people are seen and recognized,
not just because of how they fit into
this square, you know,
or how they fit into your environment or
how they fit into your culture.
But understand that in your culture,
you recognize and celebrate and value
theirs.
You know,
engagement goes off the chart because
people are just like, oh,
I'm seen and I'm valued for me,
not just because of what I can do.
Yeah,
that particular implicit bias workshop
that we shared together,
like I also have very distinct memories of
that in particular.
I...
the thing that I took away from that
the most that I didn't expect,
because there are things like going into
it that like, I,
I am a white male,
cis presenting individual living in the
Western part of the United States.
Like I,
I understand my privilege and I understand
how I grew up and where I grew
up and the relationship.
And so I expect certain things about,
how I was raised and what my culture
was growing up and my experiences and
whatever.
And so there's certain things that I
expect to find from something like that.
What I did not expect to find in
myself was that I was so deeply,
and honestly, still am,
deeply biased against gun owners and gun
ownership.
Oh, wow.
Yeah.
Like I, it was, it's like,
there's something, I don't know,
deep inside me that just like, it's like,
I,
I have an immediate picture in my head
and I,
I immediately have an impression that I
have over, over people and,
and an expectation.
And then like a friend of mine,
a fellow developer,
someone who I've known who I had known
for, you know, a couple years says like,
well, I own a gun and like,
And how confronting is that?
So all of the noise in your head
about what these people are like,
and you're like, but I know you.
Right.
And you're not bad.
I know, right?
I mean,
I come from a country where we have
serious gun control.
And again,
I don't want to turn this into a
political discussion about that.
But I got confronted with a very,
very similar experience.
Beautiful people that I was staying with.
And I still have this picture of him
walking up the stairs with his handgun in
his hand.
And I'm like,
I had no idea because I would just
come from a place where you would never
expect that.
But yes,
I completely understand and resonate with
that sense of, oh,
I have these expectations about what a
person is going to be like based on,
insert your bias here.
And it's confronting to actually have
those, realize, oh, hang on just a second.
that is not a true picture of what
people are really like.
I think I had some interesting
conversations because I did that talk and
I flew from there back to Vancouver and
I was hanging out with friends, again,
former human-made colleagues, actually,
who are from India.
And I was spending some time with them
and I was kind of unpacking the talk
and what I'd come away from.
I also heard Jill Binder's talk,
which was also really, really good,
touched on this as well.
And I came away going, oh, Jill's was...
Really impactful for me.
And I was critiquing my own work against
what Jill had delivered.
Not necessarily negatively,
but it was like, okay,
so I would change this and I would
go, you know,
so I was kind of critiquing myself.
But I sat down with these friends and
I was talking to them.
And I said,
can we have some real discussions about
this?
Because now I have an opportunity.
And they were open to talking about their
experiences.
And it was funny, actually,
because we talked about that event and
that bias training that we did.
And I said,
how was that experience from you?
And they're like,
we didn't learn anything because this is
the stuff that they see all the time.
But it was interesting for them to see
the white people in the room go, ah,
and actually start to get a sense.
Because I know that they had challenges
even in this, you know,
beautifully accepting workplace that we
were in.
Yeah.
Again,
actually watching everybody start to come
to grips with that.
Like I cannot recommend companies,
and if there's one thing anybody takes
away from this conversation,
I cannot recommend highly enough putting
your teams through implicit bias training
like this.
Because that sense of,
and I know empathy is a word that's
getting a bad rap at the moment,
but that sense of having an empathetic
workforce that goes, oh,
somebody might be seeing something
different in this experience or this
problem than I am.
Maybe what they bring to it might actually
be helpful rather than me expecting them
to shift to solve the problem the same
way as me.
Like that was one of the things that
came away was how do people solve problems
differently?
I think one of the other algorithm,
you know, in inverted commas,
the cultural algorithm that I talked about
was this Dutch one where it talks about
the dykes and...
I've even forgotten the word,
the way that they structure the landscape
to make sure that the water stays out
right because it's such low-lying land.
And in order to do that,
towns and villages and local people had to
work together to do it,
even if they would normally be feudal.
And so this whole sense of consensus
building is something that lives very,
very deeply.
in them so the people building you know
who working within a team to build
consensus versus a an autocratic group
that will be like well the boss says
this is the way we go we here's
where we go like oh there's so much
richness and all of the things that people
bring to the work
and being able to see that and have
your team be able to see that and
be able to leverage that.
