 Hello. Yes. Working. Yes. Hello. Good morning everyone. Good morning everyone. Please have a seat. We are going to start in about few minutes. Good morning everyone. How are you? Welcome to Vadikamp Asia 2024 Day 3. Yesterday we had very insightful session from our amazing speakers. So please give a big round of applause to our speakers. It would not be possible without our organizers and volunteers. So please give a big round of applause to our organizers and as well as our volunteers. And for you as well. So are you excited? So our first talk will be something about contribution and that is something I am very passionate about as well. And I can see many familiar faces in audience with whom I have worked on various projects. So before starting I would like to ask some questions. How many of you are contributing to WordPress before? Please raise your hands. And who are never contributed? Is there anyone? Yeah. You are going to learn a lot from this session. Okay. So our next session, next speaker is now Kotakano. She is a regular contributor. And WordPress is the community, WordPress is the project for the community and by the community. And our next speaker is now Kotakano. She has been a force within the WordPress community for over two decades. Starting her journey back in 2003 by translating WP documentation into her native language. Correct me if I am wrong. She is the one of amongst few people who started the WP localization. And she is not just a contributor. Naoko has been the heart of organizing word camps, meetups, do action in Japan and in Asia as well. And as a project manager for contributor growth initiative she has played a pivotal role in helping shaping the future of WordPress, focusing on projects like mentorship program and for the future. She was the global lead for first flagship event WordCamp Asia 2023. And the preparation goes for more than four years from 2019 to 2023. She was the biggest, longest preparation WordCamp. Today Naoko is here to share her insight in her talk with title insights from WordPress contribution. What makes us impactful? She will take us on a journey through the heart of the WordPress community exploring what drives impactful collaboration from data to real life experiences. Now Naoko will show us how we can enrich our collaborative efforts in any setting. I would like to call her on stage. Please give a big round of applause to Naoko. Thank you. Thank you. I'm so excited to be here on the stage again at WordCamp Asia. So, yes. Okay. Hello. My name is Naoko Takano. As I was introduced, I was one of the global leads for WordCamp Asia 2023 along with some threads here. And J.C. Palmer, who was the contributor they lead for the two days before. So, as you can see, it was the longest planning WordCamp in history for those who didn't know. We started planning in 2015 about the idea of the WordCamp Asia. And we actually started organizing in 2019, and the pandemic stopped us from having the event. So, we posed for two years, and in 2023, we were able to have the event finally. So, that was one of the happiest days of my life to end the WordCamp. So, I'm going to talk about my WordPress journey a little bit, who just shared my history a little bit. But as she said, I've been involved in WordPress for two decades, which is scary long time. So, I started using WordPress in 2003 as just a user because I was not a web professional at the time. I was working for a Japanese automotive company in Michigan doing a temp administrative assistant job. And my dream was to become a web designer. But I didn't know how because I graduated from school, college in graphic design degree, and I was struggling to find my first job to get involved in this internet web industry. It was early time. But I was kind of reading things online. Blogs at the time was becoming popular. I found lots of design blogs and designer blogs, web design blogs. And I found a hood of one of my favorite blogs set, not WordPress, but Moveable Type, which was another type of blogging software. And then from that, I started installing Moveable Type, getting stuck, and also discovering WordPress and fell in love because it was so easy to customize, so easy to use. And as a designer, it was such a fun experience to customize it with a template and CSS. So, that's still, you know, the user part of my journey. And I started contributing as, put it to say, documentation, WordPress itself, forums. So, you know, as a non-coder, I knew a little bit of coding, but not much. So, I was kind of trying to spread the word about WordPress to the Japanese community. So, that's how I got involved, because there's so much things to be done for, you know, letting people know what the WordPress, you know, the software is. So, I didn't know what I was doing exactly. I didn't know anything about open source. I just started doing things that was ahead of me that seemed, you know, important or seemed needed. So, that was my first phase. And that's my first contributor phase. And thanks to WordPress, I was able to become web designer because of the skill that was still emerging time for CSS, which might sound very weird for younger people. CSS was early stage of adaptation, but thanks to WordPress, I got to learn how to use it, you know, templating, you know, at the time, seeing this was CSS in a PHP file. And thanks to WordPress, I got to learn the latest skill of web, which was not adopted by the industry yet. So, when, you know, blogging became popular, I got to get some, you know, job making templates for some blogging software, blogging, you know, team for, you know, company blogs. So, that was where my contributor journey and my professional journey kind of converged for the first time. I even got to write the books, two books about WordPress in Japan, in Japanese. And I got a job at an agency doing web design, which was like my dream come true. I worked for websites like sherry.com or navy.com, which is like kind of high-end type of agency job. So, it was like not possible without WordPress. So, I became more involved as a community manager, and at the time I had to experiment with the photo. I went to work in San Francisco in 2007. I met Matt Malinwick, who is co-founder of WordPress. And I asked him, what can I do to spread the word about the WordPress? How can I make WordPress popular in Japan? And he said, you should do a WordCamp, just like that. And I'm like, okay, I'll do a WordCamp. And yeah, just a small thing like that, small thing like that, you know, small encouragement like that can really make a big difference. Because without that, I don't think I had done WordCamp for this many years. And maybe WordCamp Asia wouldn't exist in this shape. So, that was 2007. My first WordCamp organization was 2009 WordCamp Tokyo. And the Tokyo community grew bigger. And this is a designer of WAPU. She's an illustrator of WAPU. Her name is Kazuko Kaneuchi. And this was one of WordCamp Osaka moments. And then, yes, and then I had a job. I was hired by automatic as a customer support happiness engineer in 2010, shortly after WordCamp, first WordCamp in Japan. And then my journey from then was doing my work at automatic, getting some involvement in the community, continuing to translate, continuing to grow the community. Then my professional role changed to localization manager, which is training wordpress.com into multiple languages. So, at the time, I was having hard time balancing my professional role and community role. Because wordpress.com is similar to Wordpress.org, but a little bit separate from the community. And I had two kids, my son, my daughter. My daughter is going to turn 10, so in the middle of this journey, I was struggling to find time to contribute. But, again, thanks to automatic, I am now a four-time contributor working on the projects like Five for the Future and a contributor mentorship program. So, that's a long time, but as I explained, a little bit of progression in my journey helped me to get where I am. So, I'm excited to share how I got here and what made a difference in my journey. So, as I said, yes, this is my role, open source project manager. This was an event last year, in summer. We had a Tokyo Five for the Future event, and it was very successful. Some of the attendees are here too. So, how have you seen people wanting to contribute? I know some of the people who raised hands who never contributed to Wordpress. I'm sure you came here because you want to learn how to contribute. There are so many people who want to contribute to Wordpress. Even though we keep saying we need more contributors, I think there are more contributors who want to contribute, but not exactly able to do that. So, there's a lack of contribution, which is, even from experienced contributors, they don't always know exactly where they can contribute the most, the impactful. So, there's some disconnect between want and leading that to actual contribution that is impactful for them and the project itself. At the same time, we always see joy of contribution. People keep doing it because it's fun, because it's enjoyable, it's meaningful. And whenever you make something, some kind of contribution that is worthwhile or impactful for the people or the project, you feel this excitement. I think that's what kept me in this community. It was very different from anything I experienced outside of this project. Somehow, maybe it's connecting to someone you never knew in the world to be able to help or some kind of big impact Wordpress had to people in their life. It makes you so happy to be able to be part of this project, because it's not something you can get from outside of this open source contribution. You see these three things. How can we embrace the want? There are people who want to contribute, but there's lack of contribution, connecting them to actual contribution activities and sustaining it. We want to make them happy and we want to make us happy by having some contributors who are active and enjoying their activities. That's my question, that's my work, that's my mission. Let's go through some ideas about how to make it happen. This is my favorite book, Art of Community. It's a Japanese version because it has a different subtitle. I wrote about this in my blog and someone who read that in Japanese said he was very inspired, so I decided to include it. The subtitle is how to connect the desire to contribute to lead to success, to result. That's only in Japanese version. It has this subtitle and the book is Art of Community. It's a little older than another book with the same title. I remember this cover, I think the English version has the same cover. I love the idea about how can we bring this want and connect it with the actual contribution and lead to success. That's my big question in my journey. Five for the Future is one of the initiatives to help Five for the Future is promoting the WordPress community's contribution to the platform's growth. Currently we have this pledge system where companies and individuals can say hey, I want to contribute. From there it's me and Harishanko, my co-buddy for this project. We try to help people and organizations succeed in their contribution journey. Pledge is just like that. It contributes as an organization and as an individual you can pledge to say that I contribute to WordPress. This is available as of now, so if you have questions about that, let me know. The State of Five for the Future. About 20% of the pledges raised hand to say they will contribute as an individual who are not sponsored, who are not paid to do their contribution work. This is the number percentage that is for the self-sponsored contributors who are active. This means they have logged in. They had some kind of activity on WordPress.org. It's small. I know we have people who have been leaving and not getting involved again. Even though people say they want to get involved, they don't always succeed in their journey. For the company-sponsored contributors, for example, GoDaddyEOS 10UP, they have several people pledged to contribute to WordPress as part of their work. During 40 hours or 5 hours on their workday, they contribute to WordPress. Of those company-sponsored contributors, we still only have 60% who are active. Some of the top companies have much higher activity percentage. For example, Automatic, I'm sure it's close to 100% except for people taking leave because that's a four-time job. But some companies say, okay, we want to contribute, but it doesn't lead to actual contribution, unfortunately. And also, 21% of those 60% of company contributions are, we would say, impactful. I think every contribution is meaningful, but maybe some of it is not as impactful for us. For example, core contribution or event organization. Of course, small things you can do, but company-sponsored contributors, they might be waiting to be connected to projects that they can make impact. So only 21% involved in these impactful projects. We have so many individuals who want to contribute, but desires and motivation is not enough. Why can't we connect the want with the joy of the contribution? My observation through these 20 years, I think it has several factors. Contributors get stuck. Many get stuck at getting started. They say they want to, and they don't have any opportunity to actually get started. And they're like, I don't know what I'm doing. And then maybe you have seen people like that. Maybe you have helped people like that. But this is a super common thing, which is maybe surprising for you, for people like me who started earlier, because it was easier when time was simple. And sustaining activity can be hard, maybe because it's a life situation or other things. You can say, like, I'm going to do it, and then you do it for a short period of time, and then you go away. And making impact, as I said, finding a project that is impactful and that's available for you. There's a concept of a contributor ladder, which is a blog post by Josefa, and you can check out later. The ladder is, first stage is connecting. So maybe work camp is your opportunity, or you go into Slack and you connect with people. And you understand, you know, your surroundings, how things go, and you engage, and then you perform, then you become a leader, you know, encouraging others. So it's not always smooth ladder, even for me, myself. I think I was lucky to be able to kind of, you know, find my way, but it took a long time. So how can we, you know, optimize this ladder? What blocks us? I'm sure you're familiar with this if you're involved, but there are, you know, lack of resources. Even though we have so much, like, information about contributing, documentation and everything, there still isn't enough, it seems, that we are able to activate all the people who want to become active. And sometimes there's lack of creative direction in some things, and lack of collaboration is a big challenge. We are dispersed and some people are doing one thing, other people are doing the same thing, we don't always find out. And also, of course, it's born out. How can we unblock? So I think this is for everybody's interest to, you know, be more successful in your journey, even if you're already active. Maybe you can think about how you can help others to unblock their, you know, contribution blockers. First, provide or find resources. Of course, there's no resource. We need to provide it. And it's not about, you know, written documentation or onboarding sessions. We need time and skills and peers or mentors to help out. For example, if you're a company supporting your contributor employees, have time set aside, even one hour every quarter or, you know, a few hours one day. For example, yours does this. Contributor day happens regularly. I think a couple of times a year. Next edition is April 18th. They have set aside a day to host a contributor day, which is similar to the day one of World Camp Asia, but online for the guests. And your employees can join offline at the office. So this is the one way to say, hey, this is a day for contribution. That way you can continue to do it on that day for sure. Another one is have an internal resource and use it. RT Camp have learning courses for their employees that includes contribution to WordPress. This is not like the entire part of their training, but they teach new hire skills to, you know, as a part of their training to contribute to WordPress. So it's their part of their training process, which helps gain their skills and, you know, expand in the community. Web studios, they have five for the future of Friday. So on a day, I think it's once a month, they have regularly held the internal day for contribution. So JC, who was a co-lead of World Camp Asia last year, she would spend Friday, you know, working on WordPress World Camp things. And she said, I'll do it on Friday because I have time set aside from my company. Another one is WordPress contributor mentorship program. This is another resource that people can use. This cohort has started already for this, you know, this time around, but we plan on having more in the future. So if you know anybody who wants to get started, keep an eye on the idea for this contributor mentorship program, will be, you know, collecting more people, calling more people to be mentee and mentors. So, you know, once you have a resource, we need to share and find a clear direction. If you are in a position to, you know, read a project, of course we need to share it, but if you, you know, the person to find the direction, to stay informed, you know, it's best to be connected and ask questions. And you also need to accept priorities for yourself because the direction is not just given to you, but you need to set your own direction and without that it's really easy to get lost. So don't just say like, I'm just going to keep doing the same thing, but maybe to, you know, come up, you know, climb up the ladder of contribution, try something new, try something, you know, more difficult and, you know, or, you know, expanding your skills and, you know, experience. Set a priority to, let's say like, I'm going to try to become a mentee next time, try to, you know, set a PR to, you know, go to work repository, do something different to, you know, expand your experience so that you can start to see more and more different types of contribution and stay informed. And collaborate, of course, we all know collaboration is the best way to get something done in the world-best community. We've learned through, you know, work camp, of course, projects, open source itself is a result of collaboration. So communicate well, even though we only get to talk to each other often online, written communication is the key of how we get, you know, things done. So be careful with your language and if English is not your first language, learning is, of course, important, but, you know, communication is just beyond that. So maybe, you know, look at the people who are doing well and learn from there, you know, what they're doing. So, and then working open, open source is open, so you need to work together, not just, you know, get things done in a direct message, get more people involved, share information, and more people who want to help will be, you know, able to help without you opening up the opportunity, they won't be able to find what needs to be done