EP446 – WordCamp Asia Brings the Heat

[00:00:00] Sé Reed: Hit it. Hit it.

[00:00:08] Jason Tucker: This is episode number 446 of WPwatercooler Word Camp Asia brings the heat. I’m Jason Tucker. You find me at Jason Tucker dot blog. Feel free to go over there and take a look at that.

[00:00:27] Sé Reed: I’m say Reid. Uh, my business is kerredyn.com. That’s a fun one. I’m Sé Reed Media on all the

[00:00:33] Jason Cosper: And y’all who it’s Jason, the large language model, back at it again, WordPress.

[00:00:41] Jason Tucker: Speaking of those podcasts, go listen to us. Go over Apple Podcasts, audible, wherever it is. You can find them and you can go hang out with us over on Discord.

[00:00:50] Sé Reed: We’re the chat og. I just thought of

[00:00:55] Jason Tucker: it going folks?

[00:00:56] Sé Reed: Wait, what happened to being the large language model

[00:01:01] Jason Cosper: I mean, I’m, I, am I things I contain multitudes.

[00:01:07] Sé Reed: Like, it’s wild. Um, anyway, now that we know whoever that guy is, we have guests today. Um, now have you been on the show?

[00:01:16] Nyasha G: No, this is my first time.

[00:01:18] Jason Cosper: What

[00:01:18] Sé Reed: so funny. I, uh, I just, you’re just in my life now, so I’m just like, oh, you know, you’ve been here, right? Uh uh, please introduce yourself. Welcome.

[00:01:29] Nyasha G: Hello. Hello, I am Naisha. I am the editorial director at Master W P, and I am a software developer or WordPress developer at Howard Development and Consultant. And nice to meet y’all.

[00:01:41] Jason Tucker: Yay.

[00:01:43] Sé Reed: And then we have, wait, the illustrious, Courtney,

[00:01:49] Courtney Robertson: Hey, so yeah, I’m averaging hanging out with WPwatercooler, like one in three episodes. I don’t know, I’m, I could be a good substitute, per se, something.

[00:01:58] Sé Reed: always angling for a job here.

[00:02:00] Courtney Robertson: I know, I gotta try.

[00:02:01] Jason Tucker: Sorry, say that again.

[00:02:02] Courtney Robertson: uh oh. Oh, hey. So So, um, I, I get to do some amazing things with the wonderful say Reid. Over at the W P ccc, we are working on funding contributors.

[00:02:18] We’ll talk more about that probably a little bit later. Um, I do things with the WordPress training team@learnedwordpress.org, but I’m a dev developer advocate at GoDaddy Pro as well. I also have bronchitis as I’m recovering from a cough. I was sick days before I went to Veria. Got over. It was not contagious.

[00:02:38] During veria. Was covid testing Not contagious, but if you see me coughing, hear me coughing, I will try to mute myself during today’s show so that I could spare you the concerning hacking of bronchitis. My voice doesn’t sound like my voice. This is the best it’s been in three weeks. It’s all.

[00:03:49] Nyasha G: I, I’ve been to a lot of tech conferences, but I haven’t been to a lot of work camps, so Yeah. Yeah. Work camp US was my first one. Um, but I have been to a lot of different tech conferences. That was the best tech conference I’ve ever been to. Um, I, I hate to say like it’s the best work camp cause I’ve only been to us.

[00:04:07] But it was, it was amazing. Like, it was like, I felt like I was in another world. I know I was in another country, but it was amazing. It was so well organized. The, the, the atmosphere was amazing. The people I 10 outta 10, I have no complaints about it.

[00:04:25] Jason Tucker: That’s awesome.

[00:04:26] Courtney Robertson: So I had the honor of going and I say honor because I’ve contributed on various WordPress make teams, the 21 teams that make WordPress. I’ve contributed with some people that are now very close personal friends of mine for going on three years, you know, since the beginning of pandemic when I started contributing again. and it was just an honor to spend time in person with some of my, my friends that are there, because a lot of times they face visa issues that they can’t get to Europe even, or the US certainly. Um, some of our India friends are unable to get a Visa to the US because it’s like a 900 day wait period. So it is really important for the APAC community to have an international flagship event like this.

[00:05:15] it spares the logistics that they face as hurdles, not just even monetarily because economies of scale are different, but the literal just blockage of things like visas and passports and that whole process. Um, it just was very important for them to be there. That said, again, I count it as an honor. The role that I am in.

[00:05:34] I have contributed to the WordPress project since 2009. I have only been sponsored for a year and a half. I got to go to all three international camps. This. , US, Europe and Asia over the past year. And I tell you, the after party at Europe, I thought like raised the bar further than anything I saw in America.

[00:05:53] Work camp Asia’s after party was lit. I mean, like it was a shame the Europeans because everybody came with a lot of their cultural attire on and um, yeah, and, and you know, I roll in as the American in like a t-shirt, pants. Yeah, it is. That is, um,

[00:06:14] Nyasha G: I tried. I tried a little bit,

[00:06:16] Courtney Robertson: yeah, yeah.

[00:06:18] Jason Tucker: It’s party central.

[00:06:22] Courtney Robertson: Uh,

[00:06:24] Nyasha G: I like

[00:06:24] Courtney Robertson: word camp every day, attire. Yeah. Yeah,

[00:06:28] Nyasha G: the, like the dashiki, west African print. Like with the top. Yeah. It was really nice. I looked good. Not just letting you

[00:06:35] Courtney Robertson: it was, I got to sip and I for a little bit. It was great.

[00:06:43] Nyasha G: Mm-hmm.

[00:06:46] Courtney Robertson: Mm-hmm.

[00:06:47] Jason Tucker: that’s smart.

[00:06:48] Courtney Robertson: Yeah. So then, then a lot of the typical cultural dances that you would see at general celebrations within their home nations, they were all doing during the after party dance party. And I tell you that the Asian folks know how to. Group dance, I think better than any of the other after party camps.

[00:07:09] Okay. Which is great.

[00:07:28] Jason Tucker: That’s smart.

[00:07:49] Nyasha G: send it to you. I have it on my Instagram. Yeah. I have a video on my Instagram.

[00:07:53] Courtney Robertson: Robbie McCullough also has a couple good videos that he posted on his Twitter account. Robbie is with Beaver Builder, one of the.

[00:09:32] Nyasha G: you wanna go first?

[00:09:34] Courtney Robertson: No,

[00:09:34] Nyasha G: I can go. I didn’t know.

[00:09:35] Courtney Robertson: Now you cover it.

[00:09:36] Do it.

[00:09:38] Nyasha G: Um, I, I did hear a little bit of that. Um, one of the biggest things, well, would it be one or two? Two of the biggest things. Um. Was one once you brought up with about the Visa requirements, but also it was that I was just going on about how while I was there, it’s so wonderful.

[00:09:53] It’s so great. This is so organized. I can’t believe this. I’m like the attention to detail them checking on everyone like, are you having a good time? Do you need anything? Everything was perfect. And I just kept going on and on about it because like I felt like, wow, like I’ve been to some good tech conferences, but you know, I have not felt that level of like help and you know, Love in the air, basically.

[00:10:12] And when I talked to one of the organizers, they said, you know, we, we honestly think, um, well, they thought, sorry, that, uh, it may be because a lot of people take conferences, especially word camps for granted. They’re like, okay, we’ll always have one. Even when Covid hit, it’s like, okay, they still weren’t one of the first ones to have one when, you know, we started getting back together.

[00:10:31] So it was like people take advantage of the opportunities. I’m segueing into, uh, I think people take advantage of the opportunities they getting WordPress, they don’t have as much. So, you know, when they got that, that spotlight, it’s like, look what we can do if you invest in us and you foster this in us.

[00:10:48] So I did, I definitely felt that and I felt that’s why it was such a great conference because they wanted to show people, like, foster these relationships here with us and you’ll, you’ll see the beauty we.

[00:10:58] Jason Tucker: awesome.

[00:11:00] Courtney Robertson: I got a chance to spend some more time, um, briefly with Naoko and John, who I know both from sitting next to them during the after party in 2015 for work camp us. Um, Naoko is an Aian. John works at Human Made. , both are very active contributors. Sam Delotz John is over in the Docs team. And um, you know, they both just had such pride and I felt such pride from a lot of the local folks there that they got to host the event.

[00:11:31] You know, Niko came out at the very end and said, we did it, meaning that successfully there was a word camp to happen. And I think that the caliber of the volunteer contributor group was at least on par with Work Camp Europe in terms of professionalism. from people that are solely volunteers to organize this event from every role.

