 This is a long walk. I don't know why I thought I had to walk over here to actually say hello. Hello. Howdy. I'm super, super honored to be here at WordCamp Europe. I'm disappointed in retrospect that this is the first WordCamp Europe I've ever attended, but I'm really happy to be here. My name, as mentioned, is Andrea Middleton. Like factual correction, I started my WordPress blog in 2006, but I was hired to work on community in 2011 by Automatic and focusing mostly on overseeing the WordCamp program for the past six years. And I'm really excited to talk to you today about the global community team. So what do we mean when we talk about global community, about the WordPress community itself? Well, look around you. This is it. You're in it. Done. I'm going to talk to you later. By participating in this event or by using WordPress in any way, you are part of our community. So that's it. You're on our team. Welcome. You belong here. The WordPress community team's job is to create community using the tool of these in-person live events. They are our code. They are our whatever designers use to make pretty things. What do they use? Pencils? I don't know. But you can't just organize any old event and create community, just like you can't throw a bunch of guitars and people into a room and record a hit album. So today, I want to talk about how we craft our events to result in the WordPress community that we're all part of and proud of. Our community team organizes a very specific, very special kind of event. They're informal events. This event, notwithstanding. They are organized by the community itself. And they're all about WordPress. They're put together by WordPress users, just like you. Everyone in here is capable of being a community organizer on our team. By the way, that's also recruitment. Please join our team. We organize these events, building these communities, using the same tools we use to build WordPress itself. If you're familiar with how the WordPress open source project works, a lot of the stuff I'm going to be talking about will look really familiar to you. But I realize there are a lot of people who have been welcomed into the WordPress space, who don't have a lot of experience in the open source space. So I want to do a little bit of background about open source. WordPress, this magnificent 28% of the internet, volunteer coded, volunteer organized project, was made possible because of the open source movement. And it has flourished through open source development. But what does open source really mean? Well, there's a book, a little book. I recommend you read it, called The Cathedral in the Bazaar. I'm going to summarize the message of that book. It's written by a man named Eric Raymond. And he describes the rise and growth of the open source movement, focusing mostly on Linux and then also a mail project that he oversaw and ran, kind of as an experiment. And the book details a new approach to software development that Linux and other projects like it proved could work better than the old conventional style of software development. He defines the two main methods of software development as the cathedral and the bazaar. I just remembered I have a clicker. I don't need to be over there all the time. It's going to be great. All right, so the cathedral and the bazaar. In the cathedral approach, to build our software, we get a small group of developers. We stick them in a room. We don't let them talk to anybody. And they work on a predefined plan. And they build something. And they perfect it and perfect it and perfect it until it's as perfect as they can possibly make it. And then they release the product. And they keep the nuts and bolts to themselves. Closed source is what it's frequently called these days. The bazaar method turns this all the way around. You publish the source code. You make it public for anybody to do anything with that they want. That's crazy. And you allow anyone who is interested and capable of and contributing to the project to help you build it. The open source method in many ways seems very ridiculous. It shouldn't work for a number of different reasons. Largely divergent agendas and approaches to one project doesn't seem attractive, right? And conventional wisdom tells us that frequently adding a developer or multiple developers to a certain project tends to slow down development rather than speeding up, right? But it does work. And it's kind of sort of taking over the world. Why does it work? I love these visual notes by Julia Forsythe. They're magnificent. For one thing, it really calls out the problem with the cathedral approach. Primarily the problem with the cathedral approach is that software, when it is written by people who aren't going to use it and kind of don't care, is never great software, right? The first and most important tenet of open source software is the importance of having users. You need to have and cultivate a large user base. And this is important because with many eyes, all bugs are shallow. Raymond calls this Linus's law after Linus Torvald of Linux. And the idea here is that when lots of people are using the software and lots of people are quite candidly complaining about the software, certain people, one person over here can say, hey, this doesn't work. And someone on the other side of the world can be like, oh, yeah, I've got a fix for that. Also, when you have vastly different perspectives on what's good about the software, what's bad about the software, and also what it needs to do, you in the end build a better product because the direction of the product is responsive to the people who are using it. When someone finds an error or a bug in an open source project, we don't tell them to shut up and go away. On the contrary, we're like, ooh, great. Bring it in. You're a contributor now. Patch is welcome. We want you to be part of our team and help fix it. And because everything is public and open, anyone can learn how to provide really high quality fixes to the problems that they found. If somebody loses interest, somebody else who's more motivated steps up and gets