 Yn yma, dyfodd y gallwn ei wneud yng ngoswp ysgol yma ar y gweithio. Yn ymgyrchaf, yw'r rhaid i'r gwahaniaeth sy'n gweithio. Yn ymgyrchaf, ei wneud o chi'n ei gweithio ar y panel, ar y ffordd y pressed. Yn ymgyrchaf, mae'r idea eich bod ni'n gweithio mewn dweud yma, ac mae'n ddod â'r argyn iawn, ac yn oed yn amlwg ni'n ddod! Yn ymgyrchaf, mae'n gweithio ar y cwnau oed. Felly, we're going to jump straight in. The kind of first initial theme that we're going to be talking about is the kind of professional word press world. So I'm going to go straight in with my first question to the panel. In a world that is increasingly competitive, what will be the most important differentiation factors in the future? That's�o by picking the bucket here. I'm going to go with adaptability because the things that are changing that are changing so quickly and so common, that there is no more common threat in what WordPress is, those companies that are able to adapt to the change and restructure themselves basically every year to where the internet is going, those are the ones that are going to keep up. I'd like to add that I think that it is becoming more and more important that you put yourself in a position that you can seize opportunities once you present themselves. That's basically the side effect of having an ever-changing environment. Once there is an actual opportunity, you want to be in the best spot to be able to act quickly and be the first to market to whatever that opportunity has presented. Thank you so much. The technology industry is changing really fast. We're going to go with this whole constant change. I'm interested to find out for the people who do own companies or work for companies what the future of your company is in WordPress. Thanks, Anna. It's a good question and something that's on my mind a lot at the moment. I think it comes to thinking about what is it that we're trying to achieve with WordPress. What was the sort of human need or desire that WordPress obviously fits so well because it's been so popular and so successful, which is I think people's desire to communicate and connect. The future for us is about looking at how we take that capability, the understanding out of WordPress and try and build it into a more transcendent value proposition. That's about understanding how people, organisations, machines all want to communicate and looking at how content management supports that. Thanks, David. Does anybody else want to speak to that question? So I'm not technically a company owner, but I'm working a lot with other companies. I think that we are at a changing point right now where people have to recognise that the one software foundation they used that was always that solid rock that didn't budge with any current trends, that is slowly shifting and it is both a risk and an opportunity for company owners. I think it will drastically reshape the way companies generally see WordPress as part of their stack of their product offerings as being more of a generalist building block rather than the core foundation that they use to sell something. So in the future I think that you will not sell WordPress so and so. You will sell a solution and you will find the best way to use WordPress and other components to build that solution. Thanks, Elaine. So we're going to be looking now kind of outside of the WordPress world. We're going to, the first question is, what do you think needs to happen for WordPress to become a truly global project? I think the biggest thing is listening, so listening and finding out what that means, so learning about different cultures, both from people to contribute through to how the product itself behaves. It's kind of a short answer but really just listening and through listening you have understanding and then that's like the baseline for it. It needs to involve just observing, really. I think that in one of the ways that WordPress is lacking is internationally. If you're not a native English speaker, it's very hard to contribute to WordPress even today and reaching out to more people and listening means that we're going to have to start listening to people not just from different cultures but in different languages and bring more of that into WordPress. If you want to be global you have to act global and we're getting there but not very fast. I often find that WordPress is working a lot on improving the language support of internationalisation. There's a lot of work being done and there's lots and lots of volunteer hours that go into translating the project and making it available in all languages but the more that this happens, the more it becomes obvious that the structure at the core of the project and the decision making needs to also take the cultural diverseness into account and you see more and more that some directions of the project and some decisions are taken in one context and not directly applicable in a different cultural context. So just making it accessible to more cultures is not enough. You also have to take their context into account when you decide on the next steps of the project. Thank you so much. Cool, so we're going to be now looking at how WordPress exists even outside of the community. So we know that we've got this huge user base, millions of people and we've got hundreds of thousands of people within this community. But what do you think that we can learn from how people are using WordPress that exists outside the standard contribution groups? I think just the stories and I'm going to say listening again but it is that, right? We can learn how people use WordPress in small and big ways and by understanding all those stories, that's how we can decide the direction and surfacing and telling those stories is also really, really important. So listening isn't just like, oh I heard you and then walking off. But listening is an active state, right? You listen and the new process and then you relay what you listened. That's the whole way we should be doing it. So really surfacing the stories, surfacing the ways and when decisions are made, taking those into account that way. Thanks, Sammy. Yeah, and I think