 Yeah. Okay. So usually I talk about my failures. This time it's a success. There's an happy ending, so that's great. I think it's better than here how bad I was at being an entrepreneur, which is usually the talk that I give. So my name is Francesca. I'm from Torino, Italy, and I'm the WordPress community manager at SiteGround, international web hosting company. Giving back to WordPress is basically part of my job description, which is pretty cool. And I travel to conferences, and I do one of the things that I love the most in life, which is sharing knowledge. I believe we shouldn't go to our end with keeping our knowledge for ourselves, but share it as much as possible. I think we all agree because we're here for open source, right? So sometimes I share my experiences or my failures most of the time, and sometimes from the collective knowledge of my talented SiteGround team. My role in the WordPress community includes an active participation in the community team, where I support local organizers from around the world to plan their events and strengthen their WordPress community and groups. So if you need help, ping me, please. I love doing that. If there's a work camp in the making that needs a mentor, I'm available. And that's exactly how I heard about Work and Nordic. One year ago at Work and Postal, where the organizers from all this wonderful country had a round table, and they spoke about organizing this event. So I'm very, very honored. You pick my talk because I know you pick mostly Nordic countries people. So as I say, this is a personal story. It has a happy ending. And we're going to talk about how your community can help make WordPress and how making WordPress can help your community grow. It goes both ways. And we're going to do so by using the Italian community as an example. So there's a before and an after. Before 2015, the situation was not very happy or positive. This was what was going on. There were two meetups. There were a few work camps. Actually, Italy was one of the first countries that had work camps in 2008, but it was before Work and Central was invented. So it was kind of hard to keep the continuity because there wasn't much support. So it really relied on, you know, individual efforts. Also, translations relied on individual efforts. It was like the smallest team ever, and they somehow managed to release WordPress in Italian at every release, but it was honestly a one-man show. And the forums were outside of ITWearPress.org. So in brief, we didn't really identify as a community. And for sure, we didn't identify as a community, a local community, part of an international global one. And then that's 2015. And after that, everything changed. This is the situation now in Italy. It's not true. There are more marks. I don't know how you call those, a signpost. I'm just very lazy doing this, takes a lot of time. So this is when we had about 20 meetups. Now we have 34 and counting. I have at least three in the vetting queue to work with. We had two word camps in 2016. We had the six last year. And we're in March. We already have five in pre-planning for 2019. We have more than 2,000 people translating WordPress. That's the group, the contributor group that we call Polyglots. And the forums are now part of id.wordpress.org. So they're in Italian, and we have an active team dealing with that. Very dedicated to what they do. So how did we get here? Because this is pretty impressive. I mean, Italy is a big country. Thank you. But it's not like a massive country, right? And then we also have the language barrier that we will not talk about today because we don't have time, but that was a big problem for us. So a number of things happened at the same time. First of all, in this lovely graphic, you'll see how the rise of the overall WordPress usage. I really need a graphic to do my website. The overall WordPress usage reason for everyone. And the platform has been growing steadily since 2003, as you know. And this obviously helped everyone. The creation of Work in Europe here with this original Leiden logo in 2013 started a big shift in how communities organized themselves and how they exchanged information with other countries and other communities and learned from each other. And as Marco said this morning, Paris was the point where you all met. Vienna? That's where the idea started. For us, it started in Seville in 2015. So that's the proof that Work in Europe works. There were a few Italians there. They're met a contributor. They discussed, as you can imagine. And they decided to create a community. We didn't really know what the community was, but okay, it sounded good. So we're going to do this. And the community would be global and local at the same time because why not? So after they came back, they opened a Slack workspace. And in Italian, and that's where we started chatting. You can imagine how much we chatted. You know the free Slack account has 10,000 messages free. We reached that like every month because we do chat a lot. And we started making plans and we started dreaming. Let's do a work and let's do a meet-up. Let's do work in Europe. Let's do work in Word, whatever. We want to do it all. So we spent a few months getting to know each other online. And then we decided it was time to meet in person. And honestly, we didn't know much about any of this. So where do we start from? Meetups started at this point, we went from two to eight, from eight to 10, and stuff like that. So we decided to organize an event whose format