[00:11:51] I heard people had asked, I was an mc for the event, and people had asked if the MCs were professionally hired. MCs we’re like, no, no. We just, we know we’re pressed people and, and we wanna introduce them and, and, you know, make it shine. Um, so I think from that side, everything was really great. I’ll speak a little bit to, as a GoDaddy person, I know that we brought with us some staff that are new to the WordPress community but are part of our GoDaddy Asia initiatives already, and they just embraced what was going on. I set some context again that everyone is volunteers here, right? And so keep in mind this is a little different, but that at a work camp, it is very much community driven.

[00:12:37] People were constantly checking in on each other within my own team, but also within all. How are you doing? Is there anything that you need? Is there anything I could help you get? And in addition to that, um, you know, we’re, we’re looking at this right after many WordPress companies have been announcing layoffs.

[00:12:54] People were really just interested in networking together and making genuine connections. And our staff that were new to the WordPress space commented on how different that approach is, how it’s not a competitive environment, how everyone was very welcom. All the vendors were going around, meeting each other.

[00:13:14] Um, and I will say, taking note of this, I saw, um, the, the company that brought the largest contingent of folks was WP Developers. They had about 75 staff there, and then they went on a team trip afterwards, and that was impressive. So there were some more, um, sponsor vendor sorts that don’t get as much attention at other.

[00:13:40] that we’re getting this spotlight at this one, and rightly so, because they’re an APAC based business. They’re an APAC based, employee based, and so reaching and connecting that part of the WordPress audience just got me really excited because I feel like this is like this pocket of people I’ve interacted with a little online, but having that opportunity in person, I think was.

[00:14:01] Jason Cosper: Yeah. Now, now Courtney, you, you mentioned they, they brought 75 people, so this sounds, uh, quite a bit larger than Word Camp US was for, I, I know that that was kind of a reduced camp size. Like how many people would you say were at Word Camp Asia, uh, Courtney and Naisha, either one. Feel free to take that.

[00:14:23] Courtney Robertson: So in my, um, Roundup post, NY and I both have. Some recap posts and we’ll, we’ll give links to those things, I

[00:14:30] Jason Tucker: Links in

[00:14:31] Courtney Robertson: Um, yeah. But in there, there’s the stats and I think there were little over 17,000 tickets purchased and 1,299 attendees in person. We were missing one to bump it up to 1,300. And Naoko said that that one missing was Matt

[00:14:53] Soko shared that right from the stage. Oh. Just, just, yeah. Matt was, Matt at the last minute had to come in and join us via Zoom. Um, so we accommodated that. So we would’ve had 1,300 there if Matt had been able to join us in person.

[00:15:12] So

[00:15:12] Jason Cosper: Matt, Matt wasn’t the only person that joined y’all through Zoom. I know that for contributor days, there was also kind of a remote component there as well.

[00:15:24] Courtney Robertson: let’s, yeah. was online workshops. Yeah, so we have these, we have online workshops unlearn, and those are like a meetup with a Zoom. There’s a meetup group with a Zoom, and they show up in most people’s WordPress and dashboards. And that’s how people find out what’s going on. And different people host them different languages, time slots, et cetera.

[00:15:49] But we’ve done one now for during her camp. Also again during Work Camp Asia, which was great. It’s made,

[00:16:02] yeah.

[00:16:03] Jason Tucker: the dashboard thing is like a massive thing for even like the local meetups. It was huge. So for having something like that and in a grander scale for this, is it, it’s, it’s, it’s like the perfect way to, to kind of spread the word.

[00:16:18] Courtney Robertson: Yeah, and I’ll turn it over to say, to share about the rest of the online contributor experience because say was the one I tend to get online. Yeah. So. , there was like seven, seven, m, and eight, and I was sprinting between the two of them, um, opposite sides of the building with bronchitis, uh, because I love helping people with all of this. So I let the both teams get their people onboarded for like set up your accounts and then came back and it was right after lunch that we got into. The marketing team, Yvette and I coordinated together. Yvette works at Yost. We have coordinated for Yo’s versions of contributor days online during the pandemic to start helping the marketing team create the social media content that promotes learn on wordpress.org candles. And that’s something that will help new contributors see what this content is.

[00:18:26] And it’s something that they can give a rough draft of something and be done with it that day if they only ever wanna contribute that. , they have that window. So I was able to sort of help between the two teams, um, because we had some amazing table leads available on location to do all the other parts.

[00:18:43] So that was, that was a good experience.

[00:18:46] Nyasha G: Courtney was amazing. Like if you, like, if she didn’t cough, you wouldn’t have known she was sick. Like she was like, yeah, I’m a little sick, but I’m gonna go do this. I’m gonna do that. Hey, how you doing? I wanna do this, I’m gonna do that. I was like, Uhhuh, like she, she is amazing.

[00:19:04] Jason Cosper: I was, I was gonna say between Courtney, between uh, Michelle Farha, between, uh, these handful of people who are, are just all over the damn place. Like really, uh, you know, shout shoutouts there cuz it’s . Yeah. It’s, it’s a lot of effort and it’s really admirable the amount of effort that, that folks like y’all put in.

[00:21:11] Nyasha G: I have two. Um, first of all, the speaker where the, the speaker rooms, the speaker setup was incredible. I thought I was at a TED Talk. It was so professional. Everything was so nice. I’m looking at my pictures like, oh my God, I look like I was like watching celebrities or something. And then I saw a drone one time.

[00:21:27] I was like, oh my God.

[00:21:36] Courtney Robertson: Yes. Oh.

[00:21:39] Nyasha G: Oh, wow.

[00:21:40] Jason Tucker: it. That’s, yeah.

[00:21:42] Courtney Robertson: I didn’t realize the audio was coming from that.

[00:21:46] Nyasha G: well it looked cool. It looked cool. Yeah.

[00:21:53] Courtney Robertson: Yep.

[00:21:54] Nyasha G: Yeah, it was, no, it’s fun. Like that was amazing. And like I, it’s gonna sound weird, but I felt more into the speeches because I felt like I was in like a really cool place and I felt like important. Like I, they told me to stop saying that at work. They’re like, you are important. But I felt very important and it was just great.

[00:22:11] And like my second thing was the word camp. Everybody was so freaking sweet. the people there, like the Thai people are the nicest people I’ve ever met in my entire life. And like I just, it wasn’t very important for me to say that. Like I was so happy because I just moved to a city where everybody’s mean.

[00:22:28] Like they’re so unfriendly here, , and like everybody was so sweet. Like one of the attendees was telling me he got lost and a police officer was like, Hey, you lost. He was like, come here. And he like grabbed his hand and walked him to like, catch the train. Like that’s how nice people were they, anybody a stranger would stop and say, Hey, how are you doing, Yeah. So I, those were my two biggest things. Like the atmosphere at the, at the conference was like the. Let’s not just network, but let’s become friends. Like I’m in selfies with like, I feel like a hundred people. Like I’ve met so many people that were like, you know, we’re a fan of Messenger people. We’re a fan of the podcast.

[00:23:03] And I’m like, oh. And they’re like, yeah, we’re, we’re so glad you came here. I’m like, I’m glad you invited me. Like, you guys are so awesome. I’m just here . So I, I felt so loved. Like I, I, I definitely wanna go back next year. That was like the bo the best,

[00:23:17] Jason Tucker: So speak.

[00:23:21] Nyasha G: Taiwan.

[00:23:22] Jason Tucker: Hmm.

[00:23:24] Nyasha G: Mm-hmm.

[00:23:25] Jason Tucker: Wow.

[00:23:26] Courtney Robertson: Mm-hmm.

[00:23:27] Jason Tucker: So speaking of non WordPress, parts of the word camp, Wha what about the food? How did that go?

[00:23:40] Courtney Robertson: I will say Thai restaurants in America tend, tend to be fairly authentic, but the flavor is next level. When you get a pad Thai or ma on curry directly from a restaurant inside of Thailand in Bangkok, the food was just fantastic. I still, because of the, you know, the cold and things. , I still went for American version of heat, not Thai heat.

[00:24:05] So that was . That was good. And to cool things off, I had the best. Um, at our team staff dinner, we always as a team, because this is the rare time, our team actually can work together in person. We go out for dinner as a team the night before, contributor day, and all of the madness really begin. So I had the most amazing, um, mango sticky rice that had a coconut ice cream.

[00:24:31] And when you have a cold, you don’t wanna have lots of dairies. Like this was the perfect, the perfect food. I, I wanted more of that exact thing, but my, I couldn’t find more of that exact one at other places. It’s amazing though.

