 Welcome everybody to today's online workshop brought to you by learn wordpress.org. This is five for the future how to succeed by making ongoing contributions to WordPress. My name is Courtney and I am joining you today from the island of Oahu in Hawaii in the US. And I am mainly a contributor to the training team these days. And so I'm focused on bringing the community content like this and a lots of educational content for the WordPress community. And joining me is now go and I'll let her introduce herself as well. Hello, and I'm now go Takano from Japan and I've been working with WordPress, like Courtney, since the beginning as a user and a web designer, and then I started translating WordPress into Japanese. And since 2019, I have been a full time sponsored contributor working with mostly community team, political team, and now more or less back to community team with this contributor experience in the future program. So, yes, I'm happy to hear what you want to know and how you want to, you know, have your contributor journey in this WordPress project. Great. Thanks now. So let's get started with our content and we'll just dive right in. So we're going to start with this, this comic from XKCD. If you're not familiar with the comic called XKCD is a web comic with a variety of topics, but it's largely about programming math and science. And so this particular comic is one that we as open source contributors can relate a lot to the idea behind this comic is that the infrastructure of the web is sustained by open source contributors that are volunteering their time. So this comic is of course, a joke, but it makes our volunteer contributors laugh because it feels like our reality. So you can see here like this complicated, you know, all modern digital infrastructure that's just supported by, oh just some random person in Nebraska that has been thanklessly maintaining the project since 2003. This is a pretty funny little comic that we wanted to start with. So let's go through this. Oh, this is this was in December 2021. So this was a critical vulnerability that was unveiled in a widely used open source, Java based logging utility that was called log 4j. This incident highlighted challenges in open source funding and security oversight. Post incident calls for enhanced collaboration among open source foundations emerged bolster security measures and tackle vulnerabilities collectively. And the global impact underscored the industry's heavy reliance on open source software, showcasing the urgent need for a concert effort in securing open source projects against against potential cybersecurity threats. The maintainer of core JS, which is a JavaScript library that's vital to many websites, including like Netflix. This maintainer voiced his frustration about the lack of financial support for open source developers, threatening to abandon the project or switch to a closed source license due to insufficient funding. Despite core JS being integral to web development and having been downloaded billions of times. His call for financial support went largely unanswered. So that reflected a broader issue in the open source community, regarding the sustainability and funding of crucial projects. This is a problem that volunteer contributors are not unfamiliar with. So what do we do to fix this problem. This is a open source security and risk analysis report that was published in 2022 by an independent company and this states that 88% of code bases contained components that had no no new development in the past two years, and they were behind on user updates. So this presents serious security issues. Why would that be, think about the many contributors that volunteer their time working on these things. Do they have the bandwidth to keep maintaining these components. This could be one of the reasons why this is happening. Let's talk a little bit about the tragedy of the commons. One of the main comments is what's happening here and all over the open source community. It's a social and political problem in which each individual is programmed to act in a way that will ultimately be harmful to all individuals. This comic demonstrates the concept of the tragedy of the commons. There are a lot of people over using a shared resource, which results in a tragedy for all when the resource gets completely depleted. And so you can see other examples like someone's just taking all the water they want they're not given back to it and yeah and that results in just scarcity and less resources for all. In order for the commons to be sustained. It needs work and support from its community. So that brings us back to WordPress. So we've been so far generally talking about open source projects, but let's bring this back to WordPress and I'll hand it off to to now go to continue with this. Thank you. And as you can see in the court in 2014, the founder of WordPress wrote a blog post to introduce the concept of the future to the WordPress community. This was proposed as a potential solution to avoid a tragedy of the commons in WordPress. He proposed organizations that has built their companies and products around WordPress to dedicate 5% of the people to contribute back to WordPress. So this was the concept at the time, but it has been developed into a program now and we'll talk about that more later. And next. And more recently in at the World Camp US that happened this year in August keynote speech, Joseph mentioned that there was a significant interest in WordPress sustainability at the community summit. So WordPress sustainability is, you know, how to, this is how she described it is that, you know, how can we make sure that WordPress just last any of us, you know, for long term success of the WordPress project, we need to bring in more new members into the community consistently. Okay. And here comes the future. So a little bit of history. So after the match blog post in 2017 at the