and help others to collaborate, you know, work together, matching people who are, you know, looking for something from each other, so we can do a lot in here. So this comes from outside of WordPress or open source, but I thought it was interesting. There's more and more things to know, especially, you know, as the project goes into, you know, 21st year and it gets bigger, more complicated, more people are involved, there's always more things to know. It's not possible to know everything. I learned in World Camp Asia organization it's much bigger than local World Camp, there's so much to know, so you need to be able to trust others and work with them and help them become a good leader, otherwise, you can't do everything. So you will, you know, be forced to learn doing things with others and that helps avoiding burning out because by, you know, delegating work to others, you can, you know, have time for yourself, rest, self-care is very important because that's the only way you can, you know, stay in the community and keep contributing long-term and keep building the, you know, network that is needed for working together. So these are the tips for, you know, becoming more impactful, provide resources for yourself and others, share and find a clear direction, collaborate, align with the user needs. Yeah, I skipped it, but I originally had it, sorry, avoid burning out. So what makes us impactful? I'm coming back to this first question. My theory is that we need to think long-term advancement of growth of the ecosystem. If you're starting out, maybe it doesn't feel quite, you know, important as other things that you need to learn, but I think what has been driving me is that I care about workers, I care about the community, and I care about the long-term existence of the ecosystem. So the decisions I have been making is, okay, I will be able to fix this in a long-term, so I will choose a, you know, slower way, that way, you know, you can always, you know, have the result in a long-term. So I would say don't focus on, you know, short-term result if you have the mind of five-food for the future, not the 5% part, but the future part, you will always be able to, you know, work together and contribute to the future of the world best. Only way to, you know, be able to make the first five-food for the future successful is to, you know, to have the future mindset and think about how you can, you know, start to really contribute to the world best and not just, you know, focus on things in front of you, but think as a community, think as an ecosystem, you need to help out, you need help from others. We work together, and that's the only way for the future world best to be able to have a successful state. So let's build the future of world best better together, and that's my hope and I hope that's your desire to be here in this room. I hope this conversation will continue and we will be able to talk more about this five-food for the future and world best contribution in the course of the day and after this event. Thank you. Thank you so much, Naoko, for this amazing session. And if anyone have any questions, please feel free to ask. Is there any question? Yes, please. First, there's a contributor tool to make that wordpress.org slash contribute, correct? Yes, so there's a tool that you can choose your contributor path based on your skill and desire. But at the same time, since you're here at the work in Asia, I would encourage you to talk to others. There's a hub table in the second for sponsored area. There's a way to, they'll teach you how to get involved in Slack for make wordpress and they'll help you. So please talk to people and what's your name? Michael. And please help Michael. Thank you. Anyone else who want to ask a question? I have a question if I can. How can we motivate people to contribute? I mean, how can people contribute? How can we help people contribute and how can we help? Motivate them, yes. So I think motivation always comes from your desire and interest, but I was motivated through small encouragement even from the beginning, not just from Matt, but from everybody who are around me. So don't hesitate to say, things like you're doing a great job, you're doing meaningful things, you helped me. I think small care to others that goes far away. Sometimes it's kind of, hesitating to say that, but if someone does a great job, I sometimes send you, you're doing such a great job, I think that keeps you going because you realize, okay, I'm doing something meaningful. So don't assume people know that. People like Pooja, I think it needs to be said, even though it's so obvious, you might think, oh, she knows, but it helps a lot. I can still remember my first message back in 2017 when I first time attending Polyglore's meeting after the meeting you messaged me and encouraged me to contribute more. The first time was, it was amazing and when you get appreciation from the seniors and it was like seniors and who are already contributing, it is always awesome, feeling awesome. Yeah, yeah. So if you're already contributing, I think everybody feels, oh, someone who is already doing, see me. So Slack DM, let's do it more now. Yes. How we can encourage companies to contribute to open source project? The companies to contribute. I would say we need to find a sweet spot of where they can benefit from contributing to WordPress and how WordPress benefits from their contribution. For example, I know like Google hosting companies, they are interested in security and they work on it. It makes sense. So don't just think like it's an obligation to help WordPress. It is an opportunity for you to make a change into the direction that you want to. Find something that helps your business through contribution and if you have a question about that, me and Hari, we are happy to answer all the specific questions about your company contribution. Yes, please. I have two questions. One for folks who are contributing for the first time, they know where they would like to contribute. They decided on the team and they know kind of what they want to do, where should they go to figure out more about what the teams are doing, where they meet, what they are looking at, what they are trying to do as their beginner first time contribution. The second question is for companies that looked at your presentation and realized like they didn't know that they could sponsor some of their employees time. Where could they go to say I'm ready to help an employee contribute, how do I get that done? So the first question what people find out, I would say make.wordpress.org front page has links to each team and document, handbook, everything. So meeting is team meetings that happens on Slack is the best way to say hello and ask questions even though you can ask questions anytime on Slack. So if you are not asking questions in person Slack and make.wordpress.org website has all the information but I know we need to improve in in terms of you know good first bad kind of things for every team we don't exactly have page to send people to the tool is great but after that they might feel lost so I think it's ready to contribute for others to help contributors so we need to help some work to improve. I have this email get involved at wordpress.org we can contact us but we don't have exact way of pointing people to where to work on I would point to about big things for 2024 so she lists important projects for this year including data you know so make.wordpress.org projects is one of the location to find out but we are also working on dashboard for contributor which will help help new contributors and experienced contributor to find the most important things to work on for some teams they have good first bug for GitHub issues but finding that could be also a problem so we need a better onboarding of new people so yes, thanks for the question thank you for your answers they are amazing and we have a token of appreciation for you just a minute thank you thank you and let's keep talking yeah thank you everyone for joining us we have our next session in 20 minutes so please feel free to get whatever and what you want and we will be back in 20 minutes here, thank you hello, yes it's working now hello everyone hello again today is the AI world and we we are using AI tools everywhere in our business to find any content and code anything we use AI in our day to day lives and do you ever care about legalities of AI how can we use and all our next talk gonna be around this so let's give a warm welcome to Helen Tung founder of new space 2016 and a leading expert in international law and emerging technologies Helen is on mission to help individuals and organization make better decision as an international lawyer speaker and consultant she is known for her insightful talks on authenticity alignment and leveraging the laws of nature and the universe in her various roles including G100 space technology chair and vice chair of the enterprise risk management committee Helen is at forefront of legal discussion surrounding space exploration and AI technologies today Helen will be shedding light on the legal implication of using AI tools in her talk titled legal implication on the use of AI tools from data protection to intellectual property she will guide us through what users need to know to navigate rapidly evolving in landscape so please give a big round of applause to Helen thank you so much so let's have a scan around the room how many of you are developers hands up just one good idea very good how many of you guys are content content people okay wonderful how many of you are entrepreneurs all hands should be up wonderful I want to start by saying I am so delighted to be in Taipei and I want to say that this moment this moment where you guys are here sitting with me is a very powerful moment why because all the years of talking about AI thinking dreaming about AI it's happening and why is it a powerful day today well in my talk I am going to try and convince you guys if not least to share the relevance of why legal is important and why we need you and you need us for too long the conversations on law and AI in the sense of what are the legal issues and the technical developments have been two very separate conversations and what's important for me as an advocate and lawyer is also I am very passionate in helping businesses and entrepreneurs like you guys and I want to see the discussions of law and AI moving forward like this in partnership in conversation and developing together because what have you noticed recently in the news everyone is getting very excited you got chat GPD, Bard and so forth but equally there is a lot of concern there is a lot of worry about how do we regulate AI how do we contain potential dangerous scenarios so we are going to touch upon all of that and really my talk is a call for action it's a call for action for you guys to not take the back seat but to take the front row in leading the conversation in partnership with us as lawyers so without further do let's start a bit about myself I'm a traditional lawyer in the sense that I got qualified in England and Wales I started off as a litigator I might not look like it but I am and then I worked in-house I spent some time in Silicon Valley I co-founded a satellite propulsion start-up I spent some time at NASA and my start-up failed miserably but hey if you are an entrepreneur you go through cycles and so in a small way relate to most of you now what is AI I loved it for the last few days we talked about what is AI in the meeting rooms over lunch and also in on platforms but for me AI on a high level conceptual level it's everything and anything you want it to be why? because it's about your dream it's about the lifestyle that you wish to have it's about the ideas and turning it into a reality and hence I think this picture depicts it quite well and it's also about envisioning what kind of a future that you want so I don't know if it's going to end up as a quote but it is literally everything and anything we can think up what is AI if I had to encapsulate AI as a person how would I describe them well I would say they're a high performer they never sleep and they never die they can actually work and perform non stop they're time efficient they're cost effective and they're also very flexible they can survive and maintain whatever they need to do in any environment and I can also engage with them 24-7 due to constant connectivity and by the way even through avatars and different mediums I can still be in touch with time and space and so hence I had to put some imagination in there like your fantasy dragon slayer superhero magician is it really that far off you might ask now this is where I'm going to throw in a space concept but not quite have you guys heard of the concept of parallel universe come on all hands should be up so we're living it and I define it in a very way you and I sitting here the 3d versions of us and we all have a mobile phone we all have an online presence that be it our avatar is a different universe some might take it to the next level and say it's metaverse you don't need to be on a different planet to have another personality and so that's why I think in a humble way we're already living the parallel universe now more than that and this is where the conversation can either go positive or negative depending how you think of it who do I have here that's quite a famous personality people should know Gandhi now my first thought about AI this is just to show how I think was we can bring back the dead all the famous philosophers like Aristotle Plato bring back the real ideas now you might have a different version you might think of the Frankenstein version zombie version I'm not thinking that you can tell I'm an optimist but there is something that is really beautiful about that idea that kind of power is unspoken of if you get what I'm trying to say right if not in the 3d at least in the you know ultimate various universes and of course some of these images whilst I'm saying they're all digital and AI but to the ordinary folk particularly if you look at that frog that looks pretty real to me right so then we go on to the next topic legal issues now before you get too bothered about this topic or feeling it's a bit heavy let me share this idea with you so I've been getting engaged in this topic of AI for a long long time in fact I call myself an advocate but for years starting in my career as a lawyer I wanted to advocate more interest in AI because I know and I knew that it would come to this point where we had to have tough conversations and a few years back I attended the UN conference on AI it's actually named quite nicely it's called AI for Good you had major stakes stakeholders like the states you had the military you had academia you had experts and I looked around the room and I said you know someone's missing here and they are you guys where are all the developers where are all the content people I need those whiz kids in the back garage to be here at the UN to be talking with us and you know what I discovered in that conversation it was a tough one to swallow that maybe for the people who were making and developing they were too busy or that they really don't think this is part of them like why should we be talking about legal we just want to do our creative stuff we just want to develop we just want to do our work so this is where I come in right I talked about this the partnership because it's at this point we need your help now let's just have a look for a moment what kind of legal issues there's a whole heap and I'll go through it don't worry I'll simplify as much as I can issues like liability and accountability with great power is great responsibility we have data and privacy and security we have issues like bias and discrimination we need to tackle regulatory compliance ethics international laws and regulations so let's have a look what does liability and accountability mean now what has been really interesting for me is I've heard some speakers sort of blip over the issue no really AI systems are not liable how sure can we be let's play this out a little shall we now you are a person we call this someone in legal terms with legal personality you if you have a problem you can go to court and file a claim now just bear with me for a moment because this concept has been tested in court for now so you have some judgments in the US court primarily and also in the UK and there's a question that we ask if you develop an AI system that can create artwork who owns that artwork is it you the creator or is it the AI system that you created that could have the artwork now this was tested in the court and the court goes no this AI system does not have entitlement to it why is this important now it doesn't take a genius but you can have a guess if you are the artist you have rights, you have obligations if you create a piece of artwork you are entitled to what trademark protection licensees fees if people use your artwork being paid for your services isn't that important, correct this is really important so the question of where the liability sits right now I think is still out in the open but to give you some ideas it could be the developer it could be the creator it could be the user for example if you are not reading the instructions properly it might be the AI system so we do need a legal framework to try and envisage how would this all work now autonomy is an interesting one to give you guys some idea of how I came into this so I started off doing a PhD on piracy not cyber but pirates of the Caribbean piracy and whatever you are seeing in Yemen right now I deep dived into it but the point I am trying to say is I looked into autonomous vessels ships with no one driving it but you allow them to press a button and say what level of autonomy do we want do we want the human in the loop i.e. you are controlling the robot do we want the human out of the loop we press go and the robot does whatever they want we allow them to have their own judgement so these are the kind of discussions we are having and I am really glad to say at least in the maritime world it has progressed a long way but we are still there and just to simplify it you don't need very complex cases you just think of traffic systems right now you drive your car on the road you have a red light a green light and a blue light a green light, orange and a red that is what it means so maybe it is something like that we just need to understand what are the rules do we want to allow and enable the kind of systems and how they operate and then there are other factors if you develop a good and it goes rogue this is the classical Hollywood style when the robot is out of control or it is made defectively not intentionally but in any event and what impacts that has on licenses and licensees when the business people put their caps on and say I bought a service and I need a good and if for instance it doesn't line up to what I signed in the contract are their liabilities, are their rights theirs and then of course I gave the example of ships but here you can also refer it to cars and then it is also decision making you guys have clients you develop something or you are selling content or doing content of sorts so this is one of the questions that you also need to think about