 Bonjour You didn't greet people in Bulgarian in Sofia, so just to be clear Good afternoon, and thank you for making time to listen to us talk about Everything except WordPress Because you can ask him all the questions directly in the Q&A session Though we do have a little WordPress to get started with yes You know you took my lead into that, but it's okay That's what friends do right? So again It just wanted to give you one second of My wordpress involvement. I was I think patient Maybe one of the first five or ten people to download the original WordPress and Then install it on my server and then since then Matt has been my private sysad man And so that's his claim to fame But it's it's great to see What started as such a small project with six people Become so big and so huge that we have a packed audience so take a minute and Give yourself a round of applause because you guys are what make WordPress so awesome. So thank you So Matt you are amongst your people and I believe you have a little gift for them We do we do so Who here has heard of the Gutenberg editor so far? Okay, a couple who's seen it Fewer who's installed it on their sites Couple this is pretty good. Well, I think we have a little video we can roll right for those watching at home and for those who are Perhaps seeing it for the first time. I want to give a little bit of a preview of What is coming with the Gutenberg editor, which is the fruit of our first main focus for the year So here you see it replaces the entire right screen. Look What just happened was there was an insert you can click which is in two images. We're creating a gallery You see the little arrows next to things. Those are blocks. So the blocks can be moved up and down See we've got Dynamic blocks so things that are currently widgets can be turned into Blocks we're about to insert a block of the latest post you can see below that a HR block a button block It's being moved around. It's being populated dynamically The button block is I think is actually going to be a really popular one It's the simplest thing in the world But very challenging especially if you don't have HTML or want to tweak with CSS to be able to add that sort of thing turning this into quotes with a citation. This is going by pretty quickly because there's a lot to show and This kind of block-based editor We still retain the flexibility and ease of editing of before so if you're in a text block You just press enter twice and you're in a new paragraph or new block You can select multiple blocks which we're doing here and actually move all of those around so This is The very very first thing we're sort of ready to show to the world of the blocks of Course it works on mobile So this is a little preview of the mobile version of it because of course can't have anything that doesn't work on mobile anymore But you'll see the exact same UI patterns the exact same kind of ideas of what's going on Working perfectly in a mobile context as well the cool thing about this is that for those of you all watching out at home or Admitting system in your blog on your phone. This is now available in the WordPress plugin directory It's just looping now. You can stop it So as of before I got on stage it have fewer than 10 active sites in the world So we'll see how many it has at the end of the talk I think that value is cashed for like 24 hours, but by tomorrow the next day Hope we can get that up there. The purpose is to we can stop the video. I Don't know where AV is The purpose is that we built this in a way that we can have it gestate and be used as a while as a plugin and so we want as many people trying this out as possible and We're gonna build a lot more types of blocks And this is the basis for of course what's gonna be the future customization So blocks will replace widgets blocks will replace kind of all the other fundamentals and primitives inside WordPress until everything is a block Well done, so couple of comments are those my images you guys are using They might be some of your foes. Okay. Just want to make sure who to send the bill to Not everything in life is open source Hold the mic a little closer. So I'm sure you know, I'm gonna be politically incorrect for a minute. I You know Medium should just you know close shop right now. Don't they shouldn't they? Well, what I'm hoping is that you know medium started five or six years ago Browser technology which you can do has advanced quite a bit I think that this actually allows us to leapfrog past some of the really great visual editors that Because we're able to build on the shoulders of things like medium Wix square space to other people have come before us and say, okay building this today in 2017 What's the very best experience that you can have? I'm also just so so so proud of the team You know it by yo and a Matias, but with many others contributing at how far this has come So we're about six months in on here the previous attempts that We made or I made to replace tiny emcee went about two years and we ended up not shipping it So this happening in six months and being available to you all to run on your blogs today It'll add us a menu to your sidebar, so there'll be a Gutenberg menu item Is to me, I'm just so so proud of the team and so so excited about what we'll be able to do over the coming months So, you know jokes aside, you know, I've like no problems with medium and But what I do like the idea of having a very clean interface for editing Writing and creating a website When will this become standard like interface for a wordpress going forward? It's a good question. I posted a little bit about this on both the make core blog and on my own blog ma.TT We should say our Twitter handles too. You're at home, which is like the coolest Twitter handle probably in the room Maybe in the world. I'm at photo mat So you can visit those and see the latest post But I think that you know, we did a 4.8 release just last week That went pretty well and we were able to get some nice Especially customization related improvements into core in a ways I think will significantly help new users and also with the events