 Thank you very much My title is director of happiness. I get asked a lot what that means and the truth is it changes consistently It started out just basically meaning that I was responsible for the happiness of our customers and Kind of as a play on word at word camps and said we have the happiness bar You know, but being that person who's the expert who is there to help with word pressure related issues And then because of the size of our company and how quickly things change and kind of a small start-up then that turned into helping to manage Employee happiness as well and different things. So we joke that I'm the HR department I'm not really the HR department, but we joke that I'm the HR department and But yeah, basically any any aspect of Happiness in our company I'm kind of the go-to person for that. I Have an interesting perspective I think on contributing to WordPress as a non-developer because I really am fairly new to WordPress in 2014 I went to my first word camp in Chicago and I had not started working with the WP ninjas yet But I was talking with them about the prospect of doing so it's not worried to learn a little bit more about this crazy WordPress thing And I remember being so overwhelmed That word camp and just so much information getting thrown at me and it was you know Just it was crazy and I'm thinking man You know like I enjoy public speaking, but I could never speak at a word camp like these these guys They know their stuff like they're on the ball like this is you know, it was very overwhelming And I I feel like I learned nothing At that word camp because so much information was starting me But I realized later on as I started learning WordPress like how much I actually Picked up there And interestingly enough less than a year later after being at that word camp and being like so flustered and thinking man I'll never be able to contribute to this awesome community. I was honored to speak here last year On my customer support experience So not on a WordPress related topic But on the topic about how to keep your customers happy and I shared kind of an interesting anecdote then that I won't repeat about this Just a just a funny like customer support experience that I had and it pales in comparison to one that I would like to share with you I had what I'm going to call the the best support ticket ever This year and I apologize because I didn't realize the resolutions be like this So I actually took screenshots of the conversation so you could see verbatim what was said by me and the customer And I don't think you're gonna be able to read them So I will kind of read them for you We got a support ticket and the only text in it was dead won't start And I got excited because I love a challenge guys like That that to me that's a challenge so one of our other support team members actually got this first and laughed about it I was like send that guy to me, you know, I'll work on this one. This will be fun So dead won't start and so then I said, oh man, I can't do either I said can you help me understand what it is that I can do to help you Charles and and Sorry a little bit of trouble and Charles said Was plugged in where it worked before hit on off dead the other plug. I knew was working same Looked for reset. No button found So we're a wordpress plug-in and I'm really confused at this point Well, I'm trying to give him like the benefit of it out here. So I'm like, okay was plugged in wouldn't start Okay, so he's using the plug-in Wouldn't start can't activate it. I don't know. This is this we don't figure out what's going on, you know So I said Charles. This is the support Refund email account for Ninja Forms is form building software for wordpress is there a specific issue I can help you with and Charles uses our customer service feedback tool to give me a poor rating and says tell the customer what's going on like Tell me what's going on Charles is because I don't understand this is very interesting experience. Oh, oh, no So then he says, where's my support in this issue as it shows I would love to assist you I'm very sorry. I'm not clear what the problem is that you're having you describe in detail Where in your Ninja Forms installation on your wordpress site is not working properly He says it does not turn on what more can I say Mr. Happiness? All right, I'm still enjoying the challenge at this point. This is still fun for me So then I'm like, all right, I tell my support guys Look if you get a customer like this that there's obviously like some communication breakdown Kind of give them this copy paste. It's not really copy paste But break it down tell them exactly what you need from them So I go into this big thing I say can you provide a screenshot of your issue a copy of your system status page where we get Some information about your wordpress install a link to your website with temporary admin credentials a link to the effected form In a detailed description of the issue you're having if you can walk me through what you are doing What is happening what you're expecting to happen? That's very important for support. What are you doing? What is happening? And what are you expecting to happen? I've learned is key customer service. I might be able to assist you, but I'm afraid I don't understand the issue You're having so I'm not able to assist any any further. I just don't know what your problem is yet And then then then the magic happens Dr. Happiness there is only one part that has electricity going the blender Which has a switch on it when you push the button on nothing nada. Have I not reached ninja customer service? As it turns out there's a company called Ninja Blender that makes blunders And and if you Google the phrase ninja support you find us first And so he was absolutely insistent that we were the Blender company And it was it was just very funny. So I said Charles, you know, we don't make blunders for a software