it's looking at what's going on outside of even people that are using WordPress. It's looking at the web, right? Social, it's looking at what's happening with software development in other spaces. So I've found that kind of whole blockchain and cryptocurrency space really interesting to look at what happens when you change some parameters with open source software development like what happens when you put a, you know, you can do a pull request that's worth tens of millions of pounds like how do you manage your governance around something like that. But just looking at the trends that are kind of here and now so social messenger chat, all that kind of stuff but also the stuff that's coming down the road, chatbots, mixed reality, AI, data visualisations and enrichment of content that go beyond what, you know, anything that we get out of WordPress with the five minute install but there's still a really important role for WordPress to play in supporting all those kind of technologies. So as much as anything, I think it's about understanding what the vision for WordPress is in five years' time and what the strategy is about how we're going to get it there and then evaluating all of the noise and all the signals and being able to process those into, yes, this is in line or no it's not and we're okay with that or we're not okay with that so we need to course correct and like calling back to Alain's point about governance decision making, how that works I think is something that, you know, it's a really interesting sort of challenge for us as a community. I think for software development generally like open source software development I mean there are some great examples of long term successful open source projects is that, you know, what's the magic source behind that how do we look at it on every level not only what the users want but what the developers want what the businesses are using it want what the ecosystem wants and all of that is a it's a leaning tower to try and keep up right. That's a really good point actually because you lead me on to my next question which is kind of the same question but just takes into consideration what processes we can actually learn, so I'm supposed to learn from people what processes can we learn from outside of the community? Before I started working in WordPress I worked for a bank for almost 15 years and one of the things that I noticed in software was how slow the development process was but also how rarely things actually changed when they changed. They'd either be very incremental and a massive update that did nothing or it would be what they would call a small update and everything changed and I think that by looking at how traditional business used to run software before we finally all accepted that open source was actually working a bit better than they thought it was we can see the missteps that were made we can see that holding on to things too closely and not letting change from outside come into us will prevent us from growing we can look at things like Squarespace and we can look at Wix and we can see where are they excelling and where didn't they excel. We can look at Medium and say they did a very good job with an editor but they did a bad job the way that they handled ads and that didn't work out at all well when they started trying to make a gated community so if that doesn't work what can we learn from them and carry into us and it's being aware of what all those things out there are doing and how it comes back into us. I think on a process level we also need to look at just systems so design systems, ways of generating and sticking things together and processes and structures so that we're not dependent on reinventing all the time so that we maximise and we really refine what we have and we take audit and that kind of structure is something that sometimes feels like ah too much structure we can't do that and we won't be able to be creative in that actually when you add that kind of structure you can be more creative and part of the success of the future is going to be having that process and then we can shoot for the moon we can go and do all those crazy amazing things because we have that base and that solidity and that consistent product and I use the word product because that is what WordPress is and it has to be both from a contribution and from the actual product itself that is used and contribution is also a product but having that basis that then we can experiment, iterate and refine other than every time we do something having to guess what shade grey we have or have to guess this blue or guess this button or it's kind of that doesn't move us forward that kind of stalls that creativity I think there's also a lot of value to be found in academia because computer science is a much older and much more mature discipline than most people assume everything seems to be moving so fast but things were pretty much all every time the same for the last few decades so people have figured a lot of stuff out already and have solved a lot of problems and academia does not always have the answer of what is the right way to do something but often times they've built theoretical models that can tell you the things that will certainly not work out and instead of threading down that path and adapting processes that are already theoretically flawed only to find out six months later or six years later that oops, that did not really help us move forward often times academia can help avoid these pitfalls because they've already solved these problems theoretically to at least exclude the stuff that cannot work I think I'd like to dream a little bit bigger and look at the economy and politics as processes and I'll say this as quickly as I can I went to a really great talk I'd recommend you try and watch it it was South by Southwest by a guy called Tim O Riley and he's been in tech for far longer than I have started a Riley publishing and he made some really good points about how basically tech's coming, it's going to disrupt a whole bunch of stuff and the time where technology companies could play this neutral academic acetic