 OK, guys, I think we're going to go ahead and start. I think we've given people enough time to drag in after lunch. Everybody's here to learn how to get involved in the WordPress community and give back a little bit to WordPress, right? Otherwise, I'll give you a minute to go ahead and head out. This URL right here, this short URL, is where all my slides are. It's on the side of every slide as well. There's a lot of links in my slides that will take you to various places to get connected with the various groups involved in WordPress. So I encourage you to either go there or at least write down the URL so that you can check them out later at your convenience. I'm Aaron Campbell. I'm a developer through and through, but that's not the only way to contribute to WordPress. So I'm going to go through lots of different ways. But I would like to get a feel of what everybody does. Who in here is a developer like me on the coding side of things? Somebody that's more on the designer side of things and more on the management or using WordPress side of things. Fantastic, because we have ways for every one of those groups to contribute. And who makes a living or at least some money related to WordPress? Awesome. So you all, I can guilt trip every one of you into trying to give back some. Awesome. So the biggest thing to start out with is why. Why contribute back to WordPress? And I think that there are a ton of reasons. But I just want to touch on some of the biggest reasons. I think you all are at least interested in some way or another in contributing or you wouldn't be here. But the first and the biggest one is profit. Who here wants to make money? It's OK to make money with WordPress. Even though WordPress is free, that's fine. That's how I make my living. It's OK to profit off WordPress. We want you to be able to profit off WordPress. That's awesome. No, you don't get paid directly for contributing to WordPress. But there are a lot of ways that contributing back to WordPress will help you profit, whether you're working for yourself, whether you're working for someone else. Who works for themselves? Professional development. Everyone that just raised your hand, one of the most difficult things for me when I was working for myself was, how do I consistently get better at what I do when I don't have other people to sharpen my skills off of? How do you make sure that you're always progressing forward, always getting better, and not stagnating where you are? Getting the chance to work with everybody else that works with WordPress, whether you're coding, whether you're working on user interface, whether you're translating. We have people that are doing all sorts of stuff, and they are fantastic at what they do. And you get the chance to work with all of them if you are also contributing back. And I found that for me, when I was freelancing, this was one of the best ways that I kept my skills up and kept getting better at what I did. Contributing back also gives you the chance to be an authority on WordPress. Every one of you knows more about WordPress than 90% of the population. Having said that, the more involved you are with the project, the more you will know, the more you will learn. And it's not just maybe learning about things that WordPress does, but as you get involved and you start to pay attention to the development processes of WordPress, you start to know what's going to happen in WordPress. In the next release, or even the release after that, or what our plans are for next year, and those kinds of things benefit your clients. They let you plan better when you're planning projects and let you be more in demand, because a client wants somebody that can plan that far ahead. It's not building a site that works now, but you wasted a bunch of time building a feature that WordPress was already developing itself and it got released three weeks after you released the site. And another big thing, who has just the easiest time finding fantastic clients all the time? Yeah, that's a wonderful process, isn't it? Getting referrals. The WordPress community is massive. There are thousands and thousands of people. I mean, these kinds of events that there's what, 600 people at this one, something like that, these kinds of events are happening all over the place. Every weekend, as a matter of fact, there's two this weekend, right? San Diego's on the same day. And three, what's? Seattle. And with this huge community, we're a pretty friendly community and people trade, work around and refer clients and the more involved you are, the more of these people that you link up with, the better. And as you are exercising your skills at giving back to WordPress, you're also showing all these people in the community what your skill set is and how good you really are at what you do. And it makes them comfortable referring clients to you. And it's a great way of getting work to start rolling in. And last but one of the most important ones is just simply to make WordPress better. Almost everybody raised their hand and said that they make money off of WordPress. I do, that is what pays my bills. And so I want WordPress to be as good as it can possibly be because it benefits me as much as it benefits everybody else. So some ways to help. There are a lot of ways to help. I'm gonna try to run through some basics on all of them. But you don't have to write code to contribute