 Hei, dywedais i'r lleidio. Gweinwch. I have given this presentation at WordCamp Norway and it ended up kind of forming a part of a discussion. So we are going to have plenty of time for Q&As at the end of the, all of the sessions today, so if we can get a good discussion going, that would be great. So wordpress is licensed under the GPL licence. These are the freedoms that you are granted as an end user and a developer of wordpress. We don't need to read the whole lot, we can cut it down a little bit, so as an end user and as a developer, you have the freedom to run the program, you have access to the source code and you have the freedom to change the source code, you have the freedom to redistribute copies of the original program and you have the freedom to distribute copies of your modified version of that program. We can cut that down a little bit further. You have access to the source code, freedom to modify it and freedom to distribute your changes. And I like to cut that down even further, make it better and give it back, so this has been my mantra for a while and I like to try and apply this mantra to not just the software that I write and develop but to other parts of my life. There's a great book published by MIT called Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software and there's a prefix in the book which covers this topic. It talks about the ways that you can apply the philosophies of open source to not only software, not only open source software but to many areas of your life. And it's also touched on in this book called The Cathedral and the Bazaar and anyone who is involved with open source at all, this is a must read by Eric Raymond who was involved in Linux in its early days. So let's take a look at an example. This guy is Rodney Mullan, he's a skater and he was a pioneer of skating back in the 70s. And at first thought you might not think that open source could apply to skating but Rodney gave a really, really interesting talk at TEDx a few years ago where he touched on the topic of skaters who go to a skate park and they practice their tricks and they get good at their tricks and they go to a competition and they win a competition with their tricks. But the next thing they do is they go back to the skate park and they go back and see their friends and they say, hey, look at this cool trick that I've invented and look at this cool trick that just won me a trophy at Games and I'm going to show you how to do it. And instead of keeping that knowledge to themselves, they share it amongst the skating community and people practice it and they get better at it and then they share those improvements with other people in the skating community and it's a cyclical process. People don't tend to keep skating tricks to themselves because you can easily find out how it's done by watching someone do it. So the whole process of taking something, making it better and then giving it back to the community which effectively enabled you to do it in the first place is quite a formative part of skating as it turns out. You should definitely go and check out Rodney Mullan's talk on TEDx. But it applies to many areas as well. So recipes are a great example. Recipes tend to get handed down throughout generations of families. You'll get a recipe from your mum or your dad. You'll make the recipe and because you know a bit better than your mum does, you'll make it a little bit better. You'll make an improvement and quite often if you're brave, you can then go back to your mum and say, hey mum, I made your recipe just a little bit better. What do you think of it? Or you'll pass it on to other family members. Yeah, you've got to be brave. Or you'll pass it on to other family members or you'll pass it down through to your children or other members of your family. And it also applies to martial arts. Obviously martial arts are an old process and an old art. So the whole education, the whole training process of martial arts is really similar to the open source process of taking something, getting good at it, going off and practicing it, making it better and then going back to your peers and going back to your people who you are involved with in the same process and saying, hey, I've made this better. How about it? Is this something we can iterate on and something we can get better at? And of course with martial arts over thousands of years this process has been refined. Open Street Map is a bit more of a modern example of this process. For those of you who don't know, Open Street Map is a free and open source and community driven alternative to commercial services such as Google Maps. And all of the data that populates Open Street Map is community generated. But if you go on to Open Street Map and you're looking at some streets around where you live and you find a mistake, you can go on Open Street Map and you can click edit and you can move a pointer around, you can fix the name of the street and you can give your improvements to Open Street Map back to the community and everyone will benefit from it. And of course the scientific community, this is a great example of this iterative improvement process. You would have a hard time publishing a scientific paper without having peer review these days. It's a whole process of saying, you know, I've got some ideas, it might not be fully formed, but I would like feedback on it. I would like people to iterate on it and improve it and they do that and they give it back because that's the whole foundation of the scientific community. And then on a bit of a larger scale, evolution in