Backing WordPress Open Source Contributors for Long-Term Growth

Zach: Hey, this is Zach Stepek here with another Do the Woo, WooDevChat. I’ve got my regular cohort in crime, Carl Alexander, here with me. Carl, how are you doing today.

Carl: I’m doing good. I’m very excited for this one.

Zach: Yeah, this one’s going to be pretty cool. We actually have Bob with us, which is rare. Bob, how are you?

Bob: I’m good. Stepping into the danger zone here.

Zach: This is definitely the danger zone. Yeah. You were on the highway. Now, you arrived.

Bob: Yeah.

Zach: So, I know this is going to be a casual conversation today, just talking about… How am I kidding myself here? It’s not going to be casual, it’s going to be fun. We’re going to have a great conversation about supporting developers in the ecosystem. We have Alain and we have Carole with us today. How are you both doing?

Carole: Hey, there. Excited to be here in a DevChat. I’m like, “Should I consider a career change?” Thanks for having me.

Carl: You can always consider a career change.

Zach: It’s not that hard. You just get into the code side of things. PHP is easy to learn, just a couple of days.

Carole: Good to know.

Carl: You always have to start somewhere. You have no innate skill at anything. You have always have to start at zero, so it doesn’t really matter. I have to learn marketing. I have to learn social media. We all have to learn things. I strongly believe that anybody can career change into programming if they so choose.

Zach: Absolutely.

Carole: Sure does, and I might know some people who could help here.

Zach: Well, yeah, I think you have one. Yeah, you have one really close to you, right?

Alain: Hi, everyone. I’m very interested in seeing where this topic will take us. It’s a discussion that’s very… It’s a passion thing for me, where I try to be as open as possible about sustainability and economics of open source. And so, I’m really looking forward to get into the depths of this topic.

Zach: Now, I know that most people in the WordPress space know both of you, but why don’t we do a quick intro for both of you, just so that maybe some of the store owners or other people that listen to these have more of a background on where you’re coming from.

Alain: So, I’m Alain Schlesser. I have been involved in the WordPress space since 2014, I think, did random other development before. Currently a software engineer. Most people know me as the maintainer of WP-CLI, but I also do all sorts of other consulting and open source work. I do a lot of speaking at conferences as well, where I try to get more topics in about sustainability and open source. I used to do purely technical talks before, but I’ve since been pivoting more towards more general and fundamental issues that we’re facing.

Zach: That’s awesome.

Carole: Yeah. My name is Carole Olinger, and I am involved with WordPress communities since 2016 when I visited my WordCamp, which was WordCamp Europe in Vienna. Since then, I have been involved as a contributor, but I’m not a technical person, so it has mostly been in WordCamp organization as an organizer, as a volunteer, but also in terms of marketing activities. I have been involved with a few companies since then professional-wise, also on the marketing side of things. My latest gig was with XWP. Yeah. At the moment, I’m in a transitioning phase and there’s going to be news soon about that. This is also a topic, which is very, very dear to my heart because I have strong opinions on how we could support developers, but also non-developer contributors in this community monetarily, but also in different ways. So I’m looking forward to what we’re going to be discussing today.

Zach: Well, let’s all started with a tweet from Carl as so many things do.

Carl: I don’t know if it was just one tweet as more like a vomiting of tweets.

Zach: It was definitely a thread. Yes. You had enough thread that I think you took the whole spool.

Carl: Yeah, I definitely went on the high end for the number of posts. Yeah. So I can describe a bit what the thread was about. So, basically, the struggle that a lot of open source and WordPress contributors… So the opening statement basically of the thread was that I’ve been contributing to WordPress on a very consistent basis basically since I got involved in 2008. Sorry. That includes organizing WordCamps. That includes organizing meetups. That includes doing talks. That includes a lot of non… It’s always been a very strong stance of WordCamp, of WordPress Central and to not have some sort of financial incentive to organizing these events. The problem is that they’re very time-consuming, and I’m sure Alain too is in that. We’re talking probably in the four figures and not starting with a one number of hours dedicated given for free.

