 I'm Naoko Takano, and I work for WordPress automatic. I'm going to talk about why mature open source project needs our culture of mentorship. I am an open source project manager. I'm in this role for about over two years. But before then, I was a localization manager for WordPress.com, which is a blogging service run by my company, Automatic, which is based on the open source version of WordPress, of course. And before that, I was a support. And before that, I was a freelance web designer. And I studied fine art in school, college. And I wanted to become a graphic artist, but now I'm here. I now work on the Five for the Future program, which is the initiative to encourage contribution from user companies. So for hours, it's hosting agencies, product companies, such as plugins and themes. And you can visit the initiative on WordPress.org slash five. So the topic is why mature open source needs mentorship culture. WordPress has been around for 20 years. And as I've spoken in the keynote this morning, maybe you already know why mentorship culture and mentorship is necessary for the open source project to be sustainable and thrive for years. So at Automatic, we're a little bit unique in a sense. We use WordPress so much, because one of the biggest business at Automatic is WordPress.com, which is the source version of WordPress. So we are kind of a hosting company, in a sense, which is only where you can only use WordPress. But we are hosting WordPress. And 5% of Automatic employees, which is about 100 people, are working four times as four-time OSS contributors. And I'm part of this program's contributor experience team. I'm part of team of two. And we are working on this five-foot feature initiative. And others are on, of course, CMS itself, software, infrastructure, events, dev rails, design and management leadership, such as. And then that's about 100 people. So that's the world best. But so we've been around for 20 years. And we are facing new challenges these years. So Linux has been around 30 years. We're maybe kind of falling the same similar path. But maybe we have unique challenges, because our users are not always tech savvy. They might not even know how to write an HTML. They might only access WordPress dashboard from their smartphone. They might not even own a laptop. So we have very diverse user base. So there might be artists, shop owners, people like that are using WordPress. And we want to embrace and scale with them, because we really need to understand them and work with them to be used by people like that. So WordPress contributor community has 22 teams, including core design, mobile accessibility, political science, translation support, events, testing, ename it, we have it. And there are tens of thousands of contributors working in any of the team, sometimes multiple teams. And they are, I'm sure we cover almost all countries. But active contributors are about in 50 countries. And like I said, they are diverse profile people, not necessarily programmers. There might be just hobbyists, bloggers, and designers. And of course, people who are excited about all things, open source, and coding, and grading. So we have very diverse profiles of people. And when we look into core contributors, which is the WordPress software itself, we call it core. And we have plugins, which is the functionality added to the main software and theme is kind of design part of it, template. So core is just the maybe like kernel WordPress. Each release, we usually have two or three releases a year. Five to 800 contributors are involved. They may only have one prop, but we count them. And it ranges about five to 800 contributors. And there are 30 co-committers in a variable range of activities. And hundreds of companies contribute. And besides that, there are, of course, document writers and translators. They're not counted in that 5 to 100. There are people who received props, I would say. And this is the stats. So this is about two years, over two years. We've released 5.7 to 6.3, which is the latest. And the dog report is the brand new people who has registered and had the first prop in that release. So we have a pretty good range, about 30% give or take, first time contributors. But so I think Linux was about 50. So they may be fixing one thing or two that they wanted to fix. So we can say we are welcoming a number of people each release. But what this shows is, OK, 6.1 is a little bit unique. I think it was the COVID bump. So ignoring that, I would say it's increased, but we don't know what next release will look like. It's hard to say we are steadily increasing the number of contributors who are sticking around for the second time. So that's the biggest problem. We notice people are excited. They want to get started. They do get started, but we're lacking the system to have them stick around. For example, this is a street translation contributor stats. The little slur, which is orange-yellowish part, percentage of people who became promoted this year who has been in the contribution profile or user over one year. So I would say those dark blue part, maybe there are people who join a new language team. So maybe there is nobody doing it. So they become what we call translation editors. It's like a maintainer for translation. So I would say it's not as significant as those people who are promoted, who's been active and became maintainers of translators. We have not seen that generational switch. I'm also to be blamed. I'm a translator for Japanese. We've been struggling to kind of passing the button to the next generation. 