 And there's going to be chances to ask questions, to participate, to play a little quiz, to win this amazing Uno deck that is a custom deck with wapus. So keep that in mind, we'll play for this. And more generally to do something that is a little more collective and participative. So, oh, I see it works, amazing. So on every side you can react that way and then you can ask questions. There's going to be two moments where we'll stop for a moment and we'll go see the questions. I will of course try to answer the question, but even if the question, if you want to answer one, just raise your hand and I will give you the chance of answering. Oh, I have a question on there already. Sorry, here it is. The code will be at the top of every slide anyway, no worries. I think there's a way to do it where, here it is. So that's going to stay here. Just a word, very quick about myself. My name is Paolo del Castro. I work on wortus.com. I joined automatic in 2011. I live in Vienna. I've been living in Vienna for actually six years. I do not speak German. My German allows me to wander around the city unharmed. That's the extent of my level. And the reason for that are a whole different story that I'm not going to touch here, but you can come and catch me later if you want to understand why that happens. And today the idea was how we got here. A few years ago there was no wortus community in Vienna. Now there is one and five. How did that happen? And what did we learn along the way? I wanted to share three things that we learned along the way by making a ton of mistakes. So to get this started with sort of warming up with the voting system, I want to ask you how you feel this morning? If you're green, full of energy, ready to go, ready to absorb all the knowledge, ready to meet people, please let us know if you're orange. Like kind of just woke up maybe on the way to green, maybe you need coffee, which you will have a little later. And if you're red, well, you could be tired, maybe a little sick. We'll do our best to move you to the left of that spectrum. So please take a minute to share how you feel this morning. It's pretty good, pretty good, very little, right? We'll put the 50% of orange on the upcoming coffee. I'm pretty sure that if we try again around 11 or 12 noon, we're going to be much more on the green side. So I've already worked, we have 66 people using the system, perfect, I already have your question queued. Now the second and last warming up is the time for the little game. It's going to be a game of speed because it's a question. You've got to answer right and you've got to answer fast. But the knees gave the answer three minutes ago, so it's going to be about speed essentially. Everybody's ready to vote, everybody's on the right screen. We're here with the first team and we're going to take place. Go, you have 10 seconds to reply. And remember you're playing for an amazing waku set. So boom, oh, we have 29 people with the right answer. Awesome, now we have to see who's the winner. The winner will have to declare themselves if they won the waku game. Let's see, let's see, let's see, let's see. Looks like Karl Gustav was the fastest with 921 points. Where are you? I'm at the symbol. Sorry? I'm at the symbol because I didn't put it in the name. Yeah, the symbol of the name. Sorry, these are code names, these are not like real names. It's all anonymous, by the way. Don't worry, it's all entirely anonymous. The system will ask you if you want to receive the results at the end to put your email. You don't have to, I will share the results anyway. So come see me at the end to get your, okay, a round of applause for a very nice app, by the way. Perfect, my internet connection appears to be slow, but so am I, so it's okay, we're in sync. I'm yet my internet connection. So this is proof, this is proof that January 2013 we started. And see the little avatar there, hosted by Luca Sartoni. Luca posted the first call for Meetup ever. Luca is here, round of applause for him too. He was there at the beginning. And yeah, this is a little more than just a screenshot to me. It has a value, something I learned along the way that is really dear to me. Is that it doesn't matter how big the dream you have. You've got to start somewhere by one single step. And that's how it happened. It was the winter 2012. Luca and I had just met a month or so before through a conference. And then we were having a discussion after lunch. And I said, oh, you know, by the way, I just moved to Vienna. I went to Meetup.com. I couldn't find a Meetup about WordPress. And he said, well, let's make one. And that's it. We went online. We opened Meetup. We actually discovered that 80 other people had made the same search in the past. And so there was already an attendance. So that's how it started, one single step. And one of the things that really struck me when we did that first Meetup, when people started gathering, was how different everybody was. It was very diverse. There were different ages, different origins, different interests. Everybody wasn't looking for the same thing. And I feel this is a very, very... One of the biggest strengths of the WordPress community is to be so diverse and including and welcoming. This, of course, is not a photo from the very first Meetup. This is a photo for Workamp Europe in 2016 here in Vienna. But it's to say, everybody is unique in this crowd and everybody shares that one common interest, which is WordPress. So I thought, okay, this community is made of people that are very, very unique. I would like to start knowing each other a little better. What do we do? Why are we here? What languages do we speak? For example, I don't speak German. I'll go back to that later. So we're going to use the system. You're now pretty comfortable with everybody's voting. We're using the system to try to know each other a little better. And as I mentioned before, all the results will be available if you're interested in looking at those after. So I would like you to tell me which other languages you understand. Now on the screen, you can put three languages. If you're one of the amazing people who can speak and understand more than three, you can actually vote several times. And so we see up there