company I think you may have reached the wrong company for your needs. I'm not a hundred percent certain But I think this is the company in support form that you might be looking for and I actually sent him a link to the Ninja Blender support form We didn't hear back from him for a day Yeah a day the next day Here's what's special about this one. This was not a reply to his email This is a brand new support ticket that he made via the support form on our website again Not the link that I sent him This has to be a joke have someone who understands English contact me. Oh man So this time I was like alright I'm going way above and beyond and I actually I typed out like a full-page document like Without trying to be condescending and I said, you know, this is our website. It looks like this This is the Blender's website. Here's their phone number. We don't offer phones, you know It's but and he didn't email us back after that But yeah, it was just so funny that I sent him the link to that support form and he still used our support form to create a new Ticket, it was just funny. So but that's just one of the the really funny support tickets. So you got this last year We really laugh about the Blender incident It was just really funny like watching that process unfold and when he finally said the Blender everyone in the office was like Oh, I totally get it now But yeah, it was great. So what what I'd actually like to talk to you today is about code this contribution being able to contribute to The WordPress community without knowing any code. I don't know much code at all I've learned a little bit in the last two years as I've worked with WordPress, but I'm definitely not a developer but by Being able to speak at WordCamps on things that aren't even necessarily strictly WordPress related I've still been able to give back to the community And so it's a topic that I that I'm kind of passionate about and I think it's really exciting And I think people don't realize the areas that we have to contribute to WordPress Without without knowing a lot of code By the way, this is a real URL make dot wordpress.org slash a great dash again make WordPress or great again Brian Crogs guard someone gave him admin on dot org and he added that the other day I just thought it was really funny Obviously parodying the Trump the Trump slogan and it actually directs to the code contributors page But the purpose is to make WordPress great again. Now. How do we do that? How do we contribute as non developers or even as developers? How do we contribute to WordPress? Matt Mullenwig in his state of the word speech in 2014 coined the phrase five of the future Is anybody in here familiar with that or if you heard the five for the future phrase before okay So they were you that hadn't haven't fired for the future the concept is basically you look you make your living on WordPress if WordPress dies what happens to your business? It's gone if WordPress's market share starts disappearing your market share starts disappearing And so Matt's point to the WordPress community was look instead of just being interested in increasing your slice of the WordPress pie Make the pie of WordPress bigger Contribute your time and resources five percent of your time of resources is what he asked Companies who make their living on WordPress to contribute back into core and so how do we do that when he offered some ways in his state of the word speech This is how I imagine most WordPress contributors or how I used to at least I I I can't even type without looking at the keyboard now and and I'm definitely a tech person And so I yeah, but I there's so many people so much smarter than me And that's how I kind of met and everybody who contributes to to WordPress to look like By the way, I use a gratuitous amount of animated gifts that way. I figure if my talk is terrible at least you may be mildly entertained But Matt Matt suggested several ways he started with Development you know obviously contributing to core doing some theme plug-in review You know reviewing the code of new themes or plugins and doing security audits on themes or plugins Now before anybody who comes in here says wait a minute. I thought this was for non developers. I'm out He also continued With adding documentation contributing in the support forums Working on the training team testing translation, and he ended with whatever it might be that helps move the WordPress mission forward so my goal for this talk is to give you kind of a a Idea of where WordPress needs help right now where you can contribute and no matter what your skill set is I fully believe that there is somewhere you can contribute to the WordPress community if you want to and so I want to show You where some of those opportunities are The first thing you need to do is get connected with the community Anybody watches how it's made like I love that show and I could literally I might get a straighter right now and just watch that gift for like 10 minutes, but it's I Those kinds of show so like all that I put in will tell you a little bit about my personality But make dot WordPress dot org is kind of your homepage For WordPress contribution if you're interested in contributing to WordPress at all That is the site that you need to bookmark and on the front page of that site You're actually gonna find a much more detailed description of all of the teams that I'm going to discuss here And you can go and join those teams as well I put slash chat at the end of that because there's actually if you Is anyone well, there's there's a chat tool called slack which you may or may not be familiar with and It's a really awesome tool. You can have it just up in your browser You can download a native client for it and WordPress actually has a massive slack community where you can collaborate in real time With people who are constantly contributing to WordPress and if you go to make that word press