 Welcome to everyone. Thank you all for being here. This is very exciting. I am excited to see all your faces. It's been many years since I've seen some of you. In case you have not noticed, we are changing our hashtag this year. It is state of the word, written out. But remember to do your capitalization for people using reading, no, assistive technologies, readers, screen readers. I got it. There is going to be a Q&A portion after this. It will be here from our live audience, but also some folks at home, at home. He's the at-home portion for us right now. So if you have any questions, get them ready. If you're here, there's a microphone here that you will be able to ask your questions at. Or if you are watching at home, you can head on over to the YouTube embed of this live stream, and we are monitoring the chat there for questions as well. That is all that I have to say. And I think that's probably all that you want to hear from me anyway. And so tonight, giving our annual state of the word, where we talk about everything we've done this year and everything we hope to do next year is, of course, WordPress project co-founder, Matt Mullenweg. Wow, wow. We're really here. So welcome, everybody. And I've been told to ask if folks over here can just move up one row. If you don't mind, we're going to try to fill out the front a bit. This is so exciting and so honestly fulfilling to be together again. Oh, yeah. I guess everyone's, I'm starting to cascade. For those joining us live, we are here in New York City. It is, the sun is setting. We've got a few invited community members from all over the world. Thank you all for coming. We had people joined by plane, train, and automobile. How long was the train ride? Wow, two and a half days. Two and a half day train ride to get here. So that is definitely the most interesting. I actually also came probably a two and a half day trip, but I'm all the way from Antarctica. So if you notice a little bit of a raccoon tan, that was because I had very strong sunglasses and I guess not strong enough sunblock. So that's maybe some penguins. And while there, I read a lot of books and learned a lot about Antarctica. And one that particularly stood out, actually a leader who's inspired me for a long time was Ernest Shackleton. And I knew a lot about his endurance journey where ship crash or got stuck and then they sent back, basically they saved every person who was on that journey. But a story I didn't know about him, which I learned about was on one of his journeys to the South Pole, he turned away only 97 miles away from reaching the pole, which is pretty darn close. If you've ever tried to go, I think I flew like, if you add it all up like almost 7,000 miles back. So to turn around to the last 97. And actually as this was happening, as I was reading about this, I was thinking about the version 5.9 release. So you might know that today was the scheduled, right around today, was the scheduled, originally scheduled date for the WordPress 5.9 release. And we made a very, very unusual decision for WordPress to delay the release for about a month. So we're going to release it in January. But it felt like we were so close and we decided to turn around. And but I am very, I believe it was entirely the right decision as it was for Shackleton. He made it back alive. I think his saying was better to be a live donkey than a dead lion. So we don't want full site editing, which is coming in 5.9 to be a dead lion. But it was also, I think, a moment for reflection. Because of course, we talk about in the philosophy part of WordPress how dead lions are in our arbitrary. And whenever we were making that decision, which wasn't that long ago, to delay the release, I wasn't thinking so much about what was happening right then, the kind of month before the release. But what did we do three, four, five months before? So I think it's an excellent time to reflection, for reflection. And actually some of this has started on Ann McCarthy's blog. We've started talking in her comment section. In public, of course, as everything happens on WordPress, about what we can learn from this, that we can start putting into effect not just for the release coming next month, which will be fine, but for the big 6.0, which is coming next year. I've even heard some rumblings that 2022 might be a year we aim for four releases instead of just three. But let's not get too crazy just yet. We're at the beginning of the state of the word, not the end. We had a very, very exciting 2021. And really, it was quite fulfilling to be part of it after such, well, it's still part of a very challenging time in humanity. One of the things I want to highlight first was our eight new core committers, both the core and themes. So let's do a round of applause for Kelly, David, William, Isabel, Johnny, Jeff, JB, and Tanya. So excited that they now have ability to change the code that runs 43% of the internet. Another update is we focused a lot this year on WordPress.org. And one I'd like to highlight to start is around the news sites. And this we do have some guest audio. We weren't able to get people from around the world all to New York, but there's some audio there. For the past year, we've been working in the redesign of the news page in WordPress.org. The general inspiration was last year's state of the word presentation and overall jazz aesthetics. Because the blog doesn't have much imagery, we took some time to explore shapes, typography, layout, and colors to get a successful result that expresses the playfulness of jazz. I think the last time we redesigned this might have been like WordPress 3.0. So it's exciting to start to loop back to some things in WordPress.org. Another thing we were able to launch on WordPress.org was Openverse, which I swear we named before Facebook decided to pivot. Openverse is a search engine for openly licensed media. Search for an image, download and put it on your site. Give attribution to the creator, and that's it. Ta-da! Ha ha ha ha! Name more at WordPress.org slash Openverse. So Openverse is part of... We've started to expand how we think about our mission from just being about the code and the tools that allow people to publish to actually what they're publishing. So Openverse was originally called Creative Commons Search. It was actually part of the Creative Commons nonprofit. But the sort of cost and running it, they decided they were going to shut it down or put it somewhere. And we found a home for it on WordPress.org, which I'm very, very excited about. We have over 600 million Creative Commons images licensed through it. And we're going to have audio coming up at the end of January. There'll be 2 million audio clips there. And, you