general. Where do we start with that? You give your genes to your children, they make them a little bit better and they can't give them back of course, but they can pass them on to younger generations. So maybe, who knows, maybe evolution, maybe open source is rooted in all of us through our genes and through evolution. So that's about it, that's all I've got. Make it better, give it back, this is my mantra. Thanks. Next, Rachel McCollin about teaching WordPress to kids and what it taught her. Good morning everybody. My name is Rachel McCollin, I'm a WordPress developer and writer from Birmingham where today the sun is shining and if you were in room 3 yesterday afternoon you'll know why I said that. And I'm going to talk to you today about my experiences teaching my code club to create their own sites. So I run a code club at my local school which happens to be my kids school. I've been running it for nearly two years now and it's part of a national organisation called code club, unsurprisingly. Can I just ask for a show of hands, anybody who's heard of code club? So there's quite a few people. Anybody here run their own code club? Do. Hopefully I'll convince some more of you to get involved by the end of this talk. Code club is a voluntary organisation that teams up people with technical skills, volunteers with schools or libraries or community centres or anywhere where they want to run a code club for kids to learn. And they start off with scratch, which is a great tool that helps kids understand how code works without having to worry about the syntax and so forth. So you don't get any white screen of death, any of that thing. And my kids have been spending some time on scratch, they've been doing a bit of HTML and CSS, they've been doing some Python. They created loads of really, really fab projects. But they were getting a bit frustrated particularly with the HTML and CSS because when you're starting out it's a bit dull, you're doing. And when you're 11 you want to create flashy, whizzy things. So I said to them, how do you fancy all having your own blogs? And they were like, yeah, we'd love a blog. So I set them up with a multi-site installation. Multi-site, yes. And this is a screenshot, I talk of it recently. You can see I haven't really been maintaining it very well. There's a few updates available. But this was about a term ago and we spent half a term working on this. So I created user accounts for each of them and I set up a number of sites, just empty sites for them. Installed some themes and some plug-ins as relevant to them. And just sort of let them get on with it really. So I found some themes that they could customise, had lots of customisation options which they really liked. And it was quite interesting to see the different directions that they all went in. But the thing I really found useful was because the way that kids learn, the best thing to do is to just give them something and let them play with it and work it out for themselves rather than try and teach them up front and tell them what to do first. So I did that. I just basically gave them WordPress, moved around the room and gave them tips and answer questions and so forth, but let them discover it for themselves. There were some aspects of WordPress they just couldn't do that with. Some aspects they found really intuitive, the UX was very friendly for them and they got on great with it. But there were some aspects that were a bit more tricky. So as somebody who's been using WordPress for years and years, it was really eye-opening to me to see people who'd never seen WordPress before and how they responded to it. So I'm just going to quickly show you what they did with WordPress. Here we have Yolo Marvel Heroes. So they really enjoyed finding lots of photos and adding them to their sites. I have no idea where they came up with the idea of a blog about mustaches. This was three girls who invented this Princess Mustache character and are still blogging about mustaches. And they're making up all sorts of random rubbish about mustaches. And then we had our mystery blog. Now the two girls who run this blog said to me before I came here today, whatever you do, miss, do not tell them who we are because it's a mystery blog. And the whole point is that their classmates are supposed to guess who wrote which posts. So I've promised them, I said, I won't say who you are. And besides, nobody at work camp London is really going to know who you are anyway. So they are sort of, does anybody ever feel that Mondays are unlucky and things like that? I mean, sometimes you read this and think, oh, I should be telling the parents what they're writing. But it's very entertaining to see what they come up with. And then here, I'm quite, on one hand I'm quite proud of this one because my son's behind this and he's got four WordPress sites. But on the other, I'm quite ashamed of his design skills. He's definitely a geek. But this site was interesting because there were three of them working on it and they had very different ideas about how to customise it. And they kept going in and undoing each other's work. And then at one point somebody deleted somebody else's posts. So I had to change permissions. Oh, I had to basically tell them that they can and can't do this. And in the end I had to split one group in two because they just kept changing each other's work. And then finally we had this quiz site. A quiz all about football teams. So I installed a quiz plug-in and they created this quiz and then got the other kids in the group to do it. So that was really good fun for