 So I figured I would introduce our four panelists and I did some background research and after a week or two I mean time zones are killing so getting to talk to all of them at the same time is impossible. I decided that it was a lot better idea to just have them do it because they kind of know who they are and what they've been working on. So I'll leave it to them to one by one introduce themselves to you. You're first. Great. I'm Michael Arstead. I'm a designer, front-end designer and developer and I work at Automatic. I work on WordPress.com, Jetpack and I'm a committer to WordPress core for some reason. I'm not fully aware of but other than that I mean yeah that's that's what I do. I design a lot of stuff and make things pretty but more importantly I make it so that people can actually use it and I really don't care if robots use it so great. All right I'm Joe Dalson. I'm a contributor to the accessibility team. I'm self-employed. I'm a plug-in developer and web accessibility consultant and for core I help try and review things and make sure they're usable by people with disabilities and also contribute a lot of my time to the theme review team to help look at themes that have been submitted and try and make sure that they're also usable by people with disabilities. Hi everyone my name is Tina. I am part of the side round team and I'm only mentioning this because I got involved with WordPress community because of our company sponsoring a lot of WordCamps. After going to a lot of WordCamps I got excited about organizing WordCamps myself so I guess that makes me active on the community team who's mostly responsible for growing the WordPress community through different programs like Meetup, Organizer, Meetups and WordCamps and various outreach programs and I guess that's it. And I'm Gary Pendergast. I'm employed by Automatic but I spend my full time working on WordPress core and on WordPress.org mostly to do with emoji but general kind of core architecture and those kind of technical problems. All right so I'll quickly introduce myself as well so then you know who's the guy asking the questions here. I'm Taco. I work at Joost as a community manager and well basically the WordCamp US organizers tricked me into making their life miserable for the next couple of minutes which I happily do. So the goal is to well explain to you to show you why contributing to WordPress is awesome, why you should do it more and also why you should make your boss pay for it. Any bosses around here that aren't paying yet for none. I figured yeah. So let's start with an easy question. Why do you contribute to WordPress? I mean Dina you mentioned it already but Michael why? I don't. All right I'll be honest I started contributing to WordPress because I thought it was pretty bad like and I had just gained enough skills to go oh I can make this look slightly better here and so I did and then it turns out a lot of people were like oh great a designer we could use that you do this and this and over you know I got really excited a lot of positive feedback and I learned a lot over the last several years working on it so that's that's how I got started and why I continue to contribute is just so I can make the product better for me to use and then it also benefits a lot of other people especially when we do things like working with Joe to make it more accessible for people that that's a huge win I think so I spent a lot of time kind of fiddling with little things like focus styles and stuff like that. Cool is that the same for you Joe did you start because you thought it sucked? Well I wasn't going to use exactly that wording but essentially yes it's the same reason I mean as an accessibility consultant and developer I needed to be using a platform that could offer my clients something accessible that they could use and WordPress was really pretty good but it wasn't where I needed it to be so you know I can work on this I can make it into the product I need it to be. All right so that that makes me wonder does contributing to WordPress take a lot of time I mean I've heard full-time on WordPress from you and does it stick with like 40 hours a week or do you even spend more time on it? That can vary wildly it's kind of a choose your own adventure there for a lot of people they they'll contribute a small amount of their time or just sporadically whenever whenever something takes their interest which which absolutely works we have several hundred people who contribute in that manner with every release but at the other end of the scale there's there are a handful of folks who also work full-time and then towards the end of a release cycle it can get a bit ridiculous but it's a it's a pretty good pretty good situation it's pretty easy to balance. All right so I know I mean I know most of them personally and I know from your Tina that you have two and a half full-time jobs at Siteground so how do you combine that where do you find time to contribute? So yeah it I was gonna say that if you decide to contribute the good thing about it is that you can choose how much you want to dedicate it to it but when you get into organizing an event like WordCamp Europe which is like a massive huge how many people like more than a thousand or WordCamp US for example it can be very time-consuming so when I was organizing WordCamp Europe 2014 I worked almost full-time for four months on it and Siteground was generous enough to pay for my time but it can be very frustrating because you have other things to do like this is not my full-time job and I also work with people I have people to manage and because I was contributing to