 All right. Hello, everyone. Welcome to study hall today. We're going to be hearing from Topher on Word Camp crazy leveraging WordPress for world peace Topher is a WordPress developer from Grand Rapids, Michigan Where he lives with his wife daughters and two little dogs. Thank you. Topher take it away. Thank you very much Does anybody never heard of word for a hero press? Hero press have you ever never heard of it? Okay, so a few years ago I started I tried to start a commercial company called hero press There was gonna be like Ted where people would do video talks and it was intended for People on the fringes of wordpress people who live a thousand miles from the nearest meet-up To speak to other people like them A young man came to me from India and said, how do I get good contracts? I said, I don't know I'm not in India. I don't know business. So I found him somebody else in India and They spoke to each other and it was it was great As a commercial company that failed I didn't get the funding and it just That didn't work out. So instead of turned it into a blog style And so if you go to hero press comm today, you will see essays from people writing to their peers About the successes that wordpress provided to them the opportunities that wordpresses provides to them I've been doing this for several years now and over those years. I've got to know a lot of people from all over the world I like more countries than I knew existed I know people all over the place and we're good friends. We get on slack We chat we talk for hours and I learned things about Their culture and their life and things like that and the ideas for this talk Came from all those experiences all those interactions How many people know where pakistan came from? All right, good I have a little bit of information here. I want to read to you from wikipedia The partition of india in 1947 eventually accompanied the creation of two independent dominions India and pakistan the dominion of india became as of 1950 the republic of india and the common I'm sorry the dominion of pakistan became as of 1956 the islamic republic of pakistan The partition displaced over 14 million people along religious lines Creating overwhelming refugee crises in the newly constituted dominions There was large-scale violence with estimates of loss of life accompanying or proceeding the partition disrupted And varying between several hundred thousand and two million The violent nature of the partition created an atmosphere of hostility And suspicion between india and pakistan that plagues their relationship to the present When this happened There is there is a river That is the border between west pakistan and india And there was a farmer who his farm bordered that river And when the day came That the new pakistanis were coming for his farm The family ran out of the house and ran down to the river and started climbing into their boat And as he was pushing the boat into the river The pakistanis showed up and shot him in the back And he stayed there Dead in the water while the boat went on without him And his children in that boat grew up in punjab in the north of india And there one of their children moved to grand rapids michigan and runs a liquor store across the street from my house And he is a firm believer That ghandi was a criminal and a traitor Because he gave up His grandfather's farm He just gave it away And i talked to my other friends in india they're like really somebody thinks ghandi is a not a good not a good guy Well all of those people that lived up in west pakistan who were not muslims and had to run Are not very fond of ghandi Something interesting that happened when they split is you ended up with east and west pakistan Two separate areas Culturally quite different The people in east pakistan Are bengali People in west pakistan Are urdu urdu In Let's see is the date on here. Yes in 1971 There was a national election And the guy from east pakistan the bengali guy won by a landslide Huge No question The military in west pakistan said no we will not accept that leader And deposed him and put their own in place So the people from east pakistan said fine We're leaving And pakistan west pakistan said oh no you're not And so they went to war and i have this from uh Wikipedia The genocide in bangladesh began on 26 march 1971 with the launch of operation searchlight As west pakistan began a military crackdown on the eastern wing of the nation To suppress bengali calls for self-determination rights During the nine-month long bangladeshi war for independence members of the pakistani military And supporting islamic militias killed up to three million people nine months Three million people That's half the holocaust People in bangladesh do not like pakistan They struggle to Talk about pakistan They struggle to be in the same room with people from pakistan There we go Several years ago the the year the hero press started i was at word camp miami And i was walking across the lawn from one building to another and this guy walks up to me And he says are you tofer i said yeah And he stuck out his hand he said i have come here from pakistan to shake your hand I said what why would you come to miami from pakistan to shake my hand and he said because of hero press because of that project i started because He saw somebody like him on hero press and that changed his life Now he had other reasons he didn't just come to see me You don't just i mean that's that's a big trip Um, but he's from pakistan While he was there He met this guy My mouse off there Asif asif is from bangladesh As you may recall bangladesh he's don't like pakistanis Muhammad did not know that In pakistan They don't talk about the war because they lost They lost hard During that war they also attacked india at the same time India didn't put up with it That was what is now known as the shortest war in all of history. It was 13 days um So that was 71 was a bad year for pakistan They don't teach about it in schools. They don't talk about it. Nobody knows The old people know they don't but they don't talk about it So he was Muhammad was floored When asif didn't want to shake his hand he didn't want to talk to him. He didn't want