Got to attend WordCamp Asia 2024 and it was a wonderful conference. Some notes and photos.
The Future of WordPress Noel Tock - Human Made
WP search interest trending down, market share stabilized.
‘mature services’ on an upward trend. (# of freelancers and agencies offering WP services)
S-Curve: Early adoption —> growth —> maturity.
WP brand has some challenging narratives to overcome. Competition labels it as a monolith and its seen as obsolete tech; still over forty percent of the web is using WP.
“Market doesn’t understand WordPress” WP needs to transform itself to make the distance from core to the market is the answer.
WP has over 60k plugins.
Noel sees an opportunity to create first party plugins that WP can ship and support for common third party integrations.
Human Made has to sell clients not only on their services but also fight against the negative branding around WP (being outdated, insecure, just a blogging platform, ect.)
Siobhan McKeown March 8, 2024 10:00 am CST Track 4 / Room 101C
WordPress is used by 42% of the web, that means there is a lot of fishies out there using WordPress. Some of them are krill, some of them are clown fish, some of them are barracuda and some of them are sharks, but some of them aren’t even fish at all: some of them are whales.
In this presentation I’ll talk about some of the tactics that you can use to net yourself a whale. These are tactics that anyone can use, whether you’re a freelancer, an agency, or a big company. All you need is a small hook and the right technique and you could be netting your first enterprise client, where you’ll deliver WordPress at scale for some of the biggest companies in the world.
I’ll be sharing our experience at Human Made as well as the experiences of other people who have been catching big fish in the WordPress space.
Rich Tabor March 8, 2024 11:00 am CST Track 2 / Room 102 Met Joe Keenan at Automattic
what design tools do your team use? penpot? figma?
Design is more than the way things work; it’s the essence of purpose, intention, and human connection. A transformative craft that weaves functionality and meaning into the fabric of being. Let’s journey through the intricate art of design and embark on an expedition of its multifaceted, ingenious nature. Join me, and a community of fellow design enthusiasts who, like you, are passionate about how design shapes our world, and let’s explore the nuances of what design is.
Jonathan Desrosiers March 8, 2024 1:00 pm CST Track 3 / Room 101B
WP has sponsored contributors. Five for the Future Challenge (a program where companies making money on WP are encouraged to contribute 5 percent back to WP)
Aretha Franklin “give me my propers” - WP uses props as a kudos.
Props are built into WP PR’s.
They have a line that is required to give people ‘props’
They have different distinctions within
what about the things that don’t track.
There is an independent website called WP world that allows contributors to register profiles there.
They have a props bot that collects all activity connected to a PR using a github-actions
Faces of WordPress series seeks to do more qualitative approaches to recognition of contributions.
look to more qualitative approaches to recognizing contributions Non-Privileged contributions need to be celebrated more Understand motivations and expectations and factor it into recognitions
They have a ticketing system and it exists outside of
Do people know how they want to be recognized?
Drupel has some interesting gamification of contributions.
Ensuring contributors feel appreciated is essential to the success of any open source project. In its 20+ year history, there have been over 5,400 unique contributors listed on the Credits pages for each version released. But even as one of the largest current FOSS projects powering 43%+ of the Internet, this number is inaccurate and low.
Have you ever considered what a contribution actually is? Where does it come from? Who is contributing and how? How are contributions tracked? What does recognition mean to contributors? And why is the number above lower than it should be?
Come learn about the types of recognition the WordPress project currently has, where the blindspots are, what the challenges are at scale, and what’s being done to overcome these obstacles in order to ensure every contributor feels appropriately recognized to create a more stable supporting community.
Gerlynnia Aprille Galgo March 8, 2024 2:00 pm CST Track 4 / Room 101C
Personal branding is a vital asset for anyone who is seeking to thrive in an era of technological advancements like AI. It’s the process of shaping your professional identity and effectively utilizing social media platforms to your advantage.
It allows you to differentiate yourself in a competitive landscape. It highlights your unique skills, values, and personality traits, making you memorable and relatable to clients. This human touch is something AI lacks.
Having a personal brand helps you with networking as well. Engaging with your industry peers, potential clients, and thought leaders through platforms like LinkedIn can lead to collaborations and business opportunities that AI can’t replicate.
It also positions you as an adaptable professional in the AI age. By constantly learning, sharing industry insights, and demonstrating your ability to evolve with the technology, you ensure you’re not overshadowed by AI but rather seen as someone who can harness its power to benefit your clients.
Make (All) WordPress (Events) Accessible Favorite session: Make (All) WordPress (Events) Accessible
Speakers: Joe A Simpson Jr.
Building and Leveraging Your Reputation
Aaron Campbell
Josepha Haden Chomphosy March 8, 2024 5:00 pm CST Track 1 / Plenary Hall
The future of open source comes down to how we care for what grounds us, how we manage what distracts us, and how we feed new growth around us. WordPress, as one of the largest open source CMSes in the world, is incredibly grounded in how we came to be—but how are we managing our distractions, and feeding the opportunities around us? Join WordPress’ Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy for a look at what the sprawling future of our project could be as we continue to convert walled gardens into community gardens.
5 good faith rules of community
Wordpress
20 years old, multiple teams 5k contributors, plugin ecosystem of 60k make.wordpress.org
Naoko Takano March 9, 2024 9:00 am CST Track 2 / Room 102
Join me on a journey of exploration within the WordPress community as we uncover the qualities and practices that underlie impactful collaborations. Drawing from both data and the real-life stories of WordPress contributors, we’ll dive into the essence of meaningful contributions.