them. So on a more serious note, some of the things that I learnt from watching them do this, the good, they loved creating the sites, adding content to it. They found that all really straightforward, had no problem with adding images, links and so forth. None of them asked me how to do that. They just got on and did it. They really liked the customiser. The customiser, I showed them that there were often two ways to do something. You go through the widget screen or go through the customiser. For example, they all went for the customiser because it was very visual. It was immediate. They could see what was happening. They liked that. And the other thing that was interesting in the way that kids do, they find their own work around. So those things they couldn't work out, they found some sort of solution. Now, I looked at some of those solutions and thought, that's a bit of a messy way to do it, but it worked for them. And they're not so good. Posts and pages, they could not understand the difference between posts and pages. These kids had never blogged in their lives. They had no idea. When I tried to explain to them that a post was for their posts and that it would be constantly updated and that they had a page that would show the loop and the feed of all the posts. To them, a web page is a web page. And then I said to them, well, on your pages, you want to put things like about you. And then they just started doing it, put loads of content in the wrong post type, as it were, and ended up when they then came to look at categories because they couldn't categorise their pages. They had to then create posts and copy and paste what they'd done in the pages. But they didn't care. This is the thing with kids. They could just like, oh, I did it wrong. Oh, I'll redo it. I'll just get on with it and do it. Whereas I'd have been sitting there going, I messed up here and I've been getting really annoyed. I just got on with it. They struggled with the difference between categories and tags. This may have been because my explanation of it to them wasn't really very good. And none of them really used tags in the end. They all used categories. And the main reason they used categories was for navigation when they discovered that they could add categories to the menus. That was when posts really made sense to them when they're linked with categories. And creating menus was something they didn't find very intuitive. Even through the customiser, I had to help quite a few of them create menus. So when we spent a couple of weeks creating all the content, doing all the customisation and design, and then when we got on to looking at structure and navigation, they did need quite a bit more input from me. Although I will say I did stand up and give them a demo and they all ignored it. They all just carried on doing what they were doing. And then afterwards they said, Miss, how'd you do this? I just demonstrated that. I'll have to do it again with you. But all in all it was really interesting experience seeing how young people who've never even heard of WordPress in many cases and who've never had their own website or blog got to grips with it and they really quickly created. I think we spent about four hours in total working on it. But some of them are still working on their sites and their blogs and adding posts. Occasionally when they have a spare few minutes in co-club, working on Python for example, if they finish a project in one session, they'll just go back to their blog and have a bit of a tinker and add some more content. So it's really encouraging to see that they like it so much. So I would finish by saying teaching WordPress to kids is great fun. If you're at all interested in running your own co-club, please look at the codeclub.org website or come and talk to me afterwards and I can tell you all about it. Or alternatively if you know some kids, if you've got kids yourself or nieces or nephews or kids of friends, it's a really good way to get them to introduce them to the internet and to creating their own thing online and they love that. So thank you for your time. Thank you Rachel. Next. Probably the tallest person in the WordPress community. Taco Verdon Scott. That's probably Remkes by the way. Taco Verdon Scott. You've been practicing. No problem. All right. So in 2013, I joined Yoast. I did not have a lot of WordPress experience and I thought I could be a developer. So did Yoast back then. And on my very first day, he told me I would be going to something called a word camp. Word camp Europe. And I did. And I attended some sessions. In fact I was a really nice guy and I attended pretty much all of them. And I felt out of place. I wasn't that awesome rock star developer that all the others were. And there were like 900 of them. And it was quite a bit overwhelming. So I just sat in all the talks and I tried to remember as much as I could feeling my own little self. And then by the end of the day we, because Twitter, ended up in a bar in Leiden. And at some point I had the courage to tell one of the people there that I felt misplaced. And that guy happened to be Jeremy Felt. And Jeremy said, you know what? All you have to do to be part of the WordPress community is to show up. Well, I was there. So I was now part of the community, he said. I didn't quite believe him. So he said, wait, I'll introduce you to some people. That worked. I had an amazing night when we got thrown out of the pub at 4am in the morning. I made a lot of new friends. Some things happened. If your name is Taco, don't ever tell Americans they tried to eat you. But