 I'm going to talk to you today about the power of open source and how WordPress can save my life. So, whom why? I'm a happiness engineer with Automatic. I provide support for customers that are building e-commerce sites using WooCommerce. At the university, you're up out. You'll see why that's important later on in my talk. Also, I'm an open source enthusiast. I believe in the power of open source, which is where we're here. So, first of all, what is open source? For me, I believe that the power of open source is an open collaboration. And open collaboration is basically any system of innovation or production that relies on goal-oriented yet loosely organized, coordinated participants who interact to create a product or service of value, which they make available to contributors and non-contributors alike, which is essentially what we're doing here. The key things there are people come together around a common goal. They create a product or service that has some economic value. And it's offered to both the contributors and people who are contributing to it equally. And generally, there's a loosely organized, loosely coordinated team. Open source can impact pretty much any field of human endeavor. And it encompasses both open source software and open source hardware. A lot of the time when we hear open source, people just think about software, which is what WordPress is. But there's open source hardware as well, which stuns a lot of people, but the first time they hear that. I'm going to quickly go into a few of my favorite open source hardware products just to show how that is. And then I'm going to tie that back to WordPress. So the first one is push up 3D printing. Who here knows anything about 3D printing? So essentially 3D printing is a process where you can make whatever you want. So you want a cup. You can either go to shop and buy one, or you can print one from materials in your own home. This 3D printer in particular is really cool because even though this company sells the 3D printer, they have the plans for it available online, blue prints, you can download it, go buy the materials and put it together yourself. And even when you buy from them, I say they have an inception style operation because they 3D print your 3D printer with the 3D printers they already have. So anything from like making toys, making cool tools, making prototypes of little products, you want to go into production of that water bottle there, but you don't know if anybody is really going to like it. You don't want to have to order like a container load of stuff from Taina and then find out that nobody wants to buy it. You can print three of them and say, do you like it? And so it says yes, all right, would you pay 10 pounds for it? You can put 10 pounds in your hand right away and you're like, all right, maybe this has a future. This next one is called Bycroft. It's an open source AI. So think Alexa or Google Home, but you get to contribute to the code. You get to see all of the code. You know exactly what's running there. It's private. It's custom. It's not listening to everything that you're seeing and recording you. It doesn't laugh hilariously in the background. And even though they want to use your voice to train the AI, you have to opt in. So it's got privacy by design built into it, where if you want them to record your voice, you have to go find the setting and say, could you record my voice? Which is awesome. And you can do cool things like, first of all, you can change the call name. If you don't want it to be called Mycroft, you want it to be called Neal, you can have it called Neal and say, hey Neal, what is the timing in Edinburgh? And it'll tell you, if you're in a different country and it needs to convert, it'll tell you that. How many teaspoons are in a tablespoon? It'll go on Wolfram Alpha and it'll figure out that. And it'll tell you, you can display it on the screen and it can give you a voice prompt as well. And you can teach it really cool things. They've also got, I backed it on Kickstarter and I got the developer kit. So what you get instead of getting a product like that, you get all the parts that you have to put together yourself and you get the schematics for 3D printing the casing. So you can then go and 3D print it, which means that you can make more whenever you want. And this is something that, once I get it, it's going to be a project that I work on with my seven-year-old. We're going to put it together as a team. And it's a sneaky way of introducing him to coding because you write all the code in Python, which is an open source language as well. But for him, it's just, oh, I need to make it do this cool thing. So it's not like this huge task of I need to learn Python. It's just I need to make it do this one thing. And finally, there's this Global Village Construction Set, which is just a DIY low-cost modular high-performance platform that allows for easy fabrication of 50-plus industrial machines that you need to build a thriving ecosystem. Or if you want to, say, build your own little village or little city, you can buy all these pieces of equipment, but they're pretty expensive. Or you can make them yourself because all the plans are available. They tell you exactly what parts you need, how many screws, what size, where they go. The schematics is there for you to put them together. And you've got things like a bulldozer, a