The next generation of WordPress contributors

Simon Kraft: I i hope you practice your german vocab because there will be a test at the end.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy: I know the word schneebesen which is probably also the same word i knew before.

Simon Kraft: No no that's so cool, i found some really elaborate elaborate title to lure you in here and then i didn't prepare anything and now I have to look up the title. I started out with something that was a bit Star Trek-y and was the next generation. I cannot stick with that, that's too weird. And I continued with how to build tomorrow's community today and by accident I invented a brilliant title for a talk. That I'll maybe recycle sometime. So this is a topic I've been thinking about a lot over the last year a year or something. Yeah, basically since the sustainability came into effect.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy: Yeah.

Simon Kraft: Because one aspect of a sustainable WordPress project, I think I've mentioned that I'm more in the eco corner of the whole thing, but one thing I was thinking about a lot is...

Josepha Haden Chomphosy: Because you're a botanist. That's why you think about the eco thing, but also because we all should, because we live on this planet.

Simon Kraft: And we kind of like it, right? I mean, there's no other place like it.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy: There's no other place like it. I interrupted you. I'm sorry. Continue.

Simon Kraft: I completely lost my train of thought.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy: I know, I did that.

Simon Kraft: That's an ongoing discussion. Like, do you all recognize that all the people in the WordPress ecosystem kind of get older?

Josepha Haden Chomphosy: When you say, do you all, who do you mean in your all? Because I recognize that.

Simon Kraft: Yeah. Yeah. No, that's just a discussion in the community. What's the youngest person we have in Germany, for example? And I was like, oh, there's not too many of them. And I thought that you might be one of the best people to talk to about this topic. Not necessarily because you have all the answers, but I think that's an interesting conversation. I'm pretty sure that you have thought about that as well.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy: Yes, yes. At some point.

Simon Kraft: Yeah. Or another.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy: Yeah, so I mean, the question, and this is true for any organization, that relies on human beings to support it, which is gonna be most organizations, because if you're not an organization of human beings, then until all the robots arrive, if you're not an organization of people, then what are you an organization of? So this is actually, a kind of problem that I have sort of grappled with and considered for long before I got here. So I have served on a number of boards for like old art forms, so symphonies and choral organizations. And one of the questions that we always work with in those situations is like, Like, how do we take this art form that is historic and nuanced and also still evolving and existing, but bring in new people to it so it continues to evolve and it continues to exist? And that is a really hard question for, you know, symphonies, unless everybody's like super into John Williams. And then they're like, this is the only symphony that matters. Just this and that guy from Interstellar. What was his name?

Simon Kraft: Is that Hans Zimmer?

Josepha Haden Chomphosy: Yes, Hans Zimmer. And so like, if that's all you care about, then great. You're like, it is all modern and it's wonderful. And so that is almost exactly the same question that we have for the WordPress community. So we've got this 20-year-old CMS, this 20-year-old software, which is still functional and valuable and exists and is evolving. And if all you know of it is Gutenberg, which is the newest parts of it, then you're like, why do you need to make this evolve? This is great. This is so easy to do. I can create a whole theme with no knowledge. And then that is all true. And that is your experience of it. And you don't worry about the youth of the groups, keeping it alive and together. But of course, as a holistic understanding of our community, I am quite concerned about that. What is good news, though, is that if we look at our three main kind of locuses of community generation, where we try to really get folks in, it's represented currently with our flagship events. So we have the US-based community, we have the European-based community, which is where we are at the moment, and then also Asia. The US-based community is our most long-running one. We're the longest in the tooth. And like a good old river, we have kind of a meandering way about us. And in the European community, one of our strongest current communities. And so it still has a lot of energy and a lot of momentum, a lot of interest and concern in making sure that we're on the cutting edge of things. And then when you look at our Asian community, like if you look at Young Rivers, they're gonna go in basically a straight line as fast as possible. And that is kind of what we're seeing in our Asian community as well. We had so many new attendees there and people who had been trying. And in a lot of cases like succeeding at building a business based on WordPress, and they were specifically showing up to get as connected to the entire organization as possible. I keep mentioning rivers. I assume you understand what I mean by this. But for your listeners, I'm just going to let everybody know. As rivers age, like when they start out, they are in a pretty clear direction, their water is moving fairly fast. And as they get older, and the landscape around them changes and moves, it slowly becomes more winding, and a little less water in it and a little slower, a little nicer to kind of wander around in. And so that is my most common explanation of like the youth and vigor of a community as a young river, and then the gentle meandering of a community being a mature, established river.