[00:24:48] Nyasha G: It was so good. Like that was the be again, I’m, I’m like not being paid to say this, like they didn’t pay me. That was the best conference food I ever had. There was like ro, I had like roasted chicken with like sweets and like rice. Sticky rice and like someone had like duck. And then like the dietary restrictions.

[00:25:06] Like I know one of the big criticisms of us last year, like there was no dietary restrictions. Some people just couldn’t eat because they didn’t know everything was like organized by halal food, you know, vegan and everything was delicious. Like I wanted to try everything, but I’m like, no, you don’t have dietary restrictions.

[00:25:21] Don’t do that. But I was like looking and everything so good. Like I don’t know

[00:25:26] Courtney Robertson: easy to live gluten free there to

[00:25:28] Nyasha G: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it. Not, not to me. So I’m, I like, I like a lot of spicy foods, so not to me, but like I had breakfast noodles and like I put the Thai spice all over it and I was like fighting for my life, but it was so delicious. So I was like at breakfast, like sweating and like my eyes were red and like my husband came with me.

[00:25:54] He was like, are you okay? And I was like, yeah, I’m so fine. So good. Can I have some more?

[00:25:59] Courtney Robertson: I am just hot.

[00:25:59] That’s all.

[00:26:00] Nyasha G: like, yeah, I actually brought some spices back with me, so yeah, part two coming soon. Mm-hmm.

[00:26:13] Courtney Robertson: Yes, I was not.

[00:26:16] Nyasha G: I was not there, but I watched it online.

[00:26:47] Courtney Robertson: A little bit later. I don’t remember the person asking the question. I don’t think that was in Milan’s. In Milan’s question. She was asking again about Let’s get contributors funded. And I was thinking WP CCC we’re working on that. Um, but when it came to the, the rollout of the redesign, so we saw.org got a redesign and then slash news got it.

[00:27:05] And then they’re working on bringing that redesign to the other teams. And it seems that Matt would like that to happen instantaneously. Feeling that too much is, um, designed by consensus, but yet I can say as a training team member, We haven’t spoken with design about the redesign that’s coming to learn yet, so there’s some weirdness that’s there.

[00:27:26] Um, yeah, just some, yeah, that was Matt’s word. Oh. I had asked in Europe and us both about make itself getting the redesign and um, had asked Matt during the q and a about those and uh, he didn’t really have a solid answer. So it just seems like he wants things to happen really soon across all of it, because it would.

[00:29:32] Jason Cosper: Yeah, I, I was gonna say, I was gonna say my, my spicy take is I think that Matt is used to having a thousand some odd employees that he can direct at a problem and get it fixed and get it done and, uh, you know, redesigned. Whereas because the project is on a contributor and volunteer basis, um, things have just gotta be a little slower, like right. I, I, I just, I think that. , I understand, uh, why He probably just wants to see the whole thing redesigned and hell, if he wants to, uh, sync some of that, the, the employee resources that he has over at Automatic into this to, uh, to help push that along, uh, please do so. Um, but, uh, I mean, unless you’re, you’re gonna pony up then, uh,

[00:30:54] Jason Tucker: Since, since we’re going into a little bit of an overtime here, real quick, uh, I did wanna bring up something here. So, um, in the chat, uh, nomad Skateboarding was talking about how um, Michelle is doing a selfie hashtag and I wanted to bring that up real quick here and show you folks cuz it was, um, It was a pretty, it was a pretty epic like, kind of way of, of making, making things happen.

[00:31:18] And so, you know, she went and posted this saying that she would, um, you know, donate money to, uh, a big orange heart if you did a, uh, selfie with her. And so it was like selfie after, selfie, after to ads selfie after selfie, after selfie, after selfie. Of, um, just, just tons of selfies with her and it was so awesome to see something like this, um, happening just as a way of being able to do a donation.

[00:31:45] And I think in the end it was like a thousand bucks that was donated, um, uh,

[00:31:51] Courtney Robertson: it was matched. She

[00:31:52] received, someone matched

[00:31:53] it too. Yeah.

[00:31:54] Jason Tucker: so cool.

[00:31:55] Courtney Robertson: was amazing. Yep,

[00:31:57] Jason Tucker: So cool.

[00:31:58] Courtney Robertson: yep.

[00:31:59] Nyasha G: She is the best.

[00:32:01] Jason Tucker: That is, it is the power of community. It’s so cool.

[00:32:05] Courtney Robertson: Okay. I’m showing off the swag real quick while we’re going to outros. I think here there’s some stickers. NA’s got wpu. I got a little postcard, another postcard. There’s the, this is a pin staff here? Yes. That

[00:32:26] Nyasha G: Wigan Wigans.

[00:32:28] Courtney Robertson: there’s the scarf, that’s the scar. Group of wuss when we have like, you know, a whole flock. It’s not a flock of wuss. I don’t know what it’s, I know, yeah,

[00:32:42] Jason Tucker: Oh man.

[00:32:44] Nyasha G: Wigans. Wigans. I

[00:32:46] Courtney Robertson: that was official swag. I’ve got more.

[00:32:49] Jason Tucker: That’s it.

[00:32:50] Courtney Robertson: That was official swag. I’ve got more, but we don’t need it today.

[00:32:54] Jason Tucker: Yay. Yes. Yeah.

[00:33:28] Courtney Robertson: L. Less jet lag involved and germs, less germs. That too.

[00:33:35] Jason Tucker: Well, yeah, like SA said, thank you very much for coming, hanging out with us. We really appreciate it. For, uh, the folks at home that are watching, uh, click the little share button. The little like button. We’d really appreciate it. We, we’d love to have more folks come hanging out with us. Nah, we’re not smashing.

[00:33:49] All right. Here we go. See ya. And you subscribe to our content over there. We’d really appreci. Yes. Say, what else do you gotta say?

[00:34:10] sounds good.

[00:34:13] Sé Reed: Hit it. Hit it.

[00:34:22] Jason Tucker: This is episode number 446 of W WPwatercooler Word Camp Asia brings the heat. I’m Jason Tucker. You find me at Jason Tucker dot blog. Feel free to go over there and take a look at that.

[00:34:41] Sé Reed: I’m say Reid. Uh, my business is@carin.com. That’s a fun one. I’m say Reid Media on all the

[00:34:47] Jason Cosper: And y’all who it’s Jason, the large language model, back at it again, WordPress.

[00:34:55] Jason Tucker: Speaking of those podcasts, go listen to us. Go over Apple Podcasts, audible, wherever it is. You can find them and you can go hang out with us over on Discord.

[00:35:03] Sé Reed: We’re the chat og. I just thought of

[00:35:09] Jason Tucker: it going folks?

[00:35:10] Sé Reed: Wait, what happened to being the large language model

[00:35:15] Jason Cosper: I mean, I’m, I, am I things I contain multitudes.

[00:35:21] Sé Reed: Like, it’s wild. Um, anyway, now that we know whoever that guy is, we have guests today. Um, now have you been on the show?

[00:35:30] Nyasha G: No, this is my first time.

[00:35:32] Jason Cosper: What

[00:35:32] Sé Reed: so funny. I, uh, I just, you’re just in my life now, so I’m just like, oh, you know, you’ve been here, right? Uh uh, please introduce yourself. Welcome.

[00:35:43] Nyasha G: Hello. Hello, I am Naisha. I am the editorial director at Master W P, and I am a software developer or WordPress developer at Howard Development and Consultant. And nice to meet y’all.

[00:35:55] Jason Tucker: Yay.

[00:35:57] Sé Reed: And then we have, wait, the illustrious, Courtney,

[00:36:03] Courtney Robertson: Hey, so yeah, I’m averaging hanging out with WPwatercooler, like one in three episodes. I don’t know, I’m, I could be a good substitute, per se, something.

[00:36:12] Sé Reed: always angling for a job here.

[00:36:14] Courtney Robertson: I know, I gotta try.

[00:36:15] Jason Tucker: Sorry, say that again.

[00:36:16] Courtney Robertson: uh oh. Oh, hey. So So, um, I, I get to do some amazing things with the wonderful say Reid. Over at the W P ccc, we are working on funding contributors.

[00:36:32] We’ll talk more about that probably a little bit later. Um, I do things with the WordPress training team@learnedwordpress.org, but I’m a dev developer advocate at GoDaddy Pro as well. I also have bronchitis as I’m recovering from a cough. I was sick days before I went to Veria. Got over. It was not contagious.

[00:36:52] During veria. Was covid testing Not contagious, but if you see me coughing, hear me coughing, I will try to mute myself during today’s show so that I could spare you the concerning hacking of bronchitis. My voice doesn’t sound like my voice. This is the best it’s been in three weeks. It’s all.

