 So my talk today is about WordPress the software and the WordPress community and how it changes lives. How being involved with WordPress and contributing has had an impact on people's lives that they never even dreamed about and how you can let WordPress in and have it change your life too. You'll be introduced to all sorts of people, some of them you may know, some of them you don't know, but all of them have had their work with WordPress, whatever capacity that is. They've had that change their lives. This is Mika, this is my friend Mika. We joke that she's my WordPress BFF. We met early on in our WordPress days when I released a cheesy and not very well designed theme based off the old classic template that was pre-cubric if anybody remembers that one. Yeah, I reskinned it and I called it sense and sensibility because it was very plain and sensible. Mika saw it and she forked it and called it sense and sensibilities and monsters, which of course I thought was hilarious and I thought I need to meet this person. So the more that we talked and we got to know one another, the more she got sucked in. She was running a fan site and she was working with that in her spare time from her job at a bank and she got involved in the community and she talked to me and we hit it off and she got introduced to more people around. She started doing more code and things like that because she's a programmer type and now she's not only on the plug-ins review team. She quit her job at the large bank she was working at. She moved halfway across the country from Chicago all the way out to California and now she works at Dream Host. So very life changing, packed up everything, moved west. This character here is a guy named Jim Groom. They know him. This is Jim. He's hilarious. He was the director of the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies and an adjunct professor at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia, representing in the back. He's got one of those fun titles called Instructional Technologist, which to me is like what? He teaches students how to learn with technology. Go figure. One of the things he was really passionate about and really interested in was experimenting with this and with a number of things at that intersection of technology and education and seeing how far he could bend it and he started a blog network for his English department. He created another online community for another department for digital storytelling and he spearheaded an initiative called A Domain on One's Own and back then I did a lot of work with Multisite when it was WordPress MU and this is what he was using for the blog network so that's how I got to know Jim directly and work with him too and he's really smart and he was learning like a learning like information sponge. He just couldn't learn enough fun stuff about this because we all thought it was fun. We still do. Eventually this led him to start reclaim hosting so other universities could learn about WordPress and how to use blogs in their teaching and in their institution and get out of the trap that a lot of educational institutions get into with licensed software and the restrictions that gives them. So this way they get more control, they get more freedom and they can do more experimental things with their students. It became so successful as a side project for him, the reclaim hosting. He quit his university job. He works full time at reclaim hosting with his partners and he's taken his wife and kids and moved from America all the way back to Italy for where his wife has family so we're just going to be jealous because he's in Italy and it is fabulous there when he posts pictures and he gets to work remotely in helping people, universities and other people reclaim their hosting. I mean that really changes life when you pick up and go to Italy. This beautiful lady is my friend Siobhan. Siobhan McEwen, she started out by being a blogger and writing about WordPress, just WordPress news, WordPress posts on various sites. Eventually this work that she did on all the other sites, writing about WordPress things, it led for her working for Audrey Capital and she wound up writing the official history of WordPress and I think she said that took her like a year. She was, while she was doing this, she had to interview a lot of people, myself included, about the early days of WordPress and what we all did and she managed to do this while working remotely and again traveling the world for an entire year going to all sorts of word camps. She's done a lot of community work while she did so too. She was facilitating meetings, she was last year at the community summit helping out organizing and she helps lead teams and she's very well organized. She organizes things even like word camp Europe, multiple years in a row. Now she works as an event planner and she's home in England with her baby and her partner, which I'm super excited about because the baby's really cute. This is Amanda and I first met Amanda when she filed a support ticket for where I work and she started out with, I hope this isn't a stupid question, but I'm a blind developer and I'm having a hard time with my screen reader. It was actually a really smart question but I had a question for her is, hey wait a second, can you explain to me how you're a blind web developer because I'm really interested in how this is working and Amanda is probably a large chunk of the reason that you hear about people talking about accessibility these days. She's a big push for accessibility. I know last year when she was in San