 In 2015, WordPress made a decision on behalf of the web. It was a significant one, although at the time it didn't really look like it. It was the inclusion of responsive images into WordPress core. The reason why it was significant was because in 2015, the jury was still out on responsive images. There was a spec. There were a huge group of people working on that spec. And some of those people said, if we're going to win this battle over what the spec should look like, we should just ship our code to as many people as possible. And then the web will just follow. And some of those people looked to WordPress and said, there's already work being done there, so we're just going to come into the project and help out. Package it up. Put it into WordPress core and ship it to 20-something percent of the web. And then hopefully that will be enough. This is a slide from Joe McGill's talk about this from 2015. Unfortunately, this stat no longer exists. It's a weird thing on the web. All these companies make stats about how the web works, but then they change their algorithms all the time. So you'll be like, whoa, look at this graph. It looks crazy. And then six months later, you look at the same graph and it looks completely different. And then the explanation is in the annotation going like, we changed the mathematical formula to calculate this and we omitted the following data. So we're just going to choose to believe Joe's screenshot because that's how the web works now. Anything that's a screenshot is real and happened. But this is actually real. Until WordPress was at 4.4 shipped, responsive images was not something that was prevalent on the web. When WordPress 4.4 shipped, responsive images was suddenly a thing that was happening on the web in a very specific way to the point where Joe's told me that now when you go and look at tutorials on how to do responsive images, you'll find little snippets of code that actually originate from WordPress. We have not been the best custodians of our decision, though. On Thursday this week, WordPress shipped code that doesn't comply with responsive images anymore to every WordPress user in the world. And this wasn't something that we didn't know. This was flagged in April 2017 and it kind of tells us something about how we make decisions in this community. We all want to do great things. We are in this room, we are in this community, we build WordPress together, specifically because we want to make the web a place everyone can be at. But because of how WordPress came about, because of how open source works, because of everything else, the way we make decisions on individual items is often strange. And when you dive deep into it and invest time in it, you can often get rather confused about what is happening and how it's happening. And it's funny because if you've been following me on Twitter, it's like 90% garbage, but occasionally I'll say something that I think is meaningful and then other people will be like, hey, yeah, I disagree with you and I'm going to have a conversation with you in this forum because that makes sense. So I had this huge thing going where I was saying, hey, we really need to fix this problem and it's this really technical, small, little problem that no one can see, but it's a problem that we need to fix because we are custodians of a decision that we made on behalf of the web. And in the middle of our conversation, this guy called Matt, are you here? He's watching somewhere else. I'm sorry, that's not a joke. I appreciate it. He'll probably hear about this at some point. But, you know, it's public, so it's on the internet. So Matt came in and said, not sure if responsive images should have ever come into core. I think I agree with Matt, but I don't think I agree with the reason. You see, responsive images, when it was included in core, the decision was made because it was a new, cool technology and it was something that looked like we needed. Unfortunately, the spec was really not ready for the future. So what worked in 2015 doesn't work properly anymore, but we shipped it and it became a standard because of it. I want to talk to you about how we can use WordPress to move the web forward. So we keep talking about this number, ever-increasing, incremental, probably wrong because the stat probably updated this morning. Number of, like, 26%, 25%, no, 27%, 32%, 32.5%, that was Thursday. So, I guess it's probably 32.56% or something like that today. This is the footprint that the software we create has on the web. Well, to be frank, it's like, what is it, the top 10 million sites according to Alexa or something like that, but it's a significant footprint on the web. And we keep talking about where are we going to go next? Well, the goal is 50%, apparently. The goal is to, like, really make the web powered by WordPress in some fashion. Last year, Matt Molenweg said, what got us here won't get us to 50%. That's true. But it's true in a bigger sense than just, you know, code and how we do things. It's actually true in the way we manage our community. What got us to this point was deep devotion to open-source software and a community that piles together to solve huge problems in a very interesting way that works really well and a lot of luck. What gets us to the next hurdle will be how we manage ourselves. You see, the web evolves by caving, paving the cow paths. Some of you may have seen this picture before. It's a story I tell a lot because I think it's funny. This is our head office at LinkedIn Learning. They built a new building because we were expanding and the designer of the head office had this grand idea that there's a building and then