[00:38:03] Nyasha G: I, I’ve been to a lot of tech conferences, but I haven’t been to a lot of work camps, so Yeah. Yeah. Work camp US was my first one. Um, but I have been to a lot of different tech conferences. That was the best tech conference I’ve ever been to. Um, I, I hate to say like it’s the best work camp cause I’ve only been to us.

[00:38:21] But it was, it was amazing. Like, it was like, I felt like I was in another world. I know I was in another country, but it was amazing. It was so well organized. The, the, the atmosphere was amazing. The people I 10 outta 10, I have no complaints about it.

[00:38:39] Jason Tucker: That’s awesome.

[00:38:40] Courtney Robertson: So I had the honor of going and I say honor because I’ve contributed on various WordPress make teams, the 21 teams that make WordPress. I’ve contributed with some people that are now very close personal friends of mine for going on three years, you know, since the beginning of pandemic when I started contributing again.

[00:39:00] and it was just an honor to spend time in person with some of my, my friends that are there, because a lot of times they face visa issues that they can’t get to Europe even, or the US certainly. Um, some of our India friends are unable to get a Visa to the US because it’s like a 900 day wait period. So it is really important for the APAC community to have an international flagship event like this.

[00:39:29] it spares the logistics that they face as hurdles, not just even monetarily because economies of scale are different, but the literal just blockage of things like visas and passports and that whole process. Um, it just was very important for them to be there. That said, again, I count it as an honor. The role that I am in.

[00:39:48] I have contributed to the WordPress project since 2009. I have only been sponsored for a year and a half. I got to go to all three international camps. This. , US, Europe and Asia over the past year. And I tell you, the after party at Europe, I thought like raised the bar further than anything I saw in America.

[00:40:07] Work camp Asia’s after party was lit. I mean, like it was a shame the Europeans because everybody came with a lot of their cultural attire on and um, yeah, and, and you know, I roll in as the American in like a t-shirt, pants. Yeah, it is. That is, um,

[00:40:28] Nyasha G: I tried. I tried a little bit,

[00:40:30] Courtney Robertson: yeah, yeah.

[00:40:32] Jason Tucker: It’s party central.

[00:40:36] Courtney Robertson: Uh,

[00:40:38] Nyasha G: I like

[00:40:38] Courtney Robertson: word camp every day, attire. Yeah. Yeah,

[00:40:42] Nyasha G: the, like the dashiki, west African print. Like with the top. Yeah. It was really nice. I looked good. Not just letting you

[00:40:49] Courtney Robertson: it was, I got to sip and I for a little bit. It was great.

[00:40:57] Nyasha G: Mm-hmm.

[00:40:59] Courtney Robertson: Mm-hmm.

[00:41:00] Jason Tucker: that’s smart.

[00:41:02] Courtney Robertson: Yeah. So then, then a lot of the typical cultural dances that you would see at general celebrations within their home nations, they were all doing during the after party dance party. And I tell you that the Asian folks know how to. Group dance, I think better than any of the other after party camps.

[00:41:23] Okay. Which is great.

[00:41:42] Jason Tucker: That’s smart.

[00:42:03] Nyasha G: send it to you. I have it on my Instagram. Yeah. I have a video on my Instagram.

[00:42:07] Courtney Robertson: Robbie McCullough also has a couple good videos that he posted on his Twitter account. Robbie is with Beaver Builder, one of the.

[00:43:46] Nyasha G: you wanna go first?

[00:43:48] Courtney Robertson: No,

[00:43:48] Nyasha G: I can go. I didn’t know.

[00:43:49] Courtney Robertson: Now you cover it.

[00:43:50] Do it.

[00:43:52] Nyasha G: Um, I, I did hear a little bit of that. Um, one of the biggest things, well, would it be one or two? Two of the biggest things. Um. Was one once you brought up with about the Visa requirements, but also it was that I was just going on about how while I was there, it’s so wonderful.

[00:44:07] It’s so great. This is so organized. I can’t believe this. I’m like the attention to detail them checking on everyone like, are you having a good time? Do you need anything? Everything was perfect. And I just kept going on and on about it because like I felt like, wow, like I’ve been to some good tech conferences, but you know, I have not felt that level of like help and you know, Love in the air, basically.

[00:44:26] And when I talked to one of the organizers, they said, you know, we, we honestly think, um, well, they thought, sorry, that, uh, it may be because a lot of people take conferences, especially word camps for granted. They’re like, okay, we’ll always have one. Even when Covid hit, it’s like, okay, they still weren’t one of the first ones to have one when, you know, we started getting back together.

[00:44:45] So it was like people take advantage of the opportunities. I’m segueing into, uh, I think people take advantage of the opportunities they getting WordPress, they don’t have as much. So, you know, when they got that, that spotlight, it’s like, look what we can do if you invest in us and you foster this in us.

[00:45:01] So I did, I definitely felt that and I felt that’s why it was such a great conference because they wanted to show people, like, foster these relationships here with us and you’ll, you’ll see the beauty we.

[00:45:12] Jason Tucker: awesome.

[00:45:14] Courtney Robertson: I got a chance to spend some more time, um, briefly with Naoko and John, who I know both from sitting next to them during the after party in 2015 for work camp us. Um, Naoko is an Aian. John works at Human Made. , both are very active contributors. Sam Delotz John is over in the Docs team. And um, you know, they both just had such pride and I felt such pride from a lot of the local folks there that they got to host the event.

[00:45:45] You know, Niko came out at the very end and said, we did it, meaning that successfully there was a word camp to happen. And I think that the caliber of the volunteer contributor group was at least on par with Work Camp Europe in terms of professionalism. from people that are solely volunteers to organize this event from every role.

[00:46:05] I heard people had asked, I was an mc for the event, and people had asked if the MCs were professionally hired. MCs we’re like, no, no. We just, we know we’re pressed people and, and we wanna introduce them and, and, you know, make it shine. Um, so I think from that side, everything was really great. I’ll speak a little bit to, as a GoDaddy person, I know that we brought with us some staff that are new to the WordPress community but are part of our GoDaddy Asia initiatives already, and they just embraced what was going on. I set some context again that everyone is volunteers here, right? And so keep in mind this is a little different, but that at a work camp, it is very much community driven.

[00:46:51] People were constantly checking in on each other within my own team, but also within all. How are you doing? Is there anything that you need? Is there anything I could help you get? And in addition to that, um, you know, we’re, we’re looking at this right after many WordPress companies have been announcing layoffs.

[00:47:08] People were really just interested in networking together and making genuine connections. And our staff that were new to the WordPress space commented on how different that approach is, how it’s not a competitive environment, how everyone was very welcom. All the vendors were going around, meeting each other.

[00:47:28] Um, and I will say, taking note of this, I saw, um, the, the company that brought the largest contingent of folks was WP Developers. They had about 75 staff there, and then they went on a team trip afterwards, and that was impressive. So there were some more, um, sponsor vendor sorts that don’t get as much attention at other.

[00:47:54] that we’re getting this spotlight at this one, and rightly so, because they’re an APAC based business. They’re an APAC based, employee based, and so reaching and connecting that part of the WordPress audience just got me really excited because I feel like this is like this pocket of people I’ve interacted with a little online, but having that opportunity in person, I think was.

[00:48:15] Jason Cosper: Yeah. Now, now Courtney, you, you mentioned they, they brought 75 people, so this sounds, uh, quite a bit larger than Word Camp US was for, I, I know that that was kind of a reduced camp size. Like how many people would you say were at Word Camp Asia, uh, Courtney and Naisha, either one. Feel free to take that.

[00:48:37] Courtney Robertson: So in my, um, Roundup post, NY and I both have. Some recap posts and we’ll, we’ll give links to those things, I

[00:48:44] Jason Tucker: Links in

[00:48:45] Courtney Robertson: Um, yeah. But in there, there’s the stats and I think there were little over 17,000 tickets purchased and 1,299 attendees in person. We were missing one to bump it up to 1,300. And Naoko said that that one missing was Matt Soko shared that right from the stage. Oh. Just, just, yeah. Matt was, Matt at the last minute had to come in and join us via Zoom. Um, so we accommodated that. So we would’ve had 1,300 there if Matt had been able to join us in person. So

[00:49:26] Jason Cosper: Matt, Matt wasn’t the only person that joined y’all through Zoom. I know that for contributor days, there was also kind of a remote component there as well.

