EP439 – State of the Word 2022 Recap

Episode Transcription

Speakers:
Sé Reed: 45.82%
Jason Tucker: 3.90%
Jason Cosper: 5.05%
Courtney Robertson: 33.94%
I’m like, not only is there a poster, but it’s framed and it’s on the wall and it’s well placed. So there was definitely [00: 0.23%
but as far as the appetizers, there were lots of appetizers going around. I am brand new to owning an EpiPen, which tells me that for a little while, I should not be [00: 0.56%
and there was a little dialogue about how, all of chat G P T and the [00: 2.01%
No, no one’s tackling the, is AI and ethical use of, data sets on the Word Press team. It’s not happening. If it does, I will be shocked and a amazed, and I will, I will hope we will dedicate an entire episode to it and I will in that process, find a tiny hat and eat it or something, but pretty [00: 0.33%
5 8, 5 9, somewhere in there. And. [00: 2.34%
And I actually really agree because I think oddly during Covid we saw the teams having contributed before Covid. And then walked away for some time and then come back in the middle of this pandemic. we saw the team starting to cross collaborate a [00: 0.83%
That part was not true. However, I really like the meta team and, I feel comfortable there. So I’ve been hanging out with ’em. and I noticed earlier this week that, there had been a commit about, business taxonomy for plugins. And I was like, woo, this is [00: 0.46%
the point being here is that when that was [00: 1.39%
Was one of the [00: 1.55%
To, just be more on the same page, literally on the same post . but we would be able to, we have enough places where there will be friction. , end of story, there will be friction. So if we can find ways to create less friction, that would be great. and over again, this presents itself and a lot of the folks in the meta [00: 0.69%
but I just wanna say, so I think that this is, one of those examples of, a place where we have some room to improve [00: 0.13%
having some comms help with marketing and marketing is definitely always looking for more contributors and people to volunteer. If you’re good at thinking through those types of things, come back to that piece in a bit. The other two thoughts that I had around this also, friend of the show, Scott Clark, is in our [00: 0.17%
And I just had Scott come on to my show, we’ll call it. I was on with Maya last week talking about pods recently, and that’s something where. . I know Scott’s not making a profit on these things. no. And he’s probably losing money, but loves this passion project. And [00: 0.59%
Sé Reed:[00:00:00]
Five golden rings three.
Jason Tucker:[00:00:08]
This is episode number 439 of WPwatercooler, state of the word recap, I’m Jason Tucker. You can find me at Jason Tucker dot blog where you can find all the links to me and where you can find me on the different socials.
Sé Reed:[00:00:25]
Not on Twitter anymore. Oh, I’m Sé Reed. I’m at, that’s not right, but sure. I’m here. Hi.
Jason Cosper:[00:00:32]
And y’all know who it is. It’s your boy Jason Cosper, AKA Fat Mullenweg, back at it again on the world’s most influential WordPress podcast.
podcast. Go to Apple Podcast, audible, Google Podcast, Spotify, and go and subscribe to us over there and
Sé Reed:[00:00:47]
We are federated. Ooh, yeah. Federated and distributed and not isolated. We have with us [00:01:00] today the most wonderful, one of the most wonderful humans I know, like literally in the world, Courtney Robertson, who is, joining us. Despite the trek that she went through a blizzard, two directions, two trains,
Courtney Robertson:[00:01:14]
Up both ways.
Sé Reed:[00:01:16]
subways, uphill both ways, wasn’t home until two in the morning.
Seth Goden. Seth Goden has been very bald for a decade
Sé Reed:[00:01:36]
So excited about Seth Rogan than Seth, for the record. Way more excited.
Yeah.
Sé Reed:[00:01:43]
Anyway, yeah,No, it’s not all about Seth Godin. Although the YouTube chat was super. Every time they found out someone saw him, they were like, is that Seth?
Meanwhile say, new of this before the live stream
Sé Reed:[00:01:56]
yeah, I got the inside scoop[00:02:00]
and then she told us to not talk about it, and then the camera cut to him. She’s don’t post this on socials, but Seth Godden is there. And then all of a sudden the
He’s like front row. Yeah. Yeah.