community summit again in Paris. The contributors Tracy and Robert and Ian done propose the idea of formalizing the future as a program for the WordPress community with the help of the community. The program was defined and formalized in 2018. This is the first trial run of the program with dedicated teams sponsored by companies happening in 2019, which is, you know, right before the pandemic started. And you can access the website by going to WordPress.org slash five. It's a short hand or five for the future. And you can see, this is the program website. The program is an attempt to avoid the tragedy of the comments in WordPress. This is where people where the companies and individuals say that they will contribute the WordPress we call it pledge. And the, it's a little bit different from how you contribute in other ways with which is more casual and one off way but it's a pledge and commitment to contribute for a period of time. And we'll also share some ideas on how companies can contribute to the future and some benefits that they can get from contributing. And finally, we will share some ideas where this program needs to go in the future. So I'll hand this off. Oh, no way. Is this my part? Oh, sorry. This is, I think we continue. Okay. Okay. So we've been talking about five with future. What is this five for the future contribution and what is it so different from anything else. Next. So what's defined in max bone post any direct contribution to the work of make WordPress team is five for the future contribution. And next page. Make WordPress teams, or you can go to make that WordPress or something is teams of WordPress contributors who work together for the products project itself. So it's unlike, you know, you can contribute to WordPress in other ways, but the specifics of the five for the future contribution is tied to these teams working in these teams or working for these teams. So currently, there are 22 different contribution teams for the WordPress open source project. And you can have contribution in core design. As I said, transition performances, so many other ones, but you can go to next page. And you can still casually contribute to these teams and the difference between casual versus pledged for the future commit contribution is that as a casual contributor, you do it whenever you feel like it, which is, you know, perfectly fine. There's pros and cons. For example, it's flexible. And there's low barrier to entry. You don't have to commit to you don't have to, you know, feel the pressure. And if you're, you know, you can't have certain amount of time every week. This is a perfect way to make it flexible and still contribute. But the cons of contribution is think about, you know, what if everybody is this casual contributors. There's no consistency or reliability that someone will do something at certain time, you know, it's not like work. If you're just volunteering, there's no pressure, which means maybe things don't get done at a certain, you know, time period. And they, they might not be familiar with the overall objectives or guidelines because they might not have time to go through or work with the larger part of the contributor team. So this pros and cons. And on the other hand, the place to contribute is more consistent because they may be either sponsored like ourselves and myself, or they might have, you know, certain set of time with a habit to dedicate, let's say even 30 minutes per week, that gets things done. Make sure, you know, you get five things done, some, you know, checklist, and it's consistent and accountable. And it leads to skill development, maybe it's more likely because you do it at a certain pace. You can have a stronger relationship with the team, and that all leads to project sustainability as we talked about. And there's also some things that might be more difficult, which is definitely you need more time to commit, even if it's 30 minutes, even if it's one hour. That is, you know, maybe reason why people don't pledge or commit, or sometimes people love to contribute so much that they see burnout. So this is, you know, needs to be balanced. There's no good about like having too much or too little. So it needs to be a balance. But one more time on the screen. Yeah, so the part I want to emphasize the project sustainability, we need pledged contributors who are reliable and say, I'm going to do this, you know, certain amount of hour per week consistently, continuously to make this project sustainable, because that's, you know, work needs to get done, and we need people to spend time on it. And that's where our future project is important. And next slide. So, so every contribution to WordPress supports its sustainability, and together what five of the future contributions make a significant, significant impact to sustain the WordPress project. So when you're, you know, debating if you should pledge or not or just get started. We want to remind that it is, you know, really important for your future, maybe to think about this pleasure to contribution, because that's that's what makes WordPress sustainable. And next page. And here's just a chart of different types of contribution in terms of impact. So, as I mentioned, casual WordPress contribution is still variable, and we need a lot of people to do things like, you know, just to maintaining small things or long term involvement. But five future contributions towards make WordPress contribution is the highest impact. And that's why we like to invite everybody to join this new course. Okay, so Courtney will explain how to pledge for the five future program. Thank you. So yeah, let's quickly take a look at how you can pledge your time for five to the future. So there are two ways to do it. The first way is to pledge as an individual. If you're an individual contributor, you can add your pledge by editing your WordPress.org profile. I'm curious how many folks here