 Thank you, and thank you for being here these early in the morning So before we start and before I introduce our first guest today Takis and Jordan are gonna Treat us with some special start of the day activities. So please welcome them and give them a round of applause They're gonna be very quick. Yes. Good morning. So Welcome everyone It's time to do something I see taco sitting there. I think he will know what will be happening right now That's a warming up with you so everybody join in we're at the roller coaster park and Join me with the roller coaster ride. So please join in so Follow my moves and gestures. We sit down We grab the bar Pull it towards us and we sit and then the rollercoaster starts to move Okay, there's it we're going upwards Okay, we're climbing up and then we go down again We go up again Okay, we have it to the right Oh, and we have to the left and we go up again. All right Expect one slide down and now we have a looping. Whoa Okay, can we roll Okay, and the end will always have a photo shoot so everyone if we go for the photo shoot we always Fill our arms and yeah, so do do do do. Okay here the camera. Okay photo We go to the end we stop Lift the bar Thank you enjoy the day Thank you so much. Okay. Now that everybody's up our first Talk for the day is called the blind guy who beat the developer at his own game and To give us this amazing talk. We have lasar bullettovich and Andrea Radoyev I hope I said that right Lasar is the first and only blind public speaking coach in the world he has his own agency and He teaches he coaches people to grow their business and by public speaking and Assistive technology for the blind is in his blood Andrea works with websites video games He's the founder of the video game studio Thunderstrike and they met because they wanted to create a game that is accessible for Succeeded so please allow me to welcome Lasar and Andrea to the stage, please give them a round of applause Welcome. All right, so before we start. Let's see What was your experience with accessibility so far Anyone do we have developers designers content writers? okay so Yeah, there are so many people taking care about accessibility and even more definitions related to accessibility But today I'm not going to share any of them. You can't go about that Dear friends Today I want to talk about something much more important than pure terms You know Here as I told you and as you know, there are so many developers and designers and you Have a strong power power to Make and impact thousands of thousands of lives of people with disabilities to help them buy things for travel and overall lead more prosperous life Truth be told not so many developers and people think like that and it's not because you are bad persons. No, not at all It's because of the lack of education causing lack of responsibilities and Now here is my personal definition of accessibility So accessible website is a website that allows all people to use all of its features without any support except Assistive technology devices that they use in the everyday life and so third solution such as magnifiers and speech programs Of course, there are so many disabilities out there Accessibility can be done across different types of disabilities But today we're going to focus exclusively on this accessibility for screen reader users In most cases they are blind or visually impaired although they are not the only users so screen readers are used by People with different types of disabilities such as like the people with dyslexia now Let's see. What is the screen reader ad? How does it work? So the screen reader is actually a speech software It converts text into speech No, many people don't know this but screen rears are very powerful very sophisticated programs and They have a long history of development They have been developing for more than 30 years. So they follow Development of contemporary PC machines screen-year users can use Normal machines with Windows iOS Android however on Top of all programs that we usually use and that they all know about they have installed those speech programs that speech software and Although it's so powerful and sophisticated. It's not Well, it can't do anything and it has some limits And this is why we need you developers Who can help us? Make the world wide web more accessible Here are at least three reasons for which accessibility Standards should be met So the first one is obviously CSEO Google loves accessible web And if the website is accessible the ranking will be higher number two Returning customers When people with disabilities understand that their website is that the website they want to buy from is great I want to use they will always come back and Number three brand reputation You can stand out from competitors If you are sure that you are accessible there are various ways to check accessibility some of them are useful some of them are much more useful at a One thing that you should remember is That you should never assume that something is accessible Just because you think that it's accessible Especially if you have never had experience with that also Just because Something works with the keyboard Does not mean that it will be accessible to screen reader users Andrea will cover this shortly but what I can say is that You should always reach out to users and Ask them if they are willing to test the website for you Do a quick report and show you if the website is accessible enough to tell you what are some errors they detected and what you should fix Okay, but how the accessibility Or inaccessibility affects daily life of the blind Well, you know, I wanted to open a bank account and I completed all of the information that they required First name last name whatever date of birth And then they said, okay, you can click here. We'll send you the sns code type here to verify good And then the last step that said Please agree with our terms and conditions Click submit and your account will be created. The problem was The checkbox that I was expected to check That says yes, except Was not accessible And I couldn't check it and I could not proceed with my account creation And guess what I did? Well, I closed the website And I changed the bank So they lost my money What a silly now The most popular Website for job seekers in Serbia Was not accessible A few years ago for five years ago I Was looking for a job And although all fields that were Required were labeled to collect correctly I could not upload my CV there And so I called them and said hello. This is Lazar So I'm trying to apply for xyz position But the problem is your platform is not accessible. So I cannot Put my CV And that said, oh, there's a sorry to hear about it Let us reproduce it and we'll call you back Shortly, they called me back and said You're sorry for waiting. Yes, you are right Unfortunately, we could reproduce your issue And our platform is not accessible And I said, okay, so what should I do now? And the guy said look Until we fix it which requires strong budget and time I suggest you Send me your application via email and I will upload this for you A comma just a few months ago My friend Who is my chance? Well, nothing is my chance, but he was totally blind Called me up and said hey Lazar, you know what? I want to try to find a job and Do you know if that platform is accessible? Well, I'm not sure I mean, I found the job in the meantime and a lot of things happened, but as far as I know they were not They are expected to fix it. Let me check So I checked And guess what? It didn't work again So I called them up And said basically the same thing And the guy said look, yes, we totally understand you But the problem was that we had COVID And this is why we had to restructure our budget So unfortunately, we were not able to fix it yet And then I said, look If you do not fix it Shortly, as soon as possible I will publish this on a link And I'll say that the most popular platform for job seekers is not available to people Who lack jobs Who are actually, so to speak Disadvantaged group when it comes to finding a job And in two days, that was Friday That was Friday I checked the platform on Monday and that worked correctly So changes are possible But we need pressure We need to put pressure Now, I would just kindly ask my assistants to show the video that I prepared for you You will be able to see What the inaccessible website looks like And what are some issues that blind people or screen users can have If the website does not work as expected All right, so now I will show you two inaccessible websites When I say inaccessible, I mean an available for blind people and screen waiver users You will be able to experience what it looks like when you're blind And you want to get something, get the information or Book something, buy something from the website, which is not accessible Let's start with eDreams For people who don't know, eDreams is the agency that allows you to book flights So now I have this website up and running Let me maximize the window so you can see it properly System menu, your travel agent I will now press eKey Where from edit? Where from? I'll press enter Where from edit lang And let's say I want to fly from Belgrade Okay, I will now press tab key Belgrade where to edit lang Where to? Let's go to Athens Okay I'll now press escape key to leave this edit field List with 6 items at Athens Priest, Fulni and Shilos follows 164 Km from Athens coefficient On Athens, one of Fulni priests at Athens Okay, I can choose the airport Priest, Fulni 100 on Athens, United States A-O Athens, in Anna 100, Fulni and Priest Fulni and Shilos Priest at Athens Out of list blank, where to edit departure edit read only Where to edit Athens Where to edit Athens Okay, so I think I was able to choose the airport Departure edit read only But now I have to choose my departure date I'll press enter here But I already know that this won't be accessible Because this is the read only field And when you encounter this on a calendar It's very difficult to do anything With travel agency, booking flights, eDreams Okay, so now I opened this field And now I'm going with my down arrow key So below the picker Then to the left, I press my left arrow key Then I'll press my right arrow key up And it doesn't say a word So it is not possible to pick the departure date Let's go, let's see if I can choose the date The return date Continue button Return at read only Your travel date Return again So I can't choose my return flight Okay, so the date picker is not accessible And people with disabilities, particularly blind people Are simply not able to book the flight Throughout this agency What a pity Now, let's go to the other website It is Desco Supermarket It is the, as far as I know, one of the biggest supermarket chains in the UK Our Tesco supermarkets online go Okay, so now I'm on the website I'll press system menu I'll space an X to maximize the window And then I will go down the page Let's skip the main content Community food connection scheme You're working with fair share To save and donate surplus food From our stores, find out more Community food connection scheme You're working with fair share To save and donate surplus food From our stores, find out more Community food connection scheme Find out more, feelin' free of free items What's for lunch? You see? This is the slider That is constantly appearing Community food connection scheme You're working with fair share To save and donate surplus food From our stores, find out more Community food connection scheme You're working with fair share To speech mode off Um, let me switch off the screen here So now the slider is here And it constantly speaks Which simply does not allow me To control my behavior on the website Let me turn my screen here again Out of list dialogue, we use cookies To improve your offline Some functionality may be a new car Many item buttons signed in Community food connection scheme You're working with fair share To save and donate surplus food From our stores, find out more Community food connection scheme You're working with fair share To save and donate surplus food From our stores, find out more Community food connection scheme Find out more, feelin' free of free items Community food connection scheme You're working with fair share To save and donate surplus food From our stores, plan, plan Lookin' for a change Mix up meal times with our range Of covered staples and dinner kits Shop now, lookin' for a change Mix up meal times with our range Of covered staples and dinner kits Shop now, shop now looking for a change, feeling one of three items, looking for a change, mix up your text, speech mode off. OK, so I think you got the idea of what it looks when the website is not accessible. All right. Now the question for you all is, will you now start considering accessibility solutions and taking care about accessibility when you create websites? I hope yes. Hand over to my friend Andrea. Afterwards, we'll be available to all of your questions. Hello, guys. My name is Andrea, and I'm a web developer. Laza has just provided you the answer to the question, how? And I am here to provide you with the answer to the question, why? Why we overlook website accessibility? First of all, I would like to ask the audience, how many of you are web developers, web designers, website builders? Could you please raise your hand? Ask. And now, how many of you are doing accessibility testing using a screen reader? Please raise your hand, the last people. We are here to change that. So let us answer the question, why we overlook website accessibility? There are many reasons. And they depend on a specific situation. But I would group them in four categories. You have budget and time frame. Then generalized approach to website design. Then the fact that website accessibility is a brand new area to explore. And finally, reliance on accessibility test tools. We are going to see in a bit why is that wrong. Let's talk first about budget and time frame. In many cases, accessibility is never mentioned in the project because you think about how many pages these websites have, how many products. Let's define the content that goes in. Let's define the time frame in which it will be delivered. Let's make sure it complies with GDPR, et cetera, et cetera. And what we forget? We forget to mention accessibility. Sometimes clients think, hey, accessibility is included, right? And that's where the problems start when accessibility was enforced. And then customers can get fined for having an inaccessible website, and then they can sue the developer. Anyways, that's only one of the issues. The another issue that creates an inaccessible website is that time count can very often result in cutting corners. Basically, I'm not going to test the specific feature of the website correctly because I'm on a deadline and I need to finish the project. That's obviously going to lead to accessibility issues. It can also be compromised by a specific list of a customer. And in those cases, it's most likely, hey, I want a slider which has this animation. It looks cool on this website. I want it on my website. Then we have to develop it from scratch. And in that very moment, we forget to include accessibility. Also, unfortunately, even the basic user testing often gets skipped. Now, let's talk about generalized approach to website design. When I mean generalized approach to website design, I mean that when we start building a website, we start building it for a majority of users. And then we start developing the bits for a minority of users, which can obviously lead to issues. And the specific user groups are not included resulting in accessibility issues. I also had experience with many of my customers that did not really understand website accessibility. And they were confusing it with, for instance, a responsive design. For instance, they said, hey, my website is accessible. I can access it on my mobile phone, on my tablet. No, website accessibility is not just about the device you are accessing it, not just the browser. You have to include assistive technologies. You have to include specific behaviors of people. If you don't include that, you didn't make anything. You didn't make a website accessible. Also, as I mentioned before, many of us, when we want to make something cool, we don't really think about website accessibility. And I can use Lazarus's example that he could not open a bank account for a simple checkbox. I checked that website. And what I found out, I found out that the checkbox he was unable to click was actually composed from two divs, lots of styling, some JavaScript, and what happens when a web designer makes a checkbox like that? Well, input type checkbox element is automatically recognized by screen readers and is easily to check it and you don't have to put too much effort to make it accessible. If you develop something from scratch, you have to put lots of effort to make it accessible. And these guys are obviously oblivious to that fact. In general, I'm just saying, guys, if you don't have to, please do not reinvent the wheel. Now, let's talk about the website accessibility in general. It's a huge, huge area to explore. And we are barely scratching its surface. Many people feel intimidated by that. Does they revert to old habits? And sometimes they don't like to reject taking on a website accessibility project. They just say, hey, I'm going to develop you a website. However, if you want to make it accessible, hire a specialist developer or agency or something like that, which is a very bad approach. If we need to avoid this, how are we going to do that? We're going to do that by just saying to ourselves, like the great Greek philosopher Socrates, I know that I know nothing. Why is this important? Accessibility is a huge field. And we would spend years and years trying to figure out every single accessibility rule. But if we know that those rules exist, that those users exist, which technologies do they use? How does technologies work? We are already on the right path. And basically, if you are not prepared to develop yourself further to learn new things, then it's time for you to find another occupation, because web design does require continuous learning. Now, I'm going to talk about the most tricky of those reasons, and that is reliance on accessibility tools. OK, I am using this tool. I'm using this tool. I'm using this plugin to make sure that my website is accessible. And it gives me information. I'm happy with that. I think my website is accessible. What's the problem here? The problem with this mindset is it's probably derived from a website optimization. We like to tick checkboxes. We like to think, OK, if I do this, this, this, and that, my website will be accessible. If I ensure that my website is ADA compliant, it's going to develop the best experience to the users. This is wrong. There is a big gap between theory and practice. And right now, at this very moment, user testers have no real alternative. Let me show you an example. How can we test out the website? Let's say we use an accessibility tool. I'm using Wave for this example. And I asked Laza to give me one website, which is fully accessible for him. And the other website, which is not very accessible and he had issues using it. What are we seeing here? We are seeing here that our accessibility test tool and this is not the issue with the tool itself, but the way it was used shows much more errors and notices and alerts to the website that is perfectly accessible to us. And why is that? Let's see. So this is the first website. It's called Bind Help Project. And as you can see, it has errors, contrast errors, et cetera, et cetera, lots of things that can be improved. Yes, it does. However, for a screen reader user, this website is perfectly accessible. The issues this website has are more for the users that do not use a screen reader. For instance, contrast issues, text formatting, font families which use server fonts. That is not a very pleasant experience. However, that does not mean that this website is inaccessible to us. And let's now try the Air Serbia website, which was a head issue using it. It has only a couple of errors, but there is one big issue. Can anybody from the audience tell me what's the issue with this test? You can't see the website? Yeah, correct. So I'm going to explain you what happened. When you visit this website, a DDoS check will fire. When DDoS check fires, it basically checks whether the website is being abused or not. And it's like a failsafe. The problem is when we access to the website, the DDoS check fired and completely hidden all the content. So you cannot see anything. And basically, what is wave testing? It is testing this black screen for DDoS check. But if we use wave with a browser extension, which looks similarly, and wait for the DDoS check to pass, we are going to be able to see the real deal. Lots of errors, lots of contrast errors, lots of room for improvement. So you can see the issue is not with the accessibility tool. It's only an issue with the way it was used. Try understanding the way how website accessibility tools work and base your results on that. And obviously, never ignore a screen reader user. If there is one key takeaway that I want you to bring home from this talk, it would be this. Regardless of your profession, always remember, it is our duty to make the internet a more accessible place. Thank you. A few minutes for questions. If anybody has questions, we have mics lined up on both sides. And you can approach the mics as any questions. Thank you very much. That was an awesome talk and very eye-opening. I don't know if we have also questions from the live audience. I do have a question, though. Because when we talk about accessibility and we are trying to introduce that and make that part of the project, unless somebody is fully aware of what it means and why it's so important, it's difficult to convince them that one of the excuses they say is, yeah, but most people can't access it. Like, a lot of people still dismiss it. So I don't know if you have encountered tips and tricks on how to make people more aware of how important it is and who's left out. It's very difficult to convey this message to people who never heard about this. But that's why we had strong and strict regulations. You can just say that people can easily get sued and they will need to pay a huge amount of money. That always works. That's a good one. Yeah, I would just like to add that, first of all, that's an excellent question. And there are a couple of ways, a couple of strategies to persuade people. First of all, you're trying to convert a customer to, like how to say, a long-term customer. If you want to keep that customer, you need to make sure that customer gets the best out of the website. And the best way you can engage with that customer is do the homework, do the research, feel how their business works, see what their business needs, and then you can present to them the numbers, the legislation trends, which are coming for the EUO that comes in 2025, right? And obviously, it depends from the region to region, however, it is coming and it is inevitable that websites will have to be accessible, otherwise there will be consequences. And not only that you are going to get a long-term client using this approach, but also you are going to avoid bad reputation. Even if you protect yourself perfectly from any legal implications, you're still going to have bad reputation. Hey, this guy developed me a website, but the website was not accessible, and I didn't read the contract correctly. I'm not going to hire this guy anymore. So you're losing a client. You're using a customer. And if you are doing research carefully enough, you will see that depending on profession, there are lots of opportunities to gain extra profit for the business if your website is accessible. That's it for me about this question. Thank you very much. Thank you. I think we still have time. There are some questions. Go ahead. Susan, coming from the hosting industry. You know me from earlier. And I want more money, of course. That is like the point of business. Have you ever tested C-Panel Plus and hosting dashboards and panels? How many of these are actually accessible? Yes. So I tested Hostinger panel. This is the only thing that I had the opportunity to try out that worked. It was decently working. So this is what I can see. And just my personal opinion, but I could be wrong. Although it is not related to hosting, Gutenberg just doesn't work as expected. Thank you. Thanks a lot. Maybe I think we have a question over there. Hi. OK. Not always. Thanks for your talk. For a great, interesting talk at first. I have a question, because in 2025, as you already said, the European Accessibility Act comes into force for a lot of companies, not all companies, but many large companies. How do you think how will this influence the accessibility of websites in the real world? Because if I think about GDPR and the compliance there, we have laws into force. But even nowadays, a lot of websites are not compliant with the laws. And I think what happens about accessibility, because it's a topic which is important for less people than GDPR compliance. Yeah. The accessibility will come, although that will not be. It's the never-ending process that's a thing. You never can say, yes, so we made the web fully accessible. Some companies will always try to avoid it. Some of them will do their best to fix those issues. So yeah, I don't believe in the fallacy that one day, every single website will be accessible to the fullest. No, unfortunately, we will never reach that goal. We have to be upfront with that. But it is honest. As Andrea said, we need to try this out. We need to push this forward. So yeah, I can assume that big companies will be doing things towards accessibility. But let's see. I'm just going to add to the question a bit of a technical side. I believe that the website accessibility will rise gradually. However, the accessibility law that comes in 2025, well, I'm pretty sure that it's going to create a sort of panic. Hey, my website is not accessible. I need to get it accessible. So majority of companies would probably react in the very last time before the law comes to fruition. However, the thing is, even when the law comes, I think that it would mainly revolve around ADA compliance, and then there will be special cases, et cetera, et cetera. We are not going to see a fully accessible, obviously, we are not going to see fully accessible company websites because of that. We have time for one more question. So I think from over here. Do you want to go? Or please let us have two more. Come on. Go ahead. He considered the question. Mine's not so much screen reader-related, but so accessible. There's a lot of contrast myths that exist. And I'd just like to hear your opinion on when a button fails a test for contrast, but user testing shows that the black on blue is not as easily to see as the white on blue. We get black pass as white fails. I'd just be interested to hear your opinion on myths versus the actual kind of user experience. Actually, I had a similar question, so I can maybe piggyback on that. Thank you so much for your presentation. The question was, when you say that a site is accessible, how does somebody determine that threshold? Just like the other questioner said, some of these decisions are based on how we perceive the contrast versus how the testing tool tells us. And what you demonstrated today is that the testing tools also are not very good. I will take your question after, my friend, because it's a contrast issue, that I will take yours. Go ahead. The question was exactly how do you figure that out? Andrea, maybe you can go first. Of course. Very nice question, by the way. I would say that when I'm comparing tests from accessibility tools and tests from real life users, the main thing that makes me find what is working the best is just interviewing the users, seeing how they use the website. And even if there is a contrast issue on the website, if multiple groups of users are not having the issue with that, that is fine. That's exactly actually what I mentioned on the last topic. And the thing is, when users are able to use the website and they do not have trouble with it, they can go to all the functions of the website, they can visit all the pages, they have access to all the content, the user experience is seamless. That is my goal to me. I'm not interested what testing tool will say to me. Testing tool is just like guidance. It can help me. But I'm also aware of that, that it works a specific way, which is not always going to work the best for my users. So the main thing to take away from this is to always go to the user and ask them, hey, do you like this? Do you like that? Even if it's not within the rules of a specific tool or a specific testing device, it can still be accessible and it can still provide amazing experience for the user. How do we know that the website is accessible? So you raised the crucial question here and that's why there are so many agencies around. So first things first, we have to separate user testing from accessibility auditing. User testing is a simple test. So a user in terms like a screen reader user in question goes over the website, checks the issues, and tells their opinion. How do we know it's accessible? So there are accessibility standards that are internationally accepted. We have WCAG, WCHE. And then we have American Disabilities Act. Then we have that European Accessibility Act. But mostly people are following WCAG. And that is very comprehensive accessibility standard that covers all accessibility issues that you might think of. Screen reader issues, color contrasts, keyboard users' issues. Then we have voice control issues. So a lot of things are covered by those standards and they are revised as technology goes on. They are revised every two years or every three years. Now we have WCAG 2.1, which is the standard that most agencies are following. And yeah, all accessibility issues are grouped into three categories. We have P1 issue. If the website has a P1 issue, it means that there is no way that the user with disability, for example, today we're talking about screen reader users, let's stick with that. So if the website has a P1 issue, it means that a screen reader user has no way to access the certain feature and do the things they want. For example, choosing the right date is a P1 issue. It's a critical issue. Then we have P2 issues. Those are serious issues, which means that there are ways if the screen reader is advanced user, there are ways that users can navigate the web and do the thing. And then we have P3 issues. Those are issues that exist, but they do not affect the entire experience. Now the thing is that people or companies can get suited only for P1 and P2 issues. So this is how we know if that answers the question. Thank you so much. Please, a round of applause for Andrea. Thank you. Okay, so now we have 15 minutes of break in between the talk and between the sessions. The next one is at 10. And thank you very much for being here. I have a couple of announcements. If you haven't picked up your swag, please remember that we have the swag station and the information desk. The lost and found, if anybody has lost anything in the middle of the sponsor area. There is also a game going on with postcards. The postcards are in your swag bag. And the cool thing is you get to swap them with people and collect them all. There's eight in total to collect. Yesterday there were two questions that were asked. If you don't know the questions, you can ask your colleagues so that socialize, meet somebody new. And if you go to the community booth, which is also in our sponsors area in the middle of the area back there, you can get the new postcards. So start collecting and switching and trading. Good morning, I'm here with Katie Keith, who's the CEO of Barn 2 Plugins. Morning, Katie. Morning. So first question, just a bit of background about Barn 2, what you do? We're a WordPress plugin company. We've got 21 plugins currently. Most of them are WooCommerce, although we have a couple of non-WooCommerce plugins as well. For example, our best selling plugin is a document library plugin called Document Library Pro. Okay. And so you've got an interesting story. And one of the interesting bits you went from agency to plugin company. So just tell us a bit about that, how that happened, that transition? So we started off building WordPress websites for clients in 2009, 2010. And back then, not many people specialized in WordPress. So we grew into a kind of distributed agency with freelancers all working together to build WordPress sites. But we always kind of had this vision that we wanted to sell products instead. And we switched in 2016 to selling plugins. Started off quite simple with some very niche plugins around WooCommerce mostly. And that took off, which was great. So we stopped designing client sites a few months later. Okay. So in terms of where you're based, how many people are you now? We are spread all around the world. We're a UK company, but I live in Spain now. And we have 17 team members, including my husband and co-director Andy and myself and in all sorts of countries, very spread out. Okay, so you're slightly unconventional in that you are your husband and wife team. So tell us about how that works, some of the pressures around that? Well, it's been real opportunity actually because a lot of new theme or plugin companies are one developer who has built a product and launched it. And they have to have all the hats. They have to be a business person, a marketing person, the developer, obviously, customer support. And so with Andy and I, we had different skills and backgrounds. So Andy's a software developer and my background is project management and marketing. So we immediately had that sort of double skill set which really helps even before we started building a team. But the other benefit in terms of the dynamic of the husband and wife team is that we're not necessarily working on the same things. There isn't so much overlap, as you might expect and we have our own areas that we don't have to step on each other's toes all the time which helps. Yeah, so you're sponsoring the Savannah part, your first time sponsoring, isn't it? So tell us a bit about that, how's that going? Yeah, it's been amazing. So this is the first WordCamp we've sponsored. Last year at WordCamp Europe, it was the first time we've had team members other than the two of us to come and support us. And we thought, oh, actually we could sponsor. There's enough of us now. We wouldn't be on our own. So there's six of the 17 of us here this year and we have a sponsorship stand that we've had like a rotor to make sure it's manned at all times. And it was a lot more work than I expected preparing for it with getting all the swag and making sure it was good quality. And we've done like a WordPress quiz which is quite cool that people can test their WordPress knowledge in return for better swag or all access pass for the ultimate winner. So that's been fun and we've had well over a hundred people already do the quiz and we're only halfway through. So that's gone well. So it's a lot of work, but it's been a really great experience. So many, I've talked to a lot more people than I would have done attending a WordCamp, not as a sponsor because people are constantly coming up to us and just wanting to talk in general, asking about the products they might know as already from something or not. So it's been really interesting seeing the- Do you get a sense of whether those are sorry to interrupt? Those people are agencies or freelancers or people coming to WordCamps just to learn about WordPress? All of that. There's lots of freelancers, lots of agencies. So those are the two groups that would be most interested in our products. And then there's the other product company owners and people that work for other larger WordPress companies who are just interested in general networking, possible collaboration opportunities. So all different groups and it's all useful talking to any of them. Okay, so I've seen a big change in terms of Barn 2 the last year in terms of your social media presence both on Twitter, personally on Twitter and YouTube, you've got a growing your YouTube channel. Just tell us a bit about strategically why you've started to go on Twitter and the YouTube stuff and how that's working out. Yeah, they're kind of two separate answers. So with the YouTube, I looked at the UTM codes which we had on our previous YouTube videos because we'd been doing YouTube for years but just not that seriously. There was no real strategy around it. We just had a freelancer in the UK who did the odd video for us about particularly new plugins and we'd always put UTM codes on to track the sales that we would get from those. And when I looked at them, I was quite amazed and it was like enough to cover maybe half a salary or something from not really doing anything. So we've now