organizing the WordCamp I was away from them and that's that kind of makes you feel a little bit anxious at least to say so it can be frustrating at times and I think that's the biggest struggle for me personally how do you balance it's hard but you just have to I think that the key here is when you get excited about contributing very a lot of people commit themselves to more things that they can do so I guess my tip for you would be be very realistic about how much time you can dedicate and start small like you don't have to do everything you can start just by captioning a video on WordPress.tv and that's that's a contribution that will count so yeah just don't commit to way too many things and try to balance your time better it would be a tip that I would share and on average how much time do you spend in general I mean a number a week is it five minutes and then ten times a day or is it like 15 minutes once a week how do you distribute your your time contributing and your normal work Joe can you can you answer that well that that is really complicated like I mentioned I'm self-employed so any time I'm spending contributing to WordPress as time I'm not spending running my business or working for my clients or essentially getting paid so I have to balance it very carefully but I do look at it in the long-term picture where because I'm contributing to a product I'm using for my business it is part of developing my business it is helping me so anytime does have a real benefit that said essentially it fluctuates wildly for me one week I'll be able to spend ten minutes popping in and out of a meeting and then the next week I'll spend an entire day trying to resolve a particular patch and I have no idea what's really going to happen because to me it all depends on what deliverables I have for clients at any given time and sometimes that means I can't do anything and sometimes it means I've got plenty of time or sometimes it even means because I have a project for a client I have to finish solving this bug because they need this bug fixed that's a rare case but it's really great when it happens I can imagine that that feels like being paid for working on WordPress right I don't yeah alright so would you say that if someone has five minutes a week to spend on contributing that would be enough to be helpful that depends on what they're doing honestly five minutes a week as a long-term practice doesn't really get anything done it takes more than five minutes just to write a good ticket I mean and by good ticket I mean a ticket where somebody can come in and read it and say oh I can reproduce this problem I know what's going on and you can't do that in five minutes five minutes is enough to kind of say oh yeah I can see this problem I'll come back and make a ticket later so I would say no five minutes a week isn't isn't going to do it but if you can save up your five minutes and have half an hour one day in a week yes you can do something with that so then you know what to tell your bosses five minutes not going to cut it make it more I mean we're trying to convince the audience here to contribute more right so I guess I have something to add to that my word camp Europe organizing experience gave me the confidence that we as a business can probably organize more community events so after with I did I was involved with word camp Europe we've successfully organized PHP conferences for more than 700 people like we did it twice already and I attribute my word camp Europe experience to taking the decision to do it so if you ever question whether it's worth to contribute back I definitely think it is and to me personally it's been very it's been an amazing learning experience because you learn a ton of things by working with other people and other contributors because the way it work is done in a community aspect is very different than the way that then the work that I'm used to do at side ramp so that alone is worth the experience yeah I think that's that's a valuable addition for sure so when looking into this to prepare for for this panel I ran into a system called track and as a normal WordPress user I must say that I see this track thing in several places can you help me understand what it is Gary or Michael so you grab your mic so track is our bug tracker system it's where all all bugs and all features are listed and worked on and patches are uploaded people test them so on and so forth so it's if you run into a bug with with WordPress then track as the as the place to look and that's and it's a place to if you find a bug write a ticket then you're also welcome to submit a patch but there also a lot of other people who go through and look at new tickets and say okay I can reproduce this here's a patch that'll fix it and that gets in the core so as far as like contributing for your business if you run into a problem while you're doing work then you can make WordPress better specifically for your case and then it's people people like everyone up here who'll kind of look at whatever your whatever your issue is and think okay well we can make it better for a huge number of people if we tweak it a little bit or something like that all right want to add to that or start a complete description of track I would say that's a pretty good technical description of track to kind of bring it down a level it's it's a good place to report problems if you have problems with WordPress or anything you can report it there it might be a duplicate that's fine there's people who keep track of that and we'll mark it as such and we'll point you in the right direction it's a good place to kind of see how