there's the new office directly in front of it and they built this huge oval of grass in front of the main entrance and then had a path that went around it and it looks really nice. They opened the building the day I was there and I walked through and I'm like, this is stupid so I'm just going to walk right over the grass. It was this high, really tall grass and when you walked over it you kind of pounded it down. So I started walking over it and then other people walked over it and eventually it became a bit of an issue. So they paved it. This is how the web works. Someone proposes a spec or some sort of new technology. A bunch of people use it. Then a bunch more people see that they use it so they use it too and eventually the browser manufacturers say, it's been paved that people have been using. So we're going to pave that cow path. The idea is instead of coming up with a new and better spec they look at the current behavior of the people who are creating things on the web and then they say we're going to formalize this behavior into a standard and we're going to make it so that that's how it works. With 32% of the web we are actually the cow path now. Whatever decision we make for WordPress is the decision we make on behalf of the web. So how do we make these decisions and how do we know that those decisions are the right decisions for the web, not just WordPress? What principles do we stand for and refer to anytime we say this is something not only WordPress but the web should do? Well, we have a principle in our about page it says we believe in democratizing publishing and the freedom that comes with open source. The spelling errors likely mean not the about page, by the way. What does that mean? Democratize publishing. It sounds great, but what does it actually mean? I like to break down words and figure out what they actually mean. So democratize means introduce a democratic system or governance principles or democratic principles or make something accessible to everyone. So that last one seems really reasonable, right? And publishing means make content available online or in paper or whatever, but online. So if we take those two pieces together we get this really awkward sentence democratize publishing means making content available online accessible to everyone. This is what we believe. This is our principle and it has been since day one. This is democratizing publishing on the web. Now if we take a step back and look at the larger web and what the larger web's principles are we find the web foundation founded by Tim Berners-Lee the inventor of the worldwide web. And the web foundation says we envision a world where people are empowered by the web. Everyone regardless of language ability, location, gender, age or income will be able to communicate and collaborate, create valued content and access the information that they need to improve their lives and communities. And you read them and you go that sounds like WordPress and it truly does because if you take that and then you combine it with our values, let's say we combine for everyone emphasizing accessibility performance, security and ease of use and we believe great software should work with minimum setup and you can focus on sharing your story, product or services freely what you realize is WordPress in a really real sense can be the realization of the promise of the web. The promise of the web is that everyone should have equal access to content and content publishing to share their thoughts, ideas and creations with the world and talk to anyone else about those thoughts, ideas and creations and WordPress makes that possible it costs nothing it runs almost everywhere and it just works. What's missing from us is maybe the most crucial part for the web which is participation and representation in the fora that make decisions about the space we work in. Who speaks for WordPress? When politicians make decisions about the internet they introduce privacy laws, they introduce encryption laws they ban encryption or add more encryption, they ban privacy or add more privacy Who speaks for WordPress in those fora? The answer is corporations with financial interest and specific outcomes The answer is corporations with specific interests that are an antithesis to what we want The answer is everyone else speaks on behalf of us and we say nothing Who speaks for the people who use WordPress? No one We power 32.5% and when a decision is made and people want to know what WordPress stands for there's no answer We have made a conscious decision to not take part in any decision that impacts every user of our software and many of those decisions are now coming into our software and saying hey you didn't take part in this decision but you now have to change your software to fit with our demands We are at the point where we need to claim our seat at every table where a decision is made because we have an obligation to actually represent the people affected by WordPress and the people affected by WordPress is not just the 99% who are not here today it is actually every user of the web because when we make decisions on WordPress we are making decisions on behalf of the web but to do that we must first know what we stand for and like I said democratize publishing that's what we stand for but what are the necessary conditions for us to be able to democratize publishing that's the question we need to answer because when we go in and we talk to all the people that make decisions we need to figure out what is it we want to ask them where are the principles that we are going to stand on when we argue with them over how they govern the web how they govern the