 Can I say before you start, Tuesday morning I was sitting having my breakfast and I genuinely thought to myself, you know it's going to be a lovely going to the board camp the past of the weekend. It's the first board camp I've been to in a very long time, but I haven't had to do anything. I'm not organizing, I'm not speaking, I'm not MCing, I'm not doing any of that. At about 60 minutes later the email comes in, so my plans for the week have changed, but it's a pleasure to be here. I'm genuinely amazed at any of you are actually in the room. I wonder if you were expecting some other Simon Dixon possible. If you search for GDPR you find Heather, if you search for Simon Dixon you won't even find me. Well my very first question Simon, to you, because now you're in the hot seat and you're all prepared for this interview, is the people who've obviously seen this advertised have seen you look a slightly different. Cycle helmet? Yeah That's true. This is a rare weekend where I'm not doing something on a bicycle. My life basically revolves around two things, one of which is work press, one of which is bikes, and what I'm not doing, one doing the other. It's glorious weather outside, it would give me greater pressure in the world than to go out there and do it over the coast road. But instead of here talking about work press, can't we? But again it's about breaking down barriers. We have actually been putting out some messages to people about trying to find cyclists, some of the work press community, inspired by your picture and to the extent that Neil, part of the work camp team, even put in how to cycle around the work camp belt fast. So there you are, inspiring at every level. So we are delighted to have you and we're going to look forward to this talk which we're also going to be using as part of the work press 15th anniversary. So thank you very much. Simon I know you love nothing better than talking about cycling and work press, whichever order depends on the occasion. Do you do the same together? Do you actually cycle and talk about work press while you're cycling? That's a genuine question we've had over Twitter. That's very interesting. Do you actually cycle the opposite? So I work automatic and as I'm sure many of you know we're at 100% distributed remote operating company. So there's no central office that you go into and do your day to work. You can work from anywhere. Most people work from home. And I guess I wanted to probably do the same. It's very easy to live your entire life working when you work from home. You get up and you just check your phone, check your email, check your incoming Slack messages, whatever it is. And then the next thing you know it's bedtime. And it just, it can eat your entire day unless you kind of attack it and take ownership. And my release valve is lunchtime. If it's not raining, I shut down and I do a lot on my bike. And I don't think about work. I don't think about work press. And that is the one thing that has kept me sane over the last five, six, seven years that I've done this. I think working from home is great. I think remote working is fantastic. There's a lot of positives. Some negatives I've got to say as well, but a lot of positives. But you can't let it take over your life. And I would urge you that if you're contemplating it, if you're working for yourself, if you're working from home, find some kind of release valve that may not be a bike, recommend a bike, but find something that means you can just walk away from it, get an excuse, get a hobby, get an interest, get a thing to do that isn't work, because otherwise work will just eat your day. I don't have to ask. Any cyclists in the room? Cool. So that's about a third of the room. That's really good. So, but will there be more of them after this talk? That's the question. How did you discover WordPress? I presume it wasn't out on your cycle. So WordPress for me began at arts. I'm going to hate to do it in math stuff. It's probably a dozen years ago. I worked in web development, web design, web management from the mid 90s. I was very lucky to be in the right place at the right time. And I just fell into it as a career. And the first, first few years of that were brilliant, because nobody really knew what the web was about. And I had amazing amounts of kind of autonomy and control in the jobs I was doing because people didn't think it was that important. This, this computer thing was all well and good, but it's not going to take off. And they didn't want to get involved and manage it. And then of course, over time, they realized hang on, there might be something good and positive to this. And to some degree, that's what I always wanted to happen. I wanted people to take us seriously and care about what we were doing in this internet, things going to change the world. And then people did this. And then they started forming committees about it. And then people work and everything. And it just, to me, it felt like a grantor holds late 90s, early 2000s. I was desperate for, for like an injection of energy. The same thing that I found in the mid 90s, this kind of amazing explosion of creativity. And open source was beginning to become a thing. But around for a long time before that, but we were getting traction