 Hello everyone. I'm happy to introduce these fine people for this session. This session is five for the future. How can someone become a Sponsor's contributor and how a company can donate an employee time to the WordPress project. And I'm happy to invite here Courtney Robertson. So they are going to cover the topic that I mentioned. And if you have questions you can ask them and they will be happy to answer you. Hello. Hello. So we have a very exciting topic that we are discussing today. Before we start I guess it's best that we all quickly introduce ourselves. I can start. So my name is Aishankar. I am a full-time contributor to WordPress. My work is sponsored by Automatic. My focus specifically is on improving contribution for WordPress contributor experience and five for the future. I'm currently running a working group to build a mentorship program for WordPress. That's about me. I live in Kochi, India. What do you call me? Hi there. I'm Courtney Robertson. My first contribution to WordPress was in 2009 when I checked guests in for work at Mid-Atlantic before we had a foundation. So there was no foundation yet. WordPress events people were just doing them however they did them. So I volunteered because I didn't get a ticket any time. I joined the WordPress training team in 2014. I've been contributing to that team ever since. We're the ones making content on learn.wordpress.org. I spent time teaching and in working in plug-in companies as well in support and knowledge-based articles. These days you can find me for the last two years. I have worked at GoDaddy. And in that time my role has evolved. I'm a developer advocate and I've been that since I began. But what that also looks like is that I advocate for how we responsibly handle open source software including the community aspects like getting people sponsored. And so I do that. I have some responsibilities internally at GoDaddy. I also contribute a lot to the WordPress training team and other teams. And my schedule varies based upon where the need is at the time. So I have to do a lot of maintaining my own priorities and knowing where those priorities lie. So you could say I have time but also I have internal things that are making sure our booth here is good. So there's that. We have our own. You're fancy. Hi everyone. Thanks for joining us today. I've been contributing to WordPress actively since the very first work of Europe in Leiden. That was where a lot of sparkle started for a lot of European communities. I started contributing to WordPress even before. But generally I'm a designer. So I'm not like that's connected to WordPress. Like for the past six months I've been doing more WordPress projects than in the last 10 years altogether. Because I'm focusing on the design. In community I was part of community. I was mentoring work camps and meetups. I was part of the first work and peer incubator program. And alongside that I was also in the organizing team for work in Europe in Vienna, in Paris and in Belgrade. For which in the last two I was leading the communications team. So I was contributing quite a lot at the time. It was a big emotional toll eventually because communications team is working throughout the year. But I wouldn't change that experience for anything in life because I met so many incredible people. And I'd like first of all to just say thank you to all. And a round of applause for you as well because some of you I know I remember you won't hear in all of the way. So I'd just like to thank you. Thank you. This is Afsana. I'm from Dhaka, Bangladesh. So I travel around 14 hours to be here with you all. So I started my WordPress journey back in 2009 when I was just using it blog. I was not contributing at that time. Later after my undergrad I started working with WordPress product company. Then I joined my first WordCamp back in 2017 which was in Singapore. So that was not a sponsored trip. I joined the WordCamp because I wanted to even if I'm not a developer. I was completely no code and before attending that WordCamp my idea of WordCamp was it's mostly for developer. Then I joined WordCamp Singapore and my whole idea was changed for better. After that I got involved in my local community. We had our first WordCamp in Dhaka and we had around 800 people attending our WordCamp in the first WordCamp ever. Our ticket got sold out in just 14 minutes. So the community was very active from many years but we didn't have the WordCamp. When we had the first one we started seeing more people interested to contribute to WordPress. Even in my first WordCamp we didn't have any female organizer except me. We didn't have female speaker. We kind of influenced one to talk. After that we had our regular meetup. People started coming. Female started to participate. And right now even in this WordCamp Europe we have except me there are a few other female and there are a lot of Bangladeshi people joining. I just took a picture of all Bangladeshi people making effort to WordCamp Europe. Then after WordCamp Dhaka I was also part of WordCamp Europe last year as organizer. I was organizer for WordCamp Asia this year. I'm also a community deputy for Make One Press. So I'm trying to help make people make team by supporting the community. Thank you. Wow, what a panel. Not counting myself of course. But really I think we have the best crowd to talk about the topic that we have today which is Five for the Future. The very important topic of being contributors and very important topic of companies getting more contributors. But before we start all that the title of our topic is Five for the Future. I think we should briefly go into that. What is it exactly? Some of you might have heard of it. I think it's time for us to start there. What does it mean? What does it mean for contributions? What does it mean to WordPress? So I'm going to start by asking Kourtney that question. What do you think is Five for the Future? Can you briefly explain what your feelings are? Thoughts up? So if you go to the actual