have a WordPress.org profile. Feel free to like use the little hand emoji. If not, that's okay. This will just, we can show you how to do that too. Yeah, if you do not have a WordPress.org profile, you can go to login.wordpress.org slash register. Here, I'm going to share that link in the chat. Oh, I do see your question, Erin, we'll get to that soon. And so you can go to this link and create a WordPress.org profile. Once you have a profile, there's a contribution tab as seen here in this screenshot. And then you can pledge your time as well as the team or teams, multiple teams, if you'd like, that you'd like to contribute to. And once you save your changes here, it shows up in your profile. And then the second way to pledge is as an organization. So if you run a company or if you're an entrepreneur, you can pledge to WordPress as a company. And it's the same link that now goes shared earlier, WordPress.org slash five. And on this site, there's a link for organizations. So you'll see that circled here in red. And so if you visit this link, you'll be able to pledge to WordPress as a company. And to remember, the 5% is purely aspirational. You do not need to contribute exactly 5%. It's just a guideline. So for smaller agencies, 5% might be tricky, but anything you can is appreciated anything any contributions you can make. So if you go to this link, you'll be able to see that you can actually list your company and you can list the number of folks from your company that you pledge to contribute. And you can add their WordPress.org profiles. And they can specify the amount of time that they want to contribute and the teams that they want to contribute to. So let's show you an example of that. So this is an example of a company pledge. You can add a brief description of your company and it shows the number of contributors that you have pledged from the company. And it also shows the profile photos or images of the individual contributors. So this example shows a pledge page which currently shows that each company has a certain number of people who have pledged to support WordPress. So it's pretty simple. That's how pledging works. I believe that we have over 140 companies from all over the world. It's always changing. So all of these companies have pledged to support WordPress. And I'll hand this off to now go to continue. So you may wonder why should I pledge for my Twitter and next please. Because contribution to WordPress can help you succeed. So not only it helps WordPress, but there's a benefit of contribution. That's why people do it. So I will explain some of the benefits and how it helps you as an individual contributors. We are going to talk about how we can help individuals and then organizations. And we'll start with with individual contributors. All right, so this is a great article that was published by Justin Tadlock on WP Tavern in 2021. And it's titled contributing to open source is better than any college degree. Those are pretty strong words, right? So it might not be the truth for anyone, but both now go and I are living examples of this. You can learn so much by putting your contributions out there, learning by doing, making mistakes, learning to fix them, building things. And you're doing this all alongside people all over the world at no monetary cost to you. One of the greatest benefits, in my opinion, is working alongside talented contributors from all over the world. The experience you gain, the ideas you exchange and the opportunities that you get by interacting with all of these contributors. It's all priceless. What you see pictured here on the right is a list of contributors for WordPress 6.4 and you could also be a part of the list like this. By the way, this is not all the folks that are contributing to WordPress 6.4. That's all we could fit on this page. When you contribute to WordPress, your WordPress.org profile or GitHub profile becomes your resume. So currently the meta team, the contribution team called meta, they are working hard to bring as many contributions as possible to the WordPress.org profiles. They've done a lot of great work and as a result, any translations a contributor does will show up in your profile. So there's a lot of information there which really helps anyone viewing your profile identify the work that you're doing. You could definitely write along resume if you want, but demonstrating that you have open source contributions shows tangible proof of your work. And it really stands out. So when you apply for a job and especially for WordPress-based company, when you have open source contributions to show, they really speak for you. The connections you build in the WordPress contributor community are similar to a trusting relationship at work, but many say that there is something uniquely special about collaborating as fellow contributors. Building a professional network of diverse individuals from different experience, age, location, background is not only valuable to your career, but it's also for your personal growth. This here is a very brief contributor journey in the WordPress project. Most if not all people start as a user and some move on to becoming casual contributors. Some people pledge themselves to fight for the future. When you pledge or contribute consistently, you have a greater chance of becoming a leader or expert in the project. And being that leader really brings you some professional advantages. Contributing can also be especially helpful in this time of economic slowdown because it gives you an opportunity as an individual to become a leader or expert in your field. And finally, on a lighter note, contributing to an open source project like WordPress makes you a part of the team shaping the future of the open web. You will make an impact you can't imagine by yourself or even through your work, all through building the software that runs over 40% of the web. We've talked about