Josepha Haden Chomphosy – Executive Director of WordPress

Simon Kraft: Oh, okay. Yeah.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy: And it turns out I have a specific kind of usefulness at hackathons, which is not hacking at things. And so this year, last year also, I didn't go to the hackathon or to the event last year. I spent a little bit of time at the hackathon this year, but mostly here for the event.

Simon Kraft: Cool. Okay. Yeah, it's my first CloudFest as well. I was at the Hackathon last year.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy: If they're not careful, they're going to be overrun with WordPressers.

Simon Kraft: I think they will. And they are to a certain degree already.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy: That's what they want.

Simon Kraft: I have a very stupid question.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy: I am so excited.

Simon Kraft: Your job title is Executive Director of WordPress. Yes. What does an Executive Director of WordPress do?

Josepha Haden Chomphosy: This is actually not a stupid question.

Simon Kraft: I think it is kind of.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy: My job is very hard to explain because after about 20 seconds, people are like, this is hard. I don't want it. So if I had to explain to you my job in an elevator, what I would say is that I'm responsible for the overall health and wellness of the WordPress project and ecosystem. That's what I would say. But if you dig into what my job is, I do a lot of work around like making sure that we have enough resources for each one of our various economies inside the WordPress project. I make sure that when contributors say like we have problems getting people onboarded, we have problems with enough documentation, we have problems with plugins or security. Like, I do the work to figure out how to solve those problems and also, again, trying to do the necessary fundraising for all of those things and translate a lot of the, like, strategic plans that will work best for WordPress based on various pieces of information and advice that I get from people. And so really, really complicated my job.

Simon Kraft: I see. Yeah. I expected kind of a complicated answer. How did that happen? Because the first time I was in contact with you was my onboarding as a WordCamp organizer for WordCamp Frankfurt back in 2016, maybe even late 2015.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy: That was forever ago. You were in the same onboarding group as Birgit Polyhack. I still can picture the notes that I took about your onboarding. don't be alarmed i hope.

Simon Kraft: That's a good thing.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy: It is it's just my it's what my memory holds don't be alarmed it's fine so how.

Simon Kraft: Did that happen how did you become executive director.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy: Um i mean i mean the literal answer is that matt has appointed me to that role that's the literal answer um but if you look at like how i started from like being a meetup organizer to being a word camp organizer and then moving forward and forward into my wordpress career um i was hired by automatic in 2015 specifically to work on meetup um organization and kind of managing that program and and over the years like I just was so uh. I was so committed to the work that we're doing that I just took on more and more responsibility and that's kind of how it grew into that but like the essential parts of why we gather people together in WordPress because that is the thing that makes us so different compared to other their projects. Like we gather people together so that they are connected and they have a community and a structure to help them thrive in a project that is difficult. But then also we really provide kind of those equitable networks for people who are building their own businesses and people who are wanting to change their lives with WordPress, even if that's not what they're initially coming in to do. Like no one is like, you know what, I'm going to change my life. first things first, figure out what WordPress is. Like no one's doing that. But those basic principles that are in there just really, really called to me. And so I ended up doing more and more things, having more and more responsibility. Jen Milo left the project. And so there was this kind of vacuum of leadership that I sort of had some spare spare mental capacity to step in and help with. And in 2019, at the top of 2019, is when I was appointed to that role. And it's been the most exciting challenge of my career so far. So, Does that answer the question?

Simon Kraft: I think it does, yeah.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy: There are more stops along the way, but I think it's boring just to tell everybody what my career maneuvers were. But I got too excited. I took on too much responsibility, and then I got a title that matched the responsibility I took on. That's kind of the answer.

Simon Kraft: Good for you.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy: Thank you.

Simon Kraft: And good for the project, I guess.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy: I hope so.

Simon Kraft: You mentioned solving problems for the community. I'm a meetup organizer. I've been a meetup organizer for more than 10 years by now.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy: Thank you for doing that.

Simon Kraft: Yeah, that's all right. It's kind of my hobby. I don't do anything else. And the thing we struggle with here in Germany right now, for example, is getting the local community restarted after COVID.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy: Yes.

Simon Kraft: I used to travel around to all the meetups in Germany and give a talk, talk to people, get in touch with the organizers. and my first visit to an in-person meetup this year was in Munich. They were a big community before and now they are like struggling to get more than six people in the room. Do you have a plan for that? Do you have like a strategy for restarting the community?