To be fair, I would do it all over again, but the problem that I was highlighting is that I’m now in a situation, where I basically am trying to do more coding stuff, open source coding work and I’ve tried to find ways to make it sustainable because this is a new topic that has always been in the background, but is becoming more and more important because so much of the infrastructure of the internet today, not just WordPress, just the internet. We had the Log4j issue last year and now, especially most of the listeners are probably in the US, the White House and everything is doing auditing now to figure out what are their exposure to this because a lot of these issues come from basically… A lot of the internet runs on software that’s maintained by one person with no financial incentive to do so or support. So it can be really tricky to do that. So that’s where I was going at.

I was just saying that basically WordPress as a community that harps so much on open source, it really does a very poor job at this idea of sustaining open source. There’s really the only thing is Matt’s flagship effort, which is called Five for the Future, which basically is this idea that all the WordPress companies and agencies that make a lot of money off WordPress should contribute workforce to the WordPress project itself, but the problem is that there’s just a lot more. I feel like Carole too, you can be very… You’ve organized working at Europe a bunch of times. The amount of hours to organize a WordCamp is immense. There’s all this side question. This isn’t even into the freaking thread, but it’s there’s continuity. There’s how to train new people. There’s so much involved and it’s all done for free and it’s very time-consuming and it’s hard to basically sustain yourself.

Basically, I started a business now, where I’m trying to basically make my work sustainable while keeping it mostly open source, and it’s a struggle because I have to balance consulting work, all these other aspects. It’s hard to get anybody to really get themselves involved financially in that because most of the time they’re basically… It works two ways. One, they’re either contributing to Five for the Future so they feel that they’ve covered what they need to, or they feel, well, there’s Five for the Future and people are doing that so there’s no need to help anybody else in any other way, but that’s really a huge problem because there’s just a lot of open source work and tangential open source work.

I was talking about PHPUnit, but there’s the PHP Foundation. I retweeted something a couple of weeks ago. The PHP Foundation collective receives a fraction of the money that most of the other programming languages receives. Even though it does a disproportionate amount of lift on the internet, it receives a very small amount of work. People were like, “Oh, why don’t you do something like Rust, where you have different additions of the language? It’s because we need five programmers to be able to do this full time.” We don’t have enough funding to do that. There’s just a lot of tooling inside WordPress too that doesn’t receive help. There’s people doing work around accessibility, around inclusivity and things like that that are also trying to find ways to make this sustainable.

I feel that there’s a lot of effort… There’s a lot more money in WordPress now, and I feel that it doesn’t take a lot to sustain these people. It’s the same problem that everywhere else, it’s only a handful of people that are working on this stuff. I’m working on the serverless stuff, how to make WordPress work on Lambda. Alain does the CLI. You have, not Jason, I’m forgetting his name, that does the WP Query Monitor. There’s just a lot of people doing a lot of work.

Alain: John.

Carl: Yeah, John, thank you. John. John, who’s doing a lot of work for… That’s the primary diagnostic tool for WordPress. Just a lot of work are done by single individual. It wouldn’t take a lot of work just from companies and things like that to just financially support these initiatives in a way.

Zach: And things like WordCamp Europe, they’re not small, right?

Carl: No, they’re not small.

Zach: WordCamp Europe is not small at all. This is a large event and an entire volunteer group running it. A little way to compensate that involvement would be really helpful because it does take an enormous amount of time. Now, just venue selection takes an enormous amount of time. And then you have coordinating everything else that goes into the event, coordinating hundreds of volunteers to help make sure everything goes smoothly. Now, you have leads across every team that’s running the event to help make sure that all of this happens. Of course, these events don’t happen without sponsors in the first place, so you have to have volunteers getting sponsors to give money to make the event happen and they’re not getting anything out of doing that, which is it’s fine in some instances, but when you reach a certain scale, there’s just a lot of work happening.

Carl: It’s hard to balance. It’s not to throw Central under the bus here. I think there’s an aspect to it, but the problem is, like you said, I’ve done speaker and sponsor, it’s hundreds of hours each year to do all of that. Alain, Carole and I all speak at WordCamps. Every time I do a new talk, it’s a hundred hours to prepare it. There’s just a lot. I’ve always been a proponent to at least have some sort of numeration. I talk about it in the thread because it’s funny because it was a debate.