Francisco, she did a lot of work with the core team on contributor day. They were very excited to talk to her about what needs that she had, how her screen reader worked and they really were interested in figuring out programmatically how screen readers worked and what to do with accessibility. So they can make WordPress better for everybody and for Amanda, I mean obviously she's blind but she can still work with WordPress and that's something that she can do and that gives her freedom and again to work at home, to work at a job where it's easier for her to work around what she needs to get the job done. She helps make WordPress better and she helps themes and plug-in devs too. Like if you're interested, if you have a theme or a plug-in and you're wondering about accessibility, Amanda is one of the people that you should be talking to and she's very happy to help you solve those problems. She worked with Carrie Dills who released the Utility Pro theme. It's completely accessible because of Amanda's help. So if you're interested in accessibility, Amanda, yeah, Amanda is one of the people you really, really need to talk about, talk to. She's very knowledgeable but again WordPress helps give her that freedom and it's easy for her to contribute and to help others, not just herself but for other people who use screen readers. Even, I've heard them talk like if you use your keyboard a lot, that comes into play too so it's not just people with disabilities or differing abilities. People use the internet differently sometimes just for their own workflow and that helps a lot too. And one of my passions in the WordPress field is working with a lot of different women in WordPress and some of these ladies are some women that I know and I know lots of women so I couldn't talk about all of them so I had to pick a few. Because just like me, there are other women in the WordPress world whose involvement with WordPress helped change their life and helped made it easier. Kathy on the top here with the lovely red hair. She was a real estate broker and as you know the real estate market crashed. So she turned her natural gift of teaching people she turned her natural gift of teaching towards teaching people to use the technology that they owned. This developed into building customized sites with stock themes and just customizing them a little bit and she started out using studio press products so that's how I came to know her a little bit. And this is also her third career change and it's a later in life career change and I know as some people get older they're worried about their job going away and then they have to start a new career and with WordPress I'm finding a lot of older people are starting a successful career just because they're getting into WordPress because it's easy to start learning and they can find a spot for them if you've seen Bob WP here he also came into WordPress later in life. One of the core contributors Andrew Oz he's in his 60s he's like one of the oldest contributors we have so it's not an age restriction in WordPress you can be any age old to young she's a grandma too like me so if anybody says oh but is it easy enough for your grandma you can say yeah it's easy enough for grandmas because I know at least two that not only use WordPress but develop with it she's been facilitating meetups for the last five years and she's been an active organizer for WordCamp Atlanta as the queen of registration you may have seen her earlier today at the registration desk and this year she's going to be the lead organizer organizer organizer words are hard she's going to be the lead organizer for WordCamp Atlanta in the spring and there's my friend Stephanie on the bottom right and in front of me Hi Stephanie Stephanie her husband first installed WordPress 1.5 so her and I like her familiar with it that far back but the first website Stephanie and her husband launched together was 2.2 or 2.02 she didn't really get involved in the community until 2014 because she thought well these are developers and I'm a designer what do I have in common and I talked to a lot of women who are like that but WordPress is a bunch of coders and developers and I'm a designer and isn't it a guy thing and I'm like no, no, no there's lots of you'll find some like minded women and that's what Stephanie found out because when she started dobbling in front end dev she's met more like minded women than she feels that connection and I know I talk to Stephanie almost every day now because we have a ladies of WordPress Slack channel where a lot of us hang out and support each other and Stephanie shared with me that she feels that she's felt more connected through word camps than probably the last 20 years of her life and to me that's really amazing to go that long and then you finally found basically your tribe of people who understand you and get you and she really feels that this is where she belongs I mean I do too obviously that's just really cool to me because it could take some people a lifetime and she's finally found it and I know I found it and on the bottom left is Nila Flores from nilish.net and Nila's here too and I know Nila's written on her blog about how much her life has changed because of WordPress helping her to provide for her son, she's a single parent and it's helped her be able to spend more time with him and have a job where she can have her time available and work around his school schedule and be there for him and be supportive and still provide for him and for a lot of people that's super important and you don't always get that but