 Courtney is a tech savvy developer advocate and music lover. As a developer advocate at GoDaddy Pro, Courtney combines her passions for teaching and learning with her expertise in WordPress to empower developers. Not only does she outreach to the developer community, but she also gives back by contributing to the WordPress training team and learn WordPress. A founding board member of the WordPress community collective, Courtney is dedicated to funding WordPress contributors and fostering a vibrant community. When she's not working with her WordPress magic, you can find her attending to her garden or spreading on her seven-string electric violin. Nice. Yeah, it goes down almost to the base range. Close. It's like very close to as much as the base can get. Anyway, that's a talk for a different conference. Maybe at a WordCamp US party. I don't know. I don't know. We'll see. Hi, everyone. It's good to see you. I want to see some friends in the crowd. I want to get a gauge before we get started on this of who in the room has ever in any way contributed to WordPress, whether that is by logging in to make WordPress Slack or like running a meetup group or something like that. I see a couple of hands. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Some of you, I know you well enough that I could probably take a guess which teams or which areas of the project that you have contributed to. Who has ever hit the point as a contributor of wondering, where's all the information of missing something? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's me. So I want to say that today's talk, We Are They, is for everybody at any point along the journey of either you're new to the idea that WordPress even has contributions and what does that mean? Or you're a core committer and you're at the point where you're still lost some days and we all get there, right? So I want to say that today's talk is called We Are They and it's about fostering belonging as a WordPress contributor and what that looks like. So my background is that in 2005, I think I found WordPress in 2009, I began contributing to WordPress. What do I mean by that? Well, I wanted to get into, we can't mid-Atlantic in 2009, tickets had sold out. The only way to get in was to volunteer to do something. So I volunteered to check people in at the desk. So from the beginning of my time at a WordPress event, there I was as a contributor. I was helping this. Remember WordPress, the software is open source and we'll talk about what that means in a minute, but it's all possible because people volunteer to do things and none of this would happen if people weren't volunteering to do the thing. So that's how I got into my first WordPress event and I've been hooked on contributing since then. Through Story in 2014, I attended my very first contributor day and I'll share a photo of that experience with you and tell you what it was really like, but that's how I really got connected to teams and I'll explain again what that means soon. I became a team rep, so held a role of facilitating meetings for one of our teams in WordPress in 2015 and then I took some time off and I had kids. So my kids are now almost seven and about five and when they were little babies, it was really hard to take them to camps. I took one when a brand like six months old with me, but it really was hard to be able to get out to camps for a long time and around the time that I could start doing that again, pandemic. So I still resurfaced during the pandemic in the Make WordPress Slack for the training team. Rejoined, I was teaching at a boot camp at this time, so I have instructed in the programming languages. I know enough to ask appropriate questions to someone like Catam who spoke before me, but I would not consider myself a senior engineer by any means. I could get someone up to being advanced care support or entry junior dev in terms of my code, but it's enough to have an understanding a little bit of what's going on. I began working at GoDaddy because I really wanted to contribute more and got hooked and I flat out called my manager during a word camp event online and said, I believe so strongly in this work and I would really like to get sponsored to do this thing. And if you ever hear of an opening and wouldn't you know a few months later he said, hey, I have this developer advocate role opening up. Would you consider applying please and you'll have to contribute as part of your job? Are you okay with that? Yes. Yes, I am. So as a review, let's take a look at the mission of WordPress given that it's open source software. And this is fascinating sometimes to read. You can find it at wordpress.org slash about WordPress is designed for everyone. Who's our target audience? WordPress is designed for everyone. We believe great software should work with minimum setup emphasized accessibility, performance, security, ease of use. The basic WordPress software is simple and predictable, offering powerful features for growth and success. WordPress is open source software supporting the idea of democratizing publishing and the freedoms that come with open source is a large community of people collaborating on and contributing to this project. So whether you are checking guests in as my first spot or you are contributing to any one of the teams, that's how all of this happens. That's how this software gets released. That's how