Open Source Sustainability, Contributing and Proposal Processes

Courtney:
How are you, Robert? How’s your summer going?

Robert:
It’s still summer? I don’t know. It’s been so hot. We were just talking about that in the green room, how the temperature’s been nuts.

Courtney:
Yes, yes, yes. Robert and I, being in America, our weather has been very weird. I’ve been having a lot of Florida weather here in South Central Pennsylvania, which I would like to send back to Florida and now that would be delightful. But the weather in Europe was pretty cool at WordCamp Europe. I liked that temperature better.

Robert:
Everything is cool when you’re in Torino.

Courtney:
This is true. So today we’re going to get into a little bit of some of the talks that we saw at WordCamp Europe, some of the other open-source connections that were made during this event, and a little bit of pulse on the community as to what we’ve seen going on in open source. Most recently we’re just on the heels at the time of this recording of seeing WordPress 6.6.1 ship, which is great. But that said, Robert, how did you spend your WordCamp Europe and what stood out most to you?

Robert:
Wow, attendance. I mean, I’m just going to go with that. So WordCamp Europe was talk, talk, talk, work, work, work, network, network, network.
We had a booth there for Botguard and had to do some of that. But yeah, it always amazes me how full of people WordCamp Europe is and it was really great to see some of, even I’ll call ’em micro-communities, get together. I know there was a large contingent from Serbia that was doing their thing, and then you’d have folks from the Netherlands and Germany and getting that face time that they may not get during the rest of the year. So it’s always the people and the networking and energy that leaves me smiling for at least six months. Hoarse completely, but definitely smiling.

Courtney:
I saw that there was also a sub-community of the Jonathans getting photos together. Were there any photos of the Roberts? Because I think you and Mr. Dunn here could both be in that photo.

Robert:
And Robert Windisch.

Courtney:
Yeah, see, I was just hanging out with him in Canada the other week. That’s right. Yeah, the Roberts need to do a photo. I’m going to petition for that.

Robert:
And we will also include Robbie Adair.

Courtney:
Yes, yes, absolutely. Include all those that have Rob, Bob or some variation of that related to their names for sure. So WordCamp Europe kicked off with a really amazing talk. We heard first as our opening keynote at WordCamp Europe about the sustainability of open source being the future, and this was something that was shared by both Joost and Juliet who gave a presentation on this. Joost, of course, being the founder of a very well-known SEO plugin company, and Juliet is really well-known in the PHP space, but not a lot of people in WordPress outside of those that pay attention to PHP know Juliet yet. Juliet is an amazing, amazing woman, very talented dev, and somebody that I got to know during Europe quite a lot. And so during that time that she and Joost gave that presentation, they were sharing a great deal about how much of what we use or do on a daily basis depends on open source and how people are often unaware of that implication.

And that’s something that’s been eye-opening to me, not just from their talk, but also over the last couple of years as I tune into the automotive industry using a lot of open-source technology. Of course, I work for a web host and I know that our servers use a lot of open-source technology to power the hosting environments as well, but there’s a lot more to open source to learn about that I think we don’t often see. So they were sharing some of the use cases of that, but they were also really great at helping shed light on. Open source is never free, so you’ve got either funding to pay people or the time that people give up for their families and their jobs and these other things to make open source possible. So I thought that they really landed that conversation fantastically well, and it’s something that I believe that the WordPress community especially needs to tune in on. You haven’t gotten a chance yet, go watch the replay on that one.

Robert:
Yeah, I think hopefully Bob can drop that into the transcript of the actual link. Yeah, free and open source are always fun words to mess up. And yes, the code may be freely accessible, but how do you put it together? Who’s put that together? Coming from the Joomla community, which is a hundred percent volunteer where there is no corporate support in any way, shape or form, the burnout is extreme because you just can’t do that all the time.