Sé Reed:[00:02:11]
I think, do you think it was placed there? Like I, I have questions about why Seth
There were a few reserve seats. I remember that in the day Seth used to have, he was one of the holdouts for movable type and had Seth’s blog on movable type for quite some time. but now I would be surprised if he’s not on v I p because his web address, I think is Seth blog.
Sé Reed:[00:02:38]
There’s no way He’s not on v i P and at this thing and sitting in the front row. But also interesting is that he was there like a year or a couple years ago or something and had the same person with him. I thought that was really interesting. Like it was like they’re not handlers right. Assistants or whatever, but I think that’s just really interesting that they’re like,
Yeah. Seth’s
Sé Reed:[00:02:59]
But anyway, [00:03:00] there’s Seth.
Yeah. We have a scroll
Oh no, it’s frames. Just kidding. there’s a scroll in that sidebar. it’s not the ip, but the dot log address is definitely purchased,
Sé Reed:[00:03:20]
Oh, he’s dot blog. That’s right. Actually, I saw somebody had posted, I can’t recall who apologies. Someone posted a picture of all the swag they got and it was, obviously cuz it was at the automatic offices, it was all automatic swag and it was like Tumblr and blog and v i p and I really wanna run v i p sticker even though I don’t use v i p at all.
But Yeah. Yeah. so I found a few fun things while there.
Sé Reed:[00:03:47]
Do you have a
I am double verified as a
Sé Reed:[00:03:52]
Yeah. I wanna know what is the turnaround time that they did the Tumblr merch crew on the, internet check.
[00:04:00] Stickers are pretty fast.
Yeah.
Yeah. Yes.
Sé Reed:[00:04:28]
that is a Tumblr meme
pay $8 to get your own versions of these on your Tumblr
Sé Reed:[00:04:35]
also, speaking of Tumblr, I noticed that behind the, lectern was a Ovv poster, which is another ov, I don’t really know how to say. It turns out, the, Tumblr meme that has exploded recently of the fake Martin Scorsese movie. That is like a whole thing. And I was impressed with Turnaround time on that.
I’m like, not only is there a poster, but it’s framed and it’s on the wall and it’s well placed. So there was definitely [00:[00:04:53]
05:00] thought put into the images. behind
The offices were really cool. this was on the 11th floor of Automatics Building. It’s close to one of the New York City. We work facilities. Yeah. okay. The floor,
they are the 11th floor. The area has a couple of glass in meeting room areas, so imagine that it’s a whole rectangle.
Sé Reed:[00:05:51]
really not get anyone? Did you really
and then I got, so it’s Christmas, it’s getting close. We do Christmas in my house and so we’re getting close to Christmas with my [00:06:00] kiddos. And so one child has a lot of things in blue and the other in green, and so I found some more moleskins that were full size by the swag, so I can have hard back.
Sé Reed:[00:06:20]
Courtney, I have a really important question for you, and this is important and it needs to be covered first. Okay? I know we already talked about swag, but this is even more important than swag.
Ah.
Sé Reed:[00:06:30]
How are the snacks
Oh, there were many, there were lots of good snacks to be found. However,I’ve been a little, I’ve shared this publicly.
but as far as the appetizers, there were lots of appetizers going around. I am brand new to owning an EpiPen, which tells me that for a little while, I should not be [00:[00:06:50]
07:00] experimental in the foods that I am testing out because especially be traveling to New York.
Sé Reed:[00:07:30]
You didn’t wanna have to go to the
out.
Sé Reed:[00:07:32]
But I wanted to be sure there was Weird.
no shellfish for me these days.
Sé Reed:[00:07:36]
So I’m glad the snacks were good and now we can check out. Cause that’s really all I care about. And that’s what matters. The snacks and swag.
Sé Reed:[00:07:45]
There’s content also. Okay. Just kidding. Okay. Content. Who wants to go first? These are not fists. That was like being, I was not trying to fight people who were on the audio [00:08:00] stream.