invested in a full-time video producer to really push our channel to the next level and see how that goes. And you on Twitter, that's going well. That's new as well. Yeah, I only joined, well, we've been going for years as a company. I only joined in October last year and that was largely because my husband, Andy, told me to. He was like, you're the face of Bantu and you should be on Twitter. And I was like, what's the point in Twitter? I'm no interest. I just thought it was people showing off or whatever. I had a go and actually got really into it and I met some really great people. It's a bit like having a kind of wider mastermind group of people to share your experiences and learn from, which has been really interesting. Yeah, I think your Twitter personality is fantastic. Okay, okay, because you're very honest on Twitter. There's, yeah, you're very natural. You're one of the most natural people on Twitter. Was that a deliberate attempt to be authentic or was that just happened? It was just me. I don't see the need to be private about certain things. So I do share stuff about like how business dilemmas, for example, if something's difficult, I might ask for advice. Previously had a mastermind group of like-minded, well, I still do plug-in company owners, but I found that Twitter is actually spreading the word and getting advice more widely from people with an even greater breadth of experiences. So I'm careful about what I share if there's a problem with, I don't know, an individual team member or something that it wouldn't be appropriate to talk about on Twitter, then I don't. If it's a more of a general business dilemma I'm having, I don't see a problem with sharing it and I think people respect that rather than, nobody expects everybody to be perfect. You know, I think it's incredibly refreshing to see somebody that's successful that's actually posing questions and asking the community what they would do. So that's been fantastic. So in terms of Barn 2, what's the next steps? What's the next sort of year, three years looking like for you guys? We've got a couple of major new plugins in the works. We've got a WooCommerce pricing plugin, which we'll be releasing sometime this year. And also a plugin to improve the WooCommerce checkout and add and edit checkout fields and that kind of thing. So and once we launch those two plugins, we're gonna step back and consolidate because we've had a lot of growth recently. We've really expanded the development team and we need to improve our processes and automations and testing and make sure that's all running smoothly. And we're also recruiting to our marketing team. We're looking for a SEO and marketing manager at the moment as well and expanding that way. So no AI projects on in Barn 2 at the moment? We haven't come up with the right fit yet for our specific product. So obviously it's probably will happen in the future, but not for the sake of it. There needs to be a reason and a fit. Yeah, final question then. And you're in Spain at the moment in New York, I think. Is that your long-term plan as a family now? You're gonna stay out there? I think my daughter's got six years more of school. We're planning to stay for that period because she's settled in her school there now. And then how old is she now? She's coming up to 12, nearly 12. So we'll stay for that time. And then after that, currently we quite like to do the digital nomad thing, a bit more traveling because our work is flexible, but we are not that flexible as parents. So we've done one move, which is more interesting, moved to Mallorca, and then longer term we might travel more. I'm sorry, one more question. Do you view your life as unconventional? Well, very few people I know outside of WordPress have started their own business, particularly in tech, and it does lead to a much more flexible lifestyle. So probably, but maybe not in a WordPress context because lots of people have that story. Cool, fantastic. Thank you so much. Thank you. Yes, welcome to All New Comers to session two on track one today. So we are going, they removed my chitchat guy, so sorry. We are gonna listen next to David Urbanski and he's a raving fan of WordPress. And he was raised on PHP. He's a very active member of the community and he's here to talk about Gutenberg, collaborative editing experience. So please give a round of applause to David. Thank you, thank you. Nice to see you all here. Second day morning, ready to continue. Yeah, so let's talk Gutenberg and collaboration, these two things. We have a presentation already somewhere. Okay, we have to wait. But you can watch me in the meantime. I will maybe start since we have no slides yet. Do we? No. So why am I actually talking about this? There are two main reasons. First of all, I'm a huge fan of Gutenberg, the project Gutenberg from the day one that it was created. And second of all, I was working as a JavaScript technical lead at CK Source, where I was heavily exposed to collaboration and collaborative editing in the web browser, in the JavaScript. Oh yeah, we have this. So it's me. I'm David Reizkeme, a full-stack web developer, WordPress developer for many, many, many years, tech lead, I'm a huge fan of Gutenberg, React, TypeScript, JavaScript, everything, web development related. And as I already told you, I love Gutenberg and I worked as a JavaScript technical lead. So now I will show you two possible to collaborative editing experience in the web. Also long-term roadmap for Gutenberg states four phases. First is the easier editing, which is the Gutenberg editor itself. Second one is the customization it includes, for example, block patterns, block themes, block directory and full-side editing. I had to check this out. Third phase is the collaboration. We will be just touching this a bit today. And phase four is my personal favorite. It's a native support for multilingual in WordPress and Gutenberg. Phase two is still in progress. If you want to check what still needs to be done, you can check this issue on GitHub in the Gutenberg repository. And kind of unrelated, but one of the most favorite features of mine in this phase two, Gutenberg is this command center feature, which is basically like a spotlight for Gutenberg and WordPress, so you can add stuff quickly and do stuff even in the WordPress admin eventually just by hitting a shortcut and doing what you want. So let's first start with basics. So collaboration, what is actually collaboration? Collaboration is when multiple people are working together to achieve one goal. And what the goal is in context of Gutenberg. The goal is to create or produce content. So it could look like this in like bigger companies producing content could look like this. We have editing part where multiple people are editing the content and they are creating it, editors. Then eventually they optionally may pass this to another stage like correction and then maybe compliance to the legal team if we are working on, for example, terms of service page. And then maybe we have someone who can approve the changes. And once all of this is done, we have ready to publish page. So we can tell that all of these people have collaborated to create this publishable version of the page. Real-time collaboration on the other hand is just an extension of collaboration. It is the same thing, but allows you to do this simultaneously. In our case, a great place where we could put real-time collaboration is the editing part. So instead of people passing the document to each other so they can apply more changes, they can just do it simultaneously, which would be great, like Google Docs, wouldn't it? Basically, the idea is to just get rid of this, of this post-lock model. Instead, we want to allow everyone in and enjoy editing the content at the same time. Still, there is no real-time collaboration without collaboration, so it would be great to have these flows of collaboration in Gutenberg before going real-time collaboration full. Now let's get into some specifics. These solutions for collaboration, they usually are network layer agnostic, but when you try to implement this in a real product, which Gutenberg is, you probably just stick to one of the connection methods. So we could use one of these short or long polling with traditional HTTP requests similar to what Heartbeat API is doing in WordPress. We can open a web socket to the server, and we can use WebRTC to just connect people in a peer-to-peer network. Speaking of peer-to-peer, should we use server or peer-to-peer network? This illustrates the difference. So in peer-to-peer, obviously we connect everyone directly to each other. This has an advantage because there is no server in the middle. But you might already tell that adding such a synchronization in such a decentralized network is probably a bit more difficult than normal. On the other hand, we have a central server in the middle which really reduces the problem of synchronization because we have one central server which is a single source of true, but we now have a server. So now we also have to ask other questions like where the server should live? Should this live alongside with the website? If yes, it's probably have to be written in PHP which is, trust me, not an easy task to create a webhook server with PHP. If not alongside with the website, then when, where? Maybe an external server or network of geolocalized servers hosted by someone like maybe Automatic or WordPress.org. But then we enter into a data privacy issues because all of the data is flowing through those external servers so we need to probably have some encryption. Some advantages, again, some disadvantages. If we are working in a system where multiple machines are connected across the network, it's unavoidable to stumble across concurrency. So let's see this very simple diagram. We have two timelines and two nodes. Node A sends some information to node B and node B sends some information to node A. Then they receive one and another and when we look at this from an external actor perspective, us, we know the absolute order of all of these events, the total order, because we see both of the timelines. We know that node A, I mean, the A1 happened first, then B1 happened second, A1 prime happened third and the last one is B1 prime. But if we look only at the one node perspective, let's look at the node B and let's think only based on the information he has, can we figure out the whole order? I just told you. You know, probably you know since I'm asking the answer is no and it is no because if we look at this and from the node B perspective, what is the difference between this for him and this? Node B timeline didn't even move. It's the same for him and this is all the information he has. So going this and this changes nothing to him. So what we are saying that A1 and B1, these changes are incomparable so therefore they are concurrent. So at this moment you might say, well, just use timestamps, just send it when this happened. And I don't have time to enter into these timestamps and clocks in general, but if you want to get into this stuff, ask me about this in the QA session, but trust me if I'm saying, if you have multiple machines, you cannot rely on the physical clock they are operating with. Also there is this misconception that you can just avoid concurrency altogether by just using a server. And this is simply not true. Let's see the same exact example we had before and what we just do is just change the labels. Let's say the top one is Jane, the editor, and the bottom one is the server. As you can see, we have still the same situation. We have still concurrency. The only difference is that it's between the client and the server. And if you think about it for a second, it's great because we still, again, reduced the concurrency issue to only two actors. And you might also think, how is it even possible that the server has some concurrent changes to Jane's? Well, it could receive it from another node that is also connected to the server. And as a by-product, we also have a single source of true on the server about the total order of events. Because for the server, the order is basically whenever I received the event is the order of the operations, and this will be important later. For the comparison, this is the decentralized network example. We are sending all the information to all the nodes. We have only clients. There's no server now. And the sending part, by the way, it looks complicated, but it can be simply handled by WebRTC, for example, so it's not an issue. But the problem is the ordering of these events. How do you can ensure that all of the clients, all of the nodes have the same content in the end? It's a difficult problem to solve. But we'll get to this. So handling concurrent editing ideally should have two main properties, which is strong eventual consistency that basically means that at some point in time in the future, all of the nodes that are connected, they end up with the same content. That's as simple as this. The second one is a bit more tricky to implement, which is intent preservation. So what we are saying is that when someone edits the content and someone else edits the content, when we merge those changes, we don't want to just merge them wherever. We want to have some intent preservation. So we have two words. We don't want these letters to interleave, for example, just creating gibberish. Two words, one by one. Even if they are in the wrong order, that's still fine because it's easily fixable. But if the letters interleave, there's no intent preservation and it's obviously bad. So are there any solutions already created by the people? And they are. Two types of solutions are OT and CRDT. If you don't know what it is, bear with me, I will explain this in a moment. So OT stands for operational transformation, a super, super, super old piece of algorithms, ideas, software, and all the stuff around it. And most notably, it's being used by Google Docs, for example, and CK Editor 5. So how does this actually work? Let's see this diagram. And let's imagine both of these nodes, they have some content in the editor, ABC and D. Now, Node 1 wants to insert X between C and D, and Node B wants to remove B, basically. So now they end up with the content ABC, X and D, and on the right, ACD. Now they exchange information on what I have done. And the first node says insert X at index 3, and the second node says delete B at index 1. Now when we receive this operation, we pass it to some transformation function. And this function is clever enough to know, oh, the B is still on the index 1, nothing has changed it, so just do nothing with this transformation. Do this operation, do not transform it. And we end up with applying delete B at index 1 as is, and the result is ACX and D. On the other hand, we have the same exact transformation function, but now it's clever enough again to know, oh, something has changed, and just basically we have to account for this change in our operation. So we transform it, and we say instead of index, insert X on index 3, we now have to insert X on index 2, which ends up again with ACX and D. There are multiple algorithms created for these OT solutions, but they're true to be told, as you can see, the OT is very old because it's even have some stuff from 80s. But most of these have been proven to be just straight wrong for some situations, and the only two I know are correct are the highlighted, the ones highlighted on the slide, and they both use server in the middle, and the Jupyter one is used by Google Docs. So I already told you that order matters, but what if all operations are commutative? So what does it mean? In mathematics, it's very simple to explain. Commutative means no matter which order you apply the operations, the result is the same, basically. So we can shift operations and we have the same result. So let's see if our operational transformation is commutative. Imagine we are creating a title for this whole conference, and we start with the World Camp world in the editor. I want to insert hello at the beginning, and you want to insert rules at the end. If we represent these changes as operations and then exchange them, now let's apply the first one, insert hello at index zero. So index zero is here at the beginning. We inserted hello world camp rules, all good. And now let's do the opposite one, and you probably see where this is going. The index eight is now between O and R, and we end up with hello world rules early camp, which is basically wrong. So both of these content diverged, and this is basically a critical error of the system, and they will never get back, they will never converge. So what we are saying is that these two operations are not commutative. We cannot apply them in any order because the result will be different, and that's the main reason why we need these transformation functions in the first place. And just to say also about these transformation functions, this is the main criticism of OT because those transformation functions are very complex. They are full of magic in direction because what they do is they transform operations against another operation. So you have often like a change, transform operation, then transform operation, then transform this operation, then transform this operation, and we have like very long chains that nobody is able to debug or even understand the code that is creating these transformations and also to foresee the result of this code, which is pretty bad. If they would be commutative, it would be more like this, we start with the same state, an empty document, we have three operations, we shuffle them, doesn't matter the order, and then we end up with the same result. If they also are idempotent, which is a big word but it's pretty simple, it means that no matter how many times we apply the operation, we end up with the same result. So multiplying by one is idempotent operation because we can multiply by 100,000 times and we have the same result. In our operational transformation world, or CRDTs, if we have operations like this and we somehow receive the same operation twice, exactly the same, we only apply it once and we have one paragraph with text hello in this example. So if we would have a system where we have operations that are commutative, both commutative and idempotent, we have a very simple way to synchronization because think of this, if I can send anything in any order to anyone and they receive it and we don't even care if they receive it multiple times, it would be pretty simple, yeah? I mean, here we enter CRDTs, which stands for conflict-free replicated data types, also known as commutative replicated data types or convergent replicated data types. This one is the most popular. And CRDTs are the set of data structures and also algorithms and, again, stuff around this to basically enable this commutative idempotent, everything is going, you know, merging itself, hence conflict-free. Some advantages of this are, for example, you can create a software that is ready for offline editing, you can create a local-first-apps, so you can have two different editors that are completely offline, either changes, you do changes, and then once we are online, somehow it magically merges. It supers both operation-based and state-based things, so we can both use the normal operations as I showed you in the operational transformation or we can just send the whole state of the application and they will be getting merged. This is obviously more expensive payload-wise, but it's also an option. And there is no need for the server because we don't care about the order of operations, so we can send it to anyone at will. Some of the solutions and algorithms for CRDTs are listed here. These are the ones that I know. And I'm not going to go into details about this, but the wood, the first one is pretty funny because it stands, this abbreviation stands for without operational transformation. So you can see that this has been created just to kill the operational transformation. And it's like a new and more fancy way of doing collaboration these days. So how actually these CRDTs work, because you might think it's kind of difficult, like I sent any order, any duplications, and it still somehow works. So how actually does this work? I will give you an example of one of the algorithms. There are multiple ways of doing this, but this one is the simplest one to explain, so I will get this one. In CRDTs, if we have again the same content ABC and D, we instead of working and operating on indexes, which may shift, we operate on IDs, on unique IDs. So in this case, I made these IDs 1, 2, 3, and 4. So now, well, if I want to insert X between C and D, well, there's no ID there because it's 3 and 4. What do you do? You just create a new ID in the middle, 3.5. And now you might think, okay, but if two people want to insert between C and D, they both have ID 3.5, which is bad. We don't want this. And yes, you would be true because it's not that simple. I will explain this on this example. Let's say we have a collaborative session between John and Jane, and John have created some content first, ABC and D. And now you can see, instead of just adding ideas and number, what we are doing is we have an array of tuple. Tuple is basically two-value array, let's say, two-value data structure. So we now have ID of, like, index or ID of this element, and also an ID of who actually created this. So in this case, I'm using emojis because it's shorter. But we know that ID 1 created by John, ID 2 created by John, 3 created by John, and 4 created by John. And now, if Jane wants to insert something between C and D, she's no longer need to shift and do stuff with indexes. What she does is she takes whatever was before, 3 by John, and now she appends it, and she says, this is 3 by John, followed by 1 by me. And now let's go even deeper. Like, now we're removing B, the same situation we had before. Removing B, and now John wants at the same time to insert Y and Z between X and D. So what we do, we just remove the two by John, and the John inserts after X, so it takes whatever was there, and it adds Y and Z, adding 1 and 2 by him at the end. So this way, we have, like, conflict-free merging of the letters. There's also one, and by the way, these fraction numbers I just showed, like, 3.5, they are actually created by taking all of these numbers in the ID. So it's 3.1.1 for the Y letter, and therefore we can order all of this based on these values. There's also one edge case for this. Let's imagine I removed C as a John, and I added D also as a John. So we would have, again, the same situation, but different letter, and this would be bad. So what we are doing, we are just using something called logical clock or just counter, basically, and every time we do any operation, we bump the counter, which is kind of like a timestamp for us. And the whole thing, the whole row is actually the ID. The whole row is the ID of the letter. The two main known libraries or software that is actively using in real projects CRDTs is AutoMerge and YJS. And now, you can just Google this and find this on GitHub. Now let's go, we talked basics. We talked how collaboration actually works. Now let's talk Gutenberg. If we look at this issue, it's actually from 2017. So it's six years ago already, and people were discussing collaboration. And if you look closely here, we also have a mention of operational transforms. It's also sometimes called like this, and CRDTs. And they also say peer-to-peer, by the way. It's six years ago already. And it's by Chris Blower from Automatic. He's still working there, legend. Then around the same time, a guy called Abyshek Galot, back then working at Automatic, he created this proof of concept using WebRTC, and then it was taken also by Grzegorz Jukowski from Automatic and put into the WordPress repository to WordPress issues, and it was, at some point, it was closed. But it was a nice proof of concept. Then the guy who created YJS, his name is Kevin Jans, he actually took YJS, which is exactly what they do. They take YJS and put it into all of the editors, with the weak editors, and he took YJS and said, okay, if I can add this to any editor, I can also add this to Gutenberg. And he created this proof of concept, and if you are paying attention, there's a link here. And it's live. It's still live. It's 2019, but it's still live. You can go there and you can check collaboration in Gutenberg right now, if you want. In 2020, this is the latest take on collaboration. As you can see, something is going on, although we don't have the Phase 3 yet. This is the latest take. It's created by Enrique Piqueiras, who back then worked at Automatic. Now he works at Google. But I took this GIF, by the way, excuse me, the quality, because it was just downloaded from the comment on the pull request. But you can see how does this work on this pull request, and it's kind of impressive. You type something, and the person sees this, you can comment on stuff, et cetera. And this is using also YJS, so it's using CRDTs. It's kind of superseded the previous pull request I told you from the YJS creator. There's also this Asglock.com, created by Riat Benguela, who also works at Automatic. And this is not embedded in WordPress, but he took just the Gutenberg and created this nice piece of software and you can create a session, you can share it, you can visit the link in another browser, and suddenly you have collaborative editing enabled in both of these Gutenberg editors. Until now, I was talking only about text editing, mostly because it was simple enough to explain, but it's nice to know that CRDTs also can handle all of the different types of data. For example, this is showing the offline capabilities on a to-do app, probably it's just a JSON under the hood. It's just sharing the state and merging it somehow auto-magically after they change the toggle to online from offline, which is super cool. So exciting times ahead of us, amazing times ahead of us. I truly believe that adding collaboration, real-time collaboration to Gutenberg is going to be the biggest milestone that WordPress had to face and will actually achieve since the creation of Gutenberg itself. Oh, you got a problem? But the next slide is thank you. Yeah, something popped up here. But the next slide is thank you, so that's it for me. Thank you, David, that was an awesome talk. Thank you. If anybody has questions, again, we have the mics in the aisles. If you want to ask a question, just please proceed to either of the two sides. This was very exciting to watch, especially the last gif showing how it could work. I can't wait. Yeah, I can't wait, too. I mean, it would be awesome. Yes, yes. I think we have a question over there. Hello. Thank you for the talk. I have a question. How will this influence database and also revisions? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, so... It's a good point. It's a good point. Oh, you probably know what you're talking about. Yeah, it obviously has to be integrated somehow with revision history for... And what was the first one? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I don't know the answer to this, to be honest. I'm not working at Automatic. I did my due diligence and I spoke to people working at Automatic. Thank you, by the way. Thank you, Adam Cieniski. But I don't know... I don't have answers to all of this because I'm not very close to this development cycle of Gutenberg. But I can check this one. And I know there's a revision history feature and all of the other features like suggestions, like content locking. So it should also work with locking the templates and everything. Some people can edit some stuff, some people can't. So this also should be aware of all of this, which is not an easy task. That's why we only have proof of concepts. We don't have the real thing yet. But, you know, hopefully, at some point in the future, we will get this. Also, I know from the insight that, to be absolutely honest, I'm not representing Automatic, but I know that the real-time collaboration is not like super main priority. The icing flows for content teams is kind of like a more important thing for Automatic for the collaboration part because they don't specify real-time collaboration. They are working on it, looking at it, but the icing collaboration is the main priority because now the bigger content teams, they are using external tools, they create content there, and they just move it to the WordPress in the end, which is not ideal. So yeah. Any more questions from the audience? It looks like... Okay, thank you very much, David. That was amazing. Please, everybody give it up for David. This is for you. Okay, so we all have a few minutes before the next session, so I have notes because you can move around, you can go explore. Please remember to visit our sponsors. They are the ones who make this possible. These amazing things happen. My name is Maria, by the way. I don't have to say that, but I'll repeat that some time today. We have a community booth also, and I have a question for you, you can still move around, but remember that postcard game I told you about? Yesterday there were two questions, today you'll get the other two. The question is, when and where was the first work camp ever? If you know the answer to that, please go to the community booth and get your extra postcard. Don't forget to grab your swag, you have also postcards there to swap with your friends, or any new networking that you do. I have a couple of announcements to say. Remember that we all have to follow the code of conduct. You can find that on the Europe.workcamp.org website. We also have a contributing area in the Trianti balcony. You can go there if you want to maybe work with your colleagues or continue something from the contribution day. There is a wellness track, if you don't know, that's on level one. And if you want to leave feedback about any of the sessions, you can go to Europe.workcamp.org slash 2023 slash feedback and let us know what you think about these sessions, any other tracks. And I will stop for a minute until the next session. Hello, Work Camp Europe, armchair work campers. How's it going? My name is Angela Jin and I am joined here today by Sam. Do you want to introduce yourself? Hi, yeah, I'm Sam Waynes. I work for Barn 2 Plugins doing their YouTube channel. And it's my first word camp. I think that's what we're here to talk about. First word camp, that's excellent. How has your experience been so far? Well, first of all, I got in on Monday and we had three glorious days exploring Athens and getting out on a boat with the team, which was awesome. And going up the Acropolis, getting photos, videos, museum, everything's been excellent. And the food has been divine. Oh, okay. Well, so for those who are not here with us in Athens, tell us more about the food, because I adore Greek food. I grew up thinking, oh, I don't really like Greek food because of olives and stuff. But honestly, since, I don't know, something changed in my palate or whatever, but I've been loving all the, even like the Greek salad with feta, but my favorite is the moussaka. It's like a combination of shepherd's pie and lasagna. And Italians and Brits are probably killing me for saying that, but I think it's great. I think it's great. Thank you. Moussaka is like my favorite and I have just been eating as much of it as I can here. And okay, there's something about that palate because I hated eggplant as a child, but love it here. So yes. Maybe they just grow better versions of it here. It is quite possible. Yeah. So, first time at Word Camp and you are diving into the deep end with our very, our biggest Word Camp, how has it been so far? Oh, well, first of all, the venue has been really cool. I love getting around on the Metro, not having to worry about getting taxis and stuff. Super cheap, super like reliable and everything. And the venue itself, beautiful, huge. I was getting around with my GoPro and camera because I'm trying to film something for a video. Cool. And today I'm entering all the competitions, hoping to win some headphones or something. Yeah. Yeah. Going to the talks as well. I've got a few lined up today and some yesterday, and the auditoriums are really good for, yeah, audio viewing, everything. All right, good. Well, I'm glad to hear that that experience is going well and you are sponsoring, so thank you. And how have your conversations with the community members have gone? Well, it's really cool. So we're one of the smaller sponsors, but we've got a competition running with a little quiz so people can pop in and do the quiz on their phone. The winners get an all access pass for all of our plugins. And anyone who plays gets some of our cooler swag, you know. And I think my boss, Katie, did a great job organizing all of that. I just sat in the background and said, yes, that sounds like a great idea. Our conversations with people have been excellent. I've been able to talk about the plugins in a way that I was only doing on the YouTube channel before. But now it's great to talk to the actual customers of our products as well as potential customers, people who might be interested. And they've got a lot of great questions. And sometimes I'm able to answer. Sometimes I defer to the experts. Wonderful. And you said you've been attending some of the sessions. Were there any that really got you thinking or that you really liked? Yeah, I really enjoyed the first session I went to, which was to do with marketing, specifically analyzing your marketing data and just coming to a conclusion about what's going to improve the overall experience for customers. And it was like a scientific process, right? So you go through the analysis, like hypothesis, A-B testing, statistical significance, that sort of thing. Excellent. And we still have one full day. We're just getting started at WordCamp Europe today. Do you have a plan for today? Yeah. So I'll be at our booth for quite a bit of the day as we still have lots of people stopping by. And it's great to just hang out with the team because we're a remote company, so we don't get a lot of face time with the team. And besides that, I've got a few more talks lined up. If I'm honest, I don't remember exactly what they are, but they're on the schedule, so yeah. Yeah, there is a lot of content here to enjoy. Excellent. Well, so are you familiar with the WordPress community outside of this event? Do you spend time with people online? Yeah, no, this is really my first getting into it. I did a video recently on the channel this year, which maybe it's a little bit of a controversial topic, but it actually had a positive spin. The video was titled, Is WordPress Dying? And so that was when I learned a lot about where WordPress started, a lot of the large contributing members of the community, as well as some of the main stakeholders and everything. And so now it's great to meet all those people in person, like Yoast and everyone else. So yeah, I think there's a real positive spin because at the end of the video, I'm saying, well, actually no, it's not anything close to that and the community is stronger than ever. Excellent. That's a relief to hear. And I think definitely true. And so yeah, what do you think you'll do after this event? I might just sleep for a whole day. That's fair. Me too. Put my feet up. It's a lot of energy to go to something like this, but I'm a very social person, so I quite enjoy it. And maybe recover the voice a little bit. But I hear there's an after-party. There is. So maybe I'll be going there, of course. Excellent. Good, do. WordCamp Europe always throws an excellent after-party. Good. How about after WordCamp Europe? Do you want to get more involved? Have we got you into the WordPress community now? Yeah, well, I'm actually networking with a lot of video creators because that's my space. So it's been great to meet people who are also making YouTube videos or have channels for their companies like I do. And so my goal is to continue to talk with those people in a more formal way so we can bounce ideas off each other and get a better idea of how to make videos that service the community in a way that they respond to because that's ultimately what it's about, like helping people to solve their problems. I love it. And that feels very, I hear a lot of WordPress community in that we love bouncing ideas off of each other and solving problems. Yeah, cool. Well, I am curious, remind us, where are you based? So currently based in Poland. But as we are remote first, I have the freedom to sort of choose a home as it suits. And so yeah, there's some ideas in the future to travel a little bit as well. I love travel. But we really like our base in Poland because we got a great, we invested in like a chair and a desk and stuff and actually going to be getting married later this month. Congratulations. Thank you. That's fantastic. My fiance works in marketing, but she's not in the WordPress space. But we've been really enjoying our trip here. It's kind of like a pre-honeymoon or something. Yeah. Yes, do the pre-honeymoon, do the