 Thank you very much. All right, the future of WordPress. So this is a pretty big topic. When I was initially asked to talk about it, I wasn't entirely sure what I was going to speak about. But I think together, let's talk through some different things that have been going on in the project and some ideas on where things could go. Just a quick disclaimer up front. These are all my thoughts and opinions, not anything official from the project or anything like that. So take that as you may. I think when folks usually talk about the future of WordPress, when I've been to talks that are kind of titled like this in the past, I've heard a lot about headless WordPress. So WordPress or something else is using the information from WordPress via an API or something like that. And I do actually think that those uses are super interesting. So I'm going to start talking about that briefly and how that sort of broadens gradually what WordPress is used for and changes the way that we think about WordPress. From a couple of years ago, I really like this presentation from Ahide-san about the way that using Alexa to pull information from WordPress because it takes WordPress and basically takes an emerging technology and then connects that with WordPress in a way that at least I certainly hadn't thought about it. It's an integration with the REST API. I think it's a really good implementation there. And it's at the edge, definitely especially when this was first released of what WordPress is used for. Another really cool example that I saw kind of recently is Anthony Burchell's work on extended reality and WordPress. So he's been doing some work on integrating WordPress with VR and AR systems and things like that to do different stuff. So this is an example of what a post might look like extended back out about Mars. And this is all open source. So you can also go in there, if you want to play around with it a little bit, then that's on GitHub and you can take a look. Yeah, I think it's pretty cool. He's also working on another one that is an AR music creation app called Broken Place. And this I don't think is quite released yet, but there are some videos if you want to, or if you go to the WP Tavern link or search even just or just go to brokenplace.com, you can see a video example. And it's kind of neat. You can look around with a cell phone and choose the instruments that you want to play by looking around wherever you are. And the way that it connects with WordPress is that it uses WordPress as a backend. I mean, I at least would never guess that it used WordPress looking at the application. But it can save music that different people are generating and combine them so people can collaborate and saves that in the backend. So I think that's pretty cool. I guess all this to say that I think that diversity of application matters when it comes to WordPress to use WordPress in sort of the broadest way possible. And I think it shows how much a certain platform can stretch to support emerging technologies in the future. I think it also applies here to diversity of users and folks that are developing with it. The wider variety of folks that use software, the broader that knowledge is that can be shared with the community to inform future direction. So I don't see this in this sort of talk very often, but I'm going to go ahead and do it. Let's set up sort of the rest of our conversation. It is possible that in the future WordPress may fail. Yeah, no, technologies tend to run their course until something that fits the need better comes along. And so I think this is important to think about because this is not the ideal, this is not what we want. At least I'm going to go ahead and assume that folks coming to a WordCamp, this is not the future that you want. This is not the future that I want. I think the alternative for this that would be ideal for WordPress fulfilling its mission of democratizing publishing is that WordPress changes. And what I mean by this is that as technology emerges, I think the extent to which WordPress can accomplish this mission is going to depend on its ability to adapt. Right now, democratizing publishing looks like very similar to what WordPress looks like, but already is starting to include things that probably WordPress doesn't do natively yet, like perhaps better video support or things like that, that folks would really like to be able to publish in an easier fashion. And I imagine that there are lots of these things that I can't even imagine at this point. So to me, this ability of WordPress as not only a project, but as a community to evolve is how we continue into the future so that WordPress continues to succeed. So to start, let's take a look at where WordPress is now and how well WordPress is set up to change over time. WordPress is definitely growing, and this is an indicator that a lot of folks talk about in terms of future success. So let's chat about a few of the different ways that at least I see WordPress as growing. I think the clearest metric is an install count. So earlier this year, it was announced that WordPress was 33.4% of installs on the web, and this is up from 30% last year. The WordPress.org About page has also been updated to say that WordPress is now over 35%, which is super exciting to increase by 5% of the internet in a year. I don't know. That's hard for me to imagine. So short of something catastrophic, I don't think that this is going to change suddenly. One of the benefits of the open web and of WordPress is that all of these sites are, or at least many of the sites are hosted independently, and so all of those folks have the freedom to continue to develop those on their own. So this is cool. I think that it gives WordPress a lot of runway to be able to adjust, and it also provides some of that increased, as there are more folks, increased diversity of application and increased diversity of users that we were talking about. One of the difficulties that comes from a project this big is that it's kind of hard to steer such a big ship. So for WordPress to succeed, to change, it has to have those resources and resources, vision and organization to be able to change direction. So let's start out with communication of vision. So during the last couple of years, Matt Mullenweg, many of y'all