Yeah, as expected, we didn’t have a whole lot of time for the online q and a and I did overhear SFA indicating that any questions that people submitted that did not get answered during the event, there will be a post about that. So I would
Sé Reed:[00:08:17]
Yeah, they said that in the chat too, which I thought was really interesting because they actually asked one of the questions that was in the chat and I know there was pre, ask Matt a question that stated the word, like a post that went out. And I didn’t actually hear any of those answered in the q and a.
and there was a little dialogue about how, all of chat G P T and the [00:[00:08:55]
09:00] AI system is trained on stolen data and that type of thing. And so there were some questions about like, how do we feel about that? Yeah, I don’t know if those will be answered. because they’re more philosophical and I think people want an answer from Matt when it comes to philosophy, when it comes to questions like that.
Sé Reed:[00:09:17]
Not a, like here is the official project policy on ai. And, just, we’re just not gonna get that. And I know now having been in this community for quite some time, cause I’m older than I look. That we’re not gonna get those answers. So that doesn’t mean people should stop asking them. I just wanna set those expectations in advance.
No, no one’s tackling the, is AI and ethical use of, data sets on the Word Press team. It’s not happening. If it does, I will be shocked and a amazed, and I will, I will hope we will dedicate an entire episode to it and I will in that process, find a tiny hat and eat it or something, but pretty [00:[00:09:40]
10:00] sure. Anyway, that’s my prediction about the chat questions,
Yeah.
so talking.
Sé Reed:[00:10:14]
do it or if you don’t want it to be, just kill it. Maybe. I
about the questions first is jumping ahead to the end, but it was honestly,
Sé Reed:[00:10:23]
Do not, never.
Yeah. it was honestly one of the more interesting parts. one of my, favorite things that happened during this q and a period was, Laura Byrne, asked Matt, hey, it was great when, a while back when we had, a female and non-binary release team for a release of WordPress.
Sé Reed:[00:10:56]
This. That felt to me like when you ask [00:11:00] someone to get together and you’re like, we should get together for like coffee some time, and you’re like, yeah, totally. We should do that. Let’s stay in touch. Let’s schedule that up. That’s how it felt to me.
And Laura, again, I want to re. I would never wish you any kind of harm or ill will. because she, flustered in the moment
I know. And I’m like, I’m sitting right beside you. It’s okay. so anyway, so yes, that really squad, was a lot of fun. And that was, I think, was it five eight, I think?
5 8, 5 9, somewhere in there. And. [00:[00:11:56]
12:00] that I would like to see one of those happen again. And this time I have my bearings a little bit more. One of the things that, that we saw in that release squad is that non-binary folks and women were in n it was not to say that men could not contribute, it’s that more of those that hold the release leads role and or prominent positions on the.
And I actually really agree because I think oddly during Covid we saw the teams having contributed before Covid. And then walked away for some time and then come back in the middle of this pandemic. we saw the team starting to cross collaborate a [00:[00:12:47]
13:00] lot more. I know that Melana and I have been cooking up ideas, among docs and training team working together, the overlaps of that.
Laura happened to have co-founded the WordPress marketing team and was a pivotal person in getting that team off the ground and launched. So onboarding folks to areas like that around how do you market the. Onboarding folks to the training team and the docs team, all way is welcomed. Say you’re muted, but you have boards.
Sé Reed:[00:13:52]
coughing so much.
Sorry.
Sé Reed:[00:13:55]
Still sick. don’t get the flu. PSA for people. Get your flu shots or something if [00:14:00] you want to. Cause don’t, just don’t get the flu. It was
sh. Shout out. Shout out to Courtney, by the way, for being the only person I saw the entire time wearing a fucking mask.
Sé Reed:[00:14:09]
freaking.
Sé Reed:[00:14:14]
Way to go.
to logical. Yeah.
Sé Reed:[00:14:16]
I was so proud. every people were flying in from all over. what are you doing? No one has had any time to de decontaminate themselves.
