Hey, welcome back to Community & 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.
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 Say Reed 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, Sae Reed,
CEO and co-founder,
who's been doing this work since before
the org had a name,
And Jono 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 & Code,
the podcast where we talk to the human
beings behind the commit.
I am here for a, I don't know,
Community & Code first,
because I have more than one human on
the screen today.
Allegedly.
This is a bit of a different show
today because we're doing it during the
week of the Podcastathon.
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 myself.
So I'm here today with the WPCC,
the WP Community Collective.
And I'm just going to go...
We're also collected.
We're collected here.
So I'm just going to let you all
introduce yourselves rather than giving
you an introduction.
I'm going to go down around in the
circle and then I'll introduce myself last
because I don't know.
I'm also on the screen and I'm also
in the board of directors.
So starting at my top right,
I see Courtney Robertson.
Hello, everybody.
I am indeed Courtney Robertson,
CourtneyR.dev.
These days,
you'll find me as a developer advocate at
GoDaddy, 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 Say.
Say, introduce yourself.
Hi, I'm Say Reid,
and I am the CEO,
part-time CEO of the WPCC,
also board member as a CEO.
And gosh, I don't know.
That's all I got for the intro.
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 we are, no podcast, but all podcast.
Yes, all the podcasts.
And then directly underneath me, Jono,
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, 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 WordPress 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.
I'm sure we can get into more of
that later.
And I'm Chris.
I'm the host of this podcast.
In the hat that I'm wearing today,
I am also the interim president of the
WPCC.
I have been in WordPress for twenty-ish
years, I guess.
I have done all sorts of things in
the WordPress ecosystem.
I freelanced for a long time.
I did online developer training.
I worked at agencies and now I'm a
developer advocate at Pantheon.
Courtney and I share the developer
advocate hat among the hats that we wear.
So we're here to talk a little bit
about the WPCC and I mean also like
about ourselves and how we got involved in
our own paths 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 and so uh I 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 shit be broken yo um
that led to the organization.
I didn't say it quite like that.
Say,
could you take us back to WordCamp US
in San Diego?
Well, once upon a time,
there was a thing called WordCamp.
Once upon a time?
Oh, no.
What happened?
So the problem of...
sponsored and volunteer contribution has
been on my mind for a very long
time, pre-founding the WPCC.
Basically,
ever since I was involved in WordPress,
there was a power imbalance.
All the 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
not not totally sidelined but just be a
little bit diminished versus the folks who
were being paid to show up there not
that those folks were not also full of
passion a lot of times they were but
it's uh just that that it's it's a
weird tension the other issue that was
clear, even at that time,
was the issue that other than companies
who are strictly basically WordPress
companies, they have normal rules.
And in the capitalism rules,
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 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 couldn't contribute,
who couldn't find a way to contribute.
And 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 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 company-wise,
then that would, sure,
make that conclusion.
But until we make something that makes
sense,
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,
have known each other for a long time
in the WordPress world and would talk
about this.
Courtney's worked for the big companies
and has seen firsthand that struggle of
contribution versus the business model of
the actual business.
And I was really of the mindset that
there was a nonprofit organization that
could do this.
I've worked in nonprofit for basically my
whole career with nonprofits.
So I know that they're capable of
managing a space, hiring staff, et cetera.
So in that WordCamp, San Diego in,
I think it was, yeah.
We were at a Q&A,
Courtney and I were at a Q&A with
Matt, who was doing, Matt Mullenweg,
who was speaking.
And someone asked a question.
I actually don't recall at the moment who
asked that question.
It wasn't me.
And they said, you know,
what's something something the foundation
going to do about this?
And 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 overstepping,
that would be stepping on the boundaries
of 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.
Yeah.
I had asked Matt a different question kind
of related to this.
I should go back and look at that
video.
It was one of the first camps right
after pandemic lifted travel regulations
and things.
And so, you know, on my end,
there is a challenge.
GoDaddy does sponsor several individuals.
We have two full-time staff.
We have one engineer that puts ten hours
a week into the plug-in review team.
And then we also sponsor two other folks,
one of them being Joe Dolson,
who
part-time,
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.
Yeah.
Can't put cash in envelopes to give to
contributors.
Also,
wanting to make sure that the funding went
to specific areas in particular.
What are the spots?
We have two different needs going on in
the WordPress space.
I've done some looking beyond the
WordPress space to see how others solve
for this and different projects have
different ways.
But 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 what's good
for the entire community.
And also 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
the project you're not happy to see that
the parser tool was broken right no no
no i was i was happy to see
it got fixed right and
And so 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 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
or critical infrastructure,
one would argue,
and clearly needed some reinforcement and
some advocacy work of like,
who can do this part?