widget Which is the idea that when you load your dashboard in the news widget, it's been replaced So it shows some news, but it also shows nearby meetups and events I think this could totally blow up the community event side of wordpress as I don't know the community and kind of where we are is as many ways a secret sauce It's a magic ingredient of wordpress and so but many people are unaware of it It's the most common thing we hear from new people in meetups is I didn't even know this was happening I just kind of stumbled across it. So making those a lot more prominent. I think is Gonna really help connect the community all over the world The I think that we'll be able to do a 4.9 before we merge Gutenberg But I want in the meantime to get the Gutenberg plug-in used by a lot of sites ideally over a hundred thousand Before we do the merge in the core and replace the edit screen a lot of people have a lot of things built into the edit screen So part of the reason we're putting out there as a plug-in first and also going to be pushing it so hard trying to Gives me be many people to install it as possible is so that everyone who has sort of you know posting and editing screen adjustments Can rethink them to be beautiful within this new framework I think that some things that people did and like tiny mce toolbar things aren't really needed anymore Stuff that people did in the past of custom post types might be better as blocks There's a lot it gives us a real opportunity to reimagine a lot of the user interactions and flows that today We've taken for granted actually on the edit screen for about like five or six years So what what was the impetus behind redesigning this was it because? the blogging itself has changed or it has WordPress itself changed from being a blogging platform to to Like a web platform Well, I do tech support for this guy called Ohm who's been asking for this for like five years I still haven't used it and I didn't get to see it just to be clear It was a surprise to him too I Think that I want to you know, we've taken stabs at this before if You imagine like our previous efforts with post formats like to make it easier to do certain types of media or quote post or things Like that that whole concept can now flatten to just being a block So if you had a post with just a quote block all of a sudden that's a quote post format quote post format Coast post I wasn't used in there too fast do it fast quote post format So working all that in I think it's bringing things that we've been thinking about forever for a very very long time in WordPress and Also that there've been some cool plugins around like Taylor was a plugin that's done some interesting things There's another one whose name is escaping me Had a name like canvas or something someone will probably remember people have built some things like this before and You know sort of not building on any of that code directly by building on those concepts I think what has allowed us to You know get to this point and move as quickly as we have but I'll have it just looking around WordPress and seeing How much we're doing the same thing in different places With no sort of law just because we built it at different times. So for example, you all are familiar with short codes Short codes don't work everywhere You're all familiar with widgets. Why can't I put widgets into my post? Why can't I put widgets into my footer? Like how why do we have these different concepts of like little blocks of content all over that can be used different ways But aren't very discoverable Have the equivalent of like an HTML UI in the case of short codes or maybe Like a gallery image widget if we're lucky and then over on the widget side We're you know, it's really one of the most legacy things in WordPress because widgets go back almost 10 years at this point and A lot of those UIs haven't been rethought that was one of the things in 4.8 Like we had a text widget that never had whizzy wig Even though we've had whizzy wig in WordPress for the better part of a decade. So or maybe a decade at this point so just Looking around WordPress with kind of a beginner's Mindset and saying what are the screens that we've looked at a thousand times that we take for granted but that might not make sense anymore and This allows us a framework to completely redo all that. So just to be clear at some point in the future will People come to WordPress After they've downloaded it and all they will see is this interface and then get going I Guess the way to think about it is that right now WordPress makes you learn a lot of concepts short codes widgets kind of the stuff that exists inside tiny mce is as blocks today and People rightly wonder why they can't use those things everywhere So what we're trying to do is shift it so that you only have to learn about blocks once and once you learn About the image block that can be in a post that can be in a sidebar it can be in a page It can be wherever you want to put it and a custom post type and that is this it'll work exactly the same way and Whatever is integrated with it like I say there's a plug-in that brings in your Google photos or your Dropbox that'll now work everywhere too Okay, so Is it because people do Think of blogging differently Now that this is becoming more relevant and what I mean by that is People blog on Facebook and people blog on Twitter and elsewhere even on Instagram So and blogging isn't what used to be blogging when I started doing it and now feels like Almost 17 years ago So And now you guys are more involved in being the CMS for you know Stores and and you know restaurants and hotels and stuff is that why you guys are going in this direction Well, certainly the way plugins have been pushing WordPress is a big part of it So imagine how much easier like putting WooCommerce items on a page or embedding a gravity form or rich contact form Will be when you can move these things all around or maybe starting to put those in sidebars with conditional views So it only shows up on one page But not another like these things the concepts just become a lot easier The but