to be in the same room with him But asif did it anyway He sat down with them and they talked and they spent the entire afternoon Sitting on a bench at work at miami talking about Their countries and their people and their history and all that stuff And Within about three months they had formed a company together And they sell a wordpress plugin called uh analytifi Which puts google analytics right in your dashboard asif has been to pakistan Muhammad has been to bangladesh Muhammad's dad wants to go visit bangladesh because of his relationship with asif That one afternoon Because of wordpress that one afternoon Changed these two guys lives now in 2018 Asif went to a lot of word camps He's doing pretty well financially. He actually retired. Uh, he retired on his 30th birthday That was his goals to use wordpress to retire and it worked so in 2018 he went on a lot of Word camp trips and he published his itinerary Excuse me. I have a bit of a cold He published this itinerary and said anybody who wants to go with me. Let's go And he formed a wordpress group called word camp crazy, which is why this talk is called that and several men Pakistan bangladesh and india Started traveling together to word camps And they didn't just stay near each other and they didn't just hang out. They stayed in hostels together They were all sleeping in the same room staring into the night talking about weddings and kids and dogs and houses and all the things people talk about in the night You may recall india and pakistan don't like each other very much either But these guys Their group grows more and more every year They are learning To be friends to love each other to care about each other They they stay in touch. They find out can I help you house business? You know, how's your mom? those things and They are changing The landscape of The whole india pakistan bangladesh world now. It's a small group They're not they're not going to change anybody's government right now. That's not going to happen But their kids might Their kids are going to know Each other they're all going to know All of them Wordpress has an existing worldwide network of people With a common interest that cuts across every cultural religious political and financial barrier If you were to try to find like if you want world peace You're going to have to find some commonality and we all have commonalities. Everybody's got kids You get two parents in the same room. It doesn't matter what culture they're going to come from They're going to talk about their kids But if you want to If you want to extend that you need to find more commonalities this one Spraying into being nobody said let's make a worldwide thing that everybody knows about and agrees with It just happened. There are word camps everywhere. There are meetups in every country So this thing exists What can we do with it? We could build websites. We could make companies but A question I have asked myself And I do not have an answer is do we have a moral responsibility to leverage this network for good You don't have to I don't have to I don't have to get on slack and find somebody from Nigeria and say hi, I'm Tofer But what if I did what if I did that every week a new person every week? And I start to get to know these people everywhere There's a man in Germany named Casper Casper who bring your I think I hope He's probably going to watch this later. Sorry Casper He last year two years ago he went to word camp harara in Zimbabwe So I don't know if you knew this but traditionally in order to have a word camp you must have a meetup That meets every month for a year And then you can say okay look we have this thing we can do a word cam now Well, once upon a time in Italy By accident sort of they had a meetup or they had a word camp and it created a meetup And people said hey Well, maybe we need to reverse this So they started a program where they took five cities in the world And they just did a word cam just let's just do it and see what happens And sure enough it worked meetups spring up. Well, harara was one of them in Zimbabwe They did not have a meetup. There was nothing going on. There was just a couple of people who knew wordpress So they did a word camp Casper went and he spoke He worked for wp rocket, which was a caching plugin and he was going to teach the africans about how to speed up websites And he got there and found out that they are light years ahead of us because They all access the internet on cheap slow devices and it's very expensive They know How to speed it up? They know how to cut corners how to how to cheat the system to get more data for less time So he had to change this whole thing and he met people and they changed his life And he made friends and while he was there A woman unrelated to the whole process Was arrested Because she made a tweet about the president The week after he left They overthrew their president anybody remember his name He'd been a dictator for 40 years 40 years Zimbabwe is one of the poorest countries in the world because of this guy and the week after Casper left the government came down and Much of the wordpress world paid attention Because there had just been a word camp and everybody said are you guys okay? There's I don't know 10 or 15 people wordpressers there And people from all over the world sent them emails and said are you okay? How can I help you? Do you need money? Do you need to get out of the country? Do you? What do you need? And they were like wow Who are you people and where have you been all this time? Um, so like It changed the people who went there it changed the people who lived there And Now everybody's life is different For the rest of their lives And I was thinking wordpress had nothing to do with that government change It had nothing to do with the new guy It will probably have nothing to do with the next president after the current one But that third one's maybe 10 15 years away Maybe it's somebody from a wordpress meetup who's going to be president Who's going to have Hundreds of friends around the world To speak sanity to him To say this is how the world operates the world cares about you We're not indifferent You matter you're my friend. I'd like to