the benefits of fight for the future for individuals. So let's take a look at how it can help companies and organizations. As I mentioned earlier for individuals, open source contributions are a great way to gauge someone's talents and that they do good work. So for recruiters or people that are hiring, it makes their job easier. And when you're in the business of creating WordPress-based products, contributing will help you keep up to date on what is happening in WordPress. By contributing to WordPress, companies get a good idea on where the WordPress project is headed, which will allow making better business decisions and support the overall growth of the company. For those of you that run agencies, you know what your clients want. You can actually speak for your clients to the WordPress project and you can make changes in the project with your expertise. Companies contributing to fight for the future have a recognition in the WordPress project and can use their opportunities to represent their needs and their clients needs in the decision making processes. Companies can also use this opportunity to find growth opportunities along with WordPress. And finally, when your company contributes to WordPress, it establishes your credibility. Oftentimes we've seen many agencies that contribute to WordPress gain more work in clients because they were core contributors or that they've been involved in the WordPress community. So it's definitely a credential, especially for a small agency or company because when you're involved in the project, it shows the expertise that you have and the results for your business is immense. And so next I'll hand it back off to Naoko to talk about some tips for contributing. Thank you. So yeah, it's easy to commit or pledge because you can just edit your profile. But the hard part is how to continue contributing and you know, motivation and the good practice. So I will talk about that for individuals first. Next slide. Okay, so where you want to get started just in case this is your first time contributing is to find your team. Even you know that you have some experience in coding, there are many teams that you can help. So finding and knowing what teams are out there and what's the best match would be great help to find your interest and skill match. So there's a new contributor tool to make the WordPress that contribute and you can start your journey from here by setting your skill, interest and at the end of this widget you get the list of teams that are potentially a good match for you. So you can explore first. Next. So after you find your team, what you can do is go through the project and teams documentation. Each team has their own documentation. This is the second in the point. And I mean the third one, the team handbooks are always located at make that WordPress.org slash team. It's either core design something like that and slash handbook. And this is where you want to get started with the team. And in case you are brand new to WordPress contribution or open source contribution, you can also visit contributor handbook and learn WordPress also has a great resource in the shape of courses called contributing to contributing to WordPress. So this is a self-guided study that you can go through and yeah, make sure that you check out this documentation first. It talks about the community code of conduct diversity and statement and privacy policy so if you're the type of person you want to know everything at first you can go through it at first or you get familiar as you go. That helps you to be a part of this community. And next please. Okay, and we also recommend connecting with the community, not just contributing by yourself. It's best to do it with others. There's always meetings for the team that you can find the schedule here and some teams, especially core team has new contributor chats. So if you're just joining, it's best to, you know, to say hi and meet other new contributors so you can feel the community and then also get motivated as they go through the same journey as you are. And you can also, I think you meet up or mention they are made of sword camps, new generation events that are happening all over the world. So I can't say for sure there will be other contributors, but definitely the meet up organizers are contributors so you can chat with them how you know they got involved or if they know any advice and just get connected. And as Courtney mentioned, it's a good networking topic to talk about contribution because people who are already doing do it for a reason that they like it. They have the skill. So it's a great connector to find people that are interested in the same thing. And we also recommend creating your contribution habit, set aside consistent time for contribution, even 15 minutes 30 minutes, but do it at the same time and don't miss it. I have a friend in Japan contributor who's dedicating one hour on Friday to always translate something. And it's a great habit to build your, you know, contribution consistency. And he brings along other people to join on a slack to just do it. It's just a self contribution hour. And it kept them going and it's, you know, slowly growing the contributor base so you can encourage others and motivate others by saying that I'm doing it and actually doing it every week. So those are the tips. And next please. So what we definitely recommend is starting slow, figure out what's a good skill match and what's your interest and do it long term, even at a small pace. It doesn't have to be 5% in the beginning or even ever because just doing 5% for one week isn't as good as doing it 30 minutes for a long long term. So the build up leads to me for contribution. So we definitely recommend so start and long term commitment. And next, and this from here I will have some recommendations for the companies that are sponsoring contributors in their company. We recommend setting a