 I've got a lot to try to get through in 45 minutes, and I'm conscious of being the thing standing between you and lunch. Welcome to the wild philosophical ramblings portion of the day, as opposed to the practical advice you may have gotten from others. The map that's in the background here is available from DeviantArt at the URL provided. All of the slides have credit links in them, and I'll post the slides after the talk and tweet it to the WC.com hashtag and also the video wherever. So don't feel like you need to try to write down URLs or anything while we're gone. So when I first saw the announcements about WordCamp for Publishers this year in Chicago, I wasn't able to attend in Denver last year. I was immediately drawn to this challenge that Daniel issued, take back the open web. And what does it mean to take back the open web? And for me, take back resonated maybe slightly differently than intended. When I moved from Seattle back to the East Coast in the year 2000 or 1999, when my wife and I would drive up into New England, up into Vermont, or into New Hampshire or Maine, this take back Vermont campaign. And what take back Vermont was about was all the flatlanders, which is to say people not from Vermont, driving up into Vermont from places like Boston with their liberal attitudes and trying to do things like leave Goliath's marriage equality, something I have supported and now. And so take back Vermont felt a little bit like a hostile activity from my perspective. Felt like being told not to be there. And these signs are all Vermont, but just to be fair to Vermont, this isn't just a Vermont phenomenon. You will also see these in New Hampshire and in Maine and in various other states as part of the same reaction. Fast forward 16 years and take back, again, takes on a slightly different resonance. Carly Fiorina actually used this as her slogan at the beginning of the Republican race for the 2016 election. I'm not sure it was ever officially a Trump slogan, but certainly many conservatives rallied around this notion of taking our country back. And then across the pond in the United Kingdom, the Brexit campaign also used this same rhetoric of we're gonna take our country back, right? And I love this editorial cartoon, which points out that like take our country back can mean reclaim, but it can also mean move backward instead of forward as in the opposite of forward, right? So when we start talking about taking back the open web, I don't think that's any of what we intend, right? I don't think there's any sort of those kinds of associations. But I started thinking about what does it mean to think of the web as something that can be taken back? From whom would we be taking it back? Are we talking about take it back in the sense of return it to some prelapsarian state, right? Some before the fall state in which it was perfect and pristine and wonderful and it's now been ruined. Are we talking about taking it back in the sense of actively combating various hostile forces and we need to sort of take back what that web is? And what does that all have to do with WordPress and publishing? So when I think about trying to imagine the web as when I think about so many things, I turn to XKCD because I do. And so the map on the left here is from 2007. The one on the right is from 2010. Among other things, you'll notice the relative transposition of MySpace and Facebook. On the left, that's MySpace versus Little Facebook. On the right, that's Facebook versus Little MySpace, right? Which still exists. When we start trying to think about the web as a place and we start trying to imagine a geography of it, we think of it in this kind of what I would call proto-nationalist terms. We think about it as a series of contested countries next to each other and you're from somewhere and you're not from somewhere else, right? So the alt tags, I feel like anybody who ever puts an XKCD cartoon in a talk and doesn't provide the alt tag has done a dramatic disservice because that's often the most interesting part of an XKCD cartoon. So 2007, I'm waiting for when, if you tell someone I'm from the internet, instead of just laughing, they just ask what part, right? Trying to identify geographically. And then in 2010, Farm Bill is so huge. You realize it's the second biggest browser-based social network-centered farming game in the world. The first, actually, of course, being Happy Farm, which sits behind the Great Firewall of China, which finally made its appearance in 2010. So as I started thinking about kind of how we imagine spaces, how we imagine community, how we imagine the open web and how we think about the boundaries and the borders of the open web and the non-open web that's naturally opposed to it, I went back to Benedict Anderson. Imagine Communities is an immensely influential academic book. It was, I think, the most widely cited book in the social sciences in the 1990s across all disciplines, right? So it's a massively influential book. Came out of 1983, revised in 1991, and immediately a couple of things became clear. One was, it's been 20 years since I was in academia and I have forgotten just how dense, heavy theoretical citation-driven and immersed in a discourse community academic writing is, right? So academic writing is never sort of appearing on its own. It's always entering a conversation that other people are already having and little did I know 20 years ago in reading Imagine Communities, but Anderson is having an argument with two other liberal historians of nationalism and he's kind of playing in the Marxist historian camp against classic capital L, liberal historians and he's