the process happens see how WordPress is made I would you know there's just lots of little weird quirky tickets it's also a good place to get started to go in and find that ticket you're hoping to spend only five minutes on and get roped in and work on it for 20 hours that week which sounds not great but it's a lot of fun because there's a lot of cool people a lot of very smart people so you can write a patch which I didn't know how to do a while ago I mean everything about writing a patch was really scary to make these terminal and do all sorts of weird stuff but people walk you through it you learn a lot you have the best people in the world reviewing your code except for Gary maybe I still don't know why they let me do this here I am all right so can anyone post post on track or do you need something special do you need permission to be a core committer to right there absolutely not anyone can post just make make a wordpress.org account and post away in fact you've got an awful lot of power on track without anything more than a wordpress.org account you can close tickets you can change focuses you know that's a good thing to wait to do until you've maybe got a feeling for what's going on I had a battle with somebody recently who kept closing a ticket that needed to stay open and yeah I think it went back and forth like four times. Track is a little intimidating to use because it's a really janky UI is the nicest way I can say it you won't break anything though if you accidentally close something Joe will reopen it and you'll have a nice little battle. So that brings me to the next question I mean you said that UI for track is maybe not optimal might even call it suboptimal what what does anyone on the design team do is that work actually on track or is it stay do you stick with wordpress itself or only design teams what what does your team do. That's a great question so the team wildly varies because it has a lot of people drop in for short spurts over time we see a lot of familiar faces but there's like a few people that regularly contribute and they sort of split their effort like I said once you get involved well I think I guess I didn't say this once you get involved like you make a lot of friends and all sorts of stuff so people will start going to you for design advice early on which is where I spent a lot of my time as somebody will say okay hey we want to do this this thing in the customizer and we're thinking about going this route what do you think what can we do here so you then I'll spend some time on core as far as track goes I think people are afraid to touch it and it's not just that it's really hard to touch it's a very difficult thing to work with it's it's not just the way it's set up the technology behind it makes it really hard to modify so we could redesign it I think there are rumors about to spread of us maybe trying something else which is similar to track in a lot of ways but potentially with better better project flows track works so it's it doesn't matter if it's pretty it's easy to follow it well it's followable and and once you get the hang of it's it can be an effective communication tool especially across time zones and in locality it's it's actually a pretty great tool even despite it being a scary UI all right so let's let's step away from track for a bit because we've talked about that quite a bit if I'm into theme developing I mean we saw that quite a few people in the audience have themes would they have any value to add to the design team yeah absolutely so theming is a great way to get into either interface design or more theme design we do a theme every year that could definitely use some help and some extra people with eyes on it polishing it testing it giving giving some valuable feedback so yeah definitely and feel free to just drop into the design channel or reach out to any of us Tammy Lister who's somewhere around here taking photos and Hugo are good people to reach out to as well as me no choice does a lot of work on the design team all of us feel free to reach out will help you find a good fit in terms of what you want to do if you're just interested in committing don't know where to start will get you going like so that makes me wonder is there I mean Gary you're mainly working on core do you need designers as well or are you sticking with just developers yes we I shouldn't ask two questions I know sorry yes to both no we we always love design help at WordPress is a very visual product it's it has a lot of a lot of user interface that needs to be thought about the user experience so people helping out with design is always appreciated right so you're kind of fighting for designers both you and and the other teams accessibility and even community well I mean accessibility we're working with everybody because every time I mean we are spending a lot of time thinking about the non-visual experience with WordPress but there are major accessibility factors in the visual presentation as well and we have to make sure that those work out so every time we're looking to make a modification to the structure of a page we'll generally need to talk to somebody on the design team and say hey this is the change we need to make how should it look and then we'll work together to reach a conclusion that works for everybody and the design team works very similarly it's across a lot of the teams it's it's not really like this is that the design team doesn't really own a product it's more like the accessibility team where it works across everything that WordPress the WordPress community like all of the products together so there's a lot lot