strategy for the company. Next one. So, you can always say, okay, here's a certain hour per week, you can contribute to anything you want. That's also appreciated definitely, but sometimes that these two burnout or not seeing the return of investment and they quit doing that because that needs to be some positive impact for the company for these contributors to be spending that time because otherwise, you know, why do it? Maybe because of the reason that you want them to do it, but we want the companies to also be benefited from the contribution. Otherwise, there's no sustainability for them either. So our recommendation or tips are identifying goals for the contribution. What can you achieve through your members contribution? You know, it's not like pushing agenda or anything like that. But more like, you know, maybe you want to grow certain skill for your employees, or you want to be recognized as a contributing company, which, you know, those are great goals and identify those and know that among the business and the contributors so that they are all aligned with the company values and teams. And much employee skills, even you want them to develop new skill, you know, make sure there's a good match for the make team needs. You know, identify high impact contribution areas within the make team, which is, for example, you have a certain product that can, you know, create great feedback for certain part of the WordPress. So that's the high impact area. Instead of spending more time on, you know, something else that's not aligned with your business. So think about what can be a high impact for the WordPress and also for your company. What if you're a hosting company who is suffering from users asking lots of WordPress questions, maybe you want to, you know, dedicate some time towards clear documentation so that you can just always point people to there. So just think about, you know, what's a good match. And again, allocated dedicated weekly time for balance and sustained contributions. We know some companies spend one Friday whole Friday of every month or I think it's every month. They have certain number of employees work on five of the future contribution. That is a great way. It can be weekly time, it can be, you know, whole day in a month, make it dedicated and regular allocated time. Some companies host Contributor Day within the company. I think it just happened for your plugin company. They do it and invite community people outside of the company employees. This is one way to do it. Maybe it's one way, one day. So it's, you know, maybe there's a little bit of planning but you don't have to make it the weekly thing. Maybe this is some way to start it. So think about a way that you can just get started. And next, after you start, sorry, scale up. Here are some tips for scaling up, share learnings internally, so not just contributing. Maybe write a post about what you learned about WordPress or project or, you know, learning opportunities. And not done contributions. Keep track. There's a way to keep track on WordPress.org side from the user profile, but it doesn't always, you know, stay on there. So maybe you might want to keep notes on what you've done and not for contribution to release, for example, should be, you know, kept record. You should keep that record. And celebrate wins. If your employees do a great job, it's great to, you know, even announce it, mention it to that person and publicly because it will encourage other companies to be inspired. Also, share the knowledge within the company and outside because there's so little information about company contribution at the moment. So any experience that you think is variable for other companies, it's a great way to, you know, contribute to encourage other companies to do it. Many experienced contribution companies start building a contribution team. So for example, automatic, there are 100 people working for time to do WordPress or contribution. And there are teams for companies team is for focused on learning. And my team is focused on contributors. So it's good idea to break things down and have teams of people working on certain focused goals. Yeah, some and other tips, rotations is an idea. Maybe bring in everybody to spend this month contributing and switch to another person. So rotation, it doesn't have to be necessarily the same people, you can always edit the profile to switch who is the file for the future employees. And if you're so good with this experience, maybe it's time to hire for time contributors. They're contributors who are looking for support of companies who want to be hired to do for time contribution. Maybe you should definitely talk to us and figure out who they are and or maybe you have new people hiring and then you can hire someone who is already contributing. And yeah, that's way to scale up. So there's always opportunity for companies to do more and be benefited from it. So exercise. I think this can be shared later but there are some companies that have dedicated pages for contributing for WordPress. So we call it like showcase. They talk about which areas they dedicate their employees to or what are the wins what are the their experience are and it gets updated. So I would recommend taking a look and who's doing interesting work and it's a good way to learn from others. And yeah, I think it maybe it's a good example of what you can do to share what you're doing. So yeah, we'll share the slides later. And yeah, we've been hearing some feedback. The 5% sounds really scary. It's a lot of work, a lot of time, but I want to make sure that we know the 5% is aspirational and any contribution is viable for WordPress's future. Next slide. So instead of focusing on 5%, let's focus on the future. That's what we're here for. And it doesn't have to be exactly 5%. It sounds nice, 5% for the future, but 5% is just the representation of small percentage of what you do. And