trying to enforce the importance of Southeast Asia and other countries in the discussion about nationalism and political science and history theory because it's been overlooked. But what I remembered was this notion of the Imagine Community, right? And won't bore you with all of the rhetoric here, but the notion that a nation is an imagined thing in a new way in the 18th and 19th centuries. And that came about because of what he calls these three major changes. The first, the idea that a particular script language offered privilege access to ontological truth. Think Latin, think masses in Latin, think pre Gutenberg Bible, think pre vernacular, but also think administrative Mandarin in China, also think Arabic in the Islamic Luma of the time. This notion that certain kinds of writing had to happen in a certain script language because that was the only way to access the truth of those things. Which started to fall apart. Second was the belief that society was organized under high centers. Monarchs who were persons apart from human beings and who were ruled by some form of cosmological dispensation. My favorite for this is Monty Python's The Holy Grail when Arthur comes upon a community and says, I am Arthur Lord of the Britons. And she says, who are the Britons? And he says, we are all Britons and I am your king. She says, well, I didn't vote for you. All right, and we have this whole conversation about what it means to vote for the king. And then third was a conception of temporality in which cosmology and history were indistinguishable. And what he means here is talking about the very notion that there's a group of people who experienced the same unfolding of time in linear scale was a new way of thinking about how a group of people moved through time as opposed to being organized under their monarch and under their religious cosmology. So I warned you this would be philosophical but I'm getting the point. The most important thing that I take from imagine communities is this notion that nationalities and nationalism and national thinking are cultural artifacts of a particular kind. Cultural in the sense that they are not natural, they're not necessary, they didn't spring fully formed from experiencing reality. They are collective hallucinations at some level. The nation is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will ever know or meet their fellow members. And yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion. So if we think about the WordPress community, none of you, even those of you who go to more word camps than I do will ever meet all the people in the WordPress community. And yet you have this notion in your head that there is such a thing as a WordPress community that's moving through time. In fact, he goes on to say all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact and perhaps even those are imagined. Even if you lived in a below Dunbar's number 140 person or less primordial village, even though you might still run in face-to-face to people on a daily basis, you still had some conception in your head that's imagined about what that community is and isn't. And where its boundaries are and what's included in it and what's excluded from it. Lastly, communities are to be distinguished not by their falsity or genuineness, but by the style in which they're imagined. In other words, there isn't an accurate version of this national community and an inaccurate one. There are just different contested versions or imaginings of what that might be. So bringing that all the way back to the web, one of the things that he points out is part of that fall into the vernacular or part of the replacement of the sacred script languages was the presence of vernacular languages. The two forms of imagining which first flowered in Europe in the 18th century, the novel and the newspaper provided the technical means for representing the kind of community that it is the nation. So if you think about, I live in Boston, the sort of readers of the Boston Globe imagine some greater Boston community that exists as a result of being the people who read and are represented in that newspaper, right? And this happens across Europe in lots of different languages and across the US. In other words, even nationalism turns out to be Gutenberg's fault because it's movable type that actually creates the kind of print capitalism that enables the vernacular languages to flourish. Anyway, it's a great dense book, you should read it. The other thing that I was reminded of in reading Anderson was this question that while nationalism is such a negative word today, right? It's a word with which we associate with lots of fear and anxiety and hatred and racism and othering and all these other terrible things. These imagined communities also inspire love and often profoundly self-sacrificing love. They inspire collective action. They inspire art and literature. They inspire great works, right? They inspire all of these things. So the fact that an imagined community exists does not mean it's something to be feared. So coming back to the open web. In the call for papers itself, we talked about the open web is inclusive and encourages fair distribution of ideas with no barrier to entry. All the emphasis I've added here. So inclusivity, no barrier to entry. It exists in opposition to proprietary systems created by companies for the purposes of lock-in control of user experience or requiring payment for entry. Now I could have emphasized different words, right? Whether it's important that those are systems created by companies or not. One could get into, but obviously inclusive, low barrier to entry, no