know, applying open source to content is a little tricky, but the Creative Commons, of course, has a long legacy there, I think 20 years now. And so we're very, very excited to continue carrying that torch forward to create as much open content on the web as possible. Another thing we got on WordPress.org is the pattern directory. The WordPress pattern directory, similar to the plugin and theme directories, is a site that features submitted patterns that anyone can copy and use. With WordPress 5.9, WordPress.org members will be able to sign in and submit patterns to be added to the directory, as you can see in this flow. This is a huge opportunity for designers to contribute to the overall WordPress ecosystem without having to know how to code, plug-in, or a theme. If you've used patterns in WordPress lately, you know they make it easy to add unique layouts to your site quickly. Imagine helping others create beautiful content from testimonials, headers, galleries, and more with your own submissions. Once submitted, patterns will be set to pending, and you'll be able to see all your patterns in one place. Submitted patterns can also be resized right on the page to give a better understanding of how a pattern will be displayed at different sizes. And since patterns are really just text, they can be copied to your device's clipboard just like any other text. Just paste the pattern into any block that are incorporated into your site. And in case you didn't catch that, so the copy pattern button on WordPress.org, you just press that, then you go over to your Gutenberg, paste, and you get whatever was there. So this is a very, very exciting way. You know, with the first version of Gutenberg, the phase one, what really created was all the fundamental building blocks. Almost like that you can build pretty much anything out of, much unlike Legos or you know, strands of DNA. But with patterns, we now have the ability for really anyone with no code or no code to be able to create and share complex presentations of what you can do with blocks. Another thing I was really, really proud about our progress in 2021 was what we call the polyglots. If you don't know, polyglot is a word for someone who speaks a lot of languages. I speak barely one, so these folks always impress me quite a bit. We had a 76% improvement in the language packs that are being created for plugins and core, and we're up to now 15,900 active translators. With that work, we've been able to take the number of locales that WordPress is translated to at time of release to 71. 71, could anyone name 71 languages? It's pretty impressive. The other thing we've been able to do is, for those who don't know, our translation system is actually powered by an open source project called GlotPress. And in GlotPress, we were able to add a lot of new projects, including Openverse, Learn WordPress, the Pattern Directory, and Patterns. So these are now all part of what we're translating. Openverse, which we just heard about, is translated into 17 languages already. Learn.wordpress is in 24. Patterns are in 24, and the Pattern Directory is in 25 different locales. So in our mission of democratizing publishing, of course, we're not doing it just for people who speak English, and this presentation, everything, we're trying to translate into as many languages as possible, so it's as widely accessible as possible. And speaking of that, there's also been some exciting developments around diversity in WordPress. So we created this new diverse speaker program and speaker support program that have had 135 participants go through it so far in 66 cities and 16 countries around the world. This is basically a program to help people who might not have spoken at a work camp or at a WordPress event before, basically get some guidance on how to do so. They already have the skills and everything like that. This is, I would love to grow this number quite a bit, and if you would like to get involved in one of these trainings in the future, the URL, Josepha, is... Make.wordpress.org slash community, and the magical WordPress Twitter account, we'll put that out shortly, or probably the correct answer there. Some of these slides were changing until literally minutes ago. Part of making WordPress more accessible as well is about the learning, and so last year I talked a lot about learn.wordpress.org, which is this idea of how do we teach more people the power of how to learn WordPress, teach them how to fish. We've had 186 social learning spaces, which are basically like cohorts of people going through the different classes. We have 73 workshops and 70 different lesson plans that teachers, college professors, elementary school teachers can adopt and teach to their students. This is all available in 21 languages, and so far we have two courses that people can go through, which are like full collections of lessons and plans and things like that. This is pretty nascent as well. We've only had about a thousand people go through this so far, but as the content gets better and better, as it gets iterated on, people working on this kind of improve it with every single duration, so when a class goes through, they say, okay, this was easy to understand, this was harder, and of course it all gets translated. If you are looking for a way to contribute to WordPress, by the way, hosting a workshop is a very, very easy way because it's just a few hours of time to be there with folks that are attending the workshop, and certainly if you're listening to this, you have more than enough knowledge to be able to share with someone new to WordPress. As this grows and develops, we're gonna make it a much more prominent part of what you see when you visit WordPress.org because so many people coming there who might put the powered by WordPress or proudly powered by WordPress on a site might be curious in learning what it is, and so I think this is actually one of our biggest opportunities to just expand the knowledge of really what WordPress is and also define to a new audience what WordPress is through these courses. We had a pretty good year for growth as well, so in the distribution of WordPress, I'm proud to announce that according to W-Thrutex, we now power 43% of the websites. We also had, we doubled the number of themes that were being added to the directory, huge amount of work there from everyone who works on theme moderation and theme directory, and we had the most downloads of the software ever, and this isn't including updates, this is fresh downloads of the software. So pretty much by every metric, it was a bit of a great year, which is impressive because like many online services we experienced a big COVID bump, so to actually lap everything that happened