WordPress is the kind of software and involvement and the job and ecosystem where it's so flexible you can get up and work at 8 o'clock you know 5 o'clock in the morning in your pajamas if you want to which I have sometimes done not at 5 a.m. but maybe 7 until maybe lunch and then I'll get dressed so just I mean if you're thinking is there a place for me here's some examples of women who are like maybe just like you and they've done it another thing I wanted to talk about was not just me and my friends fabulous as you all are one of my other friends is Topher and he runs a site called HeroPress it's heropress.com or at HeroPress on Twitter and Topher has a real passion for the community same as I do that's what I love about Topher he's got this big, caring heart and he loves to hear people's stories and that's why he built HeroPress was to invite people to write an essay in their own words that tells the public and the rest of the WordPress community exactly how WordPress is affecting their lives he has people from all over the world people in places like Egypt that are being bombed out of their homes but who can still contribute to WordPress in some way and who are using WordPress to help get word out, get people running up with jobs people who are, he went to Pune India and he saw first hand the WordPress community there and how it is literally changing people's lives for the better just in how quick they can get up and running with something like WordPress and how they can find jobs and find work and make a difference in their lives and I really, really if you like these kinds of stories you really need to go check out his blog and read that about WordPress is not just self-promotion we can promote other people too who are doing some really, really great work now this is Rebecca Gale and this is funny because she's an SEO expert she owns web savvy marketing she does web design development search engine optimization and she sells themes and she employs a number of people so she's this nice business woman she came to my rescue when I was flying back home from Denver a couple years ago and I was in the middle of the potatoes across the Midwest and they grounded all the flights and we didn't get on a rebooked flight so we were stuck in Detroit for three days except my luggage went home without me so I was three days in Detroit with no luggage it was just my purse so I was tweeting and she drove almost an hour to come pick me up out of her busy day she'd never met me before she just somebody please just drive me to Target to buy clean underwear and she did and to me that's this connection with our community that we're so willing to help people out in times of need even if they're really small like I got to go to Target you know and then she took us out we just needed some food so we found this hole in the wall dinky Chinese place that was really good food but had like eight seats in the whole place it was great and we still talk about this because this is the funniest story and I put that in here because it's not just sometimes how WordPress changes one person's lives it's somebody else in the WordPress community that can help you with your life if you need them and you know she's affecting change even just a small way but she'll do that it just shows to the generous spirit and the nature of the people in our community and that's why I wanted to also mention Kim Parcel and she passed away later last late last year and we found out just in the new year and I wanted to mention Kim because she was just beginning to have a serious impact on WordPress as a whole and you can see a lot of her work in the developer's handbook and in the developer's reference site it wasn't just her who did the work I mean there was a team of people but she was a real driving force behind that and they seriously miss her on the team but she laid that foundation for all the developer notes that you see now and the standards that are being set so that the work can continue to be done and be followed so it's easier for new developers to come along and learn WordPress and not just in core but in greater community she became well known as WP Mom and that's a hashtag her and I both used on Twitter because we felt sometimes the community itself needs a little bit of caring and she did a really good job on that and we've helped that hashtag live on so like when somebody else in the community needs a hug they're having a hard day they will literally tag like I need WP Mom today and somebody will answer and say what do you need do you need a virtual hug do you need a shoulder do you want to talk to me privately what's going on I understand buddy and that's part of her legacy see like and even if you just keep somebody else in line that's the kind of thing because she didn't tolerate some of the BS so she would tell people nicely but you felt it and not only Kim but we also lost Alex King and this is him very happy with his daughter Alex passed away earlier this year and I know WordPress changed Alex life but really Alex changed WordPress and I'm not sure if I ever told him this because I knew him well enough to say hi in passing and he knew of me and I knew of him but in my early days when I was learning how to build themes his blog was one of the first WordPress related blogs that I read and remember we would have a blog role widget and there was a couple of links in it and his was one of the links and I just kept referring back to it to learn this thing called WordPress and if you think about it if I hadn't read his blog I wouldn't have started themes I