payment, and non-proprietary. Do we want the experiences of the next billion web users to be defined by open values of transparency and choice? These are again on the good side of the equation, right? These are the things we're valorizing as part of the open web. Or by the siloed and opaque convenience of the walled gardens, giants dominating today. So we're for openness, we're against closeness. Great, I get it. So I wanna talk about four different versions of sort of what I see as constructed rhetoric about the open web or four different ways of thinking about the open web. And then we'll get into sort of what WordPress means as a part of that. So the first sort of version of the open web that comes up when you look at these conversations and I'll refer to some specific posts here, but there are really any number of different conversations about the open web and how we get back to it and what the web used to be and how far we have fallen from the dramatic innocence of the original web. And the two kind of words that I think of when I go through these are Jeremiah and nostalgia. So at Jeremiah, again, this betrays my academic heritage. There's a great book by Sokman Verkovich called American Jeremiah that talks about American literary form and why this is such a common thing in American literature is this list of complaints about how everything has gone wrong based on the prophet Jeremiah in the Bible. Nostalgia I think is probably more common, but this longing for affection for the past, the bitter taste of returning home is where nostalgia actually comes from. And much of these kinds of descriptions of the open web to me have that essence of nostalgia and have that essence of being a sort of Jeremiah. This is a particular internet version of kids these days, who don't know how great it used to be and they don't even know what they're missing and with their Instagrams and their Pinterest, they don't understand how open this actually is meant to work. It's a bit of a caricature to be fair to Dries and Anil, but there's something to that as well. So on the left-hand side, this is Anil Dash's post, The Web We Lost. This goes back to 2012. Anil, you may remember, was one of the early employees at Six Apart, a big part of sort of movable type in the early days. At the point at which he was doing The Web We Lost, he was working on a startup called ThinkUp, which was a way of sort of tracking and collecting your social media from around the web and archiving it and studying it. And then Dries, you likely know as the founder of The Drupal Project and of Acquia as a commercial company. And so this is from 2016. So you notice in Anil's, he starts off with the tech industry and its press and how they treat these billion scale social networks. Then he says, they seldom talk about what we've lost along the way in this transition. And I find that younger folks may not even know how the web used to be. We've abandoned core values that used to be fundamental to the web world. Today's social networks haven't shown the web itself the respect and care it deserves. So they don't know how to take care of this beautiful thing that we once had, right? They're making the wrong mistakes. And we've narrowed the possibility so much for an entire generation of users who don't realize how much more innovative and meaningful their experience could be, right? So it's the sort of loss of an entire generation because of the way we've allowed to close social networks to proliferate. Dries is slightly different. The web felt different 15 years ago when I found a Drupal, just 7% of the population had internet access. There were only around 20 million websites and Google was a small private company. In these early days, the web felt like a free space that belonged to everyone, right? Well, the natural kind of suspicion that this raises for me again is that was your perception. Was that how everyone felt, right? Do we really know that the web felt open to everyone when only 7% of the population was on it? Because as I remember, it was an awful lot of nerdy white guys like me who wrote code and learned and taught themselves HTML and created, yes, independent websites. But it wasn't the most inclusive place in the world. It certainly wasn't the most diverse place in the world. I'm not sure that we had a shared set of core values in the way that we now project back onto the open web. And part of the question is sort of when would the open web have been, right? During the last presidential campaign sequence, there was a wonderful set of pieces that people did about Make America Great Again and sort of asking folks subscribing to that slogan, please describe for us the point at which America was great in the past, to which you'd like to return, right? And it would be everything from sort of pre-Obama, so the Bush era, all the way back to pre-Civil War, right? And anywhere in between, somebody would take as the moment at which America was great. On the web, it seems to be somewhere around 1999 to 2005. Anil's a bit clearer about what his dates are, what he talks about than most people are. But it's sort of right at the point that the web transitioned from academic only. The webpage on the right here is just the oldest webpage I can find that I actually wrote, which goes back to 1996. Before the web became commercialized, before TLS or SSL, right? Before Nutscape Invented Sessions, before Cookies, before a lot of other things came along. And I think the question is, is thinking about the internet of that era useful as anything more than nostalgia and projection of sort of what we now want to think the values were at