role in society is long gone and that actually is our generation it's up to technologists to help drive that change because we're doing it even by choosing not to get actively involved with stuff we are shaping the future and so I'd like to look at processes around governance and how that works in open source how that might work in other human processes what doesn't work in other human processes how do we learn from that in software development but also increasingly economics economic processes I think wherever you whatever people do often comes down to watching the money that's motivation and it's constraint and it's just one of those kind of fundamental forces that seems to transcend pretty much anything else and so I definitely see a time where pragmatic employees behavioural economists to understand what the economic value of content transactions behaviours are, how those interactions play out between people, third parties, customer suppliers all this stuff and just think about software and the internet for what it really is which is a vast economy which until now is really just underpinned by advertising money ecommerce whereas actually there's a whole iceberg of value of content and information and relationships underneath that which is masked by those two economic underpinnings long answer but let's look everywhere and see what we can learn and fix Cool, thank you so much everyone for answering those questions so I think I would like to open the questions to the floor just to give you some idea of other things that we're going to be dealing with we're going to be talking about the REST API in Gutenberg so if you do have any questions specific to that then just wait a little while and we'll deal with them in a sec but does anybody have any questions about what we just talked about or something else which I haven't mentioned it's only time for a few questions so I will quickly move on if nobody has a question let's have a look no obviously we prepared all the questions that you had anyway so that was good I'll take that back oh we've got one you don't need that you can shout thanks Dora I don't know if I can say this but see if I can how do you see the internet with all these small companies doing different things and helping each other being dominated by monopolies big corporations, big investment and then everything is churned out and there's a lot of the companies who just dominate in that area I mean the thing is certainly my generation have seen internet as a freedom and lots of new things happening but what about the future where some of the change there isn't so much change and that everyone is doing the same thing is that enough? I think Tammy and I work for the largest companies on the line I don't think that it's going to become that homogenous I don't think that there will be one company not even one CMS I don't even think that WordPress would ever have 100% usage because people like to express themselves in different ways just like we've got family members who love Twitter versus Facebook versus Tumblr we're always going to have different ways that we want to be and that we want to communicate and that we want to talk I can't make a podcast to save my life I tried it twice, I'm terrible at it but I love listening to them and two of my best friends have a podcast now and I love listening to it every week and I think it's great that we've got these different ways to do those things and I speak as a... Dreamhost is relatively small when it comes to the web host world we're around 200 people and when you compare us to GoDaddy and to Bluehost and other very large companies in the United States we're tiny and we get a lot done and people stay with different companies because of the people and that they share the same ethos and the same ideals and if you just want one thing one specific need from a host it almost doesn't matter where you go but once you start wanting to express yourself in those different ways and wanting to do things in a way that suits your needs and your desires that different companies offer things in different ways just like I don't think we'll ever have Facebook will be the use use for everyone or Twitter I think that we will continue to have multiple different companies offering us up different ways to do those things Fantastic Thank you so much for that There's also a sort of inverse dynamic that happens in the economics of not only the internet just generally if you have a company that really has a monopolistic role the more it becomes this monopolistic entity the more it opens itself up to become vulnerable to a new disruptive entry into the market because the simple fact of having a monopoly creates opportunity so this basically means that the closer you get to your worst case that you portray in your possible future the more probable it becomes that there will just be a new actor that enters and completely disrupts the status quo and creates something new that is just a direct result of the opportunity that monopoly has created Thank you so much I've got time for one more question for now and then I'll move on Great, thanks Hi, speaking of economics and the currently most of the internet is based on advertising money and e-commerce and also the fact that GDPR has been with us for a year now where do you see WordPress and privacy sort of taking that while also taking into account economics but also keeping users' data close to it Great question Gabor, thank you I think there's a couple of key trends so one is that something needs to change about WordPress and data in terms of self-hosted WordPress I think there's a real opportunity there for doing staging site local site, live site that whole workflow of configuration, settings content between different environments and version control but it's in the database should it be etc I think that's one of the key challenges that we have to try and solve for and I think we'll see services that are abstracting content, maybe even content storage not content management content storage out of WordPress definitely identity management I think is there are lots of platforms that are