you have a piece of free software powering 43% of the internet that anyone could take and use and you don't have to pay for WordPress itself, the software, not going to have to pay for that. WordPress is welcoming and inclusive. I don't know about you, but sometimes I struggled in my journey to feel like it was welcoming and inclusive. Sometimes it was my own fears and sometimes it was something else. But the mission right now is that our contributors' passions drive the success of WordPress, which in turn helps you reach your goals. WordPress contributors' work around the globe have dedicated countless hours to build a tool that offers anyone a voice. That's powerful. That makes things possible. The flow of information possible. The way in which we understand what's happening around the globe, the concepts that if a business owner in some remote part of the world wants to set up shop and start selling things, they can do that. They need to work with WordPress a little bit and customize it to their needs. But WordPress, the tool, is what's making all of that possible around the globe. That's why we have so much of the internet share that we do. So that mission statement mentioned the four freedoms. If you're unfamiliar with it, again, it's on wordpress.org slash about. The four freedoms are to run the program for any purpose, to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish. The freedom to redistribute. So you can get WordPress, put it on your client sites. You could get WordPress, change the code, and also redistribute that. There are some slight caveats. You have to credit things appropriately if you are going to fork and redistribute, but can help point you towards those things. And that freedom to redistribute copies of your modified versions. So those are the four freedoms of WordPress. That's what you are allowed to do. These are part of some of the philosophy of open source software. So understanding that, you might sometimes say, there's a release coming. Why did they do that? Have you ever asked yourself that about WordPress? Why? Why? Getting a head nod from a core committer. Why? Yes. So that's my friend James. This was taken during work in Europe, but I love the quote behind him is why. And I'll make sure that he sees this later. Think about the phrase, why did they do that? It could be read with intonation in a few different ways. Why did they do that? Why did they do that? Why did they do that? Why did they do that? Different meanings, right? So think about how that applies. About a month ago, I saw this tweet from Brad Williams on the left-hand side. And I know it's really small, but the tweet is nothing quite like logging into WordPress dashboard and seeing this, and it's a wall of notifications. Why did they do that? And that's a lot of plugins that are putting or themes that are putting those notifications all over the logged in experience of WordPress. And why is that going on? On the right side, what we see is there is a new feature coming out in 6.3. You'll be able to hit probably Command K on your keyboard, I think is going to be what the shortcut does. And you'll get this little search that pops up and the name for it right now, a working name is called Wayfinder. There it is happening on the screen. This gif was taken from the core blog. And so that's an example of the Wayfinder, or it might also be Command Palette or Command Center or there are a few things about this name that are happening. And so these are two recent instances of why did they do that? Happening in WordPress. Just keep that part in mind. And you might say, well, okay, so it's open source software and I have opinions about this and I'm going to go do something about that. But where do I look? How do I figure it out? Well, I'm just going to go to Twitter and shout it into the ether, right? That's what we do. That's not the solution here, folks. So the solution is to find in the sea of people a way to get to your answer. This is a photo of the community at work camp Europe taken just two weeks ago. And in that mix of people are the people that have the answers. So why did they do that? Can you find a person that can help explain why they did that? In that whole picture right now, if I said, can you point out the person that I should go talk to about the core fields API? Where are they there? When I go talk to in that crowd, that was Europe. Are they in that photo? Actually, no. The person to talk to is not in that photo. Oh, okay. So now where do I go? What do I do? That crowd can be a little intimidating for a lot of reasons. Figuring out how to navigate a big sea can be intimidating. And so we have to look at this a little bit more closely. In the photo that I have of James here, in the quote above it, it is saying, action is the foundation key to all success. Together let's shape a brighter future of work, empowering our teams to thrive. So James is talking in this presentation about something he's working on, which is great. But I think about the same thing when it comes to how WordPress comes together. There are teams, there are focuses within that, and somebody is going to have the answer. So remember I showed you that tweet with all those WordPress notifications? On the left-hand side, this is technically a link. What we're using for our presentation right now is WordPress. My slides are in WordPress, and they're powered by