that time? So I wanna move on to talk about the open web as open source. So free and open are interesting words in English and of particular interest to this community as the WordPress community because of the way they've played out. So the free software foundation, whose site you see here on the left, talking about the free software definition on the right, the open source definition from the open source institute. So fsf.org and opensource.org. Two ways of talking about the same thing. And I'll say in the spirit of transparency, I have spent the better part of 20 years as in my intro talking about open source, working with companies to understand how open source could benefit them, speaking at conferences and not properly saying always every single time free and open source software as Richard Stallman would like me to do, right? Using a proprietary operating system to present to you and not apologizing for the fact that I'm using Keynote as a proprietary system to present to you. And yet, when I look back at sort of the break between free software and open source, and it's a little bit of it is here, the free software definition talks about it means that users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. This free software is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, think of free as in free speech, not as in free beer. And since I know there are editors in the room, it drives me batshit that the period on free beer is outside the quotation mark. And everywhere else on the SFF site, they do what I think of as the American standard and put the period inside the quotation mark. But that's not really the point. The open source definition on the right hand side is derived from the early Debbie and free software guidelines. In essence says the same thing, right? In practice, it says the ability to run the software for any purpose, no discrimination against fields of endeavor, the ability to inspect the source code in the preferred source code form, all the things that are laid out in the 10 bullets of the open source definition are things we would very much recognize as free software. And yet, there's this vast gulf between the free software foundation and the open source initiative and where does that come from? So historically, 1998, and this is the free software campaign, or free software foundation's version of events, a part of the free software community splintered off and began campaigning in the name of open source. And when I hear splintered off, again, because I'm a Monty Python fan, I think of the People's Front of Judea versus the Judean People's Front from the Life of Brian. But you can think of this as a civil war within some part of our open web territory, right? Where some groups splintered off and said we're no longer happy with free software. The term was originally proposed to avoid a possible misunderstanding of the term free software. So we admit that at some point there was a misunderstanding over the meaning of words. Turns out a lot of things depend on the difference of the meaning of words. But it soon became associated with a philosophical view quite different from the free software movement, right? So open source is a development methodology. Free software is a social movement. You look at the open source initiative version, and this is from when they were celebrating the 20th anniversary of open source as a term. There is no doubt that the decision to use that term as a marketing program for free software was a crucial moment. From that point on, people who wanted to promote software freedom in business, which might be people who believe in the open web, could do so and it became easy to talk about open source projects, open source business models, the benefits of open source and so on. I've seen this in action as well. The notion of going to a company that knows nothing about free software that hasn't really thought about the import of ethics of their software usage or how they're gonna build a CMS, right? Some of you probably have the same conversation. To start off with, first it's important that you accept philosophically a basis in ethics of freedom is a hard conversation, right? Starting from, here is a development methodology that lets us use collective activity to create better software that we then share with each other is a much easier conversation to have. And that's why open source, I would argue, has largely in our space won this conversation, right? And it is the phrase that we typically use. But there's still something about freedom there that I miss and that I like, right? So the mistake of the word free is that in English, when we say free, we mean both free as in speech or freedom in Latin languages, libre, right? So in Spanish or in Italian or French, there are various versions of that. And free as in beer or free like a puppy. We'll talk about free like a puppy in a minute. But the distinction between libre and gratis. And that's why you now get some weird acronyms like floss which is free slash libre slash open source software or FOS which is free in open source software as ways of trying to sort of bridge this gap. Robert Lefkowitz, Rommel, R0ML, so he writes his name, gave a great keynote many years ago at Osconn back in 2007 or 2008 which I tried to find but is no longer exists online, speaking of not knowing what we've lost. Where he actually talked about the fact is that's a mistake. In English, we have all kinds of words that are derived from libre. Liberty, liberal are all words that come from the same root, right? So what if instead we had talked about liberty software or he proposes liberal software which