doing that, I mean a lot of people say it's kind of the end of the anonymous internet now and actually there's so much tracking that people are kind of now aware of that does go on that people are going to be more accepting that I'm going to have a persona it's going to save me filling in a bunch of forms and I think we're going to see that so for me that role is actually about going back to that kind of vision and strategy of exactly what WordPress is going to be doing in five or ten years time I think it's going to become more specialised as a kind of it will still have that kind of bundle of APIs you know the user API blah blah blah to build a cohesive system but more and more I think we're just going to see services knocking bits of that out and so WordPress is going to find like a really sweet spot as a world class content editing platform and actually a lot of the other stuff particularly for kind of corporate use is going to become SaaS and platform based so that's one trend the other one is my pet topic at the moment which is the blockchain and crypto currency stuff which is there are a number of projects out there already doing this sort of stuff so basic attention token is one and that kind of redefines the value proposition between advertisers publishers and website visitors there are others like the truth data cloud which basically says you know create your data profile and earn money through letting advertisers kind of access this and I think again it feels like callback central but calling back to the question you had about monopolies and Alan's like excellent point about like Yin and Yang and within every kind of monolith there's the birth of a radical you know that's essentially what we're seeing now I think in terms of technology both in terms of the well I think specifically technology it's like a push back against that kind of advertising power there's a project called Civil which is one of my favorites which is actually a WordPress.com VIP client super interesting looking at basically fixing journalism and how you can run a news room without having to be beholden to advertising or affiliate revenue or e-commerce or kind of even subscriptions which for consumers can be pretty clunky you know you go away on holiday you don't want to pay your £3 for your subscription that you don't use for that month so I think those are two trends that I come I see coming along and radically changing what we think about WordPress is doing cool I think I just took all the time for answering no you didn't have loads of time thank you so much we'll just move back into the panel questions and then we'll take another Q&A break at the end I'll give that to you Dave okay cool so now we're going to talk a little bit about the West API and Gutenberg exciting projects over the last couple of years that we've had so looking back to 2015-16 when the West API was merged into call obviously we're seeing a lot of projects using the West API and I'm sure through all the work that you've done you've kind of come into contact with it so how much usage are you actually seeing kind of day to day? One of the things I do for WordPress is I review plugins for the plugin directory so in the last 18 months there's been a drastic uptick actually of use of the West API where people are finding out new ways to call back to other sites to extract data without having to reinvent the wheel without having to make their own builds of APIs they're able to just call WordPress and say oh I've got data that I store in my site that I publish from it's already in a West API I can use another plugin and grab it and post it on other sites using RSS feeds and email we can now switch to using the rest API and that starts as the very basic conversation because once you've done that you can think well if I can do an API to pull the data then I can use the API to send the data and suddenly I've got a system that's talking back and forth to itself I can just do it in WordPress I don't have to build all of these things all the tools are there I just have to activate them and it started to open up a new generation of builds which I find absolutely fascinating Does anybody else care to speak to that? I've seen less direct use of the rest API in most of my daily work but I noticed that as soon as it got more real with the Gutenberg development that really pushed a lot of the rest API development work it also created a lot of new questions and it made it obvious that the foundation the data model foundation that the rest of the API is built on is not fully complete so I think that probably without such a big project like Gutenberg pushing the envelope and moving everything forward a lot of potential plugins were still being blocked by missing pieces of the rest API and we will never hear about many of these because they just never were able to get into a fully working state and an individual plugin certainly didn't have the resources to rethink the rest API implementation once it was merged into core so I think with Gutenberg now the actual abstraction that the rest API presents becomes more more complete and we will only now be able to fully see what people are capable of doing with plugins so it's very great to hear that a lot of plugins already making use of this but I think the real opportunities were still partially blocked until we now came to fully realise this rest API after Gutenberg a quick plug for Alan who's too modest and my good colleague Sean who's doing a workshop tomorrow morning looking at using the WordPress rest API in Ionic so that's definitely worth checking out and my quick two cents just because I got the mic is that I've long seen WordPress is like I've described as digital glue you know there's an integration with everything there's a plugin for anything and it's sort of if you want to build something quickly out of blocks but putting WordPress in the middle is a pretty good start and for me the rest API basically supercharges that trend and means that actually you can drop it into almost any kind of architecture and it's got a role to play so it's sort of it's a very enabling technology