WordPress, and I'll show the link on the screen at the end. So on the left-hand side, the reason you see a WordPress embed there, for those of you who don't know what that means, that's a link to the article about the WordPress feature notification project. So when I saw that article go up, I went back to the person and they wrote that tweet and said, could you go comment on this thing? This team is launching a survey, and they need some data back. And so there's your opportunity to be part of the solution, part of answering, why is this happening in WordPress now? On the right-hand side, there is the link to the article on GitHub. It's not an article, but it's a whole discussion thread on GitHub. You might say, oh, I'm not a developer. I don't want to touch GitHub. If you're not, it's kind of like commenting on a post. So if you go to this spot and you've got an account and you can log in, you could go in here and leave a comment. And it's kind of like going to a post and leaving a comment with your opinions about what we should name that particular feature. But it's hard to track some of that information. It could be really hard. You could see that big sea of people that I showed us from work in Europe and say, where do I even begin? How do I find out where the conversation is happening? How do I pick a team? How do I know what contribution the project wants or needs? How do I do that while I'm working? I have to pay my bills. How do I do this or that so we have barriers to entry? We absolutely need to take care of having our basic life needs met. How do we tack on this extra thing sometimes? Fear of rejection and failure, that's probably where I was stuck for a long time. For some people, it can be language. If WordPress is global and the main language that we're operating in is English, how do people get involved if that's not their first language? It could also be things like, I took time out for health and other personal reasons. And also, I just didn't understand processes. So I used to be that person that was stuck and frustrated. And why is this happening? It's madness. And I want to help them bring change. But I don't know what to do about that. So what I did was find a contributor day. And this photo is a large contributor day. And again, some people will say, oh, that's still really big. Yeah, that's the biggest one there is. We're at Camp Europe. The first one that I found, I'll show a picture of in a minute. But there are all these tables that are there. And there's a big group photo of contributor day. And basically, there are lots of teams in this WordPress project. We have 22 of them now. And we're about to look at what their sites are. But when we look through something like this, we go into this room. And we hear a presentation, a short description, about what each of these teams do. You put a face with the team. Oh, I can do that, except that here at Montclair, we're not doing a contributor day. And many camps don't have them right now. And that's fine. So we're going to look through, if you're not able to get to a contributor day and still would like to find out where the information and the decisions are happening and have a say in that process and how to get there. So I mentioned my first contributor day. And I have a hunch that Catam might be in this photo. It's a bad photo. But I went digging through my Instagram archives for this one. My very first contributor day. And so it was summertime in New York, and it was hot. And I don't really know my way around New York City very well. And I was staying about 45 minutes by train out of the city with a friend. Because at the time, I was not sponsored to go to these things. And it was out of my own pocket. So staying in the city can be a little expensive if you're just traveling. I think most expensive city to get a hotel in in the world, probably. So I was lost, confused. I had never been to a contributor day. I've never been a part of any of the teams in WordPress. I didn't know what was going on. And I was a little intimidated about the people backed by the window. Because the people backed by the window were talking about the rest API. And I wasn't a developer. I hardly knew PHP at this point in my career. I definitely didn't know JavaScript. So I had no concept of what does the rest API even do. So I was afraid to talk to those people. True story. But then I saw these friendly people sitting at the marketing and the training table. And I'm a former high school business education teacher. I was working on my MBA at the time. So I said, I'll just sit down between these two tables and see which one seems to be talking about things that interest me most because I teach marketing. But I also teach dev. And so I was teaching HTML and CSS at that point. And that's it. So I sat down in between the two. And I drifted over towards the training team table. And very true story. I was all about teaching users how to use post-formats, highlight of my career in WordPress, and way that I started contributing. So the training team makes materials at the time. They were specifically for meetup organizers or teachers. And I'm like, perfect. I'm a teacher. I know how to write a lesson plan. We made these materials so that other people could instruct about how to do the thing. And they didn't have to plan and do all that preparation work. If someone's a meetup organizer, they're