 So, as a roll-awayer, we have a problem with my laptop having micro-HDMI, and nothing being able to connect to that. So, no slides, but they will be available online, and I have the URL for my slide share at the end. So, my talk today is about how my shortcomings in WordPress technically make me a better contributor non-technically. It goes to show you that with something as awesome as WordPress, you don't need to be a complete genius to be able to do something in our community. You don't need to know how to code. You don't need to know how to design. You don't even need to know how to use a computer, and you can still make a difference in making the WordPress project better. A quick history of myself. I started learning WordPress in 2008. I got involved with the WordPress Orlando Meetup in 2012. Then I became an organizer of the WordPress Orlando Meetup Group and WordCamp Orlando in 2013. I helped advise WordCamp Tampa during one of their first organizer meetings when they were just starting to put things together. Now I have become the lead organizer of WordCamp Orlando. This is all coming from a person who can barely cobble together a rudimentary WordPress site with a theme that is barely customized in maybe three or four plugins. Not to say that I have tried learning, but I have another job that doesn't require the technical knowledge, so it's kind of one of those things where I just haven't found the time to really better my skills. But I've also made time to better my skills as a member of the community. And my talk today is about how you can do that too, no matter what your skill set is. Even if you are technical, there's always something you can do to make everyone happy. So why non-technical contributors matter? We bring a ton of unique talents to the mix, and we're not focused all the time on making sure that our client sites are working or that the campsites up and running technically. We can take care of all the minutiae that goes outside of what's on the computer. At the end of the day, most WordPress projects are used by non-technical people. If you develop sites for a living, you know that your clients might be anywhere in the gamut from other technical people, all the way down to grandmothers looking for really cool gifts for their grandkids. So we bring a unique perspective into the WordPress community is that we are sometimes your user that you're targeting. And in other forms, the technical people are usually busy with that technical stuff to take care of other important non-technical managers, like making sure we have the right AV plugs for rooms and finding a venue for your WordCamp. So the question is, how do you contribute so much to WordPress while barely being able to make a viable WordPress site? There are four main ways that I found me to contribute. Support those who can, channel your talents creatively, ABC, which is always be connected, and be that guy or that girl. To support those who can, there are a lot of ways you can do this. One of the ways is to help test new plugins. A plugin developer is going to be working on the core features of that plugin, all the nitty gritty coding and AV testing and all that stuff, but they need people to AV test on. And they also need people to kind of look at it from an outside perspective and say, oh, you know, you may think intuitively that people will know how to do this thing, but me being a layman user, I'm not quite getting it. And if you're making a plugin for that layman user, you need people like me to tell you what I think about it. And, oh, this just doesn't translate right, so maybe make it a little easier to figure out. You can provide feedback on work in progress designs. If you've got a friend who's a designer, it's like, hey, do you understand the navigation flow on this? Or is this making sense to you? Because if you're a professional designer or a coder or anything, you're looking at this constantly. And after you look at something for so long, it just looks right to you because that's how you've seen it the whole time. But if you get an outside pair of eyes on it and someone who's not used to seeing all the back end and how everything works, it's like, well, you know, maybe it makes sense to you and your mind, but like for the other 60, 70% of the world, not really. So you can really help provide a lot of useful feedback for that kind of stuff. One of the things that I've found really useful for is offering my devices for live testing. I've had several instances where one of my developer friends is like, my client keeps saying that they see it this way on their thing and I don't have that thing. Do you have that thing? I have an iPad. I have an iPhone. I have a Windows computer. And I've got so many other devices that they can do testing on so they can see exactly how their designs work on other people's equipment. That's more useful than you think. I know there's websites out there that mirror different browser specs and different systems and those are all well and good, but there's just something to be said for having that live device in your hand. So if you've got extra equipment lying around, tell your developers, you know, you're available to test and look at stuff anytime. One of the really cool things that we can do is to write constructive reviews on plugins. When you have a plugin that you've been using, if you love it, write a review about it. If you don't love it, write a review about it, but write a constructive one. Tell them why you don't love it or add suggestions of what would make it better. And I encourage all of you, if you want to learn more about plugin reviews, don't miss plugin reviews, Demystified at 2 p.m. That's where you're going to learn this. Also submit bugs. Whenever you see anything wrong with core WordPress working, even if you're not sure if it's wrong, it's just