 Είναι εσάς. Γιάννη! Κλείστο! Ξέρω κάτι. Κλείστο! Ωραία! Κλείστο! Είχαμε ακούει το άνθρωπο που είχαμε να κάνει ένα πράγμα με έναν μικρό. Μετά από 9 ώρα, αλλά δεν ήταν στο σχέδιο. Λοιπόν, πιστεύω αυτό. Είχαμε ακούει το αρχόμα. Κλείστο! Κλείστο, κλείστο! Λοιπόν, πιστεύω το αρχόμα. Να μπορεί να πω στο αρχόμα. Λόγο χρειαζόμαστε. Δεν ξέρω τι ήταν το αρχόμα. Λοιπόν, σκέφτερα. Ευχαριστώ, κυρίως. Μπορείτε να με άγνω, ήδη να είτε πραγματικά. Ευχαριστώ! Βέβαια, κύριο! Πώς είπαστε σκέφτερα, στο σωστάριο δύο. Ευχαριστώ! Είτε ένα λίγο χαρά, αφέρα, ένα λίγο δύο εγώ ώρα. Ναι, ναι, ναι. Οπότε θα ξεκινήσω μερικές συγγραμμές, και τώρα θα παίξω τη στιγμή στον συγγραμματικό μυαλό. Αν δεν ακούσες αυτές τις συγγραμμμές ή όχι όχι όχι, θα δοκιμήσω. Υπάρχει ένα Λάστιν Φαναντ και Σουαγ-Ταίμβολ και Εμφο-ΔΕΣΚ στην κορυπή της Εξπω. Αν πιστεύεις τίποτα, βάζεις τίποτα, ή δεν έχεις τη Σουαγ-Αγ, πέρα εκεί, που μπορείς να αποχειάζεις τα σ φάση, λαγιού και εγγραμμές. Εκεί, έχουμε ένα κομμυνύδιο, πρέπει να πεις πιο πιο εσύ, πράγματα εκεί για άλλες, και να μιλάτε μερικές συγγραμμές. Είναι και το στράχο Λάστιν. Εκεί είχαμε η Λάστιν Λόγα, στο τρία είχαμε τα Ταίτσι, εγώ τώρα, πέρα, όταν όλες της Αυγ-Στυβιούς είναι έτοιμα, πρέπει να πάγουμε ένα άλλο πόδιο. Φανώσταν ένα σήμερα. So there'll be another one today if you guys missed the one yesterday. Um, and then also don't forget that today we have Matt's Q&A, it's going to be on track one, so you can submit questions online as well if the lines with the microphones are too long. And there's the after party tonight, so it's also WordPress's 20th birthday, so it's going to be a lot of fun. Uh, so it's at the Lohan, I think I said that right, Lohan nightclub, yep, okay. Um, so just bring your badge so you can get in and you'll get some food and drink tokens, and yeah, and then we'll have a little fun party tonight. Uh, so now what you guys are all here for, I'm going to make a very short introduction because she's going to introduce herself. So let's give a round of applause and welcome to the stage Anna. Hey everyone, thank you all for being here. I know it's too early in the morning, so thank you more for being here. So I want to start with a question. How many times have you seen, no, actually have you at least seen once in your life, in your career, a big traffic drop in Google Analytics and you get panicked with? If yes, I want you to raise your hand. Perfect. Okay, I see you, I feel you, and I promise you by the end of this talk I will make my best so you have all the tools that are needed to deal with any traffic drop coming in. So allow me to introduce myself. I am Anna, I'm a co-consultant. I have seven years of experience in SEO and I'm founder of Search Magic, an SEO beauty agency based in London. So let's give a context first. Google has a dedicated team working on their algorithm to improve the quality, overall experience and relevance of their search results. So every three to four months they release a big algorithm update and once in the year they release the core algorithm update and it changes a lot the SEO landscape. Now a brief of history. These are some of the most important Google updates happened over the past decade and more. We had Panda update, which was about identifying low quality websites. Then we had Penguin update, which was about identifying black hat signs of the link building. Then we had Medic update, which was emphasizing on the authority, expertise and trustworthiness of pages that were affecting the wellbeing and happiness of a person. And then the most recent one, we had helpful content, which was about identifying the pages have actually helpful content for the users. And a small note here is that actually we don't know what an update is when it's released. There is a lot discussion and research from SEOs all over the world to identify what's going on. And a fun fact here is that we give the names. So that's where you see all these weird names about Panda, Penguins and all these animals. So a good point is why should I care about an algorithm update? And I know you're right. There are three ways to get affected by an algorithm update. You might not affect it at all. You might affect it in a good way or you might negatively affect it. And that's the point that you care about because you're actually losing rankings. So what this means? It means that simply if you lose rankings, you get lower positions in search results for specific keywords. And when this happens, you get lower visibility, less people see you. And actually you get less traffic in your website and that of course means you get less sales. That's why you should care about. So if organic search is among your three to four top traffic sources of your website, it's definitely going to be an issue. So SEOs are really good guys. We're a bit weirdos, a little bit. We love devs. They make our life much more easier. But at the same time, we are really brave. You can't scare us very easily until we see in our feed this. Later today, we're releasing a broad algorithm update. Oh my God. It actually feels like this. It's like the clown from Eat in our living room saying, hi, I'm here for you. Oh my God. And I have to admit that even though I have worked in many traffic losses, every time I see this announcement, I'm like, okay, okay, here we go again. We're going to deal with this. So what we should do if we hit by an algorithm update, what can be done? And I'm afraid you're not going to like the answer. You can do nothing. And there's nothing you can do about it. If it's about to get hit, you will hit anyway. So at this point, you'll probably be like, okay, we wake up too early in the morning. Why are you even here? Why do you even do this talk? But I'm like, wait guys, I need a moment to make my point. Give me just some minutes. So what a Google update, an algorithmic update, actually means? It means that Google has rethinked the search intent of a specific page and you're simply not relevant anymore. Meaning that based on the user's data and user's behavior, they tend to search different kinds of information or what they use to search. So yeah, simply as that, you're not relevant anymore. And if I want you to keep one thing from this presentation, is that Google is not like the big punishing guys trying to find website owners that don't comply with their guidelines. They're more like the guys that they want to serve the best search experience. This is what they're working on. This is what their mission. And Google updates are simply part of the job. And to better understand this, I have a couple of examples. My favorite one is this one. It's about a huge publishing website based in UK. They lost over 70% of their traffic overnight. It was huge at this point. And this makes, actually, creates a lot of questions. But if we look closer to their page, this is actually one of their top ranking pages. They used to be top ranking pages. But if we look closer to it, we will see that in the same page, they're talking about politics, gossip, and fashion. So my question is, what is the point of this page? What is serving? What is the main target? Why should even exist more than that? Why should even rank? And if we look even more closer, we will see that the Core Web Vitals scores, it's 11 out of 100, which means that probably a page takes 1,000 years to load. Which, okay, leads again to the question why this page should be in the top search results. And at this point, I want to tell that most of the pages, most of the category pages were like that. So it makes totally sense why they lost their traffic. Another example, Cockapoo Food. And by the way, Cockapoo is a dog breed. On April 2022, it was a keyword leading to a full informational search results. It was about research, it was about lists. But some months later, April 2022, it was leading to full transactional results. People, they just want to buy the Cockapoo Food. So that's why it makes sense to, you know, not be relevant. And okay, now we have a really good overview of what's going on and some more generic information about algorithm updates. But at this point, we need to see the next step, which is what I'm about to do with my manager or the stakeholders that once they found out this drop, they're about to get mad. And this is not you. If your website is not related to any business goals, you have a big competition, you don't have a big competition or in your industry doesn't go a lot of things. This is definitely not a point of interest. If this is you, I'm jealous of you. I want your job, but for everyone else, we have a lot to talk about here. So first of all, we need to be transparent. Meaning we have to address the issue very early on and make sure they know they are aware what's going on. Because if they found themselves, well, it's not going to be a good next step. And also make sure you have some solid next steps and actions to tell them. So that will make them feel secure that you know what you're doing and you have it all under control. Next step, you need to manage expectations because the traffic laws might happen overnight, but it's not going to get solved overnight. It probably is about to get months to recover from this. So you need to make sure they are aware of it. And the last part is to educate them what happened, why it happened and that it's not your fault or the entire team's fault. It can happen, it can happen to anyone. But actually it happens to a lot of websites. So, okay, how can we avoid get hit by an algorithm date? And to be honest, you can't avoid it at all. It's part of live, let's say. There is no specific checklist to go through and say, okay, I'm done with Google updates, but there is some kind of actions you can take to eliminate the chances. So first of all, you need to be proactive, of course. So that means you have a really good SEO strategy in place that it's going to help you a lot. You can read Google's guideline updates to make sure you comply with them. This is also going to help you. And this is especially helpful if you have like a new client. You can review their backlink profile. What we're doing here is to actually search if they have any signs of black hat strategies or they have a poor backlink profile. Also we can check if there is like any manual actions in the Google search console because all of these could be triggers for a traffic loss. And my favorite one is to create content across the buyer's journey in order to cover all search intent. So for the Coca-Cola food example, what you can do is create content, not just the product page, create content for all stages of the funnel to make sure you are covered in case you lose some rankings. So for the Coca-Cola food example, instead of just having the product page, you could also have reviews page, video content, guides, recipes and any other kind of content formats. It's going to help. So we are done with the first part and we are going to the juicy part, which is how to deal with this traffic drop and what you can do to go over with it. And at this point I have another question. How you are about to deal with Google with a traffic drop or any algorithm update. I want you to raise your hand and let me know. To throw you the laptop out of your window is not an option. I've tried it, it's not working, so don't try it at home. Is anyone would like to speak and tell me how it's going to deal with a traffic drop? Okay. Okay, let's go through the presentation then. Oh, yes. Any other ideas? I can see by the way very well. Okay, yes. Sorry? Updating. Oh, updating, yes. Really good one, good idea. Okay, any other ideas, anyone wants to serve something? Okay, let's go through the presentation then. I created a spreadsheet that is going to help you to analyze any traffic drop even if it's from an algorithm date or not. I was actually creating the spreadsheet during I was creating the presentation at the same time, so to make sure that I have detailed out all the next steps. So the goal is to study the best period of traffic and rankings and compare it to the worst period of ranking and traffic. And to do that, we will need two tools, Google Analytics and Sembras, or any other SEO tool that can provide historic ranking data. It's going to help. So for this example, I'm about to analyze an actual website with an actual big traffic loss, really big. It's mightymoms.club and it has again a big loss out of 70% more loss. So what I'm about to do first is to open Sembras at the website, go to the domain overview, at the website and go to the big traffic trend graph and I'm about to support the big, the best period of time and I'm about to click this period. Getting a period of like a month, it's like a good amount of time. So once I have the list, I'm about to get a full report of keywords rankings. I'm going to get a ton of keywords especially if the website is really big. So I want to do some filtering at this point to make sure that I don't go to analyze thousands of keywords manually, that wouldn't help. So the filtering that I'm suggesting is the following. Keep only the top 20 keywords so they have a minimum search volume of 100 and also sort the list by estimated traffic so at this point you will get all the best pages by traffic that they have a proper amount of searches. And now it's about to export the list. I'm going to get a thousands of metrics that I don't need, that I don't care about them. The only metrics that I care about and I want to keep is the URL of course, the keyword, the position and the estimated traffic. So I'm about to create a spreadsheet, create the seat 1 which is SAMRAS data and at this metrics I'm going to call this spreadsheet SAMRAS data and I'm keep forward. So the next step now that I have my SEO tools, let's say data it's to look on the real data and to do that I need to cross check my data with Google Analytics. So I'm going over Google Analytics checking a big amount of time around 2 years I'm going to find again the spot pick period of time hopefully I've done correctly from SAMRAS and it's the same period of time with SAMRAS and if that's correct good news so I'm going to click the period of time again a month go to the landing pages report sort by sessions not users and export the list and for this example the website that we were looking for I want to tell you that 75% of the entire organic traffic was focused only in one page, a category page and that was really bad it put you in terrible position very vulnerable position mostly because if this page happened something to it you're done, you have lost most of half of your traffic so again we're going back to the Google Analytics list now I have exported the list again I'm going to get a ton of metrics and things but I'm not need anything I need only landing pages sessions and bounce rate so I'm about to create a second seat Google Analytics data best period of time and adding only the three columns that I need and the tip here is from Google Analytics you are not going to get like a full URL so what you need to do is to add this specific line that it allows you it's like a formula to get the full URL of the page ok now I need to cross check what happens to the pages of the best period of time because if it's a long time away they might don't even exist anymore and it's really important to know so I'm going over Screaming Frog which is a really good auditing tool I'm going to flip Screaming Frog to list mode I'm going to add the URLs I'm going to crawl only these URLs I'm going to create a status code find out if they are for example redirected either 404s and what's going on and I'm about to create a third seat with Screaming Frog data so for the example that we were talking so far there was a really big amount of pages that were 404 pages means they didn't exist anymore and there was also many pages with non-available products that haven't been handled at all so that means actually that there were pages that make sense that they used to have traffic and they don't have traffic anymore so it wasn't even the google update thing it was just products that don't exist so the print spreads it looks like this now and once you get the presentation you probably can be zoomed more we have the Samrous data we have the Google Analytics data we have the Screaming Frog data and now it's time to combine all this data and make some conclusions so I'm going to need all the important metrics from both Samrous and Google Analytics seats and what I'm about to do is create a new seat which is called Combined Data I'm going to keep all the data from Samrous and I'm going to extract automatically the Samrous data in order to do that I'm going to create a VLOOKUP formula you don't have to go through and find VLOOKUP how it's working I have it right there exactly the formula that you need to use and you're going to extract all the data for Google Analytics automatically with this way but we're not done yet we have more the next thing is to check either any landing pages that exist in Google Analytics data they have a big amount of traffic but I didn't extract them so far from the combined data so I'm going back to the Google Analytics data create a new column again add the VLOOKUP formula to save time and I'm going to extract the data and check if the URL exists or no if the news are good I'm totally caught up with both seats so I don't need to do something else and the last piece of this Excel is to get the current ranking position or the worst ranking position for these keywords that I'm trying to study I have the best rankings what they used to be but I need to find out where they are today and now we're going to the big finale which means study the data we're about to create a pivot table this is going to help us a lot identify the next steps and what I want to do here is to find out for each URL what are the keywords and what is their ranking position trends so I'm going to use as main values the landing page and the keyword and add some secondary values from traffic, position and everything else and I have right here exactly the steps that you need to take in order to create this pivot table and add the correct values so once I have the pivot table I'm going to end up with a spreadsheet like this so for each keyword for each page I have all the keywords the rankings and the search volume and for each page I know exactly what are the keywords which might be a big variety of them for a page I might rank for like 20 keywords or more what I want to find out is for each page what keywords had the traffic loss and what pages had the traffic loss and if they have traffic or not this is the important thing here so to help a little bit the situation I'm about to sort out the page by organic traffic so at this case I'm going to get the best pages in terms of traffic and I can be able to see the keyword rankings and that's it actually then we have to to find the patterns and study the data that I'm not going to do today because it might take a lot of hours but let's recap the process actually I'm about to find first the peak period of time from Semras then I'm about to do some filtering because I don't want to go through thousands of keywords I'm about to cross check the peak period with Google Analytics data after that I'm about to find the status of the pages because they might not exist anymore create the combined data and put them all in Excel create the pivot table to identify the patterns and to find the next steps and at this point I want you to remember we have two missions when a traffic drop is happening the one is to defend the rankings that we have today and the second one to increase the potential and traffic of the rest of the pages and here are some solid next steps that can work in any case that would be to focus on pages that they have a big amount of traffic and they have a loss probably in rankings and work on their content and their metadata try to identify quick wins meaning work on keywords from position 4 to position 30 and make quick optimization that's going to bring a real quick boost of traffic to your website also sorry focus on keywords that are let's say we have such a big amount of competition but they have a big amount of searches and last but not least create content across the buyers journey and start creating more content that cover more search intent and last but not least try not to panic I don't want to say don't panic because we are all humans we are going to panic anyway so probably I would finish this presentation with the next steps I think it makes more sense because it's only next steps and thank you very much for your time today thank you and we actually have time for some Q&A so I'm sure you guys have a lot of questions but we have two microphones set up one on each aisle so if you have any questions head over to the microphone right now depending on how many people there are we'll just limit to one question at a time and we'll just be lingering over here Hi, good job Nice presentation From your experience, is it better to create a 404 page for a page that does not exist anymore or redirect to the home page I'm speaking if the page does not exist and there is no relative page to redirect the visitors In my opinion I would prefer redirect the page 301 not to the home page to the most relevant category or sub-category it would make more sense so you won't send all the directions to the home page thank you Hi, thank you very much for the presentation I just wanted to ask if a site got hit with any algorithm will Google put the domain of that particular website into their bad books even though we are trying to match the level that Google is already asking us to do as you are mentioning how will Google tackle that part they just put us like they were the people who we already hit on their faces let's put it that way and now they are trying everything to get back Can you please repeat because I think let's say that I have a URL like malapres.com and we had coming from one page which is services for example and we got hit by any algorithm update now the URL will remain the same malapres.com as a company we are taking the measure to get back what we lost and everything will Google keep that URL in their bad books as actual URL like even or the domain how do they handle that So you actually have focused the traffic back to one page and you hit by an algorithm update then this is gone the page is gone Actually this is what we said before a vulnerable position what you can do is create more content around the topic and try to recover this from blog posts or articles or content Do you change domain No domain will remain the same Domain authority is not going to affect it by traffic loss probably unless you are about to lose a big amount of backlinks for any reason Thank you Hi Anna, awesome presentation I would like to ask you from your experience how much time it takes to recover from a Google update and what are the factors that influence this one Well it's going to take a lot of time probably it's about to take more than 2-3 months but it depends on how severe you will get hit on the algorithm update and what things you have to to address, what was the actual problem There were some slight cases that were never recovered from this especially if you do nothing about it of course you won't recover but most of the times it's going to need 3-4 maybe months but maybe more depending on the case Okay, thank you so much Thank you Hi, hello, thank you for your presentation So you were talking about a Google algorithm changes that were happening in the past and it looks like that each of them had the specific intent or specific topic how would you call it So is Google like publishing or speaking about it as a hint or clue what they are working next so we can at least be a little prepared or know what is waiting us in the big unknown future Actually they do give us some kind of hints they never announced 100% what's going on but thank God the SEO community is really strong and they identify almost immediately what's going on so that's the good news I think after some months they are going to release more details after you found out but the first months most times they don't So what would be the best place to check to find out about this? To find out what's going on with an algorithm date Well, to be honest I never actually checked one by one to find what is causing the algorithm update what I'm