Simon Kraft: But it's so nice of you to just assume that I'm an expert on rivers.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy: I, for whatever reason, I was like, botany means everything about planets, but it's probably everything about plants.

Simon Kraft: Plants.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy: Plants. Yeah.

Simon Kraft: Okay. Yeah, so we have these three flagship events. That's super cool. And it's not really local communities. It's regional communities, basically, or continental communities.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy: Yeah. I like to think of it as a collection of time zones.

Simon Kraft: Yeah. Okay. That's a very automatic way of thinking about that.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy: Well, I'm sure it is an automatic way of thinking about it, but also, like...

Simon Kraft: It makes sense. I mean, it's... Yeah.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy: Yeah, because we do not have a WordCamp Africa and Africa is arguably, quite, quite a travel to get to WordCamp Europe, quite a travel to get to WordCamp Asia. And so like, it's not continental. We don't necessarily want to have continental flagships because seven is a lot to support. And I don't think it's sensible, but.

Simon Kraft: I will see you at WordCamp Antarctica.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy: Whoa, just you and me and the penguins. Is that where the penguins are?

Simon Kraft: That's where the penguins are. So we have these flagship events and we have these communities, but is that the answer to how to recruit the next generation of WordPress people?

Josepha Haden Chomphosy: Yeah, no, it's definitely not. On the one hand, our flagship events do have this function in the overall ecosystem of events that we have, where it serves to like bring in new users and get them really inspired by what they're seeing and also give them something to aspire to, which mostly gets them more interested in what they're trying to accomplish and have some sense for how to accomplish it, which I think is pretty good.

Simon Kraft: Let me stop you right there.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy: Okay.

Simon Kraft: That's a discussion we had yesterday at one of the parties. Is WordCamp Europe, or let's just go for the generic flagship event, is that really the place for new people to enter the community? Because it's incredibly expensive to attend generic flagship events. Unless you're fortunate enough that it happens to be in your city or in a city nearby. You have to arrange for travel there. You have to have a hotel there. It's stupidly expensive. And if you're not sponsored or there with your company, that's really like a big invest in like, oh, I'll check out this fun new CMS that I just learned about.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy: Absolutely it is. Yeah, it's very expensive. And not only is it the monetary expense, if you are not sponsored by someone to come here.

Simon Kraft: It's your own time.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy: Then it's also the time cost, the opportunity cost. And for all of our entrepreneurs, if you're not working, you're also not billing. Right. So like, I understand. I have no misconceptions about that. But from a general perspective of we get some group of people to a flagship event, and then they go out and create smaller WordCamps in their own communities and meetups as well. That is something that we see at every flagship event. After we have one, we have people who are like, this was a great privilege to me, but there are people who can't fly all the way to Portland. They can't fly all the way to Taipei. They can't fly all the way to Torino. And they solve that problem by creating things in their local areas. That's what I did. I didn't even go to a big WordCamp. I went to WordCamp, Northwest Arkansas, because that's where I'm from. And I thought to myself, like, why is it that we don't have one of these in the city where I live right now in Kansas City? And so I went and made one in Kansas City because I was like, we. Bigger than Fayetteville, we can have one. And so that's, I mean, that is the sort of thing that we rely on for that. But as far as like recruiting people into WordPress, is that the best way to do it? It probably was at one point. But I do not think it is at this point. I think that after COVID, there are not only the normal four ways that we already understood that we're asking people to pay to come to one of these events, but also you have to balance the getting in front of strangers and probably looking stupid, which after an extended period of isolation, a lot of people really are not wanting to do that. They didn't want to do it in the first place. We have a whole lot of introverts in WordPress. And I know, and I try to look out for y'all. And so like, it was already a pretty hard ask. And now it's gotten harder after kind of that extended isolation that many people did around COVID. But then also, it is so easy to learn anything online anymore. More and so much less scary to be around people and like being embarrassed in front of folks that may or may not understand where you are in your learning journey and can work on your own time. And so I think that we have a time where we have to kind of take a look at our event series and how it works as far as like an introduction tool for new users and a recruitment tool for new contributors. I think we have to figure out where people are wanting to do that learning, those first early steps of becoming part of this community and meet them where they are.

Simon Kraft: So I guess the next gen events, but I think we left that name behind somewhere.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy: It's just like, I don't know if the name was left behind. I think they're still being called that.