Courtney:
Yeah, knowing what I do of Juliet, I feel fine in sharing this. Just a few months back, about half a year, maybe a little bit longer ago now, we saw PHPCS, which is the PHP coding standards. Juliet is unarguably the lead dev on this. There are several other contributors to this. That project sat in an abandoned repo and abandoned being that there was a company that created this as an open-source project. The company shuttered and Juliet did not have administrative rights over that area and nobody that did was still contributing. Juliet has been funded through contract work as have others to that area, but it was not at a sustainable level for the amount of contribution needed for that. And I highlight it because WordPress uses WPCS, the WordPress coding standards, and those areas in particular also need to depend upon the PHPCS. So it’s just a set of rules basically that make sure that how we’re writing not just our PHP, but I believe it also applies to HTML and CSS, that these things adhere to specific standards so that we have some security reliability in all of the code that we’re deploying.

If any one of those areas were to fail, that could jeopardize not just WordPress, but also at PHPCS, it would impact many other open-source projects and some that are not, that depend upon PHPCS. And then within WordPress, not only does it impact core, but WPCS that depends on PHPCS also impacts many plugins. Hosts use it as part of securing their environments for managed environments for customers. So there was a lot really dependent on that, and Juliet’s just been through quite a lot in the past year securing the funding needed, not just for herself, but also the couple of other devs that are working on this. And it’s one of those backbones of the internet, so I can’t say enough about the work that she’s doing. And also, Joost wrote a fantastic piece that helped get at least my executives to participate in funding the work inside of PHPCS as well to make sure that our customers are really well protected. So please do tune in, watch, see what’s going on. Even if you don’t really understand code, not the point, it’s knowing that it’s securing you here.

Robert:
Well, it’s to your point about validating the stuff that WordPress utilizes from plugins to things to Gutenberg to all that. Of course, my favorite is having the tabs versus spaces argument, so that’s something else as well. But for those who are not technical, just think of tabs versus spaces.

Courtney:
I just got into the conversation at WordCamp Canada about pineapple and pizza. Now you’re bringing up tabs versus spaces. We’re going to start a riot with the devs. They’re all groaning at us right now, Robert. I can hear them. So in addition to that, there were a couple of other really cool things that took place during WordCamp Europe. One of the first things was that right after Joost and Juliet’s presentation during the Q&A, I asked a question, and then out of that came meeting Matthias from Typo3. Typo3 is one of the organizations that participated in the open source letter to the WordPress European Union related to the Cyber Resiliency Act. What does all that mean? Basically, the European Union has a lot of standards that they’re trying to implement, and the Cyber Resiliency Act specifies a lot of what they expect out of the software being used in various environments, and some of the wording that is in the Cyber Resiliency Act was not suitable for how open source works. And so out of that came, that’s exactly it. Joomla, Drupal, Typo3, WordPress and a few others that I think all compiled a letter together to the European Union specifying some of these things and Matthias that we met is part of the community at Typo3. Robert, did you get a chance to meet Matthias?

Robert:
We got, of course, everyone got to meet everyone at some point, but we’re definitely going to push to have, is it Matthias or Mattias? I’m not always going to look Matthias.

Courtney:
I’m an American and I butcher European names routinely. I will apologize first, but yes, we should invite him on as a guest and ask him to pronounce his own name for us.

Robert:
At least that, I mean, it’ll be a very quick podcast.

Courtney:
Yep, absolutely.

Robert:
That’ll be brilliant. But yeah, I mean not only, it’s great that he was part of that open letter, but it’s interesting how, since we’re on the open talk on open source, how open source gets attacked in different weird ways and the Cyber Resilience Act, which is called CRA before we get all tongue-tied, it just seems strange to make demands of free code and why, yes, there need to be cybersecurity standards, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Well, last I checked, we can talk about CrowdStrike all day long and they’re probably CRA compliant, and that doesn’t really help anyone when Delta is

still down for day five or six of being able to fly. The NHS, I think, had problems. European banks had problems. So some of these rules and regulations really don’t actually get to the crux of the problem, which is everyone needs to do their homework and stay on top of code no matter what it is and have processes in place.