involved. So you have a constant stream of interested, motivated people. Motivation, though, is interesting. Why do people do this? Why would anyone contribute to an open source project? Well, according to Raymond and a lot of other people, every good piece of software starts because someone is scratching a personal itch. One thing about this gets them really motivated and they want to change it. When they're passionate about the thing, they put a lot of attention to fixing the thing. And then they contribute it back to the overall software. And then somebody else comes in and says, ooh, but that's also broken. I'll fix that. And on and on and on. So we need people to use the software. We also need people to be annoyed with the software enough to want to fix it. But we don't want drive-by critiques. We want to keep people involved and connected. And that's why we always release early and release often. Rapid iteration is the key to keeping your contributors active and engaged. When they can suggest something and see it affect the overall project quickly and frequently, the imperfections don't matter because you know that it's going to get fixed soon because there's another release coming. And you know that what you have to say is important. You have a piece of this thing, and it keeps you in. And that rapid release cycle means that the project isn't ever perfect, but that's OK because successful open source projects avoid perfection like the plague. If you're building this bizarre, perfection is like a wall around that participatory space. You fix something, something else immediately comes up, and you cultivate that. The lack of perfection is not a problem. It's an opportunity. It pulls in future contributors. And as Andrew Nason mentioned this morning, thank you, Nason, for setting up my talk. It's better to have an imperfect project than to have a perfect product that nobody uses. And that's open source. It's messy. It's chaotic. But it's built on some central tenets of openness, transparency, collaboration, rapid iteration, and imperfection. Great, cool. But this is supposed to be a community talk, and you just gave us 13 slides about software development. Let's bring it back around. Let's talk about how WordPress community organizers put these ideas of openness, transparency, iteration, imperfection into practice in our daily work. So the bedrock of the WordPress community is the local meetup group, the local user group, which we frequently call a meetup. It's a group of people who work with WordPress in any way, bloggers, developers, designers, trainers, whatever, to gather at least once a month to talk about WordPress and share their knowledge. It's locally organized, meets face to face. Anything that brings two or more people together is a meetup. There's no minimum number of attendees, and there's no required format. In fact, we have a lot of formats. Presentations, social gatherings, hackathons, co-working, help desk, contributor days, so on. The model is open. Anyone can start a meetup group, and if you want to be part of the WordPress open source projects program and take advantage of the benefits that come with that, you can join our chapter account on meetup.com, pictured here. Official groups, when they come into the program, agree to follow five good faith rules, only wall of text in the entire presentation, I promise. But these rules, in their basis, meetups are organized to benefit the community. Membership is open to anyone. That open bazaar, right? No one is paid to build community, just like with WordPress. Anyone can organize. Any trusted member of the group can organize, and we create a welcoming environment. So what does that have to do with open source? Well, as you can see, these are pretty much the same expectations that you find when you contribute code to an open source project. Openness, anyone can join, events are welcoming. Rapid iteration, anyone can organize an event and experiment with models and maybe focus on subject matters that scratch their personal itch, right? That brings in more people that have something to do with their ideas. Collaboration, decisions benefit the overall group, no one is paid. We use these methods to build our community and to solve the problems that come up in community organizing, for example. I don't know if anyone's ever been to Seattle, Washington, anyone? I know we have a few Seattleites. Great city, huge tech community, beautiful. One big problem, well, multiple problems in Seattle, but one primary Seattle problem that I'm sure Parisians know nothing about, it's a lot of traffic. It is really hard to move around in that city. It can take an hour to drive, I don't know, 15 miles. And this was a problem for our local meetup group because they were holding a monthly meetup, sure, downtown. They had a huge list of people who were members of the group, maybe 900, I mean, ridiculously big. But only 15, 20 people could show up every month. This problem will not be a surprise to other community organizers who are already part of our team. This is a constant problem that we have in big cities, right? And it's frustrating because you want everyone to join. But at the same time, if you move it out of downtown, how do you keep the downtown people stressed, right? Because they're part of our program or as part of our program as an extension of our program, the group organizers opened the group and told everyone, hey, anyone can organize an event in our meetup. Doesn't have to be at a certain time, doesn't have to be at a certain place. The only requirement is you organize it and you show up to the thing that you organized. That's it. And in March, this is what their calendar looked like. As you can see, we've got what? Five different meetings a month, different times of day, different locations, different subject matter. All of those bring in more people. You have multiplied your inclusion by a factor of five. Openness turned complaints into solutions. The people who wanted something and were asking for it were said, yes, you can have that, but you have to do it. And it brings people in. With many eyes and contributors, all bugs are shallow. Another way that local communities attract more participants and give people more of a chance to get involved is by organizing a word camp. Word camps, you're soaking in it. Just like all WordPress community events are locally organized, volunteer-run events that focus on WordPress. A word camp is a little different from a local meetup in really only a few ways. It's an all-day event. Usually it's organized on an annual basis, but not always. They are the celebration of the local WordPress community. Unlike this event, most word camps in our calendar are between 200 and 400 people. And what we call the minimum viable product of a word camp is very simple. Four maybe five things. 