what happens. Oh, nice. Nice, nice, nice. Frigid in the house. Up there. We have English, we have German, of course. It's a PhD somewhere. There's Patam. You see, this is a very, very good illustration of how this room is made of very different people. The number of languages is already outstanding. English and German, of course. Not very surprising, but it's really good to know. I'm going to give you a few more seconds. Apparently people are still voting. So this is one of the characteristics that I really like in the community. I'm going to ask you to tell us also what is your age range. I'm 47 years old, by the way, so it's done. I mean the... Okay, perfect, let's see. We have people from all ranges. Siam, it's amazing that every age group is represented in this room. And this is only a part of the community. Imagine the community at large. Look at that. And then we can, for example, think, okay, when did you discover WordPress? Now, I want to say there is no right or wrong answer here. You cannot use WordPress from the very, very first year. You cannot discover WordPress yesterday. You're welcome. This is your place. This is your home. WordPress, by the way, as you may see in this chart, is turning 15 this year, May 27. And it's interesting because in May 27, 2013, so a few months after our first meet-up, we had our first party. Because what's the point of having a meet-up if we don't have parties? So we celebrated the 10 years of WordPress back then. And a month from now, almost two months from now, it's going to be the 15th anniversary of WordPress. Imagine that. And see, there's people of all levels of experience. Some started in 2004. Wow, that's impressive. That's really, really, really early. And some started this year. And I think this is also something that is amazing. This community is alive. Constantly receiving new members. Constantly receiving new people. And that's what makes it thrive. And then the very, very last question I would like to ask in this series is how do you use it? And I do realize, okay, these are just a few categories. There could be a lot more. It's an approximation. We're not trying to do a real big market study. Everything that revolves around core, put in the first level. There can be writing code, reviewing teams, translations, documentation. That's the first category. And then the other ones are pretty much self-explanatory. Of course, you can vote for many of them just depending on what you do. Please. And see again, once again, every category is represented. So there's people, every type of trade and preferences and skillset and specialties. So once again, it boils down to how different we are, meaning how diverse this community is. And when I look at these results, it makes me think about the second thing that I learned along the way. In the WordPress community, in Vienna and elsewhere, which is that if you want to gather a group of people around something, you don't need all the same people. You don't need people to be all homogeneous and basically reducing your potential audience to a very, very small bubble. You need the most diverse people as possible that have one common interest. That's much easier. Basically, you don't need this. This is not the WordPress community. Well, I mean these are stickers, but this is not the WordPress community. This is the WordPress community. It's all different people with one big interest in common. And it actually, there's a core to that that I find really interesting when you meet new people. And today is a really great occasion to do that. Which is that actually you can always find one common interest with almost anyone. And so do that today. Like as you go around, you know you have that one thing WordPress is already joining you. You can find more, but that's your opening. That's your icebreaker. You can go and talk to anyone. Everybody's sharing that interest. So let's see how we're doing this. I see there's four questions that have been asked. And I would like to see what they're asking. And if we can reply, let's take a second. Oh, there's actually, hey, where is coffee? The last news I got about coffee were that there would be coffee at 10.30. But I don't know if anyone, yes, confirmed. There will be coffee at 10.30. It means that you have to suffer through my presentation, then the second one, and then you will have coffee. And I really, really, I feel for the person who will be speaking during coffee delivery. Let's see. Oh, who sent a thumbs down? Well, you don't have to. It's probably Luca who's sitting there. Let's see, let's see. What even is a Wapo? Oh, that is a very, very good question. Have you happened to see around war camps or war press meetups these little yellow animal, kind of a strange animal? So the characteristic of this is sort of the war press mascot. And mostly appreciated everywhere that has been created in Japan years ago, sort of as a mascot for a war camp, and has been open sourced, which is essential for the war press mascot, of course. And so the beauty of that is that everyone can take Wapo and modify it as long as they distribute it under the same condition. It's basically GPL. And so it has become a tradition that every war camp would sort of create a custom Wapo based on all the basic cliches you can imagine about that country most of the time. But yeah, every war camp has one, war camp Europe does one. Often war camp Europe does two. And so then you can find stuffed animals. Often if you go to war camp Europe or war camp US, there's a swag store where you can buy stuffed Wapo's. There's stickers. I think I have a couple here. I have two Wapo's here. And so yeah, that's a Wapo. I'm not sure about, oh, the German. The German like the language. I'm not sure if that refers to me not speaking the language. Feel free to actually give more context to the question. I'm very happy to answer. It probably was the neighbors anyway, but... And what is based on GPL? I'm not going to go down into the rabbit hole of legalese, but it's about the workplace license. It's saying you can take the software, you can do whatever modification you want with it, but you have to distribute it along the same rules. And so other people can use your modification and cannot theirs on top