It’s been a debate for a long time, but I was talking about the WordCamp Paris a long time ago, where they got in trouble for paying for just a transport and things like that, but it just it helps a bit. It’s not going to replace your income, but it’s just it helps a bit and it makes it more financially sustainable because I feel like there’s only so few of us too, because I mentioned an art talk that I did at PressNomics, where I talk about a lot of privilege. I have a lot of privilege. I’m in a rent-control apartment. I live in a country where I don’t have to worry about paying for healthcare or getting injured and having thousands of law orders. All those things matter and they affect the ability of somebody being able to do this, their barriers, and that gets talked a lot about. It’s hard to tell people, “Oh, you should do contribute. It’s so easy.” It’s like, “No, it’s not easy.” If your base income is several thousand dollars, just because you have health insurance, you have a chronic disease, you have something like that, it all adds up.

So, obviously, it’s not inclusive. It’s not inclusive and there’s a lot of barrier to entry. So it’s just all these things. I didn’t even mention them all because that thread would’ve been 200 posts long if I talked about every aspect of it, but those are all aspects that affect this and it all starts with the financial stuff. People were like, “How can we help?” It’s money. It’s always going to be money because it’s the same thing with nonprofits and things like that. They’re like, “How can I help you the best?” “Give us money. We know how to use the money better than you will ever figure it out. So just let us figure it out. We’ll cherish it and be responsible with it,” but I mean, some nonprofits aren’t, but there’s still better place to use that, to deploy that money effectively than you are than just giving me… I don’t know. If you pay for travel, that’s fine, but in general, it’s better if I just get money than something else.

Zach: Exactly. Exactly. Well, let’s pause just for a minute here and get some other insight. Does anybody else want to talk on what Carl’s been talking about here?

Alain: Yeah. So first of all, I wanted to mention that oftentimes, as soon as you get to the money topic, as soon as you mention the word money, people tend to get defensive about it. “Why is it always about money? We are here for the open source and for the ideology and things like that.” But I think it’s important to realize that it’s not actually always about money, but it’s always about cost. Of all the different ways of paying a cost, you have your own time. You have your health. You have the time with your family. All of these things are ways that people pay that cost. Of all of those, money is actually the best thing we have. It is just an exchange of trading one cost against another cost so that you don’t need to trade your own personal health to pay the cost of attending a WordCamp and doing a talk, for example, or trading your sleep because you need to do 20-hour days to get your talk ready because you still need to work full time as well because, yeah, nobody else is taking care of that cost.

So it is not about everyone wanting money, but it’s about everyone wanting the healthiest possible way of covering their cost and the most sustainable way of covering their cost. So it’s all about cost in the end. When Carl mentions all these 100 hours of preparing a talk and things like that, the thing is that a lot of this time that you invest, it might be relevant in some form for your career advancement and things like that. So oftentimes, you hear the argument that while you get exposure when you talk at a WordCamp, so you should be grateful that you’re even getting to the stage, the thing is that there’s just no relation between that because that little bit of exposure that you’re getting from doing a target WordCamp, WordCamps are not very professional events, let’s be honest about that, it’s not about paying people with money that do the work, it’s also about people not going there to spend money.

It’s a community event where people get together to get hugs and to build connections. While on these larger events, while there are a lot of opportunities that are created and a lot of contracts being the end result of the discussions, it is not that every single person that goes to a single WordCamp to give a talk then ends up with a high paying job because of it. That’s just not the reality.

Carl: I’d actually want to just add a little thing to that. As somebody that does a lot of articles on the talks, the articles will get… Even if you went to next JSConf, the exposure going to get from an article is 10X, 50X more than you would get from any talk that you’ll ever give. You’re just really doing it because you like it, because you want to go and you like teaching and things like that. But yeah, that’s always been a red earring. If somebody brings up that argument to me, I feel like you’ve clearly never given the talk. It’s a really good way to single you out as somebody that’s never given the talk because really, the benefits come from everything else, but the talk.