wouldn't have released a theme I would never meet Mika Mika wouldn't have done the other theme and who knows what would have happened right it's just like a Ripley butterfly effect and I don't think Alex ever knew what an impact he had on my life or a lot of people's lives really and not only just that he did that ubiquitous sharing icon that we all see and I didn't know that that was his design until after and it's like wow we see that we don't even think about using it and every time you use that share icon you can think of Alex it's these ripples that we see all over the community the generosity that ripples outward the helping hands and the sharing like we do online at word camps big and small even if you're actively involved right now I can tell you that your work is influencing someone somewhere you may feel like you're typing into a void but it helps somebody's reading it and you don't even know you may not know it for a while and you may never know but what you do has an impact it reminds me of a friendly corporate guy that I met at WordCamp Chicago back in somewhere like 2010 didn't even know who he was real quiet sat in the back he said thanks and that was it and I was like okay they seem kind of corporately and out of place but okay turns out it was Chris Lemma right before he got into WordPress and it was the sat spirit of openness and sharing and the information that we freely gave at and you couldn't believe the ticket price you know 40 bucks really telling people this and not charging extra he couldn't believe it but that was the kind of thing that made him want to join in and he's changed the WordPress business community for the better and it's really helped it grown up and I've seen this a lot in the past year but what WordPress really did for me isn't a story I thought long and hard about sharing because if it helps one person it's worth it even though it's really personal I don't always talk about this I haven't talked about it publicly too much it's more of a private story but something kept niggling at me that I had to tell the story in early 2007 I was diagnosed with stage 0 cervical cancer it was very early and it has a highly successful survival rate when caught early 95% obviously I'm standing here so I survived however this also meant undergoing major abdominal surgery it was a week before my birthday still recovering and they had to remove my cervix and my uterus considering my grandmother also died from uterine cancer everybody thought this was a prudent thing to do but I was a stay at home mom I was a stay at home home schooling mom highly involved in raising my four children they were my whole life and I built everything around them but the oldest one had just left for college and while I was recovering from surgery my two older daughters and teenagers they could run the house without me they learned well enough that they could cook and clean and look after things and didn't need me I could just lay there and recover sounds like heaven right my baby was newly turned six and you know six year old they don't need mommy either so nobody needed me dad a little level of fun to this my husband was laid off of his teaching job which had been a break from corporate programming jobs and he found another job but it was four hours away so while I was recovering he was only home on weekends so he wasn't even there for most of the week so I've been using wordpress by then and I was getting into multi-site and I had the blogging network for home schoolers and it was fine and up and running but I wasn't doing too much in the community so what was not fine other than nobody needed me in my house and I had this identity as a mom and now it was just taken away like you know I can't have any more kids and the kids I have are growing up and leaving so what am I going to do what I could do was I could slowly slowly shuffle to my computer in the next room even if it took ten whole minutes and making sure that I'd pop the meds first I could sit myself down and I could spend time answering questions in the forums I was needed there it didn't matter that I had never graduated from college it didn't matter I was someone's mom it didn't matter if I could have kids or not have kids what mattered was I had knowledge that somebody else needed I could help direct them to the resources where they could go so yeah wordpress helped me feel needed somewhere wordpress changed my life by showing me that I could do something other than be someone's mom as great as that is you got to do something after they leave home and that's an awesome thing on its own on its own but when they start leaving the nest you have to have something else to do wordpress was something that was easy to start learning and it made it easy to share what I did know and I was accepted on my merits and that made a huge difference for me it's my loving and long suffering and patient husband eventually our family found a new house my husband's new job another kid went off to college and one day my husband came home and said how fast can you ramp up being a wordpress freelancer because wordpress changed his life too what was my hobby turned into a job and then turned into a job for him too he started out joking that maybe someday I could work full time and then he could be the house spouse because up to that point he worked and then I was the home housewife and now today this year we've had that reality after working full time with me as a freelancer and within copy blog or the company that I work for now Ron has now semi retired and I'm the breadwinner so