last year was pretty great. But that 43% in perspective, it's actually 43.1%. But we went from 39.1 to 43.1 in the past year, and this is a list of the other top five in there. So the number two right now is Shopify, which went from 3.1 to 4.4. Wix is number three, which went from 1.5 to 1.9%. Squarespace went from 1.4 to 1.8%. And the only other open source project that's still in the top five is Juma, which actually shrunk from 2.2% to 1.8%. In general, the CMSs are not taking market share from each other. So what we're taking market share from is what W3Tech calls NUN, which is basically websites that are running a not discernible content management system, which most likely means it's custom or something that was kind of bespoke for that site. So what we've seen is a huge shift. This used to be over two thirds of sites running some sort of custom CMSs of the sites in the top two million. A huge shift of them were running to CMSs. But one thing that's concerning to me here is the top three used to be WordPress, Drupal, and Jumla, which are all great because we're all GPL. So as those grow, it means that there's more and more open source on the web. But we've seen these three proprietary systems pass up all the other open source systems other than WordPress. Now the good news is WordPress is still growing pretty fast. In this market share analysis, we actually grew two entire Wix's this year, which is a new unit of measurement. And to put that in perspective, we're still 10 times larger than number two out there. But this doesn't happen for free and we shouldn't take any of this for granted. There are in the history of software and certainly the internet. There are many services that were once dominant that now we need museums to remember what they were. So to maintain and in fact, to accelerate this growth, which it did in 2021, we really need to once they humble and stay close to users and iterating the software as quickly as possible. One thing that's been in the news quite a bit lately is also security. And I'm proud to say it was a good year for WordPress security. We had over 30 people of which a third of them were first-time contributors contributing security patches. In our security reporting system, 71% of the reports ended up being closed as not applicable. And about five points is for duplicates. So it's mean that someone had reported them already. Security is a process. Anyone who says they are perfectly secure is tempting fate. But it's a process and the investments that we've put into updating WordPress and basically in partnerships with the host where we work with both host and CDNs like Cloudflare to whenever we are aware of something, we actually work with them first to protect WordPress sites often at the network edge or at the host or data center edge in addition to being able to push auto updates to the vast majority of WordPress sites in the world. And this is incredibly important as we go forward and continue to grow. Again, security is a process not an endpoint. So our ability to be one of the most secure platforms in the world is 100% the result of how much we're going to be able to update sites because humans are fallible, something I fundamentally believe. All our code is written by humans as far as I know. So that means our code is fallible. So that means somewhere in the WordPress many hundreds of thousands of lines of code there's something that could be improved or some sort of bug which might have a security implication. So what's really key there is how we're going to be able to update it. In terms of updates, changes, improvements we also did a lot of the block themes. So this is last year we only had two of these in the world. Now we're up to three, now we're up to 30. So we have a 10X but this is nothing compared to what it's going to be in the future. Block themes are basically themes that are built from the ground up to be customizable entirely with the Gutenberg block editor 2022 which is the new default theme which will actually launch in 2022 with a release of 5.9 uses all of our new tools including blocks, themes.json and the new design tools I'll talk a little bit about later and a little bit next in this presentation. We also finally got to in one of the as you know like there's a limited number of developers for WordPress so we kind of work on different things at different times which means sometimes as parts of it that haven't had attention in a while and if you have recently updated widgets in your sidebar you might have seen one of those parts but coming up or actually now you can now manage widgets with the block editor. As a WordPress 5.8 you can now manage your widgets with blocks allowing you to visually edit more parts of your site. Here's an example showing off how deep customization can go with a combination of tools starting with layering two blocks to create a neat effect. As you can see being able to use blocks opens up tons of new creative possibilities from no code mini layouts to tapping into the vast library of core and third-party blocks to create content. Keep in mind that you'll have the same controls in the post editor to perfect the placement and the opacity. Go a step further and add a do a tone filter to create an even more compelling experience. Enjoy the familiar experience of drag and drop to get the details just right before saving, checking out your awesome creation on your site. Thanks to query loop block launched in 5.8 you can now easily display your posts and pages with blocks as you can see here. This advanced block comes built in with various layouts that you can switch between till you find the one that you like. From there, you can go a step further to customize your featured images thanks to new design tools coming in 5.9. This includes dimension controls and various scale options so you can tweak to your heart's content. And that was like a pretty fancy demo. I'll mention a few things in there. You got to the block navigator which is a very exciting way and accessible way to navigate through blocks. And I don't know if you saw it but what Anne was doing in that demo when she was changing the size was actually she clicked and then moved her mouse up and down which actually increases it. And finally, one of the things that we're still not sure how to describe exactly but we're very excited to be part of the design tools of WordPress is Duotone. Image filters like Duotone can be used in even more places like the featured image block. It's a great way to bring character to your photos and perhaps in the future your videos. This means you can transform your images without touching any code for a photo editor. If you look, I'm going to try to go back to the beginning of that. She