involved and we reach out we work across teams pretty well yeah the community team needs designers too right now there is a project about as you the community teams is mostly helping people to organize word camps and as many people are first-time organizers and they don't really know how to deal with badges and schedules and all that so right now there the community team has a project of creating like a design kit with the most commonly used needed print stuff print materials so yes if you are good with graphic design you can contribute with that too for the community team so we've been talking about designers but does the gate the same goes for other disciplines I mean developers are they needed across the board or maybe even other skills I mean what are you lacking in your your teams what are you really needing to move forward again developers are welcome everywhere there's there's obviously there's core but apart from that there's the there's the WordPress.org website which which people people contribute to and where we're working on there is some private code there which is which we're working on pushing out and making it more easy making it easier for people to contribute there's word camp the word camp websites which you can you can pretty easily get up and running and contribute to that to help word camps around the world to have really cool sites. I mean the accessibility team always needs more people because essentially what we need is more accessibility people embedded in every other team because we need people in support and we need people in design and we need people in community because accessibility like design is just one of those things that's across the board it's needed in every single area you can always find a place to fit somebody yeah so talking about accessibility I've heard that you work a lot with screen readers to test for that yeah the visually well I should have put that correctly non visual experience non visual experience thank you very much does that mean that if you want to help out with accessibility that you need to purchase like a super expensive product or how does that work are those available first of all no you definitely don't need to expense to buy an expensive product first of all if you do want to do any testing with a screen reader you probably already have one because if you're running a Mac you have voiceover if you have an iPhone or an iPad you have voiceover if you have an Android you have their app called talk back and it's already installed it just has to be enabled but that said you really don't need a screen reader to test for most accessibility and in many ways if you're not an expert using a screen reader it might be better that you don't because they are very difficult to use and if you're not familiar with them and comfortable with the experience what you may come away with is that oh this is terrible when in fact the it's terrible because you didn't understand what to do and you didn't know how to use it so screen reader testing is crucial you need for good accessibility to do some testing with a screen reader but you really need to do it with somebody who knows how it works it can be really valuable if you get a little familiarity to just do some very discreet testing and be able to start up your screen reader and verify this small interaction works but on the overall usability scale of whether or not this website works well with the screen reader that's a much harder problem that needs to be looked at by an expert and usually that's not me I'm an expert in accessibility but that does not make me an expert screen reader user that makes me a hack screen reader user all right so we've been talking a bit about what to do and why you started but I mean it costs time it especially if you have your own company it sort of takes time away from making money what keeps you contributing to WordPress what's the what what why are you still doing this Michael well that's a good question I think that there are a lot of different answers from a lot of different people I would say that there's a lot of huge benefits to contributing first of all if you're a designer and you're interested in accessibility it's a great place to get your feet wet there because you have a great set of resources available you can learn about semantic markup and like what you can do to try to prep a form or something for a screen reader even if you're not super familiar they'll be like oh that you can do these or add these tags or whatever you need to do or rearrange that and learn a lot that way so you will learn a huge amount I'm constantly learning a lot but more importantly you'll probably advance your career pretty well if you're a freelancer you'll make a lot more contacts you'll get a lot more visibility if if you work for a company your company will have a better product that they get to use ultimately and will have you as kind of an insider so if you run into something goofy like the login screen it's kind of annoying to change the background color of without setting it multiple places you can step in and like go to core and change a couple lines of code and it benefits everyone as well as your company so you don't have to like do that extra extra work so you can do a lot of stuff like that where you're actually benefiting your products I think the biggest is you're just gonna advance your your knowledge in your career no matter what path you take whether it's accessibility or developer or designer you just meet a lot of people your network will grow to a huge size where you know people all of the world that are experts in all sorts of different little