the the web has moved quickly over the past few years. I would say that right now is Maybe the point since For those of you who have been around a while You remember when six apart was like utterly dominant and kind of the arch nemesis of WordPress in a lot of ways We're probably at the point when we have more competition than we ever had in the past from the proprietary side From the you know wix's and square spaces of the world we believe as well On the open source side we're a trouble eights, which has been doing some really neat things and some other open source platforms as well and then finally just on the like general Like web content building whether or mobile content building your investor was a cult story house. Mm-hmm a really beautiful like especially on the iPad app that allowed you to Drag and drop elements and rearrange things to create like a rich story experience. We have Magazines whether they're online ones like you know Vox or Recode or the verge or like what the New York Times pioneered with their a snowfall story like showing like really rich interactive stories You can do that now with this editor and I could even even imagine anything something like that. If you all see the Bloomberg code issue You don't see this it was Quite possibly the most amazing thing I've ever read online This is awesome guy called Paul Ford and for Bloomberg Business Week a business oriented magazine He did an article on code and I think it was the entire print magazine But when you looked online the article was actually an interactive like JavaScript driven teaching you how to code Thing so it's both taking you through the history of code where presses mentioned a few times and then as you go There's like little exercises with like real-time debugging Where you can like move things around or animate a hand-to-wave or and when you get to the end of it It told you how much time you spent on the article. I left it open in a tab So it kind of broke it. I left it open for like a month. So I was like you spent 9,000 hours on this article. So it's it was but it was pretty amazing You're not gonna do that out of the box with Gutenberg, but you can completely imagine Gutenberg plus a cool plug-in allowing you to build something like that and Then post and pages evolve and I think that's where the independent web really has the opportunity to distinguish itself from kind of the cookie-cutter What social media platforms lie to do be it? Facebook or Tumblr or Twitter or Instagram, you know, you can't even have links in Instagram It doesn't mean that they're not cool But I think that as these platforms on board people and as billions of people come online, they'll be like Like the training wheels, you know, they'll get people to understand the power and Publishing online and sharing and but also their limitations will be things that the the best people on these platforms were running to pretty quickly well, I think you know one of the people I've been talking to recently described the the Facebook and Google and others like the McDonald's basically One menu for everyone and you can pick and choose what you want from that menu, but that's about it But you know, there's still many more people Eat at McDonald's we may you know scoff at it, but they do and in from that standpoint, I think shouldn't Facebook as the WordPress as a community be looking at how do we figure out a way to work with things like Facebook to bring in What is the crucial part of Facebook? Which is the the social graph the network because at the end of the day? The blogging today or you know creating websites for business is a different thing But from a blogging standpoint, which may be a decreasing You know segment what really makes the difference, especially in the independent vibe is that people should be able to discover your Content more easily and read it more easily So is there a way for you guys to work with somebody like Facebook to kind of push that idea? So I think the integrations with social networks are really important and WordPress being Swiss meaning we can work with everything is a is a key advantage that we have there Versus, you know some of the the guys that are fighting each other the big giant companies that are fighting each other that with the philosophical sort of Rails that we've chosen for WordPress currently that wouldn't be something that happens in core It'll be something that happens in plugins jetpack being obvious and popular example But many others as well that do deeper integrations or targeted things with the social network social media and The big ones that are supported in things like jetpack, but also all around the world You know we have a very international crew here There's lots of other social networks and things that maybe aren't to the threshold where they're built into one of the more popular plugins But in a given country that might be a very popular integration, right? are you thinking about figuring out a way to publish from WordPress into let's say We chat or WhatsApp or telegram and if yes when I Been really fascinated by the messaging platforms Telegram is my personal favorite, but of course I recognize like the auto dominance of things like we chat in other markets Yeah, I think it's pretty cool telegram has a new sort of groups broadcast feature that I think is a really cool way to follow blogs and we're doing some experiments with that inside automatic So there's definitely some stuff that could that could come down the line there Can we do that earlier than Gutenberg? I? Guess that gets back to when Gutenberg's coming in. Yeah, exactly. Okay, when I dodged No, because I think the the the world of Information is now the consumption is happening not just inside the traditional web browser That's what I mean is that so the the great way to think about WordPress is What press becomes the information router it takes information from my head and publishes into all these different Platforms and it stays my homestead, but you know it can still go other places the content I mean the information I create that's what I mean is like all you know like