trying to do is to solve the traffic loss So probably they are looking they study a variety of websites from different industries and they try to find common things that's going on that would be a good starting point Thank you so much Thank you I have one as well I was just wondering if you could tell us about the coolest or the biggest traffic loss that you found and how you fixed it afterwards It was a directory website It was one of the biggest websites in Europe It was talking about professionals and professional works They lost almost older traffic more than 80% loss and actually we made up and create a different blog and some power pages to come up and rank the blog at least and redirect the traffic to the main website because things were a little bit bad at this point Thank you Hi Anna Looking forward to the future because we've seen the demo at Google I.O which is currently live in the US in the Google Labs that Google is showing more and more content on its own search result pages I've heard numbers like 60% of all searches do not result in clicks anymore What's your vision and strategy on this? I think we are going to see a thing called onServes.io that at this point you will try to rank on the features of Google search results and get traffic from them but we have a lot to see from the AI and all this Thank you Alright then Okay, so let's give one more round of applause for Anna Thank you so much Thank you very much Thank you Thank you Before you guys all race off to your next one I'll just give you one more announcement and then you're free to go actually you're free to go now but bear with me So there will be the first WP Connect session at 10 so you have about 20 minutes so if not, enjoy the rest of your day and eat a lot of food 10am on a Saturday morning Woo Thank you Have a great day Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Θα βοηθήσω να σας βοηθήσω. Επίσης, όπου υπάρχει η κοινότητα, μπορείς να also get a lot of help there. Μπορείς να also trade in your postcards if you've been collecting those. So you've got four in your swag bag and you can pick up more when you answer questions to them. You can also ask them what the questions were from the last couple of days so you can get extra ones. There is also a wellness track. So at three, sometime after lunch, we will be doing Tai Chi and there's a hike after WordCamp, so around 6.20 if you guys want to do that before you go to the after-party. And also lunch is served in the same places, level zero and minus one. So that will be at one o'clock. And don't forget that we have the Matts Q&A so you can send questions online if the lines are super long at the mics and then the after-party. So for WordPress' 20th birthday, you'll get some drink coupons and some food so hopefully we can see you guys all there. Okay, so I won't say too much of an introduction because he has some for himself, so I will just ask for a huge round of applause and welcome Bud to the stage. Yeah, yeah, just for you. You're going to stay right here, huh? Calimera, do you know what that means? Good morning. So how is everybody? Am I getting too close? Okay, I'm just getting used to things. Okay, I'm just trying to figure out what I want to do here. Okay, I guess you can tell my talk is going to be on low vision and really me and how I use it to help me teach people WordPress. So let's get started. I guess I can do... Yeah, I'm going to stand back here. I'm just trying to figure out what's the best place for me to see all this stuff and it's going to be right over here. So that's me. My name is Bud Kraus. I live in New Jersey, United States and as you can see I do a few things with WordPress. These days I do a lot of WordPress content creation for WordPress businesses. I'm also an instructor and a reluctant website developer. So only if I have to will I get involved in that. And let's get something out of the way real quick and that is today's talk is not going to be about these things. This is not like a technical talk on accessibility. It's not that I don't know about these things. I'm not an expert. I do know about these things but let other people talk about those things. So if you're wondering how come I'm not talking about these things, now you know. All right, we're going to start off with doing an interactive. Can everybody hear me okay? Because they sound kind of strange up here. Anyway, we're going to do an interactive survey. I call it the IQ survey and there are four questions and you should have gotten or you can get access to the web page on your cell phone because I have a QR code that should be circulating and I hope you'll take it. So it's only four questions. It's not difficult. Well, it's not very long anyway. And if you don't have the QR code then you can just go to joyofwp.com slash survey. Now I'm going to take off my coat because it is hot up here and we're good on my voice. We can hear. Okay, thank you. All right. So I'll give you a second or two to take the survey and it's funny to do a talk without a podium. I'm not used to that. I'm looking around, where's the podium? Okay, so I'm going to ask my wife, where's my wife? There she is, Arlene. She's going to read the results of the survey and because it's hard for me sometimes to read these things being a person with low vision and have people, have they responded Arlene? No. You want to refresh the browser maybe? A few. Okay, we'll give you another minute or two. You know, they asked me to do something interactive. I'm thinking like, what can you do that's interactive for my kind of talk? And I thought, well, let's just do a survey. So we have a survey and we'll wait two more, we get some more results and then, okay. So question number one. Now by the way, this is my wife. This is her first word camp ever, okay? And you can only go downhill from here, right? I mean, when you're at Mount Olympus, the rest is, you know, it doesn't get any bigger than this. So Arlene, I don't know. Somebody will help you turn it on, I guess. Yeah, here we go. And she's going to read the results and I'll give you a little color commentary. Some of the questions were a little tricky and I had a hard time figuring out exactly how to work this without making them like ridiculously tricky. Because- The only thing to do for a person with low vision is to make text larger. Now it's working. Okay. So the results, and this is, I will tell you, 26 of you responded, 4% said true and 96% said false. Yeah, the answer is false. Now the trick of the question was only, okay? So of course there are other things to do besides make text larger, but the really sort of nuanced approach to this is, take my case, and I'll talk a little bit more about my situation in a minute, but making text larger does not necessarily make it easier for me to see. In fact, in some instances, it makes it harder for me to see. So it's counterintuitive. You know, you think, well, we'll make the text larger and Bud will be able to see it, not necessarily. All right, number two. Which of the following present difficulties for people with low vision? Stairways, 67%. Recognizing faces, 90%. Bumping into objects, 80%. Bright sunlight, 63%. And the answer is really all of these things can be. Now when you talk about vision loss, it's very idiosyncratic and even within specific types of conditions, glaucoma, macular degeneration cataracts, it's all over the map, but those are some of the very big things that almost generally people like me are gonna have difficulties with. Number three. Eye glasses are used to correct vision to 2020. 23% true, 77% false. You guys had said true, you didn't get it right. So in my case, I'm wearing glasses obviously, but they cannot correct my eyes to 2020. So it's just not possible. It makes things easier for me to see long distance, but I'm legally blind with or without my glasses. So it's just not going to, it would be nice if all we had to do is prescribe glasses and we could correct everybody to 2020, but that's just not the case. Number four. If you lose vision, does your sense of smell get better? 33% yes, 67% no. Yeah, and I think that this is another one of these, well it depends who you talk to. In my case, smell, I don't think so, but what did get better over time was my sense of touch. Touch got exquisitely better so that what I started noticing when I wanted to see something, what I really wanted is you to put something in my hand so I could feel it. And with tactile ability, I could sort of get the sense of what it looked like. So thank you Arlene. Let's have a round of applause for the great Arlene. And good luck at your next word camp, my dear. So all right, so let's go on and let me go back here so I can see this a little better. All right, so I have age-related macular degeneration and I'm gonna give you a little warning before you see this because this is not pretty. How come this isn't, here we go. So here's what I, or people generally speaking, how they see with macular degeneration. And it's a loss of central vision as you can see the center of the face or the head is gone. Now it's not necessarily exactly like this for me and others but it's gonna give you a little bit of an idea of how we see and this blind spot in the middle is called the scatoma. So it is in the center. You can see the peripheral area is pretty big. It's not necessarily that well-defined as you see it. It can be little not as sharply defined and maybe not as dark either as what you just saw. It can be though. All right, how is age-related macular degeneration detected? We're diagnosed. So they use something called the Amsler grid. This has been around forever. And if you don't have the problem, you'll see a perfectly, perfect lines. No waviness, everything in nice square boxes, you're doing good. And especially that center point, if you don't see that center point you really have some problems. And if you do have macular degeneration, the first look will be something like that. So you'll see that one of the quadrants in one eye is, well the lines are really wavy. That's not a good sign. And it's not necessarily that pronounced. It can be just maybe a couple of those boxes instead of how big you see it there. And then as things get a little worse, maybe it might look like something like this. Now, a few factoids about AMD age-related macular degeneration. And you can tell it's a little hard for me to see some of this stuff. So I have to do a little memory here. But anyway, there are two types. There's the wet type and the dry type. The dry type is more common. About 90% of all people who have this have the dry. And it's slower progressing. There's no internal bleeding inside of the macula in the back of your eye where your retina is. 10% have the really dreaded wet type, which is of course my type. I have to have the wet type. And what happens is that blood vessels grow and leak into the macula, which is really part of the retina, or back of the retina. And then what happens is you lose vision very rapidly. So again, the dry is slower. The wet is a little more dangerous and more difficult. And you get wavy lines. And really, the hallmark really is rapid loss of vision. Some people who have dry don't even know that they have it. If you have the wet form, you're going to know real quick. In any event, it's irreversible. It's not curable, it's irreversible. There's been a lot of advancement over my lifetime that there are now treatments for it that didn't exist years ago that either slowed down the progression of the disease or... But they don't cure the problem. Make me manage the condition a lot better. Yeah, the prevalence, 20 million in the United States have a condition 200 million around the world and by 2040, 288 million. It is the leading cause of blindness. I know it's worldwide, but I don't know if that's true. But in the United States, for sure, it's the leading cause of legal blindness in the United States. And as you might have, you might probably know somebody who has the kind of vision that you have in the United States. You might probably know somebody who has the condition. You really don't know that they even have this until you realize they can't see me, they can't read, they can't drive. But other than that, they look like a normal person. And the other thing here, the risk factors, age, obviously, is one. In age-related macular degeneration, it tends to happen more often to women. Carcassian and obesity and smoking. And then genetics, thanks mom. I inherited it from her and she had it from her father too. But that was 60, 70 years ago now and they didn't even know really what the name was of this. Okay, let me go back over here, sorry. And so I do see things in a different way, literally and figuratively. And here are some of the big issues that I face and I'll just go over some of this real quickly. I do have a real problem with depth of field and if you see me, you'll notice when I walk down stairs, I'm holding onto a railing because I can't tell where the step ends and I just might just totally fall off. So I have to be really careful with that. So everything's sort of flat to me. And colorblind is definitely an issue. I don't drive anymore, but when I used to drive, I couldn't tell red and green lights, I could only tell the positions of red and green where they were. Contrast is a very, very important matter to me. I'll get into this in a second when I do a little demo and what I call the prism effect. So I have two eyes that don't function together and what that results in is sort of a split of my vision. In normal vision, the two eyes function as if you just have one eye. If you have a condition like I do, you have two separate visions going on. Now also, well, how do I do all this? How do I do what I do? And there are really three different things that I do. I use Zoom, I use audio, and then touch. These are all three very important factors in my life. And touch I also mean, well, what do you mean when you use a screen? How do you use touch? It's really more like when I use a mouse, I know how far I can move something. It's distance, and so I call that touch. And that's an important... So when somebody changes the UI of a system that I've been using for years, I say, oh, you know, I have to now rearrange how everything works in my head. Now I do have this little demonstration. So let me see if this will work. I don't know how this will work. Help! That is, I have a movie here, a video presentation and I don't know what button to press. I should have asked that. So can anybody help me from WordCamp? Or is it starting? Yeah. Well, you have audio here. Hello. And I'm going to take you through some of the highlights and the key settings that I use for my computer. Now keep in mind everybody with some kind of impairment or disability will be using different settings. This is very idiosyncratic just for me. And that's the key, is that there are plenty of choices that are built into the operating system for a user to have at their disposal. And here are mine. Welcome to my world of settings and preference changes. Now I use Ventura on a Mac OS. It's the most recent version of Mac. And I'm going to take you through some of the highlights and the key settings that I use for my computer. Now keep in mind everybody with some kind of impairment or disability will be using different settings. This is very idiosyncratic just for me. And that's the key, is that there are plenty of choices that are built into the operating system for a user to have at their disposal. And here are mine. So the first thing I'm going to show you is display right over here. And this is the display driver. I use a pretty low resolution 1280 pixels by 720 pixels. And if I wanted to change the display, I would just click on that. You can see the Mac OS has quite a few different display drivers, which is good. Now, bad thing is, I believe it's with this operating system. They no longer make it easy for you to change the brightness of your screen. If I go over here, you'll see the display brightness. You can't do it through the operating system anymore. You have to do it through the monitor itself. I don't like it. Now, if I was using a Mac monitor, no problem. But what Apple is saying is we no longer give you the ability to change the brightness because there are so many different monitors out there. Do it through your monitor settings, which I'm not going to show you, but that's exactly what I did. Now, also, we have accessibility settings. I think some of these settings are so important. They shouldn't even put it into accessibility. They just put it into all these other options over here. That's just my editorial comment. And I don't use everything. So, for example, I don't use voiceover, a way of listening to actions and functions taking place on the computer. No, I don't use that. I certainly use Zoom. And so, the way I have this set is when I press the Command key and I scroll like this with my mouse, I can see this much better. I can really zoom in. And sometimes I go crazy and zoom all the way in. And you get this effect of going back and forth a lot, but at least I get the job done. Also, there is a display area in accessibility. And this is different than the display driver for the monitor. And let's just take a look over here. I'm going to actually zoom in and show you how I do this. If I wanted to invert the colors, now, a lot of people like this. It's what I call the ultimate in dark mode. But I don't. But many people, as I've said, who have vision impairments will definitely use this reverse mode. Let's skip down a little bit over here and look at increased contrast. Well, I definitely want high contrast because it just makes things easier. If I were to turn this off, yeah, you can see. It makes it hard for me to see. So, I'm going with that. Reduce transfer. Let's go down to over here. And I have display contrast. Well, very important. Again, contrast is a big deal. You can see it gets really washed out, at least for me. I pushed it way up over here. Now, it's funny, they call this normal. So, if I went all the way out to here, let's see what we have. Well, that's a little bit too hard for me to see. So, it's just easier if I move it back to right about where it was like this. That's fine. If I scroll down a little bit more, the pointer, that is this over here, I can adjust that too. And you can see I've pushed it all the way up to the largest possible size. Now, I can change that, of course, to make it smaller. It really makes it hard for me to find where the pointer is. And I just found out a little bit ago that you can change the color of the pointer. That's interesting. Now, I don't use this color filters option over here, so I'm going to bypass that. Let's go over here and look at spoken content. I'm going to click on that over here. Now, this one I use all the time. So, in addition to zooming, the other way that I understand content is to use this controller right over here. Let me show you what I mean. I'm going to move this out over here. And I've got this text document over here that I'm writing for a post on my website about being chosen to speak at WordCamp Europe. Now, let me just show you this right over here, or you can listen to this. And I'm going to select these three paragraphs. And, by the way, if you haven't noticed, the font is much bigger than it would normally be. And it makes it easier for me to see. And what I'll do is just press Command and B. A couple of years ago, I was watching a live stream from Paris. It was WordCamp Europe 2017. Or maybe it was WordCamp 2018 from Belgrade. Or maybe WCEU coming from Berlin. Looking back, it doesn't really matter. All I thought was wouldn't it be cool to go to WordCamp Europe one day. Now, when I do that, you can see the visual control goes away. So, I can't pause it anymore. And it just stops, which is a little bit inconvenient. Sometimes I wish there were a pause operation available. It's either just start or stop. Now, you might be wondering, how do I even understand what I just heard? And yes, over time, I've gotten adjusted and used to hearing speech at a much faster rate than most people can understand. This also has the interesting ability to do the following. Let's just zoom in over here. I sort of use a combination of zooming and text to speech. So, we've got this option over here. Oh, yes, I can change the person that's speaking. But I've been with Samantha so long, I just stay with her. And for the speech rate, you can see, I can change it to tortoise or hare, which is what these little symbols are, I guess. Now, down over here, let me scroll. Let me push this out a little bit, because even my wife always says it's too close, too big, which makes it hard for her to see. Anyway, I'm going to go over here. Let's see, speaking announcements, fine. This is the one I want to show you. I put this on over here. So, this is very interesting. So, I don't use this, as you can tell. Speak announcements. So, whatever. So, that's very good. Now, you might be wondering, well, what about like third-party applications while it work? I can't tell you that. It probably does, but it's certainly going to work for all Apple-based products. Now, I'm going to turn this off. Okay. I'll show you one other option here, too. Again, this is not what I used, but just to give you a little touch of something that you probably don't know much about is... Capital H-E-O-E, here. A-S-D-A-H-Y. A-C-A-H-E-O-2-A-H-Y. Okay. Now, what about if I wanted to hear the whole thing? I'm just going to highlight it like so. Here is what I have to say. All right. Not bad. And that's a pretty good overview of the things that I use. Now, you know, I don't use dictation, and there's a whole lot of other things that I could use, but as I'm a very big proponent of only using the technology that you really need. And what do these technologies do? They provide alternatives for a person like me so that I can access and understand information in a way that I would not otherwise have been able to. Okay. And just a couple of little notes from the presentation that I've just noticed while I was doing this. One is you didn't see the... There was a demo of changing it to an inverse or reverse black and white, and it didn't work because of the way the software works. Another thing, too, is that you can pause. There's a little visual bar that you can click pause while the voiceover is working. But I think you get an idea, you should anyway. The takeaway is that I use technology specifically for my own needs, and everybody will do this a little bit differently. And one of the really great things, too, is a lot of things that are built in that we call accessible. They're good for everybody. Like, if I wasn't visually impaired, I would like to know that I would be able to hear the computer talk to me so that while it's talking to me, I could do other things. Which I do all the time. Okay, and let's go on. So, one of the ways... Oops, I don't want to go... Yeah, so how do I do the things that I do and what have I learned? Well, patterns is really important to me. So I don't necessarily see things the way you do, but if I recognize and see shapes and patterns, that will make it easier for me to understand content and to learn and to teach. And for example, these are easy patterns, right? This is code, obviously. This is HTML. And it's just a recognizable pattern. So it was easy for me to learn. Here's CSS. Again, a specific type of pattern that was reliable. It was always in a certain format. It's sort of easy to follow. Then we get the JavaScript and not so easy. More free form, more unpredictable, more varied than CSS and HTML. It's harder for me to learn, because the pattern isn't there, at least the way I think of its patterns. Okay, and what about... I'm just... I can't remember. Sorry, what about teaching WordPress? Yes, that's an important thing here. So I do teach WordPress. I've been teaching for years in New York City and online, mostly online these days. So the first thing is I can't wing it. So even though you think maybe I'm winging it today, I'm not winging this, I have to prepare for everything that I do. I can't go into a classroom and not know exactly what I'm going to teach, where I'm going to go with this, what I'm going to show people, the order I'm going to do it, which is good, because I'm prepared. I don't go in there saying, gee, I'll