Alain: Yeah. Carole, you can probably share a lot of insight from the other view of organizing WordCamps. I know we already had a lot of discussions about the different misconceptions that happen to be common.

Carole: Yeah. I think especially with the flagship events that are meant to be regional, which attract people from all over the world partly, it’s very difficult. So I have been on the sales and sponsors team for WordCamp Europe, and me and my team were responsible for collecting €1 million. It was the first big conference after the pandemic, I mean, not after the pandemic, we were still in the pandemic, but you know what I mean, the first in-person event that was about to happen, so it wasn’t that difficult in that case to sell the packages because everybody, all the companies, all the known suspects, they were eager to be present at an in-person event again. Also, a lot of money was literally lying around because there haven’t been events in the two past years before. So it wasn’t that hard of a job, but that was an exceptional situation.

So we are talking about a really big budget that has to be collected and I’m seeing it very difficult for the upcoming events in the future to justify the amount of money that they are going to have to collect from each and every sponsor because the packages are going to be more and more expensive. Also, the amount of costs to organize a WordCamps is going to be in Europe, in Asia, in the US on an increasing level. How will you justify an investment of 100K when you will have volunteers that are not event organizers, that have no clue about how to set up the booth in the best way and sponsors will show up with a 100K investment being disappointed about the location of their booth, the setup of their booth, the turnaround in attendees, in the sponsor area? I personally don’t think that this is a burden that volunteer contributors and volunteer organizers should have to carry.

This is already happening. I saw it happening at WordCamp US. Yeah, I don’t think that is sustainable. Personally, I think that the flagship events, a lot of the organization should be outsourced. There should be a way of not placing this on the hats of either 20 organizers for WordCamp US or 75 at Camp Europe. It doesn’t make sense, the return on investment, because I like to speak about return on investment. This is not just about giving back. If we’re talking about giving back, why do we give sponsors a booth at a WordCamp? If it is about giving back, there shouldn’t be conversations about how well or how big or how great a booth is or not.

Carl: I used to be so against sponsor booths when they started coming. I was just like, “This goes against everything that I felt like WordPress was about.” But I mean, again, that’s the growth towards more of a tech conferency environment that WordPress has been going. But yeah, I was like, “This is not the spirit. You’re giving back to help this event happen, but this is not a marketing channel.” Yeah, it used to be pushed back a lot on it.

Carole: We are not there anymore. So I agree with you, this is 100% against the initial idea of what WordPress events should look like, but we are not there anymore. We are talking about collecting 75K, 100K for flagship events so there has to be something in return.

Carl: Yeah, absolutely.

Carole: Yeah. So we should start talking about that. I agree with what Alain said earlier. I feel still today, as soon as you’re saying a thing about money, your investment, it becomes weird, but we and a lot of companies are making a lot of money out of WordPress, so there shouldn’t be a stigma about talking about how we can use it in the best way, which leads back to what Carl says, I think a good way would be to sponsor the people that are doing a big amount of important work and do not get anything in return.

Carl: Yeah. From an organizer to another, there’s a lot of structural problems too with it. I assume the flagship events work the same way, but I don’t know if they do, but for regular WordCamps, technically, you’re not allowed to lead more than two. And then Central is basically, you must divest yourself, but the problem with that then is it becomes a problem of continuity. It becomes a problem of training. You have all these problems. All this knowledge gets lost consistently unless you stick around. I’ll be honest, I was glad COVID started because all the people that were… Everybody quit Montreal and I was like, “I’m going to have to retrain an entire organizing team?” I was like, “This is insane and for free.” It was just like, “I’m sorry, but it’s insanity.”

I think partially, I mean, this is a bit tangential to the topic at hand, but I think a lot of WordCamps are going to just never come back because of that, because that knowledge is lost and it’s impossible to justify that time commitment. People are wiser to it. The environment’s changed. Even between just 2019 and 2022, the amount of money in a WordPress is insanely higher. It’s just harder to justify that. I was talking about a WordCamp US, I think it’ll end up being some local WordCamps, but mostly the regional ones. I just have a hard time seeing it because yeah, it’s almost if you’re running a professional conference, like a professional for-profit conference, but for free.