20 years, same people, maybe 10 or 15 years. Many of the languages teams, which is also communities, they haven't been active in mentoring next generation. So maybe you've all heard of bus factor. So what if some of these people who are not passing the information knowledge practices to the next generation, maybe this whole community might disappear in, let's say, France. There are five people, I can't say for sure, but a handful of people who know how things work, maybe they quit. Maybe they get old. Maybe they have life and they can't do anymore. And maybe they disappear. And what happens to the community and what happens to that area of contribution, it's not sustained. So in 2014, which is already nine years ago, our project co-founder, Maeng-Wong, said that it's a good rule of thumb for us to scale is all the companies who benefit from WordPress would contribute 5% of their resources to the project itself. So this was first time. It was raised. We have to work towards something together. It can't be just automatic or just a handful of companies creating this. We need to do it together. And let's do it. So that was just a call for action. And then this site was created five years after that. Because there's been some talks about, OK, we need to contribute. We should contribute. And people are starting to change their mind about being part of the WordPress itself, not just the plugins and themes and all the components of a project that are benefiting themselves. So 5% of the future program was initiated in 2019. And what we have is this website and mechanisms for companies to pledge, which is saying, hey, we're going to give 40 hours to the project. You can have my employees work on anything WordPress. And we have a pretty good number of companies committed to say that. But then COVID happened. And things kind of stagnated for years. But then, for example, Bullhost is one of the hosts that has many WordPress users. They have these six people contributing 49 hours per week across six teams. And we've been having these very active co-contributors create WordPress. And they believe that it's benefiting their business. So they're doing that for time. So we have these companies and active. And they each get this profile. This is mine. You have a regular profile page and these badges for contributing to the team. And you have these activity streams. So you can check who's actually active. But right now, it's really hard to say if people are making impact for activities or contribution or not. So that's the next challenge that we're going to face. But we have that. So with those companies and individual profiles, we have been able to somewhat learn about company pledge effectiveness. So right now, we have about 200 companies pledging to say that their employees can work during their paid hours towards WordPress. And about 50% of the companies are making high impact while 60% has become inactive. So we also have this excited raising hands companies and a gap between them getting actually active and staying active. So people just struggle to level up. They can get started. That's not a problem. At the same time, experienced contributors, they don't know anything. They're not sure how to make the situation better. They work hard. And they burn out. And they have more responsibilities because they're the only one who knows how to do some things. We need to change that. And we need to be sustainable, which is we need to grow with a better plan, not just work hard and guilt-tripping people to contribute because that itself doesn't work. And we need to change our mind to say mentorship is a high priority task for us to work on. We need to, of course, work on something in front of you. But at the same time, creating this sustainable project is also our high priority. We need to keep saying that and creating this culture. And we need a repeatable framework for nurturing for contributors for each team. So yeah, we don't have a lot of things. But we've identified what we need. And we are clear about that right now. This is Josefa, our executive director. Just this year in August, she said ask this question, how can we make sure WordPress just lasts any of us? So when we die, our co-founder dies years, 20 years, 100 years, how can we make sure WordPress is still around? We are very serious about this. And we need to create a system for that, for our children to survive, this children of our work to survive. So slowly but repeatedly bringing up the topic in the community to develop the mind shift, culture shift. We kept talking about mentorship and with different bumps of COVID and getting busy and other priority coming up, we kept going for nine years, I guess now. But we are getting very serious now after this hired us. We've realized this is now one of the highest priority for the community to focus on the future. So next, we need to take an action. I love this resource. You can see it, see the link in my presentation. That's linked for my talk. There's a great open source report about mentorship done by Linux Foundation. It's just a really great resource, so I recommend it. So we need to get out of this vicious cycle of over committing. We see a lot of contributors do this. They are excited. They can't do it. They are happy to do it. And then they over commit and burn out and get tired and disengaged and they leave. But we need to balance their commitment with some shift to mentorship effort so that the growth happens within themselves and also the mentees. So they can grow together and the engagement is sustained and the community expands. So this happens sometimes accidentally. I think it has happened to many people, but we just don't have a good system to make sure that is repeated over and over. So that's where we are. So we've had different initiatives besides 5.2 for the future. And the first one is the community team had event mentors all the time. And this started in 2015 and core really squad mentorship happened in 2019. And in 2023 is the last two are happening. And I'm going to talk