Interrupted by Doug.
Sorry.
No worries.
Just kind of interruption.
I want to take a step a little
bit back and talk about,
say you were talking about the things that
the WPCC stepped in to fix.
For people that are outside the WordPress
community who might not know what the
contributor model that we all,
because we've been in this place for a
long time, do know,
what does it look like for... How does...
How does the existing status quo really
work in... I'll toss it to you, Courtney,
because like you said,
you have some folks who actually are paid
staff who work on core.
There's some other organizations,
some agencies and stuff that sponsor
development.
But 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.
It kind of depends.
So in our context, Kira Schroeder,
who has been with the project, oh, gosh,
I want to say,
twenty years and 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.
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 Mamadashvili,
goes by the handle Mamaduka.
George works on specifically Gutenberg
projects.
They both live in nations that GoDaddy
doesn't
actually even technically hire in so 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 was almost two weeks ago now,
Matt Mullenweg did a tour of the
walkthrough on WordPress,
and specifically mentioned GoDaddy and
Bluehost in that.
It was in the context of testing on
collaborative editing.
Of course,
we're going to be testing on collaborative
editing.
George came back and said,
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
Pagely 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 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,
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 to 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 somebody who works at a
hosting company,
things that go into WordPress matter very
deeply to the things that we work on.
And my recent, or not so recent anymore,
but a claim to fame that I wear
as a badge of honor is that I
was able to single-handedly,
mostly single-handedly,
punt the font manager out of a version
of WordPress to a later version of
WordPress because I raised the question,
hey, what does this do if,
how does this, like,
I need a way to tell the file
system that where you're storing these
files is actually someplace different.
I need a way to put these files
in a different place because
Pantheon as a host has a read-only 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
that there's database references 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,
but the production environment wouldn't
know about the existence of those files
because they're not in the database.
And we don't want to be playing with
database backups from a dev environment
into a production environment.
That seems dumb.
So 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 infrastructure,
like other AWS platforms would fall into
this category.
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 Gutenberg ticket in GitHub,
but lots of other people that were smarter
than me came in 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 it's 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,
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 pay 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,
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 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
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 and do are they included
in 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 cr 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 think it's that tension that is
really the problem that we have
identified.
And.
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 look at this in a different
way.
The people who were working on it,
they have one of those like blinder
things, of course, blinders like this.
And you're focused on your stuff.
When we have the community,
we're bringing in all of those use cases.
It's like the many eyeballs or many hands
make light work.
And more eyeballs on something means you
can see more things.
That value is, to me,
what has created the juggernaut that is
WordPress.
I do not believe that it is because
of a single person's vision or the paid
contributors who have been coding.
It's been much more than that.
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 out of the 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 with it?
Yeah.
And 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 two 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 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.
Those are all my favorite words,
I just want to say.
You just like blitzed them.
Onboarding and like inclusion.
It's amazing.
I want to shift gears and go into
your origin story into the WPCC in a
second, Giano, but what you just said,
we are recording this the day after two
very influential members of the WordPress
community have publicly announced that
they're stepping back from the FAIR
project,
which is Federated and Independent
Repositories,
a project that started largely last year
as a package manager for WordPress that is
an alternative to the
essentially single point of failure that
is everything that is on the WP WordPress
org infrastructure the idea being that if
there are disparate 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
heaven forbid that
does something to a plug-in, for example,
that affects everybody that is a consumer
of that plug-in, then there's a buffer.
That's a supply chain issue, right?
And so the idea was we can create
this federated list of servers that then
create some distance from that supply
chain security vulnerability.
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,
the WPCC to me represents like okay that
was that was the old model that's like
the old way of thinking about how
contribution works and how Community
projects work, perhaps.
perhaps the WPCC is a new way or
something different that could happen
instead.
That's the plan.
Yeah, that's my plan.
That's the theory of change that we are
working under.
Yeah.
But Jonna,
mostly because we've heard a lot from C
and Courtney,
I'd like to hear from you about like
how you, like what attracted you to this,
community collective to this project and
made you want to get involved in it
to begin with?
Well, that's big, isn't it?
Yeah.
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 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 SaaS platforms,
and was continually frustrated by how poor
a lot of the tech was.
So they're on content management systems
that break,
that don't have basic functionality,
et cetera.
I spent most of
I don't know,
enterprise CMSs that were doing versions
of what WordPress had done ten years ago
badly.
And I think 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 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 one percent
better in a way that meaningfully impacts
the world and helps people and helps
businesses and makes money and fuels the
engines of capitalism?