you know Gutenberg the rest API the Google AMP stuff there's a P1 as well progressive web apps, headless CMS all this stuff you know those kind of those trends together I think point to the future of WordPress cool you've all answered my next question which was about the adoption of the rest API about the WordPress community which is great so so if we actually we're talking a little bit about kind of AI learning maybe a little bit so I'll answer that question what impact do you think technologies like AI and machine learning will have on WordPress when I was six or seven I used to travel with my father he used to talk about artificial intelligence and he worked for NASA post the challenger disaster my father was on the team that helped figure out what actually happened and because of that he got roped into talking about intelligence and how can we predict change him what he is now is a risk analyst and by that I mean actually figuring out things like why did the power plants in Japan have a critical failure not like risk management like software like just you know oh your company is going to fail but like actual risk management and from him I learned at a very early age that there's actually nothing AI isn't anything more than a bunch of nested if statements that are enacting decisions that are made by experts so whenever I go into how will AI change computing all it's really doing is helping us narrow down what the actual answers are because you know we see Star Trek and we see you know Captain Picard say that he wants his T Earl Grey hot but who taught the computer what hot meant how do those things get known and it's because an expert had to go in and teach the computer that when Picard says hot this is what his temperature is and we like to say that oh it's an artificial intelligence that knows these things but no it's really us teaching at these things so the secret and the magic of artificial intelligence becomes us understanding ourselves a lot better and being able to record history in a way that the computer can extrapolate from but it'll still only ever know what we've told it oh oh hang on a second so we'll take oh sorry we'll take sorry we'll take questions in a second thanks sorry just a second we'll take questions in a second thank you so much for your input I think I might probably answer your thing anyway so I'm going to be contrary here actually and like I'm going to agree with Mika like AI is actually like a big batch of technologies there's a great report there FTI it's like a tech trends report and the first 28 technologies in that I think there's 150 the first 28 are all grouped under AI so it's really kind of a family of technologies rather than one thing there are examples of AIs doing some pretty crazy stuff that we don't understand you know there was the Google AI that started creating its own language that nobody else could understand there are examples of AIs creating other AIs and so I think there becomes like this complexity theory limit to how much we're ever going to understand about what advanced AIs are going to do like we can't understand our own brain it's just too intense and I think it is definitely possible to create systems that produce results that we can't possibly comprehend so I'm going to go drag it from the kind of ethereal and philosophical down to some more practical things quickly so one thing that I think is a really easy thing to imagine you upload your image to Google media library it pings an API it sends back suggested alt text title text meta tags meta description checks for licensing and that you know that's one of the suites of AI technologies that's going to do that so it's going to help us understand our content and be able to communicate that better you then publish the story and AI semantically tags that suggest the most related stories and a third party identity management system is going to come and personalize those results on the fly for people so AI is basically to agree with Mika so that she doesn't hit me after this panel you know I agree that AI is going to help us understand ourselves better and that essentially it's going to be a tool in our kit to make sure that our communications are more and more effective but I do think that there's a note of caution that it's entirely possible for us to create something that we could never understand I've read a lot about AI a few months back and there's a lot of controversial discussions happening about what the future holds and whether we would even be able to control it once that really happens because we would basically create something that overtakes us in the food chain of thinking so we as David said we would not be able to comprehend it because at a certain complexity level our brains would be at the technical limits because it's also just processing ifs and at one point we just build something that goes beyond what our technical implementation can handle so there's I agree that there's caution to be had there and it might be sooner rather than later that some form of governance and regulation will need to take place but in the meantime it's quite fascinating if you use the regular technologies that are already produced as reusable libraries or as software as a service tag them into the admin backend of your WordPress site and let them just take over some manual decisions that save you time like the automatic tagging is an obvious example that could also include things like going through the access locks and detecting problems and being smart about dealing with the security actively that might include adapting the design of the site within constraints so that it can magically adapt to new device factors that were never actually programmed against and so forth. It's basically right now you can use it as the main specific expert systems that take over the decision-making and if you teach them if you learn them the right way they will also produce reliable results but the entire combination of these expert systems again creates another level of complexity and at one point it goes way beyond just automating your WordPress site and might replace