post-honeymoon, do another honeymoon down the line. Great. Where would you like to travel to? We have plans for Turkey, Malaysia, Vietnam. And later on at some point, I have a bunch of family in New Zealand. That's amazing. Good stuff. Thank you. Well, do you think one thing that's fantastic about the WordPress community is that we are global. And so are you planning on going to any other WordCamps down the line? Yeah, it depends on the timing of things, of course. But yeah, absolutely. Our company is invested financially in the WordCamp scene and they're willing to help us to travel to the different events depending on location, as well as just getting together with the team. It's a great excuse to do that as well. It really is. My company is also fully remote. And so it is lovely to be able to travel and see each other in person. That time is really special. And you said you did some team activities earlier this week. You went on a boat. That's right. Yeah. So we got on to this retro yacht. Yeah, I don't know what the best word is. It's old school. But it was really cool. The captain was a really nice guy. We also had some great food and drinks. And I got to go swimming and put on the face mask. And I was looking around a little fish and stuff. It was good fun. The water is so clear here. I really love that. So we sailed along the coast of Athens. So you could see the city from there. And as well as some of the little small rocky islands around. Yeah, it was a good time. Very cool. Cool. Well, I'm not even sure. What else can we talk about here? You said your company is remote. What is your company? I'm with automatic. And I'm over in the dot org division. We work on the WordPress project full time. I'm head of programs and contributor experience. And so I have the good fortune of working with word camps all over the world. So very much my passion there. Is this, are you doing other interviews this week? Just this one for this purpose. But yeah, I, one of the things that I really love about these events is being able to chat with people and catch up. And so, yeah, I'm going to turn a question around on you. Did you, did you have any talks that you've been to that you really liked? I haven't yet. But I did sit in a little bit on the performance panel. And so that was excellent. I heard really good things about the diversity panel. And then later today, I am definitely looking forward to Matt and Josepha and Matias's talk as well to see where we're going. You mentioned the panel yesterday. I went to a panel on the discussion around partnerships. And we're still being, being the smaller company that we are at the moment. Well, we haven't really discussed all like the partnership stuff. But we left that panel kind of wondering, like, okay, there's a few companies with we were going to think about the greater partnership because the affiliate side is fine. But then if you invest in the partnerships, I think that's where the, the community starts to show itself. There's, there's a lot of opportunity in, especially in this group and in the WordPress community for, for that. So it's cool that you're like, that you're coming here and then starting to think about what, what opportunities you might want to pursue. It's really nice. Katie said it's like, if I'm making the YouTube videos, that's fine. But if, even if I wasn't doing that, she'd want me doing something else in the, in the marketing space because we're, we're just trying to work out like exactly where we are. And we're trying to expand the blog, expand the channel. So yeah, I mean, check it out if you, if you're interested in the plug in WordPress plugins, especially WooCommerce plugins. That's what we're doing the most and yeah. Well, there are a lot of content creators here and that's definitely something WordPress needs. I'm curious, did you, did you attend contributor day by any chance? No, that was, it was our tourism day, but I didn't, I didn't know where I would fit in on that being my first time. So I'm, I'm certain that next time I've got a lot more to like contribute in that sense. Okay. But yeah, I was still just kind of feeling the waters this time. I understand that. Well, I hope that after this experience, maybe the next time you come to another work camp that you can participate in contributor day. And I would, I would personally love to help you figure out where you want to fit in and all of that. Oh, that's awesome. Thanks. Yeah. I, I, I feel like I've got a lot to learn still like about, well, just all of the, even just all the different businesses that are here. I, I'm still not familiar with, but it would help me also in my video creation to know the people who are making the products that I'm going to be talking about. Yeah. Because then I can even have a more direct line of information as well. Yeah. That's a really powerful tool, like in the creative space, especially making YouTube videos. I never want to make a video that's about something that's wrong, you know, I want to be accurate. I want it. So yeah, there's, there's a little bit of like that networking is going to go a long way towards understanding the products that are going to be referencing and talking about in future videos. Sure. And contributing and helping to build, build WordPress is a great way to really get to know it really deeply. Yeah, for sure. Cool. Yeah. Yeah. I, I also, I also love bringing new contributors in because I think you like it is a big space to get into. And even if like anything new that you come into, there's a lot to learn. But those people do bring a lot of really fresh perspective that we need. And so I, I always really love to encourage people to lean into all the things that they don't know and help us figure out how we can do it better. Can you tell me a bit more about contributor day? Cause I didn't hear much about it before. Oh, okay. Excellent. I love this. So contributor day is when we get all these people together in a big room and we have people help us build WordPress. We build WordPress together. And so there are a bunch of different make teams. Yes. Of course, core, which builds the core software, but also like design, marketing, community, documentation, training. And so all of these teams that make WordPress what it is. And so for me, that's really like the heart of this community where we're all working together towards making WordPress what we want it to be. And so as you might imagine, with such a big project, it is a lot of work, a lot of coordination, all of that. And so it's, yeah. And so there's a lot of spaces to figure out how we do this all together. And that's what contributor days are for. And we, of course, we regularly do this online as well. But it's just like a big team meetup. It's nice to do that in person. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Now, I understand we are out of time here soon, but are there any parting thoughts you want to leave us with here? Yeah. Well, if you're at WordPress, then you're probably not watching this online. But yeah, check out the Barn 2 YouTube channel if you want to see my work and the work that we're doing at Barn 2. And yeah, keep following the live streams if you want to see what else is happening at WordCamp. Fantastic. And perhaps did I get you on contributor day? Maybe I'll see you at the next one. I hope so. Excellent. Good. All right. Thank you so much, Armchair, WordCamp Europe Organize or WordCamp Europe folks. I will see you next time. Welcome, everybody, to session number three of today, track one. Thank you for being here. So for our next talk, we are going to have two mics in the rows. The talk goes for the first around 30 minutes. And then we have some time for questions. So if you think of any questions, feel free to, at the end, I'll tell you when go to the mics. So today we're going to have Kathy Bosco talking about 15 ways user experience impacts businesses success. She's joining us from the US. She works with top talent while helping them use the best possible UX research to build their businesses and implemented in their projects. She's been over the years, a WordPress core contributor. So please give a round of applause for Kathy who's joining us today. Thank you. Yes. Hi, everybody. I'm going to have my notes because I have a lot of important data and credit and I don't want to mess anything up. So don't be distracted. Today, I want to remind everyone that the most successful organizations are research led. They reduce risk for their projects and their organizations and they optimize with a bias towards action. There are very heavy costs associated with delivering a poor user experience and we're going to talk about what those are and who they impact. We will also count down 15 ways user experience can influence business success. You're going to need your phones. So grab your phones, have your phone handy and feel free to take pictures. We'll start with the uncomfortable part first where I'll talk a little bit about me and give you some context on where my perspectives come from. So five years before the internet became available and households in the US, I graduated from college. I was the first person in my family to graduate from college and I went to art school and it was a huge disappointment for my entire family that I would waste university on fine art. But in the end, it turned out to be the right path for me. In 1997, I opened my studio. I studied drawing and sculpture and performance art. So I figured I could make a living as an illustrator. I was optimistic. I opened the studio in 1997, completely analog, so just drawing. By about 2003, my studio had become half analog and then half digital. Around 2003 was when the Adobe Creative Suite became available and that's when I sort of transitioned to a graphic designer. Of course WordPress 1.0 was released at that time. And by 2005, my studio was completely digital. I had to make a website for myself to get my illustration portfolio online. And sure, as soon as you can make a website, everyone in your town thinks you're a web designer and you can make their website. So that's just sort of how my career evolved. Another inflection point that I've witnessed was in 2007 when the iPhone was introduced and everybody was mobile and bringing the internet with them. WordPress REST IPA came out in 2010 approximately. And by 2012, I was at a point where I was collaborating with other developers and front-end engineers and SVG animation was really an exciting part of the work we did. And scaling up my projects. And then we started creating mobile apps for customers. I began to realize that myself and all of my clients were heavily dependent on WordPress. And it became a huge sense of responsibility to recommend that to people. There are livelihoods dependent on it. So I began to contribute back and participated with the design team and making core contributions. And actually made lifelong friendships and colleagues that I could collaborate with and we subcontracted work with each other. In 2018, I also worked on the WordPress governance project. And by 2020, I collaborated with two other designers and we opened up a UX design collective. I mean, all of my businesses were not successful. I mean, some of them were kind of successful and some of them were, but it looks like I was a huge success. I pretty much learned everything the hard way. But the next inflection point is sort of where we're at now with AI. So it's been very interesting to see all these inflection points in my career. I'm the senior manager of UX research at Pantheon. So let's talk about user experience design. CX, so many acronyms, right? Customer experience, user experience, user experience research, user experience writing, end-to-end user experience design. One of the reasons I highlighted user experience design is because I'm surprised by this. I still have to remind a lot of people that visual design is only one aspect of user experience. And research is really just critical thinking. We all do research. We all do discovery. And everyone making decisions that impact the user experience or the customer experience are making design decisions. So design is something we all make design decisions, no matter what our roles are, if we're developers or designers or project managers. I'm less interested in roles people have. And I'm really much more interested in the work that they're getting done together. As a famous quote, I've got to read the quote from Albert Lee on the future of design in startups. Companies with the highest investment in UX are referred to as design unicorns. They saw their sales increase by 75%. It's a lot. We know the costs associated with poor user experience. 15 great ways we can influence business success. Let's review quickly some of the costs. They include lost sales due to demos and free trials that don't convert or retention issues and the product is just too complex to use. Support costs due to problems users can't resolve without asking for help or due to complexity that makes it hard for them to figure anything out on their own. Productivity costs are very expensive and that's due to users needing to go through extra steps just to do very simple things. Developer costs, poor user experiences due to having to work on features that don't produce value because nobody's using them or having to redo work because the previous version didn't meet the user's needs or users couldn't figure it out. There's resource costs as well. Product managers and team members can be spending too much time in damage control mode rather than working on new value for customers. We've all been there. They are also a cost of focusing on escalation issues instead of working on new capabilities. These are very costly for organizations. Businesses that invest wisely in user experience research and design deliver useful and compelling experiences for users and they positively impact their company's success as well as the experience for the end user. Okay, so let's do the countdown. 15 ways UX impacts and can influence business success. It shows up like companies are able to solve problems and reduce risk with evidence-based techniques together. We can foster a culture where continuous learning is valued. The best jobs are jobs where you learn together and you grow in your career through project work. Teams that do great job with user experience can attract and retain the top art. This changed my life, this chart. This is a diagram by Ryan Singer from Basecamp. Understanding users' needs measured in time and progression towards a future delivery. So when we look at this chart over time, the whole 50% of this side is research and discovery. We are working from, we know nothing about the problems our customers are facing to the middle where we understand the problem we want to solve. And then the second half is getting to the right solution. When we really understand the solution is really evident. If you're really struggling to find a solution, you're probably not as focused on the right problem as you need to be. And then the last section is getting it done. Pushing code, A.B. testing, creating prototypes, that sort of thing. So moving from the unknowns to the knowns, half the job is research and discovery. And we all rushed through that far too much, I think. And so this changed my life. It gave me opportunities to make impact through value delivery. Delivering value doesn't change over time. Tools change, technologies change, everything's always changing. But if you and your career can focus on your ability to deliver value, you transcend a lot of that. I have another quote. According to a study done by Forrester, which is a secondary research analyst research, every dollar invested in UX brings $100 in return. Now, this is an average figure, but it's an ROI of an impressive 9,900%. Okay, back to the countdown. Coming in at number 10, we can unlock revenue for innovation or unique allocations when we're doing great user research. We can lighten the load on our support teams. We can easily report outcomes to impress stakeholders and investors. And we can increase existing business, so that would mean renewals or upsells. And we proactively decrease long-term costs. How do teams do this? How do they do this for their clients or their products? They use frameworks. They use scenario-based user groups and other models. We'll look at some of those. This is important. If it's not secure, performant, and accessible, it's not usable. We shouldn't ship it. This was a motto of our team. Formally known as UX-ATT created, we created this usability diagram. Monique Doubleman and Jackie Dillia and myself built this as a framework for which we would work through. We would work with clients who met this criteria, and we made sure we held ourselves accountable to these standards. Ethical, sustainable, and inclusive was the foundation of anything that we worked on or produced or shipped. It had to be secure, performant, and accessible. And we used the 10 interface usability heuristics to measure the quality of our work. If it was websites, it had to be findable and discoverable. And UX writing was really important. There's a lot of hats we had to wear. I'm slightly dyslexic. I was not in charge of UX writing, but it's incredibly important to user experience. All of our projects were research-led. We look at projects through three levels, too. We look at projects through the interface level. So one example I like to share with people is the Google SiteKit plugin. The interface is incredibly delightful to use. It's very clear. It's very informative. We look at that experience on the interface level, and it's very usable. So the interface level, one view at a time. The next level would be the journey level. And when we review software or look at software, we look at it through the journey level. So an example of that would be level, level has the alley collective. And it might be the journey a customer takes through a subscription from when they sign up and the courses they take. And if that journey has an endpoint or if they come back. So the journey level, the interface level, and then the relationship level. And this is really powerful, especially if you plan on being around for a while. The example I'll share about the relationship level is the Gravity Forms plugin. Back in the day, it was the first paid plugin I ever purchased. And it was a big deal at the time that I'm paying for a plugin, right? But that plugin was incredibly valuable. I could sell products through it. I could do a lot of things very early on. And I sold it over and over and over again to my clients. And they loved it and they bought it. And then later in my relationship with Gravity Forms, I saw online that they did this huge accessibility work on their plugin. And they marketed with that. And I was able to, they even shared what they did. So I was able to inform some of my development teams how to do that work. And so my relationship level with Gravity Forms and that trust I have is the third level. We look at things through. The purpose of UX research is often to support decision makers with the valuable information they need to reduce risk in many areas. Even organizational UX research is important work. This brings me to a possibly well-known model. It's called the Exposure Formula. I didn't invent these models. Oh, we all want to remove friction, shorten tool time, and increase goal time for customers. Of course. This is important. We know from research that everyone spends at least two hours every six weeks exposing their work directly with customers. If you fall below that, the quality of your work drops off. You can do more than that. And you can get some improvement. But this was like a magic threshold. The key is to interact with someone, ask them to show you how they would do something using your software, and be in a place where you can ask questions. It's very humbling. It could be done on Zoom. It doesn't have to be in person. But not only will improve the quality of the software you deliver, we know from research that as teams go through periods of growth, they lose contact with customers. And they also lose the meaningful nature of their work. Their sense that what they do improves someone's life in some way. And this is really important. I find that the developers and the engineering teams that I work with really need to have that connection and know that their work is meaningful to people. And this is one way you can keep that healthy and thriving. There's a famous Amazon button story, a simple change of copy, and the addition of a continue button on this retailer's site netted an increase of $15 million in sales in the first month and $300 million in the first year. And you can read more about that from Jared Spool's article. User experience matters and it really influences business. Okay, let's continue the countdown. We can increase long-term sustainability for our organizations. We can improve cross-team performance. Coming in at number three, we can reduce churn. We all want successful business metrics to report and we all do research. Hopefully just enough research. It doesn't have to be research theater. This can be very scrappy. But we also know that not everyone has the same level of skills for research. So let's take a moment of reflection. Literacy is defined as detailed knowledge of what differentiates good quality from poor quality. Pretty literate. It reflects that motion from unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence. Painful. I thought I gave all my friends these biscuits, but I put way too much unconscious competence. I think of my grandmother making biscuits from scratch. She didn't have a recipe. She could do it like this, but she couldn't really teach me how to do it because I didn't have a recipe and she didn't have one either. So that intuitive way of working feels really good. But be careful. You want to be able to teach what you're doing as well probably. We all loop through this over and over and over. Every time we have to learn something new. And everything's transient in technology. We're always going through these stages. It's exhausting. Our work requires a lot of endurance because of this. Courage and bravery and resilience. It's important to stay informed about theory as well as technical achievement. So I hope to unlock an opportunity for us to be intellectually and emotionally honest with ourselves about the value and the quality of the solutions we deliver to our customers, to their end users, and to each other as well as we work on WordPress core. Research is a team sport. And there are many kinds of research. I won't go through all of them, but this is one of the trifectas of joy that I like to work under. And that's where we have UX research, working with structured data or telemetry, and voice of the customer. And these have different inputs. And when they come together, we can measure our work. We can expose our work to customers. And we can test it towards growth. This is an example of a customer acquisition cost diagram. So by using frameworks, we can hold ourselves accountable and make really informed decisions about how we move forward and how we choose not to. So the customer acquisition cost diagram is how we measure the cost of customer acquisition, how it's paid back over time, and then measure that data towards lifetime customer value, and that will help our teams avoid risk. So there's lots of different frameworks, lots of different researchers provide support to organizations with. That includes primary research, structured data, analyst research, strategic marketing, corporate research, A-B testing, win-loss marketing, all kinds of research is happening. And if you're not aware of it, get excited about it. It can really help you further your career to have some strengths in your research. Oh, I went too fast. User experience research is best measured by its impact on the roadmap. This happens by way of features ratified for the roadmap as is, features altered based on insights derived through research, or features removed from the roadmap entirely. These are the key takeaways. We know the heavy costs associated with delivering poor user experience. The most successful organizations are research-led, and they reduce risk and optimize with the bias towards action for their teams towards and coming in at number two is increasing new customer base and increasing revenue. We do far too little research or discovery, and this forces teams to have to spend way more effort compensating for not having the information they need. Okay, you're going to need your phones now. Some field research for WordCamp Europe. I have this six-question two-minute survey. No spam, you don't have to give your email. We will share the findings from this with the community. Essentially, the survey is based on the way we each interact with WordPress and is designed to surface any questions we currently have or any observations we have made about the usability or the technical requirements we need the platform to meet for us. Again, you will not be spammed and we'll definitely share the results out and maybe we'll unlock some useful insights. I'll share my deck slide out with links to the survey as well after this and the hashtag social channels. There are three potential reasons that customers fail to convert according to Laura Klein. They don't understand what you're offering them or they don't want what you're offering them or they are not willing to pay what you're asking for what you offer them. Luckily, these problems can be addressed and there are important steps towards achieving this and it all points back to spending that time up front working on identifying the right problem to solve with the right solution. Don't rush through the research and discovery. It's way too costly and that concludes this presentation. Happy to take questions. Thank you. Yes, so thank you very much. That was really nice. I loved it. If anybody has questions, please remember that the microphones are on the sides so you can walk over to them and to speak up because this is a very interesting topic and we all need to learn a little bit more about UX. It's everywhere. Everything needs it, especially in what we work, what we do. So thank you, thank you for doing what you do, what you say. I have a question that maybe relates a little bit to what you said last. How can people become a UX researcher? Because we are all, but I am sure there's more to learn. Good question, good question. So I find typically people land at UX research from one of two areas. They either lean into UX research from design, which is my path, from a designer into designer researcher to full-time researcher, or they enter into research through academic research. So they may not have anything to do with WordPress or technology or anything, but they have rigorous research skills to projects. So either of those two paths, which is very productive if you can have multiple origin points for your research team. Okay, okay. Does anybody have more questions? Because otherwise I can't keep asking. And for people that are maybe not yet in US research, how can they, like, where can they go or how can they integrate a little bit more about learning more examples of... Yeah, the Nielsen-Norman group online, I mean, I didn't invent all these frameworks. There are lots of great resources to learn about the 10 heuristics. I think the most important thing you can do is just expose your work to people trying to use your software. Just dive in. You don't have to have a fancy education or, you know, super, super analytic chops. You just really need to get in there and watch people struggling to use your software. It can be humble. I think we have some questions over there. Hello. So as a former graphic designer, now as a developer, I wanted to ask you what was the best practices when you're doing the research? I mean, okay, we have surveys, but is there anything else except surveys? Oh, yeah. I mean, I'm using a survey as a last resort, to be honest. The surveys are not as reliable quantifiably as actually doing a semi-structured interview with someone. So I do semi-structured interviews with customers and also with stakeholders, the developers, the people making decisions about particular feature work that's underway. A semi-structured interview, it sounds fancy or jargony. It's just a series of questions that we're going to ask to answer our research question. Like, is this usable? And we ask them some questions, and then in every interview, I ask them to show me how they would do something. And we usually have them show us how they would do something through a prototype, so Figma prototypes. You don't have to invest a lot of money, but every time I interview someone, if we include them showing us how they would accomplish a task, it's gold. So at least five interviews per topic. That's the core of it. Hello. Hello. Nice presentation. Thank you. I want to ask most of the businesses out there are feature factories. So how do you convince them in a sentence to stop creating unvaluable features and invest more time to provide value? Nobody listens to me, I swear. Really, being able to measure the whole team in the company does not measure their work and the impact of their work. It's a bit of an uphill battle because we're just growing towards feature bloat. And things are going to, the experience wrought is just going to keep going down, down, down, down. And so we use really direct language. Sometimes in my role, I'm sort of a people pleaser by nature, but sometimes in my role, I have to really address and ruffle feathers a lot and say, this is creating a very complex situation and we have to get people to stop doing it. And if your teams you're working with are spending at least two hours every six weeks watching people try to use their software, they're going to see it themselves. You don't have to convince them. Thank you. Thank you very much. Please give her a round of applause. That's for you. Okay, so before we continue with the next session, there are a few announcements. First at once or later today, right before lunch, there's going to be a group photo in the central area, so everybody... It's nice to have everybody together for the group photo, so I'm informing in advance in case you're wondering around. I'm Maria, by the way. I always forget to introduce myself. Maria! Maria! If you haven't claimed your swag, please do so. I've said this many times because I'm really passionate about the game. There's postcards that you can swap around and you can collect them all. You have four and they're all the same, but interact with people, exchange it. There's four different motifs and you can earn more in the community booth where they're also going to tell you about how to contribute to WordPress, what you can do with the community, how to become a volunteer like me. Everybody in blue shirts is here to help you. So goal, the community people are awesome. And I have a question for you and if you have the answer to that question, you can tell it to them and they'll give you another postcard. So, when and where was the first World Camp ever? That's the question that you have to answer. When and where? So both. For an extra postcard. There's going to be another question coming up later and there are two questions that we shared yesterday, so four postcards to be won overall. Ask people, interact. Please visit our sponsor booths as well. Remember that they are the ones that make this possible. Ask them what they do. If there's a plugin that you don't know or if a service that you find interesting, ask them. They're here to also interact with you. We have Tai Chi at 3 p.m. There's part of the wellness track. We have a hike at 6 p.m. also today happening. So, if you want to take advantage of that, that's also happening today. If you have any feedback about the sessions, in the website you can also enter www.Europe.WorldCamp.org slash 2023 slash feedback and tell us what you've thought about all the sessions. I have a whole bunch of announcements, but I'm going to keep some of them for later. Our next session is starting in a few minutes, so if you want to grab a coffee or just walk around, go ahead. I guess one can hear me now. Welcome to the last session of this morning. I'm very excited about this one. Therefore, I'm going to do it the other way around. I'm going to do a couple of announcements because then you're going to want to rush to lunch. So, I know you. Yes, exactly. This is my first announcement at one. So, that's before lunch. We're going to make a group photo. I want to say this right in the outdoor plaza at one. So, please head out over there so that everybody is in the WorldCamp Europe photo. After that, lunch will be served starting at one in multiple locations, level zero and minus one. There's, as you probably already know, areas reserved for halal and kosher meals in the minus one level. Then, I also wanted to remind people to go get your swag at the table. In the info desk, lost and found. If you've found something lying around or you've lost something, go ask them. Anybody with a blue shirt should be able to help you. The game card. Does anybody know? Who knows about the game card? Oh, I don't see everybody raising up their hands. So, this is the postcards that you receive in your swag bag. We want you to trade them. We want you to go talk to people and get all different form motifs and the extra ones that you can take also if you find out about the secret questions. Yesterday, there were two questions. I'm not going to repeat them. There's only one today, which is when and where was the first work camp. If you have the answer to this question and you go to the community booth and tell them they'll give you another postcard. Exclusive for the questions. And if you don't know the other questions, ask around. Okay. So, our next panel is about World Camp Europe Globals. The future about World Camp Europe. I am very, very happy to introduce and welcome to the stage our former global leads of the last three years of World Camp Europe. So, please give them a round of applause. These are awesome people. Welcome to the stage. Hello. Thank you so much for joining us. As mentioned, we are World Camp Europe global leads of the past three years. So, today we'll be talking about what we want to see in the future of World Camp Europe, hopefully. And we will be also, like, exploring some shared challenges that we see come up year on year and trying to identify which ones would be great to focus on in the future when new organisers and new global leads take their place. Now, obviously, we are global leads of the past. So, we can give some insight, but it's even more valuable if you all share your insights as well. We'll be doing a short discussion between ourselves and then we're going to ask all of you to get involved in a Q&A session for the second half of this session. So, when we invite you to come and do questions, please come up to one of the mics and you can join in the discussion as well. But first, shall we do a quick introduction of each of us? So, I'll go first. My name is Tess Cogman-Allen. I'm head of growth at Atomic Smash. We're an agency based in the UK. And, yeah, if you want to introduce yourself. Hello, I'm Bernhard Kauer. I live in Berlin, Germany, and I work for Insights German WordPress Agency. Hi there. I'm Leslie Melecki. I am founder of Corner Shop Creative, which is a US-based web agency that builds WordPress websites for charities, nonprofits in the US. And I'm back in the US now. I lived in Europe for 10 years, but have moved home recently. My name is Moncho José Ramón Padrón, a country manager of Site Ground in Spain, and also mentor of work in Europe and super deputy in the global community team. Hello, I'm Rocío Valdivia. I'm from Spain. I've been involved with the WordPress community since 2009. Since then I started organizing work camps and I've been part of the global community team at Work and Central in Automatic for the last eight years. My name is Tak Reijenga. I live in Spain. I run an agency in the Netherlands called Level Level, a full-service WordPress agency. Yes. Thanks. So shall we start the discussion by exploring some of the things that we'd like to see in the future of WordCamp Europe and perhaps in the WordPress space more generally too? Who would like to go first? Art. Some of the things that we have been facing, you know, in the last years, I mean, we are just a little small representation of the previous global leads of work in Europe because this is just the last three years and Jonas is missing here. Hi. One of the things that I'm especially not concerned but I think that we have to be aware of is to bring the new generations, the young people to the WordPress community, to the open source values, and Work and Europe can be an amazing door, you know, to introduce them. So it's, I think it's something that we need to have in mind, especially for the future events and how can we bring that new generation that is, you know, like in another wall? Yeah. Yeah, so true. We