it the difference between what blogging was 17 years ago and what it is today is that Like people don't go to a place to read a blog. They just need to be sent the information to get that blog You know, so that's why I'm thinking is that part of the the long-term thinking at WordPress just now Absolutely, and I think that part of it is if we look at one Some of the cool things that made blogs such a rich interaction on early days Feed readers and RSS a way to openly follow and get notified of everything out there blog roles Unfortunately of which the code is still in core, but you know this idea that you can link to your favorite sites And so there's discovery mechanisms think of it like related blogs like I think there's a ton we can do there But I think that We have to make the user experience of following and reading and consuming these sites as smooth and as fast as It is when you're in the closed garden of a social network. I think we can actually do a little bit better I think that some technologies that I embrace Hesitantly like say amp from Google accelerated mobile pages actually do provide a really cool framework to create a more Distributed Facebook a more distributed take on or more independent take on what we want to read and consume and follow And I think that is something we've all woken up to especially in the past year or two with a political cycle The social networks as a means of distribution Do influence How people think how people react What's you know the information that we put in just like the food you eat influences your health the information that we eat and consume Influencers our mindsets and our happiness and what we want to do and the actions we take So I think that we're going to be want to be much more thoughtful The McDonald's Facebook analogy actually works on a whole different level Then I think we even intended it when we started but to stretch it just a little bit further You know fate our McDonald's is what's called the largest restaurant in the world I'm just making this up because I don't know the food stats and a lot of people eat there But I bet if you added up all the other restaurants in the world it would dwarf all the other food consumed every day And Donald's would be less than 1% and I think that's what the web can create is we have this ability To create something that is highly distributed, but in aggregate Becomes the real driving force of humanities interaction with each other So I'm gonna go back to what one thing you just said earlier during our conversation that if you look at a screen Thousand times and in a month in a year you kind of you know become very familiar with it and Can't see it from a user's new a beginner standpoint And that's why Gutenberg is such such an influential thing similarly When you look at the internet today You have all these people who keep talking about the open web the independent web But they don't see things from the average user's perspective How do you make an average person care for the open web or are the independent web as we call it mostly because They just think all about the web as Facebook and say well We go there all our friends are there and all our enemies are there So we can just hang out in one place and so they it just actually when I think about the open Web and you know and I want open web to flourish, but when you think about it from like you know the the new Internet users do they really care? Well, I think something that it goes back to the very early days of WordPress is that we strongly believed and I personally believed in the Morality of open source and the GPL and that it's a better thing for humanity. It's a better thing for the world I want everything I do to be open source, but also there was the recognition from the very beginning that we weren't going to make the web Run by open source software by going out there saying how superior open source is Right, we actually had to make a better experience and we had to beat the proprietary systems at their own game We had to actually be better than them not just in license and in morality But in like the day-to-day functioning of how you interact with the software That's I believe how WordPress being six of parts which was a far better funded larger More institutionally supported everything competitor We beat it not just by being open, but by being better and being open as part of being better, but it is a Was it necessary but not sufficient condition? To what we ultimately the web that we want to create the web that we want our children to grow up with Which I don't think looks like I don't have any children yet So I got a little extra time, but I don't think it looks like the currently sort of large company dominated Facebook at all Version of what we're seeing today. So what does it look like to you five years from now or ten years from now? I Think you can take the best of the user experience of some of these platforms But have it brings together things from all over the web So that's there is or even if you're if there was an algorithm determining on what you see or what's most popular That you can see how the algorithm works that you know the data going into it We're in kind of a very strange spot right now where we're gonna have cars driving themselves that we don't know how it works That the the algorithms and the code driving that car is not gonna be public and more importantly for machine learning systems The data behind it is proprietary So it's going to be a black box perhaps even to the developers of those systems to why it makes certain decisions why it works The way it does cars are easy. They're obvious because you know, you can see them moving around Inevitably by the way, I'm a fan of self-driving cars. They'll be vastly safer than humans inevitably. There'll be an accidents People will die. It's just it's part of the the large of law numbers, but It I think that sort of more physical instantiation This machine learning algorithm-driven world will help wake us up to how much our minds are being driven by the algorithms that determine What news we see every day? No, let's