would be I think an interesting thing to try to sell in today's environment. I might be interested in being in a liberal software company but that would be a different thing. But I think that the import of the challenge is that ethical dimension that was so critical to the free software foundation that was so critical to Richard Stallman and a kind of East Coast intellectual centered at MIT world view that thought about what it meant in the long run for individual users to have software freedom is very different than a practical matter of sort of doing development in an open fashion lets us create better software because we're actually able to do things together. Many eyeballs make bugs shallow, all the kinds of things that were used to from that world. So when we start to transition that to think about open web, I think we have to be careful not to replicate the same problem that open source had which was open meant too many things to too many different people and there wasn't enough specificity about what we thought open meant, right? So thinking about freedom in the edge of web applications, there's this concept of the ASP loophole. In the GPL license you all should know and love as WordPress folk distribution is triggered when you actually are giving other people source code, right? So when you actually distribute software to people they download it to run on their own machine or their own server or somewhere else. This creates something that some people within the community called the ASP loophole. I put it in scare quotes because I don't actually think it's a loophole, I think it's actually deliberate but let's call it a loophole for the moment. And that means ASP as an application service provider not active server pages. But the notion being Google as an example can make modifications to Linux kernels to run at large scale in Google server firms throughout the world and there's no obligation to share them back because they haven't distributed that code to anyone, right? It stayed within their organization. The Afaro GPL was a license created during the 2.0 to 3.0 cycle in part to deliberately address this which says if users are interacting with your application over a network as in their web users they still have to have access to the source code, right? So it sort of forces openness in a different way. What happens in a world in which access to source code is no longer the most important or even potentially an important prerequisite, right? Is the core challenge here? For people who are in the WordPress community who are in the broader publishing community and journalistic community who are not source code literate or have no interest in being source code literate or don't feel a need to be source code literate what value does the openness of the source code give them? How do we ensure the kinds of freedom free software is designed to ensure for a user base that is primarily not source code literate? Well, the main answer from my perspective is it's not just about the code, right? There is a community associated with an open source project. An open source project that is just source code with no community built around it is useless. In fact, it might be worse than useless because you wanna slow somebody down throw thousands of lines of code at them, right? It's almost better to start from scratch. So the specific form of imagined community that is an open source project attracts not just code contributors, right? But users who have real business problems users who are trying to do things opportunities for us to take source code that exists and twist it and meld it to meet the needs of actual human beings who are trying to accomplish things. And that is the strong opportunity. So let's talk about Wald Gardens and the big dominance of proprietary platforms designed for lock-in, which was the conversation we had before. This illustration is from Dries's post which was linked to earlier and is linked to here. And I find something horribly soothing and frightening about it at the same time, right? I sort of feel like I could play hypnotic music and just watch this all day zooming in and out, right? So the four players here at Facebook, Apple, Google and let's say Microsoft represented by LinkedIn and now GitHub and others, right? Clearly big players in the internet space and in the web are they in the process taking oxygen out of the ecosystem that doesn't allow others to thrive, right? We've gone through on the web already in particular as publishers, multiple sort of cycles of disintermediation and re-intermediation, where the joy of that early web for which people is nostalgic was in some ways access skipping, right? The fact that you could access people who you would otherwise not have access to because the community was so small. The fact that you could bypass some of the traditional guardians of culture and get directly to the author or the musician or the celebrity or whatever that you were after. And yet now we've had re-intermediation happening first through kind of search engines and now social and also perhaps through devices that are controlled, right? Like iOS devices. So what does it mean to the open web to have these big dominant players? One of the things that I think we have to be careful about is we're still imagining a two-dimensional world. We're still imagining a zero sum game. We're still imagining that growth in some of these circles represents shrinking in other circles as though there's a fixed area here, right? As opposed to more thinking about other ways of accessing users directly and building direct relationships with users. So in Anil's