internet how they govern communication that goes through optical cables under oceans and into the sky and up in space we need to know what those principles are I have a proposal on how to get started so if you think about the web and think about our role on the web what you see is there are three governing principles that are essential for WordPress and its users accessibility is the promise of the web the entire reason the web exists is for anyone to plug into a phone line or a network line and be able to access content that other people have published in the way that they want and in the way that works for them the grand idea of the web was simply to take all the documents that were sitting in books and folders at CERN and make them available to people on the other side of the planet in a way that they could access it that is the extension that we've created we've made that possible to everyone accessibility is the core promise of the web privacy is the capability we must grant our users now WordPress meets one of the great promises of the web which is anyone can publish content and we take great strides to protect the publisher we also have to give the publisher the capability of protecting their users the privacy of the end user of the web is our responsibility and finally open governance for the web for the internet we need to take part in the conversations about how the web is run how the web works and we need to take part in the conversations about how the internet runs how it works and how information flows across all nations on the entire globe and in the universe because there's like a spaceship up there with people on it and they have internet and I guarantee one of them has a WordPress site I'm going to do something I'm not supposed to I don't want to talk to you about accessibility and privacy and open governance I want the people who do this work to talk to you about accessibility and privacy and governance so Rachel can you come up and talk about accessibility for me excuse me good morning so some of you know me as the director of WP campus some of you know me as the woman who says we're all tied a lot on the internet we're all tied and hopefully most of you know me as someone who cares a lot and talks a lot about accessibility and Morton's right this microphone is awkward so I'm going to lean here and have a little moment so I wanted to stand up here and talk to you for just a few minutes about this topic and have a little bit of a heart to heart like we're going to just talk one on one because accessibility has been a little bit of a hot word in our community lately and people are very passionate all around and for good reasons so I think if we chat a little bit about why that is and how we can move forward I think that would be super great so accessibility is something that for a lot of us who build the web can be quite frustrating and I get it it's tough for someone to come along and say I can't use your website and it's your fault that's hard right there's not one person in this room that can stand up on this stage and say that I have built 100% accessible websites that every single person on the web can use and the more that we can come to terms with that and kind of let go of that ego I promise the easier it is because it's not about us right it's not it's about the user it's not about how we feel about it it's about growing and making the web better and making the web more usable and making the web usable for those 20% of people that depend on assistive technologies to even consume information for those like myself who are able bodied and can use a mouse and have vision and can hear it's really easy you do not think about these problems that come along it is super easy for us we have a level of privilege that we can forget about but for those who maybe can't use a mouse and can't see and can't hear it's a very different and very real experience and a very real challenge and so a lot of accessibility discussions can be frustrating especially I'm an engineer and I'm going to be real for a second a lot of accessibility problems are due to invalid HTML like you are building we're building the web wrong and it's not I'm not saying it's anybody's fault we all learned from Googling Stack Overflow and copying and pasting tutorials and that's how we got here you know and so we've all done it and so but that's what it comes down to a lot of times we're using semantic HTML we're using span tags instead of buttons to throw things up JavaScript came along and gave us this huge opportunity to manipulate the DOM in very dynamic ways but if you don't truly understand HTML then you're more likely to basically mess up the DOM you're kind of moving HTML around a lot you're confusing the browser and I get it like it's fun JavaScript is fun and a lot of times myself included you know you're working on something and your website works and you're maybe not necessarily thinking if it's working correctly and so I think for a lot of us in our community moving forward what we need a lot in our community is some kind of enforcement and some kind of scanning and things like this like the more we can implement tools there are a lot of tools available I hope you'll join me tomorrow at the contributor day we're going to work on ways to enforce scanning and core which will be really great and I know that when something comes along some code you wrote gets scanned and returns a violation that's hard to see but I promise it's going to make you better as a developer because you're learning and it's going to make the experience better but I think that we should take it a step further because you know core is