Sé Reed:[00:14:34]
Bring.
of that. Like I might be the one with bringing the things and I don’t wanna share that. But also if I can avoid spending Christmas with the flu because say it has taken you forever to feel like you’re halfway
Sé Reed:[00:14:47]
And I like can’t hear outta this ear like pretty much at all. yeah. I just want to tell you all from personal experience, don’t Okay. It really hurts a lot.
Confession. I had my mask off when I was consuming [00:15:00] that cider because it’s hard to
Sé Reed:[00:15:01]
Yeah. Alcohol,
but it went back on pretty quickly afterwards. Yeah,
Sé Reed:[00:15:06]
the whiskey will handle that part for you. okay, so wait, I wanna segue that. I was segueing before I was, my, my sick sickness became oh, so important yet again. is that, you were talking about cross team, collaboration and that, dovetails quite nicely with, cross team, but also.
That part was not true. However, I really like the meta team and, I feel comfortable there. So I’ve been hanging out with ’em. and I noticed earlier this week that, there had been a commit about, business taxonomy for plugins. And I was like, woo, this is [00:[00:15:46]
16:00] interesting. Obvi. My, one of my, areas of extreme interest is business development.
the point being here is that when that was [00:[00:16:57]
17:00] announced, there was probably very predictably, some confusion and some questions and some issues that were brought up within the community and that results in people, taking to the internet or coming into the meta channel and being like, what’s up?
Sé Reed:[00:17:17]
This is a problem. What are you doing? and generally, feeling concerned or confused. And, we, one of those folks is friend of the show, Matt Cromwell, who’s, give, wps. you have that somewhere, right? Didn’t I send that to you? The Matt Cromwell thing Anyway, you can pull it up if you want, but for example, he was having a lot of, concerns about it.
Was one of the [00:[00:17:59]
18:00] plugins, and it was mistakenly not on purpose, just mistakenly labeled as a commercial plugin that caused some, confusion on Twitter, and I’m sure within that person’s heart. and this to me speaks, this is a much more benign, example, a softball example, if you will.
Sé Reed:[00:18:18]
And there is now a blog post that, wonderful human being and. wordpress.org extraordinaire, manager of all the things auto put together, which is great. It is not your fault. It’s fine. , none of this is auto’s fault. I just wanna state that unequivocally. Unequivocally. but that, There, there is a way to communicate this stuff to the community even at the time, cuz we have the ability to schedule posts.
No way.
Sé Reed:[00:18:54]
Yeah. It’s a feature. the. This type of thing is the type of thing that [00:19:00] causes what I consider to be unnecessary friction within the community. An unnecessary distrust. There are plenty of things out there that are. I was gonna say like rightfully caused distrust, but that’s not what I mean.
To, just be more on the same page, literally on the same post . but we would be able to, we have enough places where there will be friction. , end of story, there will be friction. So if we can find ways to create less friction, that would be great. and over again, this presents itself and a lot of the folks in the meta [00:[00:19:38]
20:00] conversation today, we’re talking about how this is really a project management issue, which I agree to a certain point.
I jokingly said that was a canonical plugin,
but I just wanna say, so I think that this is, one of those examples of, a place where we have some room to improve [00:[00:20:52]
21:00] the process. That’s
very quick thoughts. One,the communications, I would think that this would be an area that the marketing team might be able to help with the writing of some of these. Types of content that might go out even on an individual team site, but might impact the wider project. So comms about the plugin, we need to get the word out to the entire third party plugin ecosystem, especially those that have things in the repo.
having some comms help with marketing and marketing is definitely always looking for more contributors and people to volunteer. If you’re good at thinking through those types of things, come back to that piece in a bit. The other two thoughts that I had around this also, friend of the show, Scott Clark, is in our [00:[00:21:42]
22:00] comments section here today.
Coincidence. I just saw Scott, just like an hour ago. It was good times. so Scott is the lead dev for pods that I owe, and that is a plugin that is entirely free open source. Invites and encourages people to come and contribute to that plugin. The model for that is not driven by a business.