page it's under repress.org slash five dash four dash the future. You'll find it. And basically Matt had an idea and shared on his blog some time ago that those that are making their earnings through WordPress give back to that. So all open source projects need to sustain the project in some manner. That means that people show up and do the work of that. Sometimes people will need to be paid for the work that they do. And other times people just it's a sign hustle for them or a signed project even something they just really are passionate about and they'll do it either way. But Five for the Future as a program is there for both individuals and companies to say I'm going to give 5% of my working resources to that endeavor. And so I think we're still figuring out sometimes what it is and what that looks like in different contexts. Thank you for the report classification. So we learn what WordPress is but why is there a sign of it? Why do we need this thing called Five for the Future? There's been a lot of discussions especially in 2022 around the fact that why do we really need a program? WordPress is built by volunteers all around the world. Do we need companies to come in? In a way if you look at it it seems like a corporate takeover of WordPress. Do we really need companies coming in and paying people? Can't all just volunteers do it? I'd like to hear thoughts from... I see Afshana here who is a I know is a sponsor contributor. What do you think Afshana? Well actually they do because when I started contributing I was not doing it as a sponsor contributor right? I tried to influence I tried to inspire my local community to contribute. Some of the people started some did for few months then they stopped. So what we did is like I'm from the company called WB developer it's a WordPress product company so I'm the CMO at WB developer. At WB developer we tried to inspire our employees to contribute starting from me so I tried to share what I did for make WordPress team how people can contribute without even going to somewhere because we live in a city called Dhaka which has so much traffic so people don't want to make even if to go to the meet up so how they can contribute without going somewhere so we tried to inspire our teammates and we started to do some in-house contribution there what happened is like first we had probably 5 to 6 people contributing but from there they started contributing more we had our regular kind of meetings for to join WordPress team's meeting so in our meetings some people find it very interesting they describe it to the others and others started contributing so we announced that every week we will allow our team members to contribute to make WordPress for how many hours they want to contribute and that would be fully sponsored so they can contribute during their office time they don't have to do it on their personal time what happened is like when we announced that some of the people who actually wanted to contribute but didn't have the time or energy to do it after office they actually got interested they started contributing and after a while we found like in last WordPress 6.1 release there was around 16 people from our team who contributed and in last 6.2 we had 32 people contributing from our team we are a team of 120 so it's like more than 25% people contributed for WordPress core so that's the big number I think that's only happened because they were inspired and got the free time from the office to contribute yeah thank you Afshana so what I'm hearing is there is a space for sponsored contribution WordPress is a huge project it powers 40% of the internet there's so many complex things in this project that cannot be done by volunteers there's so many big tasks and so many complicated tasks some of them yes, volunteers can do it but volunteers they may not have the manner to do it and it makes sense for somebody to pay people to do it so there is a space for sponsored contributions I've actually done some research on the number of contributions and I can say with certainty that at this point in time right now most of the contribution, the majority of the contributions coming into WordPress are from the sponsored contributors as in people who have paid for it so yes WordPress is a volunteer run project but there is indeed a space for that so while on this topic before we move on to the core of our discussion I want to ask a mariole question as well I mean mariole you are a volunteer contributor and we were just talking about your experience as a volunteer contributor so as a volunteer who's done so much for WordPress and I know you've been part of the incubator program as you mentioned you've led the work in Europe in the past editions so what are your thoughts on 5th Feature as a volunteer who's pledged this time towards us well first of all I'd like to start by saying that there is not a contribution that doesn't matter no matter how small it is I mean even if you try and go to contribute today like yesterday and you go to Polyglot's team you start by translating 10 strings and then you go and translate 110 strings you're doing a lot of effort and you are helping spread WordPress and for me WordPress is like sort of a freedom when I started working with WordPress I was completely a designer I didn't know to write a line of PHP and I started working with WordPress because of the codecs and like nowadays it's much more elaborate a lot of things have changed but even today when you go to make.wordpress.org you get so many resources on how to start contributing so first of all I would like to repeat again every contribution matters we thought about 500 future at some point I contributed 50% of my time to WordPress for these two work in Europe where I was part of the communication team at the end I just like would like to figure out how many hours did I contribute and what would I buy myself if I would like did client work and I realized I could bought a Tesla and it was like I don't know I wouldn't say changing but after