Burnout, Belonging, and the Heart of WordPress

BobWP:
Well, here we are with a new host joining our team and bring a name monthly, DEIB featured episode on the WordPress Way show. This is a topic that is near and dear to my heart and I’m honored to have Birgit Olzen as our new host. Welcome Birgit. And how are you doing today?

Birgit:
Thank you, Bob. Doing fine, even if I’m kind of feeling nervous because hosting a WordPress podcast show isn’t feeling natural to me in this certain point, so please bear with me when we are starting to kick off. But as Bob already mentioned, it’s about a topic close to our dear hearts and my aim is to help everyone to understand more about how we can contribute to the WordPress community and feel also comfortable to do so.

BobWP:
Well, I’m going to have you introduce your very first official guest and I, I’m going to let you do it, but she is of course one of my favorite people in the world, but I would rather you introduce who you’re going to be chatting with today.

Birgit:
Yeah, thank you Bob. I’m very pleased to introduce you to Angela Jin. Angela is the head of programs and contributor experience at Automattic where she also oversees the work of multiple teams dedicated to WordPress open source project, and these are community events, engagement, education and marketing teams. And her passion lies in building strong and inclusive communities. And please, Angela, tell the audience a bit more about you.

Angela:
Well, first of all, thank you so much for having me on your show. I am very honored to be the first guest here. And yeah, I think you captured my bio very accurately. I am originally from the United States, but I currently live in Madrid and I have family from Taiwan, so yeah.

Birgit:
That’s very awesome. And we met each other for longer time on webcams, but we are also working closely together in the recently founded DIB working group. For all the listeners who don’t understand the term DEIB, it stands for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging. And the WordPress community aims to be more inclusive as possible, but as we all know, we are all humans and there’s always room for improvement. And Angela, I would like to hear more about your thoughts about the DEIB working group. How did you perceive this going on after I published a proposal to IN instead of DEIB, formal Make WordPress team? And so maybe you can explain a bit more about this initiative from your perspective.

Angela:
Yeah, happy to. So DEIB work is something that is near and dear to my heart. I’ve been active in the WordPress community since 2018 but have worked on DEIB initiatives long before that in other communities and I think it is essential for any community to focus on the work that has been done in the community so far has largely been through Jill Binder’s, WP Diversity Speaker initiatives, which have had really wonderful impact and she earlier this year made the decision to move on to some other passion projects of hers, which is totally understandable. She has been doing this for a long time and so it was really exciting to me to see a working group come together to focus on DEIB more broadly across the project. It is a really hard topic because our project covers so many different spaces that, and we are a global community that DEIB looks so different from place to place. And so I think I’m really excited that there are people who are passionate about this topic and want to come together to see how can we be, how can we champion DEIB for WordPress? How can we be a shared resource for everybody and help everybody better understand what it looks like when we remove barriers for people to participate and when we really help people feel like they belong in this space. So yeah, I’m really excited about it.

Birgit:
Yeah, this really interesting because the term DEIB didn’t came to me naturally before I started more researching about it. I only know the word term diversity, but learning more about what it entails to have the whole picture, I’m a person who is really more into the bigger picture and in the whole that wholesomeness of a project or the community itself. And when you say about belonging, how can someone who is interested into contributing to WordPress join the community and feel included and belonging? As you mentioned, there are certain parts which is very complex in the whole WordPress project, even as long-term contributors like myself contributing to WordPress over a decade now, and I think I know a lot, but sometimes I feel I just know a little tiny bit of the whole project and you are one of the program managers of the whole project and you need to oversee a lot, but how do you perceive this for new contributors? Can you put yourself in a shoe of a new contributor?

Angela:
Yeah, I think there’s a number of things in there. I often remind myself that our project is so big, it is impossible for anyone to know everything, and that’s challenging because I also find that WordPress contributors are people who like to know a lot of things and so there’s some self-reflection there that I always like to do when I feel like I am struggling to figure out where to go with this project. I also get lost in it and there’s a lot that I don’t know about this project and a lot more that I want to know about this project. So my reminder to everybody is that you don’t need to know everything and we have so many people who have different perspectives, different pieces of the information that getting all of us together really creates something really holistic and really beautiful. And so that’s regularly my approach when I come into my work.