on certain things and certain platforms and applications and web 2.0 was becoming a thing. How we've got to explain to people what web 2.0 was, not about I'm going to gloss over that. And WordPress became obvious to me as something that the cool kids will do. I mean, not very genuinely, there were exciting people talking positively about this WordPress thing. And I thought, okay, I'd like to think I'm a pretty good judge of the signals on these things. If good people are interested in this, I probably should look into it. And I started playing with it. I found various things that it could do that other software couldn't do. And I began to realize that this was the content management system that I was begging people to build for me. I was seeing a lot of money being spent, you know, the high end IT consultancies. It still happens. But you know, I was beginning to realize that they weren't any smarter than I was or that we were as this kind of movement. And yet here's this free thing that I could just download and use it and it did what I wanted. And that was all I needed to hear really. And I found things like it could just generate RSS feeds really easily and you could extend it and those things like plugins and stuff. And I started to find reasons to use it professionally. It was certain probably that I started my own small agency. And we realized that WordPress could do most of what most people wanted. Now, I would say over the following decade to get to this point, the reason is not to use WordPress and actually disappear. Now, I don't see many things that WordPress can't do when you compare it to the competition. But you know, 2005, six, seven, it could do enough. And I was able to take that into some of those large organizations where I had worked before places like media, like government and say to them, look, I know what you want. And this is it. This thing is here and it works. And the software itself is free. Now, I'm not going to come free. You're going to need my expertise and my experience to kind of put this together for you properly. But within a couple of weeks, maybe a couple of months, you will have a thing that you have been crying out for for years. And as far as that sounds, actually still say it, it was true. It actually was true. And you know, I worked in our day to day with some very, very large enterprises and they are in the same position still. They work with large IT consultancies who charge them six figure sons, seven figure sons to get content manager systems that don't do what they want. I have seen some shocking things behind the scenes in some very, very large corporations and publishing companies. And they're desperate for something simple and flexible and convenient with WordPress. And do you know what? The reason not to use it, we can do this. Definitely. As part of a 15 year anniversary celebrations, we're actually going to be swapping a video of Simon talking with some of the other word camps that take place over this weekend. So we can say hello to other word camps. Simon, you obviously now work for automatic and you lead European business development for the VIP program at wordpress.com, promoting the benefits of WordPress to large scale publishers and enterprises and also supporting the growth of Europe's leading WordPress specialist agencies. Before that, you co-founded Code for the People. Can you tell us a little bit about your inspiration for doing that? Well, it was becoming obvious to me that there was a business here, that WordPress was capable and there was no reason not to take this solution out to clients paying funds. And there's a demand for people who are realizing that this WordPress thing was getting momentum behind it. And I started off as a civil individual. I came over to my first few word camps and I got to know other people in the same boat who were maybe smart and lean in a certain respect. Many of them were smarter developers than I was. I was very much a hack, but I pieced the bits together. And I realized that there was a good collection of people that I could put together into a team that could then begin to grow. And I realized that an agency that was proudly based on WordPress could assert itself in a certain market, in a certain way. And when I told people I was going to start a WordPress-focused agency, many, many good people, people I trusted, tried to talk me out of it. Why would you gamble on just this one piece of software? You know, there's so many other options out there. It's not even that great X, Y, or Z. And I still felt it was the right thing to do. I could see where this thing was going and I liked to think I called it pretty well. So for me a team gathering one, two, three, four people around me, we were able to put together proposals that could tackle really kind of large-scale projects, challenging scary kind of projects. And I saw that as both asserting our team on a national step, but also certainly WordPress as well. Part of the DNA of our agency was that we wanted to take on those big scary projects because those were the ones that would move the needle. They would help build us as an agency with a reputation, but it would also help WordPress as well. So I wasn't scared of going into 10 Downing Street, for example, and