It's just, it's so powerful.
Yeah.
I just want everybody to do it.
I want my workplace to do it.
I mean, I, I, I agree.
And I, I think that it's important too,
because there's so much,
there's also like data about how diverse
teams are just more productive.
But to your point at the top of
the episode, we're like,
there's so much pressure to conform to
those groups.
It's like,
unless you are intentionally allowing for
and respecting these diverse voices that
maybe you are making hiring intentionally
for those diverse perspectives,
if you are then expecting them to just
conform to the rest of the company culture
or whatever into this melting pot,
then you're not really going to get the
benefit,
the full benefit of having these disparate
voices.
Yeah.
Well,
it's hiring for skill is that people are,
or can they do the skills or,
and hiring for cultural fit?
What is co you know,
and there are a lot, you can read.
Generally just means you're hiring to be
a, a homogenous.
Exactly that.
I mean, it's, I,
I think I understand there's a,
an efficiency or a perceived efficiency
of, well, if we've got people,
we know we can just drop them right
in.
They're gonna be able to do the work
immediately.
They're going to be able to, you know,
just kind of fit in and go with
the flow.
There's an efficiency to that, right?
They just hit the ground running.
We can get more output more quickly.
But it's like, what are you losing?
What if there was just that little bit
more time to actually be able to evaluate
people and what are they going to add?
What are some of our other problems?
You know,
just having that kind of bigger picture.
But we live in a culture where,
Generally,
in this kind of work culture where we
need to be efficient,
we need to be able to, you know,
there's this constant pressure to save on
time, be more billable,
all those kinds of things.
And so efficiency, I think,
is what probably drives a lot of that.
Yeah.
Switching gears a little bit,
you're also involved in WPincludes.
I am.
For anyone who doesn't know,
which might be a lot of people who
are listening to this or watching this,
what is WPincludes?
WPincludes,
which you can find at wpincludes.me.
is a mentoring initiative that is geared
towards pairing women leaders with women
who want to be in leadership in WordPress
companies.
If anybody saw Siobhan McKeown and I talk
at WordCamp Europe in Torino,
we did a kind of Q&A conversation around
The results of a survey that we did
to see how many women are in leadership,
particularly in the C-suite,
in WordPress companies.
And the numbers are very low.
They are disproportionately low in
comparison with C-suites in other tech
industries.
We talked a little bit about why that
might be.
A lot of the early WordPress companies
were founded by men.
um and and and we see a lot
of those leaders are still leading you
know these large wordpress companies what
it was wordpress now twenty years or
fifteen years later just as those
companies have grown and so uh siobhan and
francesca morano uh started this
initiative and then i kind of managed to
scooch in on their coattails and i'm
helping kind of
and we're just about to go into our
third cohort of mentors and mentees.
And it's kind of a,
we kind of run it over a sort
of three-month period where the mentors
and mentees just get together and talk
through.
So it's almost this coaching element of
trying to get more and more women with
being able to focus and set their
intentions and their direction and be
supported in this community of women who
want to see more and more women become
leaders,
and be kind of released into some of
these areas that they might not feel at
this point that they are ready for.
So it's just this really great supportive
group of women helping women and
non-binary or, yeah, so underrepresented.
Is it one mentor to one mentee that
you're working with at a time?
Yeah, yeah, so...
So it's great.
You start to build this relationship.
And certainly for me,
the relationships have been ongoing after
the cohort officially ends.
Yeah,
talk a little bit more about that because
from what I have heard,
the process or the act of mentoring or
being mentored, it's not a top-down thing.
It's really sort of a collaboration and
each person learns from the experience.
What has that experience been like for
you?
I have loved it.
So I've probably had more contact or
ongoing contact with one of my mentors
than the other, which is, you know,
just the way that life goes,
I would say.
I think what people bring to it will
certainly inform what they get out of it
and what they contribute and how that
conversation goes,
I think certainly informs
the kind of results that you will get.
I think one of my mentees has already
shifted gears, has gone,
is already taking on more leadership
within her current role and is ambitious
for more.
And so a lot of the conversations have
been around, okay,
so here's where I'm positioned now.
What are the things that I need to
adopt and grow into so that I'm ready
when opportunities come up?
And I can very much see that happening.
those opportunities will come up for her.
She's amazing.