might start talking again. But if you saw those images were all kind of different colors and they didn't really match. What Duotone allows is imagine Duotone being like gray scale but instead of just going between white and black you get to choose the two colors that it goes between. So essentially what this can do is create a really cool consistent aesthetic throughout all the images. And what we're having here is it's actually being used in the query block so Anne updates one of them. To kind of cross fade the highlights or shadows which you can choose. It actually updates every single post in that block so that's why they all now look cool and consistent. This is a pretty cool tool. It's hard to explain but really fun to play with. So you're going to get one of the latest block themes including you can download the 2022 one from Betas. Oh, we got a little feedback there. Play with this, it is really, really cool. And another cool thing is that themes can of course define the default gradients that are suggested through themes.json. All of this is possible because of the literally thousands of people that contribute to WordPress. So just like we did in the beginning thinking committers I do want to thank and highlight at the very least the faces if not all the names of some of the contributors to our last releases. So the 5.7 release was named for the amazing jazz bassist Esperanza Spalding. And we had 481 contributors in that release of which 24% were brand new. This is all of their faces. 5.8 was named for the virturistic pianist Art Tatum. One of my favorites, check out Tatum recordings they will blow your mind. And in that we had 530 contributors. Again, about 25% new. And this is all of them. And for 5.9, your face could be up here still. I mean not right now. But for 5.9 we've already had 580 contributors to the core software. But if you watch your avatar up here for the release post there's still a few weeks. So you can test, submit patches or otherwise contribute to WordPress 5.9. And this is the folks who have already showed up. So cheers to them. Contributors show up for all sorts of reasons. It's to give back to the project that helped them to network and socialize with like-minded people to support and learn from entrepreneurs and other professionals to gain valuable skills that are really, really useful. Work alongside some of the best developers in the world. And if you have another reason, drop us a tweet. So we're using the state of the word tag but we're also gathering lots of feedback during this. During this live stream and for whoever's watching this later. So use the state of the word hashtag and we're gonna check that out and actually highlight some of them on the blog later. You know, blog editors and visual editors have been around for a long time. But one of the things really unique about WordPress and one of the reasons it's taken us so much work to get to where we are today with Gutenberg is we are committed to doing this in a web standards-based way in a way where the code is very, very clean which also means it's more accessible and highly performance. If you're having a look up some of the benchmarks of Gutenberg versus any other page builder it generally has much higher scores and much lighter code. We are on the cusp of finally coming to 5.9. This looks like an Apple slide, right? It's kind of cool. It's got dual tone, improved gallery which you can drag and drop, block spacing with a single control, border bark, flexible layouts, themes and patterns. You can edit your site logo easily including make the logo bigger which I'm sure some designers have heard someone got that one. The list view which is super, super cool allows you to navigate between relatively complex hierarchies of blocks very, very easily. And finally the integrated pattern directory which is probably the easiest way to essentially contribute code to WordPress that has ever existed. We've got a few demos here of what's in 5.9 and these are honestly some of the coolest demos we've ever shown in the state of the world. The 5.9 release marks the introduction of a next generation of themes that allows greater customization and simpler building. Themes can now be created entirely with blocks meaning you get all the familiar editing tools and the same blocks you use when creating posts and pages to allow you to edit all parts of your site including your header and footer. All the templates from the theme can be edited using the block editor like the homepage your blog archive or single pages. Want to zoom in on just your header? Easy. Using the top toolbar select your header and switch into a dedicated mode to do exactly that. Once there you can explore the new navigation block that comes with built in responsive and keyboard accessible options. With over 30 theme blocks the ability to customize and create every part of your site has never been easier. And do it in a fully responsive way so you're just shocked with moving from desktop to mobile views. We've now got styles. Introduce a quick and intuitive way to change all the visual elements of your site globally from typography to colors to various aspects of how blocks appear. All of this allows you to achieve distinct looks by modifying the style presets. Here's an example from the 2022 theme showing how drastically different the theme can be with tweaks to the styling options. You can change anything but there must always be birds. It's called the hatchery theme. I mean, you're kind of stuck with it. And finally we improved how patterns work. Patterns can be used to create different sections like headers and footers. In a few clicks you can make a brand new header without changing your theme. Open the Inserter. Switch to the Patterns tab and select Explore to see what's available. All these new features help you get where you want to go faster. Time and time again as we look towards a future of WordPress. It's probably my favorite slide. Or finally achieving one of the things that WordPress set out to do 18 years ago now. I feel a little old saying that. I think starting well actually now I've worked on WordPress more than half my entire life. I hope to work on the rest of my life if you all still love me. And this is why we started the Gutenberg project. When we first introduced Gutenberg a few years ago all the way to when we first showed the first mockups and ideas of it in 2013 we said this was going to be the foundation on what the new versions of Gutenberg was. What the new versions of WordPress were built on. What our next 10 years would be. And not only are we enabling folks to express themselves and ideally uniquely on the web unlike the cookie cutter that all the social sites try to put you