just make it up as I go along. Uh-uh, it's not... I can't do it that way. So preparation is like number one, not just in teaching, but just like everything I do. I need to know in advance where I'm going. And sometimes that requires practice. When I do videos, I need to know everything before I do it, because I can't read a script. Anyway, the next thing is I define everything. This is like one of the principles of accessibility, really, is define or describe everything, so that people will understand what you're doing. And when I teach, I describe and define what are themes, what are plugins, what's WordPress core, what's everything about the WordPress world and ecosystem, I like to define and describe things in detail so that people will understand. And I think that makes it for a better learning experience. And then grouping content is also a standard or a practice of accessibility, like navigation is grouping and content can be grouping. Grouping is a very important aspect of accessibility, and I've learned that through my own experience of being visually impaired about grouping things and making that easy, helping me be better at teaching. And then one of the last things is you have to have patience, not just in teaching, but with yourself. And I've learned that it takes me a little bit longer to learn or to do something and trying to get frustrated because you do get frustrated, but try just to have some patience with yourself as you try to get over the hurdle of learning something. And with students, I've always been really patient. I'm not always with patient with everybody, but with students they're like special to me. So, and clients, try to be patient. I think it's one of the things I do. And finally, I do get back with a little help from my friends. These are students, clients that, you know, if I'm in class and I'll say like, hey, I can't see something. Can you help me read this or whatever? Or like my wife did something, you know, reading the survey. I'm not afraid to ask anymore. When I first was diagnosed, you know, I would never ask for any help. It would be like, forget it. And today, why not? So, I look at low vision sort of as my special filter, my own app on how I look at the world literally and figuratively. And in some ways it gives me, I know this kind of sounds strange, but it's sort of a blessing in a way, because it's taken me to places in doing things. I probably wouldn't have had an opportunity to do. Oh yes, this is, I don't just teach WordPress. I also teach my little grand boy. I will eventually, when he gets older, I think how to play guitar. And with that, let me say thank you, and that's it. So yeah, but wait, there's more. So there's always more. So three reasons why being visually impaired really is not as bad as you think. First, you get to speak at WordCamp Europe, which I think is pretty good. So I like that one. Number two, you don't see junk food in the grocery store. So if you don't see it, you're not as apt to buy junk food in the grocery store. And one of my favorites, you don't see people getting old, and especially yourself. So that's really good. Oh, I should say there's a fourth that I didn't put up there, which is you can drink as much alcohol at a party as you want. You don't have to worry, because you're not going to be driving. All right, so thank you. So please ask some questions because we have some time. So go ahead. You can ask me like whatever you want about WordPress, teaching, vision impairment. Tell me about your mother who has macular degeneration. When did you first get macular degeneration? Why is it such a hard word to say, you know, anything you want? Do we have any questions? Yes. Go. Yes, hello. Hello, hello. Where are you? I'm on your right side. Yeah. Yes, I would like to ask you what would we do as WordPress developers to make websites better for you to see and understand. Okay, great question. And I have an answer for you. Okay, the key in this, okay, not just for web development and operating system is flexibility is alternatives. Okay, and not to lock people into no choices. Okay, case in point. You go to a website, it's playing a video. There's no way to stop it. There's no way to rewind it. There's no way to, no, give people alternatives. Give them flexibility because everybody has different needs, different ways of consuming information. So, you know, that is such an important thing. Now, one other thing I have to say in general, the web has become, I think, a more accessible world. But not just because of the web, it's operating systems and technology and a whole series of factors that, you know, I'm talking about. But if you're asking me, if I'm a developer, what's the first thing that I really give, choices, don't, hard coat us into a few things and we can't make any changes. Okay, and the other thing is, and it's not really developer, but it's, you know, the browser, let's use it. The web and browsers are a user-centric world. But a lot of people don't know that, you know, that I can change the font. I can change this. In other words, it's not really, it's an education process for the public to understand that they can change their environment of how they consume content. But people just don't know that because they don't know that they can do that with their browsers. So, really good question. I hope that helped answer. Sure. Anybody else? Oh, come on. Going once, going twice. Oh, hello, hello. Yes. I should say hi. That woke me up. I guess, you know, that I am on your right side. Yeah. By the way, if I, even if I didn't have a vision and problem, these lights make it really hard to see, yeah. I have one question regarding website design. What is the most frustrating thing regarding the design across the web? I'm going to change your question just a little bit. What's the most frustrating thing I have? Getting access to information using a mobile phone. Because so much of our information is like, you know, I'm one of them. I need to use a mobile phone too. And I find that I use an iPhone. And the way the content is created, a lot of times I can't, I'd use a voiceover. And I can't, once I have that voiceover turned on, I can't go, I can't use my fingers to scroll down the page. It just stuck. And I have to turn the voiceover off, scroll, turn the voiceover on, listen to it, and then turn it off and scroll. So it's a real laborious and frustrating problem. And I, you know, this is a matter of like what websites, you know, it depends what applications it depends. But it is not as smooth as consuming information on the web and using a desktop. So, but just the, I think the web itself, desktop web, has become much more accessible to my way of thinking. Yeah, sure. And, oh, another one. I should say, you've got to come up here and say, you've got to say your name, where you're from. So what's your name and where are you from? Hi, I'm Alex. I'm from Germany. My question is, when you're looking at content in a way that you're trying to get an information out of it, do you care about the layout and looks at all, or would you prefer having just a plain text document? Great question. And I was having a little chat with someone before the talk and web accessible design, there shouldn't be, you know, I don't even like these terms accessible and not, you know, it's sort of so artificial. Sort of the way I think, but there is no reason why accessible sites should not be visually appealing sites. I want visually appealing sites. You know, maybe 20 years ago, if you go really back in time, like 25 years ago, we talked about making a separate site just for the blind and visually impaired. Of course, we don't have to do that anymore for lots of reasons. But I want, there's no reason why they should not be visually appealing. So now if a user knows how to use their browser, they know they can turn off images, they can do all kinds of things. I can make, you know, websites look very different than what the designer intended them to look like. Because, remember, it's a user centric medium. It's not a designer centric medium. And if designers understand that, then I think they're going to be way ahead of, you know, others. So I hope that helped. Yeah. And come on, somebody, we have anybody? Anybody on the left? There's nobody on the left. Anybody on the right? Well, with that, I'm probably out of time. Yeah. Okay, so thank you all. And I want to say one other thing too, just in closing. The fact that I am here is, well, I'll just tell you real quick. I never expected in a million years to be speaking at WordCamp Europe. It was always my dream just to come here. And really, I want to, you know, I would be home in the United States streaming WordCamp Europe and thinking like, God, wouldn't that be cool to come to WordCamp Europe? The fact that I'm talking, come on now. That's like, I still can't believe this happened. So I want to thank the organizers, the sponsors, and all you wonderful people for coming. Because it really means it will, it's something I'll remember forever, at least for the rest of my life. So thanks again. Yeah. Thank you. Okay? Yeah, I'll help you off. All right? Yeah. Yeah, back here. Coming back. Okay, so yeah, that's it for the presentation today. I do have one quick announcement for the next WP Connect. So that will be at 11. So in about 20 minutes, it's about demo WordPress Playground presented by Adam. So it's in the same place. If you're interested in collaborating and talking about the WordPress Playground, pretty cool if you haven't tried it out yet. It's on the Triante balcony. So you just take the lift from track one to track two, and it's from 11 till 12. And other than that, lunch will be soon. And I hope to see you guys all back. Bye. Oh, thanks. Hello. Oh, there we go. Hey, okay. I was just going to start yelling at one point. So how is everybody doing now? Oh, thank you. Yeah. Somebody's had some coffee. Oh, this side of the room. Yeah, thank you guys. Okay, so now everyone's starting to wake up a little bit. Hopefully had some coffee and snacks. Okay, so I will... Actually, I've just realized I haven't introduced myself at all in all of the other tracks. So I am Emma. I'll be the MC for this track. So I'll just do some WordCamp general announcements, and then I will leave and get to the good stuff. So I'm sure you guys all know now that the center of the expo has the information center swag area and lost and found. So if you lost anything or found anything or anyone go there and they will help you out, if not, just ask somebody in a blue shirt. There's also the community booth on the way to the middle of the expo so you can ask questions there and also trade your WordPress postcards if you are doing that. You will have to answer a question, but I will give you the question at the end of this session. So other things, there is Tai Chi today at 3 o'clock in the wellness track and a hike afterwards. After WordCamp's over. So the hike will leave around 6.20. Everyone had a lot of fun yesterday. I had no energy for a hike, but I think it will be really good if you guys are looking for some wellness. And then the Q&A, it will be on track 1 at 4. So if you're interested in seeing that, just head over there. You can send questions online. I'm sure the microphones will be super long lines. So maybe if you have a really question you're dying to ask, maybe send it to social media. And then the after party today at the Lohan nightclub. So you'll get some drink coupons, some food, and it will just be a good time. So hopefully we'll see you all there. Okay, so without further ado, let me introduce Toby to the stage. So can we get a huge round of applause for him? But I will just quickly ask. It's not really Toby, is it? Well, my name is Torbjörn Fjellner, but too many strange sounds that you are hard to pronounce for non-Swedish people. So ever since I was 22 years ago, everyone calls me Toby and I'm fine with that. Even in Sweden, the nickname would usually be Toby with two Bs, but there is another reason for that. I picked up this notebook here the other day. It has the Morse code on the cover. And here you can see that B is a quite long character. So if I say Toby with only one B, then it is shorter. And of course, Toby with I instead of Y, because Y is a long one. I did it and Y is... Okay. Well, either way, thank you. Toby, everybody. Thank you. So, yeah, we have a problem. Or we had a problem. And we will walk through it together. So Wordpress celebrates 20 years. We made a special nice site. A special nice site. We translated this site. We beat 20 to 29 and a half languages. The half language is Arabic. I mean, they probably didn't have time to do all of it. And then it suddenly occurred in the Mita channel that the Japanese site is down, but only the Japanese site. To me that is a clear sign that this is probably something about internationalization and or localization because otherwise not only one single language would be hit. So I will call this the Japanese enigma. This problem will follow us today. We will think a little bit about it, but in the meantime I will give you some good hints about the biggest problems you can try to avoid as a developer when you are writing code for plugins and themes to make sure that it will be possible to translate these to all these 70 different languages that we maintain. I mean, I think this is great. As a developer you can write code. You do it all in English. Perhaps you know Dutch or Finnish and you make your own translation. That's fine. But then you have all these volunteers, people who use your code, and think that... I really think that this plugin should be available in Greek so they can do it for you. That's great, right? So, yeah. This is how you write my strange name, Turbjörn Fjellner. I'm Swedish. I live in Barcelona since 11 years, but I left Sweden before that. I have worked in various countries in the Middle East, in Russia. I'm fluent in Russian as well. And yeah, I have a question. Who in this room don't speak English as your native language? Okay. And who here has English as their native language? Oh, okay. So, this pretty much matches what we have in the world, right? 5% of the world's population speak English as their native language. Then there is another 10%, who know English but it's not their native language. And the question for you as a developer or plugin owner is are you developing for the whole world or only for the blue areas? Right? And the situation with WordPress itself echoes this somewhat. We had a cut-over point in 2017, six years ago, where at one day we suddenly noticed that, hey, more than half of all WordPress sites that we know of, all the WordPress sites that are constantly pinging us and asking if there are any updates to go on. The last part is clickable. You've got some nice HTML. This screenshot I took from another language, Persian for Afghanistan, and it hasn't been translated yet, but you can still see the funny thing that it is a right-to-left language, so of course the cursor is blinking to the right, but this PowerPoint doesn't blink, but you can still get the idea. And now let's talk at the top five things. Also, here, if you already know what the problem is, please, I think it's best if you keep quiet for two reasons. First of all, let your neighbors also try to figure, because this is like a little thing to... It's nice if you manage to figure it out before everyone spells it out in real time. And also, if you write now, already shout out what the problem is, then I will nominate you to be the next global mentor for polyglots. So, number five, two long strings. As in, if you put in the string the whole body of an email that explains the full process, and it is like one page and a half, or if you have several paragraphs, this will... It is possible to do, and we do it, of course, but it's hard to translate in our user interface, because the translator, or if I'm the translation reviewer, I need to see the source segment, I need to see the translation segment, and I need to see some references and some comments, and even with my 17-inch screen, that gets tricky, right? So, it's hard to translate, it's hard to review, and it gets really hard to fix so-called fuzzy matches. A fuzzy match is when the translation memory has a translation since before of a string that is very close to what we have now. Perhaps just one letter is capitalized, but there is a dot at the end, your left to right, that will be here. A dot at the end that has been added or removed, and that is technically speaking a different string, and it needs to be checked, and if you need to compare a long source string that is like half a page long, and figure out what has changed, can I still use this translation, and if I need to change anything, it's not easy. And also, of course, the sad thing about if I have spent 15 minutes on translating this huge email and I get credited for only one string, that's not nice, right? So, that was two long strings, now number four, two short strings. So, if here I'm thinking about just one or two words, a good word that we could see here could be like... Clear cash. Clear cash, yeah. I mean, it's an action, and it's something that you're... So, it's good, but still... Post. Yeah, post is my favorite, but it comes... On the next slide I have something about that, so I was trying to figure out something else. Oh, in the talk we had yesterday, the workshop, they said lead is such a dangerous word because you don't know it is... You can have a lead that you connect your dog to and then you go for a walk, or you can have a lead for your hand when you're walking down the staircase or you can have leads when you're trying to sell something that is a possible future customer. In this case, or also another thing, let's say the string is just a capital letter T, then you start looking into the code and you see that, oh yes. Maybe Tuesday, or it could be Thursday, right? Or something else, I don't know. So, if in this case with post or where it's just a letter T or a letter S, which could be Saturday or Sunday, you really should use underscore X. In GetText we use the source string itself as the database key to find the right translation. But if you use the underscore X, then you add a couple more... One word may be enough just to clarify the context. And then it is a part of the translation key. So still don't put a lot of explanations that you should put in a translator's comment before. And then you have this thing that will just indicate where this should go. And at number three, two short strings. We had that, didn't we? So this is a different case. Two short strings in the meaning that you should not use short strings that you try to build together programmatically. You know, they say... They have a string new and a space. And then there is another string somewhere else that says post. Then suddenly you realize that oh, there was a space before that word. Post or page or something. And then programmatically they are combining this into these wonderful phrases that work perfectly fine in English. But in Swedish the word new needs to be translated in different ways depending on whether it's a new page or a new post or if it is plural, I mean new pages, that's a different word for new. And it's the same in many languages. You are European, you know this. If you speak Spanish or French or something else then this comes quite naturally. But for those of you who watched this live streamed in the US there are languages out there that don't combine in exactly the same way and in exactly the same order that you do in English. And this is important to keep in mind. So you need to build complete, decent sentences and if you need to put some variable inside this you need to use printf or something like that. And don't be afraid of including an HTML tag. I mean the Polyglots team has seen those before and we don't get too scared of them. And yeah, grammatical congruence, word order all these things are things that are can mess things up if you don't think carefully. And also include punctuation marks in your strings. Don't add them separately. In just the same reason that you shouldn't use CSS code that enforce capitalization because capitalization differs between languages but if you have a question mark at the end, nice but in Spanish we need to put an inverted question mark before the question or in French you need to put a space before some punctuation marks. I mean a colon cannot just be a colon of course you need to have a non-breaking space before you know that right? So next thing you have made much better being reachable So you have made a wonderful plugin and then there are some internationalization hiccups that the translators find and they would love to help you because when we help you you help us, right? I mean if you make you can translate it better and you can do this in various ways the easiest way that is already there is of course that if you have a plugin or theme in the repository then you can receive input that way so I have written several posts in specific plugin theme forums where I say dear developer here is a thing that really would be good if you could fix and that means that keep an eye on your forum because there may be useful stuff there now and then if you outsource your support handling remind them that if they see this kind of bug reports that they really should not be afraid of forwarding it to you but there are more ways you can do I guess most of the people here are already on Slack but if you are not bring up your phone activate your QR scanner go and register in Slack and then in your readme add a comment that bug reports are welcome via Slack that's great I mean very quick connections there so while you scan that I will have a sip of water ok done if you are using github for your development then by all means link to your github project in your readme because then we will happily some of us at least go and open an issue for you and some more brave polyglots would even drop a pull request that means that you can get some of your international internationalization errors fixed just by accepting them nice right and then there is one more thing we are experimenting with feedback directly inside the translation platform still a little bit unstable in terms of yeah the platform itself works but I have a feeling that now and then messages don't get through all the way if you would like to dive into this a little bit then grab your phone again and take this or the smart finger can do is I will give you a link later on so you can download the whole presentation and I will not redact these QR codes they will be there and this bigger QR code is for this longer URL ok if I go any problems if I go to the next slide ok so it's time for the next clue in our Japanese enigma so this is how this source string was translated into Japanese I'm not going to pronounce this I don't speak Japanese but one funny thing we can see here is of course that I talked about punctuation marks and you see that Japanese doesn't use normal dots they have small circles instead I think it's really nice and beautiful but there's also a clear sign that things happen in a different way so yeah any problem if we go further and we go to number one in our list of things that bothers me as a translator I take that ok go ahead or if you are asleep then that's fine too but I think we should be fine so the big problem that we see all the time every no not every but a lot of young smart developers are just like me lazy people they like wonderful efficient shortcuts and then at some point they write a program and they write code and they feel the poetry of this code and then they realize that oh I have this case here where I need to write something if it is singular that means one piece and something else if it is more than one I saw a case a few months ago where they did something for WooCommerce where if there was more than one article then they should indicate how many articles and how much was each article in price and then the row would give the total to the right or to the left if you were left to right right to left of course but there is a problem with that the this command underscore N is a great tool when used correctly and for the right thing so the purpose of underscore N is to make it possible to linguistically correctly translate strings that include a number