that last work in Europe where I was part of the organizing team I continued contributing to community team mentoring meetups work camps part of the incremental program we started I was assigned to help start meetup in Malaysia in Kota Kitabalu and we started with one meetup and they arranged another meetup and at that point I realized I cannot do it anymore and for me it was like I don't know I felt like betraying the community at that point because I said I will like do it until the end and then I realized that I cannot like emotionally sustain that anymore at that point because I'm a freelancer all my life at that point if I would have like a sort of someone who would step in and say do you want to continue contributing I would say yeah probably so yeah I think that we definitely need someone like that steps in and helps like these kind of folks I'm okay I don't need any like help anymore but I'm just getting better on track and starting to contribute again yeah that's it wow you missed out on a Tesla but thank you for me I would say like the contributions that you've done for workplace that's invaluable buddy I don't need a Tesla it's okay but really I would say that your contributions are priceless as max as 3 in both places at the same time like your contributions are priceless the important thing is that while I was like contributing I met so many incredible people along the way like yesterday and today and this is my first work camp since work in Bucharest which happened two months before covid started I spoke there and I haven't been anywhere I mean in my private life a lot of things have changed I bought a house renovated a house got two kids got married all things happening like this for five years and constantly I'm like going 10 meters and I'm seeing someone who I have seen for the last four years ago and that's like the most important thing about contributing to community and I would like to emphasize not to forget that excellent thank you thank you so much I think that brings us to a very important part so we've I think we've established that there is a need for sponsored contributions and there is a need to pay people who do contribute because there's so much work that needs to be done and yes some of it can be done by volunteers but some folks I'm using an expression that I'm getting from so many people's burn both ends of the candle while they try to contribute it's a problem that we all should be aware of and we should definitely pay contributors and I can see several contributors out here even in this group who I think personally could benefit from sponsorship which brings us to the core of our discussion today and before we go ahead I just have one more thing to say if any one of you have any questions please feel free to interrupt and ask but after we end we'll have a dedicated chat if you have any if you want to like have any questions that you want to feel free to ask us so I'm going to ask Kodini here who I know is very very passionate about this topic as I am well the core part of the discussion here is how can someone be a sponsored contributor so we there's a bunch of volunteer contributors here in this work in Europe they've done a lot of work and some of them they actually like I know real examples of this who've set a set framework and themselves mentioned as one example who they've set aside real client work to support WordPress so how can we adequately compensate them and how can they find sponsored what are your thoughts I'd like to hear from wow okay so I spent many years not sponsored by myself like a manual I ran my own business for a while I was not good at it even though I was a background as a business education teacher I was great at doing work of dev and code because that's what I could teach I was great at training my clients I was not great at the business administration as a solo person not at all and I remember that going to the first word camp in U.S. the first word camp U.S. event it was a financial hardship for me and I could drive to it and I live in America and it was a financial hardship for me to do this and that it meant a lot that time for me and in fact shortly after that I had two children close together and took three years off from contributing for the most part because I just could not fit in my schedule there was nothing that I don't know some of that probably couldn't have been changed but when I started to resurface pandemic was happening right around the time that my children were old enough that I could start going back to camps again but pandemic happened right then and so I had an opportunity to go teach at a boot camp that sort of afforded me a little bit of time but it wasn't a lot to contribute again and I saw my own journey of I really want to be sponsored and I want to do more I like I love that I was teaching WordPress but what was happening is that while teaching WordPress have you ever worked in a plug-in company and one of my co-workers is here the little test to you need to know a proficient amount of PHP even in the support forums to be able to answer questions correctly and they weren't doing that in this boot camp program and so I said oh I just want to go fix it and make official resources on learn.wordpress.org and say here's what you need at the minimum skill level to get that thing but to do that I needed more time than my teaching world could give me to do that thing and we're in the process of working on that within the training team these days I was called by now manager Adam Werner who many of you may know I found him in between sessions during one of the online word camps that was in the sponsor booth of that time and I said hey if GoDaddy would ever sponsor me let me know a few months go by and he was already looking to expand his team and he said we have this developer advocate position that we would like to bring on and it seems like you know a deep amount of developing and working with developers sometimes developers need help translating to human languages