were talking before and I said that I was 27 when I was a global lead, which is quite young really. I think it's an anomaly or it's unusual. I think that you bring so much value by being different, right? So I could bring a different perspective just like all types of different diversity. We can bring a different perspective and make it an even stronger event. Yeah. I think that's one of the things that I'm most excited about about the future of WordCamp Europe and really the future of any flagship WordCamp, so be that US, Asia, hopefully other continents get involved as well is the expansion of folks who get involved and the expansion of considerations. This organization, each WordCamp being its own organization does an incredibly thoughtful job of taking care of the people who come. So we're thoughtful about food, thoughtful about accessibility, thoughtful about diversity on stage, all of these things and it's only getting better. Each year it's better, better and better. So I'm excited to see that that thoughtfulness continue and grow. Well a flagship event has its brand for itself. It's big enough, big advertisement. But I think that the truth could be better if we focus in Omita groups because that's the root of everything that's being started in Omita group. There's a local WordCamp and people that know WordCamp Europe, Asia, because they heard something in Omita group or they say there's something in social media. So maybe a way to do it, it's just working on the root of everything that I think it's Omita groups. So I think it's important that we first innovate in trying new things that after happening in work at Urum they have become like an example for other WordPress events in the world. So I think that keep trying innovation but always keeping in mind that this is like a community driven event. It's important. On that topic, one innovation is signage and recycled signage into speaker gifts. Do you want to speak on that a bit, Bernard? Hello, okay. So in Berlin, we try to be really as sustainable as possible. We did it in many different ways. We can begin with the food like we used non-single use things for serving the foods and then we also thought about print. Like here you have lots of signage so you're able to find the rooms. I saw that here they are using paper for the room sign so that's a better material than plastic. In Berlin we used lots of roll-up banners and large banners above the rooms and from those materials we made bags. So we recycled all of them and we sent them to a company that was able people and they were cutting those in pieces and then making bags out of them and I think we got like 150 different bags and we gave them a way to some contributors of other word camps that follow word camp Europe in Berlin and this is something we really wanted to do in the future again but when corona hit somehow this idea got lost and last year we didn't do that and this year I think but that might be something we can do again and not just for word camp Europe but also for other word camps. When I think about what you all did in Berlin with that and then corona hitting and this idea of innovation I'm really proud of how word camp Europe transformed during Covid that the Porto event was put on hold and in quite a short period of time the whole team just refactored right we're doing it online no problem we got this it was an amazing event and then the next year we were a little bit better at it we had you know learned from our experiences the previous year but in terms of innovation that was fast and necessary and entirely successful but then to come back to Porto in person and just slide right back into being together and having that community spirit again just incredible. On the topic of sustainability I think it's really important to realize as organizers that we we have an example we as a flagship event we kind of set expectations for next events but we also inspire the smaller the more local meetups the smaller word camps so I would say that it is as a global leader as an organizer of one of the word camps of utmost importance that you realize that you're setting an example that you're basically maybe even opening doors for other smaller word camps and that's something with the sustainability there's also a challenge because we are global leads from previous years next year there's a completely new team with some people that were involved in the previous year but maybe they don't personally carry the same values as we did in the previous year or the same sort of thought about sustainability or about diversity or about any of the other topics that are so important for a word camp that's why it's so important to keep people from the previous years you know for the next years and sharing their knowledge to the next ones because even if we have a lot of documentation and that has been like a big thing for years of working Europe is like we organize events and we we have like a minimum of documentation but not everything so basically there is a lot word to word sharing knowledge from one to the next ones so the role of the mentor this year is Moncho and next year will be as well the role of the mentor is very important you know it's like to keep you know to keep the values to keep reminding the global needs you know which kind of things are like really you know part of the soul of these kind of events and also like in terms of sustainability at word camp Asia in February there was a new channel introduced in the makeslack for sustainability I think the first initial reason to have that channel is more of the sustainability of the software but sustainability goes into other things as well so having sustainable events is another way where we can be more sustainable as a global community and having a channel like this and maybe in the future documentation on how to not just make your WordPress event inclusive and diverse but also how to make it sustainable which are easy things you can do and which are the ones you can do if you have more time and more like team members and maybe a larger budget so it starts really small but every event even on a meetup level they can do some things that are more sustainable yeah and speaking on sustainability but switching the meaning slightly when we think of all like the longevity of word camp Europe we also have to think about that transfer of knowledge and mentoring of new cities that apply like new locations where we want to host word camp Europe because that's a difficult process and it's a challenge that they might not have been through before so how can we bring better sort of mentorship do you think into that process for sure we need something like that this is not a call for next global sorry but it's true that every time a city is applying for being a whole city it's not a simple process so because the organizing team needs to take a decision on numbers, figures and a compromise of already former team a team that is working in a city the truth is that it will be really interesting receiving more applications and open the possibility of having help from the organizing team in order to follow the process and got having information about how to communicate in the form what are the previews we can write a really good blog post which is okay I think it's better to have meetings and this is something we can do and I think it's necessary and I would love to say to the audience here and to anyone who is listening if you're thinking about hey a group of people doesn't have to be because the local team doesn't have to be huge but if there are like 4 or 5 people in your city committed to help organizing work in Europe there you already have a good you can have a good application we will help you because the rest of the team of work in Europe is global, it's from all around Europe and the rest of the team takes care of most part of the work so basically if you have doubts if you're wondering if you're thinking could be a possibility just raise your hand here or later just stop us in the corridors talk to us, to any organizer working here who has experience and we will be super happy to help you, to guide you to advise you so we want to keep seeing work in Europe in the future for many years and I think because when we can provide that guidance and share our insights we also give future organizers the opportunity to innovate like we're talking about innovation they don't have to worry so much about some details that we've already done we don't have to reinvent the wheel every year we can build on from the successes of past events and then like I said give people the freedom to innovate which I think is really special because they would camp here beyond what they would be able to do otherwise okay have people been thinking about their questions, I hope so if you have a question can you please walk up to the mics and then we'll take it in turns to answer those lovely don't be shy, we don't bite thank you this is really wonderful my name is William Jackson my wife and I eat a this year's kids camp and from our understanding and the reaction from the kids and the parents it went very well and we're just encouraging and excited to continue to do this and teach about WordPress teach about the community but also integrating STEAM science technology engineering arts math and a metaverse and AI and other elements so I would like your opinion what do you see in continuing having a kids camp and then also expanding it from kids to youth and teens and young adults but thank you I love that, that speaks to one of the initial points actually thank you so much for the amazing job that you're doing with the kids I would like to really thank you I admire your job by the way thank you so much I saw it for the first time in work so thank you first at all I agreed this kind of contribution that you're doing I would love to see it keep expanding so maybe training new organizers new people in other cities we could do like a program for example for training other people to do this kind of workshops for kids for young people and to see more events I think that would be amazing because if one of the big issues that we're facing is how to bring the new generations here the average of the attendees are increasing we're getting older somehow so we need to see more children we need to see more teenagers sharing these values the open source, the freedom the open internet so how can we share that these kind of initiatives are so important so let's talk about these let's talk about initiatives for training more people I'm sorry now I'm doing my part I brought my one and a half year old daughter she's too young for your kids camp but I'm sure in a couple of years you will join it I'd like to say that the first time I saw you was in San Jose in Costa Rica 2017 or something like that it was amazing but not only for kids to learn something like designing a website or starting a new blog but just for the fact how an event is about the the grown-ups are doing in this time in this case in an open source related project and so congratulations because you are doing something very special and you are doing very well thank you, thank you so much and I love to think about all of this like planting seeds admittedly I'm a gardener so I think about everything related to plants but what you're doing is planting seeds and whether those germinate and bear fruit eventually or not there's a value in planting them so thank you for that I think we plant seeds at word camps all the time we're planting seeds of future volunteers for future organizations future volunteers who become organizers future volunteers who then become team leads and global leads future seeds that are ideas for eventual camps and this effort to train our kids make kids welcome at these events is hugely important and potentially to Rothio's point hugely important for the future of these events that it will make it more sustainable okay great we have another question can I encourage anyone else who would like to ask a question to walk up to the mics we'll get to you next and please go ahead hi I was a teenager a few years ago yes welcome nice to meet you I want to say a particular hi to Jose and Osio nice to meet you finally so I will have a thing or two to say about no just a thing I want to be fast today about improving the how we say the age to help people the young people to attend the more camps basically I'm not a teenager I lied before I'm a 21 now as far as I know I'm the most younger person in the Italian community in the WordPress I think that one of the reasons why WordPress community have at least for Italy I don't know others but I have seen that places like schools state school that they aren't actually explaining how to use WordPress but many many times people doesn't really never says anything about what's behind the scenes so I think it's important when you do a course to also talk about the WordPress community says the teams because otherwise it's really impossible to expect that people can say something else second things and I'm stopping because I know people says I'm long and right now I'm actually long so I'm sorry for people is fun I was actually in a school where people was not there to for technology not at technology school and my teacher has started to explain WordPress starting by HTML and mysql and php how in general how this works just php and mysql just in general but the point here is when we have an audience that's not so much expert about WordPress or maybe they are not so much passionate I think the most important thing is to motivate them show them how fast and simple is contribute to that otherwise I think it's quite difficult I'm not saying to the people here because I know people here in this general but I hope that other people that can see this recording can also see that. Sorry for my long discussion, sorry for everyone. Thank you, thank you for sharing. Well I'd like something to say thanks for your question questions related to the younger people let's say maybe we need to study at what age it's important to have the first contact but I think the most practical at this moment could be in schools I don't know in English how to say but in high school universities there are a lot of brands that we can learn from like Cisco, Microsoft, Google that they have presence in all schools everywhere well that's power, they have money and really big in marketing teams for example everyone who has an idea maybe they have a check for Google to start with something like that to start in an easy way so a lot of current sponsors of work in Europe are doing efforts in schools and universities but maybe it's not enough just only the brands for example hosting companies we have normally programs for students for universities free hosting and things like that this could be an effort of the marketing team of the community to start to do something related to schools to universities just throwing an idea I think there is also related to that there is maybe a communication marketing issue here like we all know about this community we are here and probably next year but it's a bubble we live in this word camp bubble sort of how can we break that how can we make sure that more people know about or see it as a really open event like going to a festival I'm not saying this should be a festival but for anybody that feels like oh I just buy a ticket and I'm going to enjoy myself I'm not sure if word camps with all the best people have that we're really showing that it's open to anyone I agree I think we are in a bubble and most part of the world doesn't know this community the values we share, what we're doing all the potential and everything and we have so much work to do in that sense but that's great at the same time because we have so many opportunities to keep improving and to start initiatives because many people here, the sense of any open source project is that wherever you see a bug you can jump on to fix it any of us so if you see that there is potential for example here to create programs locally, regionally, globally to start sharing the word about or values or projects and everything in schools, high school, primary schools let's start it if one person takes the initiative I'm totally sure that many people will follow I know that in the U.S. they started many years ago an initiative that was something about WordPress University or something like that campus I don't know what is the state of that right now but the idea of that project was to bring WordPress to universities and to campus to teach in workshops and I love it but sometimes if there is no momentum I don't know how it is right now with momentum and people willing to do something like that sometimes you just need to start it and I totally agree that education is key here and if there are people enough to start initiatives to bring WordPress to education we can really make an impact and on the point about bringing more people into the process of contributing I think it's a good idea to mention that at Contributor Day you could go there and just have discussions and share your insights so that's mostly what I did this weekend on Contributor Day I joined the new diversity equality and inclusion table and I used most of the day discussing identifying ways that we might be able to improve or just acknowledging the challenges that we're facing and I think there's real value in that and younger people who if they're not ready to fix a bug they could be encouraged to come in and give their outside perspective and that actually might help us solve a lot of key problems I think we should move to the next question Yes, hello global leads we have learned a lot from you in the previous years, thank you very much a quick note on sustainability we're still very thoughtful on that and there's going to be a report coming in the next days about what we did on that field my question to you is no, I would like to pick your mind on the next generation word comes notion, let's say, how does this affect word comes word comes Europe and in my mind when we see a turn to a little bit more specialized events, maybe a little bit more enterprise events would that offend the community spirit of word comes, because I would hate to see that happening and what do you think about that I think we've seen in the past that word came Europe in its essence hasn't really changed a lot we've introduced new things, I mean in the beginning in Leiden we had two tracks we had a small sponsors area there was a contributor day but it was really small and then we grew to three tracks and then we had the WP cafe our first we had a try beat ups and WP cafe then in Berlin we had the wellness track so we added new things, but in essence it was a conference with one contributor day and two or three tracks and workshops and all of that so I think it's still that same focus and it's not just business enterprise oriented it's the whole spectrum my favorite talks are not the ones talking about code and design, but it's talking about people like yesterday we had some amazing panels and a talk about women in tech these are the talks I want to see on a word came Europe or word came US or word came Asia I think the special ones that are like in discussion now by the foundation is more for local word comes I don't see what can be to become one of those experience maybe we can experiment in like one track let's say one of those tracks is focused on a specific niche let's say enterprise we have an enterprise track or something like this or we have an AI track or whatever we want to have but I think in general it won't change that much and for many people word came Europe is more about the community I know so many people who don't attend a single talk not because the talks are not great but because we are not here to meet the community and the people we have people from you said 100 different countries it's like the one event to join if you want to see all the people you know from social media in one place and I think that won't change in the future maybe the schedule will change a bit maybe we focus from year to year on another like special group but I think the community aspect will still be the same in my case so for anyone who is not aware or for giving context the new generation of work or events that he's talking about is a new initiative and proposal that has been published in the global community team of the WordPress.org team some months ago and basically is a proposal for encouraging organizers from all around the world to start experimenting more with events and try new ideas with bringing new WordPress to more people you know getting out of this bubble and trying new stuff so Takis what you're saying I think this is a great opportunity for us to expand we are in a great moment because after pandemic many things has changed the world has changed we need to keep evolving I think this is a great opportunity to say let's forget but let's break this image of what a WordPress event has to be like a work with this format with this topic and everything let's try new things let's get to other people let's get outside I would love to see more people saying we don't need to use WordPress but we want to bring it to people you know more focus on marketing more focus on agencies and all of this but of course you know keeping our values that's what makes us special that's what you know keep us all of us here I'd like to say that maybe it's because the things I do in a daily basis because of the company I'm working for and the things I do there are some objectives to accomplish so we want new formats we want to change or going more to content niches which is it's perfect but who target who's the target who's the target what's the change we want to change things not because this is not working as you can see this is a flagship event it works a lot of nationalities a lot of people are coming from all around the world this is like a seat every year in a row so if we want to change things let's ask maybe why to get to more people to get to other audiences that right now we are not getting to so go for them maybe it's not a question of content or a question of I know there are many things to do but this initiative in the blog it's really interesting good question thank you for your question it's been great having you all in Athens thank you would you like to ask your question hello Rodolfo from Business Blumer I'd like to do a little follow up about content our Berlin Global Lead said 2800 people will come here not for the content come here for the community for the sponsors for the parties for just staying here in real life right and I think though if I had to log an issue on WCEU World Camp that would be content and I think there is an opportunity to bring people from outside world press if we shifted the focus on to beginners who never use WordPress to developers who want to learn much more difficult things when they are here and of course the workshops are great and the tree tracks I love the fact you can choose but I think if there was if there were a vision about content that could change things I'd like to know what's your plan for next year's WCEU and GC content as important as sustainability and inclusions which are so important as well but I think content is where we need to work I can totally relate to that question I brought my whole team here basically developers, designers working on enterprise level and they need different kind of content maybe then that is in the different tracks I'm not judging on the content in the tracks but it is a mix of talks of workshops to cater for the largest audience possible to make sure that everybody is able to learn something whatever level you are basically but I can totally relate to the question because if you pass that certain level then it's just repeating the same sort of information and how valuable is that and that's when you end up in the hallways chatting to other people networking which is equally interesting I think the proposal of you know to experiment more and to focus on different niches different topics maybe a topic focused on a certain theme could really solve that or help with that what Bernard said earlier a word camp where parts of the tracks have themes or are more focused on a certain niche or an industry and that's actually what's happening already this year I think with WordPress today WordPress tomorrow there is already sort of a theme that the talks were kind of selected to see if they fit within the theme on one day or the other as a former contenting leader I like to say that we did that and we are doing this inviting people for other communities or other sectors SEO, Metaverse there is something that is happening every year maybe we can take the advice and do it on a more big basis let's say more people but every year at least we have one or two people it depends on every year's content leader to decide how many people we invite for around it's true if we only talk about WordPress or Bookomers there is a portion of the reality we are losing it's true and as a contenting leader at the beginning of every organization year and this year also we set as a list of objectives what we want to accomplish what's the people we want to reach and we did in the past inviting for example Aleda Solis SEO specialist people from the Jumla community from the Drupal community we like to see people related to open source projects but it's true it's a way of inviting people from other sectors industries that can make richer the agenda and I would like to say as well that if we really want to make a change happening in Europe I would love to invite everyone to answer the survey after the event because we have every year we check wow hello sorry every year we check the results of the survey and the feedback is super valuable but if they are only saying hey thank you which is awesome as well but we need this kind of opinions and to see different point of views in order to keep improving so please answer the survey and give us the feedback or give the feedback to the next organizers to keep having these ideas for example if you have proposals or ideas or suggestions about a possible other format or other way of kind of people that we could invite or things like that so please share it because we welcome any ideas and you are welcome also to join the content team leader as organizer I knew that was coming please apply and join us to improve the content of next year and I will pile on and say don't wait for the strategy to be set before you bring these topics submit them as a talk encourage other folks to submit them and make that change happen because that's how WordCamp happens we are not making WordCamp you all are making WordCamp so come make it I do like to stir up this conversation a little bit because we all agree and all that how are we going to invite people from other industries from interesting speakers on different topics that are not part of the WordPress community they don't feel that connected they are willing to volunteer their time to be on stage how are we going to invite them should we not pay speakers or at least their travel expenses I've been on stage I know how much time and effort goes into preparing a talk making sure that it appeals to the public and that you have a message to bring across how are we going to solve this when we kind of want our speakers to be volunteering their time I want to say that right now there are initiatives and companies several companies they sponsor some speakers who cannot afford it as part of the fly for the future well it's not of course part of the program but many companies support the project in different ways some of them support economically some speakers or even organizers who could not afford it otherwise so that's an option maybe other initiatives can be created in that direction I think we need other initiatives in that because there's funds for underrepresented groups to pay for their travel expenses and the time preparing for a talk but at the same time if you want to have a talk on marketing or SEO or whatever from a completely different industry he's not going to, how do you say that apply for a fund or a grant somewhere to speak no, he just wants his expenses covered I face in the past the situation of inviting someone to apply or inviting someone directly and of course the question is okay how are we going to cover the expenses or something like that but what we are doing right now is for the exposure and the opportunity you have to be in front of well as we are right now near of 3,000 people and a lot of advertisements but sometimes it's not enough so maybe something related to the budget maybe if Juan is here you know this is the guy of the money and say no so let's think on something else like a sponsor for other companies but there is always a chance to do it and that can complete one of the questions he gave us to inviting people from outside and how to cover this therefore the question I saw you stand still keep joining us next year we have only a few minutes left so we'll try and get through the next questions a little bit more quickly would you like to ask your question hello so I'm Jason away and I've been working on the support team lead since last year and I'm happy to address my question to such an experience panel you were talking earlier about passing on experiences and sharing common values from one global lead generation to another I'm curious about one thing can you tell us a bit more about how global leads are selected if it was different in the past depending on the year you were organizing the World Camp Europe that's all I've been a global lead and I have no clue how it works so the first World Camp Europe didn't have global leads they might have a lead organizer and then I don't know when exactly it was it was at least in Paris that the former local lead became the single global lead and this continued all the way up to Berlin Milan was local lead in Belgrade and he became global lead in Berlin and I was local lead in Berlin I was supposed to be global lead for the next edition in Porto and by that time I was saying I cannot do that alone, I need more people so then we introduced having more global leads and I cannot tell you exactly how Tess and Jonas was unfortunately not here with us today how they were chosen Milan chose them and he asked me if I would like to have them to be the other two global leads basically traditionally the former global leads have been selecting the next global leads based on their experience working with other team leads so normally the team leads of the previous years they have done a great job management skills management skills other kind of skills the global select the next ones maybe that's why I was not asked to pick the next global lead because I'm not into managing at all so I cannot tell you exactly how it works but I mean if someone from the organizing team wants to be global lead they probably have to say that I want to be global lead the same is true for team leads I never wanted to be a team lead I wanted to be one for Berlin and we always try to identify people from our teams to be maybe the team lead in the next year if we want to step down and I mean finding good team leads and finding good global leads is tough because it's a commitment of nine month organizing and being a team lead or global lead it's even more work like you have easily two or three meetings a week at least as a global lead with your teams and then some other works as well and if you're willing to do that then please step forward and announce that you are willing to do that and if I mean you've been in the team for a while and you've shown that you are a great team lead and probably other people saw that as well so yeah I cannot tell you how the next global leads were chosen I don't even know where it's going to happen but if you see there's need for change in that process and if you see more transparent in how that's happening yeah we should definitely talk about that but as Bernard just said I want to really highlight this and emphasize this we thank our volunteers at a word camp Europe and I'm sure at the other flagship word camps as well we thank our volunteers for the time they've spent we should also very carefully and purposefully thank our organizers because that team donates many many thousands of hours to making this event happen so we get to come here and have fun because those folks did on top of their full-time job the job of making sure that this event can happen and it is those team leads it is the team members it is the global leads it is an enormous effort and so you all deserve a big thank you for making this event happen should we give a round of applause to the organizers here thank you okay we're going to have to wrap up now I'm really sorry we can't get to additional questions from you but we'd love to chat to you afterwards or put you in touch with other organizers current organizers to chat and explore the topics you want to explore one final thing I think that we could say is that if you go to the closing remarks today at the end of the day there will be a call for getting involved and organizing a future edition of word camp Europe and if this is something that sounds interesting to you we can all vouch for it's like a really amazing experience it's really tough but gratifying and your skills and experience would be really well received and we'd really like for more and more people to get involved and help pave the future of word camp Europe okay thank you very much thank you so much yes applause thank you very much all of you another round of applause these people are awesome thank you thank you thank you so wait, wait, wait there's some PR happening oh in the meantime while that picture happens there's an update that I have because we're having the group picture in the outdoor plaza at one there's like a 15 minute delay on the launch so that we have time for the picture and getting back to launch so lunch will be served at 115 and if you want to take pictures you can take pictures if not you can also move to the where the outdoor plaza where the photo is going to be thank you very much for coming if you have any questions people in the blue shirts can help and thank you to our global organizing team Bob WP with do the boo and I am here with the amazing Michelle Michelle how are you doing I'm doing great thanks Bob doing great now Michelle I know is like huge in the community and I mean you how do you describe yourself in the nutshell when somebody says and they said oh I have 10 seconds who are you Michelle I like to think of myself as a collaborator and connector of people so if you want to meet somebody in the community I could probably find a way to introduce you if there's a gap in the community that can be filled I try to help find a way to fill it you're there for us so now community the impact of community I mean we're at word camp there's literally thousands of people here what is impact for the attendees what do you view as an impact for you and how much that overlaps sure so there's very many things that word press does well of course we have software that works very well we have an ecosystem that's built up around it but my favorite thing is the community the community is what really sets us apart from almost any other organization any other field any other tech anything like that it's the people that come together the people that help one another and the sense of camaraderie even if you don't even speak the same language and here we are in Europe and there's lots of languages and lots of accents around us of course but knowing that you could have a conversation with somebody that could help move their business forward or help them find their place in the community help them figure out how they want to kind of get into contributing to the open source project and I think that's one of the magical things that happens at word camps and it happens at your small local word camps where there's maybe 75 to 200 or 300 people and it absolutely happens at an exponential level when we come to you know WordCamp Asia WordCamp Europe WordCamp US which we're talking about thousands of people at the opportunities are just immense and numerous countless actually countless yeah so what advice do you give to somebody I mean this can be intimidating for a lot of people especially in technical you know it's like you work at home you're by yourself you don't talk to a lot of people all the time interaction what is your advice when somebody comes to a especially a flagship WordCamp like this and they walk in and they literally see hundreds of people what give some words of wisdom there yeah sure so what I like to say is in the weeks leading up to WordCamp start to pay attention to what's happening with the hashtag so for this it's like WCEU pay attention to who's talking about it and the people who are enthusiastic about the community so that you can start to make some connections before you even step foot in the door and so one of the things I do is I reach out to people I don't know well in