that include a number so the value N that you use to steer whether it should be singular or plural must be a part of that string you can see an example here how it would work nicely so this is a correctly written thing of course you would need to escape somewhere later on but I'm skipping that part right now because you know that better than I do and since N must be a part of this string this means that you have to use printf statement or something similar it also means that you indicate you have to include this variable N twice first as a parameter to underscore N to select which form we should use whether it should be singular and plural actually I'm coming to now it's not about singular and plural this is about getting the right form and in many languages we have three different forms or less or more and then of course you need to have N also as a value for insertion via the printf statement so here is where it looks right now when Swedish just like English we have singular for one and we have plural for everything else be it zero or be it 25 or something else those of you who know French know that there is already a small difference between French and English and that is for zero in English you would say zero umbrellas in French they use the singular form for zero it's slightly different but still very much the same and it would work nicely in most of these cases but when we come to Japanese for instance if the number is a part of the string then nothing in other places of this string will change depending on which number we had which means you don't have any singular or plural it's just one string so this pair of strings in the source string will get only one single translation for Japanese although of course in Japanese you can give a generic plural it's possible it's just that if you have a number then you wouldn't do it and therefore those strings would need to be two separate strings but you need to use your own program to specify which of these cases you have if it is a table heading and here is the this is the evidence in Arabic every occurrence of underscore M needs to be translated six times zero is one case one another three for five then if it's eleven, twelve and thirteen then you have a the last case is if it's one hundred or more then it's six times so they have six even the fingers on one hand doesn't fit for this right so again remember and tell your co-developers that if you are using underscore N which means you need to use printf and you need to insert this variable twice in your code and it's time for our enigma so we will have some intense waiting time where you try to figure this out and I will now give you the last clue on this again one smore this is how it was translated and we will count downwards five four three two one zero here we go so the problem here is and how many people guessed this before I showed this yeah that's great it took me some time also somebody else found this out before I did because in all this Japanese I just got stuck but it's good there are some people here so this percent sign here of course it will be put inside the printf statement it needs to be escaped so how could we fix this various ways and suggestions yeah so one way would have been of course on the translation level you can fix this by just setting a double percent sign or you could change it to just write a word like we had in the source string or actually the funny and very strange way they actually solved it in this case they changed it to a different percent sign well it looks exactly the same but the double bytes character right now so the developer here they could of course have been smart they could have written something that didn't use the percent but just say they really translated and this would never have happened or they could have written percent with the double percent sign in the source then no translators would have missed this or if they would have missed it they would quickly have realized what the problem was so that was the enigma and we are about to finalize here so we should summarize and I've got two minutes left so I will try to speak but they will manage so the internationally they internationalization details to remember avoid too long strings avoid too short strings don't try to combine or build sentences or words out of short strings and be reachable for feedback and make sure that you include the value of N in your string if you are using the underscore N statement that was just the tip of the iceberg there is more I have a quite long explanation and I will be happy for feedback on how I can make it better how I can cover things that I have not mentioned there yet if you go to my site there you will also be able to find the download it should be published 12 minutes ago but the first guy who gets there will just trigger the cron so the second guy will get the download so that's what I mean when if you do internationalization right then you can double the reach of your code because you make it available for all the world and most of all I would say that this also has a deeper meaning when it comes to the mission of wordpress we say democratize publishing and one very important aspect of democratizing publishing is of course to enable it to all those 85% of the world who don't know English but now we have some time for Q&A we have two microphones set up one on either side in both aisles so come on down throw some elbows if someone is in your way and ask away ah I got a shy crowd you need to walk down there and ask a question I guess yep I think we've got a taker if not yeah I've got some hello my name is Luigi I'm from Italy I would like to ask you something about I don't know if this is the right context but recently we are using more and more the internationalization module in our scripts and everything is fine as long as we use the set script translations new function which loads the JSON translation rather than the traditional mO translation files what we are finding a little difficult is when we we need to use dynamically loaded scripts like lazy loading scripts from for example React so we don't want to load our components all our components because they will impact the performance of the website so we are forced to lazy loading some components and even though we are trying to follow the instruction from for example automatic jetpack is doing that and is giving some sort of instruction we believe that we follow what they are doing but still when some components are lazy loaded rather than loaded from the page load the translation file doesn't get picked up and we find it very difficult for us because our customers always complain oh these strings cannot be translated we are trying to translate it but we don't manage to translate it i have a very easy answer to this i'm not the right person you could try to reach out to Swisspidi because he was one of the key developers of this functionality i don't know exactly which part of the slack would be the right place to ask about this but probably core internationalization would be a suitable channel where you can find the right people to ask this of course i mean if you have internationalization questions anything except this then by all means feel welcome to come to our slack channel polyglots and ask there i mean since we are a truly global team there are almost always some experienced people around and they will be able to give you much better answers than your traditional rubber duck who is otherwise helping you with your troubleshooting and for these props i need to give props to yeast because it's there so i will need to give it back to their fishing pulled afterwards thank you i hope i want something with my question then okay thank you i have a question i guess while we are getting that courage to go to the microphone i was just kind of wondering what you thought about google translate like are you able to use it right or any other tool like deep hole or smart cat yes it's exploding right now with a lot of different machine translation solutions and it's a great tool it speeds up the translation process and the things give us every week slightly better quality but i would say as a developer or plugin owner or something never try even don't try to publish translations that were just machine translated but not checked by a human because you will get incorrect terminology you will get awkward things that just don't fit right it always needs this last human touch so the translation can go quicker we will be able to reuse previous translations from the translation memory more and more but we have that is one of our biggest rules that don't just blindly approve unchecked machine translation so very good question thank you thank you for a really nice presentation and i would just like to comment this live translation feature that is introduced for the plugins because as you mentioned especially for instance for Slavic languages the order of the words in the sentence is different so now when you load the plugin and works on the plugin live you can see how often the word is in the wrong place and this thing with like one has one form and then two to five two to four has another form and then five on has third form is very often case with Slavic languages since you know Russian you probably know how that goes that was more of the commendation for this live feature but i have a question are you a ham radio operator yeah you may have me in your logs if you were active in the second half of the 80s Sierra Mike, Romo Yankee, bravo but i haven't been on for ages for me amateur radio was very much about the combination of technology and communication and guess what the internet came around thank you hello thank you for the talk more than a question i have another pitfall that i would like to tell some plugin developers to be aware of is that do not assume the length of a string oh yes do not make like oh yes that is a very good thing in your layout first of all have someone you always can go and ask about did we do it right when it comes to right to left languages because we mess it up all the time and the other thing is yes leave at least 50% extra room and perhaps even try that ok if something is double the length will it totally break my site or will it just nicely wrap to a new line inside and everything will just adjust that is a very good comment thank you well you were here before so we started with you and we should try to do it quickly here thank you for the great talk thank you you mentioned that you think it is ok for putting html in the strings to be translated i was just wondering how you handle things like escaping for example if you use escape html on a string and it has a link in it obviously that will strip the link out so what sort of approaches do you take to deal with that that's a very good thing so if you need to put some weird things inside the string and you know that you need to escape it later on the best thing you can do is to use a printf statement and you just include it by a variable and then you make sure that you escape everything else and then you put it together so that's one way you can do it escape it in the right place and then insert what you need to insert or sometimes you can just try to fine tune how you escape and what you escape but all these long escaping functions for translations is your final protection against evil translations so it's very good to have them and always have them because sometimes translations may come from unexpected places and you don't want that to be what breaks your site or your user's site somewhere else Hi thanks for the presentation what is your opinion on translating some things which are very technical or are meant for developers like for example Token or API response maybe there are better examples but that are meant for developers maybe if you translate them to a local language the developer who is going to probably see this won't understand me yeah there are a lot of developers who barely know English back in the school many many years ago I did some school work about computers and this was like when computers weren't really a thing yet so yeah I was a nerd I guess because I read this full book about machine code for the microprocessor Zilog Z80 and my English teacher she was like wow were able to read that and I didn't tell her the truth that this specific language is just a different way of coding stuff and it just happens to be kind of English but I mean I managed to understand it because it's very simple language but yes it can be useful I would say in instructions around how to use an API but I would never dare to translate the API parameters or something like that because then it will just break things I guess I don't know if I answered your question or some other question but not the code parameters but some technical real words but they are very technical but here as well there are plugins for all kinds of people there are plugins that are aimed at developers and still yes by all means make them translatable that's nice polyglots I mean we have tens of thousands of polyglots contributing some of them are very technical and then of course a vast majority not very technical and this is their way of contributing still but you translate the strings that you feel that you understand and you can handle and if you feel a bit unsure then you ask someone else to come and have a look did I translate it right or what kind of terminology should we use here so it's still doable and as a developer yes by all means make it possible right thank you now you're going to cut me off right I will cut you off yeah but let's give another round of applause for Toby thank you here's a little gift from WordCamp thank you so much come on keep it going guys alrighty one quick announcement feel free to walk it's okay you can still listen you can listen and walk it don't mean to call you out I don't know why I was staring just at you oh no I sat okay let me just get to it so the last thing is the next clue or question for the WordCamp postcards collecting those if you head over to the community booth you just have to answer the question when and where was the first WordCamp so if you know the answer or you know how to google you can go there and get to your next word WordPress WordCamp postcard and I'll see you for the next presentation thanks guys hello oh shit okay sorry hi that's one way to start by cursing in front of a large group of people so how you guys all doing right now ooh how are you guys doing alright there you go I know it's like right before lunch and everyone's just like give me the food but okay so we have an awesome panel for you in just a few moments I will just do a quick announcement so there will be of course there will be lunch starting in about an hour there is the group photo that's also at one o'clock it's in the outdoor plaza I guess you could run and take the photo or it's going to be photo food I don't know pick your battle and then yeah the lunch is going to be in all the same areas as yesterday level zero and level negative one with the kosher and hallo meals on the negative one floor and yeah so without further ado they're going to do an introduction as well but I will introduce your host Chavon can we get around to the applause for her so Ben Miles then you guys will have the opportunity to ask Q&A questions there's two mics already set up so if you have some questions for them just hit them there have fun hi everybody good to see so many of you here are you having a good time I mean this is going to be a great time talking about enterprise wordpress I'm excited to see so many of you I'm just going to introduce our panel before we get into it so we've got Ben May who's the MD of the code company the wordpress development company that works with enterprise globally we have Carrie Dills a freelancer with 20 plus years of web development experience she's worked with everyone from small locally owned businesses to 14500 companies we've got Viola Gruner head of marketing at inside where she's responsible for marketing their services to the enterprise and we have Miles Lunger Lunger Craig who is currently the CEO of XWP which is enterprise wordpress development agency and Miles comes to us comes to wordpress via a long career in enterprise organizations so thanks to the panel we've got really broad range of experience here so it presents a really great opportunity to discuss the issues of enterprise wordpress not just in terms of delivery we've decided to broaden out because of the opportunity presented we're going to talk about sales and client acquisition and through delivery and the whole client lifecycle so to kick us off enterprise can be hard to define when I ask people what enterprise is I often get different answers so Miles as someone who's come to us from enterprise can you kick us off with a definition a definition of enterprise thanks for that but it's not easy an enterprise client I feel it's just like any client the basics of the client relationship is there but it tends to differ in terms of its scale its complexity the stakeholders and the expectations that an enterprise has that maybe will be different from like a small to medium business client if you want to delve into those things it's a rabbit hole but I think essentially those are the components Yeah I think Carrie you work with very diverse clients from small businesses to enterprise and what's your experience of the differences between them Well I think you hit it the nail on the head Miles but as a solo practitioner the layers are pretty simplified if I want to decide what tech to do I don't need to consult anyone I just ask the I ask myself what's but of course at enterprise scale you get the opportunity to work with a team and collaborate with a bunch of really smart people so the opportunity to learn from each other and work on bigger and more exciting projects and you probably would as a solo What about the different challenges that they face in terms of enterprise would anyone like to go into some of those Different challenges experiencing with enterprises Enterprise versus small business Well I think if I delve into those details you're talking about scale of maybe internal and external users and customers scale of data the scale of maybe the number of brands they have complexity can be around complex systems integrations that they have with their own bespoke systems or a plethora of quite enterprise level third party integrations the security the expectations around robustness and performance at scale and security but our clients have security issues against nation state threats and then also stakeholders you're dealing with very large enterprises the cycle times may be longer you have to get through architectural review boards and internal boards or you may to get through procurement and legal and marketing and CEOs and things so let alone finance and those kind of things so it just adds a richness we enjoy working with these companies but it adds a richness of complexities a lot more cooks involved and baking a cake I think one of the things that I think about in terms of WordPress is it's consumer software it's built with end users in mind it's got a mission of democratising publishing and one of its selling points is usability installation and so the traditional WordPress user is someone who's setting up their own blog or doing the 5 minute install and setting up their website and this is a really different target audience to the enterprise buyer who gets different needs and as we just talked about has different problems so Viola how do you approach marketing towards the enterprise buyer so like first I would like to tell you a small story because before I worked for impside I worked for a logistics company and it was a startup and we used WordPress and we used it and we liked it but the thing was the founders they were not taking care of their website for around one year or two years not updating anything and then they installed some plugins and the website was crashing down and that was the moment when impside helped me out in this moment I was like yeah what should I do afterwards we were growing a lot and then we wanted to make a relaunch and they told me the founders told me Viola no we are not going to use WordPress anymore and I said ok but it is a little insecure and they said no we don't think so look at the old example and they said let's take type 3 and when they told me this I decided to quit and to support the WordPress ecosystem but they said no so I see here a problem with scalability security it's not the problem of WordPress because WordPress is great and it is scalable but the image so WordPress is having for the bigger companies not that good image and that's very sad because like I said it is scalable and secure and I think we need to change this image and we used in marketing especially case studies because I see often these marketing tricks they are not having a good view so if we talk to enterprise clients they want to see real case studies and often also they want to have a contact here they can contact so that they know they are telling the truth WordPress is not just a block system it can be also scalable and secure but yes that's in marketing like it is and it's a little bit different so it's not about writing a thousand block articles because the enterprise audience is a little bit different here one of the things that we find at human made is we work with lots of enterprise clients and sometimes a little bit they don't want their name or the logo out there and that's like a big challenge that we've got but it's also about our stories of the things that we've built together so how do you any of the panelists have got an idea of how you tackle that challenge of getting your clients to agree to case studies Yeah I think sometimes you just can't get it past that barrier how much you try but I think we have a some of you may know we have a tonight show as part of the XWP so we actually make it about the client not so much about XWP but any marketing we talked about hey we can get you represented either at a personal level and get your personal brand out there or your companies brand out there through the marketing material right so I think that's a lot easier for them as an internal stakeholder to go and champion inside with the corporate columns department to say hey look we want to there's a message either for myself or the company's brand to get out there so they may be in a certain industry but there might be a publisher and things but also publishers also want to be seen as progressive in terms of how they do innovative storytelling and things so we kind of look for an angle for them to promote themselves Of course we mentioned XWP along the way Yeah And sometimes we find those case studies can be sort of mentioned in commercial and confidence in discussions the challenge is we need them inside the funnel at that point to be able to have those conversations So this is the marketing strategy around authoritative positioning some vagueness around the kinds of work that's done but ultimately requires a little jump of faith to have that conversation and then to try and validate some of the more nuts and bolts of projects that we can't really publish but we've definitely done and can talk about more privately in the sales process So just a general question for the panel I'm happy for anyone to answer Why should enterprise clients even want to use consumer software but there are loads of CMSs like there or DXPs that are built with them in mind like Psychor or Adobe Why should they be making the choice of WordPress against those that are developed specifically for them and their needs Carrie I'll start the conversation and let somebody else take it but I think going back to the ownership of your own content and using open source software both from licensing for the lifecycle of a project perspective can be more affordable than say maybe an AEM or sales force type solution but also ultimately building your house on your own land so to speak Yeah, sorry It's also this, I guess it doesn't necessarily have to be consumer software It is if we let it become consumer software but yeah we obviously talk about WordPress but I don't know if it can sort of do a lot of things but it's having that clear it sort of goes back to the marketing and positioning message