already doing a lot to set up the meetings. And so they just needed resources. And so this team began in 2013. And that's how I got involved with the training team. Why did I do it? Well, it was an area that I had expertise in. It was something that I was really passionate about helping others. I like to help teach people things. Other people, they scratch an itch with it. People contribute because they really believe that they can improve something. The project will be better by their presence there. Maybe it's because you want to learn or grow a skill. Sometimes it's because you network. How many people am I in the room with today alone that I've known since 2015? Some of you, you just start networking with people and you know them. And sometimes that network can lead to all kinds of good things, whether it's career or personal. Sometimes just the networking value alone. It could also be part of your personal purpose vision mission. For me, my life's work, I pour into how can I help improve the standard of living for others. And the way that I see to do that for me is by helping create the tools and the technology that anyone around the globe can use to better their lives. WordPress seems to fit that goal for me pretty well. Also, the sense of community. And that's where Belongi really comes in. The project is made better. When we have a diverse group of contributors around the globe reflecting different experiences, reflecting different life lessons, reflecting different cultures, reflecting different abilities in their life's work. And giving that back into the project to share that little slice of their life. Because that means that more people will be able to do something better because of that learned experience that they've had and how that's impacted the project. But that also fosters community and that sense of belonging. So I want to share a few photos with you before I take you into looking at Make WordPress website. I am very blessed in my job. I contributed to the project for many, many years. I've only been employed two years where I can work expense things and go fund places. But I want to show you a couple slices of WordPress around the globe. So here at the table, we're sitting with an Israeli guy, an Italian lady that lives in Spain right now. Singapore, Leslie in the back, is Singapore Bob WP. Does a podcast about Do the Woo. So WooCommerce, he's just moved to Portugal. Yvette, it works at Yoast. Hari down here in the front, it's from India. Works at Automatic, works in Community. And this is kind of normal for me now. Is every couple of months, I get to see this. And the slices of life that these folks represent. You see Devin here who works in polyglots a lot. And Nilo who does a lot of photography of these events. But Nilo is also part of WordPress TV. My dear friends, Pooja and her husband Anand. Pooja is one of the training team reps. And at WorkCamp Asia, the after party, we were encouraged to wear culturally appropriate attire. The Americans showed up in jeans and t-shirts, of course. But it was wonderful seeing folks from around the globe coming in with different cultural attire. This is the team that I, most of this is my direct co-workers. But in the photo, you can see that I've got co-workers from around the globe there with me. And it was just an amazing experience to have that time together with them. And all of them have directly contributed to WordPress in some manner. When I was at WorkCamp Buffalo just a month ago, in the back is Toa for DeRosha. He runs HeroPress. If you haven't seen HeroPress, it is tales of WordPressers around the globe, where they're located, and their own experiences of what brought them to WordPress. We're seeing his daughter in the front, asking or sharing a great question before WorkCamp Buffalo also kicked off. In the back are William and Aida. William and Aida do a great work in their community in Jacksonville. I was teaching, when I taught at the bootcamp previously, I was teaching the equivalent of inner city Philly youth, except that they were in Wilmington, just down the road. They were getting paid to learn WordPress. And William was the one that emceed for them at WorkCamp Philly. I had a group of high school kids go speak at WorkCamp Philly, technically online, right, during COVID. But these experiences, these differences around the globe are amazing. This is my friend Sergei, pretty much everything that goes into WordPress core. After it's done in the Gutenberg plugin and it gets merged to core, Sergei lives in Russia. That makes things interesting in the project. But I had a chance to hang out with Sergei a couple of weeks ago. And everything that gets committed into the project, Sergei's got his fingers involved in, and it's great. Pretty much any hour of the day that I message Sergei, he responds as well, which he should sleep. Shanta is, no, Chaya, yeah. This was, she works at Yoast, and I just love how she lives her life. She is somebody that everybody gets to know really quickly. And this was at one of the parties that took place. And then Michelle, I think you might see, if you look out the window that way, there's Michelle and my coworker, Mike. And so again, I just love so many diverse faces of this WordPress community. And then there's Ann. Ann looks around the project and knows everything that's going on about software updates. When there's a release