how do we make decisions easy for the client and then I go back to the basics this is always important, first principles what are our values when we are trying to make these complex decisions that will impact society because it does and what are the exceptions to the rule what are the exceptional circumstances for example if there was an emergency right we really want to give if we cannot reach the fire at the top if a robot can help us do that why not let's give them full power control to save lives and this is a very interesting contractual question validity in force major who knows what force major is okay law 101 force major are situations beyond your control like war disaster so if you have a situation where it's a force major everything you signed up to is no longer valid so we need to think about these things when we are embarking on our development so what are the issues so here I put down data privacy because a few years ago and it's not that long ago data was really not seen that important then over time first it was Europe then America now even in the Middle East and also in Asia data has become increasingly important your data be it health whether you buy car insurance it all matters because it's your information and it may be sensitive right some people they might say okay I'm okay with sharing my data well are you and then of course there has to be a balance between public knowledge and private knowledge for example for all of you that got Instagram Twitter what not you are sharing your information because you want the public to know but what if there's private information that's only between you and your family you don't want others to know right so you're entitled to having your privacy protected and other factors and I just lay out a few rules GDPR if you haven't heard of it start looking into it if you want to do business with Europe because it's a very important rule and what does it mean if the rules are not complied it just means a massive fine so that's always bad for business and then of course there are contractual enforcement if there's a major breach what does it mean for your business it's not just bad PR but it does have implications there's data risk, PR risk financial risk and of course I want to say there are also gaps in the law in terms of AI specifically because we're not there yet the law has a long way to go to catch up that's where we need your help and of course the other things I'm looking at are data rights so you your rights as a developer your rights in terms of protections from the national systems and WIPO now I have to ask a very interesting question of those that are developers here do you put your stuff as open source okay some of you do you sell your product product okay both wonderful because I just need to check because here I hear a lot there's about contribution and you know WordPress wouldn't be where it is today if it wasn't because of everyone's contribution true but you're also a business so you need to survive and you need to sell so that's the other thing you need to be mindful of where you find that balance now another thing we need to tackle is bias now the speaker yesterday I was so impressed by his talk and I said what can we do about discrimination and issues he says we need to talk about it so here we go I'm also talking about it today so we need to consider the issues of algorithm bias now I'm raising this to you because there's little much I can do as a lawyer but you guys can do a hell of a lot as developers the issues of gender are we ensuring that there is enough representation now if I look around the room it looks pretty balanced but in terms of what goes out there in the public that's something we need an eye on color, race, is that considered I talk about different laws now the EU is very progressive when it comes to AI laws in fact they recently published a guideline in the UK they did as well from the court setting and my take is at this okay laws are there for a reason it's to ensure the safety of people and there's no harm but law is not there to hinder creativity and development so in that sense I'm with you guys I want the law to be like the traffic system I want the cars to run but I need it to run safety so there's no collisions okay now interesting fact which you guys might know I have to ask myself what is the role of a future lawyer so this talk is going to be interesting for you guys but other lawyers out there because recently as you might have heard the AI systems have been taking New York bar exams and American bar exams and passing with flying colors what did it take for me to get my degree well seven years of hard slog, lots of hours working experience, writing, drafting, sleeping probably no different from you guys except you guys are in the computer science and engineering so there's a big question mark how would that impact on our lives and of course future careers the next generation and it's a valid question because this idea of well will AI take our jobs away well if we're not smart enough we might do such a good job that we will get replaced does that kind of make sense but my take is as an optimist is no we need to optimize technology so that it will help us in our lives and so hence the need for dialogue and for communication on what we really want now I'm talking about legal but we can't really talk about legal we don't also talk about ethics and morality and of course international law so to give you an idea of what how this all legal jargon works law is a bit like a cake you have national law so here we're in Taiwan with Taiwan and then you have maybe regional laws and then you have international laws so it's sort of like a layered cake interestingly what's the strongest of all I would say locally but if you operate internationally you kind of want to follow guidelines and I'm sure you understand what I mean when you talk about international standards certain standards that you need to meet so that's why this conversation is so powerful because whatever you think you're doing in your own small way your own website your own business the internet is an international marketplace so that puts it into perspective whatever you're doing is really really powerful and if we come together and we start looking at these issues well what we want is we want AI to promote benefits for humanity what we want is we want to mitigate any potential harms we want to improve justice systems safety also to ensure that there are no biases or at least fairness can be maintained and then a level of autonomy security and control and now when we look at international law so I can share with you for us lawyers we've been trying so hard to get to grips of how we can use AI to help the legal system help us to help you to make fairer judgments, fairer decisions so what you will find across the globe I've spent a number of years in the Middle East so I'm part of a courts of the future working group in the DIFC courts in Dubai is we've thought about how do we get come up with ideas and competitions how would it look like in the future we had a future AI judge would it be more time effective, cost effective can we solve problems more quickly because at the end of the day some of you might know in some justice systems the way justice is played out is it just takes a very very long time unfortunately sometimes it takes up to 10 years rightly or wrongly so there needs to be a way to solve this backlog and I think really the question is a balance between AI innovation, sorry and the law and it may be right or wrong to say this but you know it's like the left brain and the right brain we do think very differently but somehow we need to find a middle way so that's partly end and now I'm gonna go freestyle without this so I just want to get a short feedback from you guys of everything that I've said too far does that make sense to you so far the importance of you guys and us talking to each other yeah so then next so I just said this talk is about action and it's about pro-activity so what can you do okay because I love the fact that it's the style of speakers here of that we talk, we share ideas and we exchange knowledge and then we hope everyone plays you know has a similar understanding so I would say I think WordPress is already a very powerful platform for people to talk and engage and actually for me I almost feel it's the talk to the converted I also need to talk to my peers on how they can get interested with you guys why am I saying this the legal process is not a straightforward one I am fortunate to say I've been qualified a number of jurisdictions so I can speak relatively speaking as an international lawyer I was qualified in England and Wales first I'm a foreign registered lawyer in Australia and also work in the Middle East in UAE there are different ways of doing things but there are some countries that are faster than other this is where I want to think about it strategically since we're in Taiwan, Taipei okay when entrepreneurs come to me when I wear my new space 2060 hat and they get stuck and they don't know what they're doing and I'm thinking specifically a start-up where they have a thousand water drones and they want to get it out in the water and they come to me and they say Helen I don't think we really need to worry about the law we just file this out and of course I'm the one that's sitting back and going yeah we have a problem why do we have a problem because it's okay when you do it nothing happens but it's not okay when there's a collision something happens we take a precautionary approach that's us as a lawyer, as an advisor taking a step back but then we also need to understand where you're coming from and I can tell you right now just over the last three days the speed with which you guys work I don't know if anyone's told you this is fast I tell you that because I attended a lot of conferences I've spoken a lot of places I can sense the tempo and you guys get it very quickly it's a compliment okay that's the upside but in the legal profession if you come to a law conference the difference is we will be juggling, debating having problems we're nowhere near the solution we're nowhere near the solution okay, there is a gap there is a knowledge gap and this is where you guys come in so as much as people have this stereotype of what a lawyer can do for us very little, we've got a contract we just need them to review and sign I think you guys would do so much to actually help us to understand how can we be a force for good now that's a thought not just AI for good but actually as developers as content developers for me, I think what's really interesting is because I call myself a legal futurist I do think a little bit ahead of the curve a little bit, just a little bit so for example about seven, eight years ago when I was working the UK Maritime Coast Guard as a legal policy advisor I already brought up the issue of drones but the response I had was Helen, we're nowhere near there we're nowhere near there what's happening right now in a country that has a sea border is testing out their water drones yeah? so what I did was I went collaborated with a bunch of 15 other lawyers we sat down, we got other parties engaged and we say hey, let's have a working group let's talk about this issue of autonomous ships and I'm giving you this exam to give you ideas autonomous ships, let's engage in the parties we talked about learning and development, we talked about like if it was a vessel without a captain in the water onshore how would we be able to make sure that we can still handle risks oh by the way, we don't have insurance do you know how much a vessel costs? millions so what happens if something happens out there it's a lot of money so then we got right, okay we need to talk to Lloyd's insurance so back in 2000 it was July, I remember very clearly 2015 Lloyd's launched their first insurance autonomous vessels it's a milestone it's a slow milestone, but it's a milestone and so from there things have just moved on and Asia has just picked up pace and I would say quite humbly they've really on par or succeeded what the Europeans are doing right now in terms of autonomous vessels what I'm trying to say is things can be achieved like this we can actually sit around a table talk about what you want what problems and issues you're facing and actually see the lawyer a bit like, not just like a lawyer but like a, we call it trusted advisor but a friend that can actually sit down and say hey, how can we actually come together and think how can we solve this together you see, this missing part i.e. you guys of the equation is something for me, a simple question of communication do you guys get me? because if it's a whole bunch of very intelligent Harvard-qualified Oxford-qualified lawyers sitting in a room they're not going to solve the problem they're not going to solve the problem they need you guys sitting on the table with them to talk about hey, this is what we're really doing you can be a bit lighter on us okay so I'm really really excited about what's going to happen next and I really feel like all good things, there's never a good time but this is the perfect time this is really truly the perfect time and it really starts with you guys because I think we also had a previous speaker we have so much to contribute our knowledge, our talent and we don't need to relearn the skills you guys have been doing whatever you're doing for the last 10, 15 years plus right? so it's not about you know, teaching nann to suck eggs it's actually you coming with us and let's work together on how we can build safeguards and also the laws and regulations that we want so I invite you all to follow me I've got Instagram, LinkedIn but I'm going to be talking about this for a very long time coming so you know, I'd love to be able to work with you guys and also engage with you guys in your creativity and your success so thank you very much, thank you oh, before we finish, finish I'd love to take a selfie photo okay we'll take a selfie and then we'll finish Q&A okay one, two, three perfect, thank you no, thank you yes, that's a question at the back thank you so much for your talk, very interesting I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about how you see the relationship between ethics and the law and like what the separation there is because I'm sure you're familiar with Peru and her AI ethics institute and the work that they're doing there's a lot of interpretation of the law and the limitations of it, I think there, but then that's quite different from liability which I think well, it's an interesting different motivation for interpreting the law so I'm wondering if you can talk about how you see the relationship between ethics and the law and the two considerations there I can say it's a delicate one and even back then, Yongs are going as a law student I struggled because ethics and if you line ethics with morality not the law the law is like what is right and what's wrong but morality is more an internal compass hence that's why I also mentioned the issue of values and we need to talk about values, like what we care about in society I give you a very simple example in my taught's class first year law student we had a question which was you see a drowning girl do you have a moral obligation to save them? who thinks they have a moral obligation to save a drowning girl curious most hands, good how about a legal obligation do you have a legal obligation? oh okay, okay so you know what the actual answer I got was so maybe as a moral obligation you might have to save that girl but a legal obligation is only when if you establish a duty of care okay that's quite technical so what does that mean? you're on a flight, you've seen these in the movies you're on a flight someone's having a heart attack and they call out is there a doctor here? yeah? now that's the call to establish a duty of care if the doctor puts their hand up and says yep I'm the doctor they come and save that individual then the individual dies and they may or may not sue them that's the legal connection but if the doctor stays silent or they slept they didn't hear the call to call for a doctor then there's no obligation even though they're a doctor on the flight with someone having a heart attack so the question that you're asking which is a very good one is say you're a developer you're designing something do you design with the intention of use? yes, now this is where I'm very careful in what I'm also saying there's no use for this purpose but for this purpose you're not factoring if it goes malfunction like I was talking about the robot that went rogue yeah, no intention or you decide for this function but something else happened or the user didn't read the manual yeah, you have that happening as well some people use some equipment things go on fire and then they try to figure out so these are the kind of questions I suppose you could say scenario role playing that is also that is also important to discuss right? it's a bit like the ugly elephant in the room we don't really want to talk about it we just want to do our stuff we want to do our creative thing which is great, wonderful, totally get it but then I think what we're seeing and if I may also mention it have you guys been reading stuff about people being silently bullied or committing suicide and all this kind of stuff because of the internet what's going on? now then you might take a step back well who's responsible for that if it's not the individual i.e. the perpetrators then it's a society issue because clearly that's not a consequence that we want from the technology that we're developing correct? or let's take it one step further which is a bit probably more true is you've got so much cyber attacks or frauds that's also a concern I'm not sure you get your stuff out there but how do we ensure the users end users are also safe bank transactions all this kind of stuff it's way beyond me then we need the cyber experts in but you get what I'm trying to say so the idea is that it's multifaceted it's definitely not a one dimension and also it's knowledge building it's quite interesting so obviously as a lawyer I also have some background in understanding rules and regulations on cyber issues and I remember I worked with this huge organization their whole business in trading and I wanted to promote a training on cyber issues and you know management was not interested they're like why are we spending time it's simple you see an email, it looks dodgy don't open it and guess what happens they open it and then what happens it's a total meltdown client accounts, data being lost you know I've gone through it twice in my whole career live and you're sitting you're taking a step back and you know what it would have been good if we had a plan B it would have been good if we had a conversation about this you know and I think this is where we're at we're at this stage where we can talk about it as we're developing, as ugly and as you know but sometimes I think look at it this way right what is if I had to reframe my talk what would it be I would call it life and death why? because we are all going through a transformative phase either you're transforming or we're transforming and to give you an insight I believe my legal profession needs to transform otherwise