something that you don't understand or whatever, talk to either someone who is on the core team or submit a bug group report and they'll take a look at it. You might discover something that no one else found and it'll get fixed. Take care of each other. That's a big thing in the WordPress community. You've got your camp organizers or people who develop for a living and they're so focused on their job that they don't remember to eat. They don't remember to sleep. They have stuff that needs to be done, but they're too busy doing this other really important technical stuff to handle it. Feed your fellow WordPressers. When you have WordCamps in your town, if you have the means, offer lodging to your fellow WordPress buddies. Collaborate on WordCamp travel plans. Getting a hotel is all well and good, but for the last couple of WordCamps, we've gotten the Airbnb's and put like five or six of us up and it's a lot more fun. It's more community when you're all sharing kind of a house together. Always have time to lend in the year. We have a lot of problems where you're working on a project and you get frustrated and sometimes you just kind of need to vent to someone, especially someone who's not going to try to solve all your problems as you're talking. Developer to developer. If you're venting about the problems that you're having on making this client's website, they might try to interject with all their ideas. No, you're doing it wrong. Sometimes you don't really want answers from someone else on your own vein. You just want someone to listen and be like, man, that sounds like it's really hard and I feel so bad for you right now and I can't offer you any help, but here's a shoulder to cry on and here's a cookie. Sometimes people just need that. So if you want to learn more about taking care of each other, I suggest that you don't miss investing WordPress by investing in yourself at 3 p.m. This guy right here. Yeah. So I'm going to go on to channeling your talents creatively. The WordPress community is built on more than just technical know-how. We need people with all different kinds of talents and loves and creative ideas to come together to make this project even bigger success. Instead of focusing on your WordPress shortcomings, like I could never think of coding my own plugin ever. Identify your strengths. What are you good at? I personally am really good at cooking and really good at organizing events and I'm good at making sure that people are happy and taking care of. So I take those things that I'm good at and I put them to use in the community. Practically any interest or talent that you have can be put to use to improve WordPress as a whole. Do you speak more than one language? If you do, you're a polyglot and we need you. We need you to translate the WordPress core. If you go to make.wordpress.org slash polyglots, there's a whole thing about how you can get involved with the translation projects. We also need people who speak multiple languages to subtitle videos on WordPress.tv. That is a really cool place where you can see all these talks that go on at different WordCamps and WordPress Meetups live on TV. We also need people to subtitle videos in English too. So even if you don't speak multiple languages, if you can do English and if you can listen to people talk and write it down, that is actually a really great way to further your technical learning. You're watching all these talks, maybe on topics you don't understand, but at least as you're translating or writing them in as subtitles, you kind of pick up a few things along the way. I've done a couple of videos myself and you learn some interesting things. Do you ever ever thought you would actually, like, it might not be a talk that you'd go sit in on at a WordCamp, but doing that subtitling project really kind of forces you to listen and forces you to actually get a little better at whatever it is that they're talking about. On the same line of video, if you can edit video, there are tons of videos that could use your help on make.wordpress.org.tv. You can also just go to wordpress.tv. Do you like to travel? Are you good at planning events? Are you good at fundraising? Are you good at networking? Those are all kind of things that the community team are looking for, and people to help them. They need people that can help grow the WordPress community, help establish new meetup groups, and word camps provide support to those camps and projects. So that again is make.wordpress.org slash community. And all the ways to get involved can be found on make.wordpress.org. There's, I think, 11 or 12 different teams. If you like to troubleshoot and investigate things, if you have a really good attention to detail, WordPress core needs testers. Every time we put out a new version of WordPress, they need people to test that version before it goes out to the general public. If you go to codex.wordpress.org slash mailing underscore lists, there'll be a link down there for testers. You can join the WordPress testers mailing list. No developer knowledge is needed to be able to help. Sometimes they just need people, like the general user, like the grandma who wants to make a blog about her knitting projects, and she's going to need to know that WordPress works for her in her small-scale technical knowledge. And so if you don't have that really good technical knowledge, you're actually a great tester for it, because if you can't figure out how to work it, that means it's got to be broken. So yeah, challenge creatively. Anything that you can do. Even if it's something like you're a music enthusiast, if you're on WordPress.tv and you're like, that audio doesn't sound right, see if you can figure out a way to tweak it on there. That's along with the video I did, and things like that. You can make it work. So now on to the ABC. Always be connected. Spread