coming, Ann is the one that looks at all of these change logs and then disseminates that information to the docs team, to the training team, to the marketing team. These are faces of WordPress that I've had the opportunity to spend some time with lately. These are people that have chosen to say, I'm committed to what WordPress is doing and if I see something that I wanna fix, well, I'm gonna log in and figure out how to do that. So the basics, you'll need a WordPress profile. If you get stuck at this point, fair. I got stuck at this point. Making WordPress profile is sometimes tricky, believe it or not. Especially when it looks like it's 2005, we need to update that section of WordPress and I think there are folks interested in working on that. So you'll need to be able to log in and also to get to Slack. Slack is interesting for WordPress. You're like, oh, no big deal. I'll just syndicate with my Google account, log in or something like that. No, no, no. In WordPress, we want to let, we sort of have a gated against massive bots, but the flip side is that you have to do a weird step. So read the directions really carefully and when you're like, why am I stuck? Read these directions again. It's, you have a weird username to get in. Then to find out where the teams are, you go to make.wordpress.org and you might also read around inside of the GitHub repo. So to look at the teams, I want you to kind of tuck some of these things in mind. If you have never contributed before, if you're thinking about getting started, being involved in lots of options, you'll want to think about what skills do you have? What are the areas that you're really good at? I'll give you a hint. There are 22 teams that always need people to facilitate meetings and or take notes. If you can do that, that is a great entry point or if you like cleaning up tags in posts, sometimes we need basic things like that done. Also, there can be other specialties or other areas that are really your skill sets. When we start the tour of the teams, you'll want to look at the handbooks, the welcome boxes and the meeting schedules and I'll show you where all that is. So let's open up and take a look at the Get Involved page. Again, parts of the WordPress project could use some spring cleaning. This one is one of them. All of wordpress.org is undergoing a redesign. There are folks that are interested in working on this part of WordPress because we need to change that. I'm going to scroll slowly through some of these teams that are here and I'll jump in on a couple of them. What I would challenge you to do is to think a little outside the box. So if you are a developer and you're saying I want to contribute by doing code, most people will say, oh, look, it looks like the code's going on in the core team. And sometimes people refer to all of the teams as core. It's just one big lump is called core and they forget that core is now all of these things. And so the core team, yeah, they work on the software. Yes, they need coding. But also if we wander over towards the accessibility team to the polyglots area, to the docs and to the training team, the training team is the group that makes learn.wordpress.org. So this website. So the training team's been at this. We're the ones that create material for either made up organizers to use, some short form videos for direct learners. We also have deep dive courses into particular subjects. And in addition to that, we hold online workshops, Zoom and meetup groups together. So those online workshops are happening around the globe all hours of the day. We need people to get involved in those things. But we also need devs because look at this site. Right now, I just rattled off all these content types and the site's up for redesign. I'll just say that. So we need devs, right? And so think outside the box a little bit with sometimes you've got a specific skill set. Just the other day, I was asked, let me hit back in this. This is indeed running WordPress in the browser. I was asked by a person I met in Greece that lives actually in Athens area. Said, I've got a coworker that knows Rust. Where can they contribute? Strangely, I remember hearing during opening remarks at contributor day that the Openverse team was looking for that. If you haven't found the Openverse team, they are the ones that work on openverse.org. And openverse.org is part of the WordPress project. It is a search engine that looks for CC0, Creative Commons Zero Licensed. So anyone can use these photos. It scrapes the web and finds all the CC0 things. And so apparently they needed someone that knows Rust. WordPressers often don't know Rust. But that's an area that would be needing that skill set to contribute to the project. So sometimes there are opportunities that you don't always notice. Then there's things like the photos team. And if you saw my coworker, Marcus, hanging out over at the booth, the photos team are the ones that work on WordPress.org slash photos. If you are a photographer, you can go here. And if you've got a phone even, you can take a photo and upload it. And the content that gets uploaded here, openverse later finds. And there are rules around what can be uploaded here, but you can upload something here. It can't have people's faces or logos or text really in it. Sometimes they'll let things like the WordPress logo slide because it's WordPress. But other than