EP462 – Summiting WordCamp US 2023

[00:00:00] Sé Reed: 3, 2, 1.

[00:00:09] Jason Tucker: This is episode number 462 Summiting WordCamp US 2023.

I’m Jason Tucker. Go to my website at Jason Tucker blog, find all the links that I do over there

[00:00:27] Sé Reed: I’m Sé Reed. I make WordPress teach WordPress speech. WordPress fly across the country to do WordPress stuff. I don’t know why, but

[00:00:34] Jason Cosper: And you all know who it is. It’s your boy Jason Cosper, A K a Fat Mullenweg. Back at it again on the world’s most influential WordPress podcast.

[00:00:42] Jason Tucker: speaking to those podcasts. Subscribe to them. We’d appreciate it, and hang out with us in our discord.

[00:00:48] Jason Cosper: I.

[00:00:49] Sé Reed: I need to chat in the Discord more about this sitch, what we’re doing. Hi, from Washington. Oh

[00:00:56] Jason Tucker: Hello?

[00:00:57] Sé Reed: Hi from Maryland. Sorry. Wherever the heck I

[00:01:00] Jason Tucker: Wherever you are.

[00:01:01] Sé Reed: Hi. From a little tourist trap town that was like literally built for hotels and conventions. That’s

[00:01:07] Jason Tucker: Wow. That’s what it is, huh? Nice.

[00:01:10] Sé Reed: it’s like wild. All the buildings, you know how like mixed use, like, you have like, um, like restaurants, you know, retail on the bottom, and then above you have apartments and people live there.

This is all fake mixed use, like above one of the like restaurants. There’s like this window of things and I’m like, I think those are piping ducts. Like those are like air ducts that’s not an apartment. And then there’s like, above that is like a parking structure or above. It

[00:01:36] Jason Tucker: Oh, weird.

[00:01:37] Sé Reed: I’m like that, that’s, this is a weird little manufactured city that we are in.

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

[00:01:42] Sé Reed: Uhhuh. Wait, I gotta, I’m gonna

[00:01:44] Jason Tucker: Did they rename the city, uh, WordPress Just for, just for this, uh, this occasion.

[00:01:50] Sé Reed: Did what? Who?

[00:01:51] Jason Tucker: Did, did they, did they rename it WordPress just for this occasion.

[00:01:54] Sé Reed: No, we did not take over the whole town. Um, we haven’t even taken over this whole hotel. It is huge. Um, this, we are, it’s actually like a biodome. The Gaylord hotels are like enclosed, so there’s like, pretend outside. So like you’re in like, what feels like a, it’s like basically like a giant atrium, but it’s got like a glass ceiling.

So you’re like inside, but you feel like you’re outside, which is very weird, especially if you’re wearing a mask because, um, just to kick it off with the summit on the very first day, someone tested positive for Covid. Yep. Uh, so I’ve been masking, so surprisingly, not a lot of people are masking. I don’t know if that’s surprising or not

[00:02:35] Jason Cosper: No, it’s not surprising.

[00:02:36] Sé Reed: It’s not surprising. Okay. I, I’m surprised by it because we all got an email that said, Hey, someone had covid. And I was like, oh, that means we’ll all be masking. It did not mean that everyone’s like hanging out in enclosed rooms and enclosed spaces and happy to just get covid, I guess, or whatever. I don’t know.

Just there is going to be massive covid fallout from this event, like 100%. And there was definitely not, um, there was, there was a, there was a tepid reaction to that fact. Like there was, like, they, they uh, they did have some masks, surgical masks, um, and they did bring, after there was some ruckus raised there, they did, uh, bring a bunch of covid tests that they bought from the local c v s so everyone could take a box of covid tests with them.

But interestingly, the people who took the Covid test, and there are some people even isolating to not like, to not bother other people even though they don’t have covid. So there’s some people who are like taking it very seriously and some people who like it is not even a blip on their radar. So,

[00:03:44] Jason Tucker: Wow.

[00:03:44] Jason Cosper: I. I did not and did not plan on attending Word Camp us or the Community Summit. I did not even bother to apply to the community summit because I knew that nobody would still be taking covid seriously.

[00:04:00] Sé Reed: Yeah. And there’s a new wave and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So there’s

[00:04:03] Jason Cosper: there is, there is a new wave and, uh, there have been so many people on my timeline on the Fedi verse, like in group chats that I’m in locally here, uh, in Bakersfield and Central California, it is popping off.

Like I, this is the most people that I have known who have gotten infected,

[00:04:27] Sé Reed: and like in a really

[00:04:28] Jason Cosper: within the past like three weeks.

[00:04:31] Sé Reed: Yeah. Mm-hmm. I had some clients who had it before I left. I didn’t see them in person. Um, I masked on the airplane, which was very uncomfortable, uh, for a red eye masking. Not fun, but I did it anyway. And I’m masking here, not in this hotel room, but hopefully, whatever.

I mean, I can’t do it all the time. So, uh, that was, that was an interesting beginning. I was

[00:04:52] Jason Cosper: Yeah.

[00:04:52] Sé Reed: I was like, wow, someone already tested positive. That means they came here with Covid. That’s what, that, that’s what that means. They arrived with Covid.

[00:04:59] Jason Tucker: how did contributor day go for you?

[00:05:02] Sé Reed: Okay.

[00:05:02] Jason Tucker: looks like it was eight 30. Eight 30 to five, right?

[00:05:06] Sé Reed: day of Word camp, uh, US proper. And I feel like I have already done the conference. I’m done. It’s like I don’t need any of the rest of it. Um, I’ve been here since Tuesday morning. Tuesday morning was the first day of the community summit and the community summit.

This was the first summit, uh, for like six years. I think it was like, 2018 maybe was the last one. No, 20 something,

[00:05:31] Jason Cosper: Was Well, did they have, did they have a summit at, around one of the Word Camp Europe’s? I think this is, uh,

[00:05:38] Sé Reed: Mm. It’s possible.

[00:05:40] Jason Cosper: I think this is the first community summit since the one that they had in Philly, right?

[00:05:45] Sé Reed: I don’t actually know, but I did go to that one in Philly, so that makes sense. I didn’t, didn’t go to that one, but I did go to that. That makes sense. Timeline wise, um, it was really interesting. You know, there’s a no attribution policy, so I won’t be saying anything that anyone said specifically. Um, but I, I do have a lot to say about it.

So, um, it was, uh, just so everyone knows the formats basically, usually it was more of an unconference, right? Where you would meet in the beginning and then discuss the topics that, you know, you wanted to do, and then people would do breakout sessions, excuse me, according to those topics. But this year, um, the topics were submitted ahead of time and then just decided upon.

[00:06:28] Jason Tucker: Oh.

[00:06:28] Sé Reed: someone somewhere. Um, and oddly enough, that is a huge theme that came up for the community summit, is that people are making decisions somewhere and having discussions somewhere. But, um, not everyone is clear on where those things are. So the idea of the invisible conversations, the invisible decisions and the invisible work that is done on, um, on WordPress in general is, was a big topic.

Um, I, I kind of coin took that phrase from something someone else had said where they said that there are a lot of invisible hours that go into, um, uh, the work of sponsored contributors. Speaking specifically about automatic, um, when I was talking about how. The folks, there are folks who are pledged 40 hours a week on their, their.org profile, but they are restricted from actively contributing to the community to a certain amount of hours.