are probably familiar with, but for those who are not, is one of the co-founders of WordPress and has been leading the project for some time, has taken a more vocal and forward lead in communicating vision, and I'm really excited about this. So I think that there's a lot of WordPress growth in project organization that's happening. At last year's State of the Word, which is an annual speech that Matt gives about sort of what's going on with WordPress, what he might expect to come next, and plans for the future, he detailed basically the next steps for WordPress. So first, an ending last year, there was a new editor that was released that moved, called Gutenberg, so that's what this is, that changed the editing experience within the single post from TinyMCE to a new block format where things are more based on objects in a page or post rather than text. And there are some next phases that are coming up. So this is where we are right now. We're in phase two, and this is slowly starting to move outside of that post content and to focus on customization. It's worth noting that any... So I've made sure to include links at the bottom of most of the slides that are here, because one of the cool things to me, at least about the WordPress community, is that all of this information is open. So if you want to know about future plans or if you want to know about what's happening in organization, how decisions are made, things like that, you can always go and you can see in public posts and in videos and in things like that exactly what's happening, and you can get involved. So the link that's at the bottom here will take you to that talk, so you can watch it if you like, and I'm reasonably sure that there are subtitles there, too, that are translated, both for that one and for this year's. The next one that's coming up is phase three. I don't know exactly when this is going to start, but it's slated for afterwards, and this is collaboration, so this is kind of a neat one. The idea being to allow, kind of like in Google Docs, for folks to be able to edit a page or a post at the same time, and Gutenberg helps set that up by moving editing to blocks. So I'm pretty excited about that. The one that I think, though, is probably going to change things the most is the one that comes after that, which is an official way to support multilingual websites in WordPress and to support multilingual natively within WordPress and Gutenberg, and I think this one has been far too long coming, honestly, but I'm really, really excited to see this on the official project priorities, and I'm looking forward to that process starting. So after he announced these things, and basically I'm going to walk through a little bit here with organization and how things tend to flow, and fortunately we've got some really great examples from this year. So after this was announced, right afterward, there was a post on make.wordpress.org slash core from that about all of the projects and sort of how those plans and those focuses of the things that were coming next might look in projects, and that was starting, and that started planning. So you can go and you can see all that. Just last night, there was another update, so this was, because this was last year, and now we're at the, about at the end of 2019, Josepha, who is the executive director of WordPress, posted this update, and you can go and you can see what's happened this year with each of those priorities and focuses. There's also a fairly new page on WordPress.org about slash roadmap that has the details of all of this and sort of where the community and where the project is in planning and in execution, so that's a cool place to see it. Connected with Vision, there is also a lot of movement in terms of experimenting with different leadership models, and this is an entirely new WordPress as a project has been experimenting with exactly how to run the project for the very least as long as I've been a part of the project. Matt has been leading it, but the way that everything else gets run with releases and with leadership and with basically how everything is organized has changed a lot over time. I think this is really healthy to continue to evaluate and to see what's working best for the community at any particular time, and it's really encouraging to see this. As part of that, Josepha Hayden became the Executive Director and Yoast also had, and now I'm struggling because I didn't write down the exact title, was a marketing lead. Since then, they both decided to do something different, and I think that's also really encouraging. There's a long post that Yoast made after he stepped back from that position about all of the things that happened and about how he felt about it, and they decided to try something different. I think that continuing to that transparency in terms of how things are working and in terms of continuing to change things so that they work better is really encouraging. Afterward, Josepha started posting other details about thinking about organization. There's a post that went up about asking to see if folks were interested in being leads, and so you can still go and comment on that if you'd like, and she's started to build out some documentation and training for folks that are interested in leadership, and so that's something to look forward to. As far as I'm aware, that is still in progress, but there are drafts that are available to read whenever you would like. Following that, she continued and did some research on the way that WordPress works right now, and so basically the current way that leadership is attained and that folks are able to get involved, and this is really interesting reading if you're interested in kind of knowing the way that things are. It's not necessarily the way that things should be, but it's interesting to be able to, at least to me, it was interesting to see basically some of those things validated in an outside way, and also to let more folks who are not actively involved understand the process as it exists now and to be able to work within that in a better way. One of the proposals that came out of that was to create a WordPress advisory board of various folks from the ecosystem, and so that is one that is being acted on and is planned to move forward, and yeah, these