Josepha Haden Chomphosy – Executive Director of WordPress

Thank you for taking the time. You were at CloudFest lastyear already, weren't you? No. So I was at CloudFest in 2019, and I went to the Hackathon, butnot to the conference. Oh, okay. Yeah. And it turns out I have a specific kind of usefulness at Hackathons,which is not hacking at things. And so this year, last year also, I didn't go to the Hackathon orto the event last year. I spent little bit of time at the Hackathon this year, butmostly here for the event. Cool.Okay. Yeah.It's my first Cloud fest as well. I was at the Hackathon last year. And if they're not careful, they'regoing to be overrun with Wordpressers. I think they will, and they areto a certain degree already. That's what they want. I have a very stupid question. I am so excited. Your job title yeah. Is executive director of WordPress.Yes. What does an executivedirector of WordPress do? This is actually not a stupid question. My job is very hard to explain because after about 20 seconds, peopleare like, this is hard. I don't want it. So if I had to explain to you my job in an elevator, what I would say is that I'mresponsible for the overall health and wellness of the WordPressproject and ecosystem. That's what I would say. But if you dig into what my job is, I do a lot of work aroundmaking sure that we have enough resources for each one of our various economiesinside the WordPress project. I make sure that when contributors say, wehave problems getting people onboarded, we have problems with enough documentation,we have problems with plugins or security, I do the work tofigure out how to solve those problems. And also again trying to do the necessaryfundraising for all of those things and translate a lot of the strategic plansthat will work best for WordPress based on various pieces of information andadvice that I get from people. And so really complicated my job.I see. Yeah.I expected kind of a complicated answer. How did that happen? Because the first time I was in contactwith you was my onboarding as a Word Camp organizer for WordCamp Frankfurtback in 2016, maybe even late 2015. That was forever ago. You were in the same onboardinggroup as Birgit Pauli-Haack. I still can picture the notes thatI took about your onboarding. Don't be alarmed. I hope that's a good thing. It is. It's what my memory holds.Cool. Don't be alarmed.It's fine. So how did that happen? How did you become executive director? The literal answer is that Matthas appointed me to that role. That's the literal answer. But if you look at how I started from being a Meetuporganizer to being a WordCamp organizer and then moving forward and forward intomy WordPress career, I was hired by Automattic in 2015specifically to work on Meetup organization and kind ofmanaging that program. And over the years, I was so committed to the work that we'redoing that I just took on more and more responsibility, and that'skind of how it grew into that. But the essential parts of why we gatherpeople together in WordPress, because that is the thing that makes us sodifferent compared to other projects. We gather people together so that they areconnected and they have a community and a structure to help them thrivein a project that is difficult. But then also we really provide kind ofthose equitable networks for people who are building their own businesses andpeople who are wanting to change their lives with WordPress, even if that's notwhat they're initially coming in to do. Like, no one is like, you know what? I'm going to change my life. First things first, figureout what WordPress is. No one's doing that. But those basic principles that are inthere just really called to me, and so I ended up doing more and more things,having more and more responsibility. Jen Mylo left the project, and so therewas this kind of vacuum of leadership that I sort of had some spare mentalcapacity to step in and help with. And in 2019, at the top of 2019, iswhen I was appointed to that role. And it's been the most excitingchallenge of my career so far. Does that answer the question? I think it does, yeah. There are more stops along the way, but I think it's boring just to tell everybodywhat my career maneuvers were. But I got too excited, I took on too much responsibility, and then I got a titlethat matched the responsibility I took on. That's kind of the answer.Good for you. Thank you.And good for the project, I guess. I hope so. You mentioned solving problems for thecommunity, and I'm a meetup organizer. I've been a meetup organizerfor more than ten years by now. Thank you for doing that.Yeah, that's all right. It's kind of my hobby. I don't do anything outside. And the thing we struggle with here in Germany right now, for example, is gettingthe local community restarted after COVID. Yes.I used to travel around to all the meetups in Germany and give a talk, talk topeople, get in touch with the organizers. And my first visit to an in personmeetup this year was in Munich. They were a big community before, and now they are, like, struggling to getmore than six people in the room. Do you have a plan for that? Do you have a strategy forrestarting the community? Yeah, so, of course we have the meetupreengagement program that's happening. The folks on the community team are really doing excellent work to dig into specificproblems and work on not only innovative new ideas that will bring peopletogether in a time of post COVID. I guess if we can call it that or the timeof everyone being sick of acknowledging that COVID is around whicheverway you feel about it. So on the one hand there's that and thatdoes a lot of the heavy lifting around it. But as far as what I have seen for anycommunity trying to kind of pull itself back together,there's an extent to which we really do have to be pragmatic aboutwhat we are offering to them. So anytime that you're gathering people,there is a reason to do it. And when you have people there,the way that you pull them together, the way that you organize the event, reallysets the tone for how they are going to participate with you, how theyare going to connect with you. And so going right back to old versions of our Meetup events is probablynot the way to go right now. It's probably not reasonable to say like,hey, come and learn everything about WP admin and then hope thateverybody wants to do that. And instead it might be best to startwith, hey, we're going to start this back up and so let's stop and have a fewnetworking events every other month. We're just going to have abusiness networking event. Come here, tell us what you're doing withWordPress and just make it very low barrier to entry, very lowknowledge or access required. And the whole purpose is toreintroduce the community to itself. Like let them know these are the otherpeople that are doing the same thing that you're doing and just makethat a more pragmatic choice. I was just talking to another WordPress contributor who was saying like, we'retrying to do these innovative things in our Meetup group, but people aren't comingto us, they're not coming to the events. And so maybe we have to talk about some things that are about thebusiness of WordPress. And I said, of course, if the mostimportant thing that people want to know right now is I started a business duringCOVID so I could employ myself, I decided to go with WordPress and I don'tknow what