let's I want to see how that works. Yeah, so I just want to take give you an example Okay, sure. So if somebody was five years old in 2000 when I started blogging and they would be worth 22 now, right and their idea of a blog is very different from what is my idea of a blog 17 years ago, so Somebody who's like maybe five or ten years old now in Ten years from now, there will be 20 21 and and they are the kids who are growing up using iPads or you know Android pads and and they're talking to Alexa and Siri and things like that What does a platform like WordPress? evolve into ten years from now when kids who have Who are going to grow up and they have not really you know touch and voice and Gestures are their primary way of interacting with the information and not Text which is what the open web is all about. It's very textual. It's very you know, like link centric How does it evolve into that? How do we overcome the limitations of user experience? It's a good question and it's an interesting thought experiment So if we were to like fast forward 10 or 15 years I'll say one assumption which might be a place we disagree that I think text will Text and things on a screen even if that screen is on our glasses or something else will still be a key or visually consumed information We'll still be a key part of it. So I do not believe that voice driven interfaces Are going to be able to have the density to Do what we consume so much So let's assume that still screens You know, I might wake up Future You know today five-year-old in the future 20 year old. I have a beautiful device maybe with a bendable LED Launch an open-source application. Maybe WordPress. Maybe something else that can then go out to all of the people I follow Celebrities are now using WordPress because it's easy enough for them to use because the Gutenberg version 10 is so easy that even You know the most Challenge celebrity could use it to post music or embarrassing pictures of themselves or selfies And they're doing it because as opposed to one of the social networks because they control the follower list They can take it with them. They're not beholden. They've been burnt one Instagram version 23 Decided that you had to pay to reach your followers and so the Kardashians of the world or their children have now moved on to other things The I have a choice in my sort of app whether I want to see ads Let's say I have more time than money or if I have more money than time I filled up like a blockchain based Let's call it Bitcoin for the sake of argument wallet that gives like a little micro transaction to everything I consume or like or share with my friends And so there's a business model for everyone out there that doesn't have to be driven by you know users being sold to companies to sell more things I Think that then I message using open protocols with all my friends so I'm not tied into something that only works on iPhone like I message or something that's tied to One particular or it's sort of mind like a Gmail or Facebook messenger I think that that is a instance distributed and fully encrypted Transaction my phone is also fully secure. It's locked with several biometrics and and so encrypted that like even if State actor had it in their physical possession. It'd be hard for them to get data out of it I mean we can imagine this current trends playing out to that And then you know WordPress version 14 is Technology behind all this You know if I buy something from you know the Kardashians grandchild that's selling something on there You know a distributed network. Maybe that goes through open source software as well instead of going to Amazon I can go through a WooCommerce or whatever other plugins take it you you can imagine these things playing out But if and only if we make the user experience better Well, I'm glad you're more optimistic about the future and the open web Because you know it will need a lot of hope and optimism and you know wild imagination to to do that because The open web is competing with very deep pocketed Players with very short arms, you know, they don't they don't like to share they like to take all the time So I will go I'm gonna stop asking you questions. Otherwise. I'll just eating to everybody else's time and I will rather have the audience ask questions from and To you and and then if they don't then I'll come back again. I have a lot of questions for you by the way Cool, well, thank you so far. So we have some mics up front that people can go to so if you you go there's one over there and one over there and I'll point and then we'll kind of rotate between them or go I guess say your name and also because we're working up your just where you're from because that's pretty interesting And we'll start right over here since you got there first. Oh, we might need to turn the mic on Maybe on that side to make sure it's on 25 years in the future we'll still have problems I'm Norbert I'm coming from Germany now In my opinion every website is a search engine A wordpress.com for example if I want to discover a new blog post I can go to discover wordpress If I want to discover tags I can go to wordpress.com Tags it's a search engine every website is a search engine in my opinion search engine Optimization should be something the wordpress community develops Is this on on the map and if it is can it go higher on the map so that proprietary algorithms and secret algorithms no longer Guide users on the web That's a tough one So and to make sure I'm understanding correctly. You don't mean like the equivalent of Yoast and core But you mean like building a Google We're us building like a Google wordpress is the search engine. Oh, yeah so I Do think that we can I mean one thing about Wordpress is we've always had a foot in the idealism and a foot in the pragmatism of what's possible in today's technology That's why things like jetpack exists to kind of bridge us between what's allowable today like a distributed web host that cost five or ten bucks a month and What we think is going to be required in the future. So for example every jetpack site has Access to Elasticsearch API