back to WordPress. That is not necessary at all. If you do write code, great. I mean, we'll take that as well. But there are a lot of other ways to help. The first step for getting involved, who has used Slack? Who has used the WordPress Slack to hang out in all those rooms? This is your first step for getting involved. Every one of those groups that you just saw, every one of those ways of contributing back to WordPress, they all have a channel, a chat room in Slack. And anybody that has a WordPress.org account, if you don't, you can sign up for one, can get on the chat and go into any of those rooms and start to see what that group is talking about, see what they're working on and get involved. Who here is multilingual? Anybody? See, I'm definitely not. This is one of the few ways that I have never given back to WordPress. But translations, WordPress for last year was the first year that non-English downloads of WordPress surpassed the English downloads. That's fantastic. We offer WordPress in so many different languages. And we need people to do that translation because I guarantee that everything that I write in WordPress only has an English string. And so somebody's gonna need to translate that for everybody else. Documentation, who here does documentation work, whether it's for your company or your clients? Awesome. I hate writing documentation. I write code and I'm bad at it too, just to boot. But no, I write code and a lot of the other developers that write code are not fantastic at documenting the code that they write. Some of them do better with the inline documentation, the documentation that's meant for other developers, but talking to end users is not always our forte. And we need people, we need people to help fill out the codex. Who's gone to the codex to try to look for solutions for help in the past? Who has always found what they were looking for in that codex? Yeah, nobody raised their hand. And who, once they found their answer, went back and put it in the codex. One guy, Brian, thank you. It's a wiki. You can edit the codex, you can add to it. You can fix inconsistencies and errors in it. And we need people to do that, because as we get new users in and they need help and they end up at the codex looking for the same thing that you were looking for before, they have to do the same thing you had to do. Go find it somewhere else. And it's not a fantastic experience. And if you can have, unfortunately, have to deal with that experience, but then help so that the next person in line doesn't have to, maybe they'll have the same experience and with a different problem that you'll benefit from later. Support. A lot of you guys said that you worked for yourself, so you guys all do support, don't you? You answer questions for your clients on a pretty regular basis. Doesn't matter how well you know WordPress, you can do it, right? If you have ever created a single post in WordPress or say successfully attached an image and embedded it into your post in WordPress, you can help somebody who's trying to figure out how to do that. The support forums are massive. There are over 60 million sites running WordPress. At least some of those people need help with something that you know how to do. And who has used the support forums to get answers? And who has answered questions in the support forums? A lot of times when you're searching through there and you're looking for an answer and you find one that's unanswered, it's as simple as when you find the answer, dropping it in there and everybody benefits. And again, this is one of those things, we're not some big corporation like Apple that has paid support personnel that sit at their genius bars and answer all your questions, we crowdsource this. I mean, you get your questions answered but if you can also answer other people's questions, that's how we keep those active and useful. Accessibility, is anybody in here specifically into the accessibility side of the internet? Awesome. So we have an entire team that works on accessibility. This is one of those things that because WordPress is so pervasive, depending on the numbers that you look at, WordPress is somewhere between say 20 and 25% of the internet. I think that we have a responsibility to set the standard for accessibility, to make sure that WordPress can be used by everyone, whether they are hearing or sight impaired or whatever the problem is, we need to make sure that we are able to be used by all and we have a group that helps make sure that we do that. And this is one that another place that you can get involved if that is the kind of thing that you are that you are doing. User interface, so who, the designer type people that we're doing, user interface, user experience and design type stuff, who are you guys again, the designers? All right. We also have an entire UI UX group. Who here chose WordPress because it was the easiest to use of the available CMSs? Yeah, that is a very common reason that you say, why did you choose WordPress? Well, because it was easy to use, because it was user friendly. Well, it's only gonna stay that way if we have people paying attention and making sure that we are taking all these new features that we're building and making sure that there is usable for the masses as possible. Testing, okay. So, this is one of those places that I find that I'm not necessarily above begging. We need testers, so.