of it being a $20 blog software or something that could be a seven figure project that powers a sophisticated software so it's trying to buck that stigma that sort of does come along with WordPress have it sort of organically grown to date But a challenge is consumer software I think it's enterprise software because the WordPress ecosystem they have support multiple personas including the enterprise persona but also I would say that they don't have to use WordPress what they should be using is an integrated platform or system that achieves the business outcome and when you sell to them you should be talking about their outcomes and not WordPress We know WordPress is a valuable platform and tool but to a certain extent past the technical people they don't pretty much care about WordPress they care about their business outcomes and WordPress can deliver those we would say you can go and use Adobe or Cycle or anything else but you may not get those outcomes that you want now or when you scale later as well so those are the kind of angles you would take Thanks So Ben when you're pitching to enterprise clients what platforms are you pitching against and when you lose Why are you losing? Yeah, I was thinking about having done this for probably a decade now in different situations from publicly traded companies to government things like that and there's sort of two buckets I could think of that simplified it for this purpose anyway and the first is losing out to things like sanity, contentful a really technically advanced product and those decision makers are typically CIO, CTOs sometimes product people or internal engineering teams and I think that camp is either an education or poorly educated about bad experiences with WordPress or lack of understanding of where it goes and they can sometimes be brought around of convincing that actually it can and that's where case studies help demonstrate scale or somebody says well our site's got 5,000 taxonomies I don't think WordPress will scale to that and you can turn around and say well here's something with 500,000 and scale's fine and then the other camp is probably the ones that go to a sort of all-in-one solution AM, Kentico, Cycle or whatever else and that's a I think the simplest way those ones win is because it has a really simple sales story to tell of we'll take you out to lunch, we'll get you to sign the contract and it's got everything you need in the box and that's a harder one to turn around sometimes because WordPress is more of a Swiss army knife, a framework or whatever else to build a full experience on top of especially when you need to start talking about plugins and platforms and hosting it's a really complicated bicycle so if you have someone who's making a decision who understands that and understands the context of the benefits of building on your own land having interoperability between plugins and components and various pieces and not being vendor lock-in and all this sort of stuff then you can overcome that conversation but sometimes the sexiness of just saying you can't pay a million dollars to Kentico and I just get everything is really appealing especially if the organization doesn't have that internal maturity to understand how to do this and sometimes even as agencies we see they don't understand what they're actually trying to do and we're going to end up being on the hook for them not understanding what they're actually trying to do So how do you overcome that? For the latter one? That's a harder one sometimes if it's just not the right decision makers that you just can't overcome that but if you promise something that's unpromisable when the push comes to shove at some point and they're like well we just assumed we could do X and I was like no you understood this all along it's an open source we're building we have to build the layer on top sometimes you don't want to have those conversations while WordPress is sort of the way it is in the terms of the modularity of the ecosystem that is something I think will be slowly maturing and as more delivering to enterprise having more standards in that space but it's definitely a challenging from an education perspective So Miles you talked about the outcomes that enterprise the enterprise buyer wants like what sort of problems are they coming to you with whenever they are sort of looking for WordPress At Clienta I call them enterprise storytellers with complex needs because they aren't enterprise and all the kind of the angles we talked about enterprise before but it's simply they're trying to tell this story and that could be actually like a publisher so a man bites dog type story or it could be a corporate trying to tell the story to an audience but they have complex needs but if anything they want three things any enterprise wants three things from a solution they want to be faster, better, cheaper and faster because I mean like pay performance I mean they want to go faster to market they want to have faster decision making they want to have faster ROI and better means they really want to be better than the new competition and that may be better in terms of better innovative storytelling it might be a better performance on the website a better proposition to advertisers and cheaper is they want to be able to control the cost of the solution particularly as it scales or peaks you know some of the solutions we've put in place traffic wise are fairly high and then resource is intensive as well so they really want to be able to control those kind of things so those things changed over time you know in the past sort of five to ten years what enterprise buyers are looking for how have they changed anyone how have they changed over the past five years or so so their needs are just staying the same I mean that's pretty fundamental like what Mars was talking about from a business perspective I think in the WordPress context some of the barriers have come down it's definitely become easier as there's more education more agencies demonstrating this happening using it if you can point to Whitehouse.gov type stuff that is definitely brings down a barrier in those conversations that helps to lower some of the hurdles to cross Carrie from just want to talk about delivery and delivering technical solutions to enterprise how do you turn the problems that Miles has been talking about into technical solutions what's your approach what you said I really appreciated is that the clients don't care necessarily how you get there or what the tech looks like if you're a hammer every problem might look like a nail but one of the the things working with a team of people is the opportunity to kind of bring a toolbox of solutions to the table and figure out what is it that you just want to go to your plugins page select all and enable auto updates just kidding don't no please never do that the wordpress release cycle definitely moves at a quicker clip an enterprise cycle when you're integrating with so many different components from a level of complexity standpoint it's not just click update and click through a few pages and make sure nothing broke it's understanding exactly what came out in a wordpress release and how every bit of that code affects every system that you're integrating with so for example sometimes wordpress not sometimes very frequently wordpress may roll out a security update but it may also be a feature update as well so the challenge then enterprise may be to you do want to apply the security update but you have to go through and kind of extract that bit and apply it in a way that makes sense for the particular application you're running go through layers of regression testing etc etc it's just a much more layered process and then we've got any horror stories of when that's gotten wrong I want to share with the audience I don't want to talk about horror stories but I do want to talk about delivery because at some point we can talk about buying but at some point the rubber hits the road and you actually have to deliver and I think where the enterprise differs is that they are quite mature and actually they probably do a lot of delivery on non wordpress stuff as well so they have mature a lot of them have mature cycles around non-production environments and CICD and automation testing so they just expect that from wordpress as well but some of them don't and they can make it very complex so part of the role I think for an enterprise agency is to help educate internal teams or the client how they should be managing enterprise software as well internally and that can be from someone who says I don't want to do it, patch and all this kind of stuff but a true enterprise would have an affinity with that as well but also you do get it in complexity and an enterprise agency needs to handle a variety of delivery methodologies some of them appreciate Camban or Agile or Wajile and Waterfall and the different contexts and different phases of the projects as well and that ability for an enterprise agency to pivot and also to bring in the right resources at the right time through a complex project so the delivery can be quite complex as well and requirements change requirements bubble up these conflict between the agency and the client around what was in set up front and discovery as you go so the delivery is also very complicated and so you need one of the things I like to say WordPress is great you can use it for individuals and small to medium enterprises and things, it's not rocket surgery but sometimes it is and so you need agencies who can do that rocket surgery and bring in the ecosystem to help deliver that complex layer because the WordPress ecosystem is not big enough for every agency to be like that but some agencies have to operate that because there is an introduction of a higher acquisition longer acquisition cycle and potentially higher overheads to support that kind of organization as well Yeah, so speaking of rocket surgery I'd like to talk a little bit about Gutenberg so Gutenberg was developed to make it easier for users to build pages Ben, what's been the reception of Gutenberg with your clients? I think the idea has been great but we're moving away from the classic editor and that was never going to be a competitive CMS if that was our approach to publishing content in perpetuity so definitely it's been a step in the right direction I think like Harry was talking about with release management of WordPress releasing changes and things like that it's definitely created an additional layer of managing regressions and when seemingly small releases come out very quickly some of the things that may not be immediately obvious cause headaches in production which sometimes are the only way these bugs are discovered so it usually requires buy in to at least have that level setting of this is what we're dealing with open source we can't control it at one end of the spectrum you're on the bleeding edge and you're rolling out releases that come out straight away at the other end you're through major versions behind because you're so worried about release management that you're now having a road blocks with other plugins and things like that so it creates your own new nightmare even if you're up to date with security patching features are starting to break or behaving ways that are really hard to manage so that's been a bit of a fine line to work through especially when building native blocks and things like that as the technology changes having to explain that we need to go back and refactor certain things because standards have sort of the goalpost have shifted a little bit but so that's always a challenge to have those conversations because it's out of our control not necessarily assuming that anyone known was coming but that also is going to happen broadly with a lot of software anyway or you're going to be using something that looks like it was built 30 years ago as a CMS so you kind of take that with the good of having a pretty good rich page of building article building experience being able to bring in dynamic functionality and previewing it pretty close to where it's going to live when it's published Anyone making any interesting uses of Gutenberg for your clients like building any cool blocks that you'd like to talk about or are you not making use of it? Yeah, I'm sure my team are doing a lot of cool blocks for clients and they demo them and they think wow that's fantastic we pitch ourselves as a mastery based agency and it certainly comes through in the demos we see we all do right the opportunity that's involved there and you know you go out there the booth's outside and you see so many exhibiting mastery and the work that they're doing so yeah One of the nice things about where that's going I was going to say we're building an AI block just because No one else has You are as well You got one But the one thing that the direction of Gutenberg is the ability to sort of white label custom functionality in the CMS and make it a fluid experience that's one of the challenges of like sort of very much the authoring experience and then all the plugins that sit next to the CMS is that it feels like multiple systems especially when some plugins get very opinionated on design styles and things like that Gutenberg is a way of managing the site that feels very cohesive and that's one thing that the direction of where that's going I like because if you are using an enterprise CMS and things like that it just feels like one CMS you're not using one CMS with 12 other subsystems inside it so that's again takes a lot of self-discipline to make sure that you don't build blocks and things like that that just turn into you know a dog's breakfast of CMS authoring trying to find a polite way to You don't need to be polite, it's fine So looking to the future Viola How do you better position WordPress to the enterprise? So I think it should start from scratch so it's important that we get a good image here at WordPress and it is great you know it's about often the user and we need to share this so instead of just making case studies we should make success stories and tell them even the White House is using it oh my god that's in terms of security you know the White House is using WordPress and that shows okay it is secure and I think we need to come together and we need to show this to the world and I think also everyone who is using WordPress should share this knowledge and yeah because also some friends of mine they told me also now I'm working for a small agency and their WordPress is good but if I would work for a bigger one no because of security they would say what why no and I told them how it is and I think we should all reaching out and I think also we should bring together some case studies and yeah to work together with the others because we are a big community and we are having this great community behind of WordPress and WordPress is great and it is secure and scalable and that's something the world needs to know and people need to know and yeah also the enterprise companies need to know so that are my thoughts I don't know what you think I don't think you want to start me on this but I'm happy to go WordPress does not do a good job insanely itself to enterprise when I first started SWP and it got into it I have a guy called Scotty from marketing he's not a degenerate but he's Scotty from marketing so I said to him my first thought leadership piece should be I was involved in enterprise technology for over 20 years or over 30 years I built one of the largest WordPress instances or the largest WordPress instances in the southern hemisphere this article but now I'm running one of the world's largest leading WordPress enterprise agencies if I was to go back to my old job would I still buy WordPress and then the bulk of the article which is primarily chat GPT written kind of says yes I would because it ticks all these boxes it has control of data freedom to publish all these things that are just baseline stuff but WordPress does not make it easy for the enterprise buyer to buy WordPress and I think that's what as an ecosystem and as a layer of the ecosystem that focuses on the persona of the enterprise buyer I think that's what we need to do because actually we're behind there's an existential threat that other alternatives are doing a better job than the enterprise buyer and I think the WordPress ecosystem needs a healthy enterprise WordPress agency layer just as it does with all the other rest of the WordPress ecosystem needs to be healthy but there is a challenge at front now to the layer that focuses on the enterprise buyers so we don't make it easy there are definitely things we can do to make it easier and you know there's a lot of people talking about that kind of stuff so I think we just need to be organised around you know actually getting some traction in that space So when you say we who is we who takes responsibility for marketing WordPress to enterprise is it WordPress.org is it the make.wordpress.org is it WordPress businesses is it us all individually who is responsible for making WordPress appealing to the enterprise buyer to take a go at that then I think that is I think the enterprise agencies there is something to be had of bringing those together to sort of share the experiences they are seeing on the front of the ground and there have been some events around that this week and talking about a future that could come together because I think a lot of the top talent if you think of in the project a lot of that is probably coming either through or employed by these leading agencies because they are doing these big healthy projects that have margins to then support having people who can do to be dedicated to core and things like that so the agencies need WordPress and WordPress needs the agencies at this sort of scale for it to be healthy so I think there is some sort of an alliance almost to bring people with a shared interest of bringing these resources together to create the good for anyone who works in this space Yes and I think every client we win together it's great for WordPress and that's also the thing behind so if someone else is winning a pitch and it's for WordPress it's great because the ecosystem gets bigger and is improving Absolutely You asked specifically whose responsibility is it and I think it's important to say that it's not the responsibility of core and this is not about changing the actual software that we're using at a core level but it's been used word alliance and some great conversations going around this week about enterprise WordPress agencies aligning and aligning I think I made up that word just now Aliencing but coming together to bring kind of what's the common denominator of what it looks like to serve the needs of an enterprise buyer and aligning on that and then the optics of that from a messaging standpoint I'm just kind of saying what you've already said but I'm probably more eloquently at that so I'll stop there I think we can use an open source ethos to figure this one out because the open source ethos pretty much talks about if you care and you're passionate about putting investment in the time in the thought space to say I'm going to help solve this problem and I've got classic examples of that in the actual WordPress project of people saying I'm going to put my hand up and solve performance we'll collaborate and that kind of thing so I think there's an example of that and we should be using open source ethos of how to manage the governance of anything around tackling how we make it easier for the enterprise buyer and I think what we've seen probably is kind of a gaggle of initial gaggles we're kind of passionate, we care about it we want to stand up and put some investment of time and headspace and stuff into solving what that would be and I think it's an embryonic kind of gaggle but I think there's an opportunity for that gaggle to get some traction and momentum and start asking questions of how should we be having a cohesive narrative and a key for the message to enterprise buyers and I think that layer the gaggle, the layer should really be, the ethos there should be if the enterprise buyer doesn't care about it then we don't care about it because there are so many other people in the WordPress ecosystem who care about other personas and this gaggle should just care about the enterprise buyer persona On that note I'm going to open up the floor to questions Has anyone got a question for the panel We've got about 10 minutes I see a question at the back Hand up there There's two mics here Sorry you come down, sorry I couldn't actually see what was going on Hello Our question is pretty basic How did you start? How did you find your first enterprise clients? How did we get the first enterprise client? Right I think for HWP we were lucky We got the first enterprise client on the enterprise side and so I was already kind of bought in and actually on that story I've been doing enterprise CMSs for over 20 years 30 years and on the enterprise side we built our own we've got many closed sourced applications so much so the last one we did before we went WordPress we broke essentially but it was off the upgrade path so when we actually went to we had a lot of open source as well lampstack and other stuff inside the enterprise so we were going to go to open source and we looked at WordPress and Drupal but WordPress kind of smashed Drupal out of the park on that from the enterprise buy side but when we did the implementation of it the hashtag was hashtag don't break WordPress keep it pure so that came from an internal inside the enterprise aspiration to use the benefits of open source software so that was probably lucky but I think that on the flip side of that when we were kind of got sold on WordPress with automatic and BRP at the time they were espousing the benefits of WordPress as an enterprise CMS and things like that Carrie, I was wondering if you want to pick up on that as a freelancer how did you get from writing about Genesis to picking up your first enterprise client? Well, I went and worked with a renowned agency serving enterprise clients at crowdfavorite. As a solo operator I was not in a position and probably I don't want to say universally you can't but as a single developer or somebody delivering services to a client it's just not scalable at that level to serve the needs of a really large project so I would say most definitely needing to be part of a team to go about four more people answering asking questions we're going to move on, thank you who's next was next here Hi everyone's pointing you were here first so let's go with you Thank you very much So one of the technical issues with WordPress when you're selling to enterprise clients is most of the corporate clients expect you to have a development environmental staging, user acceptance testing and the production which WordPress doesn't make super easy Any good recommendations regarding this problem? I'm not overly technical but I think you would use classic development techniques you have to have multiple production environments you have to copy data from one environment to the other you have to have CI CD pipelines so I think those kind of things have been solved even if in a clunky way for software that doesn't move through a path to production very well so it's not easy when I was at news court it wasn't easy with WordPress but you had to make it work So some of the data from developments and staging up to production there's a silver bullet for that one I don't think anyone solved that perfectly I live in hope that one day we'll catch on to things like Laravel and things that do database seeding and programmatic database management much easier but I don't think we're there yet That's probably a very niche example of an enterprise problem that would solve on a percentage of installs fraction compared to every other WordPress site that exists Yeah, I guess it's on the list You've got to remember in the enterprise WordPress is just one of the elements of path to production that you have to control in a UAT in any non-production environment as well so some of them have environment managers test data packs and all that kind of stuff so it can get pretty complex Great, thanks Over the side please Evening Good afternoon Question in the enterprise space One of the issues with WordPress is that your client ends up