or slash chat you can set up If you have a word press or account set up, which is very easy to set up Then you can get an invite to that slack channel and that is your gateway into interacting with these teams on a much deeper level So I definitely recommend that you bookmark make dot word press or and that if you want to get involved that you join the chat And you can ask those teams in real time. Hey, what's the stuff you guys need? How can I plug in once your next meeting and start start connecting with the community in that way? The first way that I want to discuss that you can contribute to core is documentation How many of you have used the codex before and your experience with WordPress? The codex is an awesome tool. It's a little heady sometimes and they're working on that But how many of you seen like a code example or something in the codex or just something you're working with? You know, man, this is I mean, I just really wish that this had a clear explanation Make a clear explanation when you figure out how it works come back to it and go to that team and say Hey, I think if you worded it like this, maybe more people would understand what's going on No, so the documentation team is responsible for the codex. They're also responsible for the handbooks There's a lot of terminology that that I'm gonna throw out that are all kind of related but Definitely different. The handbooks are best practices for the other contribution teams So for example, there's a support contribution team the forums team There's a translation team, which they call the polyglots the core Contributors and all of those teams best practices are laid out and documented by the documentation Team the documentation team also handles inline code Documentation so if you want to document something in WordPress if you do get a little bit more familiar with code And they also maintain the site developer wordpress.org Then there's the support team which I love because I'm passionate about support And this is my interpretation of some users who have reached out to us in the past. I love a Christmas story It is my favorite Christmas movie all time. It was filmed about 30 minutes away from where I grew up so Just like fun little tidbits The support forums you'll find at WordPress.org support most of you have probably encountered it at one point or another What you may not know is it's easier than you think to contribute to those support forums And I'll tell you about that in a minute The purpose of support form is basically just to assist with basic to advance WordPress questions It also includes plug-in support and reviews for plugins So if you become a member of the forums support team then reviews actually count as the support forums and that kind of falls Under your radar, and there's also an IRC for live support chat now. I mentioned the slack earlier right now WordPress is discouraging the use of slack for troubleshooting They want to keep basic troubleshooting support to the forums and an IRC and leave the slack strictly for people that are Contributing to court so but the IR the old IRC It's a chat software the old IRC is does still exist and is maintained for WordPress And that's where they ask if you want chat support that you go there, and I also added this might be the best way to Get free stuff And I say that because you're sorry the WP ninjas We have had some users in our forums who have really just gone above and beyond That when someone comes to our plug-in page and asks a question we don't maintain our forums We have a sticky that says hey if you need help come directly to us We have a sticky that says hey come directly to us for for help and support We don't monitor these forms regularly. It's easier to handle everything all at one time If you want to know more about that you can watch my my talk from last year at WordCamp We actually talk about why we don't do forums and why we handle everything in one place But users still post there and they just don't read the sticky which it happens And we have some users who are awesome about constantly going in there and saying hey You know if you need to get a hold of them here's their actual support form But I think your problem is this and they're just advocates for us and we reached out to them and said you know We're gonna give you a free license to all of our products because you're awesome We really appreciate the way that you're giving back to our community like if there's a product that you Want maybe like a free license for something I want to say every company does it but We would love to do that for people who who help contribute to our our open source efforts in the community So especially with plugins that can be a good way to to just start doing that Some of the example questions that you'll come across in support Which some of you may be able to answer just so you know that they're easy I actually open up the support forums and I just take some questions when I made this slide How do I align my featured image if you know enough CSS? How to align a featured image or if you just know the button in the WordPress page editor that that changes the Image alignment like you can answer this question right how I remove the title from my posts I forgot my past and I get into my site that one's a little bit more advanced But there's also documentation on this so even if you just want to spend some time in the support forums as a like volunteer Googler Like there are lots of articles that you can pull up that say hey I lost my password how do I get in that you can link there's even the codex article on it that you can send that person Hey, I think this is what you're looking for How do I change the background color just pretty basic things? How do I create a post and a category someone who doesn't quite understand how the taxonomy system works? There's lots of great documentation that you could offer to them You don't