we will no longer exist I don't know as timing as that sounds but if we don't get smart about how we use technology how we adopt how we change it that's where the worry is but as an optimist as I say there's always a silver lining we just need to be one step ahead of the curve and try and figure it all out together thank you anyone else want to ask questions yeah okay I'm not sure if you heard about the dollar Chevy Tahoe in the US where they tricked the chat bot to sell the Chevy Tahoe for a dollar okay I kind of want to know your thoughts about the AI chat bots are the companies going to be held responsible in the future and is it a bad thing for me as a developer to try to break into someone's system via their chat bot thank you I think if I was in that situation I saw business opportunity I probably knock on the door and say hey I can solve your problem for X amount that's probably a better move than trying to hack into someone's account so to some extent I would have to say yeah because you know this idea if you are the seller you know you could be selling a bottle of water you could be selling for all I know whatever chips what you're trying it's called misrepresentation right so if you're going to sell land or property it doesn't matter what you're trying to do what you say and what product you end up with should kind of be the same right like this would be no different and the fascinating thing is we have to scrape all the law no we can keep the laws I was having conversation with one of the guys in the room and he said well how's the law been functioning so in America when we first had computers they used the highway code figure that one out how do you connect the computer and the highway code well there's a highway system it's very original but it's got to the point where we can try and lend borrow laws where we can as far as we could but to be honest with you there are concepts like what you've just mentioned have we even defined a chatbot like in legal terms I don't think we have and we haven't even conceptualized well what does it actually do we haven't got a universal international standard term of what that actually means so I think there's opportunities for discussions on that now this is where it gets interesting it gets interesting if you and let's say for a moment the law at this point as we're talking says no we're not going to give them basically separate legal identities but what if five ten years later we say hey you know they're so popular they're attracting fans they're literally a legal identity in itself in other words that chatbot let's call it alpha for argument's sake is the most popular influencer online and actually they can generate without anyone else mentioning them revenue watch time whatever it is and if they can actually act independently then that's a huge question there are so many issues but then you've got the other question is well then how can you control and contain but you've still got that element of question of well what if it goes rogue where can we step in how can we step in yes I would think so yep absolutely and there's another trend I can share with you guys in the legal world and it's called class action I'm sure Americans are very familiar with that term so after this I'm going to London and I'm talking about ESG class action and what that means is it's people coming together so there's one class action that already started in Australia and it's against Google and Apple and their argument is that they're overcharging customers services that are paying so you might be a third party service provider you somehow need to connect with Google through their payment system and they get a cut 60, 80% whatever and this third party only gets 20% and they're saying it's not good for consumers because in essence you're charging high cost but we should lower the cost and customers should get a refund because it's not fair otherwise so we'll see what happens so inevitably we're going to see stuff like that whether it's a good thing or a bad thing well interestingly ESG is a slightly different topic because what are we fighting for we're fighting for the environment so of course it's a good thing if you're getting companies to pay out against air pollution, water pollution whatever pollution but on the face of it based on what you're saying then sure what they should rectify as soon as possible I'll give you a really good example it's called damage control back then this is quite a few years ago, Tesco it's a supermarket chain in the UK they accidentally sold horse meat and they packaged it as beef mince when they found that ASAP they did one of the most incredulous thing which 10 years ago they wouldn't have done which was they made a huge announcement and apologizing that this is the mistake that they've done that will provide refunds etc etc because the opposite would have been to let it slide whatever happened and deny it but that would have backfired this is where we need the PR team this is beyond legal but you would need the PR team to quell everyone's concern and anger and frustration so yes these are the kind of things that what you've just mentioned is something that management and developers need to talk together because there's no good if for example you as a developer are having this problem management just saying because the damage is so great that you know it's really not just a one person's problem yeah I think there are a few other questions there sorry we are we do not have much time so please feel free to meet her after the room so yeah thank you very much thank you thank you thank you thank you hello everyone welcome again how are you when you start learning WordPress design development please raise your hand if you start learning in past 12 months so they are pretty much experienced people here between 2 to 5 years no one between 6 to 10 years pretty much and from the start from 2003 how many are there so we are having like 10 to 15 years experience people here so that's great thing and what type of learner you are audio visual learner you are visual learner and auditory learner if you prefer to learn by audio if you prefer to read or write or depend on documentation yes and hence on learner try things and all that's good so have you ever tried to access content from learn WordPress learn WordPress is like providing materials in form of lesson plans video tutorial and courses that help everyone like from beginners to professional advanced learners that is all thanks for everyone so our next talk is about learning WordPress and our next speaker is Wes Theron please join me in welcoming our next speaker whose passion for education and opens our advocacy is truly inspiring I can say because I worked with him last from past 2 years and I can say he is very very passionate about learning WordPress it is he is from South Africa and right now living in New Zealand from past 5 years he has twin dad and he was a exchange student in America during his high school today our speaker is here to shed light on an exciting initiative title learning pathways on learn WordPress.org as a strong supporter of an open source movement and an instructional designer they have been instrumental in shaping the future of learn WordPress so learn WordPress is right now working on pathway and they are creating a content in a format that will be useful for everyone so please give a big round of applause to our next speaker Wes Theron thank you alright good morning it is still good morning it is before 12 so yeah as you have heard and seen my topic for today is learning pathways on learn WordPress.org so yeah my name is Wes Theron and as you have heard I am originally from Cape Town South Africa and I have been living in New Zealand or in the APAC region for the past 5 years and I have a background in teaching and content development so after teaching high school for most of my career and doing some textbook writing I transitioned to instructional design now for those of you unfamiliar with the term instructional design an instructional designer creates educational materials and experiences like online courses training content etc and I am currently working at automatic contributing full time to the make WordPress training team and my main work revolves around creating video tutorials courses, online workshops and collaborating with other contributors and content creators so just a bit more about myself I am a father of three boys I am a twin dad which I am very proud of and I have been married to my wife for almost 14 years I would say I am happiest in nature I love being in the outdoors I also love travelling and it is so cool to be here in Taiwan it is my first time in the east and I enjoy playing pickleball and I think a lot of people have never heard of pickleball but it is my favourite sport and interesting fact it is one of the fastest growing sports in the US I have heard that they are actually turning some tennis courts into pickleball courts in the states and then I would describe myself as a lifelong learner I want to keep developing I want to keep growing as a as a person as a father and in my career so let's move on to my topic which is learning pathways and here is what I will be talking about today the Learn WordPress platform takeaways from the individual learner survey learning pathways and skill levels YouTube playlists and redesigning but firstly I would like us to reflect on the process involved in learning something new I want you to think back to the day you started using WordPress for the first time how old were you where were you which resources did you use to learn and how long did it take for you to feel competent now that question can probably be applied to so many aspects of your life learning to drive learning to do algebra learning a new language learning to play an instrument etc I always think back to when I started learning to drive in South Africa we mostly drive with a stick shift and figuring out clutch control was a process but what I'm trying to say is we all need to start somewhere on a learning journey and I don't know if you've thought about this but thousands of people will be new to WordPress in the upcoming months and years and that is where the training team steps in as you know make WordPress is a collaborative project where global contributors work on developing and improving WordPress covering aspects like core software themes, plugins, documentation and of course training and all the resources and materials created by the training team can be found on learnwordpress.org so Learn WordPress is an educational website and initiative that was launched on the 15th of December 2020 with a mission to be the definite space for WordPress worldwide to learn and to teach about WordPress and the timing of the launch was crucial as it coincided with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic which forced us to find alternative ways to learn and connect when in-person meetups and WordCamps came to stand still so I would kind of describe Learn WordPress as like a one-stop shop to learn about WordPress now at this stage Learn WordPress hosts four main content types tutorials, lesson plans, courses and online workshops and I thought I'll just quickly touch on these briefly so first up tutorials tutorials are short standalone videos that provide step-by-step guidance on specific WordPress features or topics lesson plans on the other hand are teaching guides for educators allowing them to present WordPress related topics effectively and then courses I think that's something we're all very familiar with they are self-guided lessons that enable learners to delve deeper into WordPress topics and then lastly online workshops are live learning sessions kind of similar to webinars and can be joined from anywhere in the world and these sessions are recorded for folks who can't make the live event and they're also available on WordPress.tv and YouTube so that's kind of allowed me to also connect with a lot of people around the world there are more informal sessions where people can ask questions where we try and do demos and we also try to teach people practically now the training team is very proud of the helpful content published on the Learn site but recognizes the need for improvement to help prospective students or contributors and we recognize this need for improvement through the feedback from an individual learner's survey we conducted in 2023 which kind of led to the birth of the learning pathways project now before I delve deeper into the learning pathway project let me share with you some of the key takeaways from the individual learner's survey so tutorials courses and online workshops are our most used content types secondly web-based learning is the most popular learning method number three respondents noted that the current content available on Learn covers a wide range of topics and can be overwhelming or confusing at times and then lastly suggestions for improvement included a structured way to consume learning content and of course you can read more about the analysis and the results about the individual learner's survey on the training team blog now as mentioned the needs analysis led to the learning pathways project and the goal of the project is to create learning pathways for a diverse audience so from someone new to WordPress and eager to create their first website to for example a developer who wants to move from intermediate to advanced now let's define what is a learning pathway I kind of spoke about instructional design in the beginning as well but a learning pathway is maybe also something you're not familiar with so a learning pathway is a route taken by a learner through a range of activities which allows them to build knowledge progressively or to put it differently a learning path is a selection of modules or lessons linked in a structured way for students to progress and master a particular topic now I thought it would be be helpful to view the current content on learnwordpress.org to kind of see what it's like for a new learner who visits the site for the for the first time now you've maybe never been on the site so let's kind of see what it's like for somebody who who lands on the landing page and who needs to find their way okay so if you visit on the landing page you will see tutorials on the left and lesson plans on the right and then you will find available courses and below that you will see a list of the latest tutorials that have been published and then right at the bottom you can see upcoming or recorded online workshops so that's the the landing page now let's say for example I am new to WordPress I'm on the on the landing page and my initial response would probably be to click on tutorials and when you land on the tutorials page we will notice the most recent or latest tutorials appear first and then there's some filtering options now let's select the getting started filter now you would expect it's a specific point of departure right but once again you will see the latest posts from that category and a newbie might be asking which video do I watch first seeing a variety of video tutorials in no specific order might be intimidating or confusing for someone who is unsure what they are looking for and where they need to start and then the last one when we make our way to courses we will find lots of helpful content structured in a practical way now if you click on introduction to WordPress we actually have three courses within that category so I think you will agree with me courses allow for a structured way of consuming content and this is kind of the direction we want to take with learning pathways as you can see our get up project board is full and we have kicked off our venture and there's lots of good work in progress so let me give you some context so the learning pathway project was kicked off on the 7th of July of last year 2023 and as mentioned the project aims to enhance the learn WordPress experience and also cater for different roles and skill levels now our first goal is to create learning content for each pathway and skill level and content creators are in the process of creating new content and we actually started doing this in Q4 of last year so the first thing we did was we added a thorough outline for these learning pathways and then we asked for feedback from the community and once we got all the feedback we started creating the content and the aim is of course to also reuse and update a lot of the existing content we already have on the on the learn website so each pathway will have a beginner intermediate and advanced section and the training team will first focus on completing learning pathways for the user and for developers so once these pathways have launched the training team will start exploring more pathways such as a designer or a contributor pathway I'm also really keen to look at like a build with me series in the future so something else we want to do is we want to simplify things by having one content type you know at the start we kind of looked at all the content types we have at the moment so instead of having content types like tutorials and lesson plans we will only have one content type namely lessons and this will include lessons that currently form part of courses so you might be asking what will a lesson look like within a learning pathway so each lesson will have video with subtitles and a transcript and after completing a lesson a student will also be able to complete a short quiz or a practical activity to kind of cement their learning and as you can see we are aiming to make our content as accessible as possible and to also cater to different learning styles now if a lesson has instructor notes the plan is to have a designated tab to view to view more information if you would like to teach on the topic now this is something I'm very excited about the training team also decided to host our video lessons on YouTube now this is kind of how it works the lessons are uploaded to WordPress.tv and then it automatically gets transferred to YouTube and once it's uploaded into YouTube we embed the YouTube videos into our learning pathway lessons in Sensei now I just thought I'll mention that as well we will be creating our learning pathway our lessons as well as our courses within Sensei or using the Sensei plugin and Sensei is an LMS or learning management system so that's what we use on the on the Learn website so another step we're implementing is creating playlists for each learning pathway on YouTube and setting the videos to be watched in chronological order now YouTube will allow us to reach a wider audience and also utilize the translation and the analytical features and don't be concerned YouTube allows WordPress as a non-profit organization to host our videos without any advertisements and uninterrupted and seamless viewing experience for users so that's kind of the first thing I was worried about when we started talking about WordPress because we don't want ads so yeah that's a great thing about being a non-profit organization now I think you will agree with me if I just think about myself if if you want a training video or you want a solution for a problem you have on your site the first thing a lot of people do is they go to a search engine or they go to YouTube and another thing I've