I don't know yet. And so having those kinds of all aboutconnection, sorts of events versus all about learning I thinkis maybe a way to go. Besides the COVID stuff. In your opinion, what's the next big step the WordPress project hasto take and will take? Yeah, so as far as things that are mostimportant for us to work on now, everybody's aware of gutenberg, everyoneis aware of kind of bringing the community back together after we've had so manyyears of not being able to get together. Those two are very clear. And then there are two other things that Ithink are very important for us to get really people digging into,people contributing to. So one is that our contributor tools have really spent a lot of time withoutanyone paying attention to them. And so we need a lot more time and attention given to not only talking to theteam, reps, figuring out what is and isn't working for the things that they need todo, but also figuring out where existing tools could be improved versus havingto come up with a whole new tool. And I think that's true across the board. There are a lot of tools that we own and operate basically in house at WordPressand I think they all could use a bit more love and attention thanthey have at the moment. So that's one area. And then the other area where I think we all need to be turning our attentionpretty soon is as WordPress practitioners, as WordPress users and implementers anddevelopers, I think that we really need to start looking toward what the evolution ofword of mouth marketing has to be for us. Like, we don't have infinite money,we don't have infinite resources. We are an open source project. But I really feel like WordPress developers and people who are working tobuild WordPress for other people are not given a dignified enough positionin technology as a whole. And as a result, it makes it very difficult for people who are trying tobuild a business on WordPress to really commit to the fact that they should begiven a living wage for the work that they're doing or not have tomake websites for almost $0. Because free software translates to basically free work in whoevertheir clients minds are. I think that we have to work through theevolution of how do we move from word of mouth marketing, which is great for us,because it's about the impact and what has connected for us, whichhelps other people. Connect to us and what we're doing and finding a way to move into a newvariety of talking about ourselves to people that don't know that WordPressmatters or why it should matter, in a way that still adheres to, that really impactdriven, connection driven sort of ethos that we have always had aboutour marketing in WordPress. So those are my two things. That's good. I only asked for one,but two is even better. I know.Yeah. And it wasn't short, was it?That was okay. Nothing I say. I think we have enough time tosqueeze in my bonus question. Oh, good.This is something I ask Matt all the time. Okay.And now I extend that to you as well. Oh, man. I wonder if we're goingto have the same answer. We'll see.I don't even know the question. Yeah,as I mentioned, I studied biology way back and I'm quite passionate about livingon this planet, which is a nice thing. Yes. And there is this movement inside of the project to get together amake team for sustainability. Yes.How do we get there? How do we get a sustainability team? A make team for sustainability.Yeah. So of course we currently havea channel for sustainability. I know that. But having a channel for anythingdoes not necessarily a team make. So there are two parts to this question. There's a logistics part andthen there's a reality part. So the logistics part is easy. Every team that wants to exist inWordPress has the same process. It's a documented process. I think it's documented ish I have documented it in Slack but maybe it'snot up on a make site or anything. But the process to become a team isthat you identify a project to work on. You host meetings routinely in whatever team is the closest related to yours andthen after a certain amount of time if you still are able to have those meetingsroutinely you're posting your agenda, you're posting your meeting notesand team members are showing up. It's clear for them how they get startedand some projects are getting accomplished if all of that happens and it looks likethere still is more work to do and so proving that this could be a team asopposed to an individual working group then you graduate from being aworking group to being a team. And so that's the logistics side of it. Now the difficult part of it is how do we come up with our first ever sustainabilityproject that requires a working group and we can find someone who's willingto help really lead that charge. That's the difficulty. Now, the work that the performance team is doing obviously has cleartie ins to sustainability. And a lot of the work that is on theirroadmap this year, and especially, I think it's the scripts on Queuing work thatthey're doing to kind of only send calls that you need to be sending that allis obviously tied into sustainability. It has obvious tie ins toperformance of the CMS as well. And so potentially that is the thingthat could be the project. However, you I'm sure already realized that is a project that liveswith the performance team. And so if the performance team is owning and operating that then having asustainability group that wants that to become their primary man beredundant would be redundant. And so I'm wondering I've been wonderingif sustainability actually should be a long term working groupinside the performance team. There is another route, I think because yeah, sustainability of WordPress itselfis one thing but at least before COVID our whole event ecosystem, if we call itthat, also has an environmental impact. So you could hook this up to the communityteam, for example and say we work on I think there are some documents alreadyin the Handbook for Sustainable Events. Yes. And we have like the t shirt tracking tool that's supposed to helpreduce waste for that. And I think that maybenobody knows it exists. I know it. Of course you dobecause that was a tool that was built in my era of stuff, and you were trainedby me, so of course you know about it. There's a T shirt tool that lets you knowroughly how many of each size you need at various word camps, justso everybody knows. But to answer that particular question, Iam aware that, especially at our flagship events, there is a certain amount ofwaste that is certainly concerning. I think that word Camp either WordCamp Berlin or WordCamp Europein Berlin took all of the sponsor banners and things afterward andmade bags out of them. At with a company that specializes in providingsafe manufacturing opportunities for people who are otherwise unemployable,quote unquote unemployable. Everybody can be employedif they would like to be. I loved that idea, and we were looking atthe feasibility of that across the program when COVID happened, and we just allhad to kind of panic and give up. It was like Camp Europe in Berlin. And I have one of those bags at home.I do too. It's great.I think Matt also has a bag. Okay. So we'll see what the future willbring for the sustainability team. I'm looking forward to that. Thank you so much for your time.Thanks for having me. Let's wrap this up by telling theaudience where they can find you online.