So as the marketing team rep, I’m like, so if that person is, is, is pledged to the marketing team for 40 hours, um, they’re not even coming to the meeting or chiming

[00:07:44] Jason Tucker: Wow.

[00:07:45] Sé Reed: Yeah. There’s, there’s one fo person who’s actually in the same, like it says, 40 hours for meta and marketing, and I’m in every meeting for both meta and marketing and they’re not there.

So I don’t know. That was a big, that was a big thing for me is like, you know, what, what were you gonna

[00:08:02] Jason Cosper: You know what, for 40, 40 hours, uh, no meetings. I mean, that, that just sounds like a personal preference to me. That just sounds like they’re not a

[00:08:10] Sé Reed: but it’s async, they’re async meetings. Like, it’s not like you can, like, you know what I mean? It’s like you can go back and look at them. So like, there’s not. Really an excuse. ’cause if you don’t wanna like sit there on your computer and watch like GitHub issues roll by in Slack for an hour, I get it.

But you can come in like later, anytime in the week and just, you know, you could just sign in on the attendance thread, be like, I’m here. Like, not like I would know if you read it or not, but that’s like minimum, not

[00:08:37] Jason Tucker: quiet, contributing

[00:08:39] Sé Reed: I mean, they’re contributing. They’re contributing by virtue of the fact that they

[00:08:42] Jason Tucker: instead of quiet, quitting. It’s quiet, contributing.

[00:08:48] Sé Reed: I love it. Quiet. Contributing.

[00:08:51] Jason Cosper: yeah, that’s, that’s what happens before people finally drop out of the project. They, they quiet, contribute.

[00:08:58] Sé Reed: contribute. No, I, I think that it’s really about this invisible, like that was a big thing that I talked about a lot is like, We have these invisible processes, like processes where like people just kind of know what’s happening and like someone, someone tells someone else, and then that’s how they know.

So there was a lot of conversation about, um, institutional knowledge and the loss of that when we lose people. Um, and uh, I, I brought up, I bring up sponsored contribution a lot because I have been having a lot of issues with sponsored contributors in my various areas in my contribution. And, um, now for the second time someone has been fired, a full-time sponsored contributors has been fired off of my team, nothing to do with me.

Uh, and they just disappear. It just, They just evaporate and all of their documents and all of their projects and everything, they just sit there then and all their pings, they just like go unanswered. It’s, it feels very sad. It feels like they’ve, like, they didn’t like die, obviously, but like they, I feel like they’ve been disappeared.

It feels like,

[00:10:01] Jason Cosper: Right.

[00:10:02] Sé Reed: like someone came and just like, whoop and they’re out of there. And then my, uh, I like to talk, I did in fact sing this at, um, only a tiny bit, but I said, we don’t talk about Bruno. No, no, we didn’t talk about Bruno. No, I don’t wanna us get us a copyright

[00:10:19] Jason Tucker: So what’s the, what’s the, off, what’s like the offload, the offboarding process for, for someone who’s doing this? Is there a way of knowing that’s happening

[00:10:28] Sé Reed: it’s really funny that you say offboarding because that is a term that was really, um, kind of brought up and it seemed to be

[00:10:35] Jason Tucker: mean I work in it. That’s onboard. Offboard is my, is my jam. That, that’s

[00:10:39] Sé Reed: Yeah, I

[00:10:40] Jason Tucker: are my two.

[00:10:41] Sé Reed: there was, there was an excessive amount. Not excessive appropriate, but a lot like it, an appropriate amount of, a lot of talk about onboarding, onboarding, new contributors, onboarding sponsored contributors, onboarding, you know, just anyone.

Right. Uh, we didn’t talk about onboarding to WordPress proper. Didn’t even talk about that. I didn’t even get into it. Just like, you know, I’ll just leave that all alone for now. Um, we’re talking about the community. We’ll talk about onboarding to the actual software and program some other time. Uh,

[00:11:14] Jason Tucker: delegating, and then the, and then cutting them off entirely so that way they are no longer contributing and no longer can do anything bad. Wow. That’s, that’s, that’s fun. That sounds like a

[00:11:25] Sé Reed: in fact, I, so I’m, yeah, it’s, it’s like their projects are just like, no longer have a shepherd. It’s like all the sheep are, I mean, the sheep being like the projects, not people, but like, you know, the shepherd just suddenly like gone and it’s like just the sheep just wander off.

[00:11:38] Jason Cosper: So, so these, these contributors are basically sent down the memory hole and right to, to borrow from 1984.

[00:11:48] Sé Reed: Yeah, exactly. And you’re not supposed to talk about them and they’re like erased because they actually are, their document ownership and, uh, is, uh, turns into just a generic owner, like their name is

[00:11:59] Jason Tucker: a mystery man. It’s just a mystery man avatar.

[00:12:03] Sé Reed: cases it just is like, you know, the, the name of the company.

[00:12:06] Jason Tucker: Wow.

[00:12:07] Sé Reed: that’s weird. I’m pretty sure the company didn’t share it with me, but, okay,

[00:12:11] Jason Tucker: So there’s like stubbed accounts for each of the contributing, um, uh, companies, and then they just swap out the person.

[00:12:19] Sé Reed: Uh, I don’t know about all of the companies. I can only speak about one of the companies because that is the, one of the companies that fuels all of the sponsored contributors on my team,

[00:12:29] Jason Tucker: very fun, huh?

[00:12:31] Sé Reed: team. So,

[00:12:32] Jason Tucker: We’re definitely gonna have to have a discussion about this, like, like,

[00:12:35] Sé Reed: aren’t we having a discussion about it

[00:12:36] Jason Tucker: yeah. But, but I don’t wanna take up the whole thing. I mean, there’s like an entire event that you went to and everything.

[00:12:40] Sé Reed: the funny thing is,

[00:12:42] Jason Tucker: Yeah.

[00:12:43] Sé Reed: it was the same conversation I went to every single, every single I went, there was like four, four, uh, topics or whatever, and I went to all of them.

There’s some technical ones, there’s a few two on accessibility, one on D E I B, and I, you know, I kind of split with some of my folks here. Courtney Na, hi Na, um, NA’s in her hotel room watching, just so you know, um, taking a rest. Uh, so I was like, you go to this one, I’ll go to this one. Um, but like, even at the same time, like the, the topic was like almost the same topic and the conversation I literally had, I feel like I had the same conversation for two days, like over and over and over.

And it was like, I, I was like, I can’t remember which room I said this in. I don’t remember, did I say this in here already? Did I say this like two hours ago? Like, For example, one of the, uh, on the second day there were two different talks. Um, there were three talks. One was developing the contributor pipeline.

Okay. Then there was another talk called developing the contributor leadership pipeline. ’cause that’s somehow different than the regular contributor pipeline. And then there was another one called like defining the team rep role, like, and then there was another one about like how to like keep, I can’t remember all the titles exactly.

It, it’s on the site. But, um, they sound very similar and they were very similar. And I, um, I, I think the redundancy, uh, on one hand it’s good ’cause at least from my perspective, like the things that I needed to say about like contribution, onboarding, offboarding contributors, um,

[00:14:32] Jason Tucker: You literally work for hr,

[00:14:34] Sé Reed: Yeah, I like got to say it to like a whole group of different people each time.

I mean, uh, there were some people I was in the same room with each time, but I at least know that most people heard what I had to say about, you know, the contributor pipeline. So that’s good. I have, so I, I have a lot of feelings on it. Um, because,

[00:14:52] Jason Tucker: boy.