Josepha Haden Chomphosy: Yeah. So of course we have the meetup re-engagement program that's happening. The folks on the community team are really doing excellent work to dig into specific problems and and work on not only like innovative new ideas that are that will bring people together in a time of post-covid i guess if we can call it that or the time of everyone being sick of acknowledging that covid is around whichever way you feel about it um so on the one hand there's there's that and that does a lot of the heavy lifting around it but as far as like what i I have seen for any community, trying to kind of pull itself back together. So there's an extent to which we really do have to be pragmatic about what we are offering to them. So anytime that you're gathering people, there is a reason to do it. And when you have people there, the way that you pull them together, the way that you organize the event really sets the tone for how they are going to participate with you, how they are going to connect with you. and so like going right back to old versions of our meetup events is probably not the way to go right now like it's probably not reasonable to say like hey come and learn everything about wp admin and then hope that everybody wants to do that and instead it might be best to start with hey we're gonna start this back up and so let's stop and um like have a few networking events every other month we're just gonna have a business networking event come here tell us what you're doing with WordPress and just like make it very low barrier to entry, very low knowledge or access required. And the whole purpose is to reintroduce the community to itself. Like let them know these are the other people that are doing the same thing that you're doing and just make that a more pragmatic choice. I was just talking to another WordPress contributor who was saying like, we're trying to do these innovative things in our meetup group, but we can't, but people aren't coming to us. They're not coming to the events. And so maybe we have to talk about some things that are about the business of WordPress. And I said, of course, like if the most important thing that people want to know right now is I started a business during COVID, so I could employ myself. I decided to go with WordPress and I don't know what I don't know yet. And so like having those kinds of all about connection sorts of events versus all about learning I think is maybe a way to go.

Simon Kraft: Um besides the covid stuff what do you in your opinion what's the next big step uh the wordpress project has to take and will take.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy: Yeah so as far as like things that are most important for us to to work on now like everybody's aware of gutenberg everyone is aware of kind of bringing the community back together um after we've had so many years of not being able to get together those two are very And then there are two other things that I think are very important for us to get really, really people digging into, people contributing to. So one is that our contributor tools have really spent a lot of time without anyone paying attention to them. And so we need a lot more time and attention given to not only talking to the team reps, figuring out what is and isn't working for the things that they need to do, but also figuring out where existing tools could be improved versus having to come up with a whole new tool. And I think that's true across the board. There are a lot of tools that we own and operate basically in-house at WordPress. and I think they all could use a bit more love and attention than they have at the moment. So that's one area. And then the other area where I think we all need to be turning our attention pretty soon is as WordPress practitioners. As WordPress users and implementers and developers, I think that we really need to start looking toward what the evolution of word of mouth marketing has to be for us. We don't have infinite money. We don't have infinite resources. We are an open source project. But I really feel like WordPress developers and people who are working to build WordPress for other people are not given a dignified enough position in technology as a whole. And as a result, it makes it very difficult for people who are trying to build a business on WordPress to really commit to the fact that they should be given a living wage for the work that they're doing or not have to make websites for almost zero dollars because free software translates to basically free work in whoever their clients' minds are. I think that we have to work through the evolution of how do we move from word of mouth marketing, which is great for us because it's about the impact and what has connected for us, which helps other people connect to us and what we're doing and finding a way to move into a new variety of talking about ourselves to people that don't know that WordPress matters or why it should matter in a way that still adheres to that really impact driven connection driven sort of ethos that we have always had about our marketing and WordPress. So those are my two things.

Simon Kraft: That's good. I only asked for one, but two is even better.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy: I know.

Simon Kraft: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy: And it wasn't short, was it?

Simon Kraft: That was okay.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy: Nothing I say is short.

Simon Kraft: I think we have enough time to squeeze in my bonus question.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy: Oh, good.

Simon Kraft: This is something I ask Matt all the time.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy: Okay.

Simon Kraft: And now I extend that to you as well.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy: Oh, man. I wonder if we're going to have the same answer.

Simon Kraft: We'll see.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy: I don't even know the question.

Simon Kraft: I'm, as I mentioned, I studied biology way, way back. and i'm quite passionate about living on this planet.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy: Which is.

Simon Kraft: A nice thing yes or the.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy: Only one we have yeah.

Simon Kraft: Yeah it is um and there is this movement inside of the project to get together a make team for sustainability.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy: Yes how.