things so if you have just some random question you can ask them with confidence that they'll at least point in the right direction I keep contributing because I really like the idea of making a product that anybody can make a site on even when I didn't like the UI at first I still really liked the products to be clear and I want to keep that going I want to keep that idea going that you know my parents can get a host and create a site about training their new dog like or create a shop or whatever it is like I like the confidence that people can do that all right and how about you Tina I like what he said very much is true about me so I keep contributing although not as much as I used to but I started organizing events because I like doing that and like I already said like this experience helped me learn a lot and expanded my network and personally I just enjoy it but I also wanted to say because I'm here representing a business and for us giving back and contributing to the community is crucial and there is one very ethical element to that we're a hosting provider and if it wasn't for WordPress we would probably well I wouldn't say we wouldn't be in the business but it will be very different so we basically are very much aware of how much we owe to this community for us to be in the business and it makes a lot of sense to make sure that and also with competitors Squarespace Wix and other CMSs we just want to make sure that WordPress continues to be as awesome as it is and stay competitive so also we are relevant on the market so it makes a lot of business sense for us to continue to be involved and sponsor WordCamps and speak at WordCamps and even help more people get involved with it. Do you have a similar drive Joe? Well I mean for me it is all about the passion for accessibility because by working on WordPress I can you know write a few lines of code and get it committed and then ship it out to a quarter of the web and that's a way I can make a very immediate and large impact on the world and making a difference really matters to me so WordPress is a place where I can contribute some time and it's a huge difference compared to building an accessible website where I'm building maybe I build the absolutely perfect most accessible website imaginable it's still one website that a small handful of people will go to whereas in WordPress I can make a handful of changes that affect so many more people. And the same question of course for you as well Gary? Yes so I mean I work full-time on WordPress but it's also by choice if I if I didn't love what I did then I'd be I'd switch to a different project in the company so certainly it's something I love it's like working with really interesting people working on big challenging problems it's it's it's it's a job that never really gets boring so that's cool and as as Joe was saying being able to like write writing code writing writing new features that are being shipped out to over a quarter of the internet is it's a bit of a rush it's pretty fun I like I like being able to think about the problems of where how will WordPress influence the direction of the entire internet. Alright so before we move to questions from the audience because I'm pretty sure that you will have questions for those amazing people up here there's one thing I'd like to to talk about and that is basically something Matt Mallowek said in 2014 he was talking about five for the future basically he was calling out companies and everyone in our ecosystem in our community to contribute 5% of time of resources of what have you to WordPress to make sure that WordPress would continue as a project and that WordPress would would grow and keep growing in in the future that makes me wonder what do you see as a valuable way to spend that 5% resources is that by throwing money at word camps for example or do you see more value in promoting the contributing to to the project in other ways I think you you can contribute in whatever way works for your company that's if you if you have the people to to contribute then absolutely then people can write code people can design things that's if you if you have support support engineers then they can help out on the forums and help people with their WordPress questions if you have documentation folks then there's always documentation to be written the handbooks the code documents or if you prefer using money like it's running word camps and making them making them cheaply available like the ticket today was $40 correct yeah making that available so cheaply to everyone is only possible through through sponsors so you sponsor you get you get your name up on the screen behind us and you also make it make the WordPress community really accessible for people to to get into and learn about and I think it's it's important to think about the fact that that that 5% for the future is it's for the future of WordPress but it's also for the future of your company so if you're not spending that 5% in a way that supports your company's needs as they relate to WordPress then that's maybe not what your company's view so the best way your company can do it has to be at some level of self-interest to your company all right so are there questions from the audience things you really like to know since we have a couple of mics here I'll be repeating your questions also for the video instead of running around with a with a mic today so yeah that you were first hand to be raised so the question is is there a way to it's there sorry is there a plan to extend WordPress or create a light version to make it available for Internet of Things can I answer this