Simon Kraft: I was told so. I was because I wanted to call my WordCamp a next gen event. I was like, no, No, it's just WordCamp. Everything is next gen now.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy: Just call it a WordCamp.

Simon Kraft: Yeah, just call it a WordCamp. I guess the pivot to these next gen events was a part of that as well, right? It's not just about how to get more people to come back to a WordCamp-y kind of format, but also how to find new people to join.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy: You're right. I think it was a lot of that. And there was an extent to which having more events of different varieties in more locations is absolutely, it was absolutely our best guess at the time for what would get more folks into our space, into WordPress, into our event series. And they have succeeded, but also we're having to balance that against the difficulty of organizing those things now in our current context, not only because folks didn't organize anything for three or four years. And so they have a different set of skills right now. And also because yeah, like asking people to give up here again, our maturing community, asking them to give up time in the middle of the week now is different than it was before. Like, potentially, they did not have children before potentially they did not have, gainful employment inside the WordPress ecosystem already. And they were trying to get that done. So like they just had a different energy toward a different set of things than they do now. We haven't abandoned them. But I do think that the future of all of the event series has to include what we do with that event series that was kind of being trialed for the last year or so.

Simon Kraft: My good friend Robert asked me to ask you a question.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy: Is it about federated WordPress? No. Okay.

Simon Kraft: I will leave that in. That's really funny.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy: He'll find it funny too.

Simon Kraft: I love federated WordPress, by the way. This podcast now is published on a site that is federated.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy: Oh, nice.

Simon Kraft: Just because I can. No, it was about some kind of a next-gen event, something we're planning in Germany. And by we, I definitely do not mean myself, just the community. During now before covid we had an unofficial wordpress online meetup and then covid hit and many of the other meetups pivoted to doing stuff online so the online meetup became kind of redundant um now that we are kind of done with covid for now um hopefully almost all the meetups pivoted back to do in-person events which is really cool i'm a meetup organizer myself i love it and I got really bored of doing the online events to be honest. But there's a lot of people in remote areas where they could start their own meetup but they probably would be the only person there just because they're super rural. So what we are thinking about is doing an all online meetup, once a month for the dach region so germany austria and switzerland and currently the, rules for meetups do not allow for that because you have to have in-person meetings so robert's question is what can we do about that so.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy: I i don't believe that we have outlawed online events.

Simon Kraft: Um there is one meetup in germany that is still meeting up online exclusively and they just received like first strike and the notice that I have to do an in-person thing at least once a quarter.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy: Yeah. I mean, obviously we're trying to get everybody back to in-person events, but I think also, and again, there is currently, so there's currently a post out on make.wordpress.org slash community asking about what is enticing about the events that people are going to. And this is part of, we're gathering information for this conversation that I keep referencing, which is going to begin to sound like a cop-out answer. It's going to begin to sound like I'm just like, I don't have any answers because I can't tell you any answers, but also it is the actual answer at the moment. As we're having this conversation about what our events need to look like, if it is the case, because I'm making an assumption that a lot of people want to do their initial learning online right now. If that is correct, if my assumptions on that are right, then we have to make space in our meetup series to include online learning, not only for meetup groups themselves, but then also through learn.wordpress.org. They do a lot of online learning. And I think that we should really capitalize on that. Like we have people who come through that property all the time in order to learn how to do small minor things with WordPress. But also, we have these substantial workshops for learning how to get started, with the CMS, learning how to get started with developing inside like the full stack of it, and then also advanced topics as well. And so if we are putting all the time and effort into creating those, because we believe that people need them, then we should probably also just kind of come to terms with the fact that we need a more hybrid approach to at least our initial series of learning opportunities and networking and connection and opportunities that we have there.

Simon Kraft: So now I'm in hard question mode. I'm really sorry about that. Throwing another hard ball. What's your take on...

Josepha Haden Chomphosy: Why are you sorry about hard questions?

Simon Kraft: I don't know. We were talking about rivers and stuff, and it was really nice.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy: I mean...

Simon Kraft: We'll get back to rivers in a second, but...

Josepha Haden Chomphosy: Also, your hard questions might be answered by a very lovely answer that includes rivers. You don't know.

Simon Kraft: Probably. What's your take on GatherPress?

Josepha Haden Chomphosy: So my take on GatherPress, I love that we have this need to provide an open source like meetup.com replacement. I understand it. We all would prefer to have open source systems as opposed to proprietary systems. That the pilot program that's working in there is going to give us the information that we need to know whether or not that's something i.