which gives them a much richer Form of querying and ranking and related posts and everything for all the content on their site that you can't really do with Maria to be Or my sequel Today so on a per site basis that is there today and kind of like a an in-between way Right, you need a plug-in. It's a hosted service But in the future as you know Moore's law continues That'll be something you can run on the five dollar a month web host and of course with jetpack We open-source everything so that'll be available elastic search itself is open-source now in terms of going cross-site though meaning that you You sort of map through things I'm not aware of technology that makes that really easy today, but I wonder if you know you take Sort of the conclusion or the logical conclusion of our open APIs the next versions as things like graph QL and some sort of Federation where Be a DNS based or other ways that you could kind of go out there You could have sites that tie together better than they do today But at the end of the day if you're going to do a search of everything out there you need to store that someplace For it to complete in a reasonable amount of time It wouldn't have to be a one-size-fits-all engine discover works differently than tags do and I think maybe people could also Develop their own algorithms and have different Different algorithms of references. Yeah, cool. And thank you for the question. You're very forward-thinking All right, let's go over to the right here Hi Matt, it's Alec Knieher from folio vision and Radislav in Slovakia. I hate long questions So I'll try and keep this short. It's about ethics of open-source So it's gonna just take a second you guys bought WooCommerce and have done amazing things with it I mean, it's the marketing and the support and All of the systems that you've put into place with the team working on WooCommerce are amazing even from what was a Plug-in which was running well commercially before you bought it the one thing which worries me in the WooCommerce acquisition was not your acquisition of WooCommerce from Woo, you paid them twenty six million dollars to take their crown jewel and do something much bigger with it Which is easier for? Company with audit like automatic with such huge reach But what bothers me is the original creators They moved with the product that the coders moved with the product But the people who spent five years developing it. I think it was Gigo shop ended up with nothing from the woo deal and I'm wondering how you feel about that process of sort of open-source being subverted in that some people put a lot of time and money into something and basically had their developers nipped and Ended up in a way taking Taking a huge loss And so it's your reaction to that an alternative reaction would be when you paid twenty six million dollars to woo Why not give two million dollars to the Gigo shop people and say thank you you guys did Amazing work supporting these guys Mike Jolly or I think is his name and the other developers to get where they are and just thank you so much and That would seem to me somehow more equitable arrangement. And so it's a really deep Open-source dilemma and I'd love to hear your thoughts on it. It's a good and interesting question. So thank you for bringing it I must admit that I am not Like intimately familiar with the because it was many many years before the acquisition of kind of the Gigo shop to Woo commerce The subtleties there I know that some of the developers who worked on Gigo shop then moved over to what at the time was woo themes But I do think in general that when you know when you buy something an open source Obviously when we did that acquisition for an unconfirmed amount you You're not buying the code if automatic just wanted the code we could have downloaded Woo commerce and had it all It's all open source. I mean, that's one of the beauties They could also sell it But that wasn't the thing that we were trying to bring into the to the core of automatic DNA It was the people you know 53 people joined the company Join automatic it was the brands or the brand of Woo commerce It was the integrations and the meet-ups and the everything that they had built Since then which from what I know Did a crew largely to when it was in its Woo commerce days It didn't have as much of that the extensions and everything else when it was in this the Gigo shop days to be honest I found out about Gigo shop before the acquisition but a little bit later I had heard about Woo commerce for a while and I think I'd seen the controversy originally when it happened but It was more like an diligence and I was learning about everything and I read through the Woo commerce blog going back to like the first post I was like oh this thing happened, but I guess you can make the same argument of you know WordPress itself being a fork of v2 at some point if you build enough on the code I'm not saying What is the right answer there because I would need to dig into more to what actually happened But at some point the beauty of open source is you can take the code build on it enough that it becomes something that is wholly different I guess you have sort of a thesis is ship question there and We don't yet have an equity model that reflects contributions to code over time you know when a web host gets bought like let's say media temple and Half a more of the revenue is coming from WordPress powered sites But all the people who worked on WordPress don't receive any of that acquisition I think that's that's just something that's going to happen It's something you have to be comfortable with when you put your code out there as open source And the future there might be something around like blockchains or initial corn offerings or something like that which Allows people to sort of actually have an equity in what moves with code But I don't think that we even have the technical underpinnings for that really widely available today The one thing that worries me is I'm going to open it up for other questions just because we have a long line here and not Thanks for the answer, but thank you for