 Is WordPress a product or a community? So I thought it was interesting to ask this question in this kind of room because we are not a unbiased audience, people who have decided or who have convinced their bosses to pay for them to come spend a few days here in Chicago. Clearly you're already predisposed to think that if the community is not sort of the center of the WordPress experience and at least it's important enough for you to spend your time and money to come here. So we in this room are not maybe an unbiased audience for this question. It also so happens that the people in this room are for various structural reasons, the people who advocate for the use of WordPress within their organizations. So whether you work for a client services organization and so you're trying to convince clients to use WordPress with you, whether you work in a news organization and you're trying to convince your bosses that WordPress is the right software for your organization, you are sort of the WordPress acolytes, the people who are saying we should use WordPress. And because of this overlap where the people who are arguing for the use of WordPress are also the people who think that the community is a valuable part of the WordPress experience, it is not surprising that in the WordPress pitch one of the things that you inevitably hear is WordPress has a really great community. So for people in this room who are already self-selected people who think that the community is really warm and fuzzy and great, of course this sounds like a great argument for using WordPress. But when your stakeholders who aren't already sold on the community as a great way to organize a software project, they might hear community and think something a little bit different. Who's in charge? Who do I call if something goes wrong? Who is responsible for making decisions in this thing? How do I know that the quality of the product that I will be getting matches up with what I would expect from a proprietary vendor where they have a board of directors and stockholders and things like that to answer to. So the very thing that we are trying to argue for, which is that WordPress has a great community and this makes it a valuable piece of software for us to use in our organizations. This is exactly the kind of argument that may turn off a certain kind of stakeholder. And I think too often we don't appreciate that because we ourselves are already inculcated into the importance of community within WordPress. So my thought for today is that we, as the WordPress acolytes, as the faithful, we need to come up with ways of talking about community and thinking about community, really a reconceptualization of the idea of community that is, on the one hand, fair to the real benefits that community-driven development bring to a piece of software, but on the other hand, that speaks to the very real and very justified fears that some stakeholders have about software products that may have tons of legacy code or that may have a decision-making process that is somewhat less than totally transparent. So how do we talk about community in a way that satisfies both of those things? And today what I wanna do is just give you a couple of provocations, a couple of ways of thinking about community that are maybe a little bit different from the warm and fuzzy part of community that we all know and love, but still reflect the nature of community and at the same time speak to this disparity between what we love about community and what stakeholders might fear about it. So the first has to do with diversity. And by this I don't necessarily mean diversity of a demographic sort, although that's part of it. What I mean is more diversity of an ecological sort. One of the cornerstones of Darwin's theory of evolution is that the evolutionary process in a biological community is driven forward by, is accelerated by a greater diversity in the genetic pool. So the dynamic here is that when you have a limited set of resources, you know food or shelter, then there's a lot of competition for those resources. And if there's a greater diversity in the pool of people who are competing, or organisms that are competing rather, then the winner of those competitions is going to be better suited for the environment than an environment where there was no competition whatsoever. So having a lot of diversity in the environments, in other words, has the tendency to produce an end result that is maybe better suited or a better quality organism in some manner of speaking. So something similar can be said to happen in the context of software development organizations. So just to pick on somebody, take Medium. Medium is a piece of software that in many ways is similar to what WordPress is or it tries to be. And I'm sure that internally, the Medium folks have done a really great job of fostering diversity of a certain sort. But there's one critical aspect, one critical quality that all of the people on the Medium engineering team share. They work for Medium. They get their checks for Medium. They answer to Medium's bosses. And when it comes time to make decisions about what's important for the Medium software, they have to somehow take into consideration or abide by the overarching principles that drive Medium as a corporate entity or whatever it is that they do. So contrast this with a system like our humble one, the WordPress system, where there is a big player and there's a big player who devotes a lot of resources toward the development of the software that we all use. But that's not the whole story. We have a much more diverse ecology of contributors. So we have individuals who come from large client services organizations to contribute to the project. They come from a different place. We have individuals that come from WordPress-specific hosting companies. We have individuals that come from large hosting companies, large companies. We have handsome and intelligent individual contributors. This is a diversity of knowledge, a diversity of background, a diversity of goals that is much like the ecological diversity that we talked about before in the sense that it provides a kind of strength. It's a way of guarding against bad mutations in a shallow gene pool by making the gene pool deeper. This is an aspect of community that we should be selling to our stakeholders. Here's another provocation. Communities are essentially conservative. This has come up in a couple talks so far. John talked a little bit about this yesterday. To think about conservatism, I like to think about this guy. There are some systems of government that are set up in such a way to allow for bold, brash, unilateral, risky rash decision-making. So if you're Henry VIII and you say, you know what, I'm gonna break from the church of Rome and I'm gonna start a new church and guess what, I'm the head of the church. He can do that, right? That's what the monarchy gives him. That's the system that he has chosen and it allows for rash decision-making like that. Now in contrast, we have some systems that don't allow for that kind of rash decision-making. So in a system like that one that's designated by the US Constitution, we have checks and balances like we all learned about in civics class and this ensures that no individual part of the system is able to make rash decisions without at least the acquiescence of other parts of the system. That's how it's supposed to work, at least. Now this is a kind of conservatism that's baked into the system because it prevents radical action. The same dynamic can be seen in software development. If you have a rash dictatorial, mad genius overlord at the helm of your software project, then you can make bold, crazy rash decisions that may turn out really well, they may not, but in any case, structurally, you're prepared for that. But when you have a system where the power, the decision-making ability is spread out through many different parts of a system like the US government maybe, but in a system like this, where you have a diverse pool of contributors that's coming from many different points of view, then it prevents rash decisions from being made. It prevents quick decisions from being made. And this is the kind of frustration that we often feel as developers because it's frustrating to have to work with old technology. We hate PHP 5.2 and so on and so forth, but this is the kind of conservatism that speaks to stakeholders because it's this kind of conservatism that guarantees that WordPress maintains backward compatibility through releases. It's this kind of conservatism that guarantees that WordPress doesn't jump on technology behind wagons and into unproven technologies. So is WordPress a community or a product? Well, from a very simple point of view, what your stakeholders want is a piece of software that does for them what they need done today. They want a product. But we know, the acolytes, that the product that exists today may not resemble the product as it exists tomorrow. And so what we're really selling when we sell WordPress or any piece of software is not just the product as it exists today, but it is the system that produces the product because the system that produces the product is what, that's what we are relying on to produce the product that we want to see one year from now, two years from now, five years from now. And in the case of WordPress, the system that produces the product is our community. So that's the kind of arguments that we should be making when we talk about the value of community in the WordPress project. Thanks.