it was great fun. So wordcams aren't that scary even if it's the first time you probably know by now because you were at the after party last night, weren't you? Most of you, good. So partying, it's part of WordPress. It's giving back, you know. But there's more. There's not just wordcams. There's also local WordPress meetups. And local meetups are pretty much wordcams but then really small. They are like, you know, a couple of people, some are slightly bigger. But usually a couple of people, one or two presentations or, you know, a simple subject and you get to meet the people around you. And although going to wordcams is really a good thing, especially for the parties, your local meetup is way easier to reach. I mean, if I look at the distance from my house to my local meetup, you can't even see the line in Google Maps because it's so close. Those wordcams, they're quite a bit further away. So you might go to your local meetup to meet local WordPress people to share your knowledge, especially if you've been at a wordcamp, you learn like a lot of new things probably. And you can bring it back to your own community and help your own community improve. And next time, drag them to wordcamp. So there's another advantage. Last week I was in Turin for a wordcamp and there was a really inspiring talk about SEO. So I had to attend, even though I do not speak a single word Italian. At some point, one of the people there sent me a message on Twitter and this kind of explains why a local meetup might benefit you as well. I had no clue what was going on. So yeah, thanks Luca for this. But your local meetup has more benefits. You might meet your new colleagues, you might meet new people. It's just amazing. But there still are cities in the world that do not have a local meetup. There are, really. So I'd like to quote a couple of famous people in different communities. For example, Cal Evans, who's really big with his Nomad PHP and in the PHP community. He says, if you look around you and you can find a leader of your local user group, you're it. We have another famous person. He's the main organizer of PHP Benelux and he says, if there is no local group, no local user group, start one. So of course I want to be in the list of famous people and I add my own quote. Especially for you, if there is no WordPress meetup, you are the one to organize it. And it's easy. What you have to do is pick a name for your meetup. Well, I'll help you a bit. Your WordPress meetup is going to be called WordPress meetup, name of your city. I work at Joe's, we do SEO, this helps, trust me. So, what you need is a date and I'll help you again because finding a date, you know, you need someone to help you stick to it. Date, 27th of April this year. John knows because I tricked him into organizing a meetup in Norwich last week. So, hands, who of you lives in a town or a city without a WordPress meetup? That's quite a few. The gentleman in front here, what's your name? Yeah, there's no local meetup, yeah? Yeah? Scott, and where are you from? Cardiff, and there's no local meetup in Cardiff. There is now because you are organizing a local meetup on the 27th of April. Everyone tweeted. Oh, I skipped my last point because what you have to do is announce it publicly. I just did that for you, it will be on WordPress.tv. So, there's also a couple of things that you should never do when you organize a meetup. It's easy, you can remember those. First of all, if something goes bad with a venue, a location that you wanted to have your meetup at, whatever happens, do not cancel your meetup. Find another venue, find a bar, find a friend's place, don't trash your own. Find a way to keep your meetup going, but do not cancel it. If you had a speaker and last minute your speaker says, hey, I cannot make it. What you do not do is cancel your meetup. Just find another subject to talk about or just have a beer in the bar. You know, you'll be fine. It might be that you're organizing your first meetup and that you do not have enough friends so you're there on your own. No one else repeat what you should never do. If you cancel your meetup, thank you very much. Even if no one else repeat for your meetup, you're going to be there at the set time and date because what if someone does show up without Irish repeating and you're not there? They will never come back. So you are going to be there and you're not going to cancel your meetup. It's that easy. So there's a few to-dos, especially for Scott because he's now a meetup organizer. You need to have a venue. That can be a pub, that can be a company, maybe your own company, your friend's place. Find a venue and let people know it's there. Then you have to invite people because if you just organize things and you don't tell anyone that you're organizing something, they won't show up. So use Twitter, use Facebook, use LinkedIn, use anything possible, wordpress.tv, to announce your meetup and make sure that you invite people. And then, fun thing, have your meetup, make it a success. That's it. But what to do at a meetup? Because having a speaker may not always be possible if you live in a really small town without so many wordpress people around that have the confidence to get on stage. There are other things you can do. Except for your speaker, you can also do a contributing evening or a day or a weekend, whatever you like. But just an evening, introducing people to wordpress, let them work on core, let them work on anything related. Or give back to the community. You can just have a drink, meet people, you might meet new colleagues, you