is not as popular as I think it should be. But hopefully we will see more of those. And it was a crucial point for our community. So we organized a stand-alone contributor day. We came from all over Europe. We had 90 people sign up, which was an amazing number. And we met in Milano to work side by side for the whole day. For most of us, it was the first time contributing to anything. Some of us didn't really know what open source was, but it sounded cool. We went. People came from Sicily, which is like 1500 kilometers from there. So people were really committed to this. We focused on a few teams, as you can see. The ones for which we had people that could support us, get us started and, you know, point us into the right direction. Let's do just a quick show of hands, because maybe I'm talking about something that you don't all know. How many of you didn't come to contributor day yesterday? You weren't there yesterday? Okay, keep your hands up. Because I'm I am. You know I am. How many of you didn't come because you thought it was just about the code? Oh, man, you're good. Oh, you, you, you didn't come because you didn't know it was about the code. Okay, so you're very advanced for you. I'm sorry you didn't come because it was you thought it was about the code. Because the truth is that this is what a contributor day as we define it in the contributor in the community team handbook. So contributor days are for everyone on every experience level, and even see someone who knows very little about WordPress can contribute by answering support questions and more. So please, if you have any doubt about contributor days, don't and come next time join us. There are a lot of fun. Plus the food was amazing. So you missed I'm sorry I had like 27 crabs. So organizing it was very exciting, of course, challenging but very exciting today we have basically our time here is almost all gone. So feel free to reach out at the end. I put all my contacts and I'll tweet about it so you can reach out to me anytime because I'm very passionate about this because I saw the results. And I really wish more local communities would go through this. These are the exact steps we took to organize our free day. So first of all, was find a room with free with Wi-Fi, possibly a free room. So we asked everyone we finally found an amazing venue free. And it made sense. It was in Milano. It made sense. It was free Milano is to reach from all over Italy. So it made sense. Organize food and coffee. Don't do as we did. Italians are obsessed with food. We talked about food more than anything else for that event. So this is not where you follow what we did. You go your way. If you're a small group, you take food from home and it's fantastic. If you are a bigger group, you ask a sponsor and if it's within a reasonable price, I'm sure someone will like to help you. We told everyone about this. Now, I don't know if you know that your locale, your WordPress installation in your country, so SE, WordPress.org, and O, FI, they come with a blog. You can switch that blog. So instead of feeding the global news inside dashboards, you can feed the news from your blog. So this is how we got people because suddenly they saw news in Italian in their dashboard. And finally, thank you Petia. We had, and Jenny, if she's here, we had help from mentors. Now, this is not a must have, but I have to say it helped us a lot. So mentors are people that have already some experience with that particular team. And they were very generous. They came from abroad. They helped us get this started. And obviously it was much easier to have someone tell us this instead of go look into the handbook. So Italy today. Workcamp Torino 2016, which was the first workcamp in three years. In Italy, send the application for the first workcamp there. This picture is at the end of Contributor Day. We had about 100 people on a 250 workcamp. So the culture of contribution in Italy is very high. Support. For years, the support forums were in an external website. And then the moment we decided we are becoming a community, we switched and we started using the forums that come with your locale as well. They started working in the summer, but it's during Contributor Day that they really gained momentum and they got more people to contribute. It's an amazing team. And I don't know how they do it, but basically they have never unanswered stuff. Polyglots, the translators went to be from an individual effort to a very big group of people. We have mentorship, we have procedures, we have everything you want. And I'm very proud to say that for three years, Italy attended actively the Global Translation Day. If you don't know what the Global Translation Day is, please look it up. There's going to be one on the 11th of May and it's very important because this is how we reach more people with our beloved WordPress. So please look it up. And this is full circle. So finally after two days, two years, almost to the day of hard work, we came full circle. I love this picture. This is just a small part of the Italians that were in Paris in 2017. In 2013, there were about three Italians that work in Europe. In Paris, we were 100. In Belgrade, probably more. And Berlin, get ready because the Italians are coming. Like a lot of us. So this is something that I like to say. Taking part in a Contributor Day is what helped us become a community. And as a community, we're very happy to be part of a global project that helps make WordPress for everyone. Thank you. Reach out.