But for me personally, I think, I mean,
I think one of the things that I
learned when I was in, you know,
leading the project managers at Human Made
for a while there,
or managing the project managers,
the actually,
like the stuff that sets me on fire
is that sense of coaching,
of helping people see what they already
know and understand and
in themselves and releasing that and then
having seen seeing them kind of be able
to fight the imposter really and gain that
confidence that oh there's nothing
actually stopping me from going into
greater leadership here it's my brain or
it's my attitude or it's the this imposter
that's
And being able to just kind of pull
back that curtain.
And it's all just a case of asking
the questions that help them see that.
But it's like, that's so good.
So I highly recommend anybody who has the
opportunity to sign up when the form goes
live for the next cohort.
Absolutely get yourselves in there if
that's the kind of thing that you're
wanting to do.
We do a survey of the mentors online.
afterwards and do you want to do this
again and it's usually a pretty much a
resounding yes because I think the mentors
get as much out of it as well
not just because we really want to see
this community you know see that balance
shift in a positive direction but also
because it's such a great experience to
see people that you've had input into
start to see their value and start to
get excited about opportunities and start
to take opportunities
I saw a thing recently referencing
imposter syndrome made me remember this
thing that I saw recently that was talking
about how
the concept of imposter syndrome
originates from something that came during
like women's liberation movements and
things where like women were starting to
get more uh voice uh more power in
in various circles as as because like
the dominant male culture uh was basically
like finding reasons for those things to
not be true or something and so it
so it comes out it has this like
quasi scientific medical sort of sounding
name uh sounds like a problem uh but
but it has these roots in like the
feminist movement really uh which i
thought was was was really interesting and
not something that i had encountered
before
so were they saying that the roots were
in pushback against the feminist movement
yes yes yeah yeah i'm not surprised right
for sure right yeah yeah but it's
interesting that like women go oh i just
had this terrible problem with the
imposter syndrome whether that without
actually going
I really want to use a word that
I shouldn't use here,
so I'm talking myself out of it.
But without going,
it's the patriarchy that's actually put
this problem in my head at the moment
and actually going, hang on,
let me just see.
This is actually a non-problem because
this is something that's imposed
externally.
It's not, you know,
and so that you actually have to talk
yourself around and away from that sense
of that voice in your head,
which is that we call the imposter.
And it's like, hang on.
This is societal expectations that have
been placed on me.
This is absolutely nothing to do with,
you know, I belong here.
Because, you know,
that's what the imposter is saying all the
time.
Or you're not quite ready.
Or you're not, you know.
And it's actually, you do and you are.
Yeah.
And lean into that rather than the other.
And I...
I mean, again, like I,
last I checked him cis white male,
but I've also experienced imposter
syndrome, but the,
the idea that like that experience, like,
I don't know that I even would have
considered, um,
that my experience of imposter syndrome
would be distinctly different and like
separate from your experience of imposter
syndrome,
just because of like what imposter means
to me based on my privilege and all
of the things that go along with what
this is.
is different than all of the same things
for for you yeah it's such an interesting
it's oh i mean there are so many
avenues to explore in all of these areas
right it's like you you know we've talked
about culture and race and we've talked
about um gender and and that but this
okay where are you going okay okay just
don't stand on the keyboard thank you very
much um
It's all, you know,
it's the core thread through all of these
things is the othering, right,
is the someone that is different from me.
I need to protect myself or my position.
And so all of these areas where there
is privilege that whichever dynamic we are
fighting against or being resisted by,
comes down to this, oh, well,
I've got something to protect here and
others need to stay away.
And it's infuriating because it's like,
if everybody could just see just the value
and that there is enough, there is enough.
I mean,
one of the things that I absolutely love
about the WordPress community,
and it's something I think my first
WordCamp
was WordCamp Gold Coast in two thousand
and eleven.
So what's that?
Fifteen years ago, fourteen years ago.
Um, and I, I heard somebody casually say,
isn't it wild that here we all are
competitors effectively in an environment.
And it doesn't feel like that at all.
And I think that is one of the
things that has kind of ha one of
the threads that's kind of pulled me into
this and why so many of my friends
are here and why I've pulled friends into
the WordPress community.
And, um, cause that sense of.
we're all, there's enough,
there's enough in this community.
There's enough.
And I think some,
I guess some of the dynamics of the
past twelve months have suggested perhaps
there isn't.
And I'm like, but there is.
Yeah.
There's enough.
And this whole sense of, you know, well,
if I,
I'm trying to protect my corner and the
way that I'm going to do that is
by, um,
Yeah, is exclusionary.