might meet new business partners, just having fun. And of course, there's a very important thing you can do and that is translate wordpress into your own language. I didn't forget it this time, Petja. And it's easy if you're not going to do a meetup on the 27th of April, like Scott is, you might join the wordpress translation day and you can find more info on that on wptranslationday.org and then help us translate wordpress into, well, any language. And if you speak anything other than American English you can contribute. So don't think you're excused because you're British, you're not. All right. That's it. Things you can do for your meetup. Organise your local meetup. If you have any questions, just find me. Fantastic. Thanks, Taco. And please, everyone in this room, just tweet the 27th of April, hashtag WP Cardiff. Scott is going to organise the meetup. Tweet, tweet. We'll retweet. We have, we have five minutes for questions to Taco or John or Rachel. So five minutes means probably two or three a maximum. Petia. I have a question for John. Have you found anything other than wordpress that you can implement the whole open source in your daily life? Of me personally? Yeah, you personally. Outside of software development. So I suppose I found a few other open source projects which I contribute a little bit towards like jQuery and a few other projects. So outside of my life, yeah. I suppose the primary one for me is this is going to be a bit of a strange one. So I used, when I was a youngster I used to race carts and I, as a youngster I was just kind of dropped into a go cart and gave a kickstart and that was it and I had to learn as I went. And I've got a few young cousins who wanted to get into carting so I passed that knowledge of carting onto them and I ended up helping them out to learn the racing line on the track and things like that. So it's quite a vague connection and quite often you'll struggle to find the vague connection between making improvements and the philosophies of open source. But it's also turned out that the guy who owned the track where I used to race wasn't actually any good at racing carts himself. So he came along one day and watched me showing these kids how to ride carts and he picked up a few tips from me. So that's a little bit that I gave back to the guy who put me in a cart and just gave me that kickstart all those years ago. That's about all I've got, yeah. Fantastic. Are there questions? Hi, a question to Rachel. How old are the kids you're teaching WordPress and how much you have introduction into WordPress? You just say, here's a website just started or do you explain a few hours or days before they start? That's a very good question because I should have said that in my talk. They're all aged 10 and 11 so they're years 5 and 6, the last two years of primary school. In terms of introduction, I... a couple of minutes. Yeah, I... I learned from experience of doing scratch with them which was the first thing we did that having spent the first session talking to them about lots of concepts about code and the internet and all sorts of things and having them all just sitting on their phones reading their books, ignoring me. What they wanted to do was just do it. So I set them up with WordPress, told them their login and just let them get on with it. Hi Rachel, thanks for your talk. Most of what you said I found applies to adults that I work with and teaching them how to use WordPress and those same concepts of pages and posts and categories and tags. I'm just wondering, was there things that you learned from the kids that you bring into your own work or how you teach to adults? Was there learnings from teaching the kids that you could kind of apply in other places? Yeah, that's a really good question because I do sometimes have to teach clients how to use WordPress once I've set up a site for them and it does work quite differently because they want some context and they want an introduction, what you asked about I normally spend a bit of time with clients first explaining to them what WordPress is and explaining to them what the structure of their site is because often they've got customisation and then I sit down with them but I think the thing that they have in common is that with any learner the best way to learn is through doing and so the kids, that happened very quickly and that was what they did immediately but with adults as well if you just give them a demo and don't let them do it themselves they won't remember it. I just want to note, there's one thing I give to clients was WordPress 101 I don't know if anyone uses it but it's a plugin that has all the tutorial videos so they can watch the videos in the back end and it's just for all the basic concepts so that's nice. I also, when I've created a site for a client that's quite customised I do a little video for them myself as well and I find, although up front you think it's quite a bit of work doing a video I'm actually set up for screencasting because it's part of my job but I find that spending an hour putting together a five minute video which is what it does take to put together a five minute video for a client will save you a lot of support work down the road. We probably have time for one more question I've got one. Taco Wins, what meet-up are you organising at the end of April? Well, not at the end of April because we have a regular schedule every three months so the next one is going to be the 8th of June and you're most welcome. Of course we're doing the translation day, yeah. Cool, awesome. Thank you Taco, John and Rachel.