And saves them.
Yeah, yeah, that's a meaningful impact,
etc.
And that was must have been around.
Twenty sixteen ish, 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 two thousand six ish,
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
roadmap?
And where's the governance?
And WordPress.org is weird, right?
Operationally,
like this thing that sits in the middle.
And WordCamps 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.
Fire for the future, a 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.
And even over the five years I was
working at Yoast,
the churn I saw in core contributors,
in documentation, in event attendees,
in people 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 of the lack versus such.
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 Wix site that even has
a correct XML sitemap.
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 sustainable community of
volunteers and contributors and people who
are actually rewarded for their time we
don't have any posters for that we don't
have any frameworks we 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,
even before recent events,
that assumption of infinite human capital.
I will tell my own personal experience.
There was a period of time when I
was really involved with the docs team,
and one of the projects that we,
basically, this was back in the day,
WordPress used to have the concept
of feature plugins as a way of like,
oh, if you want...
You mean canonical plugins, don't you?
No, no, this is before that.
The idea was that if you had 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
decides, yes, this is good or no,
it's not.
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 eighty percent of the
people who are using that.
So those features
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 eighty percent of
the people who use this software are going
to use or should it stay in a
plugin because it's only twenty percent?
So I just that has gone far by
the wayside.
But I it was that same era of
feature plugin.
That seemed reasonable to me.
Like that seemed like a reasonable way to
test new features.
I liked that era.
So so the project that I was working
on was to try to solve the problem
of WordPress users being overwhelmed by
all the stuff when they log in,
like new user experience, basically.
And like,
the thing is that there are all these
things that are built into WordPress,
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 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 so that was
the feature plug-in that I was involved in
working on it involved learning about how
to like add stuff into those pages and
And it's kind of janky code because
nobody's looked at it in probably fifteen
years.
And building out this plugin that tried to
do something better.
We actually did user research.
We did a number of...
There's a usertesting.com or something.
And we had an account that was paid
for probably by the foundation or someone.
Someone, not me, 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
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 gonna we're
not gonna do this we're not gonna pursue
this and probably no path for it was
just a dead end right like exactly 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 Serco,
when I joined,
contributing to the training team in
twenty fourteen,
Drew Janes had been leading a NUX
exploration for what you see when you
first log in.
And this was the days before we had
Slack.
We were all in IRC.
I was a very intimidated contributor.
And that project also just still sits
right where we left it.
That's when I met Morten.
Yeah.
Um, that, I mean, they're 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 WordCamp San Francisco in whatever,
twenty fifteen, twenty fourteen,
something like that.
Um, and I got to meet,
meet Kim Parcel.
And so,
I love her and rest in peace.
She was one of the first people that
greeted me in the community summit.
This is total tangent.
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 I knew who she was because I
knew her handle because her handle was
probably her name or something.
and mine was jazz sequence.
And she kind of like gave me a
look and she's like,
what are you here with?
And I'm just here with the docs.
Oh, she's like, oh,
I work on the docs team.
Like, oh yeah, I know I'm jazz sequence.
And she's like, oh,
and she immediately gave me a hug.
And like to speak to Jono, like,
your comment and everybody like here knows
like the community is amazing.
Like the people here are amazing.
And that was really that was sort of
my introduction to the broader sort of
contributor community.
But the flip side of that is after
sort of that project kind of got dead
ended,
that really killed my
desire to ever contribute anything to core
ever again.
Like I have zero interest 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 mullenweg 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.
So it's actually...
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...
And this has been sort of the problem.
To bring it back to the WPCC, it's...
The individuals who experience this,
like you said, Jono, and you were like,
oh,
I hit that and I hit the wall
and I was like, done, right?
That's the human churn that we've talked
about, that we've all seen amazing,
intelligent,
creative people leave the community,
ethical people leave the community,
because 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 like no one's coming in for that.
And the issue is, you know,
when you treat,
I think this is an entrepreneur tech bro
issue, right?
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 this is why I actually said a
comment yesterday about how the community
is not valued in the way that it
should be valued.
Even when we're talking about AI,
everyone's like, oh,
AI is going to do everything.
AI is not going to pop into 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.
AI is not going to innovate.
AI is not going to
make those connections of this use case
versus this use case and how those might
interact because it's not being fed that
information because 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.
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?
What happened to creating new things?
Because what we're doing right now is
we're just going to
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,
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.
Open source genetics, yep.
Yeah,
if you have an animal population that's
just breeding within itself,
like it's a contained thing,
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,
you are stuck with just the soup that
you have.