50 people in a room all day long talking about WordPress. Number five that I highly recommend is coffee. So how do we apply our open source principles when we're organizing word camp? All right, let's talk about ticket prices, first of all. We had a little issue at word camp Europe. In that, I don't know if you heard about this, the people who are applying for visas to travel internationally to come here, some people got turned down because our ticket prices were too low. And a lot of people may ask themselves, why on earth would this event, this magnificent event, charge 40 euro a ticket? Is it because the WordPress project doesn't think it's valuable? No. That was a really obviously rhetorical question. Of course not. It's because this is a WordPress activity. WordPress is free. We want all of our events and everything that touches the project to be free and as close to free as possible and as accessible as possible. Nothing should get in the way of someone joining into our events if we can avoid it. And so we price our tickets as low as humanly possible. We do charge a little bit just because that way we're not throwing out about 400 lunches every day. But we price our tickets as low as possible to help create that participatory bizarre or make this an open participatory event. Let's take another example. WordCamp London organizers this year. Is anyone here at WordCamp London? So that was an event where the organizers got super ambitious and wanted to try out some new things and really experiment with the model, not entirely the model, but really add more things to their program. This is great. And we encourage it. And sometimes when organizers get ambitious, they get busy. And sometimes when you get busy, well, maybe it's just me. When I get busy, I make mistakes sometimes. And what was happening with WordCamp London early days is that they would be publishing early and often. And sometimes they would have typos or mistakes in their content. The organizing team from the beginning, though, made a very conscious choice to organize in the open. All of their discussions that they could do in public Slack channels and the local UK Slack installation, everything they could talk about publicly, they talked about publicly. And anyone could join those channels. So the entire community could interact with them very easily or about as easily as it takes to participate on Slack. And so what they found was when they publish a blog post with a little error in it, someone would come into the Slack channel and be like, hey, got a typo. And it didn't just happen once. It happened a couple times. And so there's a couple ways that you can approach this as an event organizer. There is the cathedral approach, which is to say, this guy's a jerk. We need to get him out of here. And also, we need to slow it down and perfect our work so we aren't criticized. They took the other approach. They took the bizarre approach. And they said, you've got a suggestion. You've got a job. Welcome to our team. And they put him and they created a quality assurance place on their group. And that guy's on the team. And he helped make their product better, not by adding to their work, but by reducing their work and becoming part of their team. They opened it up. And I bet you, money, he is going to have a much more expanded role next year because he's had a good experience of being welcomed into the team this year. So where does this all get us? WordPress community organizing uses the same methods as the rest of the open source project. And building WordPress community is a contribution to the WordPress open source project itself, just like contributing code, just like answering questions in the support forums. Because we know that open source is built on collaboration and participation, let's talk very briefly about how community organizing helps the WordPress project get more of that stuff it needs. Participation is risky. It is hard to join a group. When you participate, you risk rejection and you risk failure. And I don't know about you, but I do not like that. People don't take risks when they don't feel confident. And people don't feel confident when they're uncomfortable. So one of the jobs of our organizers, the heart's blood of any great event organizer, is to tell people that they are equally welcome and important where they are. You're basically coding brains, right? You are setting up a live environment to tell people that they belong. Organizers in our program provide space that encourages connection within the event, but also encourages connection with the event, space to work on our events, space to work inside of our events, which is why the story of so many people in the WordPress community has a common phrase. I bet you've all heard it, and that is. And then I went to a WordCamp. Live events like WordCamps have been a turning point for thousands of people in the WordPress open source project. And I have another story for you. It's 2010. WordCamp, New York City. The lead organizer volunteered to do some design work. Now, this particularly lead organizer knew a lot of designers. Her name's Jen Milo. She's actually a very accomplished designer herself. But because she was right in that model of building that participatory bazaar, making everything open and encouraging people to take part, she made a public call for