so yes those are skill sets that I have and I applied and now I get to do that but I remember the journey of having to sleep on my college roommate's couch and barely afforded parking for word camp US and juggling the funds at that time and so I'm wildly passionate about unburdening people that have the skill sets for me that looked like I wasn't great at running my business I was good at teaching and I love what I get to do these days but for some people if you're running your own business it's accounting for if you want to give that back then making that a sales advantage point and why customers should come to you budgeting things so that you can afford that time off if that is not an option that you want to pursue then don't sometimes it takes this confidence of like I had but I felt that I trusted pretty well in the space that might know of an opportunity and so I started shopping that around for others that are on the flip side of this if you if you want to be sponsored other options included setting up in your github profile you don't even have to use github really for this you can set up a profile and accept donations Joe Doulson had started that for his work on accessibility he is part of the accessibility team he reviews a lot of what goes on in every release for accessibility related areas Joe is an accessibility consultant but Joe needed to do that without having all of the client work going on and so he set up his github profile he led the community now and people started giving some individuals just started giving in on a regular basis to the work that Joe does so you can accept regular donation type of things but then the flip side now that I might go to Eddie is broadly open source community and I get to work another co-worker is here with me Mike in the back and so helps work on our initiatives of how we are as a company also being responsible and contributing and how we allocate staff resources for that because you have to account for that somewhere and I've learned what the red tape is in corporate America life of how to get approval for that so when you work for really big enterprises they don't want to write checks to just some random person that just wants to be paid to just go do that thing they want employees maybe conversations like WordPress has a release coming out what should we know as far as our hosting goes or those things so they need to know details like this and that can create some red tape in terms of just giving money out some companies especially those that are not publicly held can adapt fast for those needs and that is great at that my budget was set October of last year I don't get to decide things on a sudden whim for how we spend certain money and so from that side of it and I asked Harri ahead of time about mentioning this my but I'm not contributing and on the clock and doing mom things I have a six to seven year old almost when I'm not busy with all of that I helped co-found the community collective and that is a non-profit it is running through Open Collective Open Collective is a foundation that exists for open source projects publicly transparent in how the banking gets handled so if you don't want to stuff money in an envelope mail it off to your favorite WordPress contributor across any of our 21 teams it doesn't have to be the core team it could be we've got 22 now because yesterday we launched a new team yes so we're not wild about shoving money in an envelope and hoping the mail arrives for them the WP community collective or the WPCC exists so that whether a person or an organization, a company would like to give money to those that want to be sponsored then that organization exists and I will say we are still in the early phases of this we've invited the executive director of WordPress to have a say in what areas are being sponsored, what are the needs of the project what does WordPress need we know that we need people in the plugin review team because they were small, backlogged and people want to retire and they rightly should they say this is time and I'm done here we know that that's a need we know that there is a need for more accessibility work we know that there are needs variously across the project and so we're just beginning to get going and I can say that my own employer does fund every year to get diverse speaker initiatives to get diverse speakers to work camps as speakers and I got the email confirmation while I've been here that that is almost done and it's been a few months in the process because internally at my employer it takes some time to clear all of the red tape to then onboard a new vendor and then transfer the funds to that vendor that will then transfer the which is the WPCC to the recipients so there's a lot of work that is still there to be done and I'm studying what other open source projects do as well about how other open source projects fund contributors because I think gosh there's some really big I mean think about every server out there is probably running Linux in some fashion how do they fund what they do on the servers there's entire open source stuff in the automotive industry who knew and it's on Mars inside of the broker it's everywhere and so how do these other big open source projects handle their funds and I'm just starting to touch researching and understanding that and what can we learn from some of those pieces as well so if you're at an organization that wishes to give funds see me if you are a person that wants the courage to go up and boldly tell people here I am I wish to be sponsored and I don't want the stigma of asking for money see me about that as well. Thank you so if you want to get sponsored reach out to companies look at WPCC look at different opportunities start a GitHub profile so additionally I can also share I work full time on 5 for the future these days and I'm also looking at seeing if this can be done project-wide as well like if there's something that can be done where we can bring companies together and make teams together