 Okay, so as we just discussed right now, Bob have been on so many word camps, he doesn't know how many anymore, depends on the year, but definitely Bob was a very known member of the WordPress community and is definitely one of the OGs. And he started using WordPress in 2006, I was still in the high school that year. And he produces a podcast that I'm sure many of you know at Do The Woo and who is better to reflect on 20 years of WordPress community, it's gross and devaluation than the Bob. Please welcome. How's your day been? Good? All right, good. Appreciate you hanging for as long as you did to hear this last one before we go and really have fun. She pretty much said it, I'll arrow down, I'm sorry. Okay, I'm gonna start with this story and I have a reason to tell you this story. A year ago, almost a year ago, I was in Porto at word camp Europe. My wife came along because she wanted to see Porto. And we had a great time. Love the word camp. We spent days walking the streets of Porto, drinking wine, drinking port, drinking wine, drinking port. And there came a time when one of us looked at the other and I can't remember exactly when, maybe we were drinking port, but I could live here. We had no inclination in our lives to make a move. We just kind of jokingly said that. We hadn't thought about it. We returned to the US, talked about it a little bit more, a little bit more, a little bit more, time passed. By that September, we were sitting in an office applying for our visa. And then fast forward to March 25th of this month, we were boarding the plane with nine suitcases. What was left of our lives after we got rid of everything and heading to Porto. During that time from then, since now, now I've had a couple great lunches with friends, Marco. I've spoke at two meetups. I'm here. I discovered somebody lives in the same building as me that works at Kotobol, which is a WordPress-based company. And I thought, wow, that, whoops, sorry. That is the impact of the community. And that's why I'm told you this story, not my life story of getting here, but if not for WordPress, if not for the community, I wouldn't be standing here right now. I really believe that because of all those things that played into place. Like I said, there was no plans to do this. And we're here and we're here for the long haul. We're not just moving here for a year or two. We plan on making this our home. So here we are, the impact of the WordPress community. And I'm sure each one of you, even if you've been involved with WordPress for one month, one year, five years, 10 years, whatever, there's gonna be some impact along the way. I could tell you a dozen stories, but that's not what I'm here for. So it all started in a universe far away. This little tiny kid over on the right there, some high school student, it almost looks like, was sent a message by Mike Little co-founder of WordPress. And one of the things I especially like about this is, I'm sure there are one or two others in the community who would be too, as far as interested in what they're doing. Think about that. They were thinking, oh, there's maybe a couple other people that might be interested in this. Very teeny, tiny community. They were thinking of, I mean, they did not know what would be down the road 20 years later. There's the other co-founder, Matt, at his first WordCamp in 2006. God, he looks like a little kid. When I saw that, I really, really, really, really, really felt old. And I just, I mean, look at him. This is somebody that was starting an idea, thinking a little bit about open source. What can they do with Mike? And did they ever think that this little small sector right here is just a tiny piece of the WordPress community 20 years later? I'm sure they sometimes have to look back at that and think, wow, what happened? Community. This is a definition. I just thought I would find the definition of community. And you can read it. I don't have to read it up to you. But it's a basic what you think of as community. We've all lived in communities. We've all been parts of communities where you grew up. You had a neighborhood wherever you were. You had a community of friends, a family. You have communities. You go to a church. You have a community. You have maybe a community where you work. There's always been communities. But this is a big question. And I honestly believe that the only answer can be found by climbing some high mountain and finding some guru to actually give you the exact reason or a definition of what is a WordPress community. And I look at it a couple different ways. And this is something that has evolved over 20 years. I have my birthday just a few days before WordPress. And I'm not gonna tell you what my birthday is, but I'm a lot older than WordPress, obviously. But I look at the WordPress community as two things. I kind of break it up into two pieces. One is, what is the WordPress community physically? Think about that. When you sit there and say, hey, God, I love the WordPress community, what are you talking about? Who are you talking about? I had a talk with somebody about, oh, I'd say eight, 10 years ago about this. And we're saying, what do we mean when we say we belong to the WordPress community? Is it over 40% of the world? That's a very, very large community. Is it your little small sector of WordPress friends that you meet when you're really thinking of WordPress community physically? I hang out with my WordPress community. I like to go to events and be part of the WordPress community. This was the very first word camp. So as a word camp, does that define you and what you think about as a WordPress community? It's an interesting question. And I'd love to have, I know probably you have to have a mic and there's questions, but somebody, I'd love to hear somebody's own definition because if I, let's say if I took like five people from up there and asked them in separate conversations, what do you think the WordPress community is as far as physically when you talk about it? And I'd get five totally different answers. So is anybody willing, and I don't want the, we're gonna talk about what the WordPress community stands for, how you view the WordPress community. But I wanna hear from somebody what you think of, when you say the WordPress community, what do you mean as in terms of a group of people? Why did I know Robert would have an answer? Hey, Bob. I have opinion about WordPress community, yeah. I'm, my local community is Serbian community. And if you didn't know, it is the best community in the world. So I will give you one example of our community. We have regular Zoom meetings with the organizers and usually it's just trying to do a barbecue together. So I once told them, well, we can do barbecue, but first I have a house that needs to be tear down and rebuild it from my father. And I need help to clean it up. And all of them said, just say when. So that's Serbian community. Yeah, I added that. It's basically a family with like the people you don't like, the people you really like. And like as Milana said, like