Simon Kraft: Mean i signed up for the pilot program but i know it hasn't started yet well.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy: I don't know if it's start so i things come to my desk a lot early before they get anybody but like i understand that there are a handful of meetup groups that are wanting to host their events in there to see if the tools that are in there are at least parity with what we have in Meetup, especially for the communication aspect of it. And then once we see how those run, and we can tell the distance between that software and the software we have, we can take a look and figure out whether that's something that we want to really invest time in as a tool for the community, because it will be a lot of time.

Simon Kraft: And for everyone who doesn't know what GatherPress is all about, I actually interviewed Patricia at CloudFest and the interviews in this very podcast feed here. So So I'll link to that in the show notes, link in bio, as we say.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy: Link in bio.

Simon Kraft: Like and subscribe.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy: Hey, you took care of all the requisite bits of the podcast now.

Simon Kraft: Yeah, but it's not on YouTube, so. Okay. Okay, back to the future.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy: Back to the future.

Simon Kraft: Okay, so we have our lovely events and we have our lovely next-gen events and all that is cool. I guess the fact that we do have the new mentorship program that is just about to start its third installment later this year.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy: Yeah, they're planning the third cohort now. Yeah, yeah.

Simon Kraft: I guess that's a crucial part in a strategy to like onboard new people to the WordPress project, get them up to speed.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy: Specifically around contribution, yeah. Yeah, as opposed to onboarding to how to use WordPress.

Simon Kraft: Oh, yeah, yeah. Oh, sorry, I just implied that. Yes, to contribution. Do you already have data, any results on that, on how effective that mentorship program is? So is that the solution to recruiting the next generation?

Josepha Haden Chomphosy: So we have some initial information about it, and I believe that it was published on a make site somewhere. So we can share that out for folks who love numbers. But there are two things that I took as an immediate indication of, like, this is worth continuing on, worth trying to continue to get more people through. One is that in the first cohort, the self-reported level of confidence of understanding the WordPress project and ecosystem and how to contribute to it, the initial self-reporting was like 54%. And at the end of that, their self-reported confidence in understanding how it all works and how to get it to work for them was about 80%. And so that is a substantial increase for people who now know what they're looking at and how to do things with it. And so that's already a win for me. But also part of graduating from that program is that you have to make a contribution that that is of an impactful size and scope and also succeeds at landing in. A core release or in an event or however, however that goes. And so like your impact feedback loop is built into the process. And the fact that we had, whatever I said, 55, 55 people that graduated with a successful contribution and also a high, much higher level of confidence in being able to continue to contribute, I think is a really, it's a, it's a clear indicator that we should continue the program. Now, the following questions that we have to ask ourselves is how do we make sure that they're able to come back and continue to contribute if that's what they would like to do, because we always want more people in here contributing. Sure.

Simon Kraft: And I think from what you're describing, it sounds like one of the most, in my personal experience at least, one of the most frustrating experiences is that you open a ticket on track, and wait for 15-something years, and someone picks it up eventually and then you push it back another version. So that's the immediate feedback loop that you're talking about, right? because people can do something and it happens immediately. And no, it's not about opening a ticket on track. That's a different kind of story. But still, that's the experience I think many people have initially with like, oh yeah, I report a bug. It stays there forever.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy: Yeah. Yeah. I know that that's a pretty rough experience.

Simon Kraft: But it's all volunteers in the end, or mostly volunteers.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy: It's mostly volunteers, yeah. But the shorter feedback loop that is available in that mentorship program is that you can contribute directly to a release squad or something. A minor release, major release, maintenance, if we've got one of those running around. Or, you know, participate in the organization of a large event like this. And so those types of really meaningful, but also really thankless and therefore also hard to find kind of volunteer opportunities is the kind of thing that that program is able to help people do. And it does have a faster feedback loop, because a release cycle only lasts for a certain amount of time. And an event organization process only lasts for a certain amount of time, unless you're on one of these big, big teams that make sure they all function. In which case, it is just your life.

Simon Kraft: Forever.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy: Forever. Okay.

Simon Kraft: One final question, because we're running out of time, actually. What is the thing that gets you most excited about the future of the WordPress community?