you as the one actually in charge. I think it's worth adding a little note we've gone into sci-fi and big which is it's also awesome but I think we have to also think about the smaller scale and the fact that a lot of these technologies are predictive or just make things more accessible for people. They make things do what they expect them to do anyway in a non-creepy stalky way because then that's just weird if something predicts something and that's like the balance right and that's where we we were talking earlier about roles in economics I think one of the roles is psychology and we have to be understanding the brains that we're creating things for and we have to so from neuroscience to psychology all of those things need to be part of what we're doing and understand more we have to have that to create something that does that correctly but I just think there's so much on the lower end the less kind of spaceship end that just is practical things that make things easier for people that make technology work for them that maybe was a high learning curve for them now isn't is something that is more friendly is more human which is interesting that we're kind of doing it that way but just that just makes something better for them and I think we really have to explore that we can have these wild dreams and all of that kind of stuff but we can also just see it as something on that smaller scale can just make things work better One last thing Always one last thing I was at an event yesterday and somebody from Shell who's a digital transformation lead at Shell said something really interesting about about software and how people shouldn't need to learn software anymore and I think whilst we as a kind of WordPress community think of ourselves as the puppet masters actually the future is probably that's not true you know it's going to become I mean it's already within the grasp of machine learning or whatever it is an expert machine to produce a website like the grid you throw some content at it and it decides what to do with it and I think as we as people start to understand content management as a practice better there's only so many variations on the Gutenberg blog that are actually going to be helpful to anyone ever and so as that kind of simplifies down which I think is sort of true with all the technology actually you know used to be oh wow you can do anything with WordPress so isn't that really cool and now people are like no I've got these requirements I want it to do this can it do it or not and I think we're going to see the same sort of thing so actually the need to code HTML and CSS you know front end JavaScript stuff could well drop out so don't worry but I think it's worth thinking about what is you know what does a five year future look like when people can drag and drop all this stuff and you know point I mean I have a this is my dream product right is like a pre-configured WordPress thing and it's got like an expert system and you put the URL in of the website that you want to migrate over it's got your brand blah blah blah and it just does it all because how difficult is it to like assess the amount of colour and the images and source the content and whack it all over and like how much how much of a percent of the current like WordPress freelancer and agency economy runs on like migrating content and theming an awful lot and I just think we have to be realistic and mindful about that thank you so much sorry to be there having to do we've got time for one question it did you was there a question on that you needed to ask just give us a sec for the mic so that the transcript is good thank you I'm sure I could think of loads of questions but that particular one that point my interrupted was that years ago I'm on a programme I used to I've done a lot of programme in the past and AI was very much that sort of thing that I'm a mitchie from Edinburgh you can make a programme and take it a long time to test it but we still thought that it was the programme or the compiler writers or the determinant but Google am I right it's Google deep mind let me say one thing that it's done recently is they learnt to play chess they did it alpha zero was one they did go that was a very complicated way to go through all the games but quickly they taught this machine in four hours to play chess it gave you some parameters and it learnt itself playing itself in four hours there were masters that said hey I've never thought of doing that it's amazing we've got some expert people on the panel do you have a specific question no I didn't I'm going to have to wrap it up it's just that this AI I don't know if I it's changed sorry I'm so sorry thank you thanks very much all the time in the world they're going to be at the after party and you can chat to them for hours it's going to be great okay that's a be a conversation exactly okay we'll give that back and we will launch straight into kind of where you picked up and left off with Gutenberg which is obviously a hugely hot topic at the moment so and these questions won't all be for Tammy I have to specify please I will stop that if that happens as you can tell that's what I do okay cool so we'll kind of ease our way in what problem does Gutenberg solve why do we need it why is it being built ooh that's a big few questions um so there's kind of at the moment we talk about the term WordPress way and we accept that everything works in the WordPress way which is adorable because it's then a huge learning curve and then we work around the WordPress way because that's the way WordPress works and we also assume and I'm using the collective word we and the learning you know everybody has to go through that it's that process and the fact is it shouldn't be that way there shouldn't be a WordPress way there should just be the best way that everyone does everything and WordPress shouldn't you shouldn't have to work around WordPress to do a plugin or a builder or anything you should just be able to create what is the right thing for the right instance and that's kind of one side and the other side is just making something that you want that has