 Hi, I'm Ulrich. I'm talking today about the realities of contributing to open source. So, starting off with open source and then how you go about contributing and then what the realities of contributing to open source are. It's a bit good, bad, and okay. So, as you might know most of you, the open source software is something that's freely available, maybe redistributed and modified. So, that gives you the power to make changes as you wish. So, with this open source software you mainly have four freedoms. So, the first is that you can use the software without any restrictions. You don't need to pay for it, depending on if it's premium or you get paid for access but you're not paying to be able to use it. Another one is to be able to redistribute it. If you wanted to, you can download a copy of WordPress, put it in a flash drive and pass it on to your friend. You can't do the same with your DVD movies. You're not legally allowed to copy, rip a DVD and then pass it on to your friends. Another one is you can modify it. So, you can modify WordPress, have a great new feature in it and say that was your friends too, or any other plug-in or theme. And the last one, yeah, you know, distribute these modifications. There's multiple times where people have a plug-in not being further developed and someone else is taking it, forked it and continued the development of it. So, what makes open source so special? You know, like we mentioned before, it's open. Everyone can use it. The next thing is the community. There's a community around it. I mean, if you look around this room here, where all people enjoy using WordPress open source software and we all can work together, have great discussions and learn from something from each other. Another thing is with open source software it can be continued. You see that with WordPress. Before WordPress existed, it was a different software and then that was not being continued. And Mike Little and Matt Wollinwick decided that there needed to be a solution and that's how they created WordPress. So, there's no central government or organisation who is managing the software. And innovation, you know, different people have different ideas. They can try things out. I mean, we see with the project of Gutenberg, that's being developed on GitHub. We can innovate and it's not affecting the core product. And then we can see, you know, that when it's ready it's been integrated into WordPress. And lastly, security. You know, the code is public. Anyone can look at the code and if they find an issue there, they can report it and that we can be fixed very easily. We recently had a client come to us and said their developer was working in Adobe said WordPress is not secure and we had to disagree with them and explain to them that so many people review WordPress yearly and there's so many big companies that use it and do regular code reviews, security reviews, attempt to hack it and that their Adobe system, which is not public, does not have the same amount of security testing done on it. WordPress software, open source software is free, but how is it funded? I mean, you've got these different tools here that run on open source software and each of them have got a different model. You know, Firefox works on donations and sometimes money from Google for having their search engine in the browser. You've got React that is sponsored by Facebook, you know, as they're using it as their own tool. You've got WordPress that is being used by multiple different companies who invest their employees' time into building and improving WordPress. And then you've got something like Ghost, which is a non-profit that sells their services as a SaaS programme to sponsor the work done on Ghost that people can use on their own servers. So we're just going to do a bit of audience participation. So raise your hands. So who have you contributed to open source before? So we've got about half of the room, okay. And so how many of you want to contribute to open source? Not everyone. You might have been the wrong talk. So who wants to learn where to start? Okay, that's good. I've got one there. Oops. That was the last minute of the issue. I'll come to that at the end. So the different teams that you can contribute to. I mean, today has been part of the community team. We've got the word camp. We've got speakers. We've got meetups. And these are all volunteer work. And there's everyone working together. This is one way of contributing back. Another one is through support and documentation. Documenting WordPress features, how to use them, helping users when they've got issues with WordPress. Another one is translations. Accessibility, doing testing, giving feedback. Then we have design and testing. If you're a designer, this is a way that you can contribute, help the developers who may not be so great at design to come up with better UI and user experience. Then we've got the theme review for all the themes on WordPress.org. They're reviewed for any security issues. WordPress TV, like these videos today, will be uploaded to WordPress TV, and these need to be processed and edited before they can be uploaded. They've also got teams that do training and marketing so that people understand what WordPress really does, and that is useful for wide range of clients from agencies to smaller businesses to understand why WordPress can be useful for them. Then some smaller teams are mobile and hosting, who also built the WordPress.com app, and also see that how can we improve hosting for WordPress sites. The two bigger ones, which you might know, is WordPress core itself. The code that goes into WordPress, any bug fixes, any improvements. Gutenberg belongs to the core project where you can contribute. Then