it's completely changed from when we started and on top of that that was another thing having paying work to do with wordpress made it so that we didn't have to leave the province that we loved in an area in high unemployment when we were freelancers we were booked solid like we have people leaving our province to go move out west for work and then come home with their families every two weeks to spend the weekend and then go back out west for work again because there's that little work where we live so we freelanced for a while and then we both got hired by studio press which then merged with copy blogger and now has become Rainmaker Digital and it was a lot of hard work but wordpress helped make that happen for us and although as someone who did introduce their programming spouse to wordpress I kind of need to warn you that he could eventually outshine your own accomplishments so we have like a small support group of wordpress spouses working together but sometimes we just call it therapy so this isn't just an excuse to show you my grandkids as beautiful as they are but they're also learning about wordpress we're working on the next generation and this isn't they're living in a world where anything's possible with wordpress they have a platform that gives them the freedom and the liberty to continue with whatever dreams they hold even if they just use it as a blogging platform and I'm seeing more and more kids here today and more word camps and that makes me super happy for that means wordpress will be around for a long time to come from different walks of life with different backgrounds when we all come together we create this patchwork of community sort of like a quilt it's not one that's finished but one where each piece in the quilt each person has a place and a spot to be so the whole is complete and functional and beautiful and I hear stories from all the time from people who think that for whatever reason they might not fit in but I hear from many more people how wordpress is one of the few things that fits in their lives people who have long term chronic illnesses people with differing abilities people who have medical conditions that they feel held them back holding down what we would call a normal job or they've had to overcome some sort of hardships in their personal life all of these people have found their community welcoming who they are and where they are everyone has had something to give and they found a place to feel where they belong and you can be a part of this too now Sunday we will have a computer contributor day and even if you have no idea how you can help if you're anyways interested you should really go and one of us will be there and we will help you find a spot and a way to start there's all these teams I know it's a double of the team but there's like plugins, themes core, new user community support and documentation training, wordcams, videos from wordcams putting stuff up on wordpress.tv and these are just branching into further subjects inside of that and these are just the ones that are integral to this project there's also releasing your own themes and plugins, writing video writing tutorials, doing videos for users just independently on your own blog volunteering to help at wordcams like look at all the fabulous volunteers we have here, even just showing your neighbor how to use wordpress or just showing your kids and your spouse the amount of homeschoolers I know just use it for like writing practice and I caught this screenshot this morning of wordpress 4.3 almost 30 million times and that's just that version and anyone who's in this room who has worked on any part of wordpress 30 million people are using your work we've powered like sometimes at some point I see these numbers and they just get so big they almost become meaningless because you can't really comprehend how many people you're affecting but that feeling of helping out like literally 25% of the entire internet that's getting larger as we speak and that's the kind of feeling that I just really wish I could share with you I want you to feel that good too and I want you to feel that this community is something that you can feel a part of and I want to see your life change so in closing I would just like to say thank you thank you for listening to the stories I've shared about your fellow wordpress community members thank you for being here and celebrating the awesomeness of wordpress and how it's changing lives all over the world and thank you again in advance for the ways in which your life can be forever changed no matter how you decide to step in and join us thank you yeah we do have five minutes for questions and I can't imagine that any of you might have questions but if you did want to take two sentences to share how wordpress has impacted your life now would be a good time to do that if you felt the need otherwise we can network and share with each other and if you just need a hug I can give you that too oh we do have one I'll share I've been blogging on wordpress for about 10 years and so thanks to blogging on wordpress I found a home when my family was homeless I helped raise money and made a baby the internet got me pregnant thanks to wordpress I've found income as a writer so isn't that amazing? that's really awesome ok we can talk amongst ourselves wordpress is awesome there's two rows of people up front everybody's changed their lives I always say it's the weirdest family reunion you ever go to so yeah the awesomest there's no weird uncle Jerry or anything thank you very much be good thank you very much Andrea