to bring out opportunities and bring out both connect people who want to be sponsored to companies so you know how WordPress is it's an open source project it's built by a group of people so something like this needs a broader support but hopefully someday we will have this something like GitHub is built into WordPress maybe not in that way but some form of it but in short any contributors here who want to get sponsored please feel free to ask and I think I'm going to probably have somebody to talk about this as well so what would make a good pitch let's say you want to be contributed you want to be sponsored by somebody how do you approach somebody how do you make your case for it does anybody have any thoughts so this is open to all of you so for our company I saw some people started contributing but if you ask me to select someone for sponsoring my contribution I would like to see how they have already contributed right so if you have already contributed you showed your passion for that specific thing then probably it will be easier for companies to select you for sponsorship so first start contributing and then look for the companies ask for sponsorship I think if you have done major contribution there are a lot of WordPress product company who are happy to contribute for your contributions right so I guess first start contributing as a volunteer and once you have built that start looking at things and I also want to research many companies like Yoast as a diversity fund you mentioned good ideas as a travel fund so many companies many organizations many companies actually have some funds like this a lot of company have funds and a lot of company are willing to give more funds right now since probably by seeing big companies even the small companies are willing to contribute as a sponsor right so I think to summarize what we have discussed here so if you would like to get sponsored just ask there are so many companies out there there are so many opportunities maybe you can even start a patreon so many open source developers actually use patreon so you could start a patreon you could reach out to WPCC you could reach out to companies themselves maybe write a proposal so I can see a couple of sponsors contributors over here maybe after the discussion we can come to you look at you in one so we need to move on to the next part of our discussion which is how can a company donate an employee to the WordPress project so well this is just as important as we get into this I wanna quickly talk about the reason why companies should produce I mean if you look at it from a corporate or a business perspective how does it make business sense for a company to contribute people it seems like an overhead especially mind you we are in very complicated economic times where companies have hiring fees going on like my company has one I mean in the sense like many companies are not like they are not actively hiring that's what's happening that's what's going on in the ecosystem so in this situation how does it make sense for a business to actually sponsor contributors what is the business sense I'm gonna open this question to all the panelists so maybe I'll start with Emmanuel personally I don't know because I was never in that position to work in a company I'm for the rest of my life but imagine WordPress 10 years ago if we didn't have all these contributors if we didn't have all these companies that stood behind how many features wouldn't be done and I'm not talking just like a new core feature or a new plugin or something I'm talking about I mean we are other different things so I think that's the biggest benefit WordPress now and WordPress 10 years ago completed two different things WordPress now powers so many websites from like small family-run businesses to blogs to huge commercial websites web shops and what not that wouldn't be possible without contributions and without paid contributions because WordPress is okay when things are good but from time to time you need to choose between do I want to work for free out of my passion and out of the need to help other people and provide for my family for my kids for people that I love and I want to help them for their life and what not so I'd say that that's like the biggest benefit if we want to move WordPress even further like to democratize publishing even more democratize web not just publishing then we need to have companies to understand that and I'm really happy today to see so many companies that like contribute I mean before this this panel I wanted to be part of I didn't know you guys I didn't know how many companies contribute and I was like when I was researching for this panel I went to make.org and I see this person contributes like 40 hours this person is contributing for 10 hours for 4 hours and it doesn't matter how many hours do we contribute but that someone else has faith in what we do and we are willing to pay us for that like for this peace of mind that we need to have to like give it back I want to pass this to Gordy because I think she's a very unique position to answer this so Gordy so I know Harri you have full time hours at automatic and the way that automatic tends to organize is there is a division of automatic that only does dot work things for the most part whereas at other companies you have kind of a mixture of things going on so my role is not full time my role is again it varies where I'm in the release cycle what are the fires that I need to put out internally or externally or whatever so my role it kind of fluctuates I would average that well over half of my time is in dot work related efforts somewhere between 50 to 75% of my hours are dot work related efforts and so we have kind of a mixture of things going on there are individuals that we sponsor that are not employees they do not in any way act as employees they are not in our internal comms at all and we just know that they are doing good work and we give them some money because they should be able to not do clients and