only part of the fun you know we're all writing themes and we're all writing plugins that everyone uses and that's a huge percentage of how people interact with WordPress so we do have a personal responsibility to come along and use these same tools to understand HTML user correctly to understand ARIA I'd recommend watching Rian's talk from yesterday which is a great HTML spec so we have a responsibility we have a responsibility there to come along and understand these things to scan our own things I would love to see a world in WordPress going forward where themes and plugins aren't allowed in the repo unless they meet a certain level of accessibility that's what I propose here today that we start to work on because we do have a responsibility we do have this repo that everyone's coming along and downloading all this code you know but we're not coming along behind ourselves and making sure that what we're putting out there not only works but is accessible and that's something that we should take on so I do think these are things that we can do they may seem like a little bit of a challenge here at the front but we can do this if we work together and we can take on this project and responsibility and we can as a whole impact 32.5% of the web and that's really great and amazing so I hope that you'll work with me I hope y'all will come and join tomorrow and thank you for this opportunity Morten we're passing it along oh I'm not the last in this scenario by the way and so I would love to bring up Leo to come and talk about privacy hey everyone not like 15, 16 hours ago I was on the stage talking about privacy so some of you might have seen me talk just a little while ago about the exact same topic privacy is a big deal like I don't know how many people have done work surrounding gdpr, surrounding spam cam, around all the laws and stuff and people usually say man it really sucks having to follow the law it's like yeah but the laws exist because we need to care about people so at a really basic level I think people take issues surrounding privacy and say we want to understand how to make money or we want to understand how to make our businesses sustainable we want to understand what's critical at the end of the day to get us from where we are to where we want to go and I think first about publishing at a core idea so I went to journalism school I had this dream when I was in high school I was going to be like at the New York Times writing in this newspaper maybe at this big magazine I did a lot of that stuff I did journalism and I saw that whole thing happen I remember Craigslist you guys all know Craigslist we all saw the death of the newspaper we were watching it as we speak newspapers won't exist 5-10 years from now or if they do they'll be a hollowed out shelf themselves and it's a weird thing so what replaces that model instead it's things like analytics it's things like advertising these are the core things that make the internet possible they actually make it so that these businesses are sustainable they're also things like paywalls paywalls are really interesting they make it so that people are saying this content is worth paying for at the end of the day when we start to build in these whole things we start to build up then better content and better structures around it we have SEO as a whole business there are a lot of really critical people in this space we're like yeah we have the very best content we also have a little bit of code that runs here that personalizes the ads and suddenly this data here is going to be really good well the challenge is there are a lot of frameworks surrounding all this stuff that say it should be a certain way most of us in this room are not familiar with those frameworks most of us have not decided what those frameworks should be at a really basic level we have just accepted for a very very long time that the way the internet looks is going to be essentially something that we just have to comply with in practice people have broken those rules so I'm sure you guys all know about what happened guys girls and non-gendered people all know what happened last year 2016 there was a major discussion around data that was used as part of Facebook's data collection as part of Cambridge Analytica and all this stuff I'm not going to rant about Facebook if you want to see that go look on YouTube or on WordPress.tv where I talk about that but that data including my data was used to manipulate elections all across the world a data that I did not give up that was probably using psychographic profiling which is part of marketing it's been around for the last 50, 60 years this is not a secret people use data in ways to do whatever they want in practice we need to understand what data means we need to understand how to use this data we need to understand what the scope of that data means and we should be asking questions about basic anonymization I get into some of the more technical nuances chances are 60-70% of the things we already do as a community are getting us in the right directions toward security and privacy I'm happy about that we fundamentally in America do not understand the overlap between free speech and good user privacy if I go to the library no one's going to ask me what books I'm reading if I go read an article online I should not have the same level of introspection people don't necessarily need to know that I really want to read a book about how to sew right maybe I just want to learn how to sew maybe I have a button that fell off my shirt it doesn't suddenly mean that I'm now interested in sewing classes this is a key critical concept that's been built into