formulation, when he's talking about the web we lost, this isn't some standard polemic about those stupid well gardens are bad. I love that that's a standard polemic because I wish we had that polemic more often but that's a standard polemic. I know Facebook and Twitter and Pinterest and LinkedIn and the rest are great sites and they give their users a lot of value. I would say absolutely amen. Of the four sites on the previous page, three of them are 10-up clients and anytime the fourth wants to call us I'm happy to take that call because we would love to work with them, right? They're amazing achievements. Anil says they're based on a few assumptions that aren't correct. The primary is that user flexibility and control lead to a user experience complexity that hurts growth. So we need to shrink, simplify, control the user experience in order to get big growth. We need to dumb down the web in order to get massive scale growth. And the second or great fallacy is thinking that exerting extreme control over users is the best way to maximize profitability and sustainability of their networks. And maybe though he doesn't say it I think the implication is also the notion that profitability is the key measure of success of a network which is probably something that he's less sure of. And Dries's formulation, he says people are using free and convenient services often without a clear understanding of how and where their data is being used. Many times the data is shared in exchange between services where people don't even know what's happening anymore. We need a consumer based opt-in data sharing system collaboration and open standards to decentralize power and control. So bonus points here. What was the name of the foundation created in 2008 to help shepherd specs like OAuth and Open Graph and Open Connect? The Open Web Foundation. And who were the dominant sponsors of the Open Web Foundation? They spoke to Microsoft and Google. That's not to be critical of them. I think OAuth was a fantastic thing. I think Open Graph was a good thing. I think these were all great examples of big proprietary companies collaborating on open standards in public. It just means we have to be a little bit careful about the kinds of standards themselves don't enforce ethics, right? Standards aren't grounded in a concept of what it is that we're trying to accomplish. Can have unintended consequences, can lead to unintended decisions, can lead us down different paths. Jonathan Zitron, who was a professor at the Berkman Center at Harvard. It's interesting being here in a law school because I've spent a lot of time at the Berkman Center which is at Harvard Law which studies a lot about sort of change on the internet. And Zitron's book, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It is now available at that dash URL. He's released it under a Creative Commons license. You can actually go grab the whole thing and read it if you so please. But what he talks about is generativity. And generativity for Zitron is a lot like what we talk about as the Open Web, right? It's generative in the sense that it enables community to build new things. It generates. And it generates because it can be adopted to a wide range of tasks. So if you think about like, again maybe I'm showing my age here, when I started college I had a word processor. And I don't mean a piece of software. I mean a hardware device from a company called Brother that made typewriters that was designed to do word processing and nothing else, right? Have a little four line display, you could edit, you could create content and then you'd hit print and it would basically type it out for you, right? Basically a typewriter with a small buffer. As opposed to a personal computer which can be adapted to a wide range of tasks and can be mastered widely by a large group of new contributors. Now in the era of the sort of generative PC, that's still programmers, right? That's still people writing code, that's still APIs, that's still sort of your ability to install a bunch of different programs on your laptop and do different things with it. But the breadth and openness of that is what he talks about as generativity in the early stage. He then goes on to describe what's actually happening which is the end points are getting closed down. So increasingly the devices we use to access the internet are controlled. The iTunes app store experience and what's allowed and not allowed and how much openness you have into those decisions being one of his prime examples. But it's not just that, it's also a lot of other ways in which the edges, the end points are being controlled. And he says that the joke of the future of the internet and how to stop it, obviously, is that we don't want the internet to become closed down and not generative anymore. We wanna find ways to preserve its generativity. And his answer is with the right tools, users can also see themselves as participants in the shaping of generative space as netizens. In other words, as citizens of the open web, right? He comes back to this notion of sort of re-empowering citizens of the open web to take some action and take some ownership of what happens. I'm gonna point at a couple of different examples. One is the indie web, right? Indie web styles itself as a people focused alternative to the corporate web. But what they focus on is sort of ownership of your content and interaction through open standards. They hold meetups regularly throughout the world. They're building a stack that includes various WordPress components that kind of allows you to do things like Posse, which is post once syndicate everywhere, which