Courtney:
Absolutely, Robert, I am glad that neither of us were traveling during that in particular.

Robert:
Oh my goodness, are you kidding? I just got home from WordCamp Canada to which I drove. It was a long drive, but I drove because the distance would not have been any different time-wise if I had flown. But still, I am glad to have gotten through Border Crossing and all of that without having an impact there. Related though to your idea there on testing and kind of coming in on the heels of WordPress 6.6.1 coming out and the calls for testing, I will amplify that people should be testing things and to the point where I have been relentless with my employer about giving me a little sliver of an environment to test on production. So in our managed environments and our enterprise-managed environments, I am ensuring that this gets at least the minimum testing possible. But in addition to that, I would like to call in those that are in the plugin and theme space and make sure that you are testing with the beta releases before we even hit RC. We need to be testing at the beta releases.

So not just a good way to do this in the WordPress space as you go to make WordPress dot org slash test, and usually with every release there is a guideline post saying, here’s how you could go test the thing, do that, but in addition, do some other testing, both automated and manual with your own plugins and or themes. If you are a dev and or if you’re managing client sites, the ones that are the most on most of your client sites, I would make sure to also as a user, test those ahead because things will go a little sideways and you might see a maintenance release come in pretty quickly after that. If you are in other parts of open source, the same would still apply. You absolutely should be paying attention to what’s going on in releases ahead of time and testing and weighing that kind of feedback.

Robert:
I’ll just second that, and it all circles back to the sustainability argument or discussion earlier. These things need to be done. Yes.

Courtney:
I will give a quick nod. When I was assembling today’s show notes, I forgot to include that I was on a panel at Europe about open source, about funding open source from the perspective, this time last year, I spoke with Hari and I was on a panel there from the perspective of I’m a contributor that wants to get sponsored. What can I do this time? It was from the perspective of empowering organizations such as my employer or Robert’s employer or a number of others to fund the work of open source. So I will be sure to include those as well. That slipped my mind in today’s show notes, but there we go. Related to other events and things going on in the open-source space. Robert, you brought up All Things Open. Do you know much about this conference? Have you ever attended?

Robert:
I have never. And it keeps getting put into time slots where I can’t make it. It’s really about open source and everything from GitHub and Copilot to specific projects. Of course, AI, I already mentioned Copilot. That kind of stuff is happening. Speakers have been announced, and I’m just looking at, so we got Community Leadership Summit and All Things Open on October 27th.

Courtney:
Yes, that is close to some timelines for my kiddos that I don’t know if I’ll be able to go yet or not, but I know a few others in the WordPress community that have attended in the past. You can reach out if you’re interested to Adam Silver and Nyasha Greene and find out what their experiences have been at this event. But it is really operated like a true open source without an organization besides the conference organizers, this is not an event on behalf of any one open-source project. It is an open-source event of lots of open-source people just getting together, and it’s one that I think is really, really interesting. It is in, is it North or South Carolina in the Carolinas?

Robert:
It’s Raleigh, North Carolina.

Courtney:
Raleigh, North Carolina, yeah. There we go. So if you’re interested in attending that one, do jump in, check it out, get some tickets. I always love the graphics that organization puts forward. I think it’d be a good time to also learn and connect with others.

Robert:
I have been to the Community Leadership Summit in the past, and if you are heavily involved in a project, you should really have this on your radar. I remember having attended, and at the time it was all about codes of conduct and you had folks from all these projects trying to put together codes of conduct, codes of conduct or code of conducts, I dunno where the S goes.

Courtney:
Or the apostrophe.

Robert:
Or the, oh no, don’t make it worse. But these are the kinds of things that are addressed to help projects move forward. So definitely take a look at that if you are spending considerable time in any specific project, and that ties right into All Things Open.