have to know the answers But knowing how to find the answers makes you invaluable in the support forum because it's the first place that a lot of People are going to go when they're looking for help And the training team which is a team that I tried to get involved in and I sadly let them down Had a lot of issues that happened and I ended up dropping the ball on my personal assignment But the training team is doing something that I think is really awesome and they are essentially creating a Curriculum for work press like if you're going to go to school and learn how to use wordpress They're developing the curriculum that your professor would use to teach you all of the ins and outs of wordpress so it's it's a very Low-level look at how wordpress runs how wordpress functions They're trying to document every feature in a user-friendly way the codex is pretty heavy-headed Sometimes you look the codex and things are a little I don't understand there's lots of code here. I don't know what's going on. These are step-by-step Screenshots here's exactly what you click here's exactly what you're going to see happen next and it walks you through some some really Detailed processes and it's it's really awesome some some examples of tutorials that they're currently working on is categories versus tags How do you use widgets? the wordpress one-click install writing better documentation for that how to use the customizer and Basic wordpress troubleshooting stuff like that if you've done any of that if you know how to use the wordpress admin You can contribute to the training team. They probably need someone to write a doc that you know how to do It's a really awesome way to get plugged in and get involved Then there's beta testing and this is my this is the best gift I could come up with for beta testing I think it's great If you fiddle with it enough you will break something And Man beta testing is so important for example the WP ninjas. We just rolled out a new update But it's hard we're on our limited subset of systems to know You know hey, we've tested it everything works great But the crazy thing about wordpress is that there are like an infinite number of different wordpress configurations There's an infinite number of the different sets of plugins You can have installed different themes host configurations PHP versions all those things to come together and we're raising to do some weird stuff and WordPress needs beta testers on all of those different platforms as much a variety as they can get Just to tinker just to test see if you can break something sometimes. It's fun Maybe maybe I'm just crazy, but I think it's fun to try to break software sometimes and make it do things That's not supposed to do It doesn't always take a lot of skill if you just get a little error message or whatever then hey You know just document that send it back to the team Some ways to get involved in beta testing is you can follow the development at make.wordpress.org slash core where they have a development blog Whatever they push out a new update they tell you hey here are the things that we change here The things we would like you to test if you get a chance install it somewhere spin up a site somewhere and Just try to break it install it see happens tinker with their new feature and give them feedback Say hey, this is this works pretty cool. I like this. I don't quite like the way that this works I got this error message, you know, whatever just want to let you know If you install the WordPress beta test or plug-in don't install this on a production site I Would heavily advise against it as would they you probably won't have any issues, but don't risk it But if you have just a throwaway site or if you're using desktop server or something like that or map then sure Yeah, spin up the beta test and tinker with it and then you can report issues in a special support forum called alpha beta And that's where they have all of their discussions for anything that you come across No, AB testing is is a little bit different. AB testing is essentially You give the user of your site to You get so let's say you have a landing page Okay, and you're not sure how you want that landing page to you're not sure how that's gonna best convert your users For example, so you have two different ways that you want to display the landing page You don't know which one is best Right, you just have two different versions of the same page essentially And so AB testing allows you to randomly display the different page different users And then you can go and track based on how the user interacted with that page, which one they like better So that's what AB testing is alpha beta testing is more your Testing the software that they're getting ready to push out in production But they want everybody to try to break it before they say that it's good You can also beta test plugins that are being considered to put into core It took me way too long to realize that this was in my wordpress admin But there's a special section on the plugins installer called beta testing and all of the plugins that you'll find here Some of them do some pretty cool things are plugins that are being looked at being integrated into core at some point in the future And you have the opportunity now to install these onto your site Test them out see how you think see if you think that they're a valuable contribution to core If you think core could live without it, and then you can go to that support form support Slash alpha beta and give your feedback there on the plugins Then there's the translation team the polyglots you will always see them referred to as pop polyglots in wordpress They very rarely Call it the translation team and this is my fun the rest of the development gift If you're not interested all the time, that's probably not funny to you, but I think it's hilarious It surprised me how easy it was to Contribute to wordpress translation