the community and I say hey let's grab coffee let's sit together at lunch I'm looking forward to seeing you and then when our eyes meet we have that connection already in place and then what grows from then is they'll say oh have you met my friend Bob I have a friend Michelle and so we end up growing our communities and having that network and those connections with one another that we wouldn't have had if we hadn't taken that first step into the door and met thousands of people yeah and I always wondered what we never talk about is the impact of a WordCamp once you've left it you know what are the lasting effects where you know and a lot of people it's like wow it's almost overload yeah but there's this also time to start really condensing down what happened what do you think are some of the things that our post WordCamp impact yeah so there's a couple things that happen there can be something called post event let down where you were on this mountain top and now you're home and it's just you or you and your family are in my case me and my cats and you feel like but now what and almost like a little bit of sadness right that falls in after that but to keep reaching out to the community because you're not in communication face to face doesn't mean that you can't be talking on Slack be talking on LinkedIn be talking on Twitter exchanging phone numbers exchanging email addresses and having those communications continuing those relationships that you started or continued at WordCamp that can continue beyond that one of the other things that I think that's beautiful about what happens here is there's opportunity for business growth and business connection as well often here a few weeks or months after WordCamp that there were mergers and acquisitions that happened and those conversations began or continued at a WordCamp to be able to go forward with those with those business decisions so if you're looking to grow your personal network you're looking to grow your business you're looking to sell your business it's a great place to kind of make those things happen and then follow up with those conversations once you get home yeah and you've touched on it a bit so there are resources it's like you don't have to go to WordCamp after WordCamp to stay involved with the community what are those other resources out there to help you feel connected still yeah so there's meetups right so meetup.com you can find a local meetup a lot of meetups still post pandemic or online so like my meetup in Rochester New York is online and we have people from all over the world who attend our meetup because we have topics that are interesting to them and they want to be involved there's also the make WordPress Slack so you can join that anybody can join that and you can start paying attention to what's going on in the community communicating with one another there's other Slack communities there's a WordPress for women there's Black Press for black and brown face people there's LGBTQ community so there's lots of opportunities to continue to be involved either in smaller subsets or all of WordPress itself yeah well you know you and I could talk about community forever but I know that there's other people that have a lot of great things to say so I've had lots of conversations with you yes thank you again absolutely find us online we're happy to continue the conversation yeah excellent thank you my pleasure thank you I thought the food here has been amazing so my name is Siobhan McCown I'm the CEO of Human Maids I'm one of the original founders of WordCamp Europe which was 10 years ago and I'm really excited to be here on this stage just to introduce some of our great speakers so our first speaker is Philip Cintra he is from Brazil but he lives in Portugal and he's going to be speaking to us about what is new in CSS I hope you all enjoy hello everyone how was the lunch good I just want to check if everyone's awake how was the lunch to say just scream just to see that you are great great great so today I will talk about CSS I have a lot of content here I will try to not rush but I will just keep a few parts that's kind of like old stuff but the new stuff I will put more focus on that and start our presentation today about what is new in CSS first I think some of you know me some around Europe I have been in different place in Europe different WordCamps but I'm a front-end dev lead a company called Digital Method it's a learning platform I actually don't use WordPress at the moment but I apply lots of things that I learn on the Gutenberg editor and I just use in my daily projects that's super cool and also I'm a Google developer expert so if you want to find me or if you take pictures please tag me it's at Philip and on the side of my picture some of contribution that I made to WordPress translation the most recent one dotwordpress.org and events I was organizing Dublin and Sao Paulo and also speakers in different place I love to hang out with you guys and so I got let's talk about what's matter today we're gonna learn about Karuaru Karuaru is my hometown in Brazil I have learned a lot with you for the last 7 years and I will just talk a little bit about my town during that presentation just to represent and share a part of me because I have been different place in Europe and I just love how everyone welcome and for sure we're gonna talk about CSS and actually I'm here in that picture that is a party that we do every June in Brazil it's the same days I think the folks from Portugal also celebrate the same season like they have the same day and they have San João and that was a San João night and I was in front of the stage and you can see how I enjoyed that party because I just said the front line and so let's talk now about CSS and then we're gonna come back to Karuaru and I will share more about Karuaru and for today we'll just split and pass in future so things that can use for a while and things that are new that can already use and feature features that are coming soon and also we're gonna talk about WordPress and just for we understand I think it's one behavior that probably some of you have that it's just look for new features and see and think that oh that's cool that's new but I will just use that in five years or five years because we are just used to that so the difference between the Internet Explorer six and seven was like five years and if you leave for the PNG the transparent PNG that didn't run in Internet Explorer and you need to do a fix all those crazy fix that we have on the web for example clear fix that was a problem to fix the floating was for until last year at the top 20 selectors on the web and it's still there, it's still 10% of the websites we still use clear fix to solve the problem about layout and I hope that that will disappear I think the WordPress and the Gutenberg editor helps a lot to take out these from our lives and how the things work today. Today we have that specific scenario we have Chrome, Edge Fox releasing new features every month and we have Safari with regular updates as well and some of the updates are related to the OS and we have the good news that the Internet Explorer 11 is gone and I think everyone was like that and after Internet Explorer 11 was gone we have those browsers release new features every single month and I would just name A, E and D are different features and then which feature should apply for my project because none of all the browsers has the same feature implemented at the same time and there was a time that I realized those new things are super cool but I actually can't use yet and then we have loads of tools to fix that problem but the idea scenario is not we use tooling to solve that problem but also who make the browser kind of like can you guys get together and decide what you should do and actually was that what happened like I think 2021 a commentator called Interop they got together and they decided was the roadmap for the new features for CSS and the HML and that's why now we have stable release and when you see something new they are like broadly adopted because they just get together and say ok maybe it's nice to implement those features just an example that 2022 those are the least that they implemented like layers and colors dialogue, dialogue was a night and that I was in Ireland 3 years ago when I saw dialogue for the first time I said we don't need to implement a pop-up anymore, we just can use dialogue and they just look at me and say oh but we're going to take like 5 years to use that just like looking for the full behavior that we have in the past but actually dialogue today we can use in all modern browsers it's available for all modern browsers and some of those features I will share with you today the other important initiative now that is the most recent one is draw a line to say ok those features are safe to use so they are like we all implemented but the next, not the next but the previous two release we are already using them and they are working together to document those things or the W3C documentation or inside MDM have a clear sign that you can use those features safely and the idea for that it's also to create a line for each year and say ok this year you are safe to use those features and just going back to Kararou my hometown, this some of the pictures from Kararou as you see we love music we love like how to do the sun stay and I will just use this website example and show a few things that I just notes like when I was like talk with other developers that I constantly see in different websites and for that we will just pass quickly on that because we are going to cover the new stuff but those are some common problems based on the problems that we didn't know yet oh should I use that, should I be safe and use those features and what's kind of common see that not everyone know that they can use that and they are like with a huge amount already, so the problem here are the header, the image is kind of distors, the card image maybe you want to do that like an event situation that you have different aspect ratios but let's say that you want to apply the same aspect ratio for all the images and the third item is back to top it's something that I saw a lot just someone installing a plugin to back to top transition and maybe you can do with CSS maybe you don't need any fancy solution for that and the three solutions for that are object fit aspect ratio and scroll behavior the scroll behavior it's a simple solution but it's kind of just to show that sometimes you don't need JavaScript to do that so object fit you have an image with a specific container and then you set that container and I want to just cover that whole area and when I do that that image will behave as a background so and I also can define the border center that is the reference for that image and when that image resize or do something the proportion will be there and we just want to have behavior as a background we have a few good things about that that's number one the image will be on the dawn the browser knows when should load that image we can use in that image for example laser loading or fetch priority that will improve our performance and also accessibility we can also describe that image when we have an image in the background we don't have the capability we can use way error to describe that but it's not something out of the box that we're going to have and just for those features the version that you can use that as you can see here is like Chrome for a while we already have that Firefox as well and when I was talking with friends they didn't know how to implement that and then I can also that's just like before and after you can just see the image here like how stretched the CDR and here it's like how stable that image are because the container just try to fit in that container and if I want to combine those two items there is also aspect ratio aspect ratio it's useful for you keep the proportion of the image but also any container I can apply for a div or for iframe and I can use for example to do a resizable iframe embedded from YouTube that is like responsive I can use instead one by one I can just use 16 by 9 and that iframe will be responsive and if I combine those two items so in that case here I have the aspect ratio and the object fit together and I can just have one image one by one for sure we can do that on the back end to solve those things but also we cannot decide on the front end as well how we're going to show those items scroll behavior it's another solution it's just a simple solution that we have void job script but you just need that selector and for that example I just create a video I use the site editor and I just tag the cover image with id and I just link with the image I will just play the video here for we see and I won't talk so much about the site editor but if you want to learn about site editor there is a website that's learn.worthpress.org please go there visit and get that amazing content there and here I just include that css that I showed before and then when I go to my page I just scroll to the bottom click on back to top and we have this smooth transition that we will improve there are a few things that I will show you at the end of the presentation that we're going to see how that will improve them and now that's the past things like things that for example I saw that not everyone knows but now let's talk about the present and the future so what's using the blog themes I read please just raise your hands cool it's getting there so the nicest thing about the new blog theme that I can have like a file that's called theme JSON will be kind of my styling brain like kind of the rules of my game and I can find some features on the theme JSON and I can connect those two items the CSS and my site editor and one thing that we can do for example we can find properties here it's a shadow I just set this shadow on my theme JSON file and I can get that same definition here and use on my CSS files I can reference the variables for example shadow I can just call here WP preset shadow pink and I just use the same structure across my theme JSON and my CSS and I can reuse that in my UI and have a consistency UI and then it's one item that I really love because I was working on a project and I love to have that before because we have like different views and we want to have the font adaptings my viewport and for that before I use this crazy math with like SAS to do that fluid typography when today we can do that with only CSS and claim is the function that will help us to do that so basically I have a function that has three parameters the first one is the minimum value the last one is the maximum value and the middle one is kind of the ideal value that I will navigate between those two gaps that function added it is available now not now I will just go there it's 6.1 but this is just comparing the before and after the project that I did before was like there I have like different screens and for every single font and size and spacing I need to define here that font goes from 18 to 52 I just put a small font it's not for read just to see the size of that and just think about that for all the fonts for all the spacing and when I can just do that with that line so that's a CSS claim that's available in CSS and the good news that we have claimed on think.json and how we can use that for we use that on our think.json file on the typography settings I just set fluid and I'm capable to go here at my font size for example I have this font medium and I just set here the mean and the max value and then I will have that fluid text on my block thing the other cool thing that we can do with clamp I can find my spacing using clamp also can be the other way around I can just set a value using clamp for my spacing and I can have the gaps defined and also adaptive to the viewport that I'm using so if a mobile phone I can have this minimal spacing if on a big screen I can have more space between my elements and I can just use the power of think.json to have that across my team and now that's more like on the CSS side and those are the features that you can use today for that here are the versions that we can use kind of new some recent ones but container query we had before as we learn how to work with media queries now we have container queries and how was container queries container queries I will just show example here that's where we see that in action let's say that I have a block and that block I will just define it when you have a large space you're going to have two columns doesn't matter where we are which device you are when you get that area just be two columns but when you have a small area just be one column content after content and here I just have a card that we will just check when the container has until 407 pixels we will just like set as one column just imagine that you can create your blocks and tell to your blocks each scenario that we adapt when you have a bigger size or a smaller size you just know how to do it you don't need to care about how the layout is doing there so kind of like we have an independent structure inside your block the item number six I would like to show today is layer that's a common scenario I will talk with a friend during the conference and we are just saying that if everything is important, nothing is important and that code here we have 206 important selectors so I think that there are a lot of important things here but sometimes that happens because we have for example bootstrap or something that we need to overwrite every single time and layer what that feature does is we create layers in our CSS that I can define the priority for those items so in that case I can tell that the least important one is the framework layer so it's my bootstrap or my tailwind CSS and then I can define other layers and something that I want to see in the future I was testing the site editor is when we use the site editor nowadays here's just an example but when you use the site editor nowadays everything is important and if someone has some issue or something to implement for example see a way to use editor to not use important for the CSS that came from the editor please talk with me I would be interested to know and help with that but what's that example that I did here is the least layer that is the editor so it will be the most important one I don't need to set any important over that CSS because the browser will know that that's the most important CSS in that page cool and this one I wasn't like any actual improvement but I see some faces yes for a while I used to write this mean with 600 pixels and I was like that goes on to you 600 or it's after 600 and I just want to test you who thinks that's the first code here just raise your hands that line on the top we still have a split audience here who thinks that's the that line here represent this one just raise your hands okay think that um actually it's the first one but it's still not sure it is the second one but it is the first one just inside small improvement that we as developers just help our lives to okay I don't need to stop and think about that it's just like I know how to code I learned that's the sentence that we do like greater and equally than 600 and we can do range as well right and that's a feature that's available on all the browsers today so so far so good yep and as we saw there we have loads of items that it's around helping we build our layout um but we can use some of those items that are claimed and all the items inside our theme json but I want to see for example things like layer also coming to live inside water price ecosystem and for those items now um that are in the future some are available most of the browsers and some are like not available anywhere yet but we just want to check them and see how we we can use in the future those projects but before if you want to make sure that for example I want to try that but I'm not so sure that I can use that feature for example we can do a major query to check if our browser support that feature so I can just do check for example if my browser support nesting and then inside nesting I just use nesting css and you can do for other type of features that I will show today number eight for me it's like I was waiting for that for so long it is has has is a selector that check if the container that I'm doing has item with the rules that I will define inside there and here for example that first selector if my card has item with the class feature so if you have like a store or something that you display item that you have like a sales code or something that when you have that sale selector you just include that's like fancy label that say okay these items on sales before to do that we need to use JavaScript or PHP to just check if we have that item and now we just do all the things with css it's not cool yes or no are you with me yeah yeah and so if I'm from Brazil or if you have been Brazil before those are my favorite foods then that's for northeast so I think the folks from me when he saw for the first time those pictures say yes I know that you know what is good here so here's just example so when I have a card for example I have my post that has a feature image I can do something when I don't have a feature image I can also set a different title just to feel that area that supposed to have an image and let's say that I don't know if the content doesn't have anything I can also do something and those checks are only with css I can check if I have that item but also I can check if I don't have that item let's say that I don't have an intro so if I don't have an intro I can do a fancy card or if I don't have a feature image I can do something else as well now there are kind of like a better version there are fees that are coming that we'll check for other things for example css variables if the language if we have the language direction that's just the first version of has for modern browsers the new versions of modern browsers we are doing checks for example css variables as well for example if I have a value that is like discounts true I can change the css the presentation of that card just based on that variable as well but that item is not available yet on Firefox but we already have on Chrome and Safari Safari this week we had the WWDC that they have a full presentation over css and they talk about has and new stuff that they are planning to do with has as well and the item number nine is css nesting again it's related to organize my code and if you work with sass or less before I'm pretty sure that you have used that and now we can do css nesting on css again I hope that Firefox also getting the game to use nesting but what are the advantages for use css nesting the advantage for use css nesting that I can just set the css for that block so if I want to do maintenance or anything I know that everything just contained inside that nesting selector and for example in that item here I have my post block and I have the style for my taxonomy tag so I know that I would just apply that css that taxonomy tag that is inside my blog post so and we can play around we can use like related like selectors that was the item that I show on the previous slide that I was like check if we have support basically are checking if our brides has support for that type of selector and then they will just check for the support for nesting css and now we saw like the things that are almost there the features that are almost landing in all the browsers this one is kind of new are related to two new css not css but two apis the web animation api and the css animation api and basically we can do scroll driven animation so if you have worked with parallax before you need to use JavaScript to do all the effects to check if the user is scrolling in one specific area that feature is available on the canary of chrome version 116 and that working in that way so I have this cover block when I was scrolling on my cover block we will just do animation to fit 100% of the area to 5% of the area you can see we have a few images like doing animations and also we have this progress bar on the top here and all those animations it's only css I just use css to do that and I'm pretty sure that if you love animations you love to see in the future all those template builders when you talk about animation just solve them with css no JavaScript because I'm not like I always talk about JavaScript I love JavaScript I work full time with JavaScript but just to divide in the proper way so the painter paint the walls, the electrician take care of the cables in the house and it's what happened now that evolution of css we have what is related to css like layout so keep those things there what is related to the electrical part of our application keep those things there as well and just for we check how I did that so I have my container block that I behind there I just put the main header that I used to do the animation and I have set my animation and that animation it's from 100% of the height of the viewport to 5% I just set the animation now until here is nothing new the new part start happen here on those two lines and what I'm doing here I'm going to the animation timeline and setting that that animation will run over the scroll and when I set that if I don't set this animation range my scroll timeline will be back top to bottom of my page that will be the timeline of my animation but we can define here the animation range and set I want that animation happen from 0% to 9% so in that case I don't need to scroll until the end of my page I just scroll until 9% of my page and then I will have the full animation so the the cover block that we have on the top so if you look at let's try to play again here I'm 100% when I start scrolling when I get 9% of that whole area the animation here is already completed right and only the scroll is still happen back to top because I didn't set the range so if I didn't set the range the animation will go until the end of that content and we can also define do the animation when that container appears on your view so we have different ways to acting with that so it's a really powerful API I really love to see there and I really love to not have all the the JavaScript to doing there and just like okay let JavaScript do his job with CSS and I have loads of features that I would love to show I think I have a few faces here from Rotterdam that I did that presentation there and I just changed the content the friends from Ponte Vida as well so there I have show a select menu there and Elizabeth and I have shown that the text balance and we have plenty more new features available like or popping up it's a really exciting time if you want to work with CSS and also if you see those features that can help WordPress to do like okay how we can improve WordPress with those new features please open SU and GitHub talk with the people tag me as well I'm on Slack available as well and here that link is the panel of the interop 2023 so the list I already defined it so the time that they defined that list it's from July until October and there was a funny thing that last year I was here in Athens and I show the image set feature and I was just super happy to show everyone oh you can use image set in your background and you can show different versions of your image and your website will be fast and then after my talk I went to test there on Chrome and didn't work and I was like yeah all the browser supported not Chrome and then I would say okay I need to talk with people how we can have that on Chrome as well and then it was the time that I discovered interop was the time that I think that talk was born and the word came out in the last year and then I start talk with the interop I have raised, I show over the image set and the image set was the item number 11 in the vote and I was super happy to I just open and say what I would like to see and so it's open to everyone everyone can go there to the GitHub and say I would love to see for example better scroll, smooth API or I would love to see a better way to set my background image and everything is open everyone can participate there so if you want to participate on the timeline to check when they will open new features just be part of that as well because I think everyone that is here can help before we make that environment better cool how so far? it's great can you hear me? it started when it came on we've got about 5 to 8 minutes for questions so if anybody would like to ask a question you can come down to the mic if you have more than one ask your first one and go to the back of the line we'll start with over here testing hello thank you for the talk I have a question around so you mentioned the container queries and layer and I know that at the moment Gutenberg doesn't support container queries it doesn't know how to pass the CSS so I personally as a developer can go in and I've written a poll request that's just one particular feature and there are all these other things coming is there anything that you would recommend for WordPress and Gutenberg in general to stay on top of CSS new features to make sure that when we do decide to adopt them that they're ready and we can immediately use them yeah I think one that I mentioned at the end I think image set you on the GitHub repo for Gutenberg for example we do that on other page builders that you can set an image for mobile version an image for desktop version because that's some like some browsers, not some browser some websites that when you set up, I think there is a specific scenario that you, I think you set your background for the cover image as fixed that image is not an image tag anymore and became a background CSS and then we just set one large image size and then when you have a mobile user the LCP just go way far I think it's the other item that I would love to see as well like image set and kind of like managing that thing to have like optimized LCP image thank you any more questions we've got another one here hi, oh sorry so I have somewhat of a philosophical question I guess is so there's been a lot of frameworks coming out lately that allow us to write predetermined selectors so we don't have to learn or use all the nitty gritty or the details of CSS so two questions first is are those frameworks making us a bit lazy and second question is that a good thing or a bad thing and also a third question how many people in here still write raw CSS as opposed to using some kind of framework raw CSS oh wow thank you okay I think I do love frameworks I think when we got for example was the first time that I showed nesting for example oh that's going to kill SAS I was like no we won't kill SAS because SAS has hundreds of features that you can use not only nesting that makes SAS but for example nesting can be a reason for you not using SAS and not have like a build do styling that's cool but also on the framework side they don't need to worry about nesting anymore they can invest their time in other new cool features I think that's one good thing I do love frameworks and I use frameworks every day but I think it's important for we see what happened behind the scenes because if something goes wrong you're not like a CSS blind something that I know for example my friends they start with React they never told JavaScript and then when they have a problem on JavaScript they just panic because they didn't have enough exposure to JavaScript but I think yeah we need to use both but use consciously yeah great I think we got time for one more question over here the mic working what a amazing voice thank you Philip for this talk I have a question about Clamp so as a backend developer I don't spend much time with CSS but when I do I try to read all documentation and understand what I'm doing and with Clamp I found a problematic this middle value so I understand the first value is the minimum the third value is maximum the between value is so confusing so do you have a human understandable explanation about that it's kind of for example I will try to elaborate that in a good way like for example my let's say I'm here in the word camp I will speak today and I have the whole week here in Athens and I have my minimal fellows of beer that is like before my talk and I have my maximum value of beers that is after my talk but during the week I can go easy and flexible but I can't go too much and then the middle value is like the flexible part of those two range and personally the easy math that I do is like put like a flexible value on the middle value that is like 5% of the viewport or 10% that will be a value that will navigate between those two items so in that case the 5% of the viewport will be based on the size of my screen so everything will navigate based on the size of the screen so it's a space between it's ideal value but like okay I can be flexed between those two points okay thank you great thanks everyone and thanks Philip for a wonderful talk thank you thank you alright thanks everybody I've got a quick announcement before you all go it's the time for the last word camp card game so I'm just going to remind you of the roles just in case you missed the opening of remarks every attendee has got a set of four postcards in your swag bag you should mingle, you should network meet new people and trade your cards the other four postcards you get from the community booth after responding to your question are you ready for the last question today? who suggested the name wordpress to Matt Mullenweg I'll repeat that one more time who suggested the name wordpress to Matt Mullenweg that was a good use of my pub quiz voice so if you missed the questions yesterday you can still go to the community booth and ask for the previous questions also if you wanted to do a bit of Tai Chi there's a session at three in the wellness track so see you for the next session good day, my name is Wendy we are here at word camp Europe and I am here with Afsana Dia so would you like to introduce yourself? this is Afsana Dia I'm one of the organizer for Wadkem Dhaka and also I was one of the organizer for Wadkem Asia last year and also I was one of the organizer for Wadkem Europe and also for Wadkem C22 as well I'm the very impressive list and I'm the CMO at WB developer WB developer is a wordpress product company we have around 5 million wordpress users who are using our product and you are growth I'm the CMO I'm the CMO of WB oh the CMO nice I'm sorry for my ignorance but what does the CMO do? so I manage the marketing and business development there so I started the company when it was starting so we helped to build a team grow the product from scratch and within just 5 years we have got around 5 million users for wordpress nice well done and you are here at word camp Europe how many word camp Europe is it? I think it's more than 15 nice so you organized word camp Asia few months ago do you see any similarities between word camp Asia and word camp Europe? well I see a lot of familiar face from people that's pretty similar I saw the same faces in Wadkem Europe last year Wadkem US last year and Wadkem Asia this year right like a chronic word camp visitor good to know good to know but if we talk about from the organizer perspective since I was one of the organizer for Wadkem Europe last year as well so I can compare Wadkem Asia and Wadkem Europe a bit please I often say my friends that actually I love Wadkem Europe so much because this is more mature community with properly planned and streamlined process and planning in the organizing team but for Wadkem Asia this was the first time word camp because you organized it but then COVID happened and then you had to postpone and then in January February that finally happened so I was not in the organizing team in first time I joined later I joined right after I finished Wadkem Europe last year so I was leading marketing team for Wadkem Asia what happened is like that's the first time so we didn't have anything ready we had to do everything from the scratch which is actually difficult comparing with Wadkem Europe yes it's like everything is already planned and processed so it's a lot easier and you don't have a checklist this is what we need we had to make the checklist for Wadkem Asia right and what would you think considering the both word camps or book flagship word camps if you have been to Wadkem US what do you think would be the biggest difference between the three well except for location of course I have been to Wadkem US last year but I would say I didn't get the full feelings of Wadkem US because last year it was very small probably 600-700 people so that's not the full gesture of Wadkem US like a contributor today at Wadkem Europe yes so I actually can't judge Wadkem US or I cannot compare but I really love how the European community come together from different countries and do the job I mean when I was in Wadkem team last year I didn't know where it is going to be this year but I have guessed because I saw the commitment and dedication from Greece community what