help you run your country I'd like to give you advice whatever I don't think wordpress is going to change world governments today And maybe not in the next five years or 10 years, but maybe 15 years What if you happen to make friends with somebody in Central europe Who someday becomes a cabinet minister Or president or something And that person is Is changed because of our community because Of the care and love that we show to the world That it blows my mind that that's even a possibility Um because of hero press I seek people out all the time because I want them to do essays Um But now I know that that's easy easy to do it's really easy to find people from other countries Um In fact if you go to translate that wordpress.org You will see a list of every country or every language in the world This is hundreds and thousands of them And with for each language There is an owner Somebody who's in charge of translating wordpress into that language And there's their email address and there's slack handle They'll come out say hey I'm I'm tofer. What do you do? What's your job? Are you married? Do you get kids? Just make friends just just Be friends There's not there's nothing else to it. I got this picture just the other day I was talking to my friend Aditya who lives in puna puna india He said hey, did you see that picture? of the pakistani the bangladeshi the indian And what was the other one? What's up there? Uh, what's that? I don't remember the other five Anyway, these four guys are all from different countries. I don't know them. They're not part of work camp crazy. They're just four guys Oh napal this was in napal So one of those guys is napali um They all got together for a picture because They love wordpress their countries didn't matter their histories didn't matter And so now they're all friends and they talk to each other and they They share culture they they change The landscape of the world because of wordpress And that is the end of my talk um Thank you My pitch my request is did you go make friends with people all over the world? Just look them up and say hi How are you stick your hand out virtually? If you can pull it off go to a word camp overseas it is life changing it is It's hard to imagine how different places are unless you've been there It feels like it should be the same, but it's really not It's really interesting. So if you can go to another word camp outside the us go Toronto doesn't count Any questions Yes, sir That's an excellent question the question for the camera is um His wordpress big in china and other word camps and the answer is no um I do have a contact in china and i've been trying to get him to do an essay for hero press and he has told me no repeatedly um They do not use the web in china It's just it's too tightly restricted It's not worthwhile So people tend to use apps they use we chat they use whatsapp they use Custom secret browsers that get handed around on the black web all that kind of stuff So he said to me no one here knows what wordpress is no one cares no one would use it If I did an essay no one would read it because no one here cares um So that's a really tough nut to crack um, it's I don't know how to get around that You should do another one. Yeah Right For Sure Yep, so the question is um, what would be a good model country? For Doing bandwidth better in a continent that does not do content or Uh bandwidth well and what kind of devices are we looking at? Excuse me South africa is pretty decent Their history and culture has lent toward a more western Um infrastructure So south africa does it pretty well Um, a lot of the north african countries did do it. Well, egypt was pretty good But things have kind of fallen apart recently since the arab spring um But cell phones are extraordinarily popular Um back in the 70s people would ask when are we going to wire india? What are we going to wire africa? When are we going to get everybody wired? And we've gotten to the point now where the answer is probably going to be never because wireless is the way Everybody has cell phones. So we're building up towers. Google has these dreams of blimps with servers That it will just hover over africa forever um So cell phones are the are the thing. Um, I want to show you something Interesting. Oh I lost it Can I get it back? There we go This week's europe press ssa came from magai in nigeria and In the 90s He built this website He built this website Using this phone Anybody have used c-panel Yeah, it's a pretty common web tool. He navigated c-panel on that telephone And built websites Um, he has a year on there anybody I can't see it here from from here very well What year was that? He's not very old This wasn't very long ago That he built a website with that phone um Now obviously that's that's a pretty old phone people have android now And iphones and things like that and i'm sure it's a lot easier to to build a website um But they're still running on 3g 2g, you know, it's It's pretty hard. Um Yeah, did I answer your question well enough? South africa is a good example These days people are using android phones things like that All right, sure So is there is there video chat software they could use for a conference? um I don't know anything special I mean there's google hangouts and skype and zoom Things like that. Um, I don't know of anything that's particularly awesome at bandwidth that would help um On the 22nd of february I'm going to do a presentation to the Port hard court meet-up in nigeria over hangouts probably um Mount's a decent-sized city in a Reasonably modern country, uh, they still have daily blackouts, but When the power's up things are pretty good um So, uh, I think I think they suggested hangouts specifically so However good google hangouts is at that sort of thing Yep, I'm probably a laptop like I'm probably going to connect to one laptop that they'll put on a projector And and you know, uh, circling back to that a little bit Um, they're going to hold their meet-up at a place that has internet So they're not going to be at home or out in the street or whatever um So I think it's a university any other questions. All right. Thank you very much for coming Hey, hey Check one two