do that work then there are some folks like myself that it's part of our job description and that might be all the way up through full time we've got two full time contributors one to core which is Mike and one to Gutenberg and that's their purview of what they do and then we have some ad hoc stuff so some of our folks especially in Pagely will find something in PHP that needs fixing or someone finds a typo in some Gutenberg change log or whatever and they just fix it because they see it and they're there and that's not necessarily dedicated time in any capacity they're just they happen to be needing that item from something and they spot a bug or whatever and they do the responsible thing and they log it on the clock and fix the change when they can do it so it's varied in terms of how from the business side of it we structure things and one of the areas that I'm always looking to approve without being overly creepy is tracking metrics because corporate folks in order to justify this to the financial board that owns a publicly held company I've got to have some data to tell them here is why this is important right but quantifying how long does it take to think about a thing because knowledge is work being able to sit and do things so tracking shouldn't be about how many poll requests or how many people were listed on a core release because we're contributing to all of these teams right I'm on the training team I've been leading meta meetings that doesn't show up on a core release in terms of props so props are core props for a release is not a good metric for us clocking hours thinking well that's weird too and then also people don't like to have their privacy invaded and they don't want to be like quantified necessarily and all the things so it gets complicated and I'm still exploring areas with that I love talking about those things with people I feel like I understand both sides of the equation oh we got a question go ahead have a air I'll repeat it so I have a big voice that's okay so we've been thinking about this in the hosting team for some time because we know what we need we know some companies in this case in the hosting world that have money so should be the make teams involved in this fight for the future part so I'm one of the team reps so maybe I can write like a project maybe quantify the hours maybe quantify the money maybe and publish that in some place and get all the people involved and be there because companies maybe don't want to be involved controlling the people but I'm one of the team reps I can check if things get done we can be like somebody inside the process actually that idea that you shared a couple of different learn.wordpress.org has a website folks and it needs some help in development and functionality and some things so not only do we need content we need to know what people need to learn to get started and to keep learning because wordpress and languages keep evolving we also need to develop the website and so a couple of companies that I had some conversations with I've kicked around that idea of similar Javier was saying about basically writing a document and here's what needs to be done and kind of quantifying it from the team reps perspective of things and so I've kicked out the idea of running a sprint basically if you're a dev you're familiar with sprints sprint is you have a big long epic that tells what the whole scope of maybe the year of the project is and within that you have sprints and here's what we're doing in this little window of time and that little window of time might still be like a six week window of time but you say here's everything we're going to work on and get done and I worked on these sprints with Bonn that's sitting over here a lot and then at the end you have a retro and you talk about what worked and didn't work and I think the idea of other organizations that might want to contribute setting up something like a sprint for the existing co-workers might want to do the thing and they need someone to organize what the thing is that they're going to do and they can swing in as a team unit that already flows well follow the guidelines that .org has and get that knocked out that could be really interesting that's something that I've thought about but it's great to hear other teams are thinking about it too and how we could set that up I just have a idea on this thing a little bit is about decision making process by who is there makes a decision and if you have an existing team from let's say a hosting company who sponsors a whole team to do a hosting task for the WordPress community this could be an issue maybe yes it could also yes it very much could be an issue but it's also an issue from both sides of this who gets sponsored can even be a privilege because I have been able to contribute in some fashion since 2009 so when my now employer saw that I had contributing experience then they wanted to hire me but what about the person that can't contribute until they get the sponsorship well maybe speaking at a work camp could be part of that and that might be a lesser commitment right but then the flip side of the decision makers that is a big and a hard thing so when I love what Yoast does when they hold contributed days they invite the public they don't have internal conversations during the pandemic we did three or four and I got up at 4am in my time zone to join them as part of the training team and said here is what the training team and the marketing team are collaborating on today and we were all together in Zoom with Yoast some of them are in office and the public also is so maybe sprints like that could have people join in as well and not be exclusive in that sense I think that's still an idea to play with and see could we maybe make that type of situation work because from the employer side it depends on the company and what they're doing in a large scale agency that has wanted people to contribute they go in and they get lost in slack channels and meetings and things don't get