And for new contributors, it is really challenging to step into such a big space and see that it is very well established. There are practices and processes and very strong open source philosophy and there’s just so much to learn and so belonging and helping people really quickly find belonging is a big challenge. The first thing that we all can do is just create a really welcoming space, which I think is why DEIB is such an integral part of our work. We also find that connecting people to other people, other like-minded people and quickly to resources and where they can make an impact is also really helpful for bringing in new contributors. And so that’s one of the reasons I’m also really excited about the mentorship program and I see a lot of excitement around that right now because I think we can all remember when we first started contributing. I don’t know that we all remember the exact first thing that we might’ve worked on, but we do remember the people who helped us get there and how they were super friendly helped us find our way, made us feel comfortable, made us laugh, made us feel friendship, and that is a huge, huge step towards belonging in there. I got so excited about the mentorship program. I forgot other parts of your question there.

Birgit:
No, it’s absolutely fine because I had in mind the mentorship program leading to this question because I was one of the contributing members of the first initial cohort and also mentor and currently you and I, we are mentoring the mentors within the mentorship program who are assisting new contributors or already established contributors to find a new space to contribute to because for anyone who’s listening and isn’t familiar with the structure, WebPress a around webpress.org, the software piece a community has built up and there are certain teams who are working on parts within the WordPress project.

It’s called Make Teams and someone who contributed by answering support questions on the support firms, which is also a part of contributing to WordPress would like to start contributing with code on work on the core software or wants to provide their value, time and knowledge into content to educate other contributors or users how to use WordPress like on learn WordPress dot org. So this mentorship program support the shift from one make team into another or open the space and as you mentioned, it is really exciting to see how new contributors found their way into the project by a guidance one by one. It’s not that overwhelming as we already talked about. It is really because it’s an established project and really big and feeling lost becomes very depressed and that is also why I love the mentorship program by myself. So I’m really glad that this is getting more traction currently.

I wonder what would be helpful to nurture our contributors who are already contributing to WordPress. We saw a lot of contributors are more burning out or leaving the project because they were overwhelmed with too much work and less support can we do to nurture those. Maybe you can introduce a bit about the fight for the future initiative alongside us.

Angela:
Yeah, I do see a lot of burnout. A lot of it’s a hard time right now. I think with so much economic strife and also geopolitical situations, it’s a really tough time in the world right now. And so I’m a part of some other communities outside of WordPress and I see similar things both in the WordPress community and in other communities as well. We have people who are very well-meaning with very big hearts and they are impacted by all of that. On top of that, many of us are very ambitious and hardworking and so we have so much that we want to do not just our daily jobs, but also hobbies and family. It’s a lot for any one person to juggle.

Whenever I see people are struggling, one thing that I know I can do as a fellow community member is just to check in on them and see how they’re doing. I never want to underestimate the power of just reaching out saying, Hey, how are you doing? I care about you and you mean something to me. I think that’s a really powerful way for humans to connect with each other and I really appreciate that. The vast majority of contributors that I meet, they feel a strong sense of responsibility. And so if they are on the community team responsible for mentoring a WordPress event, they really want to make sure that they do the best job possible and stick with it. And I am also a firm believer that if you are struggling so much that you’re having a hard time keeping up with all of your personal things, that’s really, I don’t want to ask you to help more than that.

That’s a really difficult position to put somebody in. And so one thing that I really love to see in our community is more of a culture of sharing the work and allowing people to more readily come in and out and pick up things that can be done like ad hoc and as people have time, I think it’s a difficult thing in the WordPress community, but we do have a number of really impactful things that people can just pick up as they have time knowing that they’ll always be welcome back and that we have a culture that allows people to prioritize their own family things and their own personal things as need be. And so that’s one thing that I would personally love to see that I think would really both benefit WordPress contribution and benefit people who want to contribute, but also in a way that is respectful of their time as well.