designers. And as you see, she doesn't just say, hey, we need a designer, folks. She says, we could use three designers if that's what it'll take. She lists out, these are the little jobs, and more or less how much time it will take to do each one of them. And says, multiple people are welcome to do this work. And Mel Choice's partner saw this post and said, Mel, you should do this. Mel had never been to a WordCamp before. She had never been to a meetup. She was just like, well, I like WordPress, and I like design. I don't know, maybe I can help. And she made her first contribution to WordPress as a volunteer on a WordCamp event. Very small. It was the batches. She helped design and make those building images and then composed that cityscape. And that's it. She got involved. She gave a little piece. She attended the event. That's her in the middle with that big, big, big, big smile. And she felt welcome. And not only did she feel welcome, she was a part of it. She had given some piece of it. And then for that reason, it was partly hers. And that kept her inside of WordPress, with WordPress, for, well, you're going to hear for how long. She kept designing and kept iterating. And two years later, she was a speaker at WordCamp Philly. Two years, transition from designing tiny, tiny bit of the event to becoming a speaker. And at that event, after she spoke, they had a dev day the next day, a contributor day in 2012. And at that contributor day, she made her first contribution to WordPress that made it into WordPress core. Someone there helped her work on the patch. And it was accepted. It was a small patch. It was very small. It was a small contribution. Again, doesn't have to be big. You don't have to rewrite something to be part of the team. But the very fact that she figured out, she got some help figuring that out, it went into core. It gave her confidence. It made her independent. So she was like, oh, OK. Now I know how this works. I'm going to go. I can do it. And now I have people that I can bounce stuff off of, because I've met people who want to help me. In the years that followed, Mel contributed to many efforts and many projects in the WordPress open source project. She contributed to MP6. She worked on Dashacons. She got a job at a WordPress company, Automatic, which is the same company I work for. And three short years later, she was named as a core committer for WordPress Core. In 2015, 1.4.5 was released. That's a lot of movement in five years from tiny little design contribution to permanent core commit. The next year, she led the design and development of 2017. And this year, she is the design co-lead for the WordPress Core customization focus. It all changed at a WordCamp. Two WordCamps, to be absolutely precise. A small volunteer opportunity brought her in. Another small contribution taught her confidence. But each of those events were key steps in her path to becoming a leader in the WordPress project. And without that program, who knows whether we would ever have been able to benefit from her perspective and hard work. So as you can see, in-person events are powerful tools for building that participatory bazaar. They create volunteer opportunities and personal connections. And those personal connections and eventually friendships do a lot of things for us. They help us step out of our comfort zone and speak up instead of lurking or just standing back and thinking, I don't know. I have a thought, but I'm not going to say it. They help us contribute and collaborate more efficiently. I don't know about you all, but I don't generally see the best version of myself when I'm communicating in text on the internet. When we see each other and meet each other, we humanize the person on the other side of that screen. And we help ourselves get past our conflict, or at least be more patient with us. It helps us reach out and get support instead of giving up. And generally, it keeps us all in. Not only that, but the project itself depends on local community organizers to deeply understand their local communities, to draw attention to all the ways WordPress is being used. Because that expands the community too. It helps the project grow. We depend on local organizers to say, hey, we're doing some cool stuff with WordPress over here, and we're going to tell you about it through our events. It helps us expand WordPress. So you're already part of our conspicuously imperfect WordPress community, and open source methodology is all around you. Every local WordPress community has plenty of interesting bugs and problems that you can work on. And as you can see on this slide, there are lots and lots and lots of ways to help. We need your eyes. We need your unique perspectives. We need your participation. And now you know our source code, so you are educated community developers. Please join us. Thank you so much, Andrea. I am such a lucky girl that I was allowed to MC here, because I wouldn't have wanted to miss this talk. It was so inspiring. And I really recognize so much things on your talk which fit to my own story. That was so cool. I will watch it again. So but I'm quite sure it's not only me who found this very inspiring. We have still some time left for Q&A. And I would like to see if there are questions in this room. We have two standing microphones here in front and two standing microphones in the upper rows. So please, if you have a question, move to the microphones so that Andrea can give you the answers. I can then ask you the first question. Oh, you were there. Great. Hi. My name is Dave from WordCamp Antwerp Belgium. What is your best practice for a multilingual audience like we have in Dutch and Dutch-speaking French? Also a German part. Well, this is pretty good right here. But this is an expensive solution, right? You know, we have been working on this off and on in multiple communities around the world. And I'm not sure we have established a best practice yet. We have a lot of different approaches. And I think they work well in different places. Some communities like to choose kind of a third-party language and have everything