they are putting back in 2012 so it shows that they are preparing themselves to do better for next year so even if I didn't know I could guess easily and did they live up to their expectations I really love Wadkem Europe 2023 so what has been the best part for you so far people of course who would say the people and I also love the Athens and the Dispenu Dispenu looks awesome I agree it's super big but it is nice and spacious and it is really bright and light yeah I agree it's really nice alright so you already gave a talk earlier you were on a panel you are now on the live stream when did you meet the people you were talking about today it looks like you have done nothing but work well I was there in the contributor day so I met a lot of friends already in contributor day the community team I am one of the community deputies I made all of those friends in contributor day already alright I made them in the social event before Wadkem the party I actually made a lot of them individually yesterday after the talk nice oh smart move and you work at a company with them quite a demanding job I can assume yes you do a lot for the community you organize work camps do you do anything that is in your life in general that is not work camp or work press related I have my husband with me okay but you met at work camp no no not really so I got married last year congratulations it was so hectic with work camp Europe work camp Asia and I got married in between like a big wedding yes so my friend had nothing to do I had a very big wedding my friends joke about this that my wedding was more than bigger than work camp Europe we had around 4000 people in total excuse me you said four thousand yes we had five days event it's kind of tradition in Bangladesh so we had five days event and all together we had more than four thousand people I'm surprised no you actually did work camp Asia and then you did the four thousand people wedding five days five days event I did my wedding shopping from Dubai and I also traveled I think nine countries last year do you ever sleep yeah that's the problem okay okay we found the trick so the trick is not sleep my favorite sleeping hour is like four hours now I would be dead if I had to lie on eight hours of sleep well for me I personally like sleeping is wasting time right I'm missing out something I mean even I like to read the books instead of sleeping more do I sound too crazy a little bit I must admit but you're just too hungry for life I think that's it hungry for life knowledge and sharing and getting to know all the things stay alive I mean I enjoy my job I enjoy community I enjoy my family and I also spend a lot of time with my family as well yeah and then you have me who spends most of her week under a blanket by herself not seeing anybody choose your life choose your life yeah I feel like I don't know how much time I have so I have to idealize whatever I can I want to enjoy my life I love that I love that spirit and mentality it's really it's really super inspiring so I have one more question it is not related to your life but to the situation we had here at work in Europe where a lot of people from India and Bangladesh and Nepal applied and we're not able to get in do you have thoughts on that is there anything we can do we're sending love to all the people who are not here yeah and also I have one tips that I would like to share because I also hold a Bangladeshi passport which makes it difficult to get the visa for many countries but what is what people can do is like they can really build their travel portfolio before applying for Shenzhen or US visa because this visa requires to see that you actually travel and you will return back to your country I never faced any issue I got my this Shenzhen visa approved in two days I had my passport in my hand in three days probably because I travel a lot so it is easier for me so for the people who are applying from Bangladesh or India or Pakistan they should travel to other countries like Singapore go to war camps go to nearby country like Malaysia is going to have war camp in September Nepal is going to have war camp in September there are several war camps happening in India as well so go to the nearby countries make your portfolio then apply again right that is actually a very good tip for people to make it to war camp Europe or maybe in war camp US or any other war camp that is in a harder to visa country so is there anything you would like to let the world know and get out in the world about maybe war camp maybe war press or source I actually joined a panel discussion last month which was in Bangladesh it was in Silat so I made one thing for the press community that start contributing even if you contribute for like one hour or two hour per week start contributing get connected with the community and it will help you in many ways you cannot imagine that sounds like a best tip so it is time to wrap up thank you so much thank you so much for watching we are moving up we are moving on to our next talk and we will have another live stream interview after the next speaker so see you later hi everybody welcome back hope you had a nice break great so I am really excited to introduce a speaker who is going to talk about a really important topic which is accessibility this is Mitchell Labour who comes from the Netherlands an agency that I have always admired called Level Level and he is going to talk to you about accessibility meets style a design revolution thanks Mitchell give it up for him hello everyone how is everyone doing it is a really big crowd today not really used to that thanks for being here I am going to talk about accessibility meets style design revolution I am Mitchell I am a digital designer at Level Level but I would like to talk a little bit about my history first I think back in the days as far as I can remember I have always been a creative a creative person my earliest memories include drawing with a pencil painting making art projects at school name it everything and I think a lot of you people as a child were kind of the same like me because who didn't love to draw as a kid now the older you become most of the people lose that interest but to me it never really did actually my love for art only grew stronger as I got older I kept drawing I made beautiful portraits of people and I loved art to look at art architecture name it all around me but as time flies by I was drawn to digital art and digital design technology advanced there arose new opportunities and my old traditional skills actually got lost because I did everything on the laptop or the computer but people still tried to see me as an artist and I often got the question you're an artist right can you draw me like one of the French girls okay sure only to come up and let them down with something like this okay anyway years later now I find myself as a digital designer you could also call me a UX designer experience designer interaction designer visual designer web designer it depends on who's asking but the most important thing is I try to create my designs with a mindset of an artist I like to make designs that are functional user friendly accessible but also aesthetically pleasing compelling to me it's not enough to make something that simply works I really try to make it a piece of art but now I hear people say a web designer is not an artist a designer is a problem solver in Maniac I think people know who they are of course that's true but why can't we be both be the problem solver and be an artist and combine those two skills to come up with the best and most beautiful creations I had a lot of animations but it's not really working that's okay but wait a minute if we look at the problem solver and the artist and I was talking about the professions a little bit before we could see the problem solver and user experience designer and the artist as a user interface designer the user experience is about experience and user interface is about making something a little bit more pretty so we combine those professions you've got the user experience user interface designer someone who can do both we should use the skills of both to come up with the best and beautiful designs so we should solve problem blur first make it accessible and user friendly and then make it visually appealing so go ahead and throw all those artsy designs visuals on your designs problem solved right well not really because more and more websites need to be accessible even by law it's becoming the standard but a lot of people still have a very black and white stance about accessible design and especially accessible websites accessibility and aesthetics are often seen as conflicting goals you can't have them both so accessibility is more important one and they go with that one aesthetics really gets neglected some people say the more accessible an interface is the acclimate becomes and that kind of hurts my feelings but that's why I'm here today to show you that accessible sites can be beautiful and creative on top of being user friendly there's no need to sacrifice aesthetics to create beautiful websites so aesthetics and accessibility should go hand in hand and not fight together to create a best combination you just have to find the right balance between the two now if we're talking about the balance I created a very beautiful scale which I'm really proud of not let's try to talk about aesthetics first so let's pull down the scale to down and weigh down the aesthetics what are aesthetics anyway and why is it important it's really about the visual attractiveness of a product it's a visual or sensory qualities of a design that are intended to evoke an emotional or psychological response to the viewer you know that feeling you get when you look at a piece of art or an architecture or a website that's saying I really like this or a piece of clothing or whatever it really fits my feelings that's what we're talking about and in web design it's more about look and feel so it's about using different colors spacing images, typography and elements so what makes a website or something beautiful or visually appealing to you guys could it be bright colors or the use of dark modes lots of white space lots of spacing bold and daring, warm and calming there are a lot of different things not everyone is the same that's really interesting because everyone has a different perspective and preferences and that's really influenced by our background our cultural background and our social backgrounds as well as our personal experiences because what I find pretty doesn't mean you have to find it pretty as well it's my personal taste that feeling that I was talking about but there's also something called generalized aesthetics and to make it a little bit more simple you could think of it in trends, as in fashion architecture design so I got some examples for that in art it's like expressionism and this was actually my phase when I heard I could give a talk at WordCamp Europe on the main stage and you got and you got the Renaissance art work mostly my process when designing something all those phases in architecture you got like art deco beautiful shapes brutalism really robust and bold buildings but also in fashion with like the 70s with a lot of pastel colors and really daring pool cuddles anyway the trends come and go but common elements are often liked and pursued I like that, me too let's wait a little bit such a trendsetter but that's also in web design we got like examples for minimalism with a lot of white space a lot of spacing mostly pure white and a few images neomorphism not really sure how to pronounce this but I hope I'm right this is actually not a really good example for accessible design because is it a button what I'm seeing is it what kind of contrasts are here is it selected or not also brutalism in web design really daring against the mainstream against the rules also not really accessible but I like it and who doesn't remember the pretty little bookcase the realistic bookcase from Apple with the scale morphism that was like a trend to make things realistic last example is dark mode which is actually a good one because it's accessible as well it reduces your eye strength when you're reading something like a long read and it's good for the environment because it uses less energy so you can really get that feeling that are different kind of feelings with aesthetics that people can get but aesthetics are more than just superficial decoration and making things pretty they can serve a critical and crucial function because a well-designed website can really help establish creativity with your visitors making them more likely to trust your brand differentiate you from your brand from differentiate your brand from competitors create a positive perception and really communicate your identity but most importantly it really makes the visitor want to interact with the website explore it and of course hopefully make a conversion early impressions matter the visitors form initial impressions within seconds I think if you walk around here at the sponsor booth booths you could see attractive booths and you're really attracted to go to those booths also something with aesthetics they could really play a key role in shaping your impression if the impression doesn't stick you could lose your visitors and if a website looks unprofessional or outdated visitors may assume that the business is not trustworthy or that the products or services are of poor quality but instead if a website looks sleek, modern and visually appealing visitors are more likely to view the business as professional, credible and trustworthy so I've rattled on and on about aesthetics I guess you can really see that I like this and I think this is really important but let's go back to the balance and the scale of accessibility versus aesthetics and we really pull down the accessibility one that was a accessibility is really heavy accessibility that's really about making sure that everyone including people with disabilities you can use a website or I think a lot of you people know what accessibility is about this could mean things like easy to read texts good clickable buttons enough contrast between colors images that should have alternative texts so screen readers could read them and when I first heard about accessibility I was quite sceptic about it because I really thought doesn't this limit my creativity or and prevented from creating stunning websites that would stand out from the rest and so goodbye creativity make boring websites and I wasn't alone there are a lot of people that still think this way it's a question I get asked a lot actually even from businesses from how can you create stunning websites but still follow the accessibility rules and be still creative but it's actually quite opposite because once you start working with it it could actually be really fun and challenging it doesn't have to block your creativity it can really thrive your designs and it opens up really new possibilities it can expand your creative tool set or your brains so you could approach designs in a more innovative and creative way you're really forced to think deeply about the user experience to create innovative and creative user friendly designs which would lead to new designs design elements and techniques which you actually never even considered before a few examples for my architects we used high color contrast colors larger font sizes which could really improve reliability and it still is bold and modern and gives the architectural vibe which perfectly matches with my artistic views you can really think outside the box it encourages you to think outside the box to find new ways to solve problems for example you shouldn't really rely on color alone for I hope you could see this for Almere it's like a website that sells plots we used a agenda with the statuses of those plots if it's sold or if it's available or if it's soon available or if it's reserved already we used colors icons and text to show the status of those plots you should really optimize your website's navigation making important information easy to find which will improve usability and functionality and alternative text for images which makes your website more accessible and it really impuses SEO I mean who doesn't want that these are just a few examples of what you can do but most importantly it's just the right thing to do everyone should have equal access to information and services online and by designing with accessibility in mind we can really achieve this so now what we talked about aesthetics we talked about accessibility how do we make a website that's good looking and how can we ensure that it's accessible for everyone let's go back to the balance we changed the nails to a frame we need to make sure to find a good balance between these two and have them complement each other and not conflict with each other I like you but let's make it simple we could also see accessibility and aesthetics is something different accessibility could also be the functional elements of your website and aesthetics could also be the decorative elements of your website now what are functional elements elements that are essentials to the functionality of the interface which must be fully accessible so it's like the core of your website this just has to work these elements could include colors accessible of course typography and the right use of headings, the heading structure good clickable buttons also contrasting buttons and to me it's important to show the hover state as well perfect input fields for forms even with labels that's really important and easy to use navigations these are just a few examples which just have to work if a button isn't easy to click or a form isn't easy to fill out users will get frustrated and may leave your website which could be a job for problem solver this is really the essence of functional elements so what are decorative elements these are elements that are purely aesthetic in nature and do not have a specific function within the interface it's important for your identity and recognition but your site can work without it a few examples background images and elements for nature today we used those cute swirls and colorful blobs for a podcast platform listen we use the audio elements to get the feeling that you really can listen to something and even the WordCamp Athens website right now uses a lot of those visual elements that I'm talking about icons could really help for example these are some tasks that you could use and people could really see this is a task I could do also here these just add like a visual cue from you can do something like this but also animations for Amsterdam Sinfonietta we created a really slow animation on the background and some content elements that slowly appear when you scroll through the website which perfectly fits their branding but animations is a difficult one slow moving animations can be used as long as they are not the primary way of conveying important information and do not interfere with the user's ability to use the animation on the website we can provide users with the ability to turn off those animations or just adjust the speed or we could use the reduce motion function don't you know how it's better to create still elements to get the same effect or you could ask a developer for help decorative elements that are not essential to your website and can be removed or simplified without impacting the user experience we can have more flexibility to make those elements accessible and experiment with different styles and techniques without worrying about compromising the accessibility these styles may not meet the WCAG guidelines but we could still find a way to seamlessly integrate with functionality so again aesthetics and functionality should work harmoniously together instead of clashing with each other let's put it all together with all the things I've said and quickly build a website from scratch this is Pip a creative photographer he loves colors but he's also a little bit mysterious to create him a portfolio he gave us some elements like a logo, colors, images a typography that he loves and we started with a simple navigation easy to find things like a good title a subtitle maybe a search bar so people could really see his portfolio search for his portfolio items add a few blocks of portfolio items add some images this actually could be it but we want to make it a little bit more visual appealing so the text will go over the images add a background with it to make it accessible change the font type you could really see a different kind of vibe already already now we can add more style elements that he was talking about with the colorfulness but this is a little bit too bold for Pip so let's tone it a little bit down and change the font because he really didn't like the font anywhere this almost feels perfect it just doesn't really give that mysterious vibe that he was going for so let's make it dark that's with this really gets the mood going last but not least we can also add some animations I hope this one will start I hope you guys could see it it's a little bit dark but there are some elements that are slowly moving and the use of hover animations gives a really different dynamic and not that static feeling and this really fits his identity and feeling he was going for this was just a super fast example of a website and we could do so much more even with WordPress templates or themes so let's conclude accessibility really is important it should be the default but we really can't neglect aesthetics altogether we can go full accessibility mode and copy and paste popular designs or themes that work and it will be way easier from the design perspective which is okay of course but it could be a disaster for your business you don't really have an identity or personality to convey that identity to users to beat your competition of course it will be just one of those in a million I think maybe you also images and websites like this which is okay of course again but is that really what you want so it's really time to put a renewed focus on creating websites that are both functional and visually stunning by preserving and finding a balance between accessibility and aesthetics we can really revolutionize design and create exceptional websites that truly stand out sparkles fire this takes too long and that's really a win-win for everyone and that's my wrap up thank you so much for listening thanks Mitchell that was a really great reminder of how limitations spark creativity rather than like limiting them so I thought it was really wonderful talk thank you so we've got about 10 minutes for questions if anybody's got a question if you go up to one of the mics and we'll fit in as many as we can I have a question so I'm interested do you still feel that you have to convince businesses of the benefits of accessibility or is that something with level levels of reputation do they come to you for accessible websites or are you trying to convince them of it at level level you mean? we don't really have to convince the businesses anymore because we are known for accessible websites what advice would you have for other businesses who are trying to make the case to our clients that they should focus on the mindset of the business the business owner is king but you should really teach them that it's really important to make an accessible website as well and it's even good for business because if you are one of the few who have an accessible website you could get so many more visitors even people with disabilities I think that's one of the tips I could give thanks any more questions that we got on here? yes you have a lot of ready-made tools that you can install on the website that have accessibility functions so how do you think about that and is that not the solution for us who don't want to do accessibility? it could be like plugins you mean? there are a lot of accessible plugins you could use them especially if you use WordPress templates but you could also start with a blank accessible theme and then add the visual elements later on if you need those you also have the external services that you can just plug into a website and then certainly they have some accessibility then I should maybe this question should be given to one of my colleagues because I'm not really a developer or plugin user is that okay? thank you any more questions? if there are any questions that you're maybe afraid to ask on the microphone you could always just tap me on the shoulder and ask them great alright thank you so much for your talk Mitchell we're just getting ready for the last session of today which is going to be with Matt, Josefa and Mathias just an important note for Matt's Q&A if you're watching on this stream you can submit questions via social media Twitter, Instagram and Facebook and if we can we'll ask them along with the other questions so enjoy your break and we'll see you back here at 4 o'clock my name is Remke Zafriz and I'm here with Anna Moragli welcome you have been presenting a talk on a very interesting topic for a lot of people so how did it go? I think it went really well it was a really nice crowd we did some interesting questions and answers about Google updates and how they go over and also presented some nice stuff about our Google algorithms I think they liked it a lot I was going to say if you can explain a little bit more about the topic it's about SEO and the impact of Google specifically losing rankings there are a lot of Google algorithms going over they're almost like every 3-4 months a new algorithm update 3-4 months once in a year there is a really big one that most of the time is changing the landscape and people got really upset when they got losing rankings and traffic from it I can imagine I think we should talk more about it and learn people know how they can actually face these updates and how to protect their websites is it something they specifically do that gets them losing their ranking and it depends on everybody well it depends they might have done a variety of things together it's not like the algorithm itself or the update itself it's like a variety of things that you might already have done on your website to end up losing traffic because Google is not like the big punishing guys go over and they are not they are not going to go over and punish website owners they have a lot of their mission to provide the best search experience this is what they do so updates are part of the job actually for anybody having a site to understand what Google wants to see well there is a big amount of things but good and really well website structure is going to help a website that loads quickly is also important yeah content quality content and helpful content it's really important backlinks, other sites talking about you and what are these websites of course and yeah I think overall the user experience it's a really important thing right now what would you say that the biggest mistake is if somebody is hit by the algorithm I think that's how you say it if somebody is hit by the algorithm that's the biggest mistake that you encounter with your clients because you have an SEO agency right yeah correct, search magic yeah so what's the first thing that you go like this is the first thing I check because it's the worst the buckling profile where they get bucklings from because they might have any battle city bucklings from websites or websites that they are bad quality some website owners might go to the trap to buy bucklings in a bulky way and that it's definitely a trigger so Google doesn't like that no, I think no so how do you remove backlinks because you have no control over that yeah that's actually a good question you can't you can remove all the backlinks yeah so the disavowing of bucklings right now Google algorithm it's smart enough to ignore them themselves and if we got like a really big amount of bad backlinks this is a case that we start removing backlinks but we are in the current position that Google is really smart enough to disavow them to ignore them themselves so you need to be conscious of not getting bad backlinks if you get a lot of them and you didn't do it or buy them might go to an attack from a competitor or anything else it might not be your fault oh that's the shady stuff what has happened a lot I think to big companies yes I think it's a practice yeah another thing you can do is to take care of all the technical stuff because technical SEO is really important right now especially everything related to user experience loading time core web vitals all of these I think are really really important right now yeah I agree as an SEO agency you obviously encounter these types of problems you need to solve if we look at the inverse if we look at the opposite you also get companies that have probably not a really good profile just yet but you help them build as well right yes that's correct so what's a great example of something that you've made happen you don't need to name the client but like a case they came with us with this and we ended up doing this and now they're there I think I have two examples here we were working right now with the fashion e-commerce store they came to us with a really bad buckling profile and then overall Sadie let's say buckling profile that it wasn't their fault and also they had a really terrible technical SEO get done on their website it was a magento but it was terribly set it up so we did some you move them over to WooCommerce no no what we are in a kind of transition so we will do that magento is pretty complicated right now for them and also we managed to create some content do some good technical SEO and now we're in a really good position to have almost 200% increase in revenue those are nice figures that's really nice and that would be only in four months so I think it's really important if you do things right that it can turn around in four months yeah definitely if you have like a right process in place you can definitely move things faster the typical range of SEO results could be six to eight months but four months for me is really good and I think you shared something in your talk as well right on a tool that people can use yes actually we created a spreadsheet step by step that we combine data from Google Analytics and Semras study historic ranking data and create an overall spreadsheet like a table that could actually help to analyze any traffic drop and find the patterns and learn how to deal with them and is it difficult to do? no it's pretty easy what kind of skills do you need? to create the spreadsheet to work with the spreadsheet? no skills just to know Excel I have detailed out all the steps one by one all the formulas that are about to need they're already in the spreadsheet they're already in the spreadsheet they're also detailed in the presentation I was creating actually the spreadsheet while I was creating the presentation to make sure I have detailed all the steps and go to the presentation can do it themselves nice and that will be made available when it's being published on Webster TV so is this your first work in Europe? yes and how do you like it so far? I love it I mean the organizing team do an amazing job it was a really nice experience we really enjoyed going around the booths and talk with people also overall it was a great experience the games I mean the games were the best there's a lot of games here I also enjoyed the part that some games are connected so you were going to one booth and then you have to go to another one and another one and it was a really nice experience good so I asked work in Europe and right before we went online you also mentioned you went to work in Athens in 2019 what would you say is the biggest difference? the space it was the exact same venue and it was I was really shocked when I realized that in this event you have the entire venue like the whole building and on work in Athens we had only like one out of ten of the space it was like really tiny what is happening right now actually when we were in the work in Athens I was like a big venue, we have a lot of space and now I'm like really big difference but of course I think here you have much more than these so it makes sense so what would you say to anybody who's kind of looking at this and go like maybe that's too many people for me maybe that's he should come I think there is a really good vibe around here all the people are really pleasant to talk they're open to conversation you're not going to feel that it's too crowded oh my god and I'm introvert myself and I'm having a hard time to talk most of the times so thank you but here I really enjoy connecting with people which is really rare for me I think that's you're I think that you're explaining correctly in terms of yes there's a lot of people, yes it's a big venue but there are areas where you can sit and separate, have discussions off in the corners and stuff you can also find new tools, new opportunities and it's also I think that's important it's not only for developers because people many times think that this is only an event for developers, this is really wrong because there are different kind of areas around here there are content marketers designers, people from all different kind of areas it caters the entire spectrum so what are you taking home to your company most of the time? I don't know probably all the nice tools I discovered and talked with today and the really good vibe we had around here I would probably miss that also what is your favorite tool that you've discovered? I don't there are many of them, I don't want to name just one but you're saying if and when you go it's fun, it's nice learning you get to have very wide groups of friends learn different things so I have one more question about your presentation so what was the you had questions at the end right? yes so what was the question that you went like ooh that's a good one, I wish I put it in my presentation how much time it takes to recover from a traffic drop that was a really good one and roughly roughly it might take 4-5 months so similar to starting from scratch because I would imagine it is similar ish to starting from scratch can you hurt your entire profile so bad? it's not similar it depends on how much traffic you lose because there are some cases that they may be like oh we lost 20% of our traffic okay fine, manageable and more than 70% of the traffic and it was a total disaster I can imagine and they still haven't recovered from it and it's 2 years now that this happened wow but they didn't hire you no but at the same time I wouldn't be the SEO when this happened this guy might have a really hard time I don't want to know good answer so the recovery time that's long, 2 years that's a long period wow is this something that every site should do maybe what if I have 500 visitors a month does it still have benefit to pay attention to this what do you mean in terms of SEO do I still need to worry about bad backlinks yes, you should worry about SEO in every little step and if I had to advise every website to do one thing that would be technical SEO no matter the size, no matter the business no matter the industry or whatever you have to do technical SEO what are good examples of technical SEO websites yeah camva camva.com is extremely good HubSpot also I would say yeah nothing else in my mind right now I would add this to top and as a if we look at technical SEO because perhaps somebody watching us now doesn't really understand what technical SEO means I think most folks understand what SEO means search engine optimization what does technical SEO mean can you give an example of things happening in a site that are bad and are part of technical SEO technical SEO is all the actions related to technical items you don't have to be a developer to address them but you need to give them to a developer to fix them the actions related to technical SEO might be to fix page speed how the page is loading it could be internal linking how the pages are interconnected it could also be duplication that's the most simple one because you will know if you have duplication in your website duplication what does duplication mean have the same content in different pages you might have multiple product descriptions that are similar if you have an e-commerce store and you have 10 different products and you are roughly using the same product description you might have a product that is coming in 10 different colors and have 10 different product pages so the only difference to the product actually is the color so it should be one product 9 variations exactly that's the most simple version of duplication let's say so that sounds like technical SEO is indeed a very important component the most important one what's a good tool to monitor how bad your technical SEO is let's say somebody watching goes like I love what you are doing and I would love to be able to hire you but this is just my hobby project is there a place where they can go and find out how well they are doing HREFS for me is the best SEO tool out there HREFS.com it's not only for auditing but it has a feature that you can add to your website and get a weekly audit in your email of the biggest let's say issues that your website has and it's really helpful and I believe it gives you a health score as well what do you think is the minimum people should strive to reach 70, 80 70? 