You mentioned Five for the Future in there and I think that’s a really excellent thing to touch on as well. So the Five for the Future program is very much about WordPress is open source software, and so it is available for anybody to take and use and build a livelihood on top of. And so the companies that have built their products, their companies, their enterprise on top of WordPress, we want them to contribute back to open source because that is how we sustain it and that is how they can also continue their business in the best way possible as well as enabling other businesses to be created with five for the future as well. Part of five for the future is sponsorship, and I think sponsorship is a really wonderful way to bring people who otherwise may not be able to contribute into this space. And so I think that’s another way that we can support people to contribute to this space.

BobWP:
I was just going to interject something there because it resonated with me is I’ve been probably involved in this space for at least 14 years. Then there was a bit before that I got into WordPress. And during all those years I’ve never per se contributed to a team. I was always, I’m a lurker, so I watch conversations, I love learning about things going on, I’ve contributed in my other ways that I’ve done and I’m not even going to go into all of that. But when you talk about the things you’ve just been saying, Angela, that and nobody should wait 14 years either. So I’m going to put that as a disclaimer too, but for me, it wasn’t necessarily even the time I had available, but when I saw the DEIB group and I started getting a little bit more into it and hanging around more and then I started participating a bit more, it was like finally, I don’t want to say after all this time, but something just hit a nerve and it was all these other things that were going on in my life and the things I was doing with the podcast and the business and a lot of stuff just came together and it was like I thought that’s it.

That’s the one I want to give my time to. And it took me a while. Again, I don’t want to tell anybody to wait that long, but if you keep your fingers in enough and so I guess I’d just say to everybody, hang in there, watch, listen to people, get to know people, and you’re going to find that little sweet spot and it’s going to fit into everything and all the other aspects of your life, both probably personal and professional.

Birgit:
I’m really glad that you found a spot for yourself. And as you mentioned, it doesn’t matter how much someone is contributing, every contribution counts and especially for someone who maybe feels afraid in contributing to a software project, you don’t have to know any knowledge of coding or development. In any case, you can contribute, like Bob mentioned in participating into text chat meeting or conversation, bring in your own perspective into the project. And that is what I personally love about the WordPress community diversity and diversity is also allowing different perspectives, perspectives from life and culture backgrounds and even life experience and the generations which is spanning over the time. And when we think WordPress, a project itself turned 20 last year, turning 21 this year.

I’m kind of getting old, but I’m wondering, as you mentioned participating into the project, it reminds me of some discussion around we are getting older as a WordPress community and WordPress might be not that famous or interesting for the younger generations, but how can we say, okay, WordPress is open source and you can contribute to WordPress even if, but you can also use and create your own apps.

For instance with WordPress, there are so plenty ideas what you can achieve with WordPress and Angela, you mentioned the sponsorship part. How do you think will be when you are looking forward for the goals WordPress project published and was working on when you keep in mind younger generations but also the established contributors, what do you see in the future of WordPress looking for the next five year, for instance? Is it possible?

Angela:
Yeah, that’s a question I’ve been thinking a lot about, so I’m glad you asked it and I’m going to try my best to have a succinct answer because it’s a hard question. Yeah, I think today we are so large and we are all getting older and it’s a really interesting time in tech right now where you have a lot of new innovations that are very attractive and I think Josepha had flagged two things that she is keeping an eye on for WordPress’s future. First is that our growth has become stagnant, and so how can we increase that? It’s a huge thing for a project this big, but also a really important thing for us to keep an eye on. The second thing is are our events, which are a fundamental way that we bring people in, are they meeting the needs of what people want today?

And I absolutely love our events. I think they are wonderful and we have a lot of really good times at them, but undoubtedly we’re not seeing that younger generation come as much. And so when we put those two together, I do really think we need to think about how are we adapting WordPress and what we offer to meet people where they are. And so I’m a big fan of diversifying our events for one, to help people see exactly what they’re going to get out of our events so that they are more spread out. And therefore for people to get to the more events we have, the more varied opportunities that we have for people to participate. It is really, really difficult for somebody who is a brand new speaker to say, I am going to go to the WordCamp Europe stage and speak in front of 3000 people.