[00:14:53] Sé Reed: uh, the, the real problem, and this was just underscored, just, just it, it, it is mind boggling how unanimously the new contributor experience is a cluster for everyone.

Like, everyone’s like, yeah. Until someone grabbed my hand and literally showed me around and told me what was happening, I had no, I could not figure it out. And, you know, that’s not sustainable. Like, that’s not a one-to-one. Like it’s nice, right? But an unofficial one-to-one onboarding, um, means that if you don’t already have a buddy.

A friend who’s bringing you in, you’re kind of iced out. And that is not, that’s not accessible, that’s not inclusive, that’s not any of these things that were like, oh, we champion these causes. Um, but it’s, it’s, it’s not just me who has experienced this. Like people, everyone was saying this. So that’s why it’s not just, it wasn’t even just me saying the things that I was saying.

Other people were also saying the things that I was saying and that I also think, and I was like, I wanted to stand up in so many things and just be like, oh my God,

[00:16:07] Jason Tucker: Have any of you worked for a company?

[00:16:08] Sé Reed: about this? Please? Because we, we weren’t supposed to make any decisions. So it’s just conversation,

[00:16:14] Jason Tucker: Wow.

[00:16:16] Sé Reed: which I didn’t realize was gonna be as frustrating as it was.

[00:16:19] Jason Tucker: it seems like the summit had a lot going on though. I mean,

[00:16:22] Sé Reed: It had a

[00:16:23] Jason Tucker: was tracks

[00:16:25] Sé Reed: There’s track. Yeah, it was weird. But the, so they weren’t, the facilitators were not necess, were not, um, they didn’t present. Right. They read like the description. And then, so the setup was interesting. There are usually two note takers per session, and I’ll get back to those folks in a second.

And then there was someone called a stack leader, or a stack taker, or a stack timer, I don’t know, whatever. Um, and then there was the facilitator, so essentially four roles of, of admin for each session. And the facilitator was like introducing the topic, moving people onto the next topic. In some cases they synthesize the topic, um, but it was all very different.

There was no standard to the facilitation whatsoever. And sometimes people would get in there and be like, all right, well what do you think? And then there’d be like this silence in the room. And I’m like, okay, fine, I’ll come first. It’s fine. I just, I have stuff to say. So it was like, I, I really was walking a tight line between I have stuff to say and I want not to dominate the conversation.

Um,

[00:17:29] Jason Tucker: Which is hard to do when no one else is talking because you’re, you’re essentially dominating the conversation. Yeah.

[00:17:35] Sé Reed: and other people are talking, I can generally like curb my, my talking impulses, but if no one’s talking, I’m like, I, am I really raising my hand again? Oh, there it is. Hand’s going up. Like, ah,

[00:17:46] Jason Tucker: you, can you tell me a little bit about like how, how a session works? Are you essentially showing up as the marketing, like one of the marketing people in the session and there’s other people in there too, or two?

[00:17:58] Sé Reed: there was a lot, some facilitators, like one in one, they, they were very, the, the facilitators did their own thing for the most part. So in one session, Maybe it was ’cause it was a little smaller, but we went around the room and said who we were and you know, what we were, what we did in WordPress sort of deal.

Um, and so sometimes that was helpful. Um, mostly it was not about like, oh, you’re representing marketing, or Oh, you’re representing this. It was really just more like general contributors. But I would of course say, you know, I am as the marketing team rep, I have experienced this, you know, and so I definitely, you know, there was definitely like bringing that up in, in context, but not in terms of like, I am representing marketing and this is what marketing thinks it was, it was me.

You know, it was all everyone’s individual thoughts and what they’re bringing to the table, but they, their, their role, you know, as a, as a, you know, core lead or like a team rep or whatever. I mean, it was relevant to their perspective and their experience. So there was some surfacing of what people’s, it was not like a titleless thing, you

[00:19:06] Jason Tucker: Yeah, I’m just thinking like, be because of that, I, if you’re in a, like I’m reading some of the, some of the, um, the different, uh, topics for each of these.

[00:19:16] Sé Reed: Yeah, pop it on so we can look at it. I’ll tell you as I

[00:19:18] Jason Tucker: yeah. It’s just like, I, I’m just trying to think of like, how would you, um, go for it. Cost per while I’m doing this.

[00:19:24] Jason Cosper: Uh, yeah, uh, I was gonna say, like, while, while Tucker’s getting that up, um, I, what I recall of, uh, attending, uh, a few of these community summits was that, um, usually, um, folks like Will. Circle up some chairs. They will, um, kind of all, uh, like collect, uh, in a way that usually traditionally, um, like puts no one at the center occasionally.

Like, uh, things got like, I think in, uh, at, uh, Philly, there were a couple like breakout rooms that were in like a, a more like feeder classroom setup, so people stood up near the front. Uh, but, um, the one that they had at automatic, like at the last work camp, San Francisco, uh, et cetera, uh, all tended to be like just a, a circle of chairs, almost, uh, a little, a little kindergarten, but in a good way.

Um,

[00:20:25] Sé Reed: Or like you guys go sit over there and talk about that, that you all wanna talk about, and now you guys go sit over there and you talk about that over there. Yeah.

[00:20:32] Jason Cosper: But, but didn’t, it didn’t center anybody as like, leading the conversation. Even if there was a person who was there, like kind of going, okay, this is what we’re gonna talk about. Uh, and, and facilitating a little bit, but it didn’t necessarily mean that like they were where the, the buck stopped, uh,

[00:20:55] Sé Reed: Right. Or that they were like, it, it, it, um, many of the facilitators were sponsored contributors and many of the facilitators were, you know, occasionally were project leadership. And there is, there’s a dynamic, I actually said this at one point, uh, to someone who’s, you know, there’s not a very small, it’s a pretty small project leadership, so it’s one of a few people.

Um, and you know, it’s like whether you want to be super approachable or not, um, if you approach someone, you are coming from a position of authority. Just, it, it just, it exists that way. So if someone who’s in a position of authority is leading a session, I do think that it has a. A quieting more quiet, a quieting effect on what people might feel like they, they want to say.

Um, because the person who they’re, you know, you don’t really talk necessarily to the facilitator, but people do anyway because that person is, you know, um, leading, you know, directing the conversation. So even they’re not leading it or presenting they’re, it is still kind of like the focal point for the conversation.

And, uh, you know, when that’s being led by project leadership, you’re not going to get the same responses. Like in most cases, project leadership was sitting and listening and I appreciate that. And they, they would talk, they also talk and had conversations and would synthesize things. So, um, it was not terrible.

Uh, but the format was, to my mind, difficult because like, for example, look at this one that was on the screen right now, like we’ve got an 11 o’clock session. One is iterating on the team rep role, and the other one is how does the make team ecosystem work and how are we connected? Well, team reps are really a big part of that ecosystem.

So I went to the ecosystem one and like some of my friends went to the team rep role one, and I was like, well, you know how to, you know, you can represent our fuse there. And then there’s, there’s multiple, um, multiple instances of that, right? Like multiple, like even if you scroll down again, part one, aligning processes and contributions and then communicating on the blogs.

Like, well, communicating on the blogs is a process. So in that one about process, uh, and contributions, well, that one’s about, um, anyway, they, they do map like, there’s like definitely like overlap. My favorite talk, not talk wasn’t a talk. My favorite session, my favorite, I don’t know what you would call them.

What do you call like my favorite? Room.

[00:23:26] Jason Tucker: Right?