you just said, like I have a problem and they go like where, when and how. So it's, that's for me, like it's the, as we agree on, that's family. So, and there's this saying in the open source world, like come for the software, stay for the people. And this also is for WordPress. Like it's the same thing. I love it. You two are the little gurus on top of the mountain, I believe. Anybody else? How about somebody that has been using WordPress for like say under a year? Is there anybody that would give their impression of what they think of when they are talking to somebody and they say, yeah, I've started to get involved in the WordPress community? Anyone? Okay. Little pressure there. Okay, anyway. So you get, those are two wonderful examples. And I think we do get, we could get bogged down in trying to determine which community we consider our WordPress community. And oftentimes it's geographical. That's what I've found too. Is it's very, very geographical. That people have a closer tie to the people within, yeah, through their meetup or whatever, to a more location based community. Now the big thing here is what I wanna talk about next. This is a fun one. Whoops, I'm just screwing up there left and right. Okay, so continuing this talk, the other piece. Here's a fun piece about community. What do you think of when you hear people talk about the WordPress community? How do you define it in the sense of what it brings to you, what it brings to others, the emotions? That is really what the WordPress community is about. I mean, I brought up the physical part. And that's kind of, yeah, hey, everybody kind of works out their own way. But within that physical part, whatever it is that you view as a WordPress community and often even beyond the WordPress community, that's where we go beyond the barriers of maybe the family or people we don't like or people we do like. We kind of put them in these different little sections. And I could sit here and spout out a bunch of words or I could have put them on one of the slides. And I decided it's not the way to do it. The way to do it, and I don't need necessarily a microphone, I just want people to yell out, what do you think when you think of the WordPress community as far as a feel? What did you feel today? Okay, let's step back a bit. I know you're all wanting alcohol and parties and you're tired and I understand it. But what did you feel today? When you were talking to people, when you were going in sessions, when you sat down with lunch, all those times, what did you feel today? What else? What else? Think about it. There's so many feels that you get in this community. When I got into this community, I was basically coming from the, I almost had, I hate to say this, but the real business world. And I moved into open source and the WordPress community. And it was literally kind of a shock just because of the support, the knowledge, the sharing, the friendships. It's been incredible. And 20 years this community has evolved and everybody within those 20 years, whether you've been here 20 years, 10 years, five years, one year, you've created this community feel and those words are coming to you all the time. You're thinking the next time, wow, I love the WordPress community because they're always there for me when I have a question. I love the WordPress community because they've supported me when I wanted to speak at WordCamp on and on and on. One of the things that I've heard so much and this is a great quote, I went to WordCamp Asia and I asked a bunch of people, what is it you love about WordCamp Asia? And I probably asked about 20 to 30 people. There was a constant in every answer community. Every single person, nobody said, I said, what did you like about it? Well, you know, I liked it because I sat down with this person, we looked at this plugin and we talked about the features and it was really great, nobody said that and that's not anything against the plugins or what they do, everybody said the people. And these were a lot of first timers and they were just amazed how friendly, how helpful people reaching out, caring for each other and they could see it with people that knew each other for years and years and years but they didn't feel like they were an outsider and that piece of the community, I mean that in itself says a lot when you ask a lot of people and all they keep saying is the people, the people, the people. So as we wind down, because you're wanting to get out there and do things that I could talk forever which you don't want to happen, the future of the community. This is an interesting thing to think about and I have a perspective here that I want to share with you before you go. When we think of the future, we think of the next generation. I mean it's kind of automatic because you think you need people to carry on this excitement, this community, everything that's going on and I'm not just talking about the software itself or supporting and contributing the software because you do need that. But they found out through a recent survey, WordPress had, that the average user, and this of course is a survey that as many people that use it, how accurate it might be but the average user is getting closer to Bob's age. Which means that, well, they're not quite there, yeah. But you get my drift. So everybody's kind of thinking, oh my God, that's the future of WordPress? A bunch of OGs? And I thought about that and I thought, yeah, we need new blood in here. We need people constantly coming in and they don't always have to be young. Every way that they're coming in is the future. So here's my take on what the future is of WordPress. Look at the person next to you. That's the future of WordPress. Everybody here, what you're doing is going to make the next generation, the next whatever, you are primarily responsible for the future and it's because of what you talk about. Whether you go out and get new people and whether you are an advocate for diversity, whatever you are doing to build this community, you're building it for the future. You're not building it just for yourself, you're not building it just for us sitting here. You're building it for the next group of people and the next and to make it continue on and on. So when we think of the future, hey, I'm putting a bit of responsibility in your hands. You are the future. Everybody that is at WordCamps, everybody that's involved in WordCamp, Wordpress, it's your responsibility and it can just be a little tiny bit to keep thinking about, hey, it's just not about me, it's just not about now, but everything I do has got to affect the future. So with that said, this was very off the cuff type of talk and I think of 20 years where the community's gone, I think of the birthday coming up in 20 years, a lot of people will be celebrating and I've often wondered, am I supposed to sit at my computer and look at the screen and say, happy birthday, Wordpress? Because I mean, we're thinking the open source software, this has been around 20 years, but to me, I say, happy birthday to you. Thank you.