getting in on the WordPress. I wasn't scared about talking to large publishing companies about moving 30 to 40 magazines into a WordPress multi-site. I had enough experience behind me of business, but I also knew that I had a great bunch of people behind me who wanted to install the room, who could back that up and were bold enough to want to push those barriers. Because I think that's what's made WordPress the success that it is. It's that so many of us want to push it that little bit harder. Look for the opportunities to do something clever. Don't do it for the sake of doing it necessarily, but be building your ambitions when you're building something. Build it right, try to build it flexibly. Use that plug-in architecture to create something that can be reused, possibly open sourced. Now as an individual, doing it as a cylinder with your own bills to pay, that's hard, and that's a massive commitment. I completely respect that. But I think as you grow a team, you gain efficiency. The first couple of horrors, to be honest, probably diminish your efficiency a little bit. When you add your second person, you don't double your capacity. Maybe add one or the other. But when you start adding three, four, five people into a team, there is slack. There is that scope to bring the ambition to projects and start to do really significant things. And then the final part of that, and a part that people often forget about, is to talk about it. Tell people what you're doing. Put that code out there. So again, because we have a small team, we can cover each other a bit. We would send people off to work homes. We would allow people to do core contributions to the WordPress project for significant portions of their week. It's not necessarily pure altruism that makes people do that. There are some people who do it, are nothing but altruism. God love them. But I don't think there's any shame in you doing it to benefit your own self, your own career, your own livelihood, as well as the project. If you built something that you needed, that you think other people might need too, tell people it's there. People want to know what's there. And actually that's what brings the community. It's not selfish. You're not trying to blow your own trumpet by saying, but this great thing that I wrote, aren't I brilliant? What you're actually doing is pumping back into the project and giving it that sense of momentum that it has always thrived from. We look at other open source projects and this isn't just purely natural in all open source projects. WordPress, I think, is particularly good at this. It's a welcoming community. Yeah, not about its faults, of course, but I think compared to a lot of other communities out there that we might compare ourselves to, we're very, very good at this. If you've got something to bring to the table, bring it to the table, wave it around a bit, tell people it's there. People want to receive that stuff and that is what makes these things better. Did that answer the question? It did. Everybody just looks inspired, so that's got to be a good thing. So obviously Code for the People was acquired by Automatic in 2014, so a tribute to their success. Now, who in the room remembers the Howdy on WordPress admin? Yeah, but do you know the person who got rid of, well, who actually was behind it and more importantly, got rid of it? It's still there. It is still there. Okay, so I can claim partial credit for that. It was a joke. It was a joke. WordPress was just starting to get into translations and I made a passing remark to one of the core developers, oh, you know what would be really funny? We'd love a UK-English translation of WordPress so you could get rid of that damn R&D. And then a button R&D. Again, a button R... I should stop saying these things. A button R&D wrote on email and said congratulations, you've been appointed as the lead translator for UK-English and we use the translation function to take hardy out and then we engage in a huge argument as to what should replace it. Because the one thing WordPress has in its admin is a sense of personality. Now that personality has been Matt's Texan personality in a lot of respects. Unlike the fact that it's got personality but I'm also aware that for a lot of people that Americanism just jarred and I knew a lot of people who, like the idea of WordPress, logged in and said hardy and I immediately put them off. There are languages within Europe where this is particularly strongly felt. So German for example has a formal and informal translation because certain people want it to be very formal in German, certain people want to be very chatty in German and the beauty of the translation framework is that it can be both. So if you want to keep your hardy, if you want to keep your customization with Z or Z in it, you can do that. If you'd rather not spell it properly as has been pointed out to me subsequently inefficiently because color is only five letters but we made it six. You can do that. And actually I really think that that helps build people's engagement with WordPress. That means it is talking their language literally. We've got something like a hundred, I don't even know what the current card is. Well over a hundred different languages that WordPress is