with 15 different monthly or annual bills for this commercial plugin and that rather than one with AEM or Sitecore and it's a much easier thing to manage How do you at the enterprise level address that with your clients in terms of commercial plugin licenses as well as kind of the updating of commercial licenses Are you bundling that are you packaging that, are you managing it and how are you having that conversation at the enterprise level Anyone want to take that Yeah, I can take that one Yeah, like most clients of ours they have to have two MSAs two S&Ws and then two bills and that can be an issue for procurement and legal and finance they would love to have one bill because what they like to do in the faster and cheaper world is to say here's a big bill from a client, we talk to them and say how can we screw them down and part of that is even if you have a big bill from AEM the bill is segmented, right and some are for services and some are for hosting costs so you don't really you might get one bill that might be good on the one budget line item but it's not too much of a hurdle it does take more line to get the two MSAs and contracts and things and the two budgets over the line but enterprises do get understanding between kind of infrastructure pricing of hosting things as well as services you know for talent on demand or project teams and things like that and if anything they like to make it a little bit complicated themselves because they'll do multiple S&Ws for phases of delivery and things as well right so and yeah so I don't think that's too a problem it does get more of a problem when there's a plugin cost you know of $100 sometimes that's the hardest one then tens of thousands of dollars budgets like who's got a credit card to pay for $100 and an enterprise so especially when like a plugin expires and it was some product manager three years ago who bought that subscription and no one has access to their email address or their credit card or they need to receive so that is a pain constant pain we try and like work on either agency type licenses for some that allow that and then the ones that just don't operate that way that they have to do that and then try and coach them in making subscriptions email address or some sort of mailbox or that we're not having that problem in a year that we can't update Yoast because so-and-so who signed up for that's gone and we don't know how to retrieve it now it sounds familiar thanks we've got two questions left so we'll try and get through both of them so let's keep our answers relatively short hello good evening I'd like to ask how often does an enterprise WordPress installation become a mold rather than a puzzle meaning that how often does an engineer have to interfere in the code to make custom custom fixes and custom applications in a way that there has to be a familiarity in that enterprise with that associated developer that knows whereabouts of this exact installation can never enterprise in short how often can an enterprise site become a custom solution rather than a generic WordPress installation a modular kind of thing Carrie I'll let Carrie go first if I'm understanding correctly the beauty of WordPress and its modularity is that it can be extended in so many ways and there are different ways to customize that experience to make it into a more cohesive singular UI versus I think it was you mentioning earlier if you're managing a bunch of different plugins and each one has their own sort of interface that you've got to go through part of the it is a challenge but part of that is figuring out what it is the client is trying to do and then creating some sort of user interface that supports whatever their particular workflows are in terms of compromising that modularity that benefit that WordPress has in order to produce a custom solution that's my how often does it happen and is it a way to follow or is it I mean you say no customer when he says I want this but you know that it will require building a lot of back end code in order to accommodate their needs so do we draw a line and we go the modular way or we go on with customizing and delivering exactly what the customer wants on an enterprise level but I think that's one of the reasons why the client looks for the rocket surgeons these are the kind of almost ticket by ticket sprint by sprint decisions they have to be made sometimes an enterprise client can get a very generic solution because they have enterprise needs that tick other things they don't have a lot of complexity in the code but they want to have scale they want to have access to either good design resources or foreign resources but often you do get into quite complex decisions about how you customize WordPress for the client specific needs and that's why you get good engineers thank you one question left so let's try and slip it in before we all disappear for lunch thanks for all your perspectives really interesting Myles I think you said earlier that WordPress doesn't do a good job of marketing itself to enterprise a question for the whole panel maybe what do you see as the main issues or the main hurdles there have you perhaps got some thoughts on solutions or what the best ROI on that would be in terms of So I think when I say WordPress doesn't do it make it easy for the enterprise to buy WordPress when I was on the enterprise side you had to Amazon would come into my office Google would come into my office and they have the brochure the one throat to choke the enterprise roadmap and so that is appealing to an enterprise buyer who at some point is just trying to cover their ass in terms of making an investment decision but and they kind of they may rubbish WordPress but most of them don't but when WordPress comes into the office you know, is that XWP is it VIP is it some amorphous combination of things and then they go to research the ecosystem as well and they go okay well you know what is the WordPress ecosystem there's Adobe, there's cycle and break open things so I think the elements of WordPress as a solution for the enterprise buyer are all there but at some point we actually expect the enterprise buyer to put those together and I don't think that fundamentally has to change but we have to make it easier for the enterprise buyer to put those elements together and understand how the enterprise layer and the WordPress ecosystem there's a benefit I think to having modularity because at some point everyone falls out of love with their agency they say great take your code you know go to code company or whoever because you can but really you can't it's not that easy but it should the open source not only from the technology perspective from a business and the ecosystem perspective should be a strength that we're marketing to because if you go to really on stage he said to rubbish people you've got to arc there's nothing you can do if you go to Adobe you don't have really control of your own roadmap to a certain extent if you go to a hosted solution the data is not yours the code is not yours so those are the key elements you don't always win those battles because sometimes those are things that are not a high priority for the enterprise buyer but as a we should be trumpeting the benefits of open source as a kind of ecosystem to we don't do that well enough right so I don't have the solution but I don't have that I'm not going to prescribe a solution for that but that's where the embryonic gaggle and whoever wants to join the embryonic gaggle to get together I just saw I think it was Noel did it early in the week like even like Wix and Squarespace have like this full enterprise section on their side the whole journey took the bottom I don't I didn't see that I hadn't seen it before but was surprising to see that like something so consumer grade historically is even like got a very good narrative around Wix or Squarespace but like something so simple like that so they're definitely going after that as well Thank you very much for your questions Thank you all to the panel for joining us and sharing your experience and like see all of you Thank you Thank you very much Yes, thank you guys so much Yeah, let's give them an extra one Come on guys, yeah Alright, before you guys all leave there is just a quick announcement so lunch is actually pushed back to 115 So, yeah, at one just head out to the outdoor area to take the family photo I think there's going to be people kind of ushering you in that direction Sorry How was the Mia You're all coming in here Don't be shy So my name is Birgit Parlihak I'm your emcee for the afternoon and we have an awesome panel to come up here but before we start that and people kind of trickling in I have a few announcements So who's playing the WordPress the WordCamp Europe card game Who has exchanged some of the cards Alright, how many did you Aha, yeah You cheated No, but those cards are really cool So if you haven't looked at them yet they're actually printed work from the Museum of Block Art and it's a really interesting project and what you can do with block patterns and blocks that are not really content related So I really like that I want to remind you that you visit the sponsor areas between the panel and the next one 6x4 when Mad Mollinwigs event happens I think the sponsors are going to break down pretty soon afterwards So if you want to collect some more swag talk to the sponsors that would be your opportunity There's only two things on the wellness track left One is the 3 o'clock Tai Chi and the other one is the group hike from the sponsor area at 6 o'clock or 1800 And if you haven't yet from all the sessions please go to europe.workcamp.org slash 2023 slash feedback to leave your opinions about all the sessions because that helps everybody to get better get gifts feedback to the speakers that have spent quite some time to put it all together So it would be really helpful if you help them get better too I mentioned it already Mad's Q&A when you are so the people watching on the livestream if you want to send in questions for Mad or Matias or Josepha you can submit them through social media through the twitter or instagram or facebook of the official wordpress or wordcamp entities or profiles Then again a reminder on the after party and then I'm shut up It's a happy 20th birthday party starts at 2030 Well, half past 8 at the Lohan Athens nightclub bring your badge Otherwise you are not going to get in You will get a light snack and two drinks with tokens and if you need to drink more or somebody doesn't use the tokens that's okay and fine but you can also buy additional drinks So the panel format we have a panel contributing to wordpress without knowing how to code Just because there are many women here on the panel it does not mean that women don't code There are many good excellent coders that are women but it just happened that the panel came together like that So it's a 30 minute conversation Q&A for 15 minutes and then we have a 15 minute break before the next session starts I will turn it over to Birgit right away I just let you know who the other panelists are We have Birgit Olsson, then Patricia B.T. then Janko Nukaga and Alice Oru and Jussie also from Japan right? Well, Birgit Olsson is our panelist today a host of the panel today and she'll take it away Thank you Yeah Good afternoon I'm really glad to see you all here and welcome to our panel discussion like Birgit also said contributing to wordpress without knowing how to code As Birgit mentioned my name is Birgit Olsson and unfortunately the original host I met a a panelist who were original part of this panel couldn't attend due to the visa situation and on very short notice I'm really glad that Junko and Alice agreed on participating on this panel and sharing their stories and I'm also very thankful for the WordCamp Europe content team who were very responsive to deal with situation on short notice and yeah make the best of all So now let me introduce again Alice, Junko and Patricia I invite you Could you please introduce yourself for a short? Sure So I work as a content designer and software localization specialist especially for many things and wordpress things and plugins with a focus on inclusive and accessible writing and I started contributing wordpress in 2016 Hello, my name is Patricia I come from the French speaking part of Switzerland in Geneva I contribute to the community team by organizing event in my country Wordpress meetup now is 10 years for 10 years and co-organizer in WordCamp in Switzerland Hi, hello, my name is Junko Nukanga I live on a small island in Japan called Okijima with a population of 115 people Yeah I'm freelance web designer and with Wordpress I organize of WordCamp Kansai and WordCamp Kobe and I'm a deputy in the Wordpress community and one of this year's team lives I also do translation and report bugs when I notice them I'm not very good at English so today I'm supported by my Japanese friend Shusei I try to speak myself as much as possible but sometimes I may mix Japanese sorry, thank you Again Welcome to our panel and thank you for your assistance Ok, let's start with some personal experiences and your journey Could each of you share how you contribute to Wordpress project and what initially inspired you to get involved and why community What do you personally get from contributing to Wordpress but would you like to start by moving over to Alicia and then to Junco Do you want to introduce yourself as well first Ok, I call myself a Wordpress veteran because I've used Wordpress since the first release 20 years ago and I'm contributing to Wordpress over 13 years and I started translating Wordpress in German and then I also started a local translation platform on dewordpress.org Thanks to Robert Windisch who pushed me to do so and this when I started actively contributing to Wordpress but I also visited WordCams and now I'm focusing more on creating more awareness for diversity equality and inclusion in the Wordpress community so that everyone feels welcome and belonging to the Wordpress community Ok Can you just repeat the first question Yes Why community What do you personally get from contributing to Wordpress community So the first thing is I made friends from all around the world and by organizing local meetups I made long lasting friendship in my local community So that is the main good thing That is to contribute to community and organizing events and I get to travel to WordCamp Europe and nearby country WordCams for example from Switzerland I go to WordCamp in France in Italy and I try to volunteer all the time because it's such an amazing experience What I get is because every time every month when we do local meetups I learn something new all the time you know in the years also I learned how to organize events find sponsors raise funds and it's good also to have some diverse range of speakers who talk about so many topics so I learned a lot to meeting all those people Thank you So in my case I started contributing in 2016 and those times I recently joined a WordPress company WP Rocket so I was already working in translations and I met Laura Sarko who is one of the pillars of the Italian polyglots community and she onboarded it immediately because she said you can speak languages you can speak Italian I also speak Spanish and French so being a polyglot was my thing right away So I found the Italian community first then the Spanish one met the European one as well so I really first of all I'd say that the main reason why I'm here is because of as Patricia was saying because of people and I met a lot of friends over the years so speaking at work I'm also contributing via Slack and remotely where the community is a way to keep in touch with a lot of people scattered around the world so that's very precious for me and also professionally I'd say that the community has been my first training field because I learned about localization, internationalization very specific topics that it would have it would have been difficult maybe to pay maybe online course or going to university just to learn those stuff so the community was very supportive also in that sense so I own it a lot also in the professional side of things Yeah, thank you very inspiring Hi, I focus on WordPress community and support begging and orientation for people who want to start WordPress campus and thank you very much so as I understand you choose to contribute to WordPress because of the people within the WordPress community you found someone who had introduced you or you picked up your own profession within and found your field I would like to hear about your challenges and skills and how you overcome obstacles involved into the project What are the skills that I had when you started contributing when you what you learned through the process you told you learned so much English also to contribute and what are the obstacles you saw while contributing to WordPress Alice would you like to start and we move on to Junco and then to you The main obstacles I found I think was just getting used to all the I don't know many places where the community moves there is this lack there is the make or press there are a lot of places and channels of communication so at first maybe for me was a bit difficult to understand where my people were where the polyglots met but at the same time the onboarding process was pretty supportive so I always had people around that told me where to go where to find answers but yeah it was kind of I think it's natural when you start doing something new you feel overwhelmed a little bit by the many information and flow of information you can get but I mean the good thing of the WordPress community is that there's a lot of people doing this for so many years and they're very supportive so it's easy to find your way yeah that was the main obstacle I have to say in the Italian community and welcoming so I've always felt at home awesome yeah I think relationships can be very difficult most of us are doing WordPress things while having other jobs so communication in a limited time frame can lead misunderstandings we value dialogue but at the same time we try to make sure our honest opinions are hard for example when someone is struggling struggling thank you with someone else in the community I will not be really no but I will be as honest as possible about what I think yeah very important and if I am long I approach it I believe that even if the conflict is not resolved immediately immediately sorry no need for apologies we are all human beings yes and the most of the people who are attending to WordPress Europe are not native English speaking people yeah I think and honest so important yes absolutely agree so first Junko your English is better than my Japanese so thank you for contributing like this so about the struggle I think I'm a kind of freelancer or rather solo printer so one of my struggles was to work with a team when we were organizing WordCamping Switzerland so I had to learn to work with others and I got better at that I hope and on another level the struggle we faced organizing events especially WordCamps is about the multilingual part because the WordCamp site are not yet multilingual and in Switzerland we speak so many languages so thankfully this year we had the help of a great teammate Mark, Mark Owalsmid who used the great features of the site editor the full site editor and blocks to create as free languages WordCamp website so that was how we overcame this it's much better now with the site editor and yeah there is also struggles there is no budget for meetups monthly meetups so we have to get creative to find free venues and we somehow used to that now but it's now also because after the pandemic people get used to stay at home and sometimes it's difficult to even have people coming to the meetups so we have to get creative and that's good because we train our creative mind to find solutions that would be the struggle what do you think are also obstacles for new contributors to contribute to WordPress especially for people who are afraid or intimidated by having to know code because as we are seeing in the WordPress community there is some kind of celebrity around the core committers at the beginning how to contribute to a project like WordPress it's an open source project and so many talented people are also giving their time and effort and skills to it but I think we would like to have more people involved especially in underrepresented make teams for WordPress as you mentioned you started with translation you are organizing event what obstacles do you feel are there for new contributors to entry the WordPress ecosystem would you like to start yeah she's saying if there's too much things to do and get worried there might be an obstacle for the new contributors they don't have to be scared I have to do this I have to do that they can just start small so that could be one of the obstacles the she sees what do you see that's obstacle for new contributors to start yes there is this misconception that I don't know to code I cannot join or I'm not a designer I'm a beginner and I constantly repeat meetups and local wordcams you don't have to be so many things to do we need you I would say the first thing would be to attend meetups and local wordcams and join the contributor day where there is an onboarding process which is very welcoming also have a look at www.make.wordpress.org and look at the description for each team because you might find something that appeals to you and at the beginning when I started organizing meetups I didn't even know I was contributing to a large scale community I was thinking there is a local meetup about WordPress so I go there and they asked me the founder of this group were leaving the town and they asked two of us to take it over I didn't even realize there was 800 groups around the world and so many wordcams I didn't know about so I was contributing without knowing that I was contributing but when I say now to people please join we need it would be a dream if every WordPress user like 5% of their time to contribute to the project as we we talked yesterday about 5 to 5 for the future so it's good we have a free and priceless solution that is WordPress so it's good if we give back by any skill that you can contribute with Absolutely Patricia said it all but I wanted to add up that from my experience what I notice is meetup maybe contributor days local wordcams or even European ones are very crowded there's a lot of people starting from they want to contribute what I notice is that sometimes it's difficult to make people say so you have a lot of onboarding the first day and then over time it's difficult to keep up so what Patricia said about finding your local places your local people it's very important to keep the motivation of that first contributor day because it's easy to be onboarding on the first day but then when you get back home you get caught up with your job your family and your life and maybe the contribution is left a bit on the side so maybe as a community we should keep on strongly encouraging people to keep in touch even remotely and sharing the way we can do that without even being let's think about how many people live in little towns or remote places where there's not even a local meetup so finding community moments online and remotely is still very important Absolutely I got something to what Alicia said I just heard that a new meetup group has been created in Catalonia to be rural sorry rural I know rural meetup for Catalonia that will go from small towns to small towns because there is no meetups and that's a great initiative that should be shared and copied and also for meetup organisers sometimes we don't have an idea who to invite what to do but to say at next month's meetup so we could simply do contribution meetups So you would say the easiest entry point into the virtuous contribution is going to a meetup attending to a meetup or maybe organising a meetup but what's about the other projects and teams within a virtuous community which doesn't involve to have the knowledge about how to code as we see we have the documentation team the training team who are building LearnWetress.org who want to help to build more confidence we have also the WP diversity team who is very very passionate about to motivate and encourage new contributors to speak to be on a stage like