noticed within the WordPress space is that a lot of tutorials about WordPress or learning material it's kind of scattered and it's fragmented people need to go to different places and even if you like in a search engine or within YouTube you search a topic and then there's just a list of things to choose from so from my perspective having our content on YouTube in a structured format is a significant step forward and vital to reaching a diverse audience so one thing I've also noticed is that now that we've started uploading our content on YouTube is that we've got those analytical features and we can see more traffic and we were reaching people through the Learn website or TV and now we've got YouTube as well and it's been wonderful to see like our content is reaching much further and hopefully then also drawing people back to to the Learn site now another topic and this is probably at the top of mind for us as well is language diversity so we have translation contributors actively participating in the training team and so far training teams content creators have predominantly been English speaking contributors and this is of course resulted in many of Learn's content being in English so the great thing is the training team has a growing team of translators who translate these resources into multiple languages I was actually on I was in Slack yesterday I can then kind of see some of the new content that has been published and some new things that are being translated on a weekly basis in different languages but I don't know if everybody realizes this but we're always open for non-English speakers to create content in their own languages so that's something we really want to encourage and see more of so that someone can say I want to create content in Japanese and then we can host them and create the content in Japanese originally and then we can actually translate that to English or other languages from there and of course to address the language gap for non-English speakers we are leveraging YouTube's translation feature and I actually tested this out the other day so I also speak Afrikaans and then I looked at some of our content and I changed the language to Afrikaans and I was kind of impressed by how accurately things were translated so it is a helpful tool but of course we also want our transcripts and so forth to be translated now some of you might have thought but what about Glotpress so you may know that Glotpress is used to translate this system or as a way to translate WordPress, CMS but we have experimented with Glotpress and the feedback from MEDA has that it's not ideal for translating post content but yeah having content reaching different languages is the top of mind for us so one of the main goals of the learning pathways project is to redesign the Learn website so you've seen the old website or the current website and the plan is to redesign that website with the clear learning pathways and also improved content discoverability, new search filters and also other organization strategies and the mockup of the new website has been created it's actually been created as we speak and finalized in Figma and yeah, I'm very excited when it is when it's going to be finally done and as you can imagine to get that project over the finish line of redesigning the website there's been strong collaboration between various MAC training teams such as the training team org design team, the MEDA team marketing team etc to complete this part of the project now you might be asking when are we going to see the new learning pathways and the new website so the plan is to actually launch in Q3 of this year and we're very excited about helping folks learn in a more effective and structured way and as I said we first going to start with the two pathways the user pathway and the developer pathway and then keep building from that and I want to take this moment as well to just thank all the contributors to all the contributors who's been involved in making this come to fruition and to develop content to help with the information architecture for the new website so many different role players and of course we want you we want contributors from word camps everywhere in the world to contribute to learn WordPress so if you are keen and interested in creating content please reach out to us but the great thing is you don't only have to be a content creator you can review content you can edit content you can translate content you can run online workshops you can help with administrative work etc there's many areas to be to get involved in so I contributed for example I mentioned that two folks from the Japanese community have decided to run online workshops and that's their way of contributing to the training to the training team so yeah we eager to see more content creators join but yeah there are so many other areas to get involved with as well so that is learning pathways and that's a wrap thank you thank you so much learn WordPress and training is something I'm always passionate about it is something I'm very always try to learn more so is there any question I want to ask Hi Wes thanks for the presentation I was wondering how you deal with WordPress evolving and training material getting outdated so you have that's a touchy subject so I would say that's been the hardest part of my job is kind of keeping up to date with the UI changes and WordPress evolving so quickly I feel it's been easier for our developer Jonathan Bosch for creating content for developers I think that's been easier for him but we are just constantly updating content as well so with new releases we try and update content but yeah there's a lot of work and there's not as many people that can do it so yeah it is a to keep to climb and it's a continuous challenge but we do we do try and continue to update content as much as possible to make our content relevant and the UI relevant but yeah it's a tough one can people report that something is outdated how do you know that if you're on a tutorial for example there's usually a tab at the bottom where you can give feedback maybe there's a technical error, maybe there's something out of date and then yeah people can just click on the button and they can give feedback and we will get that sent to the training team so yeah same for courses lesson plans and tutorials yeah anyone else want to ask a question hi thank you so much for the presentation and great to learn more about the platform the question is so we have volunteer content creators I was wondering about how many are there how do you guide, review and do quality control on the content and then what are the popular formats that they're submitting content in okay maybe you just maybe keep your microphones so I can go back to the first so maybe just ask the first part of your question again how many content creators are there that volunteer and then how do you guide and review and do quality control for those so we have so we've got two full time my colleague and I we are contributing full time to as content creators and then we have I would say two or three other content creators that are maybe just self sponsored or partly sponsored so yeah there's not as many content creators of course there's lots of other people or contributors translating or reviewing content and that kind of links to the next part so when when we create a video for example I will upload it to a get up issue and then I'll share it in the training team and then we usually wait for three reviews from people within the training team to review the content once it's been reviewed for quality control then we only go ahead and publish yeah and that's all managed through github and yeah so we mainly use get up for all of that so our project board our issues like content yeah of course Slack as well but yeah we communicate a lot in Slack but all of the the administrative work happens within get up and your other part of your question and then what are the popular contents like content formats so like are they, is it videos on youtube most yeah so as you heard now we've shifted in the past few months so in the past until like a few months ago we only had our content on wordpress.tv upload to wordpress.tv and then we added the link to a lesson so people would have only been able to access our content through wordpress.tv or if they go to the learn website and then they can click on a tutorial and they can watch the tutorial but you're saying what's the most popular and yeah I would say looking at the latest stats as well it is mostly videos video content but as I said we have transcript as well for folks who just wants to read and not watch the video but yeah the traffic has gone up so much since we've uploaded everything to youtube as well so we're actually getting people that's watching our content without actually having to go to the learn website but it's a portal in and with the playlists that we want to create for a learning pathway that's a great way for people to say learn in a structured way so the next video links to the previous video etc yeah but yeah if you're a content creator please reach out anybody else what kind of length of videos do you have shorter videos or longer or what's preferred so to be honest it varies some videos are 3 minutes some videos are 5 minutes sometimes 10 minutes 12 minutes but I would say it averages around 5 to 6, 7 minutes so of course the aim is probably always to go shorter but depending on the topic but yeah I would say 5 minutes is usually a goal high risk so wordpress.tv it has talks from the word camps yes so is the plan to maintain it on wordpress.tv it goes also be published on youtube or any kind of work being done so that we can do some advanced filtering and searching on wordpress.tv since the beginning all our content goes to wordpress.tv so that's where we upload our content so if you go on wordpress.tv now you will find all of our content so yeah we can see wordpress content and stuff on wordpress.tv but also all our content but it's set up now in a way that as soon as I upload a video to wordpress.tv it just automatically goes to youtube and then I publish from there yeah so um was the second part of your question are we going to try and help folks to search in wordpress.tv yeah so I haven't been on wordpress.tv in a long time but I found some issues in filtering or searching my own wordcam video in the past so let's say if I want some of my team members to go on wordpress.tv and filter by topics let's say a rest api is that possible right now yes that is possible right now but yeah I also wanted to say Julia was a team rep for the training team so yeah it's cool that she can introduce me today but yeah it's been wonderful working with her as well thank you thank you is there any more question here yeah so all I can say is watch the space I think that was a yawn yeah sorry for that you almost got yourself in trouble there thank you for the informative session and we have learned a lot from you as well and we have a token of appreciation for you I can give you a hug thanks everyone now it's a lunch break time so if you are feeling hungry must be feeling hungry go to plow third and take your meal enjoy we will be resuming after lunch here thank you hello and anyhow that's the only word I know in Chinese but that should be good okay let's see this is fine and if I speak at this volume that's also okay good enough I think this is fine no crack no okay that's fine hello everyone welcome to this post lunch session of contributor to conference day 2 of work in Asia 2024 I hope you are enjoying the event so far so before I call our next speaker let's do a quick check in how many of you have been have got a chance to be on this stage like speaking at work camp meetups on anything like that please raise your hands so that's a quite a good number and so how many of you haven't got a chance or haven't ever applied might be due to some fear or anything like that or you're still thinking that I should speak someday yeah so be ready for this session you can recognize from the topic already so in this session you will learn how to deal with the fear of public speaking and come to this side of the hall come to this side so you will learn this you will figure out the common mistakes that many of us do when we get a chance to do the public speaking you will also learn that what to do and what to do when you get the chance to be on this stage so I think that's enough about the talk I don't want to reveal most of the things so let's talk about our speaker because he believes that you all are here not to know about him but to know about the message and the topic that he is going to deliver but still it's my duty to introduce him so he started his blogging journey in 2009 and then jumped into the wordpress plugin business in 2011 he's the founder of plugin and SaaS business he sees wordcamp as an opportunity to meet and exchange ideas with the people he understands in the public speaking he's an unusual combination of geek, entrepreneur storyteller and mentor he is also one of my mentor for public speaking so let's please welcome Mr. Neerao Mehta on the stage to start the public speaking masterclass please welcome physical class welcome I know it's a CSTA session for anybody who doesn't know CSTA session that means it's post lunch usually people prefer to sleep especially especially if it's dark at the same time you're here and that tells me a couple of things about you one is that you're curious about public speaking you want to learn something and second is that you're also committed to it you may be an introvert to make a difference in your public speaking so I promise you that you will learn a lot of things about effective public speaking today like Anand mentioned we will cover the classic mistakes the golden rule of goofing up and I'll also tell you about how you can turn any dry topic into an engaging session but before we do all that I think we need to go back 30 years so let's just rewind and go back 30 years imagine that there is a big auditorium much bigger than this it's a Friday morning a hot Friday morning and I'm sitting right in that end corner somewhere on stage is a charismatic lady and she is teaching us public speaking and I'm listening really glued in in that session I learned the first lesson that I learned was about how to tackle anxiety see all of us have butterflies whenever you go or have to go speak about something you will feel the anxiety and how do you deal with anxiety simple what you do is you may want to try that now when you take deep breaths you will center yourself and that will instantly calm down your nerves and that's the most effective technique of dealing with any kind of anxiety that I've learned over the years now that was my first big lesson from that lady and the other lesson that I learned from her about public speaking was also equally effective so let me demonstrate that imagine if you are in a big hall and you are talking to so many people public speaking is about talking to people it's not really about presentation etc, it's about talking to people and you can't talk to people if you are not connected to people so how do you connect to people the only way to connect to people is through eye contact now if you are talking to one person maintaining eye contact is easy you just look into their eyes but what if you have like 50 people, 500 people, 5000 people then how do you maintain eye contact and the trick to do that is also not very difficult and here's how you do it you look in one direction soft gaze, you are not looking into any particular person's eye you are just looking into that direction and you deliver one sentence and then you move you turn and you look into the next angle next direction look in that direction in a soft gaze and deliver one sentence turn, deliver the next sentence turn, deliver the next sentence what happens when you do a soft gaze is that everybody in that direction will feel like you are looking at them and when you are looking at people and they feel that you are looking at them do you think they have any other option they don't have any option they have to look back at you and they have to kind of pay attention to you that's how it works when you do that you instantly pull people in because you are just looking at everybody talking to everybody now over the years I turn this into a very fine principle and I call that my 1.1.1.1 principle I'll tell you about that if I forget remind me to talk about this but for now we have to continue in our flashback so let's go back again 30 years now I have used this technique about public speaking in a lot of elocation competitions but now I have a bigger challenge what's the challenge so this time it's the nation's independence day and it's not an elocation but this time it's a singing competition now I like music but I'm not a singer but I still gather up courage and I go up stage and I'm like okay let's try something this time you know let's try something new so I go up on stage and this is 32 years ago okay exactly as you can guess it's a disaster it's it's the worst public humiliation I ever got somehow I managed to complete the song I don't want to complete the song here you really want me to do it no no so somehow I managed to complete the song and what I expected was that the audience will burst into laughter just like you did but that didn't happen the audience actually burst into an applause and at that time I learned the next biggest lesson in public speaking your audience wants you to succeed see they've taken that time out from their life and they're here and they're here for you they're here for themselves also but then they want to listen to you and they want to cheer you up so if you make any mistakes they are not going to throw rotten tomatoes to you did you guys bring any rotten tomatoes see so you know the whole thing is that we are so afraid of going on stage remember that the audience is always on your side they're not against you they are with you they are with you in this conversation that you're having with them so so let's jump back into the future now and let's hope this works so now let's get started and let me tell you what we're going to do today so my name is Neera Mehta and I'm a successful entrepreneur WordPress community member we have a portfolio of 30 products more than 600,000 users I have 30 years of experience in speaking in public I'm not one of cats but cat pictures are cute and that is going to be our agenda for today easy? shall we do that? please don't do this please please do not ever do this classic mistakes it's full of classic mistakes what are the mistakes first people are here not for you they're here for themselves they want to learn they don't care about who you are what your organization is what are your credentials if you've got it demonstrated you don't need to shout about it many people come on stage to gain some value this is not a stage to gain value for yourself this is a place where you give so don't come on stage to gain value for yourself gain some whatever if you're going to talk about something that people can search online let them search online don't talk about it if you're going to fill up your slides with so much information people will just read the slides why should they listen to you there are lots of classic