That is a scary, scary thing to do. I get nervous speaking in front of that many people and I’ve spoken on quite a few stages. And so the more we can provide different opportunities around topics that people are interested in, I think that is a really great way that we can reach a broader audience, not just the younger generation, but also people who we previously haven’t reached before. And because this is a vat, DEIB, I do think that we need to move into this next era of WordPress with DEIB at the forefront of our minds because this next generation really does care about that. And if we are not considering that as part of our practice, I think we will quickly outdated ourselves.

Birgit:
I am really glad that you mentioned that this was in my mind as well because the younger generation is really caring about diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging. And this also for companies who are interested into sponsoring to the WordPress project. It’s also beneficial for them to get more talents and qualified talents, especially when you are hiring someone who is contributing to an open source project, even if it’s not only WordPress, but for any open source project. And someone who is contributing to a project like WordPress is also self-driven in most places and they’re interested and invested into something building for a bigger project. And this mindset is also nurturing and benefiting other companies. From my perspective, I’m a mom of five children. I built my expertise while watching my kids and I was growing into from pure curiosity. And when I started contributing to WordPress, I was visiting a WordCamp beforehand, I was participating in the forums and I got aware about what camps in this forum, and then later on I was facing the opportunity to translate WordPress into my native language German. And this was my kickstart to really look behind the curtain and a person, I’m always curious and I always want to look behind the curtain, how things are going, how things are working. And with this mindset, I am always moving forward. Sometimes I feel I’m kind of like a bulldozer.

And that leads me to my other question for you. In your role currently as a project manager, program manager, we had so many great initiatives beforehand. We had so many great contributors who are having talks about DEIB and WordPress several years ago before even this was kind of a buzzword. I don’t want to limit it on this terms, but why does this now work? Is this the right time or how do you feel the, it was a shift maybe in the project? I don’t know because I just put out a proposal idea because I felt the injustice in some places within a community. And I’m a duo person. I do and I cry out and I work on constructive feedback and moving things forward. But why now? I would love you to hear your thought on that.

Angela:
Yeah. Well, you’re not the first curious person to come into the space and I sure hope that you are not the last one. Curiosity is one of my favorite characteristics. I’m also a very curious person and tend to ask people a lot of questions. And so I generally encourage that. I think diversity is, if I had a magic wand and I could just wave it really quickly, I would make people understand diversity and the benefits of it and why it’s so integral to everything that we do and its importance and make a more equitable world immediately. But the reality of the situation is that we have had so many struggles, and I use we in this context as in the world. There are systems outside of much bigger than WordPress that we operate in, and those systems have been longstanding and inequitable. And so when we are faced with such a societal structure, the path to changing that is long and arduous.

And so I don’t think that it’s, for me, it’s not why now. I think this has always been an issue whether people realized it or not or whether it was in front of them or not. But I do think we have passed the point of enough is enough. And so there are a lot of people who want to see positive change and positive change is going to be really difficult. If it were easy, we would’ve fixed it Yesterday. We’re good at solving easy problems. And I realized that that is not an answer that many people like because they have been subject to injustice oppressed for a long time, and asking people to wait longer for justice is terribly unfair, which is all the more reason that we should be doing something today. And so yeah, I want us to keep going for it. I want us to create a more equitable world. And I guess we’ll start with a more equitable word for us for starters. But yeah, I think it’s a hard thing. I also don’t want to ignore all of the excellent work that has been done to date. There have been many people who have come and gone in WordPress who have championed various diversity issues, who have been excellent allies, and all of that is impactful towards where we are today.

Birgit:
Thank you very much for your insight in that as well because I feel even if I rallied and what an ally for as long as I can think of, I wasn’t aware about, as I mentioned already about the terms itself and what it mean to someone, but also from my perspective, I am feeling I’m in a kind of a privileged situation because of my heritage, because I’m living in Germany. I was born and raised in Germany. I never experienced some tremendous issues someone else experienced, but I’m a great listener and I, I’m really thriving to learn more about what is someone facing, which issue is someone facing on daily basis working with WordPress as a software, but also being part of a broad and global community. As we already know, global means different languages, different culture backgrounds, and it is also part of being inclusive, translating WordPress for instance. It’s one of my core, but accessibility is also really, really important topic and I would love to see WordPress as a torch moving forward and being a role model for others to follow. What do you think about this as a global project? Can we achieve this?