into. The cookie cutter looks. We're doing it a way which is standards based interoperable based on open source increases the amount of freedom on the web which is very key certainly to me and the most important thing that I work on. As we're renewing our commitment to the open web as a whole it's also been kind of an exciting time to just be following technology news because a lot of people have been talking about web 3 and the decentralized web. I'm not going to dig super deep into defining web 3 because I don't think anyone really knows what it means. But it is a buzzword that's now being talked about on MPR or Wall Street Journal is being talked about in the context of global standards and to me what web 3 embodies is two essential ideas decentralization and individual ownership and for me those are both things that WordPress is both well poised to be already doing and to continue doing for some time to come. Let's talk about decentralization and ownership. WordPress in specific but open source in general you can participate in it from anywhere. There's 30 of us here but the WordPress community as we saw is thousands and thousands of people 15,900 translators you can host the site anywhere on any infrastructure that you like you can create your own forks of WordPress any person here could create Penguin Press or whatever you want to call it take the code and take it on your time and you're really only limited by your time and creativity which is also an aspect of at least my favorite web 3 products. The other key is individual ownership so in WordPress as with some of the best web 3 products you own your own content the code everything to run it without any payment to WordPress you can move your content from one site to another easily. In fact WordPress's export format has become the de facto standard for all their CMSs so even like a Squarespace and Kudos to Squarespace for doing this supports when you export from Squarespace they actually export in the WXR WXR format which is basically just something we did like 15 years ago which is take RSS2 and add on a few extra XML fields to create a standards based WordPress export format and you have the four freedoms of open source and the GPL which allow for ownership for every individual including every person in this room or every person watching this owns WordPress just as much as myself or Mike Little do and individual individuality of expression keep this in mind and I would say apply the filters of everything in web 3, the NFT space, etc there's been an incredible amount of innovation I think this has also attracted some hucksters and some folks kind of hustling things that aren't truly open so you all are very familiar with WordPress so for every project which is asking for your money dollars or for you to pay the cost of a house for a picture of an ape you should ask does it apply the same freedoms which WordPress itself does and how closely does it you to and apply to increasing your individual agency and freedom in the world ownership has also been fun topic in WordPress this year because we've had a lot of acquisitions there are 42 logos and slides on this logos on this slide which represent acquisitions I was able to track for those on the live stream something just crashed we don't know what it was hopefully everyone's okay over there on sites like post status has been a joke number of days since acquisition constantly reset to zero there's been a lot of these and I probably missed some in this logo slide so I apologize whatever I missed some people have been saying there's been some unusual trend in WordPress or something crazy happening in our community so one thing I like to do in the state of the words is also put whatever we're doing in the context of what is more broadly happening in the technology and world ecosystem out there so I've got a few slides to share to you technology and macroeconomic trends so this from refintive is the number of deals and M&A happening in just the technology space so you can see over there a big roll of it doesn't look like almost anything that happened before so maybe 2000-2001 I don't have any comments there but this is going to well over 10,000 transactions in just the first nine months of 2021 alone and if you were to broaden it to the global M&A landscape not just technology we've seen over 45,000 different acquisitions this is up over 24% from last year which is already a huge year and represents $3.6 trillion of different mergers and acquisitions the United States in particular is leading the pact and the stats there show 139% increase year over year from last year this is driven by another trend which I found utterly shocking to learn and understand which is capital inflows to stocks the chart says come and get them while they're hot I'll counter that with a Warren Buffett quote which is to be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful so basically what this is showing is dollars and billions of money moving from other assets into public equities so you can see for example kind of 02-07 it's kind of plus or minus 10, 20, 30 60 million dollars going in and out of equities we had some bumper years in 13 and 17 with 252 and 295 billion dollars coming into public equities but look at why I had that graph so far the estimate for 2021 is let me make sure I get this correct $1.6 trillion of capital inflows to public equity markets so if you see valuations going crazy mergers and acquisitions going crazy I believe this to be the root source of what's happening in the broader economic market there's obviously a source before this I will not venture to guess what it is around stimulus or governments or something like that but this also my point here is that these trends are not unique to WordPress so our 42 deals is not that bad compared to what's going on in the world there's also been something that's been talked about in context of this that the larger the company the greater the influence they are on the WordPress world and I would like to counter that as well and invite more companies to contribute so this is a graph for WordPress 5.6 of the contributors you can see one of the biggest bubbles on there is the company I always like to highlight and say the word which is Yoast Yoast is three times larger than a few others there including some hosts like GoDaddy, WP Engine even though it has one fifth in the case of WP Engine and like one eightieth in the case of GoDaddy number of employees so the impact the company has on the future of WordPress is not at all related to the size of the company what I would love this graph to look like in the future it's more like this there's no reason that if we really take to heart what's made us successful so