[00:23:27] Sé Reed: know, because it’s not a tra, it’s not a talk, it’s not like a really a session. But I don’t know what it was. My favorite topic,

[00:23:32] Jason Tucker: Mm-hmm.

[00:23:33] Sé Reed: was open source participation in global legislation.

[00:23:36] Jason Tucker: Mm.

[00:23:37] Sé Reed: And I was, I, I guess not shocked, um, that I actually ditched a second part.

Like these were two parters. They were all two parters, you can see here. Like, so every other one was a two-parter except the open source participation in global legislation, which also paired with the accessibility one. And so I feel like everyone who was in that one in the first kind of wanted to stay for the second one to like finish their conversations and, you know, do whatever was happening next with what they had already put into that conversation.

But I, I mean, so, you know, I never. Uh, there’s a quote in a blog post that I read today, which maybe we can link to in the show notes that said, um, there’s some theorem that you should not confuse malice with stupidity, which is not a really kind,

[00:24:29] Jason Tucker: Right.

[00:24:30] Sé Reed: but I, I find it to be accurate in this. So I’d like to think that the positioning of this topic, for example, was not malicious or anything.

It just happened to be that way or wasn’t really thought through, but there were not very many people in that

[00:24:43] Jason Tucker: Yeah, so what I was asking earlier regarding, regarding the, the idea of having someone like yourself who’s representing the marketing team, if you went to, if you went to this one in particular, it’s like, can WordPress become the household name that it deserves it, that like, that one makes sense, like that one makes like, that one makes sense for marketing, but if, and, and it probably makes sense for somebody like Polly Gloss where that looks at it and goes like, okay, well, you know, uh, in this language you can say about, you can go about it this way, or in this language you can say about this way.

But then like, is hosting showing up to this or is, um,

[00:25:19] Sé Reed: didn’t go to that one,

[00:25:20] Jason Tucker: showing up to this.

[00:25:21] Sé Reed: That’s, that sounds like marketing. Um, right. But I went to the five for the future one because I think that sponsored contribution and five for the future is like, I’m not concerned about if WordPress has a strong, healthy contributor culture and is a strong and healthy project, it will be, it, it will continue to grow and be, you know, that you cannot develop WordPress into a household name, uh, that it deserves to be, by the way, is a really weird, like way to phrase that.

It’s like, does it deserve to be okay? I guess we’re just all

[00:25:52] Jason Tucker: Maybe sustainability would be a good, a good group of people to show up to that.

[00:25:56] Sé Reed: Yeah. I’m like, I, I would just go up there and be like, Hmm, what are our motivations here? Um, but, uh, I actually would, I, I think if you do not have a robust WordPress community supporting the, the community, the software, the, the process, the open source components, um, then it doesn’t matter if it’s a household name ’cause it’ll be like, you know, a household name that no one doesn’t matter.

’cause it’s like a defunct, it’s like, remember MySpace?

[00:26:22] Jason Cosper: What’s funny,

[00:26:23] Sé Reed: too?

[00:26:24] Jason Cosper: what’s funny is in between those or, or like right next to those two topics, uh, refining five to the future in a robust WordPress community, just to the other side of that building trust in WordPress, c m s plugin and security, that is something that I could absolutely see being valid for someone for marketing.

You’re building trust, like you wanna get the word out there. So

[00:26:46] Sé Reed: all I.

[00:26:47] Jason Cosper: both of those things could be combined into can WordPress become the household name It deserves to be because you are building trust, you are making a robust community. Like, take that, take that conversation in Woodrow Wilson, C right in the middle and throw it the fuck out

[00:27:06] Sé Reed: that’s exactly how I felt about that session actually. Although apparently, um, I, some of the things that I heard were interesting. Um, uh, some of the sessions, I, I, you know, you hear secondhand, right? What happened in the session and no attributions, you’re like, kind of like here was the gist of it. Um, and, uh, I, I was like, someone will write down whatever ideas anyone comes up with in that, and then we can, you know, try to implement it in the marketing team with our sponsored contributor problems and our ineffective marketing and whatever we’ve got going on over here.

Um, we’ll take all those ideas, but I’m not gonna go have a conversation about can it become a household name, like, Even, like, how can we make, it would be like, I don’t know, I’m not trying to be critical of the folks who created this, but this was, this was a struggle for me. And

[00:27:54] Jason Tucker: sounds like a wordpress.com problem, not a wordpress.org

[00:27:56] Jason Cosper: was just absolutely about to

[00:27:59] Jason Tucker: Oh,

[00:27:59] Jason Cosper: that this, this sounds like an in, this sounds like an internal discussion that should be happening at automatic, even though automatic is not WordPress, and WordPress is not automatic.

[00:28:11] Sé Reed: mean, look at the description. It’s not even like, sorry,

[00:28:15] Jason Cosper: Right.

[00:28:16] Sé Reed: I didn’t even look at the description. ’cause I was like, I don’t wanna be there. I don’t wanna, I do not want, I had friends that went to

[00:28:21] Jason Cosper: The Internet’s best kept secret at at 43% market share bullshit.

[00:28:32] Jason Tucker: yeah.

[00:28:33] Sé Reed: um, it, you know,

[00:28:35] Jason Tucker: by Blue Host and I wasn’t there so I can say it, but yeah. Facilitated by the Blue host guy.

[00:28:40] Sé Reed: oh, I didn’t, I missed all that. What?

[00:28:43] Jason Tucker: I mean, uh, Devin is the one that was facilitating, so

[00:28:47] Sé Reed: Yeah, it’s uh, it was very much sponsored contributors facilitating and I don’t know if that is because,

[00:28:52] Jason Tucker: that’s kind of

[00:28:52] Sé Reed: many mathematicians, I don’t know if that’s because they were just like, we know that person will be there and consistent and you know, ’cause they’re there ’cause of their job. I don’t know. Uh, there’s definitely a dual culture.

I talked about this a lot too, of sponsored con contributors and non-sponsored contributors and, um, or volunteer contributors. And the culture differences, especially within the sponsored contributor community is basically some, it’s not quite contempt, but it is definitely a, uh, community and people and consensus takes so long and all this stuff and it’s like, where does it say anywhere that we work by consensus.

Like, it doesn’t even say that. Like it, it’s like somehow folks seem to think that if they bring things or tell people that stuff is happening in the community, that that somehow means they have to wait for everyone to agree with them. But I’m like, that’s. There’s a difference between communication and consensus.

Like those are not, they’re not

[00:29:45] Jason Tucker: yeah, like for instance, at my, at my work we, you know, I, I work at a nonprofit that has volunteers involved and has people that are paid involved. And, uh, our thing is, is like we can hire a volunteer who will like essentially work. You know, there every day, but we don’t pay them. But they’re also not allowed to be a, um, uh,

[00:30:06] Sé Reed: how are we in overtime already? What the hell?

[00:30:08] Jason Tucker: I know, right. But they’re also not allowed, they’re also not allowed to be someone’s boss as a volunteer. So, so I, I can, I can kind of see how this

[00:30:19] Sé Reed: like the team rep that, I’m sorry, overtalk, that’s really interesting in terms of the team rep and the idea of leadership in the project, because there is this idea of can, um, you know, can someone who’s a volunteer who can in theory ditch out any time, um, Have these leadership roles.

Well, I’m like, well, it doesn’t matter if the company can fire their sponsored contributor anytime. Also that it’s kind of the same thing. I don’t know. We’re is

[00:30:46] Jason Tucker: You, you don’t find out until the email bounces.