And then you’re expected to just not make money, not charge, not be paid. And then after, you can’t even continue. So you basically leave with that knowledge because there’s no effort to do… Anyways, this is completely… We could have another podcast just on that topic because I think we could… But it’s still tangential to the sustainability aspect. A lot of the people that do a lot of these works, like you, Alain, a lot of people that are doing open source work, are also doing talks, are also organizing WordCamps, they’re all doing so much and it’s really hard to sustain. I know Alain gets to work part-time. I know I tried to get into XWP too, but he gets to work part-time too. You have to find a place where you can work part-time or something like that or find clients or things. It’s just really, really hard to juggle all those things.

Zach: Well, let’s talk a little bit about the kind of sponsorship style models that exist right now, right? So we have individual sponsorships or donations. That’s one model that helps with getting some funding to these projects and the people that run them, but we also have corporate-sponsored projects. So things like the open source divisions of 10Up or XWP or any of the larger agencies, Web Dev Studios, they have people that are being paid to maintain these open source projects and the company is giving that back as part of their Five to the Future and in some cases 10 or 15. I mean, there are some companies that are putting a large amount of resourcing behind open source projects, right? We don’t often hear about that because it’s not really exposed, at least not as clearly as it could be, right? So I’m sure that there are more than a few people that have used ElasticPress with ElasticSearch that had no clue that TenUp built it other than the logo in the admin if they saw it, right?

Bob: Yeah, exactly. Let me chime in just a little bit here because I find this all very intriguing.

Carl: Bob, chime in.

Bob: Yeah. Yeah. I do have something to comment on what you just said because of what Do the Woo is going to be doing and just my train of thought there, but I’m going to just step back a bit. What everyone’s been talking about, I mean, I’ve been around a long time too, but 2006 or so, I think, and I’ve done talks, organized meetups, WordCamps, given free workshops. For me, most of it has worked well because it was part of my brand building. There was a certain goal I had in place and I loved doing it. It just worked for me and I was maybe what you might call privilege that I was able to do that.

But I think the disconnect there is that I look at Carl’s thread, I look at a lot of different things going on, and for us that are in that comfort level, where we give and we can give freely and we know our limits and I can step back and other people that want to contribute, especially around contributing directly to core and stuff, there’s that disconnect between somebody like me, I’m not talking about myself literally, and understanding that piece of it because I get it. I use WordPress all the time. I get in there and I’m just amazed. I use a free plugin. I’m amazed all this stuff. I just look at Carl and what he said and I think, “How can I do something about it?” Because I know, like Alain said, it’s not all financial, but it all centers around that, his resources, what resources can you give and they all compile around something. Sometimes they end up at the dollar price point because time, whatever is money.

So yeah, it is a tough one. I love hearing this and I’m hoping that as we continue this talk… We can talk quite a bit here. I don’t care if we go beyond an hour. We’ll make it whatever we need it to be. But all these elements you pulled out so far and all these different pieces and Carole’s talking about the WordCamps, every one of them, it has to be dealt with and I think it is changing.

Carl: It used to be taboo to even talk about sustainability. Even in 2019, I don’t remember ever hearing that much talk about sustainability. It just came out. GitHub sponsor, got that going, and then a lot of people started just talking about it more and more because before it was like you’d get pushback. You’re like, “Well, can I get paid?” and stuff like that, but it wasn’t this overall conceptual thing of sustainability of an ecosystem. I feel that’s new. That’s why I started the thread and why I’m probably going to harp on it a lot more because there’s just… That’s why I brought up PHP. It’s like PHP as a whole ecosystem is doing better to support other PHP work than we are about WordPress, but PHP compared to another language, like JavaScript or something like that, it’s not even in the same league of financial support and things like that.