they don't finish an initiative it feels like they're sending someone in that might be wasting time even from the employer side of things so from an employer side they're less likely to give people that time that are already employees because it's directionless and so having some kind of a direction but not being exclusive maybe we could play with ideas on that I don't know Thank you folks I think I just want to say that it was planned to be finished now but if everyone is excited we can keep on talking about it I think we were almost done but I just want to quickly wrap things up and maybe take a couple more arguments sorry Harry what we discussed today we were one talking mostly but I think that a really good thing that we could do afterwards is just write a post and Courtney I'm looking at you because I think that you are the person who will write that maybe just to summarize things that we talked about and kick some ideas inside all that I think what sparked this idea to get I found the idea that people get sponsored in 2014 when I attended to the WordCamp San Francisco and Community Summit and since then I'm looking for a company who is willing to sponsor my contribution time I took 3 years sabbatical because of my health issues and I'm like you self-employed and not that business type and sometimes a people-pleasing person but I also have not that big exposure before because I did also the contribution which have no props and it's not that visible so that's also an issue to make yourself as a contributor also visible to get acknowledged about it also I think a difficult part the most contributor I met on this journey contributing to WordCamp over 13 years now a lot of people are introverted and shy to ask so I think it's the responsibility of our community to make tools and connections available for them so they don't have this high bar level to overcome this and get the courage to I want to contribute to WordPress the more amount of time I can afford so I get sponsored for this thank you so I would like to add I can understand your point in our company we have the people who are contributing for our company they have dedicated our contributing not the full time so our challenges is like all of those people have specific role so we cannot contribute their full time for the contribution so we try to look for the people who are already contributing so we can sponsor them but interestingly we didn't find anyone because no one asking for it you should talk about it putting you in the spot this discussion with few other product owners as well they also want to contribute but they don't have their extra resource that they can donate full time and I think many of them would like to contribute not probably 10 or 20 sponsor contributor but probably 1, 2, 5 that would be good enough but I need we need to find them somewhere that they are looking for the sponsorship they are contributing already right? just to continue on that thought I think that there are companies that are for them it's easier to give money than to find a person inside a company for example I'm working as freelancer my partner and I we are like a two man band company and we are constantly donating things like for I don't know people in need or whatever it doesn't need to be like a huge amount but finding a way to channel that money to people that deserve it and do a lot of contributions to the WordPress that would be like I think you should look at Kotlin's initiative alright so we are almost 5 minutes ahead of time so I want to quickly summarize what we discussed today around for folks who are looking for contributions please you should advocate for yourself write a proposal, create a GitHub profile create a sponsor profile, create a Patreon look into options like WPCC there are so many and hopefully we will even have something in the project at least you can come and talk to me this is my full time job, I connect this is what I do for work so I can also maybe help you and for companies looking at sponsorship that's definitely a benefit to it a couple more points that I'd like to add personally I think there's a business there's a solid business case to contributing especially if you are a WordPress company you contribute your employees know where the product is going especially if you need hosting need plugins you can actually make business decisions based on that and did you know that contribution is a learning opportunity? like really so if you have a small agency and if you have co-contributors that definitely elevates your, you know, the QQA delivery I've seen this locally, I've seen small companies who've contributed to core, like they've actually improved their reputation they've gotten work, this has actually improved their business and not just that your employees, they learn so much so I'm working on a Kodini is also part of this, so we are working on a contributor mentorship project where both sponsored and non-sponsored contributors they can actually learn things, new people coming into the project they can actually learn things they learn actual skills which they can put to work, so you can become better as an individual, you can become better as a professional by contributing so hopefully we have a future where learn and contribution come together so we have an internship program or something just doing some wild blues type thinking so I think I can wrap up but maybe we can take one or two more questions from the audience in case anybody is curious any thoughts any questions go ahead my name is Arsene so I founded a company and we are doing WordPress for about 10 years right now when I'm trying to hire new people I see that the young age is not interested to work in WordPress so I'm wondering if big companies as a strategy to keep WordPress going to keep WordPress growing and maybe they need to look for young age people and try to support them try to sponsor them to make the contribution what do you think we have an educator here who I think so I was teaching WordPress