mostly about contributor mentorship program which is our project right now. So this happened around August, around the WordPress six point release. So we had, we called it a pilot cohort. So we're kind of testing the water. And over four weeks, 13 pairs of mentors and mentees were matched based on their needs and experience. And they engage in activities such as self-directed courses. We have this self-directed courses that's on learn.wordpress.org. And they took open source basics, how to communicate within open source or WordPress project. And they did that. And then they mentees mentors check in about their needs, what they want to do next. So this is very customized for each person because we thought that's the best way to get people started. They have a tailored program or mentors to help them out. And they engaged in training team, core team, polygots and core, several different variety of teams depending on the mentees need. And we had an onboarding workshop for different teams. And some of them contributed to each team. So this wasn't based on projects. It's more about getting people onboarded into team and helping them find things to do and answer questions, things like that. Oops. And they also shadowed the release cycle which was happening around the time of this pirate cohort. And this is just kind of a chart for what happened. They get matched and they take courses and get feedback. So this was, we would say this was successful because we would say some of the mentees are still very active and they went to become actually one of the mentees was from Spain and he wanted to be reactivated, he wanted to be a part of his community. And then also there's some people who received force props in the core and they learned how things work. So they are excited to try it out in the next release. So it depends on the mentee or their ability. But we would say we saw some success but we're still kind of learning the process. So this is my finding based on program builders perspective. So it's not for mentors or mentees but from my perspective. So these are four that I learned based on the pirate project. So program creation takes resources. We've been talking how mentorship is important for years but not many things happened because we didn't prioritize, we didn't put resource. And I was put into this role this year and my teammate, he started last year and then things started working. I'm sure other companies could put more people and we could speed it up but you can't do things on the side. It's really hard. Maybe it could happen but it could be very, very slow. So if you're interested in actually making it happen, make sure resources, people have this as their focus. They don't have to be sponsored or they don't have to be working as a sponsor contributor but make sure someone is looking at this as their project. They own it. As it happens to me, I'm also trying to make it happen for my own community in Japan but since it's not my focus at work, I kind of put it aside and it's not happening. So it's kind of my learning also. So and our variability is crucial for mentor and mentee. And this also depends on individuals but we need to make sure that we pick right timing and right match for community because when mentors are busy or mentees are busy, things don't work out very well. So pick your timing if you're doing a cohort which is a time and group based this work learning process but then if you're doing that right before release or during holiday in Europe, maybe it doesn't work. So make sure you pick a time that everybody can really focus on things and even for four weeks. And currently helps mentors and mentees. We just got started and first round we got a lot of feedback about we're not sure what's happening and when things are sometimes confusing even though we wrote a lot of documentation it wasn't clear enough to communicate. So even program itself is perfect to the design if it's not communicate while people get confused and they don't follow the process. So this is a good reminder. And over time I noticed that awareness encourages mentorship. So this is not just about this program itself but I'm noticing it. Whenever I notice this opportunity for mentorship I tend to find match between mentor and mentee or I act as a mentor and it happens if you start kind of noticing things. So when people say if you have something in mind you start noticing that in the world. If you're pregnant you see kids toys and things that you didn't know existed before. So if you have mentorship mindset you'll start noticing the opportunities and what you can do in a small steps even within the community to encourage this culture. So next steps for us. We are thinking about cohort number two which is going to be happening soon because WordPress is releasing new 6.4 next year early. And as I said the schedule needs to be super clear so we need to develop the schedule beforehand and share it in a Google calendar and so we don't just dump all the documentation text in one batch so people get notification and such and we need more documentation resources. Of course we all have handbooks for each team which should explain how to get involved but at the same time maybe they're not always findable or maybe we are still missing some parts for brand new people so we need to work on that and we're going to do that before getting started with the cohort. And reputable program for teams. This is kind of vague but we are thinking about maybe using some kind of notification or automation using GitHub to create this program itself, cohort to itself so that let's say this team wants to run their own mentorship program such as training team is doing that right now. So maybe they can reuse that source to just dumping people and then the managers can follow the steps that's