if you know another language even a little bit well You can probably help contribute to the translation and wordpress for that language. I actually went through and I I'm not comfortable enough in the like I guess syntax of different regions of Spanish speaking areas, but I know a little bit of Spanish And so I just pretended to submit a translation for Spanish just so I can show you how easy it is And so what you'll do is you'll go to the translation team which you can find from make that wordpress.org They have a little special thing that you just click to go to the site from there and Then it gives you a list of all the projects that they currently need to translations where you pick your language And it says hey we have this 96% translated for 4% of the strings aren't translated into Spanish or whatever yet So you click it and then here's an example. This one says error save saving media file That's the English string. They just need to know what the Spanish equivalent of that is So you would just type that in that box and hit suggest new translation and you're done You've contributed to a wordpress translation. It's it's that simple someone's gonna review that say yes That makes sense or know you obviously never pass Spanish one and But it's it's a way to get started And then there's the design in UX team I am not a designer by any stretch of the imagination if you can't already tell about my slides They're just like a default Google template or something like that, but I don't make pretty things But I know a lot of people do And if you are one of those people if you have an eye for design then the design UX team is definitely a team That you'll want to look into they allow you to give input on the future of wordpress' design Hey, I think these two shades of gray in the admin are a little too similar, you know We should you know, we should change those up There was actually that really subtle I think it was you know 4.3 that really subtle like Change of the admin gray that like I don't understand what anybody would made up It's somebody smarter than me decided that it was an important thing to do But if you want if you want input into those kinds of decisions, then this is the team for you to get plugged into Another thing they do which I thought was really interesting when I looked at their team page is they have a list of like 20-30 other software products where they have mapped out the flow of the user's interaction with that product from beginning to end So if you're using, you know, Google Docs or something they'll they'll say okay Well the user goes to this site then they click this button then they click this file type Then they do this then they do that and what they do is they look into all of these other services And they say hey, I really like the way that they handle this I don't only like the way that they handle this and then they use that feedback and those those thought processes to Contribute into the user experience for WordPress, which I think is really interesting So they investigate and compare contrast the design patterns of other software And they also have lots of wireframes and mock-ups for different things one of the projects that they're working on now is is actually Revisiting the revisions editor and we're press There are some WordPress is really interesting because there are some parts of WordPress You're like wow, this is awesome and modern and great And then there's other parts you're like why has this not been touched in the last ten years, you know And the revisions editor is one of those areas I don't know if any of you have tinkered with it But every time you change a post it actually saves You know a timeline of what your posts look like through the whole thing But the revision center is kind of clunky It doesn't really fit into the nice modern look of the rest of the WordPress UI So they're rethinking that now So that's an area that if you wanted to use some feedback on that then the design UX team would be a good place for you to get plugged in And the flow team I like the flow team Because I am so at the WP ninjas they call me. I hope affectionately the zack hole Because if there is something to complain about I will probably find it and make a big fuss about it And that has been really good for our company in some ways I mean we're not so good for morale, but it's been good for the product, you know in some ways I'll find those little things. I like to fight for the user experience So I'll find those little things like now this doesn't make sense from a user perspective We shouldn't do it like this and then I just stick with that And I will fight and I will argue with our development team until we come to some kind of compromise that usually I don't win You know right out, but there's usually some kind of a compromise that happens and the product in the end is made better for it And that's kind of the purpose of the flow team They they use some interesting terminology as well dog food and kibbling and tilting at windmills And I'll talk about what that means in a second No one else calls them this but after reading about them, I'm going to call them this I'm going to affectionately refer to the flow team as the squeaky wheel of WordPress All of those little idiosyncrasies in WordPress. Yeah, that's really weird the way this works That's the flow team's job to find those and pester the core development team until something gets fixed So it's my kind of team. They're all zackles. It's awesome They follow a process called dog fooding which is a term that basically means you may have heard You got to eat your own dog food if you're passionate about this product you use this product You create this product you need to use it and so that's what they do They use WordPress they use WordPress intimately the way that the design and UX team documents other products to compare to WordPress These guys do just