[00:30:48] Sé Reed: Yeah, exactly. Until your tags, your, your messages go unanswered for days or whatever. It’s like, or forever I

[00:30:54] Jason Tucker: That’s where, that’s the offboarding side for me is the delegation and setting up a delegate for someone to pick up the emails and, uh,

[00:31:01] Sé Reed: was a lot of talk, there was a lot of talk about off-boarding. There’s a lot of talk about, um, getting the folk like burnout. There’s a lot of talk about burnout, contribute, burnout. Um, there was a lot of talk about like, if you, like, how do we get the people who are before they burnout to communicate with the folks who are, you know, still there, not burning out, not leaving and um, before they’ve like, you know, dropped off the planet or whatever.

Um, it, you know, the thing is, About all of this is like the, none of this stuff is new con, like I didn’t really hear anything new. I heard, didn’t hear anything new. That one we didn’t know was a problem.

[00:31:43] Jason Tucker: Yeah.

[00:31:43] Sé Reed: I didn’t know was a problem I guess. But I’ve been around the community now for a really long time. You know, we’re about 11 years old, our show, right?

We’re almost about to be 11, so like that’s more than a decade of WordPress experience. So one on one hand it’s really sad that we’re having the same conversations that we had, you know, at the community summit I attended in like 2015 or whatever. Um, and on the other hand, I’m trying to be positive and think like at least we had these conversations.

I feel like the culture of just of the US or of the world has gotten more where, where we are demanding more accountability from folks. And you can actually see that on. For example, there was an instance, an incident on Twitter. I don’t know if you’re, you, you all saw that about the Pride Party. Someone was, you know, saying, why are we doing Pride Party?

It’s a, it’s um, it’s divisive or whatever. And everyone was like, uh, that’s entirely not the point. Uh, but that person actually just, you know, that, that it just raised the whole kerfuffle.

[00:32:45] Jason Cosper: Divisive to them.

[00:32:47] Sé Reed: Yeah, exactly. Divisive to them. They’re like, this is excluding me. It’s like, it’s not actually excluding you.

You’re

[00:32:53] Jason Cosper: centering yourself, asshole.

[00:32:56] Sé Reed: That’s a little different. Wow. You’re really fired up today, Cosper.

[00:33:01] Jason Cosper: Yeah. Wow.

[00:33:03] Jason Tucker: I will, I will say, um, just, just real quick, regarding the whole burnout thing, the, the topic of the word burnout on WordPress tv. Um, looking here, this is, this is not a new topic like at all. We may have called it something else before this, I don’t know. But there’s, there’s a lot of burnout.

[00:33:25] Sé Reed: fascinating. Um, I had not thought about that. I, I like that a lot. Um,

[00:33:29] Jason Tucker: There’s a lot of burnout.

[00:33:30] Sé Reed: there’s a lot of burnout. Uh, and you know, a lot of the burnout comes from the fact that there, everyone’s trying to do these things and there’s no processes or there’s an invisible wall that they hit and they’re like, I don’t know where, why, I’m not sure why I can’t go past this, and no one will tell me why I can’t go past this.

You know, I talked a lot about the contributor journey. You’re a new contributor, you go and after you’re a team rep, you just kind of sink back into the team. There’s like, it’s like nowhere else to go. There’s nowhere else. Let’s, like, something that I pointed out is that there’s not actually any sort of process to become part of project leadership.

Those are appointed positions. Those are, those are hired positions. Um, and that’s not that I wanna be project leadership personally. I’m just saying there’s no. That’s top down, right? Like the rest of it is like we’re moving up and it’s people who have this experience. So of course there’s burnout because you stay in the same role forever.

If it was like that in a real job, you’d be like, I gotta go, I gotta go do something else. Like I have to, I’ve, I’ve done this for a decade, I need to move on. And then what ends up happening is you get people like Mika who did that for a decade and then burns out. And in her, in, in her case, she, you know, really handled it and, you know, connected and like, did a lot of work, a lot more work after already being burned out to enable, um, the, the team, whatever the plugins team to continue and to grow.

Um, but really, like, like that’s, that’s again, and I kept emphasizing this, this is really still on the individual. That isn’t any sort of process that exists to alleviate that. And we have known about this. This is, none of this is new and I. I hope that like, like if we are still having this conversation next year, in two years, in five years, like, then it’s just, it’s futile and it’s intentional.

[00:35:23] Jason Tucker: We’ll have to, we’ll have to count the number of burnout posts

[00:35:28] Sé Reed: oh my Lord,

[00:35:29] Jason Tucker: so,

[00:35:30] Sé Reed: freaking, we’re so burned out. We’re like a fire over

[00:35:32] Jason Tucker: Yeah. Did they talk anything about the idea of a, like a thermometer or a way of, um, of, uh, putting a number, putting a value to one’s burnout? Was there anything like that?

[00:35:47] Sé Reed: Uh, there’s actually a really cool conversation happening. Not, it was very prevalent at the summit, but it wasn’t, it didn’t come out of that. There’s a really interesting conversation about dashboards that are happening. So dashboards for teams that would. There’s no metrics for this. This is a problem.

There’s no metrics, there’s no data, there’s no way to measure this stuff currently. But this is also a problem. It’s not just a problem for volunteers or certain teams getting, like, having so much work to do and you know, needing more assistance. It’s also that sponsors who may want to contribute employee time or whatever, or even just regular people who are like, oh, I can do this or this or this, but I don’t know where I’m needed.

Um, there’s no way to communicate that right now. There’s no way, you know, there’s, there are things that aren’t in place like the updates page, which is supposed to be updated, but there’s no consistency. There’s no consistency in time of publishing. There’s no consistency in format. There’s no data to make any choices off of.

So, um, there is a conversation about how we can turn those things into metrics and then each team would in theory have like their own little dashboard that would show projects that are happening. You know, amount of work that’s happening. Deadlines and like, you know, basically be, I don’t know, project management, silly stuff like

[00:37:06] Jason Tucker: but uh, I was waiting for you to say K p I, so I could take a drink.

[00:37:11] Jason Cosper: the,

[00:37:12] Sé Reed: I never say K P I, if I can help it.

[00:37:15] Jason Cosper: The interesting thing about this and, and one of the reasons that I, I wished that, uh, I, I could have, uh, attended that, that I wish that I, I didn’t, uh, feel like I, I couldn’t attend because of, uh, the, the lack of precautions taken

[00:37:31] Sé Reed: you are right to

[00:37:32] Jason Cosper: uh,

[00:37:32] Sé Reed: that, by the way, just so you know,

[00:37:34] Jason Cosper: Yeah. Um, but one of, one of the things that I, uh, really have a hard time with is like, through work.

Uh, I am a, a sponsored contributor. I, I contribute about five hours a week to the project, at least, uh, yet, um, the five for the future system. And I saw that there was something on the schedule talking about refining that. Uh, I’ve, I’ve heard some rumblings of, of some dashboard conversations and everything else.

Um, but, um, I, uh, despite contributing, uh, five hours a week, if nobody, uh, publishes like the attendance sheet from like the meetings, if nobody, uh, you know, puts those up in the, the blog posts that they do, recapping meetings, uh, if nobody does, uh, things like that. Um, then, uh, I, uh, every

[00:38:30] Sé Reed: You are invisible.

[00:38:31] Jason Cosper: I, yeah, I’m invisible and every few months I get an email from the five for the future system going, are you really contributing?

And every time I get that, I get so pissed off.