now available in including I think seven or eight different flavors of English. Turns out Canadian, Australian, New Zealand, English, Irish, South African are all pretty much the same. It's only the Americans that are different but they get to be defaulted. I think that's a real strength in WordPress, the fact that you can do something like this and actually the fact that you can make a stupid joke and it becomes part of the project. I don't shy away from that. So I think that's to our strength. So when I said to you at World Camp London you are coming to Telferst aren't you? I was really lucky that you took that as a yes and didn't mention the fact that we'd actually want you to be on our panel. But no, that's a yes so that the man who made that difference. Now the next one of course is who where did the WAPU came from and what do you think Simon has to do with that? Okay, I absolutely not playing central credit for this at all but again I think this is one of the huge things about WordPress that gives it a sense of personality. I love the fact that every event has its own WAPU. It has its own kind of self-deprecating kind of stereotype kind of thing going on. We've seen all kinds of things. That came out of World Camp Europe. The first World Camp Europe was a speaker there as a friend of mine called Nako from Japan and she got to talk about the Japanese WordPress community. WordPress is huge in Japan. Absolutely massive. They were the first place to do 1000 plus events. But Japan being Japan it was incredibly insular and it were very very shy about talking about it. So some of the great things that were happening in Japan just never got out and one of the things was the WAPU mascots. Now Japan being Japan mascots for everything. Every corporation, every sports team, every city has got its own mascot and the Japanese WordPress community very naturally came up with this fuzzy yellow thing. And Nako got up on stage and showed this and I just thought that's really cute. I'd be happy to do that. And then World Camp London was coming up and again I've got to stop doing this. It was just some stupid little passing remark. I said to one of my colleagues Scott Evans is with me at Automatic now. Don't be great if we have WAPU for London. And if you've ever seen the one with the parts that was the first WAPU that came outside Japan. And I really love the way that the community is embraced that because what I think we do by doing that is send a signal to Japan to that little insular community over there that says look we're all part of the family here and this idea that you have is equally valuable elsewhere. So now any World Camp you go to any plug-in, any SaaS company everyone's got their own WAPU now. Actually it says a lot about the good things of open source. WAPU is an open source animal. It is explicitly licensed under GPL. You are free to download it, modify it, use it how you like. You can put it on t-shirts, you can create real design, you can share it with the world. The one thing I would ask is please don't turn WAPU into different animals. That really annoys me. Yes I do include unicorns. I can see you looking at me never. WAPU is WAPU. Don't change it. I'm excluding bears. I've seen Cookie Monster. As I say unicorns. Don't overstretch it. But if there's any way to use these gestures, not even necessarily the character itself, but these gestures that show that we are a global community, we're an inclusive community, but we have space for people of all different kinds of creativity. So if your thing is cartoon mascots, raise your hand and do the WAPU for the next event near you. That is as important to the community and that's the sense of collaboration and participation as what we call it. Any WAPU artists in the audience? Going back to your day job, what challenges do you typically see when you're actually working with large enterprises who are taking on WordPress or considering using WordPress? It's changed in nature I think over the last few years. As I said, I think WordPress has become more competent as a platform and it has added functionality that enterprises want to see. So we can cover over a lot of gaps by saying there's a REST API. You don't want to use WordPress, you think the templating system isn't for you or maybe you don't like the back end, but you do want the front end. There's a REST API, you can take the bits of WordPress you like and use it how you want. And at VIP we have a number of very, very large publishing clients who are measuring their page views in the millions, sometimes of tens of millions per week who are happily using WordPress, happily using things like the REST API and consider it to be out of power with the kind of high price competitors, things like Adobe Experience Manager or Sidecore, Winner of open source obviously, Drupal. The challenge I think of WordPress used to be convincing people that it was more than just a simple basic loading platform. I think as the market share number has grown, thanks to things like the REST API. WordPress is a safe bet, no matter where it never used to be. So you can say that a third of the top 10 million websites are running WordPress that gives enterprise procurement people a sense of confidence. WordPress is not going to go away