mistakes here we will see if we get I'll talk about some more but then you definitely do not want to do something like this can you promise me to not do something like this yeah thank you so now let's you know get into something before we can even start talking about how to speak and what to do and what not to do we need to address this fundamental question first why did you not apply to speak maybe some of you did but most of you did not and you would have lots of reasons those would be valid too but you will have reasons like I don't know enough there are so many people who are smarter than me in the audience how do I speak to them if I go up and speak and if I make a fool of myself then people will laugh at me or people will stare at me I don't like that I don't like that attention we all have lots of these reasons for not even trying and I want to point out one thing to you most of the reasons that you have for not applying okay and here it is are simply your concerns with your own self image you are worried about your self image and that is the reason why you did not apply that's a silly reason no yeah it feels important but it's really not that important because why the audience is on your side so once that is out let's deal with this the elephant in the room the fear of public humiliation the fear of failure the fear of looking like a fool all that fear is unreal it feels real but it's all in your head all the fear that you have most of the fear at least most of the fear that we have whether in public speaking or in life it's all some narrative some story that we have in our head that we keep telling ourselves again and again and again and then you start believing that story we limit ourselves we limit our progress public speaking is just one of them but most of the fear is unreal now once you've dealt with your fear and you gather the courage because courage is something that lets you go beyond the fear that's all you will continue having fears I still do so if I'm coming up here I will have a lot of anxiety do I stay there or walk up walk up that is courage you will have fears but when you keep your fears with you and you take the next action that is courage so be courageous that's what it is about I'm assuming that you are now considering talking at a world camp or some other place and that's the next question that I will ask important because we need to stay focused on the purpose of the talk I already told you that the purpose of the talk is to give and not to gain but I like to kind of put it in these three segments you have some idea that you want to inform or educate people about that's your first goal but you don't want to do that in a boring, dry way right because people have seen and heard so many dry boring sessions they don't want another one you want to do that in a more engaging way and after all this engagement and information is done the real purpose is that you want them to act on something because you know what's the point of talking blabbering if there is no action so this is what you really want to focus on whenever you're considering talking about something stay in the intersection of all these three circles you want to inform you want to educate you want to entertain and you want them to take action now all that is clear and you're starting thinking okay now I want to apply and I want to do all these three things but what is it that I talk about tough one so let's try to kind of see that from different perspectives think about and ask yourself these questions what is it that people come to me for advice what are some projects that I'm really proud of what is some idea some insight that I have that needs to be shared with the world or this is the audience and what will make a difference to that audience that is what you want to talk about and what I do I maintain a list of all the topics that I can talk about and then I write a summary of it and the summary is more like an ad it's like a pitch and then I will talk about these summaries to some friends and then I'll pass through them they'll say okay this makes sense over a period of time I will have a few such list of topics that I can pull from anytime and that's what I do you can also try to do that and you know once you do that then you really want to focus on this thing because your topic is likely going to be a tech topic and tech topics are usually dry I mean if I was to talk about something like Gutenberg it would get dry I mean I love it but still so how do you turn any dry technical topic into an interesting engaging conversation well the answer is stories people love stories we've all grown up with stories and what you do is you take your experiences and turn them into stories remember I told you about my public speaking session like the training that I had and my you know singing competition what was that so take your experiences that you know the experiences the authentic experiences of failure frustration disasters that happen to you or people close to you are the best stories because they will connect with your audience you know when you when you share your authentic stories the audience will convert from plain vanilla interest to deep engagement and that's what you want to take all your experiences turn them into stories but when you do stories you also want to be careful you don't want to talk about so many stories because you may have so much experience and then we learn something from movies movies have ups and downs they have some suspense they have some characters so observe from the movies and see how you can make your story more emotional because emotions will always win over argument I guess most of you have experienced that at home so you want to focus more on emotions and then the logical flow will continue people will buy into your logic once they are connected with you emotionally that's how you do stories now let's talk about slides I think let's not talk about slides simple slides just one word no pictures no cats either and just use the slides as a reference for yourself the slides are not to be read either by the audience or by you the slides are only your cues of what to talk about now you may ask okay that's good but you know how about like some nice AI generated images in the backdrop yes they look cool if you like them you can keep them but is it going to add value to the audience if you think it will then do it if not why take the hassle I mean I try to keep things minimal and you know why I already told you that if you have a lot of text on the slides people will read the slides right and if you don't have anything on the slide if I have blank slides what will you guys do you have no option again see that's the reason why you don't want to keep too many things in the slides and you know if you keep too many things in the slide there is another risk what if you forget when people will catch you you forgot talking about this thing another benefit of keeping less things on the slide is when the timekeeper tells you that you are just out of time then what you can do is quickly skip, skip, skip because there is nothing much on the slides and you can skip the slides people don't even know what you are going to talk about anyway that's what works for me I hope it works for you also so let's move on to the next slide which is about code and demos so if you have code and demos then how do you handle it if you have a demo just record a video and show the video don't rely on an internet connection if you have code just show the most important code and not the entire file focus on the only thing that's important show less to people talk more when we are talking about slides that's the principle okay that's done now stage presence and I love this metaphor because when you are on stage first of all when you are on stage you have three tools at your disposal first is your slides next is your body and the third thing that you have at your disposal is your voice when you are on stage you just don't want to be a monotonous mimicry artist reading some text you can use your hands but also you can use your voice the tone the pitch the volume the inflections all of that in your voice will contribute to a much better experience for people so use that well it's not just the slides that you have you have a whole lot of other things at your disposal and if you do that multi media experience so to say right and that's what you'll come in the session for otherwise they can you know just look at your slides as if you practice this technique they will not get anything in the slides still but so you're an artist on stage and when you're doing all this artistry you know there are also some things that will go wrong and then you may have to focus on this then which is what I told you about you had to remind me 1.1.1.1 what is that about when you're on stage this is the technique that I love to practice and it goes like this you stand in one spot and you deliver one entire idea from that spot so one spot one idea first two ones and then one direction one sentence that's the other two ones which we talked about earlier when your idea is over you move to another spot one direction one sentence next direction the next sentence and keep repeating like that what this does is this breaks the monotony if you know many people make this mistake of you know hiding behind the podium many people don't do that anymore they keep walking and they're talking to whom to the wall the moment you lose eye contact with your audience you're gone but a lot of us make that mistake the other mistake that a lot of us make is that they know that they need to make eye contact but then they will speak one sentence and then they'll keep looking at everybody they'll just keep on like scrolling so that also doesn't work because you know if you do not stay in one direction for one complete sentence you don't make that connection so you don't want to run around on the stage unless you definitely want to do something like this which is part of your script yeah but focus on this principle and then I think a lot of things will go well filler words is another thing that I want to talk about which is all the ums and ahas that we fall into see filler words are good they make your talk more conversational it feels personal because when we talk to a friend we do use filler words but especially when you're on stage you want to reduce the use of filler words the reason why we use filler words is because there's so much going on in our head and we're just trying to put things together we fill the gaps with these ums and ahas and oks and yas the way you deal with them just replace them with silence take a pause whenever you're still trying to you know fit your thoughts there is another benefit to pause pause also breaks the monotony of talking so every time I stop you're hanging again waiting for what is to come next again raising your curiosity really works it has worked today so that's the way you deal with filler words and I'm going to quickly talk about a few more of my secrets or tips to you know deal with public speaking the next is before going on stage what is it that I do so before I even enter the hall I will just look around I'll actually you know see the venue where do I have to enter from how will I be on the stage before I actually start I will come on the stage and I'll look at the whole setup light setup we'll test the mic we'll test the clicker the slides the proportion the ratio the slides the colors everything we will make sure that it is all done well you want to test all of this every time you go on stage because something or the other will go wrong and you want to prepare for it you don't want to just get on stage and then face that and then when some on stage the first thing that I do is I don't start talking I just stand I'll stand in the middle and I'll just be with people establish that connection and then start talking yeah okay so that's some tips about being on stage but there are some more interesting important things like this we get too serious especially if you're on stage and you've done all that preparation and then you're like okay this needs to go well this needs to go well and then you forget to smile and especially when you make a mistake you're like oh what should you do when you make a mistake yeah just smile when you're on stage have fun at least you can have fun and if you're not having fun what's the point because if you're not having fun the audience will not have fun they'll not connect etc etc right so I have to remind myself of doing this sometimes I you know plant people in the audience I tell them okay look at my expression if I seem so if I look at like look boring then just indicate me that I have to smile and then I'll smile and then go forward yes quickly let me complete some golden rule of goofing up I promise you I'll tell you that the golden rule of goofing up making mistakes is that nobody will know about it you wrote your script you figured like you planned what you want to talk about you make a goof up they don't even know people don't know when you make mistakes like I would have made so many mistakes I just made a mistake in this sentence itself nobody noticed people won't notice because they don't know your script that's a golden rule of goofing up feel free to goof up but do not forget practice practice is important I go to the length of writing the script for my entire talk like really writing the script and then practicing that and rehearsing that I make mistakes but it's okay people are on my side the difference between may to memorable is practice the more you do it the better you'll get it finally remember there is no inherent stress in public speaking or life in general we make it stressful you don't have to be perfect to succeed you don't have to be a charismatic person to succeed at public speaking what really matters is authentic stories they'll connect people when you share that authentically people will get value and that is what you want to focus on when you do public speaking you want to focus on giving value to people when people receive value that is your success now I told you that it's about inform, engage and act what is the action that I'm asking you of speak and don't wait till the next word camp you don't have to wait till the next word camp to speak you can just turn to a person sitting next to you, go outside and then share one thing that you liked in this session talk about 30 seconds and that is public speaking because you're talking to somebody public thank you very much guys thank you very much that was an amazing master class in public speaking and I think we have some time can we have a quick question from the audience anyone want to ask something if you ask me a specific question I'll try to answer it specifically if you ask me a question I'll try to confuse you more what tips do you have for public speaking on a zoom call or online situation so you won't have a stage so you can't do all the acting the rest will stay the same yeah I get it that you don't see the audience but if you have the chance and if you have the setup you can see the audience like you can have one screen for yourself and the rest if you can see the other attendees if you can do that still maintain that eye contact but anytime you're talking to a camera the best way to maintain eye contact or make other people feel like you'll have eye contact is to look into the camera and talk because when you look into the camera people feel that you're talking to them on the other side thank you next question first of all your presentation is phenomenal by the way thank you my question is how is important about the speaker notes including the script of your presentation when you speak publicly and how often you read them okay so his question is about speaker notes and speaker notes are like notes that you can leave with each slide in most of the presentations of it I keep my script as a speaker note so with each slide I write a whole script about what I'm going to talk about I don't submit that to the organizers though I keep it to myself I don't read them okay so I would not read from the speaker notes so depending on the setup where you're going to talk so some of them will have this kind of a monitor okay so if this monitor may have your speaker notes and if you have speaker notes and sometimes it has the next slide that you know present so if you have that you can use that as a reference today I didn't have that because I submitted a PDF I don't prefer to submit a keynote or PPD I prefer to submit a PDF to avoid all the risk of things not working so I won't have speaker notes at my disposal when I'm speaking so I can't read them because if I read them what's going to happen if I read then what's going to happen yes you guys are smart you will lose eye contact you lose eye contact you lose the audience yeah make sense thank you thank you for your sharing the experience is so great and you said that we need to action so I decided to ask questions it's also public yes yes yes I feel so nervous just thinking about asking questions so I can imagine how stressful to be on the stage and you said last thing about practicing so I'm curious about like what opportunity can we have to practice you said that we can just find that people to learn but it's so much easier to just talk to person just two of us there's no stress to talk about it's so much different compared to stand on the stage so where can I practice if I practice at home I won't feel stress so where can I have similar environment to feel that thank you good question first of all I would like to answer the second part which is about stress and that we may not have stress with a friend or at home stress is here so you just tell yourself that this friend is actually thousand people or this mirror that you're talking to is a big auditorium just imagine that you're speaking in front of a big audience I bet you will be stressed okay there's just one way of dealing with that so if you do mirror work which is like practicing in front of the mirror or you can record yourself on camera by the way that's a fun thing to do like really and when you do that don't have anybody else in the room and don't show that video to anybody else okay because you will laugh so much looking at yourself on camera but that's another way to practice and of course whenever you have an opportunity speak in a meet up if you have an organization speak in front of people in your team if you have a group of friends speak in front of them for any topic that is of common interest you don't need to talk about wordpress you can talk about anything and see the trick is every time you talk in public if you be conscious about it and if you practice some of these principles you'll get better at it so if you practice let's say eye contact if you practice if you have few people then if you practice one sentence one direction you will get better at it and that is what will come useful when you come on stage it's just a matter of time so I look forward to see you on stage so just one question again yeah one question so how much of how do you make adjustments to your presentation let's say depending on your audience where you're at you may make slight adjustments what if you don't know that much about your audience and you don't get to ask them