WordPress and they find things that they think WordPress can do better and they submit those things One of the things I wanted to get screenshots of it But I actually lost my errant connection and I wasn't able to do it But there was this bug for like several versions of WordPress that nobody touched where only on The iphone 6s plus on wordpress.org not on just general WordPress when you went to the login page the text boxes were a skew and They argued about getting that fixed for you know several versions of WordPress We'll find so if I still have my column this squeaky wheel They find those little things that that makes a difference in the long run I think people need to need to be able to Use WordPress and that not look you know like some weird goofy thing and so their job is to do that so dog Fooding is using the product kibbling is actually Taking the process of dog fooding using the product and documenting every step of the way and Taking notes on what you think could be better and what wasn't a great experience And then they have what they call their windmills Which are those things that are those really big undertakings They're like I don't know if we could ever get the WordPress core team to change this but we really think it needs to change from a user perspective and they call those their windmills and they call tilts whenever they kind of push the team to To update that thing or to change that thing they call it tilting windmills this from the book donkey hote It's a really nonsense phrase that basically just means fighting a invisible or impossible enemy So they have the most fun terminology. I really enjoyed learning about the flow team But yeah affectionately I refer to them as the squeaky wheel of WordPress. I was not derogatory in any way I think it's awesome They define flow as the path of screens interaction has taken to accomplish a task and experience vector flow to them as a feeling It's when you're using WordPress and you're unself-conscious and you're in the zone. That's that's the flow That's a good flow anything that breaks that that's that's where they're gonna have a problem And that's where they're gonna argue for change Flow is what happens the difficulties are removed and you're free to pursue an activity without forming intentions You just do it. It just makes sense. How many of you saw the video it went viral a couple weeks ago about poorly designed doors I hope anybody saw that and I really thought more people would have seen that I love that I thought it was so cool and the idea I think it was like BuzzFeed or something that originally put it out But the idea was there's these doors of the BuzzFeed offices that have handles on both sides They're a glass door handles on both sides, but they only open in one direction And so this guy actually stood there with a video camera and watched the people who use this office every day And who know that the door only opens in one direction and like half of the people like pulled the wrong way or ran into the Door like different things because when you have a handle you assume that that means pull, right? And so they actually found this guy who wrote a book and I can't remember the name of the book It would have been really awesome if I get to share that with you since I'm sharing this story But they interviewed him and his book is about the design of everyday products and why sometimes they suck and he actually had a Whole chapter on doors And he said, you know, you'll see a door like that that has the double handles And it'll say like push on one side. He said if you have to tell the user to push It's a poorly designed door You can tell the user subconsciously to push if you just put a metal plate there and they know that oh It only goes in one direction right so that's kind of what the flow team looks like is they they look at things like that and Then they complain and say hey There's a way to make the user realize this subconsciously without you know having to put a big push label, you know on the door So really cool team as you can tell I spent a lot of time They're my favorite when I learned about them. I just thought they were they were the coolest team ever And they they dog food wordpress.org and wordpress the product and oh, I apparently just stopped my slide right there But some some other plugins and stuff like that that though that they work on Then there's the community team and they're awesome, too. They are the reason that you are here right now the community team is responsible for basically Putting on Word camps putting on your local meet-ups a great way to contribute to wordpress is if you don't already have a local meet-up Start one. It's super easy. It's really easy We started one in Chattanooga. We talked to the library there in Chattanooga and we said hey we want to start kind of this This tech meet-up. It's about this open source Software and they're like yeah, please free you know you can use our facilities for free come in We would love to have something like that to put on our calendar every month to promote technology to people in the library I can almost promise you all of your libraries would be the same You've got a venue for your meet-up, right if you already have one join it They they need you they need the expertise that you don't realize that you have that they need yet And I'll get to an example of that in a little bit, but this is actually me teaching CSS our local meet-up just a really high-level view of this is how CSS works Here's some kind of neat tricks you can do with it if you've never worked with it before Really really elementary. It's what I could learn on coach academy in like 10 minutes, right? Like it's really simple stuff There's a lot of people on a meet-up who are completely new to the web in general and they don't know how to do any of those things And so even a tiny tiny bit of knowledge can be way more valuable Especially in