in that language so that nobody gets mad that it's in one or the other. Frequently that is English, but not always. Some groups like to do kind of a parallel, like two tracks, one in each language. I was talking to a group organizer the other day who asked the same question. And I suggested, well, I tell you what, open it up to the community. I'll encourage applications in both and see what you get. Because it may be that we're perceiving a problem where one doesn't exist. Or it may be you get half and half. And then the decision's pretty easy and you provide two. But more than anything, I recommend asking the community what it wants, asking your group, and gathering high-quality data from the community. Our job isn't to give them what we think they want. Our job is to provide a space where we make the room and kind of get out of the way. And they do the connecting that they need to do and want to do. OK, thank you. Yeah, great. Hello, Andrea. My name is Mauricio. I'm from the Madrid community. Oh, wonderful. And we have always the same problem because WordPress is free and also the meetups are free that people apply and we have a small venue, but they never show up. And it's a hard problem because we don't want and we can't put a price to our meetups and we don't know how to solve it. Yes, you are not alone. You are part of a large tribe of event organizers that is super annoyed by this. We were just talking about it in the community team channel. By the way, we have a couple of channels in Slack and WordPress.org Slack. One is community-team, and that's where we talk about all these interesting questions. I get that it's annoying when 100 people sign up for something and 20 show up. From a person who likes consistency and predictable information really gets on my nerves. However, sometimes the focus needs to be on the positive side, which is, hey, we got 20 people. And what I tell most community organizers who are facing this is track the data and see if you have any predictable ratio. WordCamp organizers can almost always guarantee that there will be about 15% to 20% attrition for every event. And when I organize WordCamps, I plan for that. I'm like, OK, so we have a capacity of, I don't know how big is this room, 2,000 people? And so I'm going to sell 2,200 tickets, relying on the fact that 20%, that's not 20%, is it? Percents are hard. I'm going to plan for that attrition and go from there. So my first recommendation would be, don't limit the number of places to the actual number of seats in there. However, there are also things you can do with community engagement to ensure that if people sign up, that they actually show up. Sending messages to people right before the event, following up with people in a super not angry way to say, hey, I saw you signed up and you didn't show up. It would really help us out if you could let us know that you're not showing up and stuff like that and just encourage best behavior. But it gets on all of our nerves. And unfortunately, the solution is worse than the problem. The work that we would do to make people be consistent keeps people out. So that's something that we tend to want to hold on to. I think we had over here first, and then we'll come back over here. About that, about that. It's OK. Sorry? About that issue, we filled it in Greece by providing free pizza and beer for everybody. Oh, food is a good way to get people to show up. I agree. And hey, look at that. Our participatory group is working, helping each other. Yes? Hi, Amanda from Cluj, Romania. I often find that meetup makes it a bit difficult to communicate with people. What other means do you suggest to bring people together or make it easier to communicate like a Facebook group? There are a lot of things that work well. One of the challenges in our program is extrapolating the way we do things to work in every single culture in the world. That is one of the biggest challenges that the global community team runs into. So I don't have a definitive answer for you. I agree that sometimes meetup.com communication tools are suboptimal. But what I do recommend is finding the communication tool that works and doubling down on it. Some groups really find that a Facebook group is very, very powerful for them. Some groups find that a proprietary website is powerful for them. Some people find that just Twitter, Twitter, Twitter all the time is the way. What I encourage people to do when they're thinking of solving this communication problem is make sure whatever decision they make, they make sure that the solution is inclusive and open. The problem with proprietary websites is unlike who has access to it and then what happens if the person who owns it wants to go to Drupal or something and doesn't care about WordPress anymore, how do you hand it off, all that stuff. So the solutions that close the group end up being more harm than the problem we're trying to solve. But honestly, I don't know where your community likes to interact as well as you do. Again, I hate to say it over and over, but I would talk to the group, say, where will we most successfully communicate with each other and follow their lead? Sorry, do I have time for one more? Yeah, yeah, one last question, go for it. Andrea, this is Anastasias. Following up on the previous question, I'd like to ask you, to your knowledge, has it ever worked to make a poster about an event? Oh, yes, yeah. We get really focused on technological solutions to what are essentially human problems. Flyers, posters, signs, I don't know, bumper stickers, whatever. Things that help people communicate, little flyers that people can leave at coffee shops, word of mouth, certainly, organizing a bring the friend event is a great way to expand your communication and expand your group. Yeah, don't just fixate on digital solutions. There are a lot of analog solutions that are super powerful. So that's a great point. Thank you. Thank you so much. We are done now, and it was a great talk again. I have to repeat that. So please give a big applause, a big hand to Andrea Middleton. It was a pleasure to have you here.