And I just had Scott come on to my show, we’ll call it. I was on with Maya last week talking about pods recently, and that’s something where. . I know Scott’s not making a profit on these things. no. And he’s probably losing money, but loves this passion project. And [00:[00:22:42]
23:00] out of that, there have been a couple of contributors come through that, that have gone on.
Sé Reed:[00:23:45]
So as.
that, say, we’ve had some questions. Sorry. The other piece to that, because I know once you get going, the other questions, we’ve had a couple questions of people coming to W P C and saying, would you sponsor or help fund out of W P C, this [00:24:00] other plugin and fund me to work on that? And we were like, no, it’s only for the things that are on the project, but does this community plugin now. that’s a bigger question, but I think,that this conversation about, What are the taxon, what are the terms within this taxonomy? what are the criteria for those terms, et cetera, et cetera. This is something that is in development and Otto was very clear and, in his post that he posted today that has this information, which we can link to, in the show notes as well.
Sé Reed:[00:24:53]
And that was very clear in Otto’s blog post. And I would encourage everyone who has any plugin development, [00:25:00] involvement, literally like whatsoever to go to that blog post and talk about this stuff because, . This isn’t just it. The problem is it feels like it, but it is not actually just laying down the law of this is how it is.
I would also say one of the other questions that I had in there was about, we only have a few folks that handle the media, the plugins [00:26:00] being vetted, plugins being to, reviewed, and the update process and the notifications about all of that. Does this put an undue burden upon those already very overwhelmed individuals that are maintaining that?
Sé Reed:[00:26:17]
She’s an important person. the plugins team, literally Otto and Amika is,and even the meta team, like when these things happen, people react at the state of the word and then just jump in here and start freaking out. And that is a trauma response from the community. I feel like we’re just like conditioned to feel like, Hey, don’t take away our things.
I, I broke the news about the playground [00:27:00] on the, weekly post status roundup that I do with the full link to it, like the night.
Sé Reed:[00:27:05]
Yeah,
it’s just gotta watch in the right places. And it’s
Sé Reed:[00:27:07]
the playground is cool. We should actually have a whole episode on that, I think with a dev ranch because someone needs to explain to me what the heck is
it’s all over. Learn already. It’s all over. Learn
Sé Reed:[00:27:17]
Good. You can come back and tell us what the hell is happening. Like how is what a database and browser, I don’t understand.
Sé Reed:[00:27:41]
We should just do it January 1st, cuz no one’s listening to the WPwatercooler on the 23rd of December. It’s just not happening.
I only had
Sé Reed:[00:27:56]
all that matters. What did you, [00:28:00] Okay. I wish I don’t show pictures of my child on social media or on the internet because. It’s the internet. but I took this adorable picture of, I actually watched the state of the word with my almost three-year old, and I have this adorable picture of her just like staring at Matt.
So my takeaways, other things to take note of in yesterday’s state of the word, there’s some chatter about PHP compatibility and being fully compliant. I also, as soon as we started talking about the media library, as a person who has been watching this very fine establishment of WPwatercooler for the 10 years, I immediately say, said, say, says what? Because. because we were talking about bringing more of the Gutenberg experience into, we heard about more Gutenberg Rob app things. media library is on the horizon of things to [00:29:00] do in the not too distant future. So that’s exciting. And,
to hold my breath. Here we
yeah,
Sé Reed:[00:29:05]
But I have one more thing to say. Wait, I wanna talk about next year in January, we will talk about the Gutenberg is bigger than WordPress conversation because I think we need to have it.
Yeah. Yeah.
Sé Reed:[00:29:18]
He said it twice now at Word Camp us and probably more than twice, but twice in my personal hearing that he predicts Gutenberg to be bigger than WordPress.
Sé Reed:[00:29:48]
least we covered the snacks.
At least we covered the snacks. See ya.
that I.[00:30:00]
Sé Reed:[00:30:00]
Don’t.
dot com slash subscribe where you can go and subscribe to this content over there. And also, if you wanna listen to us or watch us, there’s a.
Sé Reed:[00:30:13]
It’s tut, right? That sounds so weird. I don’t know what.

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EP439 – State of the Word 2022 Recap

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