Angela:
I agree. So one thing you asked earlier about my five-year plan for WordPress or what I would like to see in five years for WordPress, and we also talked earlier about how anybody can contribute to WordPress. One thing I would love for all WordPress to do to take on an all new incoming contributors is for them to have a learning mindset. None of us are going to come in here knowing it all, and especially when it comes to a global community and DEIB, we have to all be in a growth mindset. There is so much to learn about what DEIB looks like from even city to city in the same country and nobody is going to have the same experience as somebody else. And so it really behooves us to listen to each other, see how we’re being impacted and help each other, help each other grow in that I think that everybody is at a different point in their DEIB journey and I would rather bring people in and help them learn along the way, especially if they’re receptive to it.

What I fear sometimes is that we are so quick to call people out that it prevents a learning opportunity and that learning opportunity can over time build stronger allies. And right now we need every ally that we can get. And so that’s my hope for WordPress, that we also create an environment where we can learn from each other and better understand what issues we’re facing and how we can overcome that together because we are stronger together at the end of the day. And it’s a hard thing when we are faced with so much struggle every day. But the people who it’s also not fair to ask everybody to do this, I do want to acknowledge that there are a ton of resources out there that people can educate themselves with. And so for WordPress, that’s what I want to see, that we have strong allies who can help people out of tough situations and that we really build a shared language around DEIB. I think that’s one of the biggest challenges with DEIB work in a global community.

Even the word diversity, it’s going to be different from place to place. I come back to there was was a study on colors and how the color blue was perceived from country to country, even something like a color, which I think the color blue we can all more or less understand, but that it’s perceived so differently across different cultures like a color. And compared to complex diversity terminology, that’s hard. And so wherever we can build shared understanding around the terminology that we’re using around DEIB, that’s one really concrete step that I think would be immensely helpful.

Birgit:
I couldn’t agree more. Thank you very much and thank you very much also for your time and your well insight into this. And I’m really looking forward to work more closely with you on reaching those goals and tangible outcomes for a better and more inclusive work WordPress community. So I can only say thank you very much. I really appreciate that You will find your time, find your time to be our guest on this show.

Angela:
Thank you so much for your get it truly my honor. And I am really excited to keep working with you on this as well, so we could do it.

BobWP:
And obviously there is a lot to be talked about and I’m looking forward to having Birgit come on once a month here to at least do this show, do something now. I know we got to get going, but some people are hopefully maybe listening to this as they’re flying to WordCamp Asia, they’re driving, they’re on their bike, maybe they’re even jogging. I don’t know what they’re doing. They’re getting there somehow or other once they’re, I just want to have Angela share just a little teaser about her panel she’s going to be on because that might be something you want to attend.

Angela:
Yeah, so WordCamp Asia overlaps with International Women’s Day on March 8th, and so I am very excited to be hosting a panel about women in WordPress. So we have three rock stars who are going to be joining me to share their stories about their experience as women in tech and to hopefully inspire the crowd who’s listening and help us get more diversity into technology.

BobWP:
Great. And Birgit you’re going to be having a panel yourself, at CloudFest which follows WordCamp Asia, Asia. Why don’t you just give a quick little spiel about that before we go. In case any of our listeners are attending CloudFest,

Birgit:
We will have a panel with two other tremendous guests and we are talking about inclusivity and also sustainability in WordPress and how we can be more sustainable with our human resources. For instance, as we mentioned, the burnout churn is really high currently and we are looking for we discussing ideas, how we can prevent those churn and be more inclusive, but also sustainable.

BobWP:
Alright, cool. Well, I can’t wait to have you back on every month. I’m sure we’ll have Angela come on again sometime. And I just want to thank everyone for tuning in and I’m just going to do one quick little teaser. If you’re on your way to WordCamp Asia, make sure and stop by the Do the Woo booth. I have these really cool DEIB stickers to give out and I’m not going to even tell you what they look like because you have to stop by the booth. So yeah, thank you both. Looking forward to having you on the hosting team Birgit and thank you Angela.

Birgit:
Thank you Bob.

Angela:
Thank you.