questions I mean certain comedians with their punch lines may work at certain cities but not other cities and the same thing with the tech audience versus an audience that you may not have that much info about environment optimal impact based on the type of adjustments you can make in real time yeah again great question so you have to listen to all kind of feedback that you'll get from the audience when I walk up stage and look at you and if you look back at me there is some feedback if I try to crack a joke and if you laugh at it there is some feedback if you don't laugh at it that's another feedback and that is how you could adjust oh you can also ask questions if it's a technical topic you can always ask questions like ok how many of you have done this not done this etc to what level so those are the things that you can do and another thing that helps is you have to be good at what you're talking about and once you're good at what you're talking about you will know that ok if my audience is like the these are the adjustments that I can make or you can pre-plan that ok if people know about this or if this is a city or this is the kind of context that I'm going to talk about then this is the branch of my presentation that I'll use and you know if you have multiple slides you can skip a few or you can say spend more time on this slide and not on that slide things like that so you can always vary your delivery even if it's on the same topic based on the audience it's important to do that because that's what matters you're here to give value to the audience if they don't receive value what's the point yeah so it is dynamic but I would say get feedback in whichever way possible so that you know whether the audience is connecting with you or not then carry forward thank you I need one last question I think we can take ok so I'm here so we are after time so we can take the question after and you can catch him outside also and he will be also after party and we have a special token of precision for speaker thank you thank you very much and I hope some of you will try to act on this we will back shortly after for the next session so stay here and if you want to take water or anything you can come back soon I have an important announcement to make so we just got some news from the program team that today's food was supposed lunch food was supposed to be gluten free but due to some from the food vendor catering vendor it was not actually gluten free so in case if any of any of you are feeling some issues and feeling uneasy there is a nursing staff near the registration counter so you can reach out there and you can also contact any staff or volunteer or organizer for the directions we are really sorry for this inconvenience but it was unfortunate from our side also so we are so sorry about it so now let's begin the next session so before that we have done a small raise your hand exercise in the previous session so let's do that again how many of you are here developers number winners and marketers so we have a mix of audience and how many of you have ever browsed a website or used an app that was so difficult to scroll or navigate and you just came out of that yeah this happened with all of us and I'm sure you will never want to have the same experience for the website you build and manage am I right? so in this talk we will learn about why it's important to design a digital experience with a purpose because without a purpose nothing is good we will learn how to apply key principle of intentional design such as knowing why and who we will also learn how to measure and improve design outcomes and navigate common challenges in the design process whether you are looking for enhance your design approach or stakeholders wanting to understand how designs, decisions impact user experiences or anyone interested in creating a user friendly and effective design this session will provide a valuable insight for all of you our next speaker is Jocelyn Jocelyn has led numerous transformative projects including successful third party integrations and system improvement projects and she also had a very interesting work camp journey her first work camp was work camp asia that happened last year and she also had a very interesting work camp journey her first work camp was work camp asia that happened last year and the second work camp was work camp europe that happened last year and the third work camp was work camp us so she started her work camp journey with all the big work camps she is a mother of five kids also has two cats and one dog anyone cat lover here and today she is accompanied by her mother she is here to cheer her please raise your hand and say hi to all our audience so please welcome Jocelyn and learn about intentional design and crafting a purposeful digital experience please welcome hasn't this been an amazing work camp so far are you guys loving it thank you so much for being here with me today like he said I'm Jocelyn Hendrickson I'm a senior product manager at Bluehost I've been there for 11 years a little bit more about me he mentioned I have five kids two cats and a dog yeah it's a little bit busy there I'm an artist I'm a creator I love building new things I love designing new things whether it's with digital art or watercolor or anything else I just love the process of creation as a product manager often times the projects I work on have a lot of overlap with developers, marketers designers and it's a really interesting and a unique place that I'm in because my job is to create and come up with innovative solutions or build on existing solutions that are in the market and seeing how we can improve those and I think one of the best ways to do that is with intention with purpose and so that's really what we're going to be talking about today is how the process in which you design things really can lead to either a really great experience or kind of be a flop so the lead up question was really great because we've all been here before right where we use an app or a website that is so frustrating for whatever reason it might be slow it might have too much clutter in it it has a confusing navigation and it's terrible you don't want to return to that site ever again or use that app again leaves you really disappointed as compared to an experience that's really delightful there's a few applications that I use in websites that I go to every time I go to them it's because they make me feel great I love using them I'm able to accomplish the task that I set out to accomplish the difference between these two experiences is really the intention behind how they were created how they were crafted and the way that website and that solution communicates with you and resonates with you so what is intentional design? it's a process where the user's intentions with the product app or website are considered at each point of the design process it begins with the conception it begins with the documentation it begins with the thoughts and the ideas that you communicate with others it even goes down to as simple as like should I use a comma or a semi colon here the details that matter when you're designing with intention so everything has always a specific purpose when you're designing with intention whether it's you're solving a problem whether you're trying to communicate information or reinforce a message to your audience everything is chosen deliberately so I will start this off by telling a story let me back up a little bit we'll talk about why it matters when you design with intention when you build user friendly accessible experiences that speak and resonate with your audience by understanding your user's needs their preferences their pain points, their motivations you design solutions that really meet their expectations and provide value so with that I'm going to now tell a story so a few years ago I had this dream of completely redesigning my office area and I spent a lot of time on Amazon adding things to my wish list I spent a lot of time on Pinterest pinning different things and it was this complete dream to have a space where I could go create, do art and be really like just have a space that was mine that felt like me because prior to that I really didn't I just kind of had things thrown in there and cluttered and my husband was very patient with me he told me you can buy anything that you want we can design it however you want so I ordered some incredible wallpaper and a light fixture that matched and I was super excited for this journey and for redesigning this office so we took everything out put up the wallpaper my husband installed the light fixture and I was so excited I was seeing my dream come true of this space that I wanted to create and then I started buying a lot of packages from Amazon and buying things from the store a lot of things that probably shouldn't need to do they didn't maybe match I was just very excited and my excitement got the best of me and after we put up the wallpaper and the light fixture I still had to work on Monday so I reluctantly returned my craft desk, my work desk set everything back up but still was very excited and all those boxes that I purchased from Amazon that were showing up I made our step and things from the store that's when things went wrong this is kind of what my office area started to look like all the packages stacked up against each other, I had paintings and pictures that were mismatched it was complete chaos but I'll tell you that I knew where everything was in the chaos but if I ask my husband, hey can you go get me some scissors from my area he would never be able to find them but I understood the chaos this is really how you want your area where you're supposed to be calm and productive to be no, it was not how I wanted it to be at all but I'd lost sight of my original intentions of wanting to redesign my office and I brought things in and purchased things just because I could and that really leads to the point that I think is really important with this is that intentionality beats impulsivity it's really easy to make quick decisions and get that instant gratification because you're able to do it we live in a fast paced world where decisions are made really fast but we lose sight of that intention and we end up often times some websites kind of feel like this I think sometimes too so how do you become intentional I'll walk through some principles of intentional designing today so we start with kind of knowing your purpose and then talk about simplicity connection clarity and impact so the first thing is before you start designing you have anything and this can be for anybody and when I'm talking about designing I want to make it very clear I am not a designer I do not go on to Photoshop and design things designing things can extend way beyond that whether it's you're designing an API that anybody wants to integrate with if you are designing a marketing campaign if you're designing products if you are actually a designer this can extend to anything and that's kind of why I started with the story of my office redesign is because these principles I really hope that you're able to take them and apply them to whatever it is that you want to create and in order to do that you have to start with your purpose you have to have a clear vision of what you want to achieve sometimes what you'll see is we'll have this large purpose of our website and that's great we use that as our north star and we continue to think about that but then when we're building small details such as maybe a contact form the purpose is maybe for a newsletter like sign up for my newsletter all you really need is an email address and maybe I agree to receive emails but sometimes you'll see those and it will be like first name, last name, favorite color name, how did you eat last night and there's no point of that so you'll need to ask yourself what the problem is you're trying to solve what's the value that you're trying to provide and what's the impact that you are trying to make and that's not just for the entire solution that's for every component in your solution and in order to do that you have to know your who who are you building this for what are you designing for why do they need this what pain points are you trying to solve for them what are their goals what are their motivations why is it that this is a product or a solution that they need often times you'll hear about understanding your users and we'll hear the same types of practices I guess is the best way to say it so doing things like create a user persona let's do market research and understand our person but for me I think that's a great starting point and I think it's important to do these things but people don't want to be personas people want to be seen as a human they want to feel that when they're using your product or your website app whatever it is that they are seen, that they are heard so we've got to paint the rest of the picture and we do that through the first thing that we'll talk about is empathy it's our way to see the world through other people's eyes it's our way to see what they see feel what they feel and experience things as they do it really is the cornerstone of intentional design because it helps us understand the problems and the realities of the people that we're designing for so seeing through the world through their eyes is something that is so powerful and it's something that I don't think sometimes we take a step back to do you'll hear about method acting and I think it's important for us to do method designing or method browsing even if you've heard that term where you become that person you become that user and you see the world through their eyes so imagine you're designing an app or a website for somebody who's taking care of elderly parents that have fallen sick they don't want to have a lot of data points and pictures and benefits and it's only $9,000 a month they want to see that you care about the problems like think about the worried, the sleepless nights that am I going to remember to give the medication on time or I have to go out of town who's going to take care of it they want to feel seen and heard and that your solution really delivers to them and that being said people are not robots PS this was all generated by AI so just ignore the words but emotional state matters to users so like I said in that instance where I'm feeling really nervous and I'm having all this worry with this situation I'm in about taking care of elderly parents mommy or not elderly I don't think that at all by the way just an example that's how I feel but maybe I'm telling my best friend and I say hey Laura I'm really looking for the solution I don't know what to do I'm feeling overwhelmed I'm feeling anxious she might want those bullet points of those features because she's not feeling the way that I feel and so it's important that we're not always emotional but we're not always analytical because we're humans and sometimes we are we work in an emotional state and an analytical state and so it's important to recognize the difference between the two and see how your audience responds to the way that you're communicating with them the next part is to design for context do you know where your users are using your solution do you know how they're using it understanding the context of how they use it and when and why they need to use is just as important as knowing their needs and their wants and their preferences so I mean for example designing application that's used in a cozy little quiet cafe gives you more affordances than you get where if you're designing an application that people are going to be used in a really busy train stop they're running late for work they need to catch that next bus they don't want to have to take the time to figure out and go through the maze of your solution they want that information where they need that information and that's why the next part is accessibility as part of empathy this is a measurement of the user's ability to use the products and services to the extent and ease that they can use them it can be temporary disabilities they may have or permanent ones accessibility design is inclusive of everybody and it is not an afterthought and I want to make that very clear because often times it is in a lot of products but if you think about those users with motor disabilities, cognitive challenges how can we make our products inclusive of them those alt text for images keyboard navigation, color contrast those are not check boxes they are expressions of empathy and they say we see you and we care this quote really just reminds me a lot of the importance of empathy and understanding so if we want our users to connect and find value in the products that we're delivering we must first really understand and recognize with their needs we need to design products that not only solve their problems but they resonate with them on a deeper level and I mentioned it a bit before but the task at knowledge having an experience that you would never be able to understand unless you've lived through it is really really important so if you wish for me to weave you yourself must first feel grief how can you design a solution for somebody whose problem you don't understand I don't think it's possible which brings us to connection it's great to have empathy it's great to understand those things it's great to understand your people but without connection it also doesn't matter we need to use storytelling and emotion to create that connection with the user we need to provide interactivity and feedback to make them feel involved and empowered in your solution we need to reward them for their small achievements like they did the thing you wanted them to do it's very very important for the users that they feel that connection and I've heard it actually in a couple times in this word camp where people have talked about examples and they said I actually love that website because it spoke to me it's important to speak the language that your users are using and I'm not talking about Spanish, Chinese it's the language that they use and that they understand which brings us to simplicity Leonardo da Vinci put it this way is that simplicity is the ultimate sophistication another example of complete chaos can anybody find the pinwheel in here it's like blue anybody I couldn't find it either but it's supposed to be there what users feel is this complete chaos on their website when the website isn't simplistic now how about we find a colored pencil it's very clear where that is to have a very intentional design we need to make sure that we are removing the clutter that we have on the website just like you don't want to live in a home that's cluttered with garbage or laundry not put away I know sometimes we're all there but it doesn't feel great the unnecessary remove the clutter focus on the essentials mention that at the beginning but what is its purpose why is it there and if you don't know that answer it shouldn't be there it needs to be removed it shouldn't exist just because it can kind of like my office just because I could buy a lot of things didn't mean I should actually bring them in the unnecessary distractions when the website and your solution becomes more pleasant more appealing and interactive clarity goes hand in hand with simplicity it's