Courtney:
Yeah, I would absolutely agree with that one. There are a couple of other things that have been popping on my radar just in the last week related to open source that are pretty interesting to check out. One of them started. So our show is not just about WordPress, but obviously we’re heavily steeped in the WordPress community and Do the Woo is related very much to all things WordPress related. I think they even have a show by that name. So a couple things that kind of popped up for me. I was watching a YouTube live with Matt Medeiros and Mark Szymanski, forgive me for not knowing how to pronounce your last name, but during this one, it’s great to see from Mark’s eyes sometimes because Mark is a young adult in his twenties, I believe, in the WordPress community and beginning to understand open source and contribution.

And I think that when I think about myself at that point, I was finding WordPress 2.3 and Moodle. So I come from other open source, and at that I found the WordPress philosophies and I thought, oh, this is for me, the ones numbered zero through three, the four philosophies of open source, that area spoke deeply to me about code being free, everyone can modify and edit and all of this and has really captivated me. I don’t know if today with as much software as is available and as much user experience as people can have at their fingertips. At that time, CMSs were new and WordPress WordPress was just for blogging and not for the rest of your website certainly. And there were no pages or sidebars or any of those things. So back then open source had a lot of potential and it really captivated a lot of interest.

These days though, the 20 something crowd is not necessarily thinking first about open source. They’re just thinking of the tool to get the job done. Open source may or may not be on the radar, and if they even are aware of how WordPress gets made, they may not understand their own responsibility for providing feedback. There is a talk I gave at WordCamp Montclair a year and a half ago, and I redid it at Phoenix as a backup speaker this year called We Are They, and it’s on WordPress TV, but it’s about this idea that if you’re using WordPress and you complain into the ether about why did they do this or that, to go log the issue in the place and provide that feedback. And there have been a few YouTubers in the last couple of days even that we’re really looking into one shedding light on the need to do that, but also two, hey, we’re logging this stuff and it’s maybe getting overlooked. And so there was some confusion around this that I thought maybe we could tackle a little bit. Robert, has there been a time in any open-source project where you have directed others to go provide some feedback? And how did that experience go?

Robert:
Oh gosh, it’s brutally painful.

Courtney:
Why is that painful?

Robert:
It’s painful. People are not inspired. They don’t know. A lot of times the feedback loops aren’t there. So you might go in there the first time, drop a ticket, look at a repo and either be overwhelmed by whatever jargon exists, and then it just goes into the ether. Nine times out of 10, you’re waiting for someone to pick up that question, actually do something with that. To your point about Juliet, how many years was that sitting there? Again,

Courtney:
It was a long time and it came down to I’m quitting doing this, I need to go pick up client work. Or you’re giving me the keys and we got to move it and I need funded. And I get that.

Robert:
And so as folks get used to much more, I don’t want to say immediate gratification, but at least some kind of awareness of what’s going on. Open-source projects need to implement the expectation level of, oh, I hit a button at my bank and I got an immediate response either from a chatbot or a human being or whatever. We need to be able to do that. We need to keep up with the Joneses in that kind of user experience because submitting tickets is a user experience.

Courtney:
Yeah, so in the presentation that I did, if your issue was related to Gutenberg, here’s the Gutenberg repo, you could leave a comment and not provide code, and that’s okay. So if you want to either open up a discussion or reply to something, here’s how to go find and see if anyone else brought the topic up and then how to go provide feedback or how to open a new ticket. If it is related to the functionality of WordPress dot org’s website, where to go log that, that’s another place. And so the experience Mark was sharing is that he seems interested, I’m just getting to know him a little bit. He seems interested in doing these things, but he doesn’t know where to go to do it. And there’s not really a clear map of some of those things, how to log the feedback in the right places.