are all public posts, so definitely if you want to follow along with how that's working, then make.wordpress.org slash updates is a good place to do that. Another place that organization has been experimented with over time is how WordPress releases are run, and I really do think that there's a lot of growth in WordPress contribution, so let's talk about how things look here. I'm gonna draw a little bit from my recent experience as media focus lead for WordPress 5.3 and compare it with some other releases that I had something to do with leadership in. So let's step back a few years. Back to 2014, this is the first time that I did anything with leadership of a release, and I started out as a deputy and ended with Nason, or Andrew Nason who was the main, the primary lead at the time, basically calling me a co-lead, which was very kind of him. So that's the only reason it's listed as two leads, but there were two people and then 267 contributors. Both folks, both co-leads, based in the United States, contributors of course from around the world. I would say that at any given time, one thing that I think folks, I don't know if talk about it that much or not, but there are often a lot of contributors that are listed for a release, and that's amazing, and every single contribution is super important. One thing that's changed over time is the amount of folks that have time every day to spend a lot of time on it though. So like during WordPress 3.9, I would estimate that probably just, probably around to just under 20 people actually had time that they could give every day or something like that. And so we'll talk a little bit more about how that's changed. In the next release, it was a team of three, myself, Mel Choice and Adam Silverstein as design lead and deputy, respectively, and also still, all based in the States. The numbers went up a bit. I don't think this was a high, but this was pretty close. So we went from a 267 to 298 in two years. And so the numbers, we can see that they're starting to slope up. It's not a serious change, and it's still three people. I can say that from this experience, it was often, it was really nice to have someone else to have that extra person to be able to talk to and be able to help out with things when I didn't have the time. But it was still kind of a struggle to be just a couple of people managing 298 contributors. So I'm very happy to say that the most recent release, WordPress 5.3, so that was just released this year, was a release team of 12. And this was completely transformative for me and my understanding of the way that releases can work. I think this is way more healthy. So in this case, every person had their own usually component to work on, or for instance, or marketing, or running meetings, or that sort of a thing, with very well-defined tasks for each person to work on. And it was also a global team made of folks spanning around the world. And so if I found myself in trouble and it was really late at night in Japan and I had to go to sleep, I could always say, hey, could you take care of this for me? And there was always someone that had just woken up or was already awake that was in Europe, or we also had a contributor from Africa and we had some other folks from, well, basically it was across all the time zones. And so there was always someone that could say, oh yeah, hey, please, go sleep, be healthy, I will help you. And so this is super encouraging for me. Just the room where we were coordinating the release was about 18 people. That's pretty close to the amount of people that were spending their time all the time, that had regular hours to spend on those other two releases three years. And now I'm missing my accounting six years ago. So this is super encouraging for me. I'm feeling very optimistic on how this has changed. So larger release teams started with, as an experiment in WordPress 5.0, and so they continued with 5.1 and 5.3. I really, really hope that this continues to go because it's been, I think it's very, very good for WordPress. Another thing that this, I think was started in WordCamp Europe maybe three or four years ago is five for the future. And if y'all aren't already familiar, this is something that Matt proposed that if you're working with WordPress, that you spend 5% of resources in some way to help WordPress succeed and continue to succeed. And so if you do regularly spend time on WordPress, whether or not you work for, whether or not it's sponsored, even if it's in your spare time, you can go here to this link and you can sign up and you can have it displayed on a page where it shows different people who are contributing. And if you do work for a company that's sponsoring your time, companies can also now go and sign up to the page and display all of their employees that are spending time on WordPress so that everyone can see the commitment. And I think it's pretty cool to recognize companies in that way. Another place I think that's seen a lot of growth is in the editor and alluded to this a little bit earlier. So this is a screenshot from the WordPress 4.5 release video. I actually have no issues with the classic editor. I think it's pretty cool. But I'm also really happy to see that this is a screenshot from 4.9. It doesn't look from not 4.9, from 5.3. And I am glad, of course, that I think this looks quite a bit more modern, but also the APIs allowing developers to expand functionality in WordPress via blocks. I think it's the biggest forward-looking change. It also changed the languages that are used in the background to ones that are more modern and kind of expected in terms of... It makes it a lot easier to expand the editor than it was before. And so I think that that will help a lot with increasing that diversity of application. It's also encouraged a lot of contribution. So I took this screenshot last night. I don't know if we've hit 500 yet, but this is 499 contributors just to the editor, just to Gutenberg so far. I said just a minute ago, the editor represents growth in WordPress. And I think that's true, but perhaps a better way of talking about the Gutenberg project is that it is involved with improving user experience and not just with the editor. And that's due mainly to the phases that are coming up next, to expand to basically