100 is for God you can get 100 it's really hard especially if your website is big what's a big website is it traffic or is it a lot of content both traffic but pages for example 10 million pages website is a really big website I would say that's a big one yes I would say everything above let's say 100,000 pages I consider it as a big website I would agree that's a lot of content to maintain a lot of products too how did you get into this by accident actually isn't that the most beautiful version I was 19 years old I was just trying to find a job at this point I just wanted to go over content marketing and I went to a growth marketing agency I got the first interview and they were like we don't have any content open right now we have junior ratio would you like to try it and I was like yeah let's go for it and that was it I've never done that before sounds like something I could do actually at this point I don't know something that I couldn't do but I was really eager to find out more about it nice but you moved to your eventually having your own agency yes where are you based with your agency we're based in London our offices the headquarters but we have clients from all over the world we have clients US UK, Greece and Dubai and the team also is fully remote at this point and we are split in UK, Greece and Poland currently were you always remote or is that because of the patient we're always remote it's just it's working I think better for us at this point everyone is more happy they can arrange better their schedule we don't have like a specific let's say time to work you can be responsible to set your 8 hours work because for example we have the morning we have some team members that they start working at 6am in the morning and we have some team members that they might start later we have some specific meetings during the day for sync and for planning but that all the team should attend but other than that so it's by design I understand I'm a big fan of remote as well if and when, where you can so one last question what is the number one tip that was not in your presentation that you would like for everybody to know about SEO do technical SEO guys immediately like yesterday it's that important that you just mentioned also take care of your users it's not about the search engines it's not about the machines it's about people and this is what Google goes for it as well so focus on users and user experience and you won't lose you only win thank you so much back to you so about 11 years ago myself and some other people here sat down with Matt and Andrea from the WordPress foundation and pitched them on the idea of WordCamp Europe and a year later, so 10 years ago we had the very first WordCamp Europe in Leiden and I just want to say personally it's been a really beautiful thing that's developed over the years and how amazing this event has been so I want to thank Matt and the foundation for putting our faith in us and taking that leap of faith and for it to thank all of the organisers over the years who've carried the baton on so thank you all back then 10 years ago we were talking about 10 years of WordPress and I can't quite believe we're now talking about 20 years of WordPress so I'm going to pass it over to Matt, Giusefa and Matisse to speak to you about variation on a theme 20 years of WordPress thanks starting music oh my goodness howdy Athens wow what an amazing WordCamp wow this has really come together it's been so incredible and gosh what a venue I feel so honoured to be here with all of y'all we have so much exciting stuff to share with y'all and I think we'll let you dive into it happy to kick us off hey WordPress I don't know if you heard lately but you are now 20 years old as a project congratulations before we get started I do want to give us a couple of updates from things that we've talked about over the last probably 6 months or so a little bit from last WordCamp Europe and a little bit from State of the Word the first thing that I want to talk about is actually our WordCamp reactivation so you all obviously are part of that last year at this time we had held 8 in-person WordCamps and as of right now as of this WordCamp I believe we're on track to have 25 WordCamps in the first half of the year which is more than we had all year last year and that's because you all are doing all of this with us huge thanks to the community team huge thanks especially to the folks who are helping all of our organisers relearn how to do all of this wonderful connection of our community and if you are one of our long-term members of the community or you just are really interested to learn how you can get more knowledge and understanding of how we try to make WordPress be organised and functional and working together we have the community summit coming up in August of this year on the 22nd and 23rd so just before WordCamp US where we all also should be barring any emergencies if you would like to attend that or want to raise a topic of your own that you think is incredibly important for the community to be discussing right now or if you want to apply for travel assistance or to our company's support travel assistance you can do all of that over on communitysummit.wordcamp.org if I said that too fast don't worry we've got social folks who are putting that out there as well soon on the hashtag T-U 2023 we also have a little bit of update on Five for the Future so that was a big topic last year and so far this year we've seen some pretty healthy growth not only in active contributors overall but also in specifically individual pledges to the Five for the Future program as well as company pledges so again thank you all for your constant support of this excellent project and we're going to touch super briefly before I hand it over to Matias on extending the ecosystem we've been talking a lot about one of our big goals which is to get open source alternatives to proprietary systems into as many tools as we can for the WordPress project a quick update on Openverse that project has been with us for a while I heard it you can applaud we love it extra special exciting announcement we finally got it onto its own home Openverse.org we have nearly 8 million images and audio files 800 million 800 million that's way more exciting 800 million images and audio files on it which I think is incredibly exciting and then of course in 6.2 we made it available in the editor so you can hit for slash openverse slash media and it comes up as an option and that's super exciting for me of course I'm sure you've heard about Live Translations before I get to this one we I'm sure all of you have heard about at this point playground, WP playground anyone? for the last remaining 5 of you who have not heard about it you are now going to hear about it it is one of my current favorite favorite explorations that we have going on in the WordPress project Live Translations are powered by the new WordPress Playground API you can now build the WordPress applications that run instantly in the browser and don't require a PHP server to get started go to playground.wordpress.net and use URL parameters to pre-install any theme and a plugin from the WordPress directory for example a pendant theme once you are happy with the result embed this live playground on your website using an iframe and if you need even more JSON blueprints allow you to provide simple by step WordPress setup instructions run any PHP code pre-install custom plugins import site content and more this is how Live Translations are set up and for even more control use the JavaScript API and what can we build with WordPress Playground let's take a look at a few inspiring projects a live plugin demo on your website just like Live Translations a pull request previewer like this one for Gutenberg an interactive PHP code editor that enables learning directly in a browser and even on your mobile phone a local development environment that works either in a terminal or as a visual studio code plugin and starts WordPress on your computer even if you don't have PHP, MySQL or Docker installed learn more at developer.wordpress.org slash Playground and start building with WordPress Playground today but before we jump in I just want to say how incredible this is when WordPress started used to have to download a zip file upload it to a server, configure MySQL like all these sorts of steps and one of our innovations was the famous five minute install we tried to shorten the installation time to be faster but literally now with WordPress Playground for those who don't know it runs WordPress inside of your browser so it spends a whole virtual instance using technology called WASM so we went from a five minute install to like a 500 millisecond install like literally like it's I'm so excited for how I'm sure many of you at Contributor today got to play with it and how easy it makes so the things we just showed where you can like preload themes, translations this is now like an instant developer environment for anyone who wants to play with WordPress and as you know, billions and more people come online on new devices all this runs on mobile phones too so literally you can run WordPress on your phone in the browser which is ridiculous sorry, I just Playground, I said it in the state of the word but Playground just blows my mind it's the closest thing to magic I've seen in my years working on WordPress but now it's also worth mentioning because I am a big celebrator of all of our wins I just want to mention that this has been featured as like a WordPress experiment in all of the Google I.O. and Google I.O. Connect events they're paying attention to what we're doing and I think that's great so congratulations all of you for that fantastic work with this fantastic magic now I'm going to hand it over to a face we all know Matias Ventura, what do you want to tell us about Gutenberg today? I think the cool thing about the Playground is I think we keep finding use cases like day to day I think some of the workshops we're using it to like get people quickly started in the sessions and so on so it's really cool to just see the results. Our table leader contributor day stood up during his wrap up and was like it turns out it's contagious we have four tables it was great I loved it and the GlotPress project as well is using it for like live translations and stuff it's really cool to see the little G project so we have a video to show you that I'm really excited about because I think it tells a bit of the story for like now like around six years so far between when we started Phase 1 all the way to Phase 2 and I think it's nice that it goes from like words to blocks to full design so we'll just want to show you that was that was all Gutenberg everything you just saw was created with Gutenberg. Yeah all the designs are like block designs or patterns or something which is to me I was reflecting the other day since we started with wasn't really like something that we planned but I think the way that it has opened up the ability for like the design community to contribute to the project directly without depending on like a developer to translate ideas into a design. I think to me it's really rewarding because I started my journey doing themes so it's really like speaks closely to me and I'm really curious to see how like new generations embrace these sort of like the expressive capabilities that WordPress needs to keep evolving. I don't know if either of you heard but I believe that our theme group at contributor day created a new community theme from scratch using only Gutenberg the whole way through yes? Yes Maggie agrees. Confirmation from the audience that's typical word camp I love it thank you. I'll move on to the next slide which is we'll talk a little bit about 6.3 we've been saying that 6.3 was going to be the sort of the wrap of these first two phases doesn't mean like our work is done of course we'll have a lot of things to continue doing but it's like I think we're closing a bit of a chapter here so can I interject with the four phases of Gutenberg? If you remember when we started Gutenberg we said there was going to be four phases the first phase being when we Gutenberg for the block editor for editing post then we would go outside of the box and lie you to edit a whole site in phase 2. Phase 3 is going to be all about collaboration and workflow and then phase 4 will be multilingual so when Matthias refers to the Parthenon in our timeline for scale great sounds good to me beautiful and one of the goals in 6.3 is also like to bring a lot of these features together into a more cohesive narrative like there's been a lot of features that can be seen as sort of isolated in 6.3 we're really trying to bring a lot of these features together into a more cohesive narrative like there's been a lot of features related in 6.3 we're really trying to bring it all together so I'll be talking through a small demo hopefully you can see some of the details but this is stuff that you can already try in the plugin we're still a few weeks away from the first betas so if you want to try you can install the plugin and play with it one of the main focuses we're introducing this sort of wayfinder tool where you can run commands and navigate to different pages quickly the editor was really focused on single pages so now you can just navigate the whole site customize the style book we're introducing style revisions so you'll be able to sort of compare how all your changes look in the side but you can see all the variations there we want to add a side by side comparison as well but it's really like coming together to tell the story the style book is also really interesting for some enterprise use cases where they can have a style guide and see without getting a single post or so to see how the whole design of blogs is coming together the navigation menus we've been wrestling with it for a few times and I think we're finally consolidating it so that you can hear it showing how to edit some of those navigations without getting into the nitty-gritty of the editor you can do it outside so that sort of balance is one of the main things we want to we want to get here you will see that it bounces between this sort of zoom out view of your site and getting into the site so there are some activities that you can do without getting boggled down into the complexity of the full editor and stuff that you can do outside once they are really excited about this is showing the ability to sort of have a more clear lineation between what is the content and what is the template so if you are editing a page you can focus on the title the content and so on if you want to edit the template it's going to tell you this is part of the template it applies to the whole site so you can smoothly get into that state and edit everything but the lineation is a bit more clear which is a feedback we've been hearing from users there's of course a ton of refinements to just the interactivity the drag and drop experience performance, there's a whole lot of accessibility refinements that are really cool to see we're introducing the finally the ability to save your own patterns so people can you'll see it now you can just have some design, you create your own pattern you save it and there's now a place to see essentially all the patterns someone's excited all the patterns on the site are going to be accessible from this slight zoom out view where you can see the ones that are coming from core, the ones that are from the theme and your own save patterns you'll be able to see them in this mosaic view and you'll be able to edit them in isolation as well so you can just go into and customize the thing and reuse it across the site so that's about it for 6.3 just so we'll be moving to Q&A now now it is totally open for questions I'm going to do the logistics because that is obviously my job so if you would like to ask questions we have a stand mic there like in the middle of the aisles we also have one floating mic in case folks cannot get down here to these if you are the mic holder, shout out there, moitz is our mic holder you probably need to go up to the higher things in case anyone there wants to go and it looks like we already have some people lining up but I actually have some prizes for the first three question askers these are custom an amazing designer friend of mine designed these little magnetic pop sockets that have the WordPress logo just kind of if you have an iPhone, it goes right on the back and then allows you to without all the sticky stuff on your phone there's only a few of these in the world right now and I have three of them right here so do you have an iPhone? first question? no I'm going to give it to you anyway and then you get to re-gift it to someone who does it will be like your magic token yeah please introduce yourself hello thank you my name is Milana Top again from Syria and I have a question about sponsoring contributors there is a platform open collective and they do all the logistics and WordPress community has their own project there are two important things for this platform first it has done all the logistics to support anyone anywhere in the world so that is not a problem anymore the other very important thing here is that anyone, individuals and organizations can support can give their finance there so right now we have a few individuals who are doing that thank you so much and we have Automatic actually gave $2,000 thank you so much for that so my question is this is all beautiful individuals who are more fortunate supporting others but when you really think of it it's us paying ourselves the question is can you as Matt Giuseppa Matthias or you as Automatic encourage other companies to do the same as Automatic did and make this more sustainable and what can we as a community do to make these donations from other organizations consistent so we can continue doing this thank you thank you for your question I feel like I've looked at the open collective thing but I haven't, I'm not current on it so I'll definitely check it out after this thank you for letting everyone know about it I'm glad that we're already supporting it though I will say that I just want to add on because that was more of like an introduction than a question yes as we talk about Fire for the Future which for those who aren't familiar it's this concept that for companies to maintain the commons of WordPress we have this kind of social norm social more that like companies if you're getting something from WordPress try to take 5% of that and put it back into the core or the community or the .org or the WordCamp or the whatever it is and it's deliberately a little amorphous because how people might define it could be different and definitely taking currency hard dollars and putting it back into a system like open collective is an amazing way for anyone to get back but I also want to recognize like you know if people are taking you know out of 40 hour a week, 2 hours a week to volunteer or companies that you know have 100 people working full time on core all of these different methods of contributing it's really the flywheel that makes WordPress work and I think the reason that we've been able to say because so many open source projects including many who started around the same time of us had a trajectory of like some growth and then they kind of withered on to buy I think what happened was there was too many people taking from the commons and putting back in the spirit of WordPress is I think one of the reasons we've been able to not just be successful but actually accelerate over the years so yeah thank you for telling us about this and come on down I'll give you this little pop socket thing well that's happening I'm going to add to the answer also some of you who were here last year or watched the presentation last year also know that we created the sustainability channel right in the middle of the presentation and that particular group has become a team and one of the things that I asked them to do at contributor day this year was to help us figure out how to do that part of the question how to answer that part of the question help companies know how to find people who need to be sponsored help people who want to be sponsored get paired with companies because right now basically you go to me or Matt and we help you find the other side of it but it's not sustainable either and so in case you didn't hear the wrap up for that the sustainability team is working on sustainability as far as like the software goes from an electricity standpoint sustainability for our gatherings making sure that we're using our materials to the best of our ability and then I asked them to add in that part also to make sure that we as a community remain sustainable for as long as we possibly can Hello I'm Alison from Germany and I have a question to our WordPress community leadership you how do you think we can evolve as a community in creating more diversity equality and inclusivity in our environment in a whole WordPress community we have the WP diversity working group to encourage people to speak and make more and to also make kind of deputy program to ensure that diversity and equality and inclusivity is met not only on word camps but also meetup groups but also in contributing groups so how do you think can we do better in a community and what do you think as a leadership is possible to create some kind of committee or deputy program to ensure DEI initiatives within the WordPress community me excellent firstly thank you so much for your question and also hello so yes so for folks who have been kind of listening to what we're doing in the WordPress project this year and certainly who've been watching what Matt or I have been saying in events that we go to we have been asking not only WordPress in our places but also other projects and other events where we are part of it to help us make sure where WordPress is putting its time and attention it also has good representation there were a couple of different events that I went to earlier this year where I asked them to please join us in that but I do also understand that WordPress too as good as we have become at this has plenty of distance to go because when you have things that are imbalanced you always have to work to maintain once you've gotten to it like the work is ongoing and so there are many initiatives I personally don't know the names of all them but I know that I have currently a proposal on my desk for exactly this type of team and I've been working with them kind of to review what they're proposing review what would make that sustainable as far as a team goes but also we have a couple of other initiatives based on the feedback that you all gave us about representation on the stage representation in our contributor spaces and also just generally making sure that we have some connection to the groups that we know that we're missing and the groups that we need to hear from that we don't know are missing yet and so I appreciate this question and the fact that you all always work to help keep us accountable to that and you know like you said just because we have this answer this thing that project doesn't mean that we think we're done with it so I hope that is an answer I'll also add that this is something it's kind of an exciting question because it's not just even if we create this committee or something this is actually something that every single person here in this room can contribute to and one of the things that makes me most proud is when I hear folks come up to me and say I came to a work camp and I felt so welcome you know and there's so many especially in these modern times when there's so much acrimony to have a community of people around a shared idea ideal of democratizing publishing an open source come together and be welcoming and so something every single person here can do is you know whenever you see someone who might you know seem like they're on the edges or might need some help or something like that like how can I make this person feel welcome and just if you're always if every one of us is always asking ourselves that how can I continue to be the type of community that has all types of people and if I can give a fast example that I saw specifically for this event there were people who are coming here or who are not here at all in watching via live stream who shared suggestions about how to do that while you're an attendee so I think Matt Cromwell maybe was like if you see somebody and you don't know that you know their name or they know your name like just go ahead and proactively tell them who you are introduce yourself especially we have to look after our extroverts we have to look after our introverts but then also we have people who tweet like don't forget the pac-man rule when you go to word camps like leave a space for someone to join like people even when they're not here are looking out for the ways that we can make those small impacts so absolutely I agree and you want to come down and get a little pop socket or can someone take it to her sure thank you thank you hi people m-a-t-t-e-o for the subscribers hi subscriber nice to meet you hope you're doing well hi Joseph hi Mattia so no no m-a-t-t-e-o please no we're good sorry question so much fast, I hope to be as speed as I can. First, are you, Matt, are you Matt Struzzepa and Mattia, are you going into the to the other party today? Second question is definitely I'll see you all there. Second question is I actually love all the updates that Gutenberg is doing. A real problem to me now is that I actually have all the tools to create a great design but since I'm not a designer I really don't know what to build. So are you preparing something like AI or something like that or also suggestion also approaches because that's a pattern are a good start but I hope that you may that we as a community create something more for this approach. Oh and for instance, congratulations for the videos was like an Apple event or something like that. They're down here the people who did that. It was beautiful. Thank you for the question. I think it's a it's a really like a great like you mentioned like patterns are sort of in that area but I think there's so much that we can do to right now like the pattern gallery is really growing in size but like really to to use pattern as a way to teach the sign and to make sure that it I don't know if you're composing something and you write a few blocks that we can suggest you like oh there's a pattern that is presenting these blocks in a certain way that combines this in a good way. I think there's a lot that we can do there. We haven't really we started exploring like transformations you can do when you select multiple blocks. I think AI has really like a there's a good place there to experiment with because you can you can imagine like from what you're writing like we can connect to this relatively large library of designs and sort of combine them in interesting way. Also transformations of them like if you want to cycle between different patterns. I think that's the to me one of the ultimate goals of patterns is to like bring these tools to people like you say maybe you don't have like a design background but if WordPress can offer you like the best design from the community from all the designers all over the world like and I think that's the other part is also not like one specific design but a really diverse set of design perspectives across the world. I think that's patterns are really the communication layer there but I think we need to do more to combine them in interesting ways, surface them at the right time, guide you when you're creating a page like these are the sections these are like the elements that you put in this way or that way. And do you know how many like block themes we have so far? How many block block patterns? Block themes. Oh anyone down there? No on the top of your head? Over 300? Over 300. Yeah. What do you think the future of themes is going to be? Easy question. Well I think like part of what the video captures I think is or tries to capture is that there's sort of like a shape shifting between like each theme into the next and the idea there is to communicate that it's all part of the same sort of experience and UI so it's like the whole point was that to get people to not have to learn how to do things in so many different ways so like it's not so much like having like one theme it's just like you can combine them with like what are the patterns, the style variations, the theme and it's it's all compatible with each other you can replace the header of your theme with a header that you like from another theme and it's just yeah I used to hear from users that they would like the typography of one theme but then the colors of another theme they were having to choose between them. Like your sheep photo. The sheep photo that people loved in uh or that 2010 or something that photo I took out of when I was with Donica in Ireland but it was yeah I think it's actually going to be a real challenge for us that we need to figure out because now that themes allow so much customization is how to show that when you're choosing a theme you can actually have almost infinite variations of typography color and sometimes even layouts uh from them and maybe what we call a theme needs to sort of have like a baseline maybe it's sort of more about the layouts and then the colors into typography is always interchangeable and and with tools like the style but you should be able to see like oh I really like the style that this theme has for the quotes and I want to use that and what I want to like grab like different combine them in different ways I think all of that is started to open up like we didn't show it there but we have like some really cool flows for previewing themes and previewing styles and the patterns that themes packages I think it's getting into a really like interesting with the playgrounds now we can yeah we don't need just to have some static screenshots you know in the theme folder you know like we originally had it can really be fully interactive previews which has always been one of the coolest things that you can for any WordPress theme you can click preview and see your whole sites totally reimagined thank you so much for that question and I've got your uh and again if you don't have an iphone you now have like a magic token so you can re-gift this to someone who uh who you you appreciate or has done something for WordPress or whatever question on this side yeah hello first of all I would like to say a massive thank you for each and every one of you who participated in this conference and who organized it and who made it so amazing that's such an honor for us to be a part of it again I'm a member of a web design studio from Ukraine and you can only imagine how important it is to us uh to feel welcomed and supported on each and every step of the way so thank you thank you thank you I'm curious who who is here you're here from Ukraine yes who else is here from Ukraine so guys wow wow that's incredible thank you so much so my question is like the Gutenberg has been a hot topic for such a long time and we've seen like a massive change that it created and now every bit of information is about AI so our company has been developing an AI software that will help basically any firm a company who deals with um customer support and make it automatic so it's called Sappilot for everyone and my question is how how soon do you see this Gutenberg and AI integration and what should we expect in this term yeah thank you so much thank you thank you in my entire career in technology which is about 20 years now I've never seen things moving as quickly as they are right now it's really incredible and it feels like entire years of progress are happening in weeks or months um in the AI in the AI field and uh so I think that some really cool stuff is shipping I actually just a few days ago Jetpack AI launched with a number of blocks and everything we're still figuring out pricing models and usage models and everything for this new technology um but the the other exciting thing is that like the demos are amazing like check out the Jetpack AI stuff and it's not just the demo you can actually run it today and create content and very soon it'll be able to like create blocks or maybe entire themes you can already ask chat tbt to write wordpress plugins and they they execute it's weird it's it's it's read all of wordpress's code it's read all the 55 000 plugins and themes um so it already knows us you know and that's why I think I've said it many many times but I believe that the two mega trends of the next 20 years are going to be open source and AI they're highly complementary because when you think about it AI is going to want to as AI is building things it's going to do it on open source frameworks and technologies for obvious reasons the same reason we all open source um I guess the final thing I'll say is what's deciding is like the the really cool stuff we're seeing is the worst stuff we're going to see it's going to get so good so fast so I think we're still on like the MS DOS command line versions of this but like literally later this year I think it's going to get much better and I think you know as we start to look to like this time next year when we're back we announced where work camp is going to be next year nope nope I won't spill it then what do they say uh no wordpress or automatic it's a ship that leaks from the top the uh the it's it's I I can't wait to see what's going to be around and um it's going to put so much power that it's a very democratizing technology it's um just like one of the most beautiful things about technology is like um you know Tim Cook's iPhone is not better than the iPhone that you or I have and how amazing is that um so like we all have access at some level to to these technologies and you know for free now on barge chat tbt other things we can all get access to essentially the most advanced new intelligences in the world and it does almost feel like we're we're creating a new intelligence or I won't call it a form of life but definitely a form of new intelligence so um if you know I think I said this but you know in 2016 I came on stage I was like learned JavaScript deeply that's right and um that's actually gone pretty well so thank you good job we like basically most new code and wordpress now is JavaScript and what we've done with Gutenberg and everything has been pretty incredible and um and obviously JavaScript has become kind of the standard of uh most modern development um I would encourage everyone here in this room to be playing with these tools uh play with chat tbt play with other AI tools the open source stuff is catching up really quickly and um I would encourage you all to be spending at least a few hours a week um following up and just honestly just playing with it it's an amazing personalized tutor you can use it to ask questions you can use it for rewriting your posts there's just it's the possibilities are endless and as you get better and better just like in the early days like some people were better at googling than others and that was kind of a competitive advantage what they call prompt engineering or talking to the AI and asking it what to do in an intelligent way you can get amazing results so if you if you try it out and it doesn't do what you want um keep trying keep playing with it and like look up some of these things um I feel like this capability is going to be as important as like literacy or typing or something like that the ability to leverage these AI's so everyone learn AI tools deeply we also yeah there is also a current and I think currently active discussion happening about AI in WordPress particularly um someone on our social and or things team will share that that link but there's an active discussion at the moment so you can join that as well yeah thank you hi uh I'm adam I've been doing some work on WordPress playground and I don't have a question I just wanted to share something I'm excited about that I'm just starting to realize during this conference because WordPress playground is WordPress running in javascript it brings WordPress to all the devices where we could run javascript apps which means you can build a native mobile application using WordPress program ship it in App Store a tablet app a desktop app my colleague Ella sitting over there she's working on a notes application that allows you to write notes in Gutenberg and then synchronize them over all your devices so we may see the entire WordPress ecosystem storming over the all all the devices that we're using every day WordPress will be everywhere yeah so imagine building a mobile app