of it. And it spreads that way. It's like a viral license. And so Wapo is GPL because you can take Wapo, you can change it, and you can make your own version as long as you distribute it along the same rules. I think we missed one question. Let's go. Let me see. When is the next Work in Europe? And where? And how amazing will it be? Luca, we got you're in the room, so you can stop asking questions. Luca is also one of the organizers of Work in Europe. So a little plot for Work in Europe is going to be June 14, 15, 16 in Belgrade, Serbia. Go there. And if there are still tickets, I don't know, but you should go there if there are still tickets. And it's going to be amazing. Work in Europe has been amazing every year since it started in Leiden, the Netherlands. I was happy to be there every time and it's really, really, really amazing. Okay, I think that we have answered all the questions. Well, oh, there's one about someone who cannot find the Wi-Fi, but it's okay, you're online anyway, so probably you have another way to reach the Internet. And for that, I'll be at the happiness bar later after this session, so come there if you want to know why I don't speak German. I'm going to skip that one. Okay, so let's move on because the questions are now getting out of hand. Please do not hesitate to use the system. We'll make another break at the end to answer more questions. Of course, let's keep it civil. I mean, you know, whatever you write is going to show up there and I shouldn't say that, but I count on you. So, Akon, how did we get here? Because that was the title of the presentation and we got here through that first meet-up, but of course that's not everything. We did a second meet-up and then a third meet-up and then a fourth and then a party, as I said, and then more meet-ups and we made mistakes. And when I will tell you, these are like stupid mistakes that you can think now, oh, why did they even do that? But, you know, we were starting. So, for why, we had three venues that were okay to host us and we were rotating. And so, after a couple of meet-ups, every time there was this game where people would be on Twitter or any other net or saying, I don't understand, I'm at the place and there's no one who would say, yeah, we're at the other place. So, oh, now it's the other place. So, we confused people a lot at the beginning by rotating the meet-up every month. It wasn't very clear how you could actually reach us. We didn't have a fixed day of the month. We would sort of look ahead and say, okay, we can plan one around here. So, people couldn't really sort of make a habit of coming. Again, it was a bit complicated. And we didn't really have a topic set in advance. We would just say, hey, show up and, you know, we'll talk together, we'll meet. It was really, really started without knowing what we were doing. But the good thing is that we learned from these things. We, the original team changed a few of these things. The following teams changed more. I've been to the last meet-up in March, and it's really nice to see that all these mistakes have been fixed. There's topics. There's dates. There's a location. People knew what they were talking about. So, again, don't, you know, you make this first step and then you make a second and, yes, you're going to make a number of mistakes along the way. It's okay. Don't be afraid of that. And we had, actually, many events over time. You know, a total of 81 events. Actually, when three days ago on the meet-up.com page, counting them all, so these are the events officially published as meet-ups. There may have been more. We had 14 meet-ups in the last five years. Eight parties, including Christmas parties, war camp parties. I think it includes the one tonight, by the way. Four war camps, three war camps, Vienna, and one war camp Europe. And 21 war camp organization meetings, just so you think about the people who are making this today possible. And please give a round of applause to all the organizers and the volunteers because that's a lot of work. A lot of work. And a lot of people, too. There's 1,175 members on the World Press Vienna meet-up as of yesterday. That's a lot. And across war camps, 3,000 people attended war camps in Vienna. That's also a lot. Now, I do realize some of those people are actually the same people. You can't just add them up. Some people went to more than one war camp, but only 3,000 is a nice round number. And out of sort of a satisfied or collective curiosity, I would like to ask you which of these type of events you have attended to already? How many of you have been to one of the workers' meeting and meet-ups? How many have been to a party? How many have been to a war camp? And if you answer no, we have questions to ask you. And how many of you have been after your organizing meeting? Go ahead. And of course, you can vote for more than once, assuming many of you have been to more than once. And that's interesting because see, that's how a community evolves. It's people giving their energy, it's people taking the time, people buying sandwiches and beer, people eating sandwiches and drinking beer, and all these things. We started actually at the first meet-up. We said, oh, we do that in the end of the afternoon. It's almost across the evening, like 6 to 9. People will come from the office. They need something to eat. So we went and we bought some sandwiches, brought some beers. Over time then it wasn't sustainable. We failed at finding a sponsor for that. But these are the kind of things you have to think about. You're asking people to come to see you at 6 in the evening, up to 9. Well, you need to feed them. I will ask you another question related to that, which is when did you become part of the workers' community in Vienna? And I would sort of consider, when did you go to your first meet-up? When did you go to your first work-in? Just as I know, you may have interacted with the community before online. This is just for A, our curiosity, and B, because I love these sliders that move left and right when people vote, like it's a... I'm only half-joking. It's actually very exciting for me to see that, because that means you're participating and we are trying to do something together. So it looks like, well, see, at