you've got the WPCLi, which is the command line, which has joined the WordPress project last year. We've got Meta that runs and improves WordPress.org itself. Heather mentioned before that there's a privacy team. This is my proposal of the logo. It's a great long decision. You'll have to choose the colour yourself with gear. I found this cartoon on the internet, and I thought it was quite cool. How is it? You've had someone, perhaps me, telling you that you need to contribute to open source. One in the ordinary thinks this would be really great. You come up with an idea. You have a bug fix, but then the feedback you get is, oh, a maintainer already fixed this. Or you come up with a new feature and then you get the response, that's great, but you need to read our style guide first. On another case, you want to improve the documentation, get the feedback, oh, maybe someone else is better at doing this. Or we're going to make this change. Or there might be a simple typo correction, but you made the correction in the wrong place. At the end, you feel frustrated. You want to contribute, but your contribution is not accepted. I've experienced this before. There will be hurdles. If you start knowing that there will be hurdles, you can plan for it. There is a case that we should try to reduce these hurdles as much as possible, but there's always going to be someone who is a bit negative who comes across wrong, has had a bad day and has affected your experience of contributing. By being aware of this situation beforehand, you can take in your stride and realise, oh, maybe there's someone else I can talk to. Maybe there's another way around the solution. You don't need to climb the mountain. Maybe you can go around the mountain. Contributing is for everyone. This is the first contribution that I attended. I'm somewhere at the back. This was in World Camp Europe in Leiden nearly five years ago now. It shows that anyone can really contribute. It's not restricted to a certain person. But you will have frustrations. I've experienced that in the last six years that I've been contributing. You come up with a cool idea. You want to get it implemented, but then there's always something not working. There's always someone who says, oh, maybe we can do that a bit later. It's just working out how to deal with it. Maybe even taking a break. It's not working now. I'll come back after a week or two weeks and then see where it's going. Can I talk to someone else? Is there another way around it? The big problem that I see with contributing is also communication. Most of us here have English as a mother language. It's your first language. You can understand other people easily. A large number of other contributors in the WordPress project don't have English as their first language. That can make it difficult to understand or to express themselves in the way that they would in their first language. Not just that, but we're writing together in text. You don't see the emotion of the person's face. I've written with a few people and then I thought they were angry or irritated. But when I've talked to them later on in person, it realised that was not the case. So it's being aware of that, using perhaps emojis to better express yourself to make sure that the other person realises you're not irritated and sometimes thinking about the tone of what you're writing if you're writing in text on Slack or any other place. Another thing is motivation. You need to work out what's your motivation for contributing. If you don't realise what your motivation is, it can be difficult. You shouldn't contribute just because told you to. I remember I started contributing to the support forums because I was learning something there. Another time, for me it's been a lot just from learning. I've been helping with the theme review code automation. The things that I've learned there have been very helpful for my daily work. So are you doing it to make a career for yourself? Are you doing it to make yourself known? Are you doing it just to have a good time to meet new people? I think it's important to think about this before you start. Contributing does bring you a profit, but it does not do it in a monetary way. You're not going to get paid to contribute unless you work for companies that allow you to contribute to WordPress. But there are so many other ways of profiting from this. I have in the past received jobs offers after having contributed, after having a certain visibility in the community. You may also profit for your company. You build a feature, you share it out, and then everyone else can profit from that. And also yourself, your company, can profit from these new features that are being worked on in this new Gutenberg project. You think how many hours are going into building this new feature, and you get it for free in your company, and so this is a way to contribute back and help everyone else. So the things that we looked on today, the first is the freedoms of open source. Anyone can contribute. It's not reduced to developers or engineers or designers, even if you've got a certain skill-like event management to organise a word camp that can be useful. Then working out how to deal with frustration and taking that into account. You want to communicate positively. You want to have a positive tone. You want to have a positive influence on the community. And then work out what your motivation is. Why do you want to contribute to an open source community? And then at the end, you might not see the profit straight away, but when you reflect back on your timing contribution, you can see that there is some type of profit. So I would like to appeal to you to support each other to contribute to open source. Thank you.