[00:38:44] Sé Reed: That email goes out no matter what. We actually talked about that in, in one of

[00:38:49] Jason Tucker: Oh, that is

[00:38:50] Sé Reed: didn’t know that existed. But that email is just a little ping email, which marketing of course has no, why would marketing ever look at any at email communication? That’s just bonkers.

[00:38:59] Jason Cosper: it’s, and and the way it, the way it reads is it looks like you haven’t been doing anything. Have you been doing any, have you actually been

[00:39:09] Jason Tucker: Oh no.

[00:39:09] Sé Reed: Hmm, are you really doing anything?

[00:39:12] Jason Cosper: Yeah.

[00:39:13] Sé Reed: That’s

[00:39:14] Jason Cosper: It’s terrible.

[00:39:15] Jason Tucker: Get off your ass. That is bad.

[00:39:18] Sé Reed: no way to measure it. There’s no way to prove you’re doing anything. Conversely, there’s no way to prove you’re not doing anything. So there’s a ton of people who are like, I’m contributing to all these themes.

They

[00:39:27] Jason Tucker: the rationale, yeah, the rationale is, or rather, the default way of thinking is you’re not contributing enough. Instead of saying like, look at you contributing all over the

[00:39:37] Sé Reed: Or, and, and again, this is, this is some wild radical talk, but what if it was like, how’s it going with your contribution?

[00:39:45] Jason Tucker: or, Hey, thanks for contributing,

[00:39:46] Sé Reed: Just like,

[00:39:47] Jason Tucker: feels guilty that they didn’t contribute.

[00:39:50] Sé Reed: and tell us what’s up? Like, has it been going well? Anything you need blockers on? Like, and this is some of the things we talked about.

So the, the real problem with all of this is there were conversations about like all the problems that you can think of. They were dissected and discussed and multiple perspectives on it, and people were taking notes and whatever. And, and at some point these, each session, whoever took notes is, uh, which was mostly mathematicians.

Uh, whoever took notes is going to synthesize the comments and then publish them on, uh, make blog, which is make.wordpress.org/summit. I don’t know if anything’s up there yet. Um, I. So the idea is that that is the next step, but there is no prescribed next step after that. And I, I, in a few things I tried to ask, it’s like, well go read the post.

It’s like, okay, uh, so we’re gonna go comment on the post or give feedback. One of my huge things that I brought up multiple times was there’s no process. It was part of the proposals and, you know, make, make blog. Like what do you put on the make blog? Where do you have discussions? There’s no process for, okay, we’ve made a proposal and this is something we, we come up with with community.

We had Leslie Sim on Simson, uh, to talk about this very thing. She wrote an incredible response when they were talking about, um, I don’t remember what the topic was. It was just, I think phase three. And she wrote this really incredible, like, well articulated, like well researched, like with examples and like really just super clear.

And we had her on to talk about that. No follow up. There’s no, it, it’s like that’s the proposal and you can give your feedback, but it’s like leaving a post-it on a wall. Like there’s nothing happens with that. And that’s a big part of the problem. There’s no follow up. So, um, I’m hopeful that just because I literally have been making GitHub issues for everything that that was talked about.

Everyone’s like, we need to define roles. And I’m like, well, I guess we’ll do that in marketing. If it’s not anywhere else, it will at least be here. So I’ve been, other than me spinning up GitHub issues, like going outta style, um, I’m not really sure. There’s no prescribed. Uh, follow up. So the blog post, then you leave your feedback.

So I guess it’d be like, well, I was at the summit and I was in this session, which totally destroys the non attribution component. Um, and then you’re like, here’s what I think about this, or this wasn’t accurate. There’s nothing that happens after that. Like there’s no set thing for what’s gonna happen.

It’s not, so it’s like we all got a chance to air our grievances. It was like, um, what’s that se in Seinfeld, there’s like the airing of the hate or

[00:42:29] Jason Tucker: Airing new grievances.

[00:42:31] Sé Reed: Yeah. What was it? Airing of grievances,

[00:42:34] Jason Cosper: Yep.

[00:42:34] Sé Reed: Yeah. So it’s like an airing of your grievances, but like nothing happens after that. Like, can we solve the grievances?

Like I, I mean there are solutions. People would offer solutions in one, in one, uh, in the open legislation, open source legislation. Uh, I actually thought we got really far and incidentally, um, I don’t know if this counts as attribution, but all of project was, leadership was in that. Session the entire, all of the project leadership was there.

Uh, so obviously there’s gonna have to be something that happens from that one because it’s like literally requires like, you know, the Europe is like doing things that could possibly like really damage WordPresses contributor community, um, with their, their different regulations that are possible. Um, so like there will be some follow there.

Something will come of that, but it’s like, did we all just have this conversation so that we could say we had this conversation and then you can then continue to do whatever. Like, that is my real fear coming out of the summit. That we all just shared all these feelings and experiences and because we got it out, because we, you know, agreed with you.

’cause we, we found, you know, we, we expressed it. The, the fire to resolve it is kind of like dissipated because now we’re all satisfied, right? We’re like, okay, good. Now something’s gonna happen. We’ve been heard, we’ve exchanged views, and now we will solve the problems, except there’s no freaking plan to solve any of these problems.

So I’m not sure. And, and the blog posts are not gonna say anything about how to solve the problems. They’re just like summaries. So

[00:44:11] Jason Tucker: Yeah.

[00:44:12] Jason Cosper: Yeah. People’s,

[00:44:12] Sé Reed: what’s happening there.

[00:44:14] Jason Cosper: people’s feet need to be held to the fire.

[00:44:17] Sé Reed: Yeah. Luckily I love holding feet to the fire. Like, I think it’s just a cozy way to live. I’ll hold the feet, make a nice fire, maybe get some marshmallows. I’ll be like, here are marshmallows and hot chocolate. But also your feet need to be right here. So

[00:44:31] Jason Cosper: Uh, so

[00:44:32] Sé Reed: closer? Little closer?

[00:44:34] Jason Cosper: you, you, you said that you weren’t sure if people had been posting stuff. I, I see stuff on the make, uh, blog, the summit, uh,

[00:44:43] Sé Reed: it’s there. Yeah. I didn’t know if it was up yet or not.

[00:44:45] Jason Cosper: I mean, it’s not all there, but there are at least, uh, as of this recording two pages worth of, uh, various notes from, from different sessions and

[00:44:56] Sé Reed: I gotta go check those out and leave some feedback

[00:45:00] Jason Tucker: Yeah.

[00:45:01] Sé Reed: and see what, I mean. I don’t, there’s not a format for the notes either, so there’s not a format for the notes, there’s no structure for follow up. So I am, um, there’s no, it’s not like a team has been appointed to like handle the follow-up word camp.

Us people are not handling the follow-up. Like, I’m like, there’s not, to my knowledge, there is no structure in place for following up other than again, individuals taking it upon themselves to follow up and hold. Said feet to said fire.

[00:45:31] Jason Cosper: I was gonna say, why, why don’t, why don’t, uh, some of us, uh, either out there in the audience or here, like on the show today, uh, take it to ourselves to, to go, I’m gonna make sure that Tucker puts the, the summit stuff in the show notes. Like, go to the summit, leave feedback. Uh, if there is something in the notes that, uh, you don’t understand, uh, if the notes seem a little obtuse, ask for clarification.

’cause the people who were there, uh, at the very least, the people who took the notes will get pinged, Hey, someone left a comment. And they’ll be like, oh, and maybe possibly, uh, it, it, it might go nowhere, but it might also, you know, in the back channel because there’s no attribution, someone might get pinged, like, Hey, you should weigh in on this.