that should be dedicated to WordPress's future if you're interested in sustaining this project. And 5% for the future has some future ideas and plans and have a list of things here. So even though we're getting better and better at recording some types of contribution and showing them to each user's profile page, it's not all recorded yet. So we need to do more of that to make sure that small contributions or unrecorded contributions always show up. We also need to do a little bit of a better job of onboarding new pledges. So if you are just signing up now, unfortunately, not much happened right after it. So we need to do more like email or documentation, that kind of things, which is also the next one that resources for companies is needed. And we've been hearing a lot about not knowing what to work on, which is what's the priority for each team, what's the areas that contribution is needed. It takes time for contributors to find out unless you're very deep into the project. So that's the area that we need to improve to make sure anybody can find what is needed to be worked on. And that's the area we want to make an improvement to make the pledges have interested work to have an impact on the work. So in the future, we hope sponsor contributors are supporting one two contributors, helping out and doing the sometimes it's sponsored the word contributors doing small work that's not super fancy or recognized but keep the project going. So I hope we will encourage more individual contributors by having a good base of sponsor contributors doing their work. Okay. And Courtney will wrap it up. Yeah, so I know we've thrown a lot of information and links at you so we have all these resources listed out in these slides. So we will share a link to these slides in the meetup events comments. So make sure you check back for that. And I will include these links and the resources all the links that were shared previously. And there's a lot for you to check out. And that's it for the content that we had to share with you today on about five feature in contributing. Thank you for being here with us today. And also feel free to ask any questions in the chat. I did see one or two go by so I would like to scroll down a scroll back up to find those. But we have our contact information here if you have any questions, or just want to reach out. We'd love to help you along your contribution journey. I do remember earlier that Aaron asked a question about the average hours that someone spends making a pledge to contribution. That's a good question, because it varies right now go. So based on this was before work camp us. The number is about 5.9 hours is the average company sponsored contributors hours. And I have more actually so yeah this is interesting. Average number of employees is 4.49. So the minimum is one companies that contribute to one person. And there are I think 100 is automatic is the largest body of contributors so it varies it's you know but by average it's about 4.5. So yeah. Good to know. I'm just scrolling back to see if there's any other questions. It's all the links that we shared with you. Are there any other questions or you want to share in the experience contribution experience with us. Nathan says I think my biggest hesitation comes from a friend who tried to contribute, but his code was consistently rejected and it was a frustrating experience for him. So things may have changed. Yeah. Yeah, this is one area we are also trying to tackle which I didn't mention, but for the next release. I mean, not the next release, but next release cycle because we're already into 5.4, a 6.4 release cycle, but 6.5 we are going to run a cohort of mentorship program for new contributors and core team is planning to have more workshops or you know, onboarding with the real, you know, code experience. So I think it would be a good idea to look into that. And yeah, for example, Courtney team. 2018 also has a guide program. Right. So that's right. Yeah, we started the guide program. Tina is one of our new contributors that went through the guide program recently. It's a brand new thing. So if you're interested in contributing to the training team. There's a lot of no code contributions, but there are opportunities for code contributions to the training team, which mainly focuses on learn dot word press dot org. So, yeah, every team has different kinds of focus focuses that that folks can contribute to. Like I said, there are plenty of no code contributions and there are lots of ways for you to contribute back to WordPress. Yeah, something I've heard is that this isn't code specifically, but it's a good idea to also look for areas contribution where you can help start small. For example, there's needs for block content creators block it themes block patterns and blocks. So those are like smaller component compared to core, which is required to have like very high standard and as a complexity related to everything else. So we need to definitely help new contributors find those areas that they can succeed from the beginning. So, yeah, absolutely. Well, thank you for sharing Tina. Like we were glad to hear that. It's been a good experience for you. So, especially since the guide program is new. Any other thoughts, questions? I share the link to the contributor mentorship program that I mentioned so we don't have the next to cohort call for, you know, contributors, but we will announce something here if anything is updated. And that will be for. That'll be next year, right? Yeah, really next year. Yeah. Great. Good to know. So if we don't have any more questions or comments, we'll wrap up a couple of minutes early, a few minutes early. If you think of anything that you want to ask us in the future are here's our contact info. Pretty easy to find on the making WordPress slack as well. So, yeah, reach out if anything comes up for you and thanks for joining us again today. Tina.