Josepha Haden Chomphosy: Community my favorite problem at the moment favorite problem which is probably the best way to explain that I I'm a big believer of falling in love with your problems as opposed to falling in love with your solutions because the all the times that I have ever just mostly loved the solution that I was coming forward I had to find a problem to attach it to you know and it wasn't necessarily the best solution for the problem I found and so I really love to take a look at our biggest problems and make sure that I understand them and get a good sense for like the best way to get it done. So the problem that I'm currently in love with, that I've been in love with for two years is of course, the kind of plateau of our year over year growth of the project. That is my. Current favorite problem to tackle, we are seeing positive trends. And so my now subset favorite problem to tackle is making sure that we continue that progress. The community has really done a lot of work and trusted me a lot in a bunch of the changes that I'm asking for to help us move forward with a bit more energy toward 51% of the web. I always knew because this is just predictable in any growth story that the last 10 points that you're trying to win are always just straight into the sky, right? Like you've got this long tail of ready to go and winning. And then the last bit is always just as high and straight and fast as you could possibly imagine. So it's like a huge hill that we're climbing here. And so finding ways to make sure that I am able to close the feedback black loops to the teams and companies and individual folks who have really stepped up to try weird experimental stuff with us in the name of like, let's get it all moving again. And just making sure they understand that this work that you did is part of what is making this change possible. And then also figuring out like, okay, so now that we kind of have a turn happening, how do we increase that momentum so that this straight up the hill journey that we have is while difficult, not the most difficult thing that we will ever accomplish. And so there are a few components to that. I think getting through, getting to the other side of the Gutenberg work as fast as possible is going to be a really big part of that because so much of the content that we are creating changes rapidly and we don't necessarily have any desire or need or requirement to go back and change old information as it becomes no longer useful or valuable. And so being able to have something that's a bit more finalized and stable so that all of the people who are out there teaching other people to use WordPress can like commit to that and have a really efficient use of the content that they're providing, I think is a really important part of that.

Simon Kraft: What's the goal with the market share thing?

Josepha Haden Chomphosy: You mean, what's the point of the goal? Like, why do I care about the 51%?

Simon Kraft: No, no, no, no, no, no. Is 51% the goal? Because I think if we were aiming for like 100%, like web domination, that wouldn't be a good thing for anyone. So what's up with the 51%?

Josepha Haden Chomphosy: Yeah, so 51% is my target, partially because I think, I agree, I think there's some risk in being 100%, not only to our community of contributors who would then have all of this really heavy responsibility to like the web, but then also a fair amount of risk to the web also like any time that you have one thing that you rely on you you have a pretty fragile future i think and so that's part of the reason why the 51 the other reason around the 51 is that i think that we are approaching a time collectively we are approaching a time in the trajectory of the open web where we just have to make this into an open source versus closed source conversation and WordPress at the moment. Are you, are you a formula one person? We're here in Torino.

Simon Kraft: Okay.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy: I have recently started watching formula one and went to the museum down here, but right now, or rather all the way until last season, there was a dominant team and it was so dominant that at some point people stopped caring what was going on. Like they would talk to the, to the team boss and be like, Hey, hey, what do you think of that other team's strategy? And he was like, what about our strategy? And he's like, do not care about your strategy. And a little bit, I think that's where WordPress is, is that we are in a position where we are so far away from our open source competitors, that the question of what are we doing versus what any other open source CMS is doing is not interesting to people. But what is interesting and something that we are poised to be able to help, in general, is take a look at an overarching open source strategy and how you can convince people that open source businesses are not only viable, but incredibly valuable, and then figure out how to fund it, how to support it, and how to make sure that they can thrive long into the future. I think that for WordPress, the further that we get toward that 51%, the more and more that we We should be able to speak really consistently and coherently about the way that this should change the proprietary conversation as opposed to change the open source conversation.

Simon Kraft: It's so difficult to end this. I would love to talk about cooperation with other CMSs as we've seen.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy: With the Open Website Alliance and CMS Garden and all the things.

Simon Kraft: I'm a member of CMS Garden.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy: I know.

Simon Kraft: Have we talked about that before?

Josepha Haden Chomphosy: No, I think probably Robert told me. that that was a that was a fair leap for me but yeah.

Simon Kraft: Okay so i would love to talk about these things but i think we have to keep them for next time because we have to close things up here i'm.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy: So glad there's gonna be a next time every time i come and talk to you i'm like what if simon never wants to talk to me again.

Simon Kraft: I was just assuming that thank you so much for taking the time yeah thanks for having me pleasure as always naturally, That is the loudest door in the whole building. Yeah.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy: It sounded like a ghost. It was not, it was a door.

Simon Kraft: Maybe it is a ghost.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy: You never know, it's an old building. It's true. It's a little old Fiat ghost.

Simon Kraft: Ghost of Fiat past.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy: Yes.