[00:49:38] Courtney Robertson: let’s, yeah. was online workshops. Yeah, so we have these, we have online workshops unlearn, and those are like a meetup with a Zoom. There’s a meetup group with a Zoom, and they show up in most people’s WordPress and dashboards. And that’s how people find out what’s going on. And different people host them different languages, time slots, et cetera.

[00:50:03] But we’ve done one now for during her camp. Also again during Work Camp Asia, which was great. It’s made, yeah.

[00:50:17] Jason Tucker: the dashboard thing is like a massive thing for even like the local meetups. It was huge. So for having something like that and in a grander scale for this, is it, it’s, it’s, it’s like the perfect way to, to kind of spread the word.

[00:50:32] Courtney Robertson: Yeah, and I’ll turn it over to say, to share about the rest of the online contributor experience because say was the one I tend to get online. Yeah. So. , there was like seven, seven, m, and eight, and I was sprinting between the two of them, um, opposite sides of the building with bronchitis, uh, because I love helping people with all of this. So I let the both teams get their people onboarded for like set up your accounts and then came back and it was right after lunch that we got into. The marketing team, Yvette and I coordinated together. Yvette works at Yost. We have coordinated for Yo’s versions of contributor days online during the pandemic to start helping the marketing team create the social media content that promotes learn on wordpress.org candles. And that’s something that will help new contributors see what this content is.

[00:52:40] And it’s something that they can give a rough draft of something and be done with it that day if they only ever wanna contribute that. , they have that window. So I was able to sort of help between the two teams, um, because we had some amazing table leads available on location to do all the other parts.

[00:52:57] So that was, that was a good experience.

[00:53:00] Nyasha G: Courtney was amazing. Like if you, like, if she didn’t cough, you wouldn’t have known she was sick. Like she was like, yeah, I’m a little sick, but I’m gonna go do this. I’m gonna do that. Hey, how you doing? I wanna do this, I’m gonna do that. I was like, Uhhuh, like she, she is amazing.

[00:53:18] Jason Cosper: I was, I was gonna say between Courtney, between uh, Michelle Farha, between, uh, these handful of people who are, are just all over the damn place. Like really, uh, you know, shout shoutouts there cuz it’s . Yeah. It’s, it’s a lot of effort and it’s really admirable the amount of effort that, that folks like y’all put in.

[00:55:25] Nyasha G: I have two. Um, first of all, the speaker where the, the speaker rooms, the speaker setup was incredible. I thought I was at a TED Talk. It was so professional. Everything was so nice. I’m looking at my pictures like, oh my God, I look like I was like watching celebrities or something. And then I saw a drone one time.

[00:55:41] I was like, oh my God.

[00:55:50] Courtney Robertson: Yes. Oh.

[00:55:53] Nyasha G: Oh, wow.

[00:55:54] Jason Tucker: it. That’s, yeah.

[00:55:56] Courtney Robertson: I didn’t realize the audio was coming from that.

[00:55:59] Nyasha G: well it looked cool. It looked cool. Yeah.

[00:56:07] Courtney Robertson: Yep.

[00:56:07] Nyasha G: Yeah, it was, no, it’s fun. Like that was amazing. And like I, it’s gonna sound weird, but I felt more into the speeches because I felt like I was in like a really cool place and I felt like important. Like I, they told me to stop saying that at work. They’re like, you are important. But I felt very important and it was just great.

[00:56:24] And like my second thing was the word camp. Everybody was so freaking sweet. the people there, like the Thai people are the nicest people I’ve ever met in my entire life. And like I just, it wasn’t very important for me to say that. Like I was so happy because I just moved to a city where everybody’s mean.

[00:56:42] Like they’re so unfriendly here, , and like everybody was so sweet. Like one of the attendees was telling me he got lost and a police officer was like, Hey, you lost. He was like, come here. And he like grabbed his hand and walked him to like, catch the train. Like that’s how nice people were they, anybody a stranger would stop and say, Hey, how are you doing,

[00:57:01] Yeah. So I, those were my two biggest things. Like the atmosphere at the, at the conference was like the. Let’s not just network, but let’s become friends. Like I’m in selfies with like, I feel like a hundred people. Like I’ve met so many people that were like, you know, we’re a fan of Messenger people. We’re a fan of the podcast.

[00:57:17] And I’m like, oh. And they’re like, yeah, we’re, we’re so glad you came here. I’m like, I’m glad you invited me. Like, you guys are so awesome. I’m just here . So I, I felt so loved. Like I, I, I definitely wanna go back next year. That was like the bo the best,

[00:57:31] Jason Tucker: So speak.

[00:57:35] Nyasha G: Taiwan.

[00:57:36] Jason Tucker: Hmm.

[00:57:38] Nyasha G: Mm-hmm.

[00:57:39] Jason Tucker: Wow.

[00:57:40] Courtney Robertson: Mm-hmm.

[00:57:41] Jason Tucker: So speaking of non WordPress, parts of the word camp, Wha what about the food? How did that go?

[00:57:54] Courtney Robertson: I will say Thai restaurants in America tend, tend to be fairly authentic, but the flavor is next level. When you get a pad Thai or ma on curry directly from a restaurant inside of Thailand in Bangkok, the food was just fantastic. I still, because of the, you know, the cold and things. , I still went for American version of heat, not Thai heat.

[00:58:18] So that was . That was good. And to cool things off, I had the best. Um, at our team staff dinner, we always as a team, because this is the rare time, our team actually can work together in person. We go out for dinner as a team the night before, contributor day, and all of the madness really begin. So I had the most amazing, um, mango sticky rice that had a coconut ice cream.

[00:58:45] And when you have a cold, you don’t wanna have lots of dairies. Like this was the perfect, the perfect food. I, I wanted more of that exact thing, but my, I couldn’t find more of that exact one at other places. It’s amazing though.

[00:59:02] Nyasha G: It was so good. Like that was the be again, I’m, I’m like not being paid to say this, like they didn’t pay me. That was the best conference food I ever had. There was like ro, I had like roasted chicken with like sweets and like rice. Sticky rice and like someone had like duck. And then like the dietary restrictions.

[00:59:20] Like I know one of the big criticisms of us last year, like there was no dietary restrictions. Some people just couldn’t eat because they didn’t know everything was like organized by halal food, you know, vegan and everything was delicious. Like I wanted to try everything, but I’m like, no, you don’t have dietary restrictions.

[00:59:35] Don’t do that. But I was like looking and everything so good. Like I don’t know

[00:59:40] Courtney Robertson: easy to live gluten free there to

[00:59:42] Nyasha G: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it.

[00:59:52] Not, not to me. So I’m, I like, I like a lot of spicy foods, so not to me, but like I had breakfast noodles and like I put the Thai spice all over it and I was like fighting for my life, but it was so delicious. So I was like at breakfast, like sweating and like my eyes were red and like my husband came with me.

[01:00:08] He was like, are you okay? And I was like, yeah, I’m so fine. So good. Can I have some more?

[01:00:13] Courtney Robertson: I am just hot.

[01:00:13] That’s all.

[01:00:14] Nyasha G: like, yeah, I actually brought some spices back with me, so yeah, part two coming soon. Mm-hmm.

[01:00:27] Courtney Robertson: Yes, I was not.

[01:00:30] Nyasha G: I was not there, but I watched it online.

[01:01:01] Courtney Robertson: A little bit later. I don’t remember the person asking the question. I don’t think that was in Milan’s. In Milan’s question. She was asking again about Let’s get contributors funded. And I was thinking WP CCC we’re working on that. Um, but when it came to the, the rollout of the redesign, so we saw.org got a redesign and then slash news got it.

[01:01:18] And then they’re working on bringing that redesign to the other teams. And it seems that Matt would like that to happen instantaneously. Feeling that too much is, um, designed by consensus, but yet I can say as a training team member, We haven’t spoken with design about the redesign that’s coming to learn yet, so there’s some weirdness that’s there.

[01:01:40] Um, yeah, just some, yeah, that was Matt’s word. Oh. I had asked in Europe and us both about make itself getting the redesign and um, had asked Matt during the q and a about those and uh, he didn’t really have a solid answer. So it just seems like he wants things to happen really soon across all of it, because it would.