And then you have someone like Matt Medeiros who very understandably has been in our community in the WordPress space a long time. And in our project we have two dozen different teams, and then we have some working groups that aren’t attached to a team and we, oh, it’s a thing. And so how do you find where to go log this stuff or where are, for instance, proposals, that was something that Matt brought up and was sharing about searching through make WordPress dot org for proposals. I have provided a link for the show notes that’s basically just a customized Google search of show me anything on make dot WordPress dot org from all two dozen teams in the past. I dunno, I might’ve set it to a year that used the word proposal because there’s no other clear way to do that. But then over in Gutenberg, there are also proposals sitting inside of Gutenberg’s GitHub repo, and they don’t make it to a make website. And sometimes that’s the case for certain teams. Gutenberg is within core, but if you want to see the proposals about what the block editor is doing or the site editing experience is doing, you’re going to need to pay attention to it in the Gutenberg repo. And then what happens if you write a proposal? What’s the next step?

Robert:
Yes, that is a question.

Courtney:
I’m shaking my hands, which no one can see. We’re audio-only. But it’s just like that both hands in the air of frustration of, again, the user experience of trying to get stuff done.

Robert:
So Robert in Joomla, how did proposals get handled?

Courtney:
To some degree, it was a much smaller community and we didn’t have 4,000 teams like WordPress does. So it was much easier to actually get in front of team leads just right off the bat and be like, here’s my proposal, here’s my idea. Then team leads would take and run with that. So being able just to have that contact with the leader of what’s going on, then that would be actually put into more of the big development process or bug fixes or proposals and whatnot.

Courtney:
So to that point, in WordPress, we do not use the term lead outside of, we have core release leads. Matt, usually, is that on most of the release processes.

Robert:
Matt Mullenweg. There’s lots of Matts in the world.

Courtney:
Yes. And then we have some folks that historically have held this title and it’s now become more of an honorary title. Folks like if you’ve been in the WordPress space, Helen Hou-Sandí and others, Dion Hulse, this crew are some of the originals of the release lead cycle and process. Some of them are still with the project and some are no longer with the project, but proposals overall across all the teams, there is no uniformity to that in our case. Other open source projects, like for instance later in the show notes, I have one on PHP has a request for comments, which is a bit akin to a proposal. It’s saying, here’s the pitch, give some comments, and then they have a defined procedure after you give those comments if it needs to go to a vote, who does the voting, et cetera. And these are points that Mark was bringing up.
Is there any standardized? What happens after someone writes a proposal? Well, sometimes it just sits there. Earlier today I had a meeting related to, there is a post in our show notes here about should the DEIB working group Five for the Future new contributor mentorship be all merged inside of the sustainability team? And it was brought up that Birgit Olzem had written a proposal for a DEIB team exclusively like a year ago. And right now it’s just waiting on Matt to respond to one way or the other. And for lack of a response, there’s a lack of activity happening. And that experience for the community is not ideal. There’s no standardization to the process. And also are the proposals going to be on make or are they going to be in a GitHub repo or what team site should something like that go to and how do we handle those?

So I think it was covered pretty well in this particular video, but I can understand why people have these questions. And I’m seeing currently a couple of other YouTubers that are expressing similar concerns, similar questions, and confusion. And what I want to sort of emphasize there is to look at it again, with fresh eyes, there are some people that are new to understanding contribution no matter what their age, they’re just new to experiencing what it means to contribute or where to provide appropriate feedback besides just yelling into YouTube and Twitter. I mean, those feel soothing for a moment or two, but it does nothing to actually, it’s not recorded somewhere that people could take action on that, right? It’s not somewhere that people have to be confronted with dealing with that type of thing and seeing a bit of that type of activity going on.

And also there are some questions. So WPTuts, on YouTube, I don’t recall the gentleman’s name. I can say that the gentleman that was doing WPTuts the YouTube video also had a lot of those same kind of thoughts, questions, and concerns. If I provide the feedback, is anyone paying attention? I saw recently a contributor Aurooba, a couple of us know who Aurooba is in our community. Aurooba provided a pull request, which means that she fixed it in code, she saw a bug, she fixed it in code, she submitted a pull request to Gutenberg, and then in 6.6, that bug was fixed by somebody else’s more recent rendition of the same solution and how inappropriate that that can feel and what can we do to sort of wrangle some of those experiences in a bit better. And so that’s a little bit of what I’m observing, and it relates a bit to, for instance, governance.