that, there are some rules around what you can contribute in this place. But they also need people to vet and approve those things. We have things like the plug-in review team. And when I say the different parts of the project need help, oh boy, does the plug-in review team need help. So if you have ever been to wordpress.org slash plugins, if you've been here, there have been primarily, there's primarily been one person that you could thank for about a decade running this, Mika. Mika goes by ifstinou on all the socials that she's on. Mika's been at this for a decade almost solo. One person handling all the plugins that have been submitted and that code needs to be reviewed and all of these things. We had another person that had a medical situation that was also assisting periodically, but that medical situation highlighted just how much this team needs to have some more help. So one and a half people taking care of it, I mean, that doesn't sound like a great experience overall for the project. So there are some teams that need a lot of help. Right now the plug-in review team for a few weeks will be closed for new incomeors. If you've got questions or ideas about them, please see my coworker Evan in the second row right here. Evan's one of the new folks that have joined. There are six total at this time in that group. They have a huge backlog of things to review. Huge backlog. But they also need some tooling and automation done. And so it's time that we work on that as well. Teams that might be a little, if you are at all bilingual, the polyglots group, they need folks that will translate sometimes it's code strings in a plugin. So the human words inside of the plugins so that the start button or a good example in the UK, they don't call it the delete button, they call it the trash bin or something like that. Like they have a couple of different, there's a few spots in even English to English that they will rename bits of code. So that's WordPress polyglots area. They often translate a lot of the most popular plugins, they prioritize getting those translated, but they also need to translate things like the about page on every release. If you're bilingual, the about page needs to get translated and sometimes down to specific locales. Like you might have Spanish as the language and then a Guatemalan version might need to be different than Spain's version, right? The themes team also does a lot of reviews and betting. The support folks, they work on the forums. They do a lot of work in the forums. That sometimes could be a low lift area and sometimes it's a really low commitment. You're like, I've got an hour one time ever and I'm gonna go see if I can answer a question or two in the forums. That's fantastic. So people ask questions often in those forums and they'll give you the ones that are not just for plugins, but for other areas. Accessibility team, I can't plug them enough. You see that there are lots of teams here. But what does that have to do with a sense of belonging and how do I get over the frustration? So let's go look inside of one of the team's sites. I will jump to, actually, I'll jump in here to the training team site. This has been my home, as I've said. Couple basic terminologies. In the last session, Catam mentioned about P2s, we call them the same thing. It's the team site and the blog that runs inside of it. It's kind of also the theme, because it's the old version. So what we have in the team site, this is the training team site at the top, there's a welcome box. Every team site that you go to has a welcome box. In that welcome box, there are usually things like at the top, something like getting started, the handbook, and you can also hide this box when it gets in on your nerves, because it's in the way. Every team site has that welcome box, that welcome box you can show and hide. But there are also meetings that are listed here as well. And you notice that this team is running meetings in a couple time zones. These meetings happen in Slack. Here's what the meetings look like. You see my friend Pooja is facilitating this meeting. She was the one in the nice peach colored gown earlier. And the meetings are all text based, and you can come back asynchronously and read the meeting notes later. This can be a little challenging for folks sometimes that are not used to meetings happening in Slack. There's good and bad to it. It takes longer to say the same words as if you were saying them out loud, because now you're typing them. But it's a lower barrier to entry. People can access this information asynchronously at any time. And there's also timestamps and links that we can go directly to where that thing was said. So once you've made your way into make WordPress Slack, you find the team sites that have the channels, you join them. And what helps create the sense of belonging is by getting to know the regulars that are posting here, getting to interact with them. And sometimes that means that we are asking what might seem off topic or fluff type of questions like what's your favorite hot beverage? Well, what's that have to do with WordPress? Well, it's because we're people. We need to know each other, we need to talk. So these are some of the basic parts of this in creating a sense of belonging. It's helping people that feel intimidated about speaking up feel like they can talk in this channel. I was delighted and also