And because of the way that we've survived
is by doing what Jono said,
which is just feeding more humans into
there.
And then when they've given their
innovative ideas, 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 what even drives the AI.
It's like, you know,
a car might be sitting there and I
guess this is a bad example now with
like Waymo 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's not driving itself around
for fun.
I thought we found out that all the
self-driving cars,
all the Waymos were actually controlled
remotely by some dudes.
Oh my God, them too?
In the Philippines.
Yes.
Most of them are,
but I didn't know it was the Waymos
too.
Yeah.
Yes.
Oh, my God.
This is... I just found this out.
This is, like, Sage's 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 Waymos were
also part of that.
I've never been in a Waymo.
I'm never getting in a Waymo.
Like, I don't... I'm sorry.
Just not doing it.
But the point is here is that we
all... 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 not.
It's a desperate push for efficiency,
which means removing humans and squeezing
margins, et cetera, which yeah,
you could make an archie 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 feature plugins coming from?
And if all we end up with is
AI that summarizes the other stuff that
the AI built, uh,
maybe Wix is the better choice.
That's not cool.
We've talked a lot about the problem
space, why WPCC exists.
I'd like to shift focus a little bit
into, okay, so what is the solution?
So by shifting into this gear,
I'd like to ask, say, Courtney,
probably say, because you...
talk about this all the time.
I think a lot of people assume or
put a lot of things like you do
onto the WPCC because they expect it to
behave in a particular way or expect it
to work in a particular way.
And then it doesn't,
because we're actually trying to do
something new and different.
So for everyone who has now heard about
why the WPCC exists,
maybe you've gone to the website and
scrolled through a little bit while we
were having this conversation,
or maybe you clicked pause, gasp,
and now you're coming back.
How does the WPCC try to solve this
problem?
How does it work?
You are muted, say.
It works by being on unmute.
The, you know,
Our organization,
I could talk philosophically about how we
work or about literally like our output,
like what we are creating.
But just for a touch on the philosophical
part,
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 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 some other nonprofit worlds,
but not in this tech one.
But in terms of our output and what
we are creating,
what we have essentially established are
two main...
two main sort of like paths for that.
One is 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
autonomy.
You know, they're part of a team,
but they are not having to report,
you know, their metrics.
We're not analyzing their work based off
ROI, right?
This model exists, again, in other fields,
usually in thought fields,
but we're bringing that model into
practice.
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 a board to then judge if
their employee production is enough,
right?
So that model gives some freedom with also
some guidelines.
And I think it's just a really valuable
model for open source.
And then the other model is projects.
And projects are essentially anything that
people need to work on.
time constrained with deliverables.
Because a lot of the things that we
see in WordPress are passion projects.
And I understand that.
But you can't fund something just forever,
right?
Without some sort of, it just,
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 the 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 complete.
I think completing those things is really
important.
And ideally, 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 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
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 during a
particular podcast-a-thon that is trying
to raise money for these nonprofit
organizations,
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 five oh one c three
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.
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 five dollars.
You can come on 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.
The members are going to decide.
We're not being like, OK, well,
now it's a hundred dollars 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's really in the name of the collective
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?
Because it'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 sort of full circle around,
in the example of, like,
partnering or sponsoring WPCC,
we were talking before about, you know,
companies like GoDaddy,
companies like Google or agencies like
Tenup that are actually, like,
have a paid contributor on staff.
instead of that model,
which is the existing model,
which our hypothesis is that is a broken
model, the solution,
the thing that is offered instead is
rather than having them on file,
partner with the WPC or 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
directing your money through the wpcc to
that particular thing because you want to
see that done 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
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 if that's how you perceive an
open source contributor on staff.
The alternative is having an open source
contributor on staff.
Oh,
I think that there's this idea that if
you have a core contributor on staff,
they can direct the direction of core in
whatever direction benefits the company
that you work for.
But the reality is that's not always true.
They are alone because they don't have the
business behind them.
So even 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.
Unless they're not alone,
unless you have a critical mass of paid
contributors.
And membership behind you, supporting you.
Exactly.
Yes.
We are together and,
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's 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.
This is sort of an historic Community &
Code.
It's an historic thing for the WPCC
because I don't think we've been on a
podcast at least all together at the same
time.
We're still missing one of our board
members.
We are missing one of our board members,
Katie.
But even so,
this is a big deal for all of
us.
It's a big deal for the podcast.
Thank you all for coming on.
Where can people go to find out more
about the WPCC?
Well,
you can go to
thewpcommunitycollective.com.
Awesome.
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 belabor
the the time but uh thank you again
for everybody for coming on thank you jono
thank you courtney thank you say 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