work-ins, most people actually joined either last year or this year, which makes sense. Meet-ups, most people went to their first meet-up in 2014.6, which is a while ago. For this 2014.6, it's probably somewhere around July. There's a skip option for the meet-up. The reason? There is a skip option, so probably those who skipped might be part of the job. Very possible, yeah. I should have removed the skip option. It should not be a skip option. You don't get to skip your questions. So what I'm trying to... What's interesting here is that I want to share the last bit of information, the chronology. You have heard already a number of times this morning, because someone actually won this one event, that was sent in 2013. And then in 2015, there was a first work campaign. A bunch of people sent in a little restaurant and said, hey, let's make it happen. We don't know exactly. Once again, let's make the first step. We just applied to create a work camp. And we did it and we loved it. And we said, oh, work camp Europe, we could apply now because one of the requirements to organize work camp Europe is actually to have organized a work camp before. So now we were ready. So we applied and they said yes. So in 2016, work camp Europe happened in Vienna. Now something happened at that point, which is that work camp Europe changes location every year. So it wasn't going to be in Vienna the next year. And the people involved with work camp Vienna, some of us were involved with work camp Europe and we had tried in 2015 what it is to work on both at the same time, which full disclaimer is not good for your health. So we said we cannot keep doing both at the same time. And the community in Vienna was growing and was and seemed solid enough that we said, you know what? We should probably take a step back and we should let other people take over and change the event as they want and make it differently. One of the things Denise mentioned was that originally both Luca and I are Italian. We had a few other people involved with us in this organization. A friend floor is Dutch. Another friend Danny is American. So there was a lack of local presence. So that's why all our meetups were in English. The first work camp was entirely in English. It's really nice to see that today we get to a point where this work camp is not entirely in English because being entirely in English is not really inclusive. There's a ton of people in Vienna who love WordPress and may not want to follow presentations in English. So by stepping back it was a way to allow other people to own and develop and change the event. And I think this is what leads to the third thing that I learned, which is if you start a community you just need to make one step and then another one and then another one. But if you wanted to live long and prosper, as they say, you need to let it go. You need at some point to take a step back and let other people take over and they will do a part of the journey and they will do the same thing because that's how a community becomes everybody's property or no one's property. It doesn't become a single small group or individual property and that's how it evolves and it grows. So just before going back to the questions I wanted to sort of summarize these points that starting the WordPress bit of in Vienna and trying to grow it and then letting it go taught me in these years that I think have been improving a lot of things in my life outside of the WordPress community. It doesn't matter if your dream seems so big it's impossible to attain. Make the first step. The one step is common to all sides of dreams and you may see how I'm trying very hard not to use the word journey, but... The strongest communities are made of the most diverse people that share one common interest because the richness comes from diversity. It doesn't come from homogeneity. And then if you start, if you do it and you want to live it long and prosper take a step back and let it go. Let it grow on its own. Let it organically become something else. So that's it. We're back to these questions. So I said at the beginning I would love for you to ask questions. I would love for you also to give answers. So can anyone say what is the square root of 138,426 please? That would be really helpful. 42? That doesn't sound right. Thank you very much. You already want something so I can't... But thank you. Let's see if you have more questions. Why do developers always choose feedback systems? I don't think that they abuse feedback systems. We all have our ways to express ourselves and I think we should allow them. Oh, that's 42. You were just hiding two questions. Now, every account on the Wi-Fi is individual so you have your own login and password. This is one of the magic things of the Wi-Fi network in the university in Vienna and that login and password... I don't know if I should say that. I'm going to say it anyway. I think it's going to be valid for two weeks in all universities in Vienna so when you walk around the city you often see the networks and you can actually login with the same password for two weeks. At least that's how it used to work. I don't know if it's still the case. Try it. Probably all Europe, not just Vienna. All Europe? So we have two weeks to travel across Europe, Wi-Fi free. That's amazing. Should we show our Wi-Fi password on the name tag to everyone else? Huh. I mean, why not, honestly? First of all, it's written small enough. You know what? Don't say static. Keep moving. If you keep moving, no one will be able to get your password. And so, I think we're getting out of time and out of questions. So, okay. Let us know how it goes. And when will the questions be over? As soon as there's no more questions to answer. Not using fixed days is nice for people who have different stuff going on exam first Tuesday in the month. Yeah, that was the original idea. Yeah. It doesn't work very well, sorry. I understand, but it's much harder. The cost is much higher than the benefit. And I think we have to stop because we have no more time and no more really serious questions. So, we're going to call it a day. Not calling it a session. Thank you very much. You can find me somewhere around here for other questions. Thank you. Bye-bye.