asking a cool one All right, we'll bounce over here Hello, Matt. Hello. I'm Sarah gooding from WP Tavern That's not a country Yeah, it will be someday I've got a question Continuing that conversation about the open web there's been quite a bit of discussion surrounding Google's amp project Accelerated mobile pages for the past year or so and there are many who believe that it's actually harmful to the open web Because it forces users to load JavaScript from their site Loads the cache content from its own servers and uses a subset of HTML that optimizes pages to benefit Google and Google's users WordPress comm was one of the first publishers to partner with Google on this initiative to speed up the mobile web But automatic's official plug-in hasn't been updated for eight months. My question is How is Google amp good for the open web and will automatic continue to support Google's initiative? Whoo, okay So there's some pluses and minuses the things I like about amp are that it removes a lot of cruft and it's ultra fast Like now in search results if I see an amp link I'm more likely to click on that than other things because I know it's going I know it's going to load really fast I know I'm not going to get some sort of weird pop-up that redirects my browser to the app store or anything like that So that I think is good and necessary It is kind of amazing that Google is driving this like I know if y'all saw the news that Google is going to build an ad Blocking the Chrome next year like it's almost like we're in a bizarre world for actually so many reasons But Google doing ad blocking is definitely a bizarre world thing like I feel like I'm maybe not in the correct parallel universe like something's forked What I dislike about it are the things you mentioned so amp itself the specification doesn't require it to be loaded from Google servers but that's currently how a lot of imblotations work and I don't like how the share URL then becomes Google dot something I think it's bad for fishing as we've seen some pretty a very smart attack on Gmail or Google Drive recently So those have some downsides. I think that those can be worked out. So something You know WordPress is very early in adopting Responsiveness responsive pages and also some plugins including built-in to jetpack itself that do a mobile version of the site Do create a better experience and I think a big reason of why people have adopted WordPress in the past Amp is the next version of that it is more open and standard than what we've done in the past and I could see it becoming a Much more inclusive thing than it is and given that that is automatic one of automatic core principles as well We're gonna work with Google to try to push it that direction and try to bring a lot of the web along with it because you know The alternatives out there like say Facebook's proprietary instant articles format are not necessarily better Especially if they tie you in to say one form of monetization like Facebook's ads So I do believe that amp has the potential to be a much more open and in line with WordPress's ideals version of that But it is imperfect as it stands today. Can I just ask a follow-up on that? You have a mic so yeah I think the amp you as a group WordPress as an as a big massive entity on the internet Basically should force Google to give people their own servers to do amp on their own servers as part of you know implementation I think when you are roughly 26 percent of the Web's traffic they you have way more control on On how they behave and you could be the user be a be you know a cop on the behalf of users and Privacy and independence in my opinion. I mean, you know Thank You Sarah for asking that question because I'm in your camp on little skepticism around amp. I Hope that we that's a very good idea And I hope that we can always be an advocate on behalf of users. Yes and everything we do. Yeah Over here to the right No. Oh, hi Matt. I'm Kevin and I'm from Bristol, England I was I like what I saw at Gutenberg. Yeah, but is it heavily influenced by Wix and Divi? Because I don't have any problems editing on in WordPress But some of my friends who are not familiar with it do and they like Divi and Wix well because they can edit so easily I think it's definitely informed by things that have come before but we're trying to leapfrog them We're not trying to catch up to what these people have now or did a few years ago We're trying to go to where the puck is skate to where the puck is going to use a hockey metaphor Even though I've only seen one hockey game in my life So that is is the main idea and I the hope is that not just that it's Easier and more intuitive for new users, but it actually allows power users to do things faster And so that's really with WordPress and its history We the the balance we've tried to walk were being intuitive and accessible for new people We're allowing folks like many of you all here in this room So maybe do the things that you used to do but much faster than before so yeah, definitely informed Thank you for the question Over here on the left. Hi. I'm Jonathan from Los Angeles work at dream host Thank you so much Ohm for asking the question about the open web. It's something that really resonates with me personally I've spent a lot of time like a lot of people in the room begrudgingly on social media and in these silos, right? but mainly because of convenience and interaction and I believe as well that with the leadership position that WordPress has and the ideals that the WordPress community has There's a real opportunity to kind of flip social networking on its head, right? I've seen a lot of really cool work going on lately around the micro blog project if you're familiar and some of the stuff that W3C is doing with things like web mention which allows you to have Your sites actually interact with each other and it's starting to build out like I can see this future And I'm really excited about it, but I haven't really seen WordPress take a leadership position I've seen it kind of watching and observing So I just wanted to see if you've been tracking those things