[01:03:46] Jason Cosper: Yeah, I, I was gonna say, I was gonna say my, my spicy take is I think that Matt is used to having a thousand some odd employees that he can direct at a problem and get it fixed and get it done and, uh, you know, redesigned. Whereas because the project is on a contributor and volunteer basis, um, things have just gotta be a little slower, like right. I, I, I just, I think that. , I understand, uh, why He probably just wants to see the whole thing redesigned and hell, if he wants to, uh, sync some of that, the, the employee resources that he has over at Automatic into this to, uh, to help push that along, uh, please do so. Um, but, uh, I mean, unless you’re, you’re gonna pony up then, uh,

[01:05:07] Jason Tucker: Since, since we’re going into a little bit of an overtime here, real quick, uh, I did wanna bring up something here. So, um, in the chat, uh, nomad Skateboarding was talking about how um, Michelle is doing a selfie hashtag and I wanted to bring that up real quick here and show you folks cuz it was, um, It was a pretty, it was a pretty epic like, kind of way of, of making, making things happen.

[01:05:32] And so, you know, she went and posted this saying that she would, um, you know, donate money to, uh, a big orange heart if you did a, uh, selfie with her. And so it was like selfie after, selfie, after to ads selfie after selfie, after selfie, after selfie. Of, um, just, just tons of selfies with her and it was so awesome to see something like this, um, happening just as a way of being able to do a donation.

[01:05:59] And I think in the end it was like a thousand bucks that was donated, um, uh,

[01:06:05] Courtney Robertson: it was matched. She received, someone matched it too. Yeah.

[01:06:08] Jason Tucker: so cool.

[01:06:09] Courtney Robertson: was amazing. Yep,

[01:06:11] Jason Tucker: So cool.

[01:06:12] Courtney Robertson: yep.

[01:06:12] Nyasha G: She is the best.

[01:06:15] Jason Tucker: That is, it is the power of community. It’s so cool.

[01:06:19] Courtney Robertson: Okay. I’m showing off the swag real quick while we’re going to outros. I think here there’s some stickers. NA’s got wpu. I got a little postcard, another postcard. There’s the, this is a pin staff here? Yes. That

[01:06:40] Nyasha G: Wigan Wigans.

[01:06:42] Courtney Robertson: there’s the scarf, that’s the scar. Group of wuss when we have like, you know, a whole flock. It’s not a flock of wuss. I don’t know what it’s, I know, yeah,

[01:06:56] Jason Tucker: Oh man.

[01:06:58] Nyasha G: Wigans. Wigans. I

[01:06:59] Courtney Robertson: that was official swag. I’ve got more.

[01:07:03] Jason Tucker: That’s it.

[01:07:04] Courtney Robertson: That was official swag. I’ve got more, but we don’t need it today.

[01:07:08] Jason Tucker: Yay. Yes. Yeah.

[01:07:42] Courtney Robertson: L. Less jet lag involved and germs, less germs. That too.

[01:07:49] Jason Tucker: Well, yeah, like SA said, thank you very much for coming, hanging out with us. We really appreciate it. For, uh, the folks at home that are watching, uh, click the little share button. The little like button. We’d really appreciate it. We, we’d love to have more folks come hanging out with us. Nah, we’re not smashing.

[01:08:03] All right. Here we go. See ya. And you subscribe to our content over there. We’d really appreci. Yes. Say, what else do you gotta say?

[01:08:24] sounds good.

[01:08:27] Sé Reed: Hit it. Hit it.

[01:08:36] Jason Tucker: This is episode number 446 of W WPwatercooler Word Camp Asia brings the heat. I’m Jason Tucker. You find me at Jason Tucker dot blog. Feel free to go over there and take a look at that.

[01:08:55] Sé Reed: I’m say Reid. Uh, my business is@carin.com. That’s a fun one. I’m say Reid Media on all the

[01:09:01] Jason Cosper: And y’all who it’s Jason, the large language model, back at it again, WordPress.

[01:09:09] Jason Tucker: Speaking of those podcasts, go listen to us. Go over Apple Podcasts, audible, wherever it is. You can find them and you can go hang out with us over on Discord.

[01:09:17] Sé Reed: We’re the chat og. I just thought of

[01:09:23] Jason Tucker: it going folks?

[01:09:24] Sé Reed: Wait, what happened to being the large language model

[01:09:29] Jason Cosper: I mean, I’m, I, am I things I contain multitudes.

[01:09:35] Sé Reed: Like, it’s wild. Um, anyway, now that we know whoever that guy is, we have guests today. Um, now have you been on the show?

[01:09:44] Nyasha G: No, this is my first time.

[01:09:46] Jason Cosper: What

[01:09:46] Sé Reed: so funny. I, uh, I just, you’re just in my life now, so I’m just like, oh, you know, you’ve been here, right? Uh uh, please introduce yourself. Welcome.

[01:09:57] Nyasha G: Hello. Hello, I am Naisha. I am the editorial director at Master W P, and I am a software developer or WordPress developer at Howard Development and Consultant. And nice to meet y’all.

[01:10:09] Jason Tucker: Yay.

[01:10:11] Sé Reed: And then we have, wait, the illustrious, Courtney,

[01:10:17] Courtney Robertson: Hey, so yeah, I’m averaging hanging out with WPwatercooler, like one in three episodes. I don’t know, I’m, I could be a good substitute, per se, something.

[01:10:26] Sé Reed: always angling for a job here.

[01:10:27] Courtney Robertson: I know, I gotta try.

[01:10:29] Jason Tucker: Sorry, say that again.

[01:10:30] Courtney Robertson: uh oh. Oh, hey. So So, um, I, I get to do some amazing things with the wonderful say Reid. Over at the W P ccc, we are working on funding contributors.

[01:10:46] We’ll talk more about that probably a little bit later. Um, I do things with the WordPress training team@learnedwordpress.org, but I’m a dev developer advocate at GoDaddy Pro as well. I also have bronchitis as I’m recovering from a cough. I was sick days before I went to Veria. Got over. It was not contagious.

[01:11:05] During veria. Was covid testing Not contagious, but if you see me coughing, hear me coughing, I will try to mute myself during today’s show so that I could spare you the concerning hacking of bronchitis. My voice doesn’t sound like my voice. This is the best it’s been in three weeks. It’s all.

[01:12:17] Nyasha G: I, I’ve been to a lot of tech conferences, but I haven’t been to a lot of work camps, so Yeah. Yeah. Work camp US was my first one. Um, but I have been to a lot of different tech conferences. That was the best tech conference I’ve ever been to. Um, I, I hate to say like it’s the best work camp cause I’ve only been to us.

[01:12:35] But it was, it was amazing. Like, it was like, I felt like I was in another world. I know I was in another country, but it was amazing. It was so well organized. The, the, the atmosphere was amazing. The people I 10 outta 10, I have no complaints about it.

[01:12:52] Jason Tucker: That’s awesome.

[01:12:54] Courtney Robertson: So I had the honor of going and I say honor because I’ve contributed on various WordPress make teams, the 21 teams that make WordPress. I’ve contributed with some people that are now very close personal friends of mine for going on three years, you know, since the beginning of pandemic when I started contributing again.

[01:13:13] and it was just an honor to spend time in person with some of my, my friends that are there, because a lot of times they face visa issues that they can’t get to Europe even, or the US certainly. Um, some of our India friends are unable to get a Visa to the US because it’s like a 900 day wait period. So it is really important for the APAC community to have an international flagship event like this.

[01:13:43] it spares the logistics that they face as hurdles, not just even monetarily because economies of scale are different, but the literal just blockage of things like visas and passports and that whole process. Um, it just was very important for them to be there. That said, again, I count it as an honor. The role that I am in.

[01:14:02] I have contributed to the WordPress project since 2009. I have only been sponsored for a year and a half. I got to go to all three international camps. This. , US, Europe and Asia over the past year. And I tell you, the after party at Europe, I thought like raised the bar further than anything I saw in America.

[01:14:21] Work camp Asia’s after party was lit. I mean, like it was a shame the Europeans because everybody came with a lot of their cultural attire on and um, yeah, and, and you know, I roll in as the American in like a t-shirt, pants. Yeah, it is. That is, um,

[01:14:42] Nyasha G: I tried. I tried a little bit,

[01:14:44] Courtney Robertson: yeah, yeah.

[01:14:46] Jason Tucker: It’s party central.

[01:14:50] Courtney Robertson: Uh,

[01:14:51] Nyasha G: I like

[01:14:52] Courtney Robertson: word camp every day, attire. Yeah. Yeah,

[01:14:56] Nyasha G: the, like the dashiki, west African print. Like with the top. Yeah. It was really nice. I looked good. Not just letting you

[01:15:03] Courtney Robertson: it was, I got to sip and I for a little bit. It was great.

[01:15:11] Nyasha G: Mm-hmm.

[01:15:13] Courtney Robertson: Mm-hmm.

[01:15:14] Jason Tucker: that’s smart.