existing. So we're still far away from that but if anybody has any good ideas about that or samples that you've noticed I'd love to hear that and all the future announcement about our mentorship program in the future is going to be posted in this WordPress community team handbook. So we don't have the announcement for the cohort number two yet but it will be posted in there once it's published. So I would say you can start the mentorship culture also. I got involved through just an accidental I was a user and I became kind of involved by starting to answer questions and transit texts and then I got mentored by many people who helped me to come here. So if you can find someone who needs help getting started or going to next level I would say just reach out and help them out and you can see the benefit on your side as a mentor and talk about mentorship and build up the culture and keep it going. So if you have any mentorships or sustainable community topics you want to talk about I'd be happy to meet you. So I'm a little early but I'm opening up for questions. Thank you. Oh, sorry. And we have a work in Asia happening in Taipei in March 7th to 9th. So I noticed many people from different part of the world. If you want to meet the international and Asian world press community we have really cool guests coming up announced being announced soon. So if you're around please come see us in Taipei in March. Thank you. Any questions? Thank you for a great talk. It was awesome. I was wondering what were some of the things that you were showing during the workshops and other self-directed courses that you spoke about? Were they more just introductory things for people that are looking for good first issues or was it more about how to use WordPress or something like that? It wasn't about how to use and I can show you the self-directed course. We have this platform called Learn WordPress and we have some open source or contribution liberated contents. So we kind of reused it since it's already here. It wasn't made for this mentorship program but it worked very well. So for example, we have, this is one of, this could be like similar to workshop. This is onboarding for community team and before that they went to maybe something like introduction to contributing WordPress and finding your team. So it wasn't about how, even though Learn WordPress has how to use WordPress, we have contribution content and we want to build more and then also we want to write mentor training courses too. That's great. So how many, this is my last question because I'm sure someone else has some others. How many people did you start out with your first cohort and how many are you aspiring to get for your second? So yeah, this first cohort was 13 pairs or 13 mentees. So it's very small. So listening to all the talk, we're still kind of getting started. And the next one we tried to expand to double. So yeah, about 25 maybe. So it's still small scale since we only have few people who are managing. Yeah, gotta start somewhere. Yeah, yeah. Well, best of luck. Thank you so much. Thank you. And which community are you from? By dense open source. Okay, cool. Thank you. Any other questions? And if you know any students or anybody who wants to get started with the open source, even though they don't have any kind of, any training skill, we're welcome. You can, they can organize events. They can be just friendly people. Thank you. Thank you for your talks. And I'm a little bit confused. So I want to clarify my understanding. So you explained about the mentorship program. And so what, but the title is mentorship culture. So what, what did the difference between the mentorship culture and also what does the mentorship training do for the culture? Okay, thank you. Yes, I need more clarity. So when I talk about mentorship culture, so as I said, like Warpess community wasn't aware of the need for mentorship process. I guess we're not still there at 100% that we realize this is needed. That's why we still don't have good, you know, generation switch like I showed. So the culture itself is not just about the program. It's just the program is a way to, you know, realize the culture. But what I'm saying about the culture is the realization for community members or project members to think about the future. Think about the sustainability, sustainability in the sense of project sustainability. So, which is something people overlook because you're only focused on like this year, next release. But when we talk about 30 years from now or you know, 100 years from now, that's when we need to realize this culture is necessary all the time. Yeah, I hope it is helpful. Thank you. So then what do you do for the growing the culture? So the mentorship program itself also training the, cultivating the mentor set, is it correct? Yeah, so we have the mentorship program I talked about is the third line. And we have had mentorship attempt in the past and you know, we already here and there, we had mentorship to, you know, kind of train the next generation of people to do things that are being done. But yeah, right now I think, so I need to talk a little bit about the relationship about the five for the future and this mentorship program. This was partially designed to get these five for the future pledged company to be active. You know, maybe I wasn't explained enough. So we have people who want to contribute but they're not getting active enough. So we want to set a system where people who want to become active can become active through the help of mentorship or some kind of better training system. So that's the current, yeah, situation. Okay, thank you for your explanation. Yeah, thank you. Any other questions? We're good. So yeah, thank you for seeing and please talk to me after and looking forward to meeting you. Thank you.