cement mixer, a bakery oven, a wind turbine that you can build yourself if you were into that kind of thing. So I find that it gives a lot of power to be able to do things that you want. And if you go back to software, this is exactly what WordPress does. One of the goals of WordPress is basically to democratize publishing. You don't have to have the financial cloud of the Washington Times or the Washington Post or the New York Times or any of the republications before you can write something or get your word out there. So we all know that it's an open-source content management system that currently powers 30% of the web and turns 15 tomorrow. It's incredible that it's been 15 years that this has been going on. And for me, just knowing that there are a lot of businesses around today that are all me around because Mike Little and Matt Muller have decided, oh, we'll do this thing and it'll be free. This business is built literally on top of this because there's lots of people from all over the world contributing to help make this possible. And this is essentially the reason that I'm here. So I'm going to tell you about how WordPress is in my life. So a long time ago, I found this thing called blogging. And I had no idea what it was. It was just all the cool kids were doing it. So I thought maybe I'll do it as well. I started off using Blogger. But then I wanted to do cool things with the site that I just really couldn't do. And then I found WordPress. And the rest of it is pretty much history. I found that I needed to make a few changes and just kind of scratch my own itch. It meant that I was learning things that I could teach people who were coming just a few steps behind me. And then that led me to the community as well because I was running into issues that I needed to fix. So turning to the forums, asking questions, going to Stack Overflow and all the other places out there helped me get information. And being able to help others with the problems that they had kind of built my confidence to the point where I could say, you know what, maybe I can start a business. Maybe I can build sites for our customers and charge a bit of money for it. Initially I was like, oh yeah, I'm not really good at this so maybe I'll charge only a little. But after a while it got to the point where this was basically how I kept a roof over my family's head. It was the difference between whether we lived out in the street under a bridge or if we had a roof over our heads, whether we had money to pay for the next meal. And it didn't matter that I was a literate. I said before that I'm a university dropout. I'm from Nigeria. In Nigeria if you're a certificate it's a big thing. If you want to get a job as a bank teller, you collect money from people, you count it and you say that's cool, you need a university degree. Even though you don't require the training that a university degree gives you to do the job, but no one's going to hire you if you don't have a university degree. So I was basically unemployable for pretty much any job. So without WordPress I would be just a liability unable to do anything. When you fill out forms, government forms, they ask you what is the highest level of education you have and it's primary school, secondary school, university master's degree. I would have to say high school. That's about as far as it goes. Even though I have professional certificates and MCSE from back in the day and all that, it doesn't matter on those forms and no one's going to employ me. They had a problem and I could help and I could get paid for it. That was a big deal. At some point I was owing my landlord 11 months rent and in Nigeria we don't pay rent on a monthly basis. You pay rent on an annual basis. So if you want to get a new apartment today or a new house, first of all you pay two years rent upfront and then the expiration of those two years you pay one year upfront every year. So I was owing my landlord for 11 months which meant, let's say we're in 2018. I haven't paid him at all for the whole of 2017 and we're about to get into a new year. How he didn't kick me out, that's a small miracle on its own. But being able to knock out sites for clients in WordPress helped me be able to pay my rent and keep my family house. And today I worked for Automatic and this university dropout from Nigeria gets to travel all over the world and talk to smart people like you about cool things like this. I like this quote a lot but John Kennedy says the rising tide lifts all boats and I feel like you don't take anything away you don't lose anything by helping others to grow without helping others to shine the same way that a candlelight another one doesn't lose anything so I believe that we should all jump into the pool and help out. You don't have to be a developer if you speak more than one language you can translate, if you have patients you can teach someone you just need to know a little bit more than they do and that's it. You don't have to be the authority on this thing there's space for you to contribute. I'm just going to look on people by saying change lives and ultimately to change the world so let us embrace the principles of Ubuntu the belief in a universal bond of sharing that connects all humanity so that we can share freely and help others for everything we have achieved is made possible by those who walked this road before us. Thank you very much.