any time soon because huge chunks of the internet right up to tragically enough, Donald Trump's White House rely on WordPress. Now, if you're going to spend a lot of money buying licenses for a CMS, you don't make a certain deal with it. You don't know that that company is going to be there next week, next month, next year. They could go bust. They could change the business model. They could be acquired by somebody else who decides that they're going to do a different thing with the software or the people. WordPress ain't going away because it can't go away. It's too many of us. And even if Matt Mullinway had a bad night and came in and decided he was going to tear WordPress down or turn it into something completely different, well, open source rules say that we can take ownership of that and if he wants to do that, that's fine. High cost, by the way. It can't be taken away from the community. So suddenly, it looks like the safe bet. And convincing enterprises of this is pretty much what I do for my day job. It's getting through that instinctive sense that large corporate solutions are better. And actually, grassroots solutions, I think, are really proving their worth now. If you are bringing new technology in, you probably want the one that people have seen and have used at home, the one that has the large number of commercial plugins, the one that the hosting companies are all optimizing their platform for it. There's so many good business reasons now to choose WordPress. We're not making excuses for it though. We're actually talking in positive terms of what it can do and what it can bring to a table. And some of the people that I talk to are corporations of a scale I would never have imagined. We talk to some of the biggest banks on the planet. We talk to governments. We talk to some of the biggest media companies on the planet. And what I find really interesting with them is that they consider themselves part of the underdog movement, part of the uprising. They consider themselves to be grassroots because where they were dominant before, they're now scared stiff of Google, Amazon, Facebook. It freaks me out when I hear about newspapers wanting to put their business model into the hands of one of their direct rivals. They want to pay the Washington Post to host their newspaper. Why would you do that? Why would you gamble? Why would you give your future to one of the people who has the potential and some might say the track record of taking you down? That's a very, very brave move. WordPress can't do that. So I talk to some people in some very, very large corporations who are threatened and see WordPress as their skate park. This is the way that they can take charge of their own destiny. So when we talk about only human content and being in charge of human platform as individuals, and that's great. I mean, you should do that. I strongly advise you do that. Big corporations are starting to think the same way because they have to. And WordPress provides an answer for that as well. People think of the VIP service that WordPress do. They tend to think of the large American websites. But you're obviously doing quite a lot in other parts of the world, particularly in Europe. How is that different? I mean, the European business has grown a lot lately. The proposition to media isn't as strong here as it is in the States. Because, I mean, for me, it's purely because of the numbers of people. If you're a modestly successful media website in America, you've got a potential audience of 300 million. And more, you consider the number of English speakers outside. Europe is not one single market of 500 million. It's lots of little ones that all have different language issues, cultural issues, political frameworks, et cetera, et cetera. So that model doesn't work quite so well over here. What we're finding success with is corporate users, particularly using WordPress multi-site to publish in multiple languages, to tailor their sites to local markets. We're also doing a lot of behind the scenes. Support is a really interesting one. Europe exports its sport. Americans, as it turns out, are really getting into soccer. And brands like Liverpool, Real Madrid, whatever, they're all resonating far beyond their own boundaries. So where a major Spanish newspaper ain't going to sell too many kinds outside Spain, Real Madrid gets a lot of website traffic outside Spain. And we don't do Real Madrid. I'd better clarify that. But I'm seeing a lot of interest in that sporting space because that's a big business that Europe is exporting to the world. And, yeah, they're ready for WordPress. Isn't everybody? What would your advice be to agencies who want to establish themselves as WordPress specialists? I think number one, they'll be shy about it. I would say go for it. As I say, people advise me against it. I didn't take that advice and I'm very glad I didn't. I think there's always a certain sense of concern about gambling your entire livelihood on one platform or one product. But actually, the ones that do, or certainly the ones that did it relatively early on, were the ones that succeeded. And I think there are now opportunities within the WordPress space. There's a new wave of opportunities about to open up that make it even more