rich content is so difficult in WordPress, vanilla WordPress um and then okay the answer will be you could use a plugin or you could use this theme or you could use this combination and then people have like this Jenga combination of things because of the WordPress way to get around they have this interesting mix of things and they kind of get that but then they have to learn the WordPress way and then Bob's plugin way and then Mary's theme way and all these kind of combination ways of doing things to get what just should be able to do simply and what people need they want to write rich content and they want to do that anywhere they want to be able to express themselves and that we can't really do now so I'm going to ask other people as well but that's kind of what I feel that it sells I spend a lot of time with companies who use our hosting and then have clients who are actually doing the writing and some of them have come to us and said you know we're a little bit afraid of Gutenberg because we're going to have to teach our clients how to do things and we said well how are you teaching your clients how to use WordPress today and the majority have told me that they're not that they're working very hard to take people out of WordPress because they find WordPress difficult and at that point I say well perhaps when we're attempting to solve with Gutenberg my father still can't figure out how to write a post in WordPress and he still emails me I finally talked about emailing PDFs now he emails me a word document and says can you post this on this date and I have to explain yes dad at schedules he still doesn't get it because his idea of how you interact with a computer and a website remain different from the way that I do and when I started showing him Gutenberg and saying this is how it builds it makes sense because it was a concept he could understand because he knew printing and so I found that the more we act scared of this thing that is changing the more we restrict ourselves from accepting the fact that what we've got now kind of sucks and perhaps maybe Gutenberg isn't going to be the one fix but it might get us started and I believe this it's going to get us started on making WordPress the thing that we wanted because when we talked about artificial intelligence is what I think of is that is I really think of creating a better user experience not necessarily making the computer smarter but making the computer more interactable because it took us a while to get from the phones where we had to press M four times you know a letter four times to get it to get the right letter and now we've got our smart phones where we can just type all we want and we can use emoji it's a progress it's a process to get there and for Gutenberg it's getting us that step of the way where people can write what they see in their mind without having to install six plugins and hope that all the plugins are going to work together because good luck with that everybody's going to want to write something their own way and this maybe now we're giving them a building block to start from can I underline that it's the catalyst that gets us started and so saying it's the solution it's the start is kind of the important framing I think Alain did you or Dave one last thing from Dave well it's not just about you know it's this whole thing where you don't want to have to train people it's super complicated like you know here's a short code if you want four things and change that number etc and that it just is rubbish but it's also about portability of content between systems so you know old editor does some weird WordPress stuff new Gutenberg does you know semantic markup in the right way so content migration should be much less of a pain even between themes but for me even more interestingly is what that lets you do with the content on the other side of it so getting the content on the web is part of the problem what to do with it is the next part and the idea that actually even a long form piece consists of lots of different things and even different kind of paragraphs can have different purposes so this might be like an introduction that might be a conclusion this might be a quote that might be a kind of particular type as well as format of information will let us do much more rich things with that content that's stored there so in terms of theme construction in terms of distributing that content out across all the different media frankly in terms of allowing the AI to do more with that content as well so yeah it's about easy getting in but also easy of getting it out thank you so we're quickly running out of time I'm going to do one more question and then we're going to open it up to the floor I'll just do one more question from the panel so what are the risks and challenges your company or you as an individual sees with Gutenberg I think Gutenberg itself is a huge risk that is being taken the obvious benefit is a disruptive change that propels WordPress forward the risk is though that so basically WordPress might be in a spot where Microsoft was a few years ago where basically the entire value proposition they had was to being compatible to themselves and as long as they kept that everyone was happy because they didn't need to change anything they just updated their licensing and all was good when Microsoft introduced a major breaking change that made this updating of license to work anymore which basically forced everyone to eat migration costs to the next version of their windows operating system it made a lot of people rethink well if I do need to pay for migration my option goes beyond just the next version of windows my option is any other system and now I can rethink the choices I made before so there is a real risk that the platform is putting itself into a position where people need to strongly rethink where the WordPress is the right choice for their current needs and that might lead them to conclusions that brings them off of the WordPress platform but is that necessarily a bad thing because yes we would lose people who use WordPress at a time Drupal has already picked up and said