and if you think the community should embrace it as well I have been tracking those things I do think that there's other things we need to Embrace and figure out beforehand. It doesn't matter if you're 128% of the web if we can only get a third of that to upgrade to the latest version You know it doesn't matter like a lot of these things happen It doesn't matter if we could you know create a distributed reader that spiders everything out if that's going to be shut down by web post for using too many resources, so I think that It's more of I raise it as something for the community to keep in mind We have something magical which is a business model, which is not advertising driven I say that we globally like as people building on WordPress services automatic certainly So I think that is the thing that will allow us to first we need to build a better user experience If you want people to use something instead of newsfeed it has to be as engaging as the newsfeed But two because you're not advertising driven thing. Can you open that up in some interesting way? Yes, and so but if you don't do that first thing it doesn't matter He hasn't talked about like the perfect software that no one uses It doesn't matter if something supports every single possible web standard and format and everything if no one's using it then it's you know It's a standard falling in a forest. So yeah, I agree with you I'm excited about seeing WordPress help drive these things though. So but the great answer. Thank you so much So we can only take two more questions All right, I got them hand wave got the hand wave. Okay, I'll try to do lightning round So if you can ask a quick question, I will give you a quick answer and maybe we'll get through four of them But we'll see I'll keep an eye on the watch Hello, my name is Jackie. I'm from San Francisco, and I'm concerned about freedom of speech Teresa may promise to clamp down on on the web and FCC chair is looking to get rid of net neutrality and Optimistic about our community leading efforts in the open web. And so I'm curious to see what you have to say about WordPress maintaining an open web and specifically about automatic perhaps revisiting the freedom of speech page that you have up that is To me personally a vague on how hate speech is treated. So curious about that That's a tough one because at the same time we're dealing with like Fake news and other, you know misleading deliberately misleading or high harmful to society things happening out there I'll have to look at our freedom of speech page I probably haven't read it a little while but I would say that constitutionally myself and automatic and a lot of people in this room are very very much attached to that concept as A company based in the US which I guess used to be more of a good thing But like first amendments and all these sort of things that allow for this We'll fight for that and we have gone to court before to fight for I think it was a user in the UK We've spent money on legal resources where we submits, you know Opinions to Supreme Court cases like we're definitely trying to stay as active as possible there I'm going to end there only because I want to get to as many of these so but thank you. Thank you Hi, my name is Hendrik. I'm from Munich, Germany and last year in Vienna I believe you talked about the possibility of work as being the operating system of the web How far do you think we've got in last 12 years and and to do that becoming reality because 28% 28% and in a mobile market. We have operating system operating far under that threshold So how are we on the operas operating system on the web? I think we are doing well But you know I'll go back to upgrades like I talked about earlier like a key thing of being an operating system is having a way to have people on the latest and greatest security becomes a huge issue and For us. I think that something I'm very excited about now that Gutenberg is In such a good place Customization is going to kick off relatively soon One of the areas that I'm going to shift my attention to a little bit and that we talked about in the community summit is looking at plugins and themes and how we can ensure that those are as up-to-date and also as Have something closer to the standards and attention that we pay to core in terms of the code quality of the code style the Scalability and the security of them. So keep an eye out Thank you. Hi, I'm Chip Rihanna. I'm from Romania Two years ago almost two years ago your recommended encourage the entire WordPress community to learn JavaScript deeply It's now 2017. How would you evaluate the overall progress? And on a strategic level, do you see mobile apps as being the next growth opportunity for WordPress? Ecosystems just like blogs and websites were more than two ten years ago Hmm who has learned JavaScript deeply so far Who still needs to Yep, it looks like we're about half the way there With Gutenberg and the things that follow it I think that will shift more and more of the WordPress interface to be JavaScript chipping So, you know as a percentage, I feel like this is going to be if you think about Writing editing and customization There you cover. I would say 70 or 80 percent of the crucial tasks that people do in WP admin every day So that's being in this modern JavaScript space I believe that the team is I don't know if they've chosen a framework yet, but let's call it reactor view It's there. So I would say that as soon as Gutenberg is out there or today Start digging into that code because that is going to be the sort of nucleus of what becomes JavaScript throughout WP admin or maybe like the calypso like replacement for WP admin in the future So we're doing okay, but could do a lot better Okay, all right That's 55. All right. Thank you so much You should do a pop-up chat with people afterwards Yeah, and if you if you we didn't get to your question, I apologize We had a few people in line if you tweet it to me I will do my best to answer it or link to an answer if it takes more than 140 characters. So Thank you very much. I really appreciate you all. Thank you so much you