surprised this morning that when I listened to Caleb give the keynote, he's like, oh yeah, I'm in the training channel. Like I had asked a question about LearnWP and he's like, yeah, I heard you say something in this other project that we're in sort of together and but I've been afraid to ask a question, right? I haven't spoken up and I think about that and think about the times when I was that person. Now granted, I was that person when we were on IRC. It wasn't as pretty as Slack back in the old, like before we all had Slack available, we were using IRC and that was a whole extra layer of complication. But when we switched over, it's having that, hey, I'm new here, can you help me? I don't know where to go for this thing. And the people that know how to help with that can certainly jump in and do that. So that's how to navigate through team sites. My plug keeps falling out. That's some of the basics that are there. I do wanna give you just a few moments before I open up for questions around navigating through the GitHub site. I might have closed my slides, but I can show us. So one of the things I like to do, if you are a Dev sort, you might like to do this too. We use a lot of GitHub in things. And so the conversations to figure out where are the conversations happening? How will I feel it's acceptable for me to ask a question or to start talking to people about these things? Remember that everybody has a time that they are new. Everybody's going to experience something as if it's the first time experiencing that. And even the people that have been around a long time have a hard time sometimes keeping up with the quantity of noise. That's not everyone's job to do that. It's kind of my job to do that and raise awareness to certain things. It's like a river that flows over me and I try and catch the things and elevate it to people. I'm really, I really like, if I know that there's a topic that someone's interested in, calling the man about like, oh yeah, you expressed this interest in this thing. Please pay attention here. But I'm one person and so I try. But one of the things I like to do is pick out a couple of WordPress repositories in GitHub. And even if you're not very technical, you might look at this and be like, what is this? Think of it kind of like forums that will simplify it a little bit more for you. And you can navigate around in here and see like someone opened this and here's what they're talking about. And down below there are some labels on this and maybe you might have a comment that's worth sharing. So a comment that's worth sharing. How do you know if yours is or isn't? Can you reproduce an issue that's here? You're testing something. If you can reproduce the same issue that somebody's describing, you've just validated that this exists and you are confirming. If it says needs more testing or needs something, test it, see what happens. See if you can give confirmation to that. And then in addition to that, there are other parts of the WordPress GitHub repo that you can get into and see that there are lots of, I was showing you Gutenberg and it's the fastest and most active one, but there are lots of these different ones that are inside of this one. So if that doesn't particularly strike your fancy and you wanted to work on something that's happening on the wordcamp.org's websites, well, that one might be of interest to you and you just get in and navigate to the issues. And if you're a dev, you'll figure your way around for pull requests and things, but you start seeing the regulars when you just kind of skim through these things like, okay, somebody, let's see down in here. It looks like this is the same person multiple times over that is assigned to a thing to work on it and Ian logged this. So Ian logs a lot of issues. Ian might be a good person if you have a question that's something related to track down Ian in Slack and say like, hey, I'm new, I have a question. Can I ask you a thing? And then here's who this is assigned to to work on it. And that's another way. It's just to sort of track the regulars. Ultimately, what I have concluded or decided for me to help me get over my fears, let me pull the slide deck back up and jump to the end, see that is in fact WordPress running all of this, is that sometimes you believe in the cause so much that you'll get over your fears. Sometimes on the other side of it for me, it was, hey, I feel a little intimidated about doing asking questions about going up to people I don't know, overcoming these people, talking about the REST API in the back and that's intimidating as all can be. I'm too scared for that. So maybe I'll find this other team and start asking these other questions. You have to sometimes see that in order to help make a contribution, people aren't going to bite you. They aren't going to kick you. They're not going to hurt you. They're here to help. The WordPress community, you see at events like this, how much people love to help. So feel free, ask questions. And on that note, here's where you can find this information and at the very tail end, actually let me hit refresh on this one because I think I saved it since this version is visible. Nope, I must not have saved it. My slides are at CourtneyR.dev. I put it out on Twitter. The link is actually for this, CourtneyR.dev slash we dash they dash, we dash are dash they. Sorry, get it corrected. We are