Um, And

[00:46:29] Sé Reed: Yeah. I don’t know where the non attribution starts. Like, so can we say, you know, can we tag Joseph up in our comments and be like, what are your thoughts on this? Like, that’s not in the

[00:46:38] Jason Tucker: I mean, we can,

[00:46:38] Sé Reed: can we ask

[00:46:39] Jason Cosper: we, we can, the, the people who took the notes can’t. Um, so I,

[00:46:45] Jason Tucker: I didn’t go, so

[00:46:47] Sé Reed: Right. So that gives you both an objectivity and an ability to, um, to, to, to, you know, we, we have no plan. We have nothing that’s happening like right after. I just, that I feel like that seems sort of essential. Like, everyone’s like, yes, we’re posting ’em on the blog. And I was just never able to get anyone to get past that because I always ask my question at the end, like of the session.

Um, so I was like, what’s happening again? And, no, no plan. So, and again, no action, intentionally no action taken at no decisions made at the summit, which I totally think is fine. ’cause open source and we don’t want closed decisions being made. Um, I just, I, I, I, I also see a lot of these problems, uh, that are recurrent problems, longtime problems.

The solution that the community is coming up with is to make external websites. ’cause you know, we make websites is what we do, right? We make websites with WordPress, so everyone’s like, well, I’ll make a website to deal with this issue. I’ll make a website to deal with this issue. But the big problem with that is, first of all, then we’re not dealing with the issue in make, we’re not dealing with the issue in the community.

We’re dealing with the issue in the ecosystem and outside of the community, which is its own problem. But the, the other problem with that is, as you know, the marketing team, for example, we cannot, or we, we should not. It is, uh, and I agree with this, start linking to third party sites. Like even if they are, you know, just a nonprofit and support of the thing that there’s a million gazillion nonprofits, right?

Like, that

[00:48:24] Jason Tucker: bunch of dead.

[00:48:25] Sé Reed: And so it’s just without. When we don’t solve the solutions here, they are being, it’s the same thing with plugins, right? If you don’t solve the solution problem in core, the solutions exist in a plugin, and that same thing is happening with the problems in the community. If the problems in the community aren’t getting solved by the community, they’re now gonna be solved by third party people outside of the community.

Um, and I, I am, I am drained by this because that just means that person is now focusing outside the community, not solving the problem in the community. And we can’t even link to it as a resource. So I, it’s like, it’s like if we don’t fill the gap with community solutions, then they will be filled with ex external community solutions, and then we have nothing.

And then it’s solved, but it’s not actually solved at all.

[00:49:18] Jason Cosper: Right, this, this, uh, this predilection to, to build a site to go off and, uh, build a, a plugin, a site, uh, some sort of like, it’s really prevalent in this community.

[00:49:32] Sé Reed: Yeah. Turns out we

[00:49:33] Jason Cosper: it’s really,

[00:49:34] Sé Reed: It’s a thing,

[00:49:35] Jason Cosper: yeah. Well, it, I mean, it, it falls. I, I know that I love to, to speak in, uh, cliches. Uh, so please take a drink if, if you’re, uh, if you’re watching and have something in hand, um, but I mean, if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Right? Like it, you know. So, uh, the WordPress community solution to every problem that is presented to them is WordPress. We’ve got a hammer. We’ve got a

[00:50:04] Sé Reed: I turn over

[00:50:05] Jason Cosper: that’s

[00:50:05] Sé Reed: a, I can build a website for that. Do you need a website for that? I can build a website.

[00:50:09] Jason Cosper: Right.

[00:50:10] Jason Tucker: are, are we just gonna do this like in, in Vatos forums or something? Is, is that what we’re doing here? Like, are we just like, you know, is there like a, I don’t know, just doesn’t make sense. I, I don’t, I don’t understand why you’d wanna do this elsewhere instead of inside WordPress.

[00:50:24] Sé Reed: if the community summit is a representation of the community, which is its own conversation, uh, then the community

[00:50:31] Jason Tucker: kinda scary too.

[00:50:33] Sé Reed: are. The community is consistent. The community understands the problems. The problems have been well articulated by most of the people.

Like there wasn’t a ton of disagreement. I think actually the most disagreement that I heard about was in the D E I B conversation, which I heard got a little feisty, uh, which was kind of funny, right? Because everyone else is being all nice. And then you get into the diversity and inclusion one and people are like, having conflict.

I was like, wow, okay. That seems backwards. Um, But, uh, you know, the, um, the open source legislation talk, I just kind of as a closing point that I, um, I attended was, is really, I think it’s really important because it literally affects like the legality of the stuff that is happening, the software, the requirements of the software, the com, what the community can contribute to.

Um, and the big kind of pushback for sort of, uh, the question is sort of like, can we take a stand? Should we take a stand? Is there a way to take a stand? How do we take a stand? And the big pushback was kind of like, You know, well, if we take a stand on this, we have to take a stand on everything. Right? I’m like, I kind of feel like that’s irrational.

Like, that’s just being really extreme. Like, just because you take a stand on open, like I feel like anyone in the community who’s like a, you know, go, understands what’s happening, would be like, oh, it, it’s okay for WordPress to stay in their lane, so to speak, right? To talk about open source legislation or to talk about security stuff or to talk about ai.

And we actually at the end of that session went through and said, okay, what are some examples of things that are in the, the realm of WordPress could kind of take stands on or take positions on or comment on as a, as a community, as a whatever. We are an ecosystem and all those things were super reasonable and rational.

It we, should we take a stance on ai? Should we take a stance on, um, you know, like I said, encryption, security. Should we take a stance on all the open source legislation that’s happening and. I, you know, the, the, like, the pushback is, oh, well then we’re gonna care about, you know, some fancy agricultural bill that happens.

And it’s like, I don’t, we’re not, we’re not all totally unreasonable. Like everyone is like, yes, it’s a software. And of course, you know, there’s a, a, a huge inclusion component in the community, but that doesn’t necessarily like WordPress commenting. And this is actually something that, uh, someone had mentioned in the thing, like WordPress commenting on, you know, an issue that is not related to software, for example, or related to tech at all.

Like that, that doesn’t even have much value, right? Like, it’s not like the Human Rights Commission weighing in on something that has to do with human rights. Like WordPress going over there and saying like, we care too. It’s like everyone’s gonna be like, yeah, but no one cares ’cause you’re not related to this at all.

Right? So it wouldn’t even make sense. What,

[00:53:23] Jason Cosper: That was an expressed concern from somebody is that, oh, once we start commenting on, uh, relevant issues, we’re also gonna have to start commenting on irrelevant issues because that seems really fucking disingenuous.

[00:53:38] Sé Reed: yes. That was a real, that was a real thing. I won’t attribute it. Um, but, uh, it, it was a real conversation. So, I

[00:53:45] Jason Tucker: Wow.

[00:53:45] Sé Reed: I, sadly that was the most, the end of that session was felt like the most productive because we did come up with, here’s, here’s what WordPresses Lane looks like. And it was just a list of suggestions.

Like it wasn’t, again, that’s, no one’s holding anyone’s feet to the fire about that unless we do. Um, but that nothing else. We did get some solutions, what could be some, whatever, but it was all very, very, uh, loose. So if anyone’s listening to this and they care about the community, I promise you that your concerns were probably brought up and, you know, talked about, because I feel like most of the folks there, you know, they, they.