to handle more of what the admin panel currently handles. So one example of this, if you go to this URL, you can kind of see a longer video where they talk about it just a little bit more. But the idea is to expand what the editor does right now to allow full page, full site editing directly in line, and I'll zoom in to the top just a little bit. It was noted, Matias, who wrote the page, and there are a lot of technical details on there too, if that's really interesting to you. You can go and see. And he did note that the dropdown at the top over there is probably or may not be the way that it looks at the end. It was just to make it easy to give sort of a prototype. But I love how there are different modes that make it really easy for users that want to get different things done to get what they need to do or to get done what they need to do. So if you want to design, it's really clear how all the spacing works. But if you're just interested in editing content, then you don't need to worry about any of that part of the site. So I don't know. I'm pretty excited about where this is going. And yeah, if you have any comments to make, of course, all of this is ongoing right now. So this is not already in WordPress. It's being worked on in the GitHub repo right now. So if you'd like to contribute or you have comments, questions, concerns, absolutely all of that can still happen and would love to have your help. I think another place that WordPress has seen a lot of growth is in community. And this is even bigger than I think have the time to talk about, but I'm really excited to see how much WordPress is growing. And so this was in Matt's state of the word this year. There were 141 word camps this year in the world. 34 of those are in new cities. So those are the new folks that we were talking about. And 17 kids camps, which is neat to help introduce kids to WordPress. And 5,000 meetup events are more than 5,000, which is really cool. And I know a lot of each of those are in Japan and in your communities. So thank you so much. I think that increasing this diversity and contribution, be it in community or be it in core, or basically throughout the project, really matters. I've enjoyed seeing this in other places in Core 2. There was a focus in WordPress 5.3 in increasing accessibility because some folks noticed late last year that there were some issues with accessibility in Gutenberg. And so there was a community-sponsored effort to go and to do an audit on all of Gutenberg to find problems with accessibility. And they went and created a bunch of tickets, a bunch of tasks to complete in WordPress Core to make those things better. And so there were a lot of fixes that went in and there was a lot of rallying around helping out with that. And I definitely believe that the wider group, the wider set of folks with different backgrounds and from different places, helps the team as a whole. It helps all of us better know and understand this change. And I think that the more folks that are included, the better off the project will be. It's a little bit of a side note, but very much connected. It's not really a side note. I'd like to talk a little bit about APAC inclusion. So I think some teams like Polyglots and Community have done this for a while, and I'm glad to see that there are some more changes in the teams that I'm most connected with are Core and Hosting. And there have been some changes there recently to not only have the information posted on the site, you've been able to see for a while what things people talk about in meetings, but it's really hard to participate from Japan and from the general area, from APAC. So Core has introduced a every other week Treeout session that is at 2 p.m. JST, which is super great. I'm really excited about. And there's going to be one with the hosting team that also gets added for that. And we're in working on having one of those for the media component as well. So I really hope that that helps. If there are other places where you all feel that you're having trouble connecting with, I would love to hear more about that. I'd also personally love to see more opportunities for folks that primarily speak languages other than English to more easily contribute. One way that I guess as one example that I've seen this work before is with the Japanese hosting community team, which I think is really, really cool because the team gets together in Japanese and then connects with the hosting community team in English. I don't know that that needs to be the language that's used forever, but because it's the one that's being used now, that allows folks that otherwise wouldn't be able to contribute to the conversation, to contribute. And I think that's interesting. I would love to see that improve. So please come chat with me if you have any ideas on how we can improve it. So to summarize, I think that change, some of the places I'm seeing change are in usage and application, diversity of application, organization, contribution, user experience, and community. I think things are moving in a generally good direction, but what are some ways that it could improve? When I was initially asked to talk about the future of WordPress, one of the things that I thought about was why are you asking me this question? Because one person can't know or guide everything that happens with WordPress. It depends on a global team around the world working together with it. So I'd like to turn this around a little bit. I'm interested in knowing what you're building with WordPress. What do your customers need from WordPress? Separately, what do you wish you could build? Or what do you currently need from WordPress but you don't have? And I think beyond needs, what I'm most interested in hearing about is what you wish WordPress could be. What would the mission of democratizing publishing, if we didn't have WordPress and you just heard, we need to democratize publishing, what would be the thing that you would create? What would that look like now? What do you think it's going to look like? And I ask that mainly because I do think that the future of WordPress is that change. Because no matter what happens, the world is going to continue to change around WordPress. And how well WordPress accomplishes this mission is going to depend on how all of us respond. So put a little more clearly. This is a little cheesy, but I think that it follows. I think the future of WordPress is in all of you. I think that the growth opportunities that I talked about, they all require having a large group of global folks working together. So including everyone, including designers, users, implementers, developers, engineers, business folks, WordPress will evolve based on all of you who are here. And the great thing about WordPress is that you get to decide what your role is in it. Thanks so much. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Well, we still have some time for Q&A. So Mike would love to invite some of the questions from the floor. So if you have any questions, please raise your hand and let us know. Can I speak in Japanese? Well, Japanese is okay. I'm going to give you a microphone, so please wait a sec. Thank you very much for your presentation. It was quite interesting. It made me think a lot. So from Japan, what kind of contribution do you expect from Japan? I don't think I have any expectations. I think that I would love, I of course would love to see folks feel like they can get more involved and to gradually become more involved. I think already the Japanese WordPress community is doing a lot. And I'm really, I'm very encouraged by the community in Japan. And so I think it's less that I have any expectations on what might happen and more that I would love to make it easier. Because I think right now, especially with core, it's very hard to contribute. And so I would love to know ways that can make it easier. Does that answer your question? Thank you so much. Thank you very much. The Japanese language has the second largest share in the world of press. However, we are not catching up with translating lots of materials. So this may be the kind of inhibitor to increase our contribution from Japan. But anyway, do you have any other questions from the person in the back? It needs to be a question. I have included wishes on here on purpose. Hello, Mike. If you want to share what you are excited to either see or wish you saw from WordPress, I would love to hear that too. Hello, Mike. It was a good presentation by the way. Thank you so much for this. Actually, I'm currently leading team review team in WordPress.org. So we are currently five, six representatives who are leading team review team right now. A few months ago, we were planning to change the leads because all of the previous leads are tired and want some rest and they have been doing contributions since long. But actually, we call for the application. Are we requested in our meeting that who want to be the next lead or who want to join the team as a lead or representatives? But no one is ready. So we need to request our previous lead to continue the same position. So what do you think that people who are interested in leading things are doing WordPress things, they are not ready to contribute so much a long time in for free or there was some restriction that they are not able to join the team? What do you think? So you mean if folks want to be able to contribute more but they currently don't have the time or the resources to do so? Yeah, but our team is really saturated means they have been doing lots of time. So we call for another leads, alternative leads but there was no one ready to take the position. What might be the problem or what might be the cause that no one is ready for taking team review lead position? Well, I think I don't want to... I'm not a member of the team and so I don't want to... So I don't know what the reasons exactly might be. I know at least in the hosting community team maybe I'll talk about that one instead because I'm not sure what's happening internally in that one although I would love to chat about it afterwards. I meant to say that you already said that WordPress have the training team as well. They provide the training and Joseph also write a post about who and to join the team they can comment. You always said that. But lots of people are actively involving in team review team but they are not ready to take the lead position. So what might be the reason for that if you have any idea? Did you ask them? Yeah, we asked them but we called them for the lead position but they are not ready to say that they made some various reasons that I didn't have time or I can't do it for free for a long time, so so. Yeah, I think that's a really common one and that's in teams that I've worked with. I feel very privileged to be able to spend time on WordPress. I can't remember if you mentioned this at the beginning but my time is donated by GoDaddy, is sponsored by GoDaddy so I have, that's the reason that I have time as much time as I do to work on WordPress and I'm very grateful for that. I think that a lot of times folks want to contribute more but they don't have enough, they don't feel like they have enough time to have more monetary resources to spend that time and when it comes to that I would love to see more, and I see this happening gradually, I would love to see more companies sponsor or reach out to those folks to sponsor, to allow them to spend some more time. I think as someone who has previously been able to offer sponsorship to folks it's also really helpful to know if people are in that position and so I think being public about I could do this thing but I can't for this reason especially if it is money is really, really helpful for companies in the WordPress space to know because a lot of times that's something that's important to those companies and important to folks to help out with. I don't know if that helps at all. I think we need to ask the big company like GoDaddy for supporting Team Riveting as well. I would love to see GoDaddy support even more folks working on WordPress, absolutely and it's exciting to see to see companies step up. That will be found too. Thank you. Yes, thank you so much. My name is Silette. I'm a Committer. You're the Committer, right? I am a Committer, yes. I'm a Committer and I'm the leader of the theme review team. This is the world of this WordPress camp in Osaka. I'm from Nepal and I'm from the U.S., right? Originally. Originally. Because of the time we would like to conclude this session. So, again, thank you very much, Mike.