they like the idea of Gutenberg they want to use Gutenberg so we already have some proof that outside of WordPress this may be the right path to be walking down and if we do lose people we can learn something from the loss we shouldn't be afraid of loss and make that stop us from trying to progress if we get changed by fear we'll never get anywhere we'll have paralysis by fear and that we don't it sounds dramatic but that we don't listen everybody, anybody we don't hear each other we don't remember we're all human and we are all doing WordPress and we all want the best future for WordPress and that might be different things that different people want but just responding to that and processing together and we have to make change if you don't make change as a project or as a product it's not around very much longer and I think everybody probably wants WordPress to be around for a little bit longer without a work camp so that's kind of the big risk the challenge is equally that is just taking some time to let every voice be heard just taking some time to process that and finding ways through inside those of us who are making Gutenberg who are part, there's lots in this room who are part of that project and and that's everybody from the person that does some testing through to the person that comments through to the person that does actually the code work or design work everybody is contributing to this project and the challenge is really to get education and really kind of help each other find the way and find what Gutenberg works for them Gutenberg is a big word for a lot of things it's becoming it's the editor but it's more than that it's that kind of encompassing a final word just a very final word please Dave a few seconds and now for a final word from Dave yeah I mean all that stuff totally but I think the biggest risk is not doing this like if anyone that's saying has used tiny mce and they've used Gutenberg you know maybe not on like a super slow connection or like et cetera but like in kind of reasonable use if you use tiny mce and you've used Gutenberg and you don't think that Gutenberg is better then like I can't relate to that and I think one thing that we have to get our heads around as a community is that market share of CMS doesn't necessarily equate to value created or importance or significance it's a little bit like running a business so that you can say we do 10 million revenue a year you ask what the profit is like £1000 you know like we should be focused on building the very best product that delivers the most value where it can and if we get stuck in this paradigm of don't join anything we might drop a percentage point then we're going to end up with a totally rubbish product and we'll lose everything over time Thank you so much no no I'm going to pass it quickly around the audience I know that there was a girl there with her hand up so we've we've got very few minutes to do an audience Q&A so I'm only going to be able to take maybe two or three questions but all these lovely people are going to be available this evening and tomorrow Okay this is super quick I am a user of WordPress so it's a bit low level probably for some people but I just want to know with the Gutenberg is that being rolled out to everyone so if you're already doing posts won't you be able to use that anymore and is it just could you briefly just say why it's better to be putting these blocks in run for the might right and the whole thing really briefly and also will it if it won't have any effect on that to say it'll be totally fine I just want to know because that was a sneaky three question I may want to know that Your SEO will be fine I'm going to I'll feel that and I can pass it to anyone I think you've got it Not everyone has Gutenberg yet you saw the call out in the last release of WordPress asking you to install it when WordPress 5.0 comes out everyone will have it and it will be currently I believe it's going to be the default header for everyone why are blocks better they're not better or worse they're just a different way to conceptualise your content we've all been thinking of I just want to write you can still do that and in fact I do I go through and I just write my content out and then I go back and say okay here I want a header so let me insert a header here I want an image and it's the same it's just thinking of them as my Lego blocks and I can move them around instead of saying this is my content and it has to match a page thank you so much to our mic runners I suppose in the briefest way possible I'll ask this question which is that we've had the customiser the rest of the API we've now got Gutenberg already bored with all of them each individual person tell us how you feel Kim each individual person on the panel if you could say what excites you next what's the next thing you'd like to add to WordPress or change about WordPress the thing that excites me the most right now and where I expect big things in the future is that there's more and more computer science and software engineering entering the WordPress world and we might finally be able to stop reinventing the same wheel all the time and build on work that other people have done and grow from there and build something new I think the thing that excites me most is because of the rest API in Gutenberg getting finally some of the love that they deserve it's going to be easier for new people to step in and build plugins because currently I feel that the settings API is a bag of wet hair and having some step forward where that's going to be easier to use for new people is fantastic so I think having a design system is something that I'm excited about moving on really auditing I mentioned it at the beginning but doing that and then we have a better experience more cohesive and then we can it's like taking audit, tidying your room and then deciding what to go and to make that next move I think we need to do that as well I'm not actually sure if we've got one Laura, I can tell us we're well over I didn't think that we were going to do this but thank you so much, a round of applause for our wonderful panel