This session isn’t just about gaining insights into the current state of WordPress contribution; it’s about going deeper. We’ll illuminate a broader understanding of how these insights can nurture impactful interactions in various collaborative settings.
By the end of our time together, you’ll walk away with actionable strategies to enrich your collaborative efforts, whether they’re in the realms of work, community projects, or personal situations. This is an opportunity to broaden your horizons and harness the wisdom of WordPress contributors to make a difference that extends far beyond the WordPress community.
“you should do a wordcamp” small encouragement to a contributor can result in big outcomes. Naoko says she wouldn’t have hosted wordcamps without that one suggestion from Matt Mullington, WP founder.
Art of Community Jono Bacon
20 self sponsored, 60 company sponsored, 21 “impactful”
make.wordpress.org (year in core)
Companies set aside time specifically to work on wordpress
Long term advancement and supporting ecosystem are the most impactful contributions - Naoko
Helen Tung March 9, 2024 10:00 am CST Track 2 / Room 102
As we embrace multiple AI tools as we saw with the launch and storm of ChapGPT, Midjourney and plenty of others, as users we also need to be aware of possible legal implications, including data protection, and governance compliance. Other matters of interest includes intellectual property and how to best safeguard your interests as users.
Jeanne Tan March 9, 2024 11:10 am CST Track 4 / Room 101C
This session is tailored for developers, website owners, content writers, and SEO beginners, filled with practical tips and strategies that you can immediately apply to outshine your competitors. Walk away with the knowledge and confidence to elevate your webpage’s ranking on Google efficiently and effectively:
Discover simple yet powerful technical tweaks that can drastically improve your site’s SEO. Learn how to enhance your webpage’s relevance and searchability by making your content more understandable to search engines, as well as helpful for your audience.
Wes Theron March 9, 2024 11:00 am CST Track 2 / Room 102
The WordPress Training Team recognizes the need for a clear, structured, and user-friendly approach to presenting Learn WordPress content. As a result, we aim to deploy an improved Learn WordPress website experience that provides an easy-to-navigate, goal-oriented learning environment that caters to learners of different roles and skill levels. In this talk I would like to talk about the Learning Pathways Project and also send out a call for volunteers to help support the project.
This project will serve as a foundational start, establishing a framework and functionality that will allow for the expansion and growth of the learning system over time. To meet our objective, this project includes a website redesign that offers clear learning pathways to reach target Learners such as Developers, End Users, and Designers. We will also focus on making relevant content easier to find and the inclusion of a framework that classifies content by skill level. We believe this will enhance user engagement, improve learning outcomes, and increase user adoption of Learn WordPress resources.
The Training Team hopes that this project will help us better serve the wider WordPress community by promoting knowledge transfer and ensuring a thriving community with diverse skills and abilities.
training team
learn WP is about 4 years old its a one stop for tuts lesson plans for teachers, self-guided courses and online workshops.
the individual learner survey - one metric for success - are there any others metrics - do we know how it connects with contributions?
Great presentation and so valuable to the community They use github to organize the learn WP project - how many volunteer content creators are there, how do you guide/review and control for quality and what are the most popular formats they lean into?
Youtube allows non-profits to host without ads.
Are you all considering LLMS?
what is glogpress?
Petya Raykovska Rahul Bansal, Kimberley Cole, Lorna Lim March 9, 2024 1:00 pm CST Track 1 / Plenary Hall
WordPress, a powerful open-source platform, offers enterprise companies a unique opportunity to enhance their agility and deliver exceptional digital experiences for their customers. This panel discussion will focus on strategies for fostering greater enterprise adoption of WordPress, thereby unlocking investments that can fuel ecosystem growth. By addressing barriers, identifying opportunities, and outlining future steps, the panel will contribute to closing the gap between WordPress’s platform potential and the needs of enterprise customers. This, in turn, will create a virtuous cycle of growth for the WordPress community and enterprise WordPress as a whole.
Adobe Experience Manager, Sitecore are winning bids because they are more streamlined in the adoption flow that compliments the decision making in Enterprise clients. Make it easy for security teams, legal, compliance to say ok.
extendability and flexibility, lower staff overhead since small teams can leverage pre-built plugins to extend functions, data portability and hosting flexibility are the strong points.
Jocelyn Hendrickson March 9, 2024 2:00 pm CST Track 2 / Room 102
Have you ever used a website or an app that was so frustrating to use that you just gave up? Or maybe you’ve used one that was so well-designed that you couldn’t help but grin and sing its praises. What made the difference between these two experiences?
In this presentation, we’ll talk about why it’s important to design digital experiences with purpose. We’ll cover the key principles of intentional design and how you can use them to create experiences that are both user-friendly and effective. We’ll also look at some examples of successful intentional design and discuss how you can apply them to your own work.
Wordpress has a consortium of the top agencies who work to improve the profile/reputation of wordpress and improve its perception among enterprise clients.
SOC1/SOC2 certs, fed certs, compliance ect.
Meetups get streaming support via wordpress thrive some budget
they have a bunch of wordpress meetups and encourage organizers to join with their regional meetups, make a new one and work directly with organizers.