that's just a WordPress plugin and then you just ship it on all the devices and oh yeah uh and maybe even creating it in Gutenberg by clicking things and if you want to change how it looks just apply a different theme so just something I wanted to share thank you just spend a day in that way hello my name is Patricia I'm from Geneva in Switzerland I'm a community contributor by organizing local meetups and wordcams um my question is the usual suspect in Europe at WordCamp Europe is a GDPR or multilingual yeah the second one so basically basically a lot of people are eager to know uh an approximate ETA for the end of phase four or when we will be able to use multilingual in the Gutenberg editor or the Gutenberg project wow protect the future I think we said something on stage before do you recall we said phase three we're starting next year we're starting now like but we're starting at this yeah yeah after 6.3 we'll start with phase three properly I think there's enough overlap there that we can start getting a clearer sense of when phase four can happen I think it's also good like for example we're thinking about like what I don't know in like five years we're like AI for translation where it's going to be like and yeah how can we like make sure that we're building towards for that leapfrog yeah yeah we're like we're not um getting too ahead of ourselves in there um but it's like I think like maybe next year like we can start with some and I think you have a community exploration plug-in that's kind of taking a look at that not you Patricia you Toby next to you I think that's right I know that's great sorry everyone who's watching this I actually brought up my question from last year I was planning to say Matt that okay uh I can talk more about that thing with you after consuming at least one ticket tonight I hope it will digest well that ticket of it um but yes it I get the feeling now that when you're talking about maltylingual you're talking about some machine translation and you want it to be good enough so but when I hear that I tremble with because to me machine translation yes it is getting better by the week but my view is and a lot of people who are with me on this that it always needs to be checked by a human before you publish it and therefore I don't see a reason to delay the maltylingual part of uh WordPress core too much because it's more about making a decision and then and just to clarify where it's not um we're not delaying so WordPress is fundamentally trying to be a content management system for everything and so the the complexity of maltylingual becomes that now every single object in WordPress categories tags blocks everything which right now is kind of like a one to one relationship or you know the data types has to become a many to many relationship that's part of why we have to do collaboration and workflow before we get to maltylingual because we need to have workflows for how when something is changed in one language it flows to another language so we're very much now whether you're choosing machines or humans to do the translation that's up to the site owner um I 100% agree with you that I think that for many many many publishers you know across Europe for many many reasons it will be human driven maybe they'll use a machine to accelerate the human but like you still want a person kind of saying like this is the content that that we're publishing on the website you're not just going to take what's automatically generated so um it's but it it adds uh a multifactorial level of complexity to all of our data models and doing that right is part of uh it's going to be the most complex thing we've ever done in WordPress and so that's why we're we're really um I would actually extend Matias's timeline sorry I think we need like 12 18 to 24 months of phase three before we can really start breaking apart the data models in WordPress and we need to figure out how to do so in a backwards compatible way which is going to be you know because we we go backwards compatible basically to like WordPress .72 so it's like 2003 so we need to um we need to figure that out before we move on to your answer of that Patricia I want to help you reclaim your time and make sure your question got answered I messed that up I'm sorry did your question get answered with that yes thank you very much oh cool thank you yeah no I just want to say also that's that's why like it was important to like conclude phase two where we're like essentially making all the aspects of your website accessible to people so they can edit it once we model all of that then we'll have a better idea of like how can we make all these objects also like translatable in more ways and we're still like at contributor day we were like um sort of tossing some ideas on how to connect custom fields with blogs and so then like once we add that dimension we also need to think about okay what's going to be the multilingual story of custom fields when they are connected with logs so it's like it's important to get like the base layer in a good place start developing some of these collaborative editing ideas because I think many things will start falling into place much better and also I think we really rely on all the community explorations that are already going around like how to approach how to do multilingual isn't it just I think that really gives us a sense of like which paths are working best what things are resonating with people and so on that's important to see and the architecture is going to be so tricky like I literally stay up at night thinking about this sometimes because like do we do we do it in a single site model and then make the data structure is much more complex or do we basically do a multi-site model where each language is like a separate word press in the multi-site and then have some way to synchronize them and have workflow between them and permissioning between them so that they sort of appear as one site to the user or as a multilingual site but in the back end where we're doing essentially a multi-site which I think might be a good approach but I don't want to say that is the right approach because I think we really need to spend many many hours like actually kind of building some of these different approaches and just trying them out looking at all the plugins out there and like seeing what because performance is going to be so important and so we you know WordPress is getting faster and faster with that release we want to make sure as we add this complexity that we don't slow it down. Also like the translation UI there's really cool explorations happening on the Glotpress side on how to translate the software itself like more the interface not the content but there's a lot that we can take from that experience that that's something I think we can get going much earlier to get like information on what works for translators what's the best user experience and so on. If someone can share that live translation link I don't know it off the top of my head or I would say it that would be excellent I don't know why I'm looking up there is someone down here. Folks I keep gesturing to our committers and team reps that are down here to help me. Question over there. Oh we're gonna go upstairs. Thank you. Hello. I'm up here. Michelle Frischat here in New York and the question has to do with mentorship. No panacea for inclusion. It's cutting out. You said I heard you say there's no panacea for mentorship and inclusion. Sorry. There's no panacea for mentorship inclusion and getting the next generation of people into WordPress but mentorship can be one way to help people into the community. I think we do a really good job of our release squats with shadowing and mentorship there with my side projects that I have I'm always being asked to add mentorship to those things but my projects are small by comparison to all of WordPress so do we have any ideas or plans for official mentorship programs in the WordPress community? I do. I'm dying the hero. Thank you. It's a great question. Anyone want to take this before I take it? Just in case. Go for it. Ready to go. Wonderful. So yes I'm so excited. So for the most part when I talk to people who are currently contributing to WordPress or tried to contribute to WordPress and kind of took a break one of the things that makes the biggest difference is whether or not they found someone to mentor them they don't always call it a mentor they sometimes call it a buddy or they're like oh so and so it's just like hey that looks like you are worried about asking dumb questions ask them to me I'm happy to help like those are always every time I talk to contributors the thing that makes the biggest difference for people who want to stay for a long time and so we do we have a trial program right now happening so in our Five for the Future program we have a trial a pilot program I think that's launching today did launch yesterday July 12th where we have asked those companies that are part of the Five for the Future program as part of what they're giving back be mentorship of especially underrepresented voices but anybody who's trying to get started as an individual contributor in the WordPress project I think it's very exciting but I also think it's going to take a lot of time and attention and resources to get it right and so for anyone who also feels like gosh I really succeeded because of this one person or these three people that really helped me to figure out where I was going versus where I wanted to go go check it out someone's going to share it also on social media so that we can see the pilot and keep an eye on how we can help get that done but absolutely 100% I will I will do that until we can't figure out how to do anything better about it I agree hi my name is Jonathan I'm a member of the training team and I work with a few other contributors in the training team creating content specifically for our extender community so plugin developers theme developers anybody writes in code and one of the questions I get a lot from folks is does WordPress have an engineering best practices document handbook whatever the case may be and I know that we don't so I will usually send them things like WordPress VIPs engineering best practices human made 10 up all those enterprise level sort of agencies that have those best practices my question is do you think as an open source project we should have a best practices document if you don't why and if you do what should we start doing to make it happen thank you I don't like my impressions that I think that it's it's very important to have like these the ones you mentioned around like the the extended ecosystem having like a bit more opinionated things and see like more than the core project having like two strong opinions on some things but it's a balance I think like what we don't have like a super formalized things I think it's important to have like I don't know similar to like Apple's human interface guidelines things that we can do for well these are the things that we have learned and we want to encourage other to do like when you're developing a blog when you're developing a plugin or a theme we do some of those things through but I think there's always a risk to become like too prescriptive and stifling some of the innovation and exploration and diversity that can happen in the ecosystem so I think that's the balance that we need to achieve I wouldn't be like super categorical in one way or the other I think it's good to be thinking about it and bringing it up and and also learning from like if there's something that again human made or other agencies or 10 up are coming up that really works and it's really like we can bring it back in but I think it's important to not be too um too stifled with cool I know we're running out of time but we have a lot more questions should we try to go through them quickly or how how are we doing do we need to end right up five or can we go a few I saw a shaking head and a nodding head okay we go a few extra minutes so let's try to go through the the remaining ones quickly so we'll do the people who are still at the mic and then uh those will be the last questions so okay hello I'm toby global mentor for the polyglots first I have a quick question to the room who here does not have english as their native language wow wow so um the point I want to make with this is that um for word press mission to stay true about democratize publishing we really need to make sure that wordpress becomes available uh in a lot of different languages and we are doing that already uh and we are trying step by step but it's hard to add more languages but what I see now is that there are so many different teams struggling with how to get their content translated and these translations maintained I'm talking about training I'm talking about documentation um subtitling um developer I mean so many different things and we need to create some new or additional way of handling these translations in an efficient and smart way and my quick question probably to Giuseppe is do we have the full support from the project we may need financial support we may need some organizational support in actually making this happen I mean I always hesitate to say that you have my full financial support which is what you asked but in general you always have I mean our polyglots always have my full support to make sure that what you need that I can provide that wordpress can provide that the community can provide that you should have it um I I know that sometimes it feels like you all come to me with questions and I'm like I'll come back to you and then a week later I'm like hey you might have forgotten but I said I'd come back and here I am like there's just a lot of things that are that are part of it so I will not pledge anything that I will not be able to actually get my hands on but obviously you all have my full support to get efficient stuff yeah so um we're gonna jump to another question though just yeah so I'm just saying we are going to need other people's support as well because with only one person supported one word thank you thank you it's really great being here and asking questions again I'm Courtney Robertson I'm at GoDaddy I am also a part of the training team um and last year at the same conference I asked about uh getting multilingual working inside of Learn WordPress happy to report a year later we've got many languages it's not elegant it's all in the same site and it's not ideal but uh there was a great meeting that during contributor day worked with Toby and a few others for improving that so ask your questions because you will see progress my question today uh it revolves around I was part of a talk in the WP Connect session on funding open source M5 for the future and it's very very deeply personal to me in my journey through WordPress and to where I am now and I am one of the founding members of the WPCC and I'm happy to have those conversations to explain further what's going on with that I've had people ask even last year Europe was my first time to take a last year's Europe was my first time to take a plane to get to a work camp and there I met Sean from American Eagle and he was sharing with me that it's hard to bring from their organization it's hard to bring contributors in to do something for a particular length of time because without it being organized like they're used to internally working as a team in sprints that gets a little bit lost and this idea came up again yesterday and could we do it in a way that is open and inclusive that maybe organizations could be a little more they would have more transparency of exactly where across are now 22 teams we have 22 of them now um so across the 22 teams could we see that plug and review was needing some more staff could we have a public way of seeing where the needs are across the teams and maybe some initiatives that we certainly want and want to be exclusive but could bring some clarity organization that for this period of time maybe between the holidays some companies have slumps at that time maybe between their holidays they could dive in and do a thing during that time and then move on for a little bit and then come back again so ways of creating opportunities in unique ways of contributing that would not be exclusive by any means and again I think elevating that transparency of what the teams need would perhaps open up more of that staff labor and funding directly to help contributors yeah I have a quick answer here which is an idea I've been thinking about and we'll try to keep this short yeah so I think uh in organizations when I say this work well is you change what you measure and one thing I'd love to get more on wordpress.org is some sort of like dashboards essentially like we have the download counter we have some stats or plugins and other things but like like what if you could kind of look across the 22 teams and each of those 22 teams hatch a metrics attached and like a health metric and you know this was how many work camps there were last year this year whatever each team can define its own metrics but then there was kind of like a red-yellow green for how things were going I think that would be really powerful and then you know that'd be fun for emotivating I think for everyone working on it and then also if you're coming in and you're like okay what needs help look at the red stuff so just want to plant that seed of an idea in everyone's mind thank you. Hello I am Kamrul Islam I came from Bangladesh and I have two questions teeny question first one is will you add volunteer badges on wordpress.org profile and my second question is can I take a selfie with you guys right now right now go ahead and take the selfie why answer your first question oh you're going to come up oh maybe don't come up on stage you could do it from here and I will definitely be at the party and by the way I love meeting people I love taking pictures so all right so while you're doing that it's a quick one yes we could definitely add volunteer badges to the profile pages and I think actually wordpress.org profiles are going to get way cooler over the next year I was just actually talking to you about some ideas around that earlier so definitely something I want to work on thank you. Hi everyone I'm from Libya and I have a couple really quick questions first one is recently I started with three of my friends we started web designing startup and now that we're here in work camp Europe I couldn't pass on the opportunity to ask the great Matt for his advice for us second question is now with the release of Gutenberg and now without bearing into mind that wordpress is a privately traded company Matt do you have any plans to take the company public yeah that's all Matt cool and so to clarify wordpress is an open source thing automatic is probably what you might have been referring to is a privately traded company and then advice for web design startup yeah sure so for automatic I'll just say that it's it's great having flexibility so we're lucky to have like great long-term investors I do wish that more of the wordpress community could could own a chunk of automatic and and just like you can own many other companies in the wordpress space there's something nice about that so that's the one thing that would make me want to be more public but other than that I would say that the flexibility that's allowed for us to make very very long-term bets that's a private company is really nice thank you so much as a as a web design company I would say I would repeat what I said earlier around learning that you to leverage AI tools and also remember that what you're charging for is not how long it takes you to do it or what it cost the value you're generating for your clients so charge based on that value thank you so much matt I appreciate the opportunity thank you thank you and then finally raise your prices almost everyone should raise their prices I think we have one last question one last question all right bring it home hello thank you my name is piotrek and I just came from the sustainability workshop and there is a very specific question that just we came up with is it possible to make one simple change in terms of where all the files for the wordpress repository are stored so that would definitely be a one step further to make it you know more sustainable yeah to choose the proper storage that would generate less co2 so if that's think it's possible to change where the wordpress is so like I'm not sure if I understand we were thinking about many ways of how we can decrease the co2 yeah so this is like minimizing the file size of the wordpress itself as a file oh and then all of the plugins all of the other files everything that is running our ecosystem the good news is that more's law and other things is is on the on our side you know wordpress is getting faster more efficient but if you added up all the wordpresses in the world it's probably like less than one like container boat or something of co2 emissions so yeah I would say I'm a technological optimist in this regard there's obviously so much work we need to do around carbon capture and other things but I think we are on the cusp of abundant clean energy and and that many of these issues we've been dealing with over the past hundred years hopefully we can start to reverse so that that's my optimism that's actually a good place to end yes a very optimistic note so thank you Matt Joseph thank you all stay around for closing remarks thank you thanks to Matt Matias and joseph and thanks to all of you for attending we're nearly finished we've got a few more moments we're going to spend with you all so they party tonight is at lohan nightclub in Athens it is at 8 30 bring your badge you need your badge and you can get the some drinks and I'd like to introduce the organisers shard evangilia and joseph and I want you to give them a massive round of applause this incredible conference thank you so much looks like they're still getting mic'd so I can stand awkwardly on stage for a few minutes while they're all doing that who's coming to the party tonight I'll be there is it going to fit all of us I hope it's a really really big nightclub um so anyone want to tell me their best presentation we're going to invite all of the volunteers up let me go and check are we ready here we go welcome joseph look at the audience so oh you can hear me now yeah wow okay before I start with the closing remarks because I like noise since I am Greek um can you scream oppa for me okay that was good acceptable yep first of all I want to thank you all for being here because without you we wouldn't have work in Europe 2023 uh this is basically the closing remarks so we're going to wrap up the three days of the event it was an amazing experience for us the global leads but also for everyone else and especially for my local team from the team of Athens thank you because they have been preparing for a lot of time to host this event and that made us really really excited so this is it I can't believe it's over yep I won't cry okay shoulder no okay no because I know what we're gonna do next year oh yeah you see yeah so I think that yeah so next year we will be in a few minutes let's start for something extra can I get a new remote please as long as the remote control works of course because we have something to show oh now it works so we were 2545 attendees on the event and in this picture that you will see now there are 94 countries represented wow picture yeah thank you thank you this is just an idea of all the people not even everyone was in this picture because yesterday I think there were more people there could have even been more people on the picture but it's already crowded thank you use a lot of zoom to find yourselves in that picture okay well you can download the picture I think pretty soon from our photo album on flicker.com yeah so this is really impressive yeah it was you are really impressive basically and thank you again thank you so for Contributor Day the first day of the event we have 658 contributors working within 23 teams it was an amazing day with a great set of results congratulations to all and we always work with media partners and media supporters but 10 of them as media supporters and 11 media partners and they sent all the awesome news of wordpress and wordcamp to the world so everybody would know about this event thank you for sharing the news I was never good at mathematics I always failed at that class at school however I do like statistics and numbers and what the world did with us these days is the following numbers that have to do with how many people we reached on social media and on streaming so on social media we had an impressive interaction it goes to 23.2 million interactions 14,000 tweets and posts on Twitter and 2,000 times we have seen mentions on Twitter these days about wordcamp Europe there was content like your pictures your videos and everything that you posted around the conference that was shared 4,000 times unfortunately I didn't have much time to do that but I will do it after the event it would have been higher if you had been clicking yeah and we have been liked people liked us this time really like over 12,000 times in general wordcamp Europe you know okay okay okay they don't like me often but wordcamp Europe is likable yeah pretty good fair oh during these days we had an amazing schedule provided by 102 speakers from 29 countries thank you to all the speakers so we want to hear your ideas your feedback and you can use it our feedback form on our website and share all your ideas compliments etc it's on europe.wordcamp.org 2023 slash feedback please do so and we will use it to make it an even a better wordcamp next year yeah definitely this is going to be very helpful because the content and everything else depends on you basically exactly oh I went too fast I think yes yes we want to thank our great members because without them we wouldn't be able to succeed in this event because it's not only us the global we have another two people that have more knowledge about the community and the event so they are supporting us they are advising us all the way since when we started organizing and that goes back to March 2022 so it's a long time and we want to thank Timmy and Moncho hey Moncho are you hiding Moncho there he is yeah no pointing figures thank you Moncho and Timmy I hope you're watching at home thank you get well soon so of course thank you to all the organizers it takes a big team to create this amazing event thank you all the organizers I'm starting getting emotional we're really proud of them I hope they're proud of us too I don't know but it was an amazing team this year we faced a lot of challenges but you know we're here wrapping the event up so we made it we all made it we all made it we did thanks to all these people with the plutisants yeah we go so we have 13 team leads running 11 teams and I want to thank you say thank you to all those team leads Poros, Wendy, Juan, Matt, Steve, Laura, Matt, we have Marcel, we have Estella, we have Takis, we have Lena, we have Costa and we have Josson thank you lovely team leads thank you very much we would like to start welcoming the teams the team leads on stage to thank them properly to appreciate them and show our respect so thank you attend this services team Uros Uros thank you man now is it done that you call your team you can call in your team my team I need to remember the names I tried this not the best not the best try to do it Vagelis, Marietta, Aleksandros, Nikola, Telma, Tozze, Ivelina sorry oh and now the budget team Juan Hernando the man with the bag the budget team had a real real fun event and I want to welcome Evangelos, Kael, Emma and Justina so we have of course the communications marketing and PR team thank you Steve and Matt come on get your team on stage all right call them in so this year we've been co-team leads of communications marketing and PR so we'd like to welcome up some of our team right now so we have got George, Mike, Karthik, Tom or Pohe rather than George we have Samena and Tom and Mike thank you and we did have an amazing content team that is basically responsible for everything that you attended as talks workshops and all that jazz so oh so I would like to see our two leads again for the content team Laura and Marcel on stage now please first Marcel oh Marcel is here I was expecting you from the other side surprise thank you um please come on stage Kaminesh, Ryan, Francesca, Panos, Anchan, Piamario we cannot be here Nate Finch, Mateos, the Almeida Martins and I also would like to thanks Sabrina Seydan, Matt, Raul de Sarka, José Ramon, Padrán Garcia and all our amazing panel guests thank you good job another great team in this continent we'd like thank you also to the community team Estella Rueva okay so my team let me call them Isota, Johanna oh you start forgetting the name too she's emotional Wahadi Elisa so I guess this is all of us and we are missing Ohaya somebody that worked with us the designer of the Wapu but she couldn't come she couldn't be with us thank you thank you so um thank you for a design team Lana come to the stage so this one is responsible for our desserts our branding our website yeah she's doing the branding the website everything the shirts the colors lovely thank you thank you so Deborah, Johanna, Sofia, Vangelia, Vangelis, Fotis, everyone thank you because we have usually some technical problems and we need support never happens well we had to establish an IT team this year to take care of the tools that we're using and several other things we are constantly whining about when we are organizing so we'd like to thank our IT team Padelis, Pascal, Fotis and Nemanja and now the incredible amazing well other things local team Takis this has been so amazing having a work in Europe here in Athens I cannot be more excited on that thank you very much and thank you to my team Nikros, Eli, Kostakis, Giannis, Yakovoz, Panos Fotis, where is Fotis? Fotis come here. Come on Dream Team, come on Dream Team thank you so much guys you have been an amazing team thank you so much thank you all and thank you thank you to the people that managed to show us the money Zesong thank you sponsors team so thanks for the sponsors so this year we are 64 sponsors who made it possible because we raised the money thanks to them to the budget so the team is composed of Anna Mikke, Dean, Angelos, David, Lukas, Marion and Marine thank you and also thank you all volunteers thank you we had 142 from 40 countries it's amazing and without these volunteers it wasn't possible to run these events yes I know there are a couple of teams waiting yeah somebody mixed up the slides so your volunteers you will get on stage afterwards because we have a few more teams so that is the thank you Wendy volunteer team so right so when you call in your team thank you this was the for the unicorn joke okay so I want to thank my team Aida, Angel, Francesco, Jelena, Stefanos and Sveta please come up and we also have three people that are unfortunately not here Stiana, Jose and Gebenga but they worked all year as well so thank you to them I hope they're watching at home and now is the moment that we get to the stage to our amazing volunteers please no no no we'll have another one no really look you see that guy over there waving no no no no no okay there is okay there is there is a mix up here um of course the photography team is very important and actually we wanted to have all the volunteers on the stage so the photographers could take the picture thank you so have it your way the way you want to do it cost us you decide thank you which order I only want stage my team good go ahead that's it nilo nilo come come on stage okay we have a photographer we have someone to take the photo don't worry nilo nilo come come on stage and Elise Nastia and Jelena and please welcome all the photography team who stays thank you very much I'm gonna take this thank you no it's safe here well safe safe there so basically we are proud of them because they take our portraits for the social media we're gonna change Facebook Twitter profile pictures later we wanted to have them taking more pictures but we will do that later can I have a very very nice smile for all of you since we're getting a family picture for what came Europe yeah we can do it smile say cheese cheese we go I guess this is it right I mean enough photos for today we have enough of it then now we can slowly proceed calling our volunteers yes let's go ahead volunteers please volunteers thank you thank you all for this side for this side thank you all thank you volunteers thank you thank you stage is big enough sir sir you won the line number three you are a volunteer also okay oh okay Milan don't fall the one hey Moncho you are a volunteer also come the one and only Milan Ivanovich and Moncho it's a crowd huh yes it's crowded amazing so another family photo did you call it's my call yes I know we we're gonna take another family photo first still more okay we'll do it you deserve this moment please stay in stage so we want you near stay on the stage we are getting very emotional and we we need your help you need we need your support I'm gonna keep thanking people now that we are here because I'm good at this okay so we want to thank our closed captioning staff because they made the event more accessible we worked again with a specialized human closed captioning company in order to provide everyone with the best captions in a live event and make wordcam Europe 2023 even more inclusive so thank you very much for being part of this and for giving us this kind of assistance it was really necessary yes it was thank you very much thanks also to the Megaron staff for doing the best they could to welcome everyone of us this was an amazing venue for the event we are grateful for it thank you also thank you to the volunteers of the Red Cross and they have been a wonderful assets to this event again they supported a couple of people thank you very much for your voluntary support thank you yeah thank you for keeping us safe basically yeah and now we have to thank our sponsors because without them this event wouldn't be reality because they have been supporting us they have been funding us and i'm gonna start with our super admin sponsors thank you house singer thank you jetpack thanks to our admin sponsors blue host elemental google ionic type grant we're glad blue and wp engine and we have the editor sponsors cloudways paypal lepros and yours thank you very much for your support thank you thank you very much also for the generous support of our author and small business sponsors because the small businesses are always part of what can be events and it doesn't matter if you're not a huge company you're still part of the word press ecosystem and thank you for being able and willing to support us thanks also to our micro sponsors this year we have 103 micro sponsors thank you please be sure to visit the sponsors until the end it's the moment do it yeah here's the time to say goodbye it is time for us to say goodbye and we're very grateful to have the opportunity and to have the opportunity to help build such an amazing event as work in europe in athens and now it's time yep to click to the next slide yep and introduce to you the new global lease for 2020-2024 Juan Hernando this is it we're done we're leaving good luck thank you so much good luck with a bunch thank you thank you for all your work we were going on vacation all three of us i hope you have a good time thank you let's go people thank you so much for all your hard work thank you for all your hard work and now the big moment you have all been waiting for the revelation of the work in europe 2024 host city it's going to be it's going to be 24 and let us introduce to you as is customary i am passing the torch to you first of all let me welcome Enrico for the wonderful video thank Enrico i'm thrilled to host World Camp Europe in Italy and in my beloved Torino and the Italian community is ready to welcome all of you in our Torino so my question is for you are you ready to book your trip and accommodation for the next World Camp Europe ready to welcome you a can't wait thank you thank you so much Laura and now in order in order to make World Camp Europe 2024 happen in Torino we would like to invite all of you to apply for organizers for that year our call for organizers is already open in the new website europe.work.com.org slash 2024 and we're waiting for your applications we want all of you with us sorry sorry before we go to Torino we need to party right this is happening tonight we are going i need to read it i'm sorry um we are going to have a 20-year anniversary party so bring your best outfit and the after party will be at the low hand Athens club tonight starting at 8 30 you will need your badge to get in and there is a hard limit of 1500 people so don't be late we hope to see you all there are we moving on 1500 i already told them two free drinks and light snacks two free drinks and light snacks see you in World Camp Europe 2024