relevant to declare yourself a WordPress expert. So if you think about what Gutenberg is going to do to WordPress and the experience of WordPress, it will transform, I suggest, over the next one to two years. We're going to need people who understand that. So I would strongly recommend that if you've got the capacity to look at Gutenberg and get used to what it's going to do to WordPress, you should be doing that now, and you should be preparing for the opportunities that come along. When people say, I've got this project, I want to build a WordPress, and I'd like to use this fancy new block thing, we're not going to find somebody that knows about these blocks. Well, do you know what? Someone in this room could be that person. So make your mark, find out about it, talk about it. Don't worry about being the expert. Just wait in, document your progress, tell your stories, learn your lessons, and then pass it on. I would love to see people standing up and talking about their experience of building blocks in Gutenberg for WordPress. And you know what? By doing that, you then become one of the go-to people. Because of course, we're running short on time. The great thing about WordPress is that if you're good enough, that's all it takes. You don't need permission to be part of this project. If you've got the code, if you're putting good stuff out there and whether it's on commercial work or you're contributing your open source or whatever, you can make your mark. And you can make your mark in various different ways. You can do it through call. You can do it through your employer. You can do it outside that. There's any number of different channels. There certainly isn't one single channel you have to succeed in. But look for those opportunities. Because people want your help. But the ones that have really kind of embedded themselves in WordPress, and I suppose the ones who have influence, they recognize that what brought them in was that this software did what they needed and then they could add a bit more and then a bit more. And it turns out that the bits that they added were used for the someone else who then added a bit more. So as long as you know what you're doing, you know, so that's the first thing is if you're going to specialize in WordPress, be special, obviously. But then be ready to offer that around, to participate, stand up, make yourself known, and embrace what has made WordPress a success. Fundamentally, the one thing that fuels this beast is community. And it's the experiences and the angles that people take and the ideas and the connections. And just so much of it is human rather than technical. So if you're a human, you're halfway there already. And please, please don't be shy. Especially coming from, like Mike's saying, give me your hand for me. I get it. We look to stay to London, you know, that's where real work happens. Those are really important people. The great thing about this is that's not the case. And if you're smart enough sitting here in Belfast or Deeper Spermano or wherever, bring your work to the table. It's a nice big virtual table. There's plenty of space around it. And you can be part of this too. Please do. For those of people who are new to WordPress and things like the REST API, you might think, what is that? Well, the WordPress marketing team have done a glossary of all these terms, which if you look up the make marketing, like WordPress.org, even. I got it right. I'll get in trouble for that. And look up glossary. We'll just publish that. And we're trying to tell stories like, like Simons. So if you have a WordPress story, if you just are passionate about what brought you to WordPress, come and talk to me. Come and share your stories with Simon. Little conversations develop into big projects. Simon and I talked in London about two, two ideas that had come up about how we could celebrate WordPress 15th anniversary, but actually reach out to people in communities that weren't being reached to already and to help those people who thought a bit nervous about coming, sharing. So we've launched two campaigns. One is about WordPressers and their pets. So you will start to see appearing on the web, a very lovely picture coming very shortly, thanks to Amanda Web, who you can wave to people out there. And so if you are a WordPresser and have a pet, then the reason we have cats is because Simon told me that we had to include cats. So it was going to be just dogs. But on the positive, we are using that to break down barriers. We're using it to bring in communities that aren't necessarily able to come and join us today. We're also going to involve some of the charities that work with assistance dogs as part of that. So if you think it, you can actually dream it. And WordPress can make that happen by us all working together. So a very, very big thank you to Simon. We're hoping that Simon will be able to input into our closing remarks just in talking a little bit about the ecosystem in Ireland. And so you'll hear more from Simon then. And as I said, we're sharing this video today with WordPressers all over the world. And we have our very own, our apologies to Matt, but it's our very own state of the word with the very amazing Simon Dixon. So please just express our deep gratitude.