[01:15:16] Courtney Robertson: Yeah. So then, then a lot of the typical cultural dances that you would see at general celebrations within their home nations, they were all doing during the after party dance party. And I tell you that the Asian folks know how to. Group dance, I think better than any of the other after party camps.

[01:15:37] Okay. Which is great.

[01:15:55] Jason Tucker: That’s smart.

[01:16:17] Nyasha G: send it to you. I have it on my Instagram. Yeah. I have a video on my Instagram.

[01:16:21] Courtney Robertson: Robbie McCullough also has a couple good videos that he posted on his Twitter account. Robbie is with Beaver Builder, one of the.

[01:18:00] Nyasha G: you wanna go first?

[01:18:02] Courtney Robertson: No,

[01:18:02] Nyasha G: I can go. I didn’t know.

[01:18:03] Courtney Robertson: Now you cover it.

[01:18:04] Do it.

[01:18:06] Nyasha G: Um, I, I did hear a little bit of that. Um, one of the biggest things, well, would it be one or two? Two of the biggest things. Um. Was one once you brought up with about the Visa requirements, but also it was that I was just going on about how while I was there, it’s so wonderful.

[01:18:21] It’s so great. This is so organized. I can’t believe this. I’m like the attention to detail them checking on everyone like, are you having a good time? Do you need anything? Everything was perfect. And I just kept going on and on about it because like I felt like, wow, like I’ve been to some good tech conferences, but you know, I have not felt that level of like help and you know, Love in the air, basically.

[01:18:40] And when I talked to one of the organizers, they said, you know, we, we honestly think, um, well, they thought, sorry, that, uh, it may be because a lot of people take conferences, especially word camps for granted. They’re like, okay, we’ll always have one. Even when Covid hit, it’s like, okay, they still weren’t one of the first ones to have one when, you know, we started getting back together.

[01:18:59] So it was like people take advantage of the opportunities. I’m segueing into, uh, I think people take advantage of the opportunities they getting WordPress, they don’t have as much. So, you know, when they got that, that spotlight, it’s like, look what we can do if you invest in us and you foster this in us.

[01:19:15] So I did, I definitely felt that and I felt that’s why it was such a great conference because they wanted to show people, like, foster these relationships here with us and you’ll, you’ll see the beauty we.

[01:19:26] Jason Tucker: awesome.

[01:19:28] Courtney Robertson: I got a chance to spend some more time, um, briefly with Naoko and John, who I know both from sitting next to them during the after party in 2015 for work camp us. Um, Naoko is an Aian. John works at Human Made. , both are very active contributors. Sam Delotz John is over in the Docs team. And um, you know, they both just had such pride and I felt such pride from a lot of the local folks there that they got to host the event.

[01:19:59] You know, Niko came out at the very end and said, we did it, meaning that successfully there was a word camp to happen. And I think that the caliber of the volunteer contributor group was at least on par with Work Camp Europe in terms of professionalism. from people that are solely volunteers to organize this event from every role.

[01:20:19] I heard people had asked, I was an mc for the event, and people had asked if the MCs were professionally hired. MCs we’re like, no, no. We just, we know we’re pressed people and, and we wanna introduce them and, and, you know, make it shine. Um, so I think from that side, everything was really great. I’ll speak a little bit to, as a GoDaddy person, I know that we brought with us some staff that are new to the WordPress community but are part of our GoDaddy Asia initiatives already, and they just embraced what was going on. I set some context again that everyone is volunteers here, right? And so keep in mind this is a little different, but that at a work camp, it is very much community driven.

[01:21:05] People were constantly checking in on each other within my own team, but also within all. How are you doing? Is there anything that you need? Is there anything I could help you get? And in addition to that, um, you know, we’re, we’re looking at this right after many WordPress companies have been announcing layoffs.

[01:21:22] People were really just interested in networking together and making genuine connections. And our staff that were new to the WordPress space commented on how different that approach is, how it’s not a competitive environment, how everyone was very welcom. All the vendors were going around, meeting each other.

[01:21:42] Um, and I will say, taking note of this, I saw, um, the, the company that brought the largest contingent of folks was WP Developers. They had about 75 staff there, and then they went on a team trip afterwards, and that was impressive. So there were some more, um, sponsor vendor sorts that don’t get as much attention at other.

[01:22:08] that we’re getting this spotlight at this one, and rightly so, because they’re an APAC based business. They’re an APAC based, employee based, and so reaching and connecting that part of the WordPress audience just got me really excited because I feel like this is like this pocket of people I’ve interacted with a little online, but having that opportunity in person, I think was.

[01:22:29] Jason Cosper: Yeah. Now, now Courtney, you, you mentioned they, they brought 75 people, so this sounds, uh, quite a bit larger than Word Camp US was for, I, I know that that was kind of a reduced camp size. Like how many people would you say were at Word Camp Asia, uh, Courtney and Naisha, either one. Feel free to take that.

[01:22:51] Courtney Robertson: So in my, um, Roundup post, NY and I both have. Some recap posts and we’ll, we’ll give links to those things, I

[01:22:58] Jason Tucker: Links in

[01:22:59] Courtney Robertson: Um, yeah. But in there, there’s the stats and I think there were little over 17,000 tickets purchased and 1,299 attendees in person. We were missing one to bump it up to 1,300. And Naoko said that that one missing was Matt Soko shared that right from the stage. Oh. Just, just, yeah. Matt was, Matt at the last minute had to come in and join us via Zoom. Um, so we accommodated that. So we would’ve had 1,300 there if Matt had been able to join us in person. So

[01:23:40] Jason Cosper: Matt, Matt wasn’t the only person that joined y’all through Zoom. I know that for contributor days, there was also kind of a remote component there as well.

[01:23:52] Courtney Robertson: let’s, yeah. was online workshops. Yeah, so we have these, we have online workshops unlearn, and those are like a meetup with a Zoom. There’s a meetup group with a Zoom, and they show up in most people’s WordPress and dashboards. And that’s how people find out what’s going on. And different people host them different languages, time slots, et cetera.

[01:24:17] But we’ve done one now for during her camp. Also again during Work Camp Asia, which was great. It’s made, yeah.

[01:24:31] Jason Tucker: the dashboard thing is like a massive thing for even like the local meetups. It was huge. So for having something like that and in a grander scale for this, is it, it’s, it’s, it’s like the perfect way to, to kind of spread the word.

[01:24:46] Courtney Robertson: Yeah, and I’ll turn it over to say, to share about the rest of the online contributor experience because say was the one I tend to get online. Yeah. So. , there was like seven, seven, m, and eight, and I was sprinting between the two of them, um, opposite sides of the building with bronchitis, uh, because I love helping people with all of this. So I let the both teams get their people onboarded for like set up your accounts and then came back and it was right after lunch that we got into. The marketing team, Yvette and I coordinated together. Yvette works at Yost. We have coordinated for Yo’s versions of contributor days online during the pandemic to start helping the marketing team create the social media content that promotes learn on wordpress.org candles. And that’s something that will help new contributors see what this content is.

[01:26:54] And it’s something that they can give a rough draft of something and be done with it that day if they only ever wanna contribute that. , they have that window. So I was able to sort of help between the two teams, um, because we had some amazing table leads available on location to do all the other parts.

[01:27:11] So that was, that was a good experience.

[01:27:14] Nyasha G: Courtney was amazing. Like if you, like, if she didn’t cough, you wouldn’t have known she was sick. Like she was like, yeah, I’m a little sick, but I’m gonna go do this. I’m gonna do that. Hey, how you doing? I wanna do this, I’m gonna do that. I was like, Uhhuh, like she, she is amazing.

[01:27:32] Jason Cosper: I was, I was gonna say between Courtney, between uh, Michelle Farha, between, uh, these handful of people who are, are just all over the damn place. Like really, uh, you know, shout shoutouts there cuz it’s . Yeah. It’s, it’s a lot of effort and it’s really admirable the amount of effort that, that folks like y’all put in.

[01:29:39] Nyasha G: I have two. Um, first of all, the speaker where the, the speaker rooms, the speaker setup was incredible. I thought I was at a TED Talk. It was so professional. Everything was so nice. I’m looking at my pictures like, oh my God, I look like I was like watching celebrities or something. And then I saw a drone one time.

[01:29:55] I was like, oh my God.

[01:30:04] Courtney Robertson: Yes. Oh.

[01:30:07] Nyasha G: Oh, wow.

[01:30:08] Jason Tucker: it. That’s, yeah.

[01:30:10] Courtney Robertson: I didn’t realize the audio was coming from that.

[01:30:13] Nyasha G: well it looked cool. It looked cool. Yeah.