our infrastructure privacy is not necessarily something that's been coupled into the guarantee of information and accessibility and I've been really excited because as I see the space slowly shift we now have laws that say you have to do this the laws aren't the fun part it's the privacy by design as the discussion and there's nothing more exciting than to finally have an opportunity to be able to discuss this as a community and I really hope that all of you have if you have any thoughts around this we have lots of docs that need to get written we have lots of code that needs to get written we have unit tests that need to get fixed we have components that half work that shift anyway because that's how these things work we need your help to be able to move the nudge nudge nudge this little ball forward and as these laws change we need your help to continuously help us understand where we've come from and where we want to go oh next we have someone else too oh Chris Taizel hey Chris alright so I get the fun topic of governance and like Leo said laws aren't fun nobody likes to follow them right and we get a lot of laws given to us GDPR we all had a lot of fun updating our websites now we all have to accept cookies and we get to have full screen pop ups and everything come at us every time we visit a website and I was inspired at a state of the word a couple years back listening to Morton talk about where is our representation to the people who are making the decisions and the laws about governance and there wasn't a real clear answer to that it was get involved and I'll admit I'm coming from a community that isn't WordPress my history is in Drupal yes I'm one of those people and I'm here and I'm converting and I'm learning the ways and I know that for a while I won't be able to use this I'm a newcomer tag but I do for now I'm coming over I was sitting there watching that and I was thinking about it and Heather Burns who's not here with us today but I Heather on the live stream I contacted her at WordCamp Europe this year and I said hey I work a lot in Drupal I would love to work with you to figure out how we can together make privacy better for both of our projects then I got sucked into this whirlwind of let's expand that and let's make that something bigger than just privacy and so we're working on it we're getting other groups other CMSs involved and what we're trying to do is build an open web governance that will allow us as a group not WordPress but as a group dictate to those that are governing us here's what we stand for and allow us to set those regulations ourselves but right now we're reactionary we are we react to a new law that comes out CCPA comes out from California and now we're all reacting to that there's going to be privacy laws there's going to be a GDPR clone for the US and we're going to have to react to that but can we get actionary can we become the ones that get out there and say this is what we're already doing we're creating the CalPath and my theory is that the lawmakers will follow they're writing the rules that they are because they're not informed by the people who are writing the code and so we need to be the ones informing them and giving them the insight to allow them to make laws that we can comply with and that we don't want to subvert at every corner that we take and so that's my challenge and so I'm coming here from outside the community from inside the community now for years too I'm saying join us, join me and let's figure out a way that we can provide a larger governance to the web and then voice that to the bodies that are regulating us so that we don't have to be reactionary anymore so with that I'll bring more back up two days ago WordPress made a very big decision on behalf of the web about how publishing should be done in the future a bold decision that will be followed by every single person who publishes anything on the web if you go outside the WordPress bubble right now on to the internet you can see people go what is this thing? and then you get the response wait a second we already did this eight years ago and our CMS that is internal to our company and has a proprietary license of $10,000 a month and you have a bunch of other people who say this is the thing that I always wanted I just didn't know it and then you have a bunch of people who are saying what does this future look like I can't answer that I stood up on the stage here last year and I talked about my crank crazy vision of VR WordPress and some people have started working on it hopefully tonight or in a couple hours our good friend Matt will tell us his vision of what the future looks like not just for WordPress but for the web that includes thinking broader if you ask me this is the last time we should be making decisions for WordPress from now on every decision we make should be a decision we make not just for us but for the web as a whole what we discovered with responsive images was Gutenberg drew a line and said this is the actual end of what responsive images can do we found the edge it is so close to the edge that it's hard to solve the spec simply doesn't meet the requirements of the modern web it was built for a time that doesn't exist anymore when we go into a media project next year and say we're going to rethink media we have to rethink media for the web that means stepping outside the WordPress community and going to the W3C and going to the RICG and going to the CSS working group and to all the people who actually build the web and say hey we are 32% of the web we want to sit at the table not because we want to dictate how things are going to be but because we want to work