in high schools in 2015 using Pippins plugins if anyone's been around and remembers the Pippins plugins videos these days though we have learn.workpress.org and one of the dreams that I have is that we take a combo of the content that's there and we will need so much content we need as much if not more help them docs because we can address people through meet up groups through direct learning we've got courses on there educators could use all of those materials in classrooms they're fit for classrooms right now we have some rules where we can't directly market to youth with it because there's legal stuff but a teacher could say this video is fine for my classroom and I'm going to show it so bringing it into educational institutions and then using things like the mentorship program Hari and I last night were talking about specifically what if this mentorship program were to approach technical schools I was teaching in a WordPress in a high school that was a technical school so the students were either college bound or off directly to work out of computer programming background and so what if we approach places like that and where higher ed institutes that could be part of their internship during their training time as well and already there are a lot of educators using things like edgy blogs in schools students have been exposed to WordPress a lot of times not always but I've seen it pop up in different places it's just that there is a disconnect from the time the teacher stops using it to them in the workforce and they don't know that the community exists they don't know that there are these resources and people that are desperate for them and ready to come and help but it's out of the scope of WordPress.org to approach every university and every possible continent and write so there is some bridge to happen with that in a long range type of fashion what I would like to do is see that we've got enough complete learning pathways meaning a series of courses on learn and then start working with the local ambassadors through polyglots around the globe and saying hey who do you know in education do you have anyone in your meet up groups that are teachers that could get us in touch and I've been in touch with some folks that work with the training materials that the EU organization implements that they're creating some materials specifically around WordPress already so couldn't we start talking with some of those kind of places where the standards of education find out at least the really large language areas the most common language is let's get prioritized finding out the educational institutions within those and say do you know that this resource exists and that we're powering 43% of the web and we could do that and let's keep working on our youth camp program we had a youth workshop yesterday a youth camp just happened last week in India that I saw went phenomenally well so let's keep doing that as well not saying that that's not stopping that but keep doing some of those things does it really feel you want to add a thing Manu? Any more questions? Yes Just a quick question I'm in awe that you put so much effort into it already can you enlighten us about the future plans about the program is there a kind of committee with or team mentorship deputy program especially for the 5 for the future initiative I would love to see that because as we see in the WP diversity with the speaker support training it's awesome to see but I would like to see something like that in the 5 for the future that we have some kind of deputy program to help companies also to vet contributors maybe we need to make sure that there's also a kind of quality also I fear that some people are jumping on the board I would like to get some money to put some fix three tickets and then disappear so not that many people are intending to but I think it maybe water down the initiative if we have such amount we see a company who contributed 5 for the future the entry from the companies who say I sponsor my employee with 10 hours per week and the employee maybe 5 minutes per month so there's a spam on the 5 for the future that's what I'm thinking about to maybe install a kind of deputy program for this that's a great question first of all honestly I don't know the answer for it but 5 for the future currently at this point it's a website it started off as it came out of a blog post asking people to contribute then in 2018-2019 we have a website we don't have a program over it yet that's what I'm trying to build a program around it so community right now has a contributor workgroup and some of the community Mike here is also a part of it so what we're trying to do is contribute so the contributor workgroup kicked off in 2021 it was active during the pandemic then it got defunct now we're trying to revive it so once the mentorship program is more or less set I think maybe this working group can focus more on other things like contributions so maybe it can look at contributions and improving the way things are and looking at 5 for the future that's the direction where things are going you asked about the direction of the mentorship program honestly I don't know so to explain to share more context with you this working group is creating a mentorship even Patricia is also part of this so we're creating a mentorship program for WordPress we're doing a pilot, it's a test really so there's going to be a first cohort starting in July so we are going to put out a call for mentee soon in a more public workspace we'll be inviting we'll be selecting 10 people 10 new contributors from WordPress we'll have a group of mentees, mentors so all these people they'll be together in a Slack channel for one month, four weeks these folks will get the training and mentorship, they'll learn about the project and they'll pick a make team they'll start contributing towards that team and our hope is that once they graduate they stay on as long as the contributors so this is open to both sponsored and non-sponsored folks