they. So you'll be able to find the slides there. And if you want to link to the plugin that enables presentations using WordPress, there's that too. Questions, folks? Yes, Jeff. So I remembered. Yep, I appreciate that. So just to be clear, Yep. SPN, you don't need to use it anymore. Or did we go and do that? Do you still need to use SPN? Or do you need to use SPN? There are a couple of answers to that one and I will defer to people that know core better than me. Catom, do you have any solutions? As they contribute, you do not need to use SPN. Yes. You can just submit pages through GitHub. It is up to, I believe that we still need to commit the code in SPN, but that's on the committer, not your contribution. Got it. Use the tool that works for you. Okay, so if I wanted to do all the testing and iterations, and everything, all that can be done through GitHub. See? And when you're in doubt, ask someone that might have an answer. Find the people that, yeah. I'm sorry, do you want me to do it? Yeah, the issues is the same as attractive right now? Or like... Discussion about if you, you can comment on the code in GitHub, but issues I think are disabled on the core repo and they still don't give you attractive value issues. So if you see something in track, you can go with GitHub and reference track. Jeff, I'm also gonna put in a personal plug and say, come over to help fix Learn's website. That's my solution. It's all in GitHub for that one. For those that are like, what was all, if you don't know that level of Dev and you're just like, give me something easy to do. There are these calls for testing that are included. So Ann made a post. I just showed Ann's picture a little bit ago. This is a recap of one of them, but there is a call for testing, make.wordpress.org slash test. She writes out the directions, it gives you a link that spins off a WordPress site with everything ready to go for you to start testing. This is beautiful and easy. You need to set aside time and if you break things, well, that's the point. They want you to break and document what you broke. So make.wordpress.org slash test and look at any of these things that say call for testing. Do it as a group and you just created some community and you'll feel like you are part of the belonging of WordPress. Any other questions? Who can I find at a Contruder Day coming up? Who could I find in the WordPress Slack? Okay, it's good, good. Go for it. Are there any easy ways to stay in touch on other local WordPress events that might be happening that we should know about? Oh yeah, there are. One of the easier ways of knowing about your local WordPress events is if you go to, actually, I'm gonna do this one. No, I should not log in that way. If you were in the WordPress admin dashboard, let me hit log in and I will take you to one. And I go to the dashboard of this site. Let's go to the dashboard. And if I'm looking in the dashboard, I see over here on the right-hand side, WordPress events and news. That's cool. So because of where I'm located, it's telling me here the nearby events that are coming up. If you want to find a different way to get there, meetup.org slash, there's like WordPress groups or something to that effect. There's a proper official meetup listing for WordPress. But this is also the easiest way when you're talking to WordPressers where they can go. You'll find your nearest upcoming camp or meetup group or WordPress related event. When? Oh, your anniversary party on July 29th. That's two days after my wedding anniversary. I need to check in with the partner. But that does look exciting. And everybody here can also go to win's party and maybe wear some party festivities like WordPress 20th. Good plug. I like it. I like it. All right. Any other questions? Anyone need help? Like really stomped? Please see me after this. I know we're heading off to closing remarks. There will be an informal after party. Please hit me up while we're here. Yeah, when? Do you have a goal as a contributor? Do you have a personal goal? Like I want this to happen. So the way that my work works is that, and I do, this will be the last one because we need to head over for closing. The way that my goal works, and I've shared some of what I am really passionate about. Some of my goals are lined up with what my employer would like me to do. Some of my goals are like, let's get people sponsored. And because I've been that and I know that that needs to happen. Right now, I'm really passionate about the new contributor mentorship program that's kicking off. And part of that will also improve Learn's website by creating a pathway of courses that people can go through to learn how to be a new contributor. And there'll be some details coming out about that. If you're on Twitter and you connect with me on Twitter, my website has links to all those things. There is, you can find my slides that are there. You could also find the upcoming information about the new contributor mentorship program. Hari is kicking off, which will be fantastic. We're taking a group of 10 people through these, through some courses and they will get onboarded to teams and continue contributing. So I'm passionate about a lot of high level project things of helping teams collaborate and also goals that I have for fixing Learn's website in my own head. Yeah, cool. Thank you all for being here. And thank you for being with us today.