your local meet-ups then you think that it could be The community team oversees official events like word camp Atlanta They handle contributor outreach. They do mentorship programs and they also have some diversity initiatives to attract More diverse people to the word press community and lastly Well, actually, I don't know if this is last time that might have been a lie, but we're close to the end Is the the TV team the the maintainers of wordpress.tv? I found that the lead of the wordpress.tv team apparently lives in Atlanta somebody told me that yesterday and their job is basically to Take a video of all of the word camp speakers, which are later are going to be put up on WordPress TV and they approve publish and assist with word camp videos They handle post-production they handle captioning and subtitling for accessibility and translations of other languages so someone is going to be looking at this word camp talk and Maybe translating it into other languages Captioning it for the hearing impaired stuff like that and their team is going to handle that after the event is over So they're pretty awesome team So now that I've told you all the ways that wordpress suggests that you Help out or that you can you can contribute we're going to strike that and reverse it And I want you guys to think about what you can do I'm going to give you some examples Because last year I talked on customer service that doesn't seem like a wordpress topic, but really it is There's a lot of people in wordpress who have customers who have never had any training in business Who have never had any training in customer service? They don't know how to handle certain Situations and if you have any kind of experience like that they want to know how to handle those things They they want that feedback. They want that knowledge There are some people in the wordpress community who actually make a fantastic amount of money just telling people how to run a wordpress business So that is something that you could do to contribute and make money Or it's something that you can do like at a word camp that you can just give a business talk and say hey I'm a freelancer and these are some of the struggles that I had as a freelancer and here's how I overcame them and that is Incredibly valuable to people especially at events like this When I was in Phoenix a couple weeks ago at a wordpress event someone gave a a talk on Interviewing for your first hire as a wordpress business and what are some things that you can look out? You should look out for the old, you know, what are your strengths and weaknesses question doesn't fly anymore It's actually a terrible terrible interview question It's not not a good way to get to know about people and so he talked about some different strategies there It wasn't strictly wordpress related But it deals with the wordpress community and so that kind of knowledge is the way that you can give back if you have any kind of SEO skills if you know how SEO works people want to know that if you are just good at planning or organizing I guarantee you that the the word camp team would love to have you as a part of The experience and be able to help shape what this event looks like And the most important thing and I'm a big advocate of this and part of it is It's working in customer service for so long. I've learned that it's okay to not know the answers But when you know how to find the answers you can teach yourself and others how to find those answers That alone is a really valuable contribution Like when we're talking about in the support forums You won't know the answer to a lot of those support questions But you do know where to find the answers they're in the codex or there might be training documentation right before already or something like that And if you spend a minute or two to find those resources for someone else who doesn't know how to find them And you not only provide those resources, but tell that person where you found them You've set that person up and from that point on they know where to go to get home And you've made a bigger contribution to the community than you know Best support answer to family I told them Do you know the secret? Side for tech support people that call tech support People know about they don't know what's the secret side I said Google it's true. It's true. But there's also a skill To using google which is a lot of times people don't know how to google what they're looking for When someone's like I want the image on the left of my website if they google Image on the left of my website. They might find what they're looking for But if they know some better terminology and they say I want the featured image on my WordPress site to be the left of my post or something like that Then that is going to find like much more precise results because like my family they'll google something But they'll give you like the most generic term like like Doesn't start won't work, you know Like the blender guy. I'm like My my dad called me the other day from Ohio. Hey, my printer's not working. You know what's wrong? No I don't I'm 600 miles away. I don't know what you've done to that printer He starts telling me about like this word document. He's working. I'm like, that's gonna like help me troubleshoot. I'm like, I don't know I love my dad Team viewer is is my friend, but I don't want my dad to know that I have access to that just yet. So So again, this is me zack scags. You can reach me at zack at wp ninjas.com I have a blog that I am terrible at maintaining at zack dot support If you want to read some of my musings on support in the past I'm trying to be more active about updating it, but I had a I had a long stretch where I didn't And you can find me on twitter at at wp nzack. So thank you guys very much for allowing me to speak appreciate I will do that. Yeah Yes, I am going to do that right now actually that's actually a really good idea Love