Simon Kraft: Do we get there how do we get a sustainability team a make team for sustainability.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy: Yeah so of course we currently have a channel for sustainability i know that um but having a channel for anything does not necessarily a team make, so there are two parts to this question there's a logistics part and then there's a reality part so the logistics part is easy every team that wants to exist in wordpress has the same process It's a documented process. I think it's documented-ish. I have documented it in Slack, but maybe it's not up on a make site or anything. But the process to become a team is that you identify a project to work on. You host meetings routinely in whatever team is the closest related to yours. And then after a certain amount of time, if you still are able to have those meetings routinely, you're posting your agenda, you're posting your meeting notes, and team members are showing up, it's clear for them how they get started, and some projects are getting accomplished. If all of that happens and it looks like there still is more work to do, and so proving that this could be a team as opposed to an individual working group, then you graduate from being a working group to being a team. And so that's the logistics side of it. Now, the difficult part of it is how do we come up with our first ever sustainability project that requires a working group, and we can find someone who's willing to help really lead that charge. That's the difficulty. culty. Now, the work that the performance team is doing obviously has clear tie-ins to sustainability and a lot of the work that is on their roadmap this year, and especially I think it's the scripts on queuing work that they're doing to kind of only send calls that you need to be sending, like that all is obviously tied into sustainability. It has obvious tie-ins to performance of the CMS as well. And so potentially that is the thing, be the project. However, you, I'm sure, already realized that is a project that lives with the performance team. And so if the performance team is owning and operating that, then having a sustainability group that wants that to become their primary mandate would be redundant. And so I'm wondering, I've been wondering if sustainability actually should be a long-term working group inside the performance team?

Simon Kraft: There is another route, I think. Because, yeah, sustainability of WordPress itself is one thing. But at least before COVID, our whole event ecosystem, if we call it that, also has an environmental impact. So you could hook this up to the community team, for example, and say we work on, I think there are some documents already in the handbook for sustainable events.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy: Yes. And we have like the t-shirt tracking tool There's a tool that's supposed to help reduce waste for that. And I think that maybe nobody knows it exists.

Simon Kraft: I know it?

Josepha Haden Chomphosy: Of course you do. Because that was a tool that was built in my era of stuff and you were trained by me. So of course you know about it. There's a t-shirt tool that lets you know roughly how many of each size you need at various WordCamps. Just so everybody knows. But to answer that particular question, I am aware that, especially at our flagship events, there is a certain amount of waste that is certainly concerning. I think that WordCamp, either WordCamp Berlin or WordCamp Europe in Berlin, took all of the sponsor banners and things afterward and made bags out of them with a company that specializes in providing safe manufacturing opportunities for people who are otherwise unemployable. Quote unquote unemployable. Everybody can be employed if they would like to be. I loved that idea and we were looking at the feasibility of that across the program when COVID happened and we just all had to kind of panic and give up it was with Camp Europe.

Simon Kraft: In Berlin and I have one of those bags at home I.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy: Do too it's gorgeous I think Matt also has a bag yeah it's cool.

Simon Kraft: Um, so we'll see what the future will bring for the sustainability. I'm looking forward to that. Thank you so much for your time.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy: Yeah, thanks for having me.

Simon Kraft: Let's wrap this up by telling the audience where they can find you online.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy: Yes, you can find me on either short form blogging platform, Twitter or Mastodon, at Josefa Hayden, pretty easy to find. If you want to see my lengthy writing about leadership or WordPress-ish things, WordPress admin things, you can wander over to josepha.blog. And of course, if you want to, I have a podcast, the WP Briefing, and I also do a lot of like really deep WordPress admin work on make.wordpress.org slash project. So if you haven't seen that and how complicated everything is, and you want to rest assured that like you don't want my job, that's the site to go look at. Thank you.

Simon Kraft: We'll include links to all of these places in our show notes.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy: Great.

Simon Kraft: So thank you again. Thank you for taking the time. And I'll let you run off now and catch your next meeting.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy: Well, I was delighted. Thanks for having me.

Simon Kraft: Thank you. And the only time I had a way more awkward situation was when I had met Om. And we were at WordCamp Europe in Paris. And we were sitting right beside a copy machine.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy: Thank you. Thank you.

Simon Kraft: And people were printing stuff all the time. And some volunteer was running around, no, no, no, don't go in there. So it was really awkward. yeah let's let's hope for the best and see if.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy: You're so i you're a botanist yeah yeah.

Simon Kraft: It's super useless but uh no this podcast is not about me i will cut that.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy: Um i'll just ask you some other time um, i don't know maybe.

Simon Kraft: We just wait for a second.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy: Oh very good i've i i have been practicing my german for 1010 days straight and that includes a fair amount of travel and also a wedding so okay good for me cool what kind of what.

Simon Kraft: Kind of app do you use to i.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy: Use duolingo because.

Simon Kraft: That sounded like a streak thing.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy: It is yeah and it the streak street gamification really works um my german is not good for native speaker levels but like if you if there's a toddler in the room i can talk a lot about cows and ice cream sunflowers i also can ask where is the beer and where are the toilets oh.

Simon Kraft: That's the basic things.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy: Right right? That's what you gotta know. Yeah. Cows, beer, toilet, sunflowers.

Simon Kraft: Pretzels, maybe.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy: Oh, yeah. You gotta know about your pretzels. So there you go.

Simon Kraft: And that's a great outtake. So. Yay. Okay.