together to build a solution that works for everyone so we can democratize publishing and we can ship that solution to the web so we don't have to wait 5 years for it to take effect we can make a decision bake it into core, ship it and with the turn of a switch we change the web into what we want because we are 32% of the web but to get there we first need to understand where we want to go that is our biggest challenge the most difficult thing in life is to know yourself it is also the most important challenge you have to undertake what got us here won't get us there welcome to the first meeting of the WordPress governance project the floor is open if anybody has any questions please come up to the microphones on either side of the room right here or if you have accessibility issues I can bring the mic to you this is made for a taller person hey Morten so this seems like a great initiative I have heard a few people murmuring about it in the last few days how do we ensure that the current decision makers hear us and understand us and implement what we want in this project so I believe the answer was just do it should I go next so my name is Linda Sherman and I created a blog post on boomertechtalk.com called website design for seniors and I am I really worked hard to collect websites that are accessible it was really really hard there's you go to Jamal Tashan who's one of the people who talks about accessibility it's very hard to find examples so if anybody here has a website they want to brag about would you please tell me so that I can put it on my website as an example I'm collecting factoids and all kinds of things so I'm going to hold something MiracleOfTheSea.com to be like that but please Twitter is at Linda Sherman or get me at boomertechtalk.com thank you Hi Morton, I'm David LaPaul I have a question about governance so you mentioned earlier that WordPress hadn't been making any decisions in the past we've chosen to stay out of the decision making process because no one speaks for WordPress so if there is a governance project what is your thought if somebody decides oh you're making a governance decision that I don't agree with and I would just say you don't speak for me because I use a software I'm not part of this decision making process I guess what it means basically if someone is making a decision on behalf of WordPress doesn't that mean they're making a decision on behalf of 32.5% of the web that's the challenge this is one of those things where if you think about it lack of participation is a choice right it's the whole thing about if you don't vote in an election you're actively not voting in an election the biggest challenge that we face now is that we need to figure out how to do this the good news is there are other people who have already started tackling this challenge so this project has a governance process that they took them years to walk through and they actually got somewhere with it the Drupal project is currently working on a governance project to try to figure out how to manage the Drupal community the AMP project just announced their governance setup so there are models in place what we need to do is figure out what do those models look like for us we need to define what is governance for WordPress we need to define what does that mean what are the powers what are the rights and privileges that are granted to people who are decision makers how do we choose those people what do they do who do they represent and in what circumstances and how do they push that representation forward because the reality is when we don't do anything a politician can go and say hey hello like if Drupal shows up and goes to we want to we disagree with your decision the politician comes back and says you percent what two percent of the web the thirty two percent aren't here so we're not going to listen to you because the majority isn't speaking so we're just going to assume they're okay with whatever we do so we need to figure that out that's why we need to have these conversations I'm not an audience plant but I like that you had slides ready to go for my answer folks this will be our last question go ahead you might have just answered this but I noticed in the definition of democratizing there was the idea of bringing democratic principles to something so I wondered if you're suggesting that we actually elect leadership to represent the whole I think that is probably the toughest part of this process personally and I say this as a former politician I don't think that that would work I think we need to look at a different kind of governance model we might actually have to come up with a new type of governance model but we cannot do that in a vacuum because every decision we make is the decision we make on behalf of the web so when we think about governance we need to look at what everyone else is doing we need to talk to everyone else and say hey how do we do this thing and how do we do it in such a way that it lasts so that we get to whatever it is we want to get to we need to define where we want to go but before we can do that we need to define how we define that this is the important work and it has to happen now that's not a really good answer but it's all I have so since that was the last question if you are interested in this Google Form to capture your email so that you can get notified about when we organize our first meeting I invite you all to come the Google Form meets GDPR compliance standards and things we promise not to send advertisements we will only use it to send you an alert about when the first meeting is and thank you all for coming and listening and forward WordPress