this but also the testing for WordPress everything which every project involves development needs also other parts I guess no developer is really fond of it of the idea to write the documentation or am I wrong So what do you see are the most needed parts of the WordPress community contribution ecosystem to jump in when you are not a developer I struggle with this word sorry I'm not a native English speaking person what do you think it's the most vulnerable part of a community where we need more active contributors do you like maybe okay we are going not for example translations is one of the polyglots group is one of the groups that really is accessible to almost anyone knowing their own language that's what Laura Sacco told me when I started you know Italian you know Italian well of course you have to speak the language well but there's a lot to do even in the polyglots team without knowing how to code we translate plugins, themes we translate the core but we also do a lot of documentation and have translating documentation from other teams so there's really a lot to do of what the WordPress community has a whole produces there's a lot to translate and if you know your language well enough there's always need for a good hand to work on those documents and the many things that the whole community produces and would like to translate I started also to translate some years ago but it's not where I was the best so you know it depends what you like and you look at the list as I said before on make.wordpress.org and you see the list of all the teams whatever sounds good nice to you to participate but you just join the Slack and begin to talk with people at the office hours on Slack and read the chat maybe you will find something very exciting you will make friends as I love and yeah I think it's up to you what you are good at what you like sorry and in Japan original Slack region Japanese Slack, WordPress Slack and and one week one time gathering Slack translation time we have and so gathering and mentoring and so kind so you are doing some kind of WP translation days in Japanese where you onboard new contributors and also work on the project itself yeah sorry sorry so you do it weekly weekly not monthly or not yearly Friday from 10pm and we in Japan we welcome everybody to come in and translate plugins or themes or even the documents that's just amazing I'm totally jealous so yeah and whenever people come in we don't do it in Zoom or in person style we only do it in Slack so everybody can join from let's say home or their work or maybe somewhere else and if there are newcomers coming in we always welcome them and we ask them what they want to do and we try to guide them to how they can do it like sustainably I think Alice I think we were saying that sustainability for onboarding new contributors is key process so that's what we've been doing in Japan and part of that also so I think she said translations keep on going would be a good thing to do awesome yep thank you just one short advice for new contributors what would you tell when someone approaches you I would like to contribute to WordPress how can I get involved how can I do it be your takeaway tip for them would you like to start yes it's basically what I said before about looking what they like to do but I would emphasise on the fact that it's a very inclusive community that we try to to like help all diverse diversity diverse people to join and yeah make friends and eat good food but not kids food is always a good topic yeah we say go all in don't worry and for everyone who is also listening not only contribute sorry when you contribute to WordPress it's not only about bringing in your own time and knowledge money is always welcomed so we have some initiatives in the WordPress community not only the 5 for the future program where companies can pledge time or their employees can pledge time to contribute to WordPress but also we have the the WP Collective I hope I recall it right I will tweet about it where you as a company or a freelancer can donate your money so that contributors can get funded to pursue and continue their work and contribute especially if you are on a level with a high responsibility or be in a bottleneck because a big project like WordPress is sometimes really hard to stay consistent if you are working on it on your spare time and you don't have the financial backgrounds to give in more time so that's why I think it's important that we as a community also make room and say these are contributors who are very involved and passionate about contributing to WordPress we need to support them with room or even money to help them to stay on track so yeah that's what do you think about this? This is very important Esfa to be like find your people as Patricia was saying find what you like but also the people you like to spend time with so that's a very important part of the contributing experience and ask a lot of questions because there will be a lot but we have a lot of documentation and information to provide so yeah ask questions and find your people to I mean we try to be a valuable community so I feel safe in giving this tip you will find somebody you like Thank you I guess there's also the mentorship program rolling in into where new contributors of WordPress can get a personal mentor to guide them and Hari Shankar is currently hard working on it so please reach out on makewordpress.org reach out on Twitter to us any questions I would like to invite you and I'm really glad that you all attended to our panel and I would like to open the floor for questions from our beloved audience please Well thank you so much a big hand before for all the panelists and when you get ready for your questions line up behind the microphones because the live audience will hear it and we have the first question over there one two three Hello my name is Tobi I'm one of the global mentors for the polyglots team so a couple of people in this room may have seen me before wanted to ask does the community team have any obvious place where you would collect good ideas about how to do things in a different way or what could be improved because I have a feeling that there are so many different things happening there are so many people involved that I a little bit lose track on ok if I just have some idea is there any kind of virtual box where I could just drop this idea so it doesn't get lost Do you mind? First on Slack make WordPress Slack you find a channel corresponding to the team you want to suggest things to and then there would be a post posted on make.worthpress.org Publicly you can comment and bring new ideas I think in every channel there is office hours as well so at that time there is a lot of people to reply to you Thank you for your question and thank you also for your dedicated work as a polyglots and we worked together for a long time on a polyglots global polyglots mentor team so thank you also for your contribution and your questions please Hi my name is Olga possibly some also saw me before anyway I'm wondering what is your next big WordPress desire what you wish like big wish you can like accomplish with help of all this audience who are looking for us right now so what you want Would you like? I hope Run World Camp Asia in Japan Do you have any ideas what's your best because wish for WordPress in the community I would like to I mean we keep on talking about diversity and inclusion and accessibility which is the three topics that I care a lot about but a lot of people in the community care about this and we had some interesting panelists yesterday and talks about this and we are talking about that it's a hot topic I mean it's been a hot topic for years and so I hope that this conversation keep going and we find more places and times to to speak about it like face to face or even remotely but like taking really good care of this I would love for WordPress to be more European it means for example last year in Porto at the Thursday event there were Portuguese dancers that bring a lot of local feel instead of only English international feel maybe in the future we can have translation tool automated tools and have more something more European rather than only cosmopolitan I think Yes Yes Multilingual translation Yeah Would be great My biggest wish is also to have some kind of entity within a WordPress community to ensure the diversity, equality and inclusion not only on WordPress camps but also within the contributing groups so that there's a dedicated team who have the knowledge and work intensively to make sure that everyone despite of color or gender or sexual orientation or skill set feels welcome and finds a place within the WordPress community Thank you Olga Great question Olga One more question Harry Hello Hi everybody, my name is Harry Shankar I am a community deputy and as Bergen mentioned I am trying to build a mentorship program for WordPress So my question is to all of you Alice you mentioned about the contributor journey about how somebody starts contributing at the contributor day then they are not able to go forward like life comes into it but I found it very interesting and that's the problem that I am trying to solve first of all point one get more people to come into WordPress and point two get them to stay So my question to all of you is I mean you are all basically non-code contributors so my question to all of you is I would like to hear your thoughts on how to solve that problem how can we get somebody who comes into the project to stay based on the paid points that you faced what are the ideas that we can do to sort of like fix that problem Thank you First of all Thank you for your question It's really a pain point to keep contributing or contributors on track and keep them motivated to contribute For my experience we started in Germany the marketing team twice and it dried out because they couldn't stay longer on the project and I think we need more involvement and as you mentioned the mentorship program I think it's important that we stay in touch and communicate on a regular basis and ask for their needs also what obstacles do they face during their journey first of all we learn as mentors and experienced contributors but also to maybe solve issues we didn't see as an experimental seasoned contributor Yeah, I have the same experience in the Italian Polyglot team I think we were one of the first teams to organize a mentorship program inside the translation process so every experienced translator had one of you new contributors to follow during their journey at the beginning of their translation journey and this worked very well because you have instantly you have a reference inside a community somebody to speak and ask questions to and that's very important for people knowing where to find that person that can solve the questions maybe not in the common channel but we can be intimidating sometimes not posing that question in the whole group so having like a direct channel of communication with your mentor it's very important also for operational tasks like translations Do you have any I think you said it all Yeah this and what you mentioned before to be sponsored because for independent workers it's a bit more difficult to balance with your client work Yeah Do you have additional ideas? I agree you and I believe size of contribution does not matter everyone can contribute and let's encourage each other and it's nice to each other These are the two Thank you very much Folks I don't know if they have this time I wanted to ask one more follow up can I ask one more question Well Quick Not to everybody Very short, very quick question So all of you One answer So it's related to this Many of you mentioned that life comes in the way that is a pain point which stops you from contributing I mean generally Other than that Is there anything in the project at this time that makes the process of contributing slower prevents people from contributing continuously I think that's overwhelming of information we need more guidance on the onboarding process on a WordPress site so make it more visual from every make team I feel overwhelmed and I'm a seasoned contributor WordPress and I can't imagine how it feels for a newcomer So I think like you also did for your proposal for the mentorship program to visualize the path the contributor journey have some visual guiding how they can start and where can they jump into the project but when you have some designers you don't need to have to code or a project manager you don't need to code to contribute to those user journeys and contributive journeys to WordPress Does this answer your question? Absolutely. Thank you Well, that's all the time we have I'm so sorry I keep talking with everybody here for another 2 hours I think I have the little presence for you exploring newanıs. Every attendee has a set of four cards and if you have it in your swag bag, mingle network meets these other rules. Meet new people and trade your cards. Each other four cards from the block art museum you will get from the community booth and that's the perfect segue if you want to learn more about 21 themes για να μην χειροκρότητας να γνωρίζει αυτό. Η τελή ευρώπη για την πρόσφυγή του μητέρα, γιατί αν είσαι στην κατάσταση, γιατί δεν θα έρθει πιο κλείο, γιατί είναι πιο κομμασιασμένο και δεν είναι πολύ δύσκολο. Γιατί εκεί, ο μητέρας δεν θα δει εσύ. Πριν, ναι. Γνωρίς μου είναι Πιρκη Πόλι-Χάγκ, είμαι η κοινή κερία. Έχω δεχτεύει τρεις εξογητές για εσένα. The first, and very important, because this is one of the last sessions of the two days, please give feedback about the sessions that you visited, that you listened to, and that you participated in, go to the WordPress Europe website for 2023 slash feedback, and you feedback, and then you can fill out the form for each session that you participated in. For the livestream audience, if you are watching on the livestream, you can also submit questions via social media for Matt's Q&A that happened at four in an hour, roughly in an hour. Just you can submit them to Twitter and Instagram, both is WC Europe, is the account, and also on the Facebook page. Very important, for the after party, it's the theme is Happy 20th birthday WordPress. It starts at 9.30, which is 2030, at the Lohan Athens nightclub. Very important, bring your badge, otherwise you will have trouble getting your snack or getting your two drink tokens, and you can also get additional drinks purchased. So we can start on time. I am happy to introduce the next speaker, which is Petya Rykovskaya, and the talk is leading with cultural intelligence strategies for breaking the invisible boundaries of global business. Petya is joining us from Bulgaria. She is the director of agency operations at HumanMate, a globally distributed WordPress agency. In 15 plus years of experience in software development industry, Petya held roles in product marketing, event management, enterprise media, product development, business operations, project management, and resource management. Petya has volunteered, led and enabled global open source communities, one of which is the WordPress polyglots, where we heard so much about it in the previous talk here. She played a key role in developing their passion for breaking the boundaries of cross-cultural communication. Give it up for Petya Rykovskaya. Thank you. Hi, I'm just going to drop this over here. All right, last session, let's be on time. First time I'm using this, excuse me. So let's see if it works. Starting with a story. It's 9.03, and I'm late. It's not a new thing. But exactly 8 minutes ago, all my notifications started popping up. I have all of them set. Calendars, Apple, Watch, Phone, Desktop, Google Calendar, iCal all started popping up. And yet, I'm late. I went to see the call agenda. I got carried away. I'm jumping on a call three minutes late, and my colleague looks very pissed. And she's right. I mean, I shouldn't be late. But the issue is I am always late, and she says that. This is turning into a thing, and I'm getting really... that this is turning into a problem for me, so what are we going to do about it? I try and take a deep breath, and I try to calm down. Because to me, three minutes shouldn't be that big of a deal. They shouldn't. They really shouldn't. And I know that. And we're wasting time discussing something after I'm already late. I try to keep composed and apologize. That's the simplest way to move forward. But inside of my head, my grumpy Bulgarian is angry. Three minutes should not be a big deal. The thing is, my colleague is American. I know for them being on time is important. She's right. I'm being disrespectful. But I was born in communist Bulgaria, and I spent the first seven years of my life under the regime. And the rest of my life, like rebelling against anyone or anything that tried to put me in a strict border. So time was one of the things I was actively rebelling against. In my teenage years, it's cool. Trying to convince my teachers, it doesn't matter. I'm late for class. I'm still going to be top of the class. I went to an extreme where I almost didn't graduate, even though I was on top of my class, but something in Bulgaria would call an excusable absence, and I had too many of those. So yeah, time. Time is one of the things that makes a big difference between how people perceive situations and behave across cultures. And for my American colleagues, three minutes are a big deal. So in the global world that we live in working today, where people are remote and all over the world, we all speak English. Somehow that became the language of our business. But what also happened is somehow, along the way, Western cultural norms became the norm of the business world. And even though we all speak English, miscommunication often happens because of that. And it happens because we have differences in our cultural background. When miscommunication and misunderstanding happens at work, it's usually due to differences in our cultural programming. In your personal and professional life, cultural awareness should be the next big thing. Especially if you need to run, and especially if you need to lead across cultures. But in any role in our kind of new global reality, post-pandemic, I guess a lot of businesses have gone remote, regardless of whether you're building a business or actively contributing to WordPress, it helps. Cultural intelligence will give you an edge and the ability to understand the people around you. These are kind of the three pillars that are important today. Obviously being smart is important to run a business, but not even remotely enough. The emotional intelligence became a thing when smart people realized that they need to work with other smart people to be able to actually achieve something. You know, how easy it would be if people weren't involved in the things that we wanted to do. And today the new thing is learning to work with people who are not like you. And that is where cultural intelligence comes into play. The Dutch social psychologist whose name I perpetually have not been able to pronounce, and I'm going to try now, and the Dutch people among you, if there are any of you, excuse me, who is probably going to be familiar to those of you who have dealt with the issue of cultural differences. He introduced the cultural dimensions many, many years ago. He said that culture is the software of the mind. It is the operating system that invisibly runs our lives and the way we have been programmed to see the world. And cultural intelligence is often the missing piece when people from different cultures work together. That or the willingness and ability to understand colleagues due to benchmarking their behavior with your own culture. This is where this disclaimer comes in. Very often, when I talk cultural differences with people, I get confronted with the following. You shouldn't really talk about culture here. You should just get to know the individual. It's important to know who you're speaking to. It's important to get to know the person in front of you. We're all unique. The cultural difference leads to stereotyping. Stereotyping is bad. You should be looking and judging people as individuals, not as a product of their environment. Which is all true. It is. We are all unique and this is important. But understanding someone's cultural background is not about you. And it's not about the person that you're talking to. The issue is that if you ignore cultural context, you judge everyone's behavior with your own culture as a benchmark. So your standard is what you know. One of the definitions of cultural intelligence in an outsider's seeming ability to understand and perceive the behaviors of others, the ambiguous gestures and the puzzling things that they do, similarly to how that person's co-patriots would. So over the years I've held two primary jobs. The past ten years I've been a part of the WordPress community and eight years ago I joined HumanMade. Both distributed global companies that gave me the opportunity to work with people from everywhere and to be puzzled as a person coming from a specific part of the world. When HumanMade was created, it was Tom and Joe freelancing for a British newspaper. So the majority of the employees over the years were a part of the Anglo cluster, similar to them. They're both from the UK born and raised. And as the company grew, we acquired small Australian agencies, then they started hiring people from the Americas, they started expanding the number of people. Almost all of us in the beginning came from the WordPress community, so they were following kind of the model of how the open source project was built, hiring the best people wherever they were, working with clients all over the place. And then the polyglots team is probably the biggest WordPress team. It has thousands and thousands of people, probably like in the tens of thousands, translating into more than 200 languages and language variants, also coming from all over the world. So when I first started working with the WordPress polyglots team, I was completely petrified, because it's almost like being thrown into a meeting of the United Nations having to be a big representative, and very quickly they gave me a lead role, which also meant that I needed to resolve conflict. So how can a complete rookie that has no understanding of a lot of cultural differences really do that? I was really, really scared, because I knew nothing. What turned out throughout the years was this knowing nothing when you're in a position like that and being curious is way better than if you think that you know everything and you know how things should be done, because you can't know all things about all people. Also, you don't really have to. We'll repeat this quite a lot throughout this talk. Cultural intelligence is not how much you know about others. Cultural intelligence is your ability to suspend judgment based on the way that you perceive the world, to accept that there is not a single normal, not only in business, in your communication with all types of people, and to have a general awareness about key differences in the way people think when they're in front of you. If curiosity is the key, let's start with this theory. The global cultural clusters as defined by David Livermore in his CQ inside series highly recommended, if you're curious about that sort of thing, they will teach you how to behave with people and how you're travelling as well as how to talk to your colleagues coming from other places. They're very interesting and very American, as in they were written with the American context in mind, explaining cultural differences to an American audience. So it's sometimes very funny to listen to that as somebody coming from a completely different culture. And it's important to acknowledge that, you know, cultural clusters can be dispersed, they're not geographically necessarily focused. There are some cultural clusters that are all over the place, there are some geographic regions that only have a specific culture. In the current global world, everyone is everywhere, and culture is not only where you come from. It's also how you are raised, what religion you are in, what profession you chose and how you pursued that. It's important to acknowledge how high level these definitions are and how diverse and mixed the world is. You might be born into one cultural cluster, but