is instead of posting directly to Instagram or Facebook or Twitter or wherever, you're publishing on a stack that you control on your own domain, and then it's syndicating out everywhere, right? So kind of take back the independent spirit of the early web. I think like the early web, it's a community that resonates really well with people who write code and tinkerers and homebrew computer enthusiasts and hasn't quite figured out how to breach that gap into a broader community. Decentralized web is a conference that happened just recently out on the West Coast sponsored by Internet Archive, and what they talk about is they're trying to build a web that we want, parentheses and the web we deserve. Not quite sure if the web we want and the web we deserve are somehow in opposition there. You don't get the web that you want, but you might get the web that you deserve if you try hard enough. And we're convening, using the convening power of Internet Archive and Mozilla to bring together people who want to build a web that remembers, forget, that's safe, that cares about people, that's a marketplace, that's a public square, that learns, that's magical. Well, that's good, we're only aiming for magic, so it should work out well. That's fun, a web with many webbers, a web that is locked open for good. So there are other communities that are starting to engage in this open web rhetoric, and I think we need to sort of pay attention to what's happening in those communities as we think about what WordPress can do. Speeding up, I said that a lot for 45 minutes, I was right. So the other kind of core conversation that happens in this open web space is the data conversation, right? This is Gaping Boyd from back in 2006, so I just love this, I wish I had this printed on my wall. If you talk to people the way advertising talk to people, they punch you in the face. So much of our web conversation of the last 10 years has been about ad technology and tracking in the absence of real relationships between consumers and the sites they consume, right? That's not to say that ads are bad, right? We need advertising, it's an important part of the revenue model for publishers, and I get that. It's that the way that we've chosen to imagine the relationship and the way that we've chosen to engage in ads has turned out to be harmful. This is my favorite, like non-profit, open standards coalition for better ads. Because they're very announcement, the initial better ad standards. Least preferred ad experiences for desktop and mobile web. When this first came out, I had to read it like five times to make sure that I was actually understanding. What they're gathering are the least preferred experiences. These are the worst types of ads on the world. So while it's the coalition for better ads and these are better ad standards, what you start with is all of the things that people most hate about ads and are most likely to be triggering ad blockers and are most likely to be used this way. Chrome rolling out obviously ad blocking based on these standards and starting to notify users of notify site owners of potential blockage has moved this conversation forward, but very much feels like a dragged kicking and screaming by once again complying with an external demand rather than a deliberate conscious choice. AMP accelerated mobile pages, controversial. I know there are talks even at this conference about AMP and sort of whether to implement it or not. While Google may have made choices in their roll out of this program that I might disagree with, I think in the end it's actually an open standard and one that many people can participate in and one that I support and like to see happening. Not to say it's the only way you can improve performance on your sites or not to say it's the only way that you might go about doing so, but it's certainly a dramatic step forward for the broader web in terms of the experience of a mobile user trying to interact with publisher content in ways that were becoming nearly impossible. Another reform arguably imposed from outside GDPR, right? I think while many in the U.S. have chosen to simply block European residents, right? As an answer to the GDPR, my hope is that over the longer term we'll recognize that security and privacy by design and transparency for end users is how we should always have been operating, right? There isn't anything in the GDPR that to me sounds like it's not what we should have been doing all along, except maybe registering with the property authorities in Europe about who your chief privacy officer is, but other than that, most of it sounds like a very good idea to me and I hope that as we keep moving in that direction we'll come to recognize that that actually can allow us to create the right kinds of relationship with users that they can sense into, that they understand that are transparent rather than thinking that we can gather better data around them, which has just often turned out to be over-promised and under-delivered and not actually realize its value. So I thought I'd come back to the future of WordPress. What is the role of WordPress in the creation of this open web? So if the open web is imaginary, it will always be imaginary. The WordPress community is imaginary. It will always be imagined. So I should say imagined and not imaginary. That doesn't mean it doesn't have real power. It doesn't mean it doesn't have real influence, but it's an imagined thing deliberately. So Morton Hendrickson gave a great talk at WordCamp Europe this summer. If you have not seen it, I would encourage you to go watch it, talking about the ethics of web design. Turns out that if you're trying to think about whether something that you are doing as a community is the right thing or not, or whether something you are doing as a company is the right thing or not, there's a whole field of study around that. It's called ethics, right? This is not a new set of conversations. Morton Sites and people who've seen other talks know that I also love to cite. Emmanuel Kant, nothing like a little 18th century German philosophy before lunch. The moral categorical imperative. Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become universal law. In other words, act the way you wish everybody else would act, right? It's the golden rule. There's lots of different variations on this. We should be basing our decisions about the kinds of directions we want the web to go based on what we want everyone else to be doing as well, right? That will help create the kind of future that we imagine. Morton's talk goes into a lot about consequentialism or utilitarianism versus deontological and sort of Kant versus Bentham and all that. I'll leave that for another day. But suffice it to say, thinking from an ethical framework about what it is we're trying to do is the core answer. So WordPress has a head start, right? Democratized publishing sounds like a very good thing to be thinking about as we think about the open web, being free and open source in letter and in spirit. Not being afraid to talk about the ethical dimensions of what it means to have freedoms, right? To use the Bill of Rights to describe the four freedoms. One side distraction, the four freedoms which are numbered from zero forward. This is perhaps arcana. I can't actually validate that this is true. We say that we start from zero because that's how computers count, but that's actually a lie. We start from zero because we actually started with one and when they first formulated these at the SFF they had one, two, and three and then somebody along the way realized actually in order to have one, two, and three in a meaningful way, you first have to be able to run the program for any purpose. So we sort of jammed that back in and gave it the zero at the number and that was the way of accommodating. But so being unafraid to talk about the ethical dimensions of open source software and what that means at least as a community, right? Doesn't mean I want you to start every sales pitch to a new vendor as with the talk about ethics. I don't start all of mine with a manual comp, believe it or not. But thinking about organizations like Better News, right? From the American Press Institute and the Night Lent Test Initiative, thinking about projects like the Coral Project, right? These are places where they are explicit about their goals and explicit about what they're trying to accomplish in terms of building community based on an ethical paradigm. Open Protocols, APIs, and Standards. So distributor, go to distributorplugin.com is something that TenUp is working on that's relevant to this audience in terms of sharing content across websites. Doing so in an explicitly open source fashion. There is a registration form on the site that's not in order to restrict license. What you get is GPL software, just like anything else that we produce. It's so that we can convene a community around talking about what are the right use cases for this to handle and how, right? So that we have some sense of what people are using it for and we can build. Accessibility as a pervasive feature. Accessibility is not something shoved in at the end. It's something we should be thinking about throughout. The early web in some ways turned out to be more accessible simply because it was simpler, right? When you had HTML 1.0 and you didn't have Flash in JavaScript and you didn't have all this other whizbang stuff. Turns out you actually made sites that were more accessible. We've allowed ourselves to walk fairly far away from accessibility as a primary thing and we ought to come back to it. Privacy, security, and transparency. Again, we talked a little bit about GPR. Two other projects I would point to, Project VRM, which is vendor relationship management at Harvard and the ethical design manifesto, which is at IND.ie, Indy, are both examples of trying to sort of create the kind of world that we want to see. And then lastly, inclusivity as a core principle as we think about the WordPress community, as we think about the open web that we want. Let's not just think about how well do we serve people who are like us? Or how well do we serve people who are technically savvy? Or how well do we serve people who are willing to download and unzip and install and get into configuration? But how are we serving the rest of the web as well? Matt, recently, timing is good here. Did an interview with Cara Swisher at Recode Decode, which I would encourage you to listen to, talking about the moral imperative of user privacy, talking about even if users aren't asking for it, there are certain things that we ought to do because it's the right thing to do, right? And that's the kind of thinking that I'm talking about. Running long, I have been John Ekman. I'm the CEO at TenUp. We focus on making a better web with finely crafted websites and tools for content creators, work with many of you in the room, would like to work with all of you in the room. We are hiring open physicians there on the right from TenUp.com slash careers. And with that, I don't think I really have time for questions, so if people need to get up and head to go pick up their lunch, that's fine. But I will stick around and I'll be around the rest of today and tomorrow to talk further about these issues.