We were not shy about the problems, like everyone was very much talking about it. And I, I feel like that was good. Even though many times there was an elephant in the room. We all know what the elephant is. Um, that, uh, the, the, um, the company that is the elephant. Um, but everyone’s still was, even if there was like maybe a chilling effect from sometimes there being leadership there, I think that for the most part, all the problems pretty much got expressed.

I didn’t go to a ton of the technical ones, but I kind of trust that they’re fine anyway. Like I was like, they’re, they’re gonna have no problems. Um, the one I would’ve liked to go to is the Gutenberg and um, core alignment because that’s something we’ve talked about here before, uh, about how Gutenberg is basically leading core and just how that works out.

Because, you know, interestingly, I. Tomorrow Matt’s keynote or Matt’s and Matt Mullenweg’s end talk is about Gutenberg. So I thought that was interesting, especially since we’ve been talking about Gutenberg, the software, the, you know, the, the program ready. Um, a lot. And it is definitely its own entity and it is definitely leading the development.

And so the conversations about Gutenberg are happening even in another removed, another abstracted level away because they’re happening in the Gutenberg GitHubs and there’s not like a Gutenberg team or anything. There’s just the core team. And the core team’s busy with core. So no one’s like, like some of the core people are monitoring what’s happening in Gutenberg.

And so that was a discussion that happened. I’m, I’m actually really interested to read the notes about that and hear, hear what was happening. I don’t know how many like core devs there are that would push back against that. Like a against Gutenberg, because really there were a lot of mathematicians and they were really entrenched in Gutenberg.

So I don’t, I don’t know. I have, I, I want to have Faith. Let me say that. I want to believe that we can do this.

[00:56:30] Jason Cosper: is, is it? Is it time for a Gutenberg Community Summit?

[00:56:35] Sé Reed: I think it, it, I think we need to like bring Gutenberg into the fold. I met some really great people from Open Verse and Open is, they characterized it as like kind of the, the, the lost sheep of the, of the world. They’re like kind of the odd, odd team out, uh, because they’re built in a totally different tech stack because it was an acquired thing.

Um, and they’re just kind of like, and they’re a completely sponsored team. 100% sponsored by automatic, but they are, Part of the community. And so there’s this real, like, and ex and, and I talked to about folks with this, like, just like the te kind of the like weirdness between like, are we part of the community?

We’re not part of the community. We don’t, you know, how do we do this? And I feel like the Gutenberg thing is sort of the same. Like it’s, it’s kind of its own, it’s its own team does. There’s no real like reporting that happens back. So, you know, um,

[00:57:30] Jason Tucker: a mixed use homeowners association is what it sounds like.

[00:57:33] Jason Cosper: I, I would, I would argue that, uh, open versus too new to be lost and no disrespect to anybody on that team. Uh, but when you have projects like the Tide Project, uh, which did get a little bit of, uh, love and mention a allegedly, uh, in the hosting space for P H P compatibility, uh, I saw,

[00:57:56] Sé Reed: about that even, oh my gosh.

[00:57:57] Jason Cosper: right. Uh, I, I saw there was, yeah, I saw that there was discussion around that and, uh, was really excited that, uh, they’re talking about, uh, kind of bringing the Tide project back, something that has not seen love in years.

And, and really, uh, now that, uh, p h p releases have hit this cadence of, uh, a new version is getting just, you know, thrown out the window no longer, um, you know, supported getting security back patches, stuff like that. Um, like it’s really important that we start updating folks and, you know, WordPress has taken a sort of lackadaisical approach in that,

[00:58:41] Sé Reed: Not sort of lackadaisical. Just absolutely lackadaisical.

[00:58:45] Jason Cosper: Right.

[00:58:46] Sé Reed: was confirmed. That has been confirmed this week by me. I, I am, it is lackadaisical. That is applicable.

[00:58:53] Jason Cosper: that is, but I’m, yeah. What, what I’m, what I’m getting at is like, I, I understand, okay, like you feel like the outsiders a little bit, but like, there are some projects that are truly neglected.

[00:59:07] Sé Reed: Yeah, they, they really are, they’re not neglected. They’re a fully sponsored team. They just don’t, they haven’t been like, brought into the community so they feel like, you know, they’re out here. I think Tide was a big part of a community and then just like withered, like didn’t get any love. And so it’s, I think that’s actually worse.

I think the Tide Project, it is a much worse kind of effect because it, it really did kind of, you know, just sort of, and it didn’t get that attention. Whereas Open versus is still getting plenty of money and attention, so

[00:59:36] Jason Cosper: Right. The, the Tide project specifically was a Google project. Hey, wait a minute. A Google project abandoned the hell you say.

[00:59:47] Jason Tucker: Wait, we’re, we’re in our Google reader age right here. This is awesome.

[00:59:51] Jason Cosper: Yeah.

[00:59:52] Jason Tucker: Ride the wave.

[00:59:53] Sé Reed: I’m really hopeful. I hope that anyone who listens to this and made it through the entire hour, which, sorry, I didn’t, don’t even know how that happened. Um, I guess I had a lot to say. Uh, I hope that everyone goes and reads the summit summaries. Um, I hope that anyone who attends the summit or attended the summit goes and reads the summaries and comments and makes corrections.

And I think that we have to come up with an action plan, like we have to move this forward. And, um, the contributor day, we, well, we can maybe talk about that next week too, but, um, contributor day was not the extension of Community Summit that I, I really was hoping that, like we would do all this stuff at Community Summit and then contributor day, which is open, could kind of see the decisions and the actions and stuff happening.

And to my knowledge, that was not the case. It was just kind of a, you know, just a contributor day. I, I mean, so

[01:00:44] Jason Tucker: I’m looking forward to hearing about that one

[01:00:46] Sé Reed: day, but for example, I had a bunch of folks come down to the marketing table because, and I was like, Hey, they came a little later. I was like, oh yeah, we’re we’re designers.

I was like, oh. And they’re like, we just, there was no design person there. So we left, like there was a design listed. Design was a team listed, had a room, was there, had a bunch of people signed up to go, but no lead, no team rep, no table lead showed up to help them at all, which is a very aptt, meta, like very apt metaphor for the design team in general.

But,

[01:01:21] Jason Tucker: hours not contributing.

[01:01:23] Sé Reed: yeah, like it’s, so they came down to, to marketing and, um, it just, uh hmm. It, that, that is, that’s weird. Like, it’s just weird that no one stepped up at all. And design is another one of those teams that’s sort of like all sponsored contributors. So, um, if they don’t want. Participation. The best way is to just not be there.

So, and they weren’t, and so they couldn’t participate there. So I, I, you know, again, I am not trying to attribute this stuff to malice, but according to that, um, that saying, if it’s not malice, then it is probably stupidity. So I’m not sure which one’s worse

[01:02:03] Jason Cosper: Yeah. It, that’s, that’s Hanlon’s razor, by the way. I’ll make sure that that makes it into the show notes.

[01:02:09] Sé Reed: uh, we can also, let’s also post in the show notes the, where I got that reference today, the article from which I got that reference, which everyone should read. We’re not talking about it, but you should read it. Okay.

[01:02:22] Jason Tucker: Well, that’s it. You heard about what we’re gonna be talking about next week, so we’ll see you all there. Talk to you later. Bye-bye. Go on over

and subscribe to this content. We’d really appreciate it. And you can also go and subscribe to us on all the different places that we stream Talkt to all later. You have a good one. Bye-bye.