the word about WordPress. If you hear people saying, oh, you know, I've always wanted a blog, but it's just so hard to get into. I don't know anything about computers. WordPress, that was basically how it started. You know, it was an easier, free way to help people get their information out there. Get to know your neighboring lead-up groups and word camps. You don't have to stay in your general area. Branch out a little bit. We go to meet-ups all around Florida. We go to word camps all around the lower east area. And we've done a couple up here and there. If you like to travel, it's a great opportunity to go see what other people are doing. Every word camp is different. Every WordPress meet-up is unique. And you're going to meet a lot of cool people and you're going to see a lot of things outside of your own realm. And you're going to learn things. We creatively steal a lot of ideas from word camp Atlanta, from word camp Miami, from word camp US. We see things and we're like, that really worked out well. I want to provide that same level of awesomeness to our people at Orlando. And so, you know, we all share ideas from each other. We collaborate on, you know, where'd you get those really cool bags? Or where'd you get that really cool, you know, whatever? We share the vendors that provide us for stuff. If you're good at finding things like that, promotional items, venues, we can use that help too. Join other local tech groups. Don't just narrow yourself to WordPress. We have O-Tech, Orlando Tech in our area. I know there's tons of groups that do JavaScript, Unix. You can even go to Drupal and talk to them. Maybe try to, you know, get a few of them over to our side. Collaborate with your local tech scene. We are not in a competition with other tech groups. We can definitely use our powers of good to help each other collaborate and make something bigger. We've had a couple of tech events in Orlando where we just take people from all different groups and make things work. So, especially if you've got a tech group who thinks they want to do this event, but they don't have the manpower or the connections or whatever, throw in your hat to help, you know? Invite speakers outside of the WordPress realm. If you have a WordPress meetup group, you don't want to hear the same people over and over again talking about the same topics. It's nice to get something a little outside. Like, I know a lot of people at our meetup group are business owners, small business owners or they do development for a living. They might really find help with someone who comes in and talks about, like, contract writing or bank bookkeeping, you know, for a small business, things like that, business skills, or even we've had a Toastmasters person come in and help get people more comfortable with speaking at word camps or even just WordPress meetups. Anything that can kind of help the general community and would be an interest, bring them in as a speaker because it's nice to just have something a little different every once in a while. So being that guy or that girl, that's the person that you go to when you need something specific. Like, I will always go to David when I want to just figure out what the heck is wrong with this site and I can't get it to do what I want it to do. People come to me whenever we need, you know, refreshments for this event and we only have a budget of, like, 50 bucks. Make it work, you know, I can do that. Make a name for yourself by providing your help however you can. Be the person that they always come to for a certain kind of problem. We've got people who we know, oh, they know all the venues in Orlando. They can find us somewhere to hold this meetup. We know so-and-so has a big truck and we need all these bags and boxes of, you know, supplies for word camp Orlando move to our venue. They're always going to be there to help offer their vehicle for that. Volunteers at conferences, that's a big thing. You do not need to have any technical skill whatsoever to volunteer in a word camp. We need people to man the cameras. We need people to do room introductions. We need people to help with registration. We need people to help set up chairs and tables. We need people to help give away t-shirts. Generally, just help that anyone can do. So my final thoughts. Give generously of your time but not to the point where it impacts your life negatively. You are losing sleep constantly because you're always going on doing and helping. Remember that you can't help others unless you make sure that you've helped yourself first. Make sure you're eating. Make sure you're getting sleep. Make sure you're not stressed out to the point where you just can't help another person because if you can't function, then no one else can benefit from your generosity. Don't ever contribute with the expectation that you will get something in return. Contribute because you love WordPress. True that we do try to compensate our volunteers as best we can and we appreciate every single person that does anything to contribute to the core WordPress project. But do so because you want to, not because you're expecting something back. And if you're still feeling lost after all of this, ask your local Meetup or WordCamp organizers where they need help. They may think that there's no one in their area that knows how to do X, but who knows, you might be that person that can fill that X. So, anyone have any questions? I know this is more kind of a self-help thing, so that's okay. If you do want the slides, I'm sure WordCamp Atlanta will have them up, but it's a go.gl URL and it's a lowercase a, capital EF, uppercase i, lowercase s, and an uppercase a. And yes, I tested it and yes, that is an actual, like you need the uppercase and lowercase part. Go, Google. So, I thank you all for attending and please go out there and make WordPress better.