far that we can't get more companies participating in the commons of what's happening so when a company benefits from WordPress when they put something back into the core whether that's through translations, community volunteering or core code as this particular graph is representing it kind of ensures that there's something left in the future for WordPress to be there you can't run Wix or Squarespace on GoDaddy that's an example so what I really feel has gotten us here is the spirit of what we call Five for the Future which some of you all familiar with but I would like to expound a little bit for those who are maybe new to hearing about this or in other communities because when we hear about things like you might have seen this security bug that's going around was a library called Log4J who's ever heard of Log4J before two, three people before Twitter recently but it's caused this very real RCE which stands for remote code exploitation vulnerability and basically every major internet service in the world for trillions of dollars of market cap all the mine grafts have been impacted by this and I wish I had a slide for this but have you seen the XCK XKCD graphic we'll tweet it out later or maybe now there's this fun comic one of the coolest comics in the world by the way that shows like a very complicated structure and this is like the global economy and there's one little thing holding it all up it's an open source project maintained by three random people in Missouri that's kind of Log4J unfortunately we don't have this problem in WordPress because we have tons of folks sponsored and we've been really key about Fire for the Future but it turns out that the folks working on Log4J there's like three people making and the first person who fixed the bug said they got a sponsorship of $16,000 per year fixing these sorts of things so how do we avoid this in WordPress what have we done that's made it successful so far and what do we need to pay even more attention to in the future as more and more companies become commercially successful as amazing businesses built on top of the WordPress ecosystem as web hosts get millions and millions of sites customers paying millions of people paying hundreds of dollars per year running WordPress as their CMS so what Fire for the Future is basically the idea is whatever you get from WordPress take 5% of that and try to put it back into the comments are you familiar with the concept of the tragedy of the comments it's in an old economics paper from actually forever ago so the example they used was sheep and the idea was if there were a lot of different shepherds I guess with sheep and there was kind of a commonly owned area of grass in the countryside it didn't really belong to anyone if all the shepherds had their sheep eat as much of the grass as possible or as much as the sheep wanted the grass would die and this thing which belonged to the community the commons would deplete because of essentially over utilization by actors acting in their own self-interest short term but against the self-interest in the long term some of you might think this parallels to the subclimate change or other things that are happening in humanity in the digital world at least I think it's possible to have an abundance of the commons so the more people that use a program like WordPress the better it gets in so many ways more bugs get reported more translations happening more more plugins get developed more themes get developed and so the more people that use WordPress WordPress doesn't get any worse for any of you the more people that use it the better it gets but part of that is some percentage of the people who benefit from WordPress putting something back into the commons fertilizing the soil planting some more grass however you want to think about it have you ever seen the take a penny leave a penny little things they still exist even do we still have pennies? I know they've been trying to get rid of them for a while funny story actually I used to participate in this macroeconomics competition because I was a really cool high schooler and I got to meet at the time the treasurer of the United States because we won the competition a few different levels and I'm a high school kid and I apologize the name is escaping me right now but the treasurer of the United States I was like cool you're the treasurer what's the thing you most want to do and her answer was get rid of the penny I was amazed so the treasurer of the United States if you don't know actually signs all the dollars all the dollar bills I mean not literally but if you looked at a dollar pocket you would see was a virtual signature or printed signature from whoever is the treasurer but apparently pennies cost more to produce than they do to use so it's kind of a funny thing that we still have pennies in the United States at least weird aside commons, sheep pennies did y'all know where I was going with that it's been a while since I talked to other people Fire for the Future is we launched this in I think 2014 where we first started talking about this but in reality it's been embedded in many of the companies including Yoast as an example and automatic that contributed WordPress almost from the very beginning because we had this sense that what we're creating together wasn't something that happened for free or that would happen automatically it was a freedom that required the diligent effort of all the people that were putting in their free time and their hard-earned talents into this thing that we were creating together and not unlike the Wikipedia could become something that's far greater than the sum of its parts WordPress cannot be written by one person or even one company the quality the robustness, everything of the software is a result of everyone who's contributed to it not just in the most recent releases which we highlighted some of those but all the way going back to even the predecessor to WordPress, B2 every line of code there represents a little bit of someone putting a penny in that take a penny put a penny jar I have studied for a couple of years whether it's open source platforms or successful desktop platforms like Windows and there typically tends to be this 21 ratio that if the ecosystem is benefitting kind of 20 times more than whatever is in the center of the ecosystem it works at the point one whatever is in the center of the ecosystem takes more than that kind of all breaks down there's something called a Facebook platform the Facebook platform mostly benefit to Facebook and when a company got too big on top of it often Facebook would change the rules or pull the rock out under where that's a company like Zynga or others that were benefiting from it if you go