It's disappointing to me.
Yeah.
Yeah,
when I flipped over to Blue Sky as
the place that I go other than the
thing,
the platform formerly known as Twitter,
one of my first,
and I still don't know what they're
called,
so I'm just going to call it a
bloot.
My first bloot,
one of my first bloots was...
Equity does not mean you don't like
someone else is getting your piece of the
pie or a bigger piece of the pie.
Equity is saying, Hey,
there's pie over here.
Do you want some?
Yeah.
I wish more people could say that.
Yeah.
Um,
Yeah, my brain,
I had a thing I was going to
say besides that,
but now it's completely escaped.
But what I will say, oh, no,
I remember.
We were talking about competitors.
You were mentioning that the WordPress
community and a room full of competitors,
but it doesn't feel that way.
One of the first guests that were on
this show was Roger,
who is chief something or other,
head of something or other at Kinsta.
um and i work at pantheon and ostensibly
we are like competitors um and like this
isn't a pantheon show or anything but like
there was a little bit of uh i
felt trepidation from him especially since
there's like one of the first episodes
just like is it okay like oh we
even we invited that's what it was like
we invited him um we were at when
we were at word camp us uh we
had a video crew at our pantheon booth
and we were doing these things called web
sessions,
which actually are starting to go up on
the internet now,
where we were interviewing people and
basically asking what makes the web work.
And I thought,
because I had just had a recording with
Roger on my podcast, I'm like,
he would be a great person.
He's here in the room.
I can just go over there and grab
him and sit him down.
And he's like,
is it okay that I have a Kinsta
shirt?
I'm like,
We don't care.
Like, we are, like, this is not, that's,
yeah, there's enough.
Like,
the people that are interested in Kinsta
might not be interested in Pantheon,
and the people that are interested in
Pantheon might not be interested in
Kinsta,
and the people that are interested in both
might be interested in both,
and they want to know what the best
thing out of both things is.
Like, that's okay.
Yeah.
it's interesting because the company that
I work for is a craft CMS shop.
So I left human made and joined them
two and a half, nearly three years ago.
And so that's been an interesting
experience is kind of looking at other
communities.
It's very,
very different community than WordPress.
It's open source,
but yet still very much made,
owned and operated by Pixel and Tonic,
the company behind it.
And, you know,
people's attitudes around WordPress is
very different sometimes in the craft
community.
And, you know,
the things that make craft craft are
different than the things that make
WordPress WordPress.
And there's been some tension around that
for me sometimes,
particularly because I am still such an
ardent supporter and enthusiast for
WordPress.
But it's been,
I have a client that has worked with
us,
had gone to WordPress and is coming back
to us, not specifically to craft,
but I'm actually starting to see more
WordPress clients.
websites in our portfolio and so I'm
quietly loving the fact that that we now
we have you know I'm sure my boss
is probably not keen that I am publicizing
that there's more WordPress in our in our
portfolio because we are such an ardent
craft shop but
um it's quite fun to be for me
now to be able to kind of jump
back in to a little bit more wordpress
and be back in the back end of
wordpress other than just on my own site
which of course is still um you know
wordpress built but not published too very
often at all anymore but um
But, yeah,
that's been an interesting dynamic is
actually seeing how other CMSs work.
I mean, of course,
for a lot of the case,
they all do the same thing.
But also seeing how other communities
work.
Yes.
And I actually just spent the last two
days in the Tessitura community.
I don't know if you're familiar with
Tessitura.
It's a software CRM slash ticketing thing
for the arts and culture community.
So that's been interesting, is seeing...
how other communities function and i won't
lie the tessitura conference there's a lot
of content in there that is not really
touching me i have a client that uses
it and that's why i needed to be
there to kind of and so i was
there for some of the tech parts of
it but it was really interesting being in
a room full of theater nerds who are
also and in some cases tech nerds as
well and um
Yeah,
so I think one of the things that
I really love is community, actually.
And I'm not a super extroverted person.
I can function very,
very well and certainly present with
extroversion,
but for the two days I was getting
home at the end of the day and
I'm like, oh, I'm all peopled out.
But what great people.
Like I spent an hour sitting over lunch
yesterday talking about musical theatre,
which if anybody knows me knows that
that's something that I absolutely adore.
And so, yeah,
I'm not sure where I was going with
that other than there is that sense of
enoughness in other communities, I think,
as well.