[01:30:21] Courtney Robertson: Yep.

[01:30:21] Nyasha G: Yeah, it was, no, it’s fun. Like that was amazing. And like I, it’s gonna sound weird, but I felt more into the speeches because I felt like I was in like a really cool place and I felt like important. Like I, they told me to stop saying that at work. They’re like, you are important. But I felt very important and it was just great.

[01:30:38] And like my second thing was the word camp. Everybody was so freaking sweet. the people there, like the Thai people are the nicest people I’ve ever met in my entire life. And like I just, it wasn’t very important for me to say that. Like I was so happy because I just moved to a city where everybody’s mean.

[01:30:56] Like they’re so unfriendly here, , and like everybody was so sweet. Like one of the attendees was telling me he got lost and a police officer was like, Hey, you lost. He was like, come here. And he like grabbed his hand and walked him to like, catch the train. Like that’s how nice people were they, anybody a stranger would stop and say, Hey, how are you doing,

[01:31:15] Yeah. So I, those were my two biggest things. Like the atmosphere at the, at the conference was like the. Let’s not just network, but let’s become friends. Like I’m in selfies with like, I feel like a hundred people. Like I’ve met so many people that were like, you know, we’re a fan of Messenger people. We’re a fan of the podcast.

[01:31:31] And I’m like, oh. And they’re like, yeah, we’re, we’re so glad you came here. I’m like, I’m glad you invited me. Like, you guys are so awesome. I’m just here . So I, I felt so loved. Like I, I, I definitely wanna go back next year. That was like the bo the best,

[01:31:45] Jason Tucker: So speak.

[01:31:49] Nyasha G: Taiwan.

[01:31:50] Jason Tucker: Hmm.

[01:31:51] Nyasha G: Mm-hmm.

[01:31:53] Jason Tucker: Wow.

[01:31:54] Courtney Robertson: Mm-hmm.

[01:31:55] Jason Tucker: So speaking of non WordPress, parts of the word camp, Wha what about the food? How did that go?

[01:32:08] Courtney Robertson: I will say Thai restaurants in America tend, tend to be fairly authentic, but the flavor is next level. When you get a pad Thai or ma on curry directly from a restaurant inside of Thailand in Bangkok, the food was just fantastic. I still, because of the, you know, the cold and things. , I still went for American version of heat, not Thai heat.

[01:32:32] So that was . That was good. And to cool things off, I had the best. Um, at our team staff dinner, we always as a team, because this is the rare time, our team actually can work together in person. We go out for dinner as a team the night before, contributor day, and all of the madness really begin. So I had the most amazing, um, mango sticky rice that had a coconut ice cream.

[01:32:59] And when you have a cold, you don’t wanna have lots of dairies. Like this was the perfect, the perfect food. I, I wanted more of that exact thing, but my, I couldn’t find more of that exact one at other places. It’s amazing though.

[01:33:15] Nyasha G: It was so good. Like that was the be again, I’m, I’m like not being paid to say this, like they didn’t pay me. That was the best conference food I ever had. There was like ro, I had like roasted chicken with like sweets and like rice. Sticky rice and like someone had like duck. And then like the dietary restrictions.

[01:33:34] Like I know one of the big criticisms of us last year, like there was no dietary restrictions. Some people just couldn’t eat because they didn’t know everything was like organized by halal food, you know, vegan and everything was delicious. Like I wanted to try everything, but I’m like, no, you don’t have dietary restrictions.

[01:33:49] Don’t do that. But I was like looking and everything so good. Like I don’t know

[01:33:54] Courtney Robertson: easy to live gluten free there to

[01:33:56] Nyasha G: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it.

[01:34:06] Not, not to me. So I’m, I like, I like a lot of spicy foods, so not to me, but like I had breakfast noodles and like I put the Thai spice all over it and I was like fighting for my life, but it was so delicious. So I was like at breakfast, like sweating and like my eyes were red and like my husband came with me.

[01:34:22] He was like, are you okay? And I was like, yeah, I’m so fine. So good. Can I have some more?

[01:34:26] Courtney Robertson: I am just hot.

[01:34:27] That’s all.

[01:34:28] Nyasha G: like, yeah, I actually brought some spices back with me, so yeah, part two coming soon. Mm-hmm.

[01:34:41] Courtney Robertson: Yes, I was not.

[01:34:44] Nyasha G: I was not there, but I watched it online.

[01:35:14] Courtney Robertson: A little bit later. I don’t remember the person asking the question. I don’t think that was in Milan’s. In Milan’s question. She was asking again about Let’s get contributors funded. And I was thinking WP CCC we’re working on that. Um, but when it came to the, the rollout of the redesign, so we saw.org got a redesign and then slash news got it.

[01:35:32] And then they’re working on bringing that redesign to the other teams. And it seems that Matt would like that to happen instantaneously. Feeling that too much is, um, designed by consensus, but yet I can say as a training team member, We haven’t spoken with design about the redesign that’s coming to learn yet, so there’s some weirdness that’s there.

[01:35:54] Um, yeah, just some, yeah, that was Matt’s word. Oh. I had asked in Europe and us both about make itself getting the redesign and um, had asked Matt during the q and a about those and uh, he didn’t really have a solid answer. So it just seems like he wants things to happen really soon across all of it, because it would.

[01:38:00] Jason Cosper: Yeah, I, I was gonna say, I was gonna say my, my spicy take is I think that Matt is used to having a thousand some odd employees that he can direct at a problem and get it fixed and get it done and, uh, you know, redesigned. Whereas because the project is on a contributor and volunteer basis, um, things have just gotta be a little slower, like right. I, I, I just, I think that. , I understand, uh, why He probably just wants to see the whole thing redesigned and hell, if he wants to, uh, sync some of that, the, the employee resources that he has over at Automatic into this to, uh, to help push that along, uh, please do so. Um, but, uh, I mean, unless you’re, you’re gonna pony up then, uh,

[01:39:21] Jason Tucker: Since, since we’re going into a little bit of an overtime here, real quick, uh, I did wanna bring up something here. So, um, in the chat, uh, nomad Skateboarding was talking about how um, Michelle is doing a selfie hashtag and I wanted to bring that up real quick here and show you folks cuz it was, um, It was a pretty, it was a pretty epic like, kind of way of, of making, making things happen.

[01:39:46] And so, you know, she went and posted this saying that she would, um, you know, donate money to, uh, a big orange heart if you did a, uh, selfie with her. And so it was like selfie after, selfie, after to ads selfie after selfie, after selfie, after selfie. Of, um, just, just tons of selfies with her and it was so awesome to see something like this, um, happening just as a way of being able to do a donation.

[01:40:13] And I think in the end it was like a thousand bucks that was donated, um, uh,

[01:40:19] Courtney Robertson: it was matched. She received, someone matched it too. Yeah.

[01:40:22] Jason Tucker: so cool.

[01:40:23] Courtney Robertson: was amazing. Yep,

[01:40:25] Jason Tucker: So cool.

[01:40:26] Courtney Robertson: yep.

[01:40:26] Nyasha G: She is the best.

[01:40:29] Jason Tucker: That is, it is the power of community. It’s so cool.

[01:40:33] Courtney Robertson: Okay. I’m showing off the swag real quick while we’re going to outros. I think here there’s some stickers. NA’s got wpu. I got a little postcard, another postcard. There’s the, this is a pin staff here? Yes. That

[01:40:54] Nyasha G: Wigan Wigans.

[01:40:56] Courtney Robertson: there’s the scarf, that’s the scar. Group of wuss when we have like, you know, a whole flock. It’s not a flock of wuss. I don’t know what it’s, I know, yeah,

[01:41:10] Jason Tucker: Oh man.

[01:41:12] Nyasha G: Wigans. Wigans. I

[01:41:13] Courtney Robertson: that was official swag. I’ve got more.

[01:41:17] Jason Tucker: That’s it.

[01:41:18] Courtney Robertson: That was official swag. I’ve got more, but we don’t need it today.

[01:41:22] Jason Tucker: Yay. Yes. Yeah.

[01:41:56] Courtney Robertson: L. Less jet lag involved and germs, less germs. That too.

[01:42:03] Jason Tucker: Well, yeah, like SA said, thank you very much for coming, hanging out with us. We really appreciate it. For, uh, the folks at home that are watching, uh, click the little share button. The little like button. We’d really appreciate it. We, we’d love to have more folks come hanging out with us. Nah, we’re not smashing.

[01:42:16] All right. Here we go. See ya. And you subscribe to our content over there. We’d really appreci. Yes. Say, what else do you gotta say?

[01:42:38] sounds good.