all the way back do you remember the release of Windows 95 whoa I'm impressed so for those who don't I'll paint a picture to get a new iPhone they used to do that for a box of Windows which came in on a CD and you'd wait at like a Best Buy or something and I think Rolling Stones recorded a song the release of Windows 95 was basically like a world event that was covered by every single major media and everything and in reading books written at the time and media one of the funny things I found Microsoft saying was that for every dollar that Windows would make $20 would be made in the Windows ecosystem this ratio kept coming up over and over again and different platforms I studied and so that's how we got to the 5 for the future it's basically a 1 to 20 ratio 1 to 19 depending on how you count it of what is in the core versus what is happening in the community the WordPress community is larger than ever some estimates put it at over $10 billion per year so how do we get to that 5% of things being put back into the core the beautiful thing about 5 for the future is it can be unique if you're an individual that 5% put back into the core of a 40 hour work week is 2 hours a week so 2 hours out of 168 that you have in a week put back into something with core and we'll talk about it in some ways you can get involved and contribute not only makes you part of defining the future of the web but gets you contributing back to this thing that if you hope WordPress is still relevant if I'm here with much grayer hair 10 or 20 years from now given the state of the word hopefully a suit still it's because we all put something back into it and we all work together beyond any individual or any single company coming together to create this thing we call WordPress and the foundations of what we're doing today also set the stage for what's going on tomorrow it's funny because actually WordPress is 18 years old the idea of democratizing publishing is probably 17 years old came on pretty early in our lifetime now every single startup raising money talks about democratizing they want to democratize ice cream etc etc but what this means to us is the software the core thing that makes WordPress again belongs just as much to you as it does to me or any other developer of WordPress means you can use WordPress for any purpose means we strive to create it available in as many languages as possible available to people regardless of economic activity and available to people with assistive needs as accessible as possible this has been the core of what we've been trying to do with WordPress and particularly the people in this room the invited community members I want to thank you all for being part of that every single one of you is a fire for the future contributor so thank you and if you're streaming you could be in this room in the future contribute a big part of what we've been trying to do and reinventing WordPress has been through Gutenberg software it's hard to change and the more successful software is the harder it is to change because there's so many built in workflows and everything so everything that we've been doing with Gutenberg when I got on stage a few years ago to introduce I said this is going to be a backwards compatibility break meaning that a plugin written for the old editor will probably need to be updated to work with Gutenberg WordPress was famous for its backwards compatibility still to this day a theme that was written for WordPress 1.2 which was the release that introduced themes in 2005 and it will still work in WordPress 5.9 coming out in January 2022 so we're really serious about backwards compatibility but for Gutenberg we said there's something new that's coming which is going to be hashtag worth it hashtag state of the word to remind you we laid out a plan many years ago which we're still following today around the four phases of Gutenberg just to remind everyone we started the first phase of Gutenberg which was around easier editing this was the introduction of the block editor and the idea that the block editor will be able to edit everything inside the post box so we were thinking inside the post inside the box with blocks we're currently in the middle phase 2 of Gutenberg which we originally started in 2019 but it's all around customization this is thinking outside of the post box all the things I showed you earlier to edit your entire site using this concept of blocks is happening now and what's beautiful about this is one all the plugins and things that used to have consciousness in the interfaces which are now being built on the Gutenberg framework inherit all the work we put into accessibility keyboard navigation everything that's built in the Gutenberg the clean code etc also when new users come to WordPress or new existing WordPress users are learning Gutenberg it used to be that the way to edit a widget or create something using a short code in a post there were like four or five ways to essentially do the same thing inside a WordPress and we're now consolidating this all to this one block interface inside of the blocks are like Lego blocks that they can be used anywhere with 5.9 which is coming out next month I would say at the MVP the minimum viable product customization phase of Gutenberg so I want to remind you of the next two phases that we're heading into the third phase of Gutenberg is going to be around collaboration I listed the start of 2023 not next year it's because I think we don't want to leave phase too early because there's still so much to do I'm forgetting the number but how many block themes were there it's like 38 28 28 that needs to be 5,000 we need to really invest a lot in creating patterns and themes that take advantage of all these blocks it's the new standard thing if you look at what block editor plugins have been doing and it's kind of a Balkanized proprietary way we now have a standard way to do within WordPress and the more we can invest into that the more they'll enable people to create really unique web presences and then finally which we don't have a year attached to and in WordCamp Europe I get a really hard time for is the idea of multilingual so we want to take everything we just talked about and essentially allow you to publish sites in multiple languages with a workflow that makes sense because the world's multilingual is basically the best way to put it if you were thinking about how to contribute I would love for you all to get involved and join the journey of Gutenberg by talking about contributing patterns, block themes, styles or if you're a musician or a photographer or videographer to take some of that work and put it into the openverse not the metaverse, the openverse which is basically this incredible