Yeah,
I went to my first DrupalCon this year,
and then I went to my first DrupalCamp
this year as well.
What's the difference?
Well, I'll tell you.
DrupalCon is the big event.
So there's DrupalCon in Atlanta.
The tickets were like a thousand bucks a
head.
It's the big industry event.
and so it's it's comparable in scale and
talk tracks and whatever to uh the
flagship word camp so word camp us
whatever uh and drupal camps are much much
much smaller um and those are the local
community things yeah so that's more like
the your your local word camp whatever
right um
So I went to Bad Camp,
which is Bay Area Drupal Camp,
which also has probably the coolest Drupal
Camp name.
I'm like,
that's just one letter away from Band
Camp.
I love that.
And I was presenting at Bad Camp,
actually.
And I went to DrupalCon in Atlanta this
last year.
And I...
it's very interesting being uh the word
presser in the room full of drupal people
right but also one of the things that
that jumped out to me immediately um at
when i went to drupalcon was how much
it didn't feel different like right it
felt like like
and I've said this before on the show,
one of the first things that I saw
when I got there was they had a
panel thing with a bunch of different
stickers,
and one of the stickers is on the
website, and it says, come for the code,
stay for the community.
And that was part of the inception process
of how this podcast came to be,
was just that idea.
And the fact that that resonated so
strongly to me
from a completely different perspective.
That is the reason why I have been
in the WordPress community for as long as
I have been.
Exactly.
Yeah, same.
And so seeing that, oh,
the Drupal community also has this thing.
And then obviously over the course of the
week,
I got to talk to people and have
these conversations.
It really is like...
We're all just people and this is all
just software.
And at the end of the day,
we're doing the same things and more
voices.
Well,
the stuff that endures is the people,
right?
Yes.
Yeah.
And the things that we can learn from
each other.
And yeah.
And I think that's kind of,
I think that's kind of beautiful.
I love that.
I think one of the great shames for
me that's kind of post COVID is that
our local community has really,
really struggled.
Our local WordPress community has really,
really struggled.
And I was talking to the Tessitura or
the group that I was sitting with at
the Tessie conference yesterday and was
talking about, so what are, you know,
the community?
So I'm sitting here going, oh my goodness,
now I need to get back into choir.
Like I haven't sung.
I came to Australia to sing and I
haven't sung really since I moved to
Melbourne.
It was about
And, you know,
I'm sitting there with all these people
just buzzing with that energy of I need
to be doing more of this.
And, you know,
generally sit in a tech conference and go,
yeah, I really need to be singing.
Anyway, apparently Tessitura has a choir,
not in Melbourne.
Anyway,
the long story short is that they're
struggling with some of those same things.
Yes,
they had a Tessitura meetup group that has
just struggled.
I mean, I think Melbourne has struggled.
We were under lockdown for so long,
and I think that has definitely impacted
the psyche of the –
But also because so many more people are
remote,
it's harder to get people out of their
houses.
Yeah.
to an event now.
And I think that's one of our,
certainly locally,
one of our great challenges as to how
do we zhuzh that up.
And part of it is also exhausted leaders
and not finding any kind of rising leaders
who are like, oh,
I'll take that on and let's go for
it.
So that's one of my hopes that someone
will rise up in Melbourne and go, yeah,
I'm ready.
Let's do things because I will happily go
along,
but I don't know how much juice I've
got to be organizing meetups again.
Yeah, for sure.
Yeah, same, same.
Yeah.
Well, thank you, Dee, for coming.
And before we go,
where can people find you on the internet?
They can find me at Dee Teal,
D-E-E-T-E-A-L.com.
They can find me on thewedprincess.com on
Blue Sky.
They can find me at wpincludes.me or on
the Future of Team podcast that I do
with my friend from Canada, James Giroux.
Awesome.
Well, again,
thank you for joining me on this podcast.
Go check out Dee's podcast.
I definitely want to listen to Dee's
podcast as well.
Let's talk about a lot of these similar
things, workplace, leadership, management.
So there's no code talk because I can't
talk code.
It's been fifteen years since I touched
any.
I mean,
I figure there's enough code tech podcasts
out there that if that's what you're
looking for, you can find it.
People, people, people.
Well, thanks, Chris.
It's been absolutely lovely to be here.
Yeah, it's been lovely to have you on.
And for everyone else who's watching or
listening to this in the future,
we'll see you on the internet.
Yes, indeed.