 So, in case you forgot, Mélis is only my Twitter description says I love cows, WordPress and food notes and that covers about 99% of my life and I'm also partner in a web development firm in Quebec, Canada where we mostly work with WordPress and I'm also a writer and I write in French. Quebec is a pretty small market, but I have more than 4,000 followers on Twitter, 1,600 on Instagram, 3,000 friends on Facebook. Well, they're not all my friends, but let's say they're friends. 10,000 followers on a page, a few hundred people visit my blog every day even though I don't post very often and I still haven't figured out what to do with Snapchat. My cloud is higher than 70. I don't know if it's still the case, but when cloud was at its peak in 2012 or something, you could monetize your influence. You could get room upgrades. You could get perks. I think I got shampoo once and cat food and my cat was pretty excited about the food and I was not about the shampoo anyways. Now that ad blocks is blocking ads. Advertisers are looking for influencers. Influencers marketing is kind of a gold rush. Everybody's talking about it even in WordCamps. Over the past few years, influence has become a synonym of marketing. Each one of us is like a marketing channel. So I guess I can use my influence to get VIP invites in restaurants and that would be super nice. But the question is, is it the best use I can make of my influence? There's an old field of research dedicated to thinking of questions like that. It's called ethics. One of the most renowned addition and we're going to do a bit of philosophy this afternoon. So there's a pretty well-renowned philosopher called Peter Singer. And he likes to think of stuff like that and he, like other philosophers, he plays with what we call thought experiment and one of those famous thought experiment is the following. So imagine that you are walking past a shallow pound and you see a small child running like this. Well, not like this, but it's a shallow pound and you could easily rescue the child, but if you do that your expensive shoes will be ruined. So what will you do? Would it be wrong to just ignore the child and walk on because you want to save your shoes? So who thinks he or she should save our shoes? Well, thank you. Nobody. Of course, we all agree it would be wrong to put our shoes first. Singer points out that by donating the value of our shoes to charities that protect children from disease such as malaria and diarrhea in developing countries, you can save a child's life. For instance, if you give $100 today at the Against Malaria Foundation, you will protect 60 people against malaria for three years. So, Singer advocates for effective altruism. Effective altruism is encourage individuals to consider all causes and action and then act in the way that brings the greatest positive impact. It's based on their values. So reducing suffering is important. We all agree on that. It's much more important than keeping our nice shoes or being VIP in a restaurant. So if our goal is to reduce suffering, we should fight against poverty in the developing world. But there's also a lot of suffering in among the animal kingdom, especially in factory farm. Each year, 1 billion and 500, 150 billion animals are slaughtered just for food. So efforts to reduce factory farming, for instance, in eating less meat is a cost-effective way to reduce current global suffering. So this is me at Vine. Vine is a farm sanctuary in Vermont that offer refuge to animals who have been rescued from the meat dairy and egg industry. It is an amazing place. It's like a word camp for animals. It's super exciting. Anyways, I work on issues related to animals for a few years and I'm always wondering what would be the most effective way to use my time. And one night, it was in 2014, I was having drinks with friends and we were discussing the fact that a group of French activists were trying to change a civil code in France to change the legal statues of animals. And we decided we should try to do the same in Quebec, where we also have a civil code that is a cornerstone of our legal system. So until recently, animals were considered things in the Quebec civil code. Both couches and pigs were considered to be movable property. So from a legal standpoint, animals had the same rights as the couch or a pair of shoes. So this opened the door to inhumane practices. And this is Esther. I don't know if you know her, but she's pretty famous in Canada. She has one million followers on Facebook. So I don't know about her clout, but she's more popular than Chris Lema. So it's kind of big in the animal kingdom. So she's like the Chris Lema of the animal kingdom, but she's popular among human too. And she was adopted by a couple in Toronto in 2012 and they thought she was a mini pig. But as you can see, it was a mistake and they kept her and she now has her own queen size bed because the couch is not big enough anymore. So Esther knows how to open the fridge door. She has her favorite meals and everything, but and she's probably the happiest pig in Canada. And while she stays, she lays on the couch. Well, millions of other pigs are simply used as a mean of production. So this could change, but we needed to raise awareness on the topic. So we created a simple website within a few hours and we decided it would be a manifesto. Not a petition on sites such as change.org or through the official government petition service because we wanted to have our own branding first. We wanted to have space to explain the issue and we of course wanted to own the email addresses of the signatories. So this site was made bilingual because we're in Quebec, French and English, we used polyline to make this site bilingual. I think it's the best plugin for this kind of use. And signatures were gathered by the participant database plugin. So it's a super great plugin for that kind of need. It's super flexible. It has a short code so you can insert your signup form wherever you want. Here it's in the text widget and you can display the list of signatures the way you want wherever you want on a page in a widget or whatever. So it was there. We were super happy. But there is a dozen of petition sites out there and we needed to stand out. So what we did is that before the official launch we reached two academic people in the media entertainment just to get signatures from celebrities. So when we launched the site it was not a bunch of activists trying to change the law. It was 30 celebrities trying to change the law in Quebec. And that decision was key in getting media attention. So we gave the scoop to a major paper and then we sent the release into the regular news wires. So a few hours after the launch we had already 5,000 signatures and then we were featured in the evening news. So we were pretty excited about that but our host panicked. So that night we were very happy not to be on a cheap $3 a month hosting plan. We had just everything. The site was kept up and we continued to gather signatures but we didn't know what to do next. So big question, what could we do? So we sent emails to our signatories asking if anybody had experience with lobbying. We got a few pretty weird answers but some people offered to help and we started having meetings with members of parliament but we didn't know what we were doing and then big surprise a few months after there was a new minister of agriculture and he declared that he was willing to change the law and that animals wouldn't be considered as things anymore. So it was super, super good news for us. We got more drinks and we were excited about that. And then the law changed pretty quickly. The government even ran an ad campaign that reads that is not a piece of furniture anymore but let's be honest, now animals are considered as sentient beings in regards to the law but it doesn't mean they have better protection. Only time will tell us if it really changed something for them. But what I realized is that having this campaign and we gathered more than 50,000 signatures we started a conversation about the way we are treating animals and the fact that if animals are not things they shouldn't be treated as simple means of production. It's easy to close our eyes on issues like that. These are things we don't want to see but once we start the conversation it's hard for people not to change their habits. On a personal level working on something bigger than me using my time and influence for the greater good gave me more pleasure than room upgrades and free shampoo. I think we can tell our friends to watch this series on Netflix we can tell our friends to use those plugins by writing a blog post but I think we should use our influence for the greater good and we can. I used my time to change law, it worked but you can use yours in many other ways. Research shows that by spreading the word around us on the good things we do as influence on people and that will influence people in doing the same. So if each one of us is a marketing channel then each one of us can take action in making the word a better place and just to finish I'm going to give you a few links and my slides are already on Twitter so you can check them out. There is a few sites you can check out and most of them are done with WordPress so there's two reasons to check them out to know where to start to make the word a better place. So 80,000 hours is the number of hours you will work in your life and this site will help you based on five years of research to find a job that will make the planet a better place. GiveWell helps you optimize the donation you give to charities by listing charities that are really efficient and demonstrate real impact. Animal Charity Evaluators is doing the same for animal charities and the life you can save is based on the Peter Senior's book and it summarizes it and you will see that with only $1,000 you can save someone's life. So go ahead and check those sites out. Thanks.