really difficult to have clarity in my opinion it's really easy to be unclear for clarity it's important that we think about our copy and our content what are the words that we're using are we using jargon are we using insider conversations with our users or again are we speaking their language are we using good fonts is our font size big enough can you read the fonts on a dark background you need to make sure that everything that you have is clear that people can not only read it but understand it your structure and navigation the way that you inform your users where they are in your application is very important too you go down a rabbit hole of website navigation and now you don't know how to go back and that's where adding the details like the breadcrumbs and a clear and strong navigation are really really important one of my favorite quotes by Brene Brown is clear this is like opposites throw me off clear is kind and unclear is unkind we shouldn't make our users guess what we mean we should tell them exactly what we mean we should tell them it's funny when contributor this quote got brought up by somebody I was really excited because I think it's really powerful we also need to understand the impact of our designs and our design choices which means that we are measuring our outcomes and the results of our solutions so start by setting very clear goals that can be tracked you need to use the data and analytics that are behind them to evaluate the performance and the effectiveness of your solution even down to the smallest detail such as a button or a link evaluate the user feedback and satisfaction that you're getting from your customers to understand not just like the visual experience but their perception of it how did they feel how did they tell others about it are they going to leave your application or your website feeling unsure about it or man that was terrible you can never go there but you need to understand the story behind them and from there you take this information to move to the next phase which we'll talk about is iterating it's not just enough though to understand the analytics in order to be empathetic and to really design intentionally you need to build the bridges between the data that you're seeing and the analytics that you're seeing and the stories behind them so somebody abandoned the shopping cart why did they abandon the shopping cart what was the reason that they did or did not feel that way what is their background or the characteristics that made them feel the same way people are not the same we could go to the same website and I might love it and you might hate it and that's why you need to tie the data to the to the humans behind the data and iterate often test often we have good ideas and it can be really difficult I think to iterate because you're like no this was a great idea I don't want to change anything you should test you should iterate you should take those analytics and the feedback that you're getting prioritize changes and ideas that you might want to make on your solution and make them small one change at a time if you change an entire web page because the analytics are saying that it's not converting or you're not getting a lot of views and you change the whole thing was it the messaging you were using was it the button, the hero image make small changes and make them frequently to understand how you can improve your solution I will say designing with intention is not easy it's difficult and it can be time consuming and it's something that needs to have a lot of practice it's really easy to have an idea and put it out there without any more thought to it some of the common challenges that you see is lack of awareness really not understanding the full concept of what you're trying to build and why and I've done this a lot with my UX team is I'll say hey we're trying to build X feature and they go okay and they bring something to me and it's lack of awareness because I have the context behind it and they may not have all the context behind it there may not be enough time time constraints are a real thing you might have a lot of pressure from your business or from your clients and so fitting those tight deadlines is easy and it leads to really haphazard designs that are rushed and they feel rushed sometimes we focus too much on the aesthetics and making it look pretty over the functionality the functionality is really really important client demands like I talked about they have a lot of demands and sometimes they don't want to listen to your suggestions they don't want to hear you say no that's not going to work they just want what they want we may have limited resources again time, money, etc lack of user research or empathy in building those solutions makes it difficult again if you don't know who you're building for what their pain points are how can you build a solution for them resistance to change where I've built a solution built different things for Blue House and it doesn't perform out and I'm like no it's going to work and I don't want to change it because it's a great idea it should be changed it's not bad to be wrong what's bad is that we are resistant to changing our ideas and doing something else and then misalignment of goals this goes back a lot to the clarity point is making sure that things are understood before you start designing making sure you're in alignment with the people that you're working with designers between designers or developers or stakeholders you may have difference of opinion and different priorities or goals so the designs lead to lack of intentionality my favorite one to talk about though is the curse of knowledge having knowledge is great I love learning things but it's also kind of a curse when we have this curse of knowledge it's really easy to assume user familiarity just because I know something does not mean that you know something right we're not on the same wavelength everybody has a different level of understanding things we'll use insider language because in our jobs and in our day today we are used to speaking that way to each other but your users may not be used to understanding that language and I don't think that we oftentimes see that we are speaking in that way or that we are that way to them we're overlooking user needs we think that we know what they need more than they know what they need because we know we have the information we have the context but we don't use that often times in a full story and one of the biggest ones I think is underestimating learning curves using a new app using a new website it can be difficult it can prove challenging but we need to make sure that we're understanding and we know that it takes time to onboard to a new solution and that we're patient with those new users so design with intention design with purpose intentional design is impactful it's inspirational and it's important that's everything I have today thank you so much for coming that was an interesting session thanks a lot for this QA any of you have any questions we have some I guess you can go there hello thanks for the talk it was a great sum up of a lot of topics very well connected I have a question regarding where you talk about the resistance to change and you said that you want to your team have designed something you are like yeah it's going to work I was wondering when is the time that you start to iterate and you decide that okay this didn't work because if you have the resistance to change you I really don't know when is the exact time that you lose the hope or you take the metrics and say like this really don't work we need to start with we need to change it okay so the question and I think I'm understanding it right is that you're asking when is the best time to look at our existing solution and decide based on the analytics when we need to iterate and how do we do that that's a great question and I think that it goes back to a couple of points you have to start with knowing your purpose and setting very clear goals build a web page that's going to have say like 50% conversion or whatever it is and you're not hitting that goal that's a clear indication that it's time to look into it and it's really important to make sure that you have the analytics on your website that you're looking at and you're looking at them regularly and you're evaluating what you're seeing against those goals and so as far as like knowing when to iterate I think as long as you kind of go through steps and you say okay do I understand what I'm building does the solution there is it the right thing it might be the wrong color or the wrong words but I think building with users and doing user testing will also help that so the best time is when you're not achieving your goals and your outcomes it's time to reevaluate because if you're not achieving them you're failing and we don't want to fail we want to have successful websites and products so that would be my advice is take a look at what you're trying to achieve see how far off you are and if you're trending up and you're not there yet but it's a good trajectory maybe don't change it for a while give it the time to ramp but if it's not if you're not seeing that return on investment then I would say figure out where it's going wrong does that answer your question? yeah thank you so we found we got the situation lately with the clients one of our clients so we are developing the consent page for the user to read the privacy notice including a term of service and we consult with the client's lawyer teams and we come up with the design that it is we think that it is good for the customer experience entirely but when we presented to the lawyer they resist then they say no, you need to put the term and condition before you sign up process but instead we are designing the term and condition built into the sign up form how can we persuade the lawyers or the stakeholders to make sure that what we are designing our intention to let people do the sign up in the sign up process to make sure that we are on the same page and they understand what our intention is okay that's a great question so the question was with the resistance to change and they had a project where they were working on building out a website and they are building out the content and they have the terms and service page and the lawyers said that they did not want to have the terms and conditions as something that they had to agree upon when signing up for the form after we filled in everything and then we read the term and condition and it just seems as though their design and the lawyers and that they insisted on it being okay so my advice is to working with the legal teams is difficult laws exist for a reason I probably would just let that one go to be because I'm not a lawyer that is a very difficult one and I've run into that a lot where even I was talking about language using clear and concise language when it comes to lawyers and like legally speak why we have legal teams is to protect companies and so I think for other situations with legal that's tricky but how you persuade them that your idea is better the best way to do that is to A-B test like listen to your stakeholders, your stakeholders feedback is important and I think it's important to collaborate and say can we try it this way for X amount of time or maybe we do split traffic testing this way and that way and let's see what the results are that's a great idea thank you Hi my name is Amy I'm a user researcher and I very much agree on your point of view about how to build the empathy with your teams and helping the teams on understanding users but in your last point about a new user that new solutions that require times and also need to be patient I'm a user researcher I can also very much like I wanted to in my current situation I really wanted to persuade my team to be patient because I know how much the learning we're introducing to the users but what if there's no time and you also know there's a cost of waiting and this is actually putting the whole company into the risk as a product manager and that means your times and also the cost of patience yeah so I think that those are really great questions sometimes we have to build things and we have to build them quickly and it's okay to build quickly and it's okay to fail fast I think that it's important to always be performing user research regardless of it is and even if it's deployed after like if you deploy a new solution take that information to propose iterations to make changes for the future because I know sometimes the stakeholders in alignment there is no time for those things and I think it's really important why I talked about the common challenges is because it is hard because there is that time constraint there is that pressure there is that misalignment of stakeholders to those people so I think it's really a process where you have to push forward and once you can kind of explain the benefits and get alignment with your team on those things I think it will come to fruition but I don't know I mean obviously I don't work for your company but sometimes you can't change those time frames and I would say to just keep pushing keep doing the research even if it's deployed understand it and then you can use it as a post launch understanding of what it is Hi Erin I love the part where you were talking about kind of building the bridge between data and stories and I think that often as we're building stuff on the web we're good at collecting data and it can be a struggle to collect those stories and so we tend to infer those stories we assume based on the data of someone leaving the cart that we maybe know why I mean like tips or tricks on how to best collect the stories in order to connect them to the data Ask them, talk to them reach out to your customers I think it's really important that you have a connection with your customers always if you're not talking directly to the people who are using your products whether that's through contacting them via email or text etc to say can we ask you more stories can we ask you these questions are you looking for feedback overall how satisfied with this today or even hey you didn't purchase this item sending an email is everything good you can ask them, talk to them you should always be talking and connecting with your users I love it Thanks Erin Can you talk a little bit about how we can scale that because that could definitely take a lot of time having all those conversations It does, so when I say talk to your users I don't mean like some of you know we have millions of customers in some of our places and it does take a lot of time but I think it's important for you to first understand what you're trying to, like the answers you're trying to get and I think that if you create cohorts of different user segments and understand okay these users are a pro user or they're a novice user you kind of have to make some inferences on the data that you're seeing to say okay this is the target audience that they should be talking to about this very specific thing it does take time but you know luckily there's a lot of tools that we have that we can say now analyze this and tell me the output right, like you give me this information so it can be hard to scale but as long as you're always doing it as long as you're reaching out and you have I think a consistent program in place to collect that it's good, working with others we try to talk to users at least once a month you know reach out can we talk through some of these things I think it's just hard to answer that like as a blanket statement just know your goal figure out what you're trying to understand and find the humans that have the story behind that to talk to and often with companies it requires a full UX research team you know Any other questions? Hi Carl Hi If you're a new but intentional design like myself what would be like good resources how did you learn about intentional design like where would you point somebody there's a lot of really great books that are out there there's a lot of really great articles actually there was one of the Apple conventions they had somebody had to talk about kind of designing with purpose but the way that I learned about it is my background is I started at Bluehost and customer service so I was talking to the customers regularly but usually it was with friends and I became very interested in the reason that they were calling us because they couldn't do something or they may have been frustrated and over time I kind of started becoming friends with the developer so I could say hey can we change this like even though it had nothing to do with me I just was answering calls but the user experience became something that I just cared very deeply about myself and so over my career I've spent a lot of time figuring out how the type of product manager I want to be and the type of the way that I want to innovate with other people but I will when we have the links on the slides I think I have a slide on here that has a list of resources of books that I think are really important that can be helpful so you can refer to those and you can always ask me you can reach out to me she's on the Twitter I'm on the Twitter I did a thing I'm at the Bluehost booth most of the time exactly reach out I'm happy to answer any questions and mentor anybody that wants more information and she's doing all the work camps now that's how you were introduced too yes that is how we became friends thank you thank you Carl I think this will be the last question because we are running out of time I have a question about hiring so I was one told that product designer shouldn't be looking into data so I'm wondering if you built your own team what is the most important element when you are hiring a designer or build a product design team that can conduct this kind of research especially if you're in a startup that's a great question and not something I have experience in I don't hire people I'm not a designer but I think who you enjoy working with if you have some buddies that work with you what abilities that we were looking to sure I am somebody who is able to really analyze information that they're very excited about learning about customers they're great to talk to customers people who like to be innovative they love to challenge, they have new ideas and people that just really showcase that they understand the reasons behind what they're doing I work with so many different people and everybody has very different skill sets but I think just somebody who constantly wants to improve and make things better for the right reasons thank you thank you very much Joslene for sharing all the wisdom and knowledge with us and answering all these questions if you have any other questions around then you can join meet her outside this hall so that's all for today and we have a special token of appreciation for our speaker thank you everyone so that's the wrap up from this stage and this is the last session from this stage now you have to gather in them in the plenary hall for the MADS AMA session after that there will be a sponsor raffle and I'm sure most of you have signed up for that and after that we will have a closing remark and we will get the answer of most of it question where will the next work ambition will happen so see you soon at the plenary hall