one you can you're eager I can see that reminder I'm a designer but WordPress has an API right and it's pretty dang awesome in fact I saw some cool stickers for it floating around earlier couldn't use the API to speak to your Internet for two devices are you talking about using WordPress as like an operating system on the devices oh that I don't know to use as an operating system on the devices no the and they need special the Internet of Things devices need specialized software which WordPress isn't the thing for that however those things generally have an API that can be talked to so absolutely you if you want to have a website to control your house then you can do it as a WordPress plug-in write a plug-in that talks to all of your talks all of your things you you can turn your lights on and off from from your blog you can let other people turn your lights on and off I'm not sure that's the best idea though maybe enable two factor authentication all right question in front here okay so to summarize your question what is the best way to start contributing given that Calypso and the current back-end are is there an expiration date on the current admin well that's a straightforward question Gary no so Calypso is an automatic product so if you go to I don't know how many people are familiar with it so on WordPress.com rather than using the standard WordPress dashboard then there's it's a completely new dashboard experience called Calypso whether so the the dashboard as it exists in WordPress today will likely change it will be it will be influenced by the things that that have been learned from Calypso it will certainly start using the the REST API endpoints sort of that are being released in WordPress 4.7 but the the dashboard that's in in WordPress today is not a end-of-life product it's something that's going to keep evolving all right so I'm going to move this way yes please curious and does that I mean headless WordPress contributing to it or all right so maybe that's a question that's better asked after the the panel and we'll stick to contributing for for now perfect question so how do you start contributing to WordPress where do you go well the first step would be to go to a meet-up or a word camp so you're on the right way you know around word camps usually before or after the event there is something called contributor day so you can I advise you to definitely go to those days and learn more like there are people from the various teams so they can walk you through and explain what you can do for each team on the global WordPress community team other than that you can go to make.wordpress.org and there you will see all the various teams that are available and basically get familiar with what each team does and choose for yourself where you want to get involved with also you can go on Slack and what else covers it pretty well yeah like the website oh yes and there is a contributor table getting involved table right in the hallway with the sponsors here yes so you can go there and there are people from the community team who can also walk you through and answer more questions for you yeah so I think the quickest way is to make sure that you're here on Sunday for the contributor day will all of you be here for contributor day as well yes perfect yes I will not be here you have your representatives yes but a lot of people from the community team will be here definitely yeah so this Sunday is probably the easiest way to start because you can sit right next to the people that are experienced and I'm sure they'll be happy to help you getting started so absolutely make sure that you come to contributor day it's super valuable well that is a good question let me summarize that really quickly so if you have a new feature that you would like to introduce how to how to do that how to get a new feature into WordPress well there are a lot of different scales of new features if it's a relatively minor thing you can just report it on track and label it as an enhancement and and say this is something we'd like to add and like to improve this but for major features you know those are most commonly lately done as feature plugins and then that's a big project and you need to get people involved you need to get buy-in there needs to be community support for the concept for it to gain traction and get tested and potentially in the future get merged and that that's a complicated process because if it's a major feature that means it's changing a lot of things and a really important thing to know about a feature is what else it touches and and Gary knows all about what else it touches when starting with a feature approach with a big feature project I would not recommend as the first thing to to get into with contributing it is it is a big process it starts like it starts like thinking about the the design and the user experience and then moves on to to developing the code and then moves on to user testing and making sure the accessibility is good and all and all that kind of thing it can be a very long-term process it's not not the place to start but that said there are existing feature projects which are which you can absolutely get involved in they're run by people who have who have experience building features so it's kind of a way to be able to build cool new things without needing to worry about fitting into the WordPress release cycle or tackling bugs or anything like that well so the short answer is probably make sure you're there on Sunday and they'll happily help you and that was it for this panel we flew through it so I'd like to thank you very very much and see you all on Sunday