That has sometimes been a hot topic. I’m not going to make it one today, but Red Hat has a really good article, ironically, Red Hat who took Red Hat Enterprise Linux that runs a lot of hosting environments and pulled it back to private. Red Hat has a good article about the different kinds of governance models. And on some of the same videos, people were inquiring what type of governance model is WordPress because things like proposals have no standardization, and we do fall under what’s known as Benevolent Dictator for Life. Matt does not enjoy that term, but it is not unique to WordPress.

Robert:
Linux in general is, I mean, Linus Torvaldsds, that’s where it was born.

Courtney:
Yes, exactly. And so basically a lot of the decision-making process resides upon the Project co-founder at this time, and that’s why procedures are maybe where they are looking for a way forward. I’m going to keep pushing on looking for how we can improve this process. I recognize that our project leadership is a small crew that has a lot of responsibility, especially when 43% of the web rides on their decision-making. So improving that experience is something that I care deeply about, about how we can continue encouraging folks to come provide that feedback, and then ensuring that things like what Aurooba experienced don’t fall off the radar that we continually look for, oh, here’s somebody actually already solved the thing, or somebody provided some really valuable feedback. How do we get this feedback heard by those that need to and take action upon it? It’s a lot to kind of wrangle and deal with.

And I admire recently that Anne McCarthy organized a bunch of the YouTubers that seem to have similar interests like this together for a video to try and unite the YouTuber community because that is a weird niche. I would say they’re not going to be as much active in Make WordPress Slack, although I’ve seen more of that and I’m delighted by it. But they have a whole subset of the community that we don’t see at events. They have a whole subset of the community that we don’t see in Slack, and they can really help bridge those connections if done correctly.

Robert:
Yes, I mean, I would just love to have every you dropped ’em in, but just now. But really, if you’re interested in working on the project in WordPress, step one, make WordPress, get on that Slack. A lot of these questions when I talked about, or when you asked about how was this kind of feedback done in the Joomla space, and this is years ago. I’m sure it’s changed now, but at least get on the Slack. You can find the leaders and have that direct question answered one way or the other. And it would be nice if every team had almost like a triage coordinator, just to Courtney’s eyes just really big.

Courtney:
I’m nodding. I’m thinking, oh, I would love to see project manager layers throughout.

Robert:
I’m just going for triage. You’re required to get back within 30 to 60 days and flag it for yes, this will move forward, or no, don’t have time.

Courtney:
I think in addition, maybe Robert, we do have triage work that happens, especially for Core Editor. I know Damon Cook has been really working on that one. Damon contributes on behalf of WP Engine. There are a few others that are in that space for sure. But also I think that we need to do that holistically throughout the whole project. Last bit of news that I have coming in is that just issued within the past week

, is the state of React informal report about the React community. About React, the open-source project as well. It is part of the JavaScript community holistically. It’s a lot of what Gutenberg is built on. You can

Robert:
Check out. I was going to say, why do we care about React?

Courtney:
Yes, Gutenberg. Gutenberg uses a lot of React. So you could find that information at 2023 dot state of react.com. It will be in the show notes, but it’s really interesting to look at contributors to the React community and what kind of feedback that they are offering too. So that’s the hit list of the news that I’ve got for this week. It was good seeing you, Robert, and I look forward to our next episode together.

Robert:
Great seeing you again, Courtney. Now that we have at least August, I think minimal to no work, travel break before WordCamp US hits us square in the face.

Courtney:
I know I’m the lead organizer for contributor day, so I will have a lot more brainpower in October during Hacktoberfest.

Robert:
Thank you, Courtney.

Courtney:
Thank you, Robert.