commons we have of content which has the same freedoms like the GPL available for any of us to use, any of us to modify remix and refresh we've got the very first version of the openverse now running on WordPress.org but really one thing I'm very excited about is actually building that into the WordPress admin so that when you upload a new image or video or anything like that, you'll be able to choose to create a commons license maybe under an open license like CC0 which will allow us to index it into openverse or maybe under a more restrictive license that's okay, whatever floats your boat it's cool, it's all about creators having the control and autonomy to choose to license their content however possible and for those that choose to put it into the commons that then becomes a part of what is shared in humanity and allows us to grow and create cool things together and that kind of usage and remix economy over time I also want to build a full image directory into WordPress and I think we missed it here but wordpress.org slash photos so if you want to learn more about Fire for the Future go to wordpress.org slash five F-I-V-E and one thing we launched also is the wordpress.org photo directory which is an idea for a CC0 which means basically a totally open imagery which is available to be used on any sites for commercial and non-commercial uses and we're going to be building that CC0 directory into WordPress core so that means that regardless of what's in your media library if you set up a site for someone new they could click on the media library click openverse and say search for puppies or coffee or whatever it is that they are looking for an image for and then be able to insert that just with one click in their post and we can do that really nicely we saw some of the openverse attribution was still copy and paste we're going to make that so that just happens when you insert the image so by default it will have attribution for content creators people could always remove it if they like especially with the CC0 image but I think it's kind of cool have credit going so the photographers and people possible so if this is something that you think would be interesting or that you have some cool content to contribute to check out the openverse there are so many ways to contribute like I talked about it it could be 40 hours a week or 4 hours a month you know anything helps and contributing money is great but actually time is the most valuable thing in the WordPress ecosystem could be through design, code contributing to community or organizing meetups helping the learning if you have any background in educational what's the word for that educational development educational development thank you that would be amazing for our learn.wordpress.org project training or documentation there's a number of ways to contribute solo or with groups companies have started to organize contributor days for the whole company might take like a Friday once a month and I'll get involved on the WordPress.org make.wordpress.org everything that happens happens in the open and any of you can be involved with pretty easily which is kind of interesting because in your code your image your something can show up in what happens for 43% of the web if you are listening to this live or in person if you want to look at your phone right now we're very curious how WordPress has helped grow your story and so what a hashtag from the state of the word one if you tag that with I love WP this is actually the tag that we're creating the new testimonial page on WordPress from so if there's something where WordPress or the WordPress community has influence on you I see tofer here I want to call out an amazing site called heropress as well is it heropress.com yeah heropress.com is an amazing site which chronicles and documents people's story in fact if you have an amazing story as well I'll also talk to Tofer later it could be cool to get on there and I think once a month we highlight those on the WordPress news blog so what a year sorry I'm out of breath I'm also really really excited to announce that just happened our first in-person WordCamp in several years WordCamp Seville I'm feeling lucky, Sevilla was the first in-person WordCamp after 21 months of virtual WordCamps they got together 101 people 17 speakers and that was all the reports I've heard back from it that was very very exciting I'm so thrilled both to be talking to the folks who are here virtually but also to hang out with the folks here in person afterwards after we wrap this up but I'd love to see also more of the WordPress community and so my one more thing for this presentation is that we've actually locked in the city for WordCamp US 2022 and God willing we'll be in San Diego, California dates and more to come but roughly around September in San Diego, California San Diego is good all parts of the year it's one of those magical cities but particularly in September it should be really really nice and I'm looking forward to seeing all the faces here again but also everyone who's listening now or in the recording later hopefully we can start to get together again it's funny because Wordpress itself has always been massively global actually my company Automatic has always been really distributed from the very beginning we're 1800 people now but really from the start we were across many different cities so the pandemic started everyone came to me and Automatic being like how do you do it and it was funny because they were asking how to work together in a distributed way which we have some opinions on we have some experience with in tools like P2 which is built on WordPress and so we did our best to share as much as that as possible but the secret sauce I think of both Automatic and the broader WordPress community has always been these times when we get together in person these meetups, these work camps these events like this so services default to being 95% in person and 5% you know, virtual free pandemic WordPress always did the opposite we were like 95% virtual within 5% of the year we get together in person and I'm excited to get back to that because the relationships learning everything that happens will meet each other is so so powerful so thank you thank you thank you to everyone who came via plane, train and automobile just show up here live in New York City for this very special state of the word most special to me that I think we've ever done and thank you to all tuning in the live stream now we have the questions and answers if you'd like more from me my WordPress is MA.TT I've got a podcast on distributed work and I'm at Photomat on Tumblr, Twitter and Instagram but now is the portion where we go to Q, questions and answers