highly, highly influenced by another, just like me. I have worked quite a lot in the last ten years with people from all over the world. Most of the lessons that I've learned, I've learned by doing, and I've made quite a lot of mistakes and broken quite a lot of relationships along the way. This is the hard way to do this. But I never really found a good framework to put all of my knowledge into until I read the culture map by INSEAD professor Aaron Mayer. It's great because it gives you a simple, simple 8-scale to differentiate cultural differences. And we're going to go through those now. So these differences shape how people communicate, make decisions, lead, provide feedback, disagree, perceive time, decide and trust across cultures. And based on those, we're able to create a map of relativity that can help you navigate this complex environment and understand situations, build strategies around choosing how to approach challenges. Just build a basis of a point from where to go. So we won't have time to dive really deeply into all of them, but I want to take you through some stories from colleagues and friends through most of them and hopefully you can relate to some of these situations. Communication. The communication scale divides into low context and high context cultures. In low context cultures, good communication is precise, simple and clear. Messages are expressed and understood at phase value and repetition is appreciated. It helps clearly define communication. In high context cultures, good communication is sophisticated, it's layered, messages can be both spoken and implied and body language and obviously different factors play a very, very, very big role. And on the one end of the scale, you can see the Anglo clusters and on the other end of the scale, you can see the East Asia and Confucian Asia clusters. So communication as the big, big thing in the cultural differences is one of the things that we get wrong very often. And if you think about it, what remote work did to the business, people coming from high context cultures very often cannot read the cues that they are used to in day-to-day communication. They can't read body language, our cameras are off, so sometimes you can't even read facial expressions. So they're at a little bit of a disadvantage, which is why remote work, in remote work in multicultural teams, we need to create low context processes and non-native English speakers need to be invited to speak. Because in high context cultures, people are used to your reading their whole demeanor, not just what they're saying, sometimes that might even be a different thing. You need to be able to perceive their behavior and judge about what they want to communicate from that. It strips people from specific cultures. Remote work strips people from specific cultures being able to perceive and understand situations. And the Japanese are famous apparently for being able to read the air in a room. So environment surrounding the person is extremely important. So it's important when you're creating your company cultures and culture and values, and your behavioral framework to have that in mind. When you're in a situation and people from various backgrounds in the room defaulting to low context communication is one thing. But also being very clear that that's what you're doing is the next thing that you need to do. And it's not just enough to say, this is how we do it now, you all do it like that. Because some people are not going to speak unless invited. And asking people whose default is to speak up when they're told to and people who need to be invited to speak to do the same thing is actually asking for a completely different level of effort if you have a cross cultural team. You know, it will be way harder for some people to be initiative. The next scale is the power distance. This is where I have numerous examples. But first of all, let's go through what one and what the other is. So egalitarian and hierarchical are the two ends. So when egalitarian structure means low power distance, the ideal distance between a boss and his burden is very low. The best boss is a facilitator among equals, organizational structures are flat, and communications keeps hierarchical lines. You can talk to anyone, it's fine. It doesn't really matter. It's okay to disagree with your boss openly. It's okay to call them out on things. People are more likely to move kind of to action without getting permission, just being more and more initiative. Where in hierarchical structures, everything is very, very defined. The ideal distance is high. And the best boss is the strong kind of director who leads from the front. Status is important, extremely important. Organizational structures are multilayered and very complicated. Communication flows a very specific line. You cannot just jump over somebody's boss. And if you send your boss to a meeting, they will send theirs. So power distance is such an interesting thing, because human-made is the most egalitarian company I've ever worked from. Nobody, it would never ever occur to anyone to call our CEO Tom. There he is over there, Mr. Wilmot. That would be extremely sarcastic if anybody did that borderline passive-aggressive. Tom runs barefoot around at company retreats in pants. We've seen him in like five years in a row, and he can talk to you about Age of Empires and his kids and the state of enterprise WordPress publishing in the same conversation. He will dance like no one's watching in front of everyone, and you can just go to him as the last person starting in company and start a conversation about anything. As an example of our egalitarian structure, I once gave feedback to our CTO, the other partner in the company, Joe, on stage at WordCampUS about a very shitty website that he built that deprived me from being able to edit the back-end. This is how open our feedback process is. And when they created the company, the values and the behaviors that they expected kind of transferred to everybody else. So the company they built is like very low power distance, very egalitarian, very flat. We only started introducing Yarraki the moment we started growing very, very much. And at some point I became somewhere in the middle of that Yarraki, a person that had to hire their team. And I hired two allocation managers from opposite sides of the world because as a global company we needed to cover three regions. To be able to do that, I hired Shannon from Chicago and Vanita from Bangalore, both really skilled, amazing women who I thought had very similar aptitude to work and were very much alike one another. They were both initiative, fun, very outspoken, very diligent, just really, really, both seemed really great. And in terms of communication, their interviews went in a very similar way. We were just chatting and when I hired them, I thought that I have a team that will be pretty easy to manage. And I mean, big mistake number one. I had the same approach towards managing both of them. The first thing that I do when I start working with somebody new, especially when they're a part of my team, is I talk about feedback because I used to not receive feedback well and I know how touchy that is. And it's been a point of friction for me for years. So I sat them down and I told them, I love feedback in context. We give and receive feedback in the open. You're open to criticize me and kind of contradict me in public. Like if I'm saying something stupid, just like call me out on it, it's fine. That's the most normal thing. But please, please, just like don't wait for feedback review to come in to kind of tell me what you're thinking. And if we're working on a project, you're absolutely welcome to just disagree with me. And they were like, oh, this is amazing. This is so great. Thank you. You know, they enthusiastically said that that was something that they loved. And we started working and with Shannon, I had no issues. She was, you know, really kind of boldly kind of giving suggestions in discussions in public. We were talking about options. She was agreeing, kind of contradicting and all that. Oh man, the first time Bonita and I were on a call. And I publicly disagreed with her. And I told her that I think that there is a better way to do it. We went on a 101 call after because I saw her face blank out. She did not speak until the end of the common call that we were having. And we went on a 101 and she burst it crying. She was just like, you're going to fire me now, aren't you? I was like, what? I want to understand what happened. You know, what happened? And she said, I mean, she said I was wrong and you told me I was wrong in front of everyone. Like how can you, I thought that was it. She was still, you know, on probation. So like that kind of makes sense. And I asked her, but we just a couple of days ago had this conversation. Feedback in public, you know, the public disagreements, all of that. And she said, well, you're my boss. Of course, I'm going to say that's okay. Trust, the big thing. So task-based and relationship-based trust. And you have countries on both ends of the map. The essence of this is that for low context egalitarian cultures, trust is built by doing things. You say you're going to do what you say you're going to do, you do it, we trust you. On the other side of that is the relationship-based trust. And there are people who only build trust through relationships and through doing things together. And throughout my years in the WordPress community traveling all over the world, I guess the most valuable lesson that I've learned is, you can't do business in Japan without going to karaoke. You cannot do business in Portugal or Italy without overeating. There's no way. They just won't work. Multicultural remote teams need FaceTime. They need to be able to build relationships and personal relationships. So getting them live in person is important. And if you can't do that, like we couldn't during the pandemic, create an environment where these things can happen even remotely and in person. The decisions, the decisions scale is very interesting. The consensual versus top-down decision-making. So decisions and consensual decisions are made in groups through agreement. And in top-down decisions are made by individuals. Obviously, cultures with high power distance usually do top-down decision-making and countries with low power distance do consensual decision-making. The worst thing you can do if you have a multicultural team is your egalitarian consensual teams to enforce a top-down decision on them. Oh man, they will fight you on that and trust will be broken. In multicultural teams, the first thing you need to decide is how you're going to make decisions and do not apply the same approach in all your regions with all your people. Disagreeing confrontational versus avoid confrontation cultures. We tried at human-made last year, not we tried, like we started embedding the principles of high-performing teams. And one of those principles is embracing conflict as a way to move past an obstacle. This is a very kind of egalitarian low power distance cultural norm and it was extremely heavy and difficult for our APAC region who were concerned very silently about it at first. Three months later, somebody raised their hand and said, actually conflict is not something that we are very comfortable with and it's true. Where in some cultures conflict is accepted and embedded within the mindset, there's no way, like unless you disagree, there's no way to constructively move on. In others, it breaks relationships, especially conflict in public. It breaks the harmony, it's embedded in their, like from their religious, all the way to kind of their mindset believes shouting in public is not acceptable. On the other side of that, like some of my French friends and my Greek friends for that matter and my Italian friends will shout at each other and fight openly at the dinner table and then go dancing together. If that happened somewhere in East Asia, these people would never speak to each other again. And feedback. That's a tricky one as well. Do you give it in public? Can you give it in public? When you give it in private, how are you supposed to give it? If you're managing a team that has like different cultural backgrounds, if you adopt the same approach, you're going to piss off someone. If you go very soft, would like the sandwich approach to people that are used to being very direct, they're going to piss them off. If you do direct, very abrupt feedback blunt to a person that is used to a soft approach, you're going to demotivate them and make them cry. So think about where the person you're talking to was born and how they were raised. Try and get to know them before you have to provide feedback. Direct negative feedback versus indirect negative feedback, frankness or diplomacy. Is speaking frankly a gift or is it a burden? Is it a slap in the face? On the one side we have our APEC team who we have to approach everything very cautious with, and we need to be very careful about defending someone. On the other side is my colleague frank who will call you an idiot in a comment in a post and then be happy having a beer with you. Persuading is one of my favorites, but I'm kind of running out of time here on the scale, which is why I'm going to tell you that it's roughly related to how the educational system is where you grow up. So if you were taught theory first, then you do principles first approach, and if you were taught implementation first, like let's do and learn by doing, then that is the application's first approach. But based on where you grew up and how you were taught, how somebody else can persuade you that you were taught, how somebody else can persuade you is very related to that, which brings us back to time. Punctuality versus my slide is wrong, it needs to say flexibility, or how late is actually late. In linear time project steps are very consecutive. If you're familiar with the waterfall approach, this is basically what linear time means, everything needs to be organized. Time, one step follows the other, nothing can overlap. The focus is on the deadline, sticking to that. The schedule, following the schedule is a must, it's very important. Conscious, everything is conscious of time. Emphasis is on promptness and good organization, not flexibility. With flexible time project steps are approached in a fluid manner, changing tasks as opportunities arise. Many things are dealt with at once and interruptions are okay. The focus is on adaptability and flexibility, and that's valued. So, with scheduling, how late is late is actually quite relative, and it's probably okay that three minutes late means nothing to me, but means everything to my American colleagues. The important thing to remember, however, is that the culture map is a scale. Everything is relative, and you have to judge situations by the people that you have in the room and adapt. Developing your cultural intelligence is actually not that difficult. It doesn't mean knowing everything about every person that's in front of you. In looking for a formula for this, because of course I will look for a formula, a one, two, three step to developing your cultural intelligence, I happened upon this talk by Julia Middleton, who's also a professor, and she talks about the two things that we have in our self, which is one is our core and one is our flex. And our core is, when thinking about your core, you should ask yourself, what is the most important thing for me? What are the most important things for me? What are the things that make me me? What are the things that make you you? What are the values and behaviors without which you're not going to be yourself anymore? And that's your core. And everything else, if you want to develop your cultural intelligence, needs to be in your flex. These graphs here, on your left over there, is a person that changes their core values and behaviors so often that there's no way for you to trust them. That's too unacceptable. On the other side of that is my grandpa, who never ever changes anything that he thinks and believes and who, until his dying day, insisted that I needed to know my place in life and how dare I deviate from that. And in the middle, somewhere in the middle, is that flexibility that we all must have. And on the borders of that are our knots. At some point, during your journey, you're going to, as you meet people and learn things, you're going to happen upon things that make you uncomfortable. And maybe things that you're not very proud of in your upbringing, parts of your cultural programming that you maybe question, and parts of your cultural programming that are challenged by other cultures. And these are your knots. So, that same, my place in life thing that my grandfather really wanted to kind of push upon me was my knots. It's so deeply engraved into how I was raised that I actually fight with it every day. So, my natural cultural programming is telling me, no, don't speak up, don't want more, know your place. My knot is kind of, and me questioning my knots, is just telling me, move on. It's not to you, this can be in your flex. So, CQ is developed by having the courage to have those conversations that make you uncomfortable. And having the willingness to admit your knots and either move past them, or accept and acknowledge them. Because when you meet other people, you can only develop your cultural intelligence if they decide to share with you, and they will only do it if they think that you have enough cultural intelligence to accept and admit. And there are some things that you can do, can listen, learn to listen, actively learn and show interest in others, not perceive otherness as threatening, can be aware of your knots, learn to make a fool of yourself, and recognize and stand up to cultural intolerance. Can tune your body, head and heart towards listening, and maybe you will never understand, but at least you will learn. Because cultural intelligence starts with understanding your own culture. Am I out of time? Yeah, I'm late. Oh, I'm late. Okay. I have two more slides. Can I do them? Okay. So reverse engineer yourself and challenge your culture. Because apparently, I am late, and for at least some of this, for some of you this will be outrageous. Thank you. Thank you. We have time for Q&A. So if you took something that you wanted to ask Petya for about cultural intelligence. About anything, really? Or other things. Yeah. There are two microphones here, left and right, and if you want to line up there, we have about 10 minutes for, 7 minutes for Q&A, we have about 10 minutes for Q&A, 7 minutes for Q&A, before we make everybody late for math. Okay. So are there any questions? Toby. Yes. Hi, Toby. Hi, Petya. Thank you. Great speech, really. I mean energizing. Okay. You said that you were, you got a very rough start as a global political mentor. Okay. This is an internal joke. Toby is the other, yeah, I pushed that role onto him and kind of left for a while, which is why he is on mic right now. Just threw him in the bin after I was thrown in the same way. It's okay. I can deal with it. Okay. Now. Yeah. So I think one thing you should just show the public here, how a typical Bulgarian will show with their head, yes and no, because I mean, India is a bit separate, right? And Bulgarian is another place. Okay. Yeah. Well, so Bulgarians shake their heads for yes and not for no. It's very similar to how Greek say ne, which means yes in their language and in our language that means no. So we're very close, but it can be a part of that. Thanks, Toby. Yeah. Hi. First of all, compliments for your Dutch pronunciation of Geert Hofstede, I think it was. Oh my God. Are you Dutch? I am mortified. Three Dutch people tried to teach me that in the last two and a half days and I probably... Don't worry about it. One question I had. You talked about the values within human made and also the differences you have with the teams in the different regions. So what is your number one tip to make sure that those values which are, well, let's say a little bit Dutch, so straightforward, out in the open, how do they translate and how do you translate them to those teams in other regions? Well, it's a converse. It has like the most important thing is for it to be a conversation, for it to not be something that you push on them, but you for whoever you're onboarding into your company, we have like really paid attention to our onboarding processes. Those values need to be a conversation. These are our values, not just like these are our values, follow them. These are our values. How do they make you feel? Do you have any questions? Is there anything that maybe worries you? And then ask those questions over and over again as you see people struggling with some of them. Because as I said, some people will say everything is okay. But maybe you can also approach those conversations a little differently by unfortunately having to use stereotypes. You know, knowing it specifically which team you're talking to, some things you can invite in to the conversation a bit more broadly. But basically that just don't push them down, just discuss them. Thank you. Yeah. Time for one last question, George. Hi Pat, yeah. Hi. I have a question about when, you know, trying to have these conversations who should be responsible for initiating the conversation? If there's a group that is, you know, like you talk about at Human Made, it's a very Anglo-oriented company, should it be the Anglo-focused people that are initiating these conversations to better understand the people that are from Southeast Asia? Or is it the people that are more of the outsider should be initiating the conversations about their needs and how they're doing it? Yeah. You know, it's interesting because actually in our American region we have representatives from several clusters now, which you think, you know, Americans can communicate and talk to each other and all that, but like when the Brazilian team joined all of these things kind of became very, very apparent. You know, people that struggle a little bit with that English or weren't, were from a different cultural background, weren't that open to speaking up, etc. The great thing about Human Made is we are very enabled from the get-go to initiate conversations at any level who should be responsible, whoever notices, who should be responsible for embedding a culture of understanding diversity and cultural awareness and cultural intelligence. That's definitely on the head of the company. We need to have those conversations. Yeah, there he is. Well, not just you. Or were you raising your hand because you had a question? But yeah, I think that it should start with the company, why their company values, why they think that it's okay to be different. And it should kind of cascade down, cascade down towards everyone. But we've had so many amazing examples. Human Made's gone from a egalitarian towards a hierarchical structure. But throughout the years, the people who have been a part of our very, very flat company in the beginning have felt so enabled because we learn by doing and we copy behaviors and try and lead by example in the company, I think people just naturally kind of soak up. But there are definitely situations where you see that there's something happening or something isn't happening and that's where you question why it isn't happening and when you find the answer there, you initiate the conversation. And it should happen at all layers of the company, I think it shouldn't be the responsibility of a single department or even a single person. Alright, that's all the time we have today. Okay. Thank you all for coming. Thank you. I have a little present for you. Thank you. I'll be outside if you'd like to for the chats. There's quite a lot to talk about, I guess. Alright, thank you so much. So, yeah. And that concludes the session here at Track 2. I will ask you to all go over to Track 1 to listen to Matias Ventura and Josepha Hayden Jean-Foussi talking about variations on the 20th anniversary and then followed by a Q&A with Matt Molenveig. For those on the live stream, you can submit your questions for Matt or others through Twitter, Instagram and Facebook and Twitter and Instagram, the account is WCEurope, one word, small letters. Well, thank you all so much. And I'll see you over there. Track 1.