There’s just a lot of work to do because it’s not every project… You brought a bunch of good points. You shouldn’t have to rely on brand building to even survive necessarily. You shouldn’t have to rely on having what I’m trying to do, which have a side business that’s tangential to what I’m working on to make it possible to do. There are some things that just don’t work that way. If we think about a lot of the things that have moved WordPress forward, like Ryan McCue doing the REST API or the WP-CLI, there’s no immediate business opportunity around WP-CLI or the REST API, but they were still driven by more or less one person. A lot of the work that happened… Even Gutenberg is literally one person that started that. It’s one person.

I think people fail to realize sometimes that some core moving forward, even outside of WordPress, just in general, it’s always one person that drives it. I’m not a big crypto fan, but it’s still… Satoshi wrote the paper and then it’s usually one person that drives the initial thing and then it drives the wave, but it’s like that person might be doing it for free for a long time trying to just get it off the ground and there’s no business incentive, business tangential way to support that. It’s like a Pareto principle, right? It’s a 80/20 situation. So that’s also another aspect that I think is really important to not take for granted.

There’s usually a couple of people running these little projects that a lot of people rely on, and it’s not just like… It’s like Sebastian with PHPUnits, one person, It’s like literally the entire PHP ecosystem runs on this. It’s like he gets supported. I’m sure he has a side consulting business. I think he’s been fine for a long time, but I can imagine somebody in a similar place, where they just built something completely foundational and then they just don’t have a business incentive around it. WP-CLI is a good example of that. It’s foundational at this point. A lot of hosting companies rely on it to do internal work. That’s why Blue Hosts, for example, supports it and stuff like that. They just rely on it. It’s foundational. It doesn’t have any tangential business aspect to sustain the developer working on it. It’s not that the developer doesn’t want to work on. It’s just like, “How do I make it work?”

Thanks to our Pod Friends CaptchaWP and LearnDash

Carole: Yeah. I just wanted to follow up with one of the last things Carl said about there’s people that are for months and years working alone on a project to get it started. So I just wanted to hear your thoughts about the complete different scenario. So there is, for example, the WordPress performance initiative, which started about a year ago or so and which was from the start, supported and sponsored by companies behind it that are pushing for a better and improved performance within WordPress. There has been a lot of conversations around that happening as well, where the community was wondering, “Is that good if there’s some specific companies?” I mean, we can name them. There was Google. There’s TenUp. There’s XWP, the SEOs and others and also individual contributors who are involved in that project. I actually loved the idea that the companies were working together on something that would benefit the larger workforce community, the open source project itself, and also interests that are obvious for these companies, but why not, again, return on investment? So what do you think about that?

Carl: Me specifically or just all of us?

Carole: Everybody. Everybody, but of course, you too, Carl.

Carl: Oh, I mean, I like it. I’m the biggest fan of the performance. If anything, I wish WordPress core hired Ollie, the DBA. I feel like WordPress core and WooCommerce could use a actual on-staff professional DBA to just go through it and help them optimize queries, optimize a lot of the database stuff that’s happening. But yeah, no, it’s key. It works as long as they’re things close enough to us. I couldn’t get any hosting company to sponsor what I’m doing right now, even though it’s only going to affect hosting companies in the long term. It’s like there has to be a direct incentive, but I do like it. I like anything that increases that kind of collaboration. I would love to see something done like that on accessibility. Just get a whole bunch of companies and be like, “Yeah, we have an accessibility team. They’re funded. They’re going to do the work and keep the project going and accessible and things like that, just constant work.”

If we silo them and then they can choose how to spend their money a bit more closely, then that’s good. It’s more options. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. I think that’s a good way to grow this idea is to have different ways to contribute back where you can be like, “Well, I’m more excited about this and I’m more excited about that.” But I think what needs to happen more is this idea that yes, you should give financially back. I’m going to do that with my company eventually as I grow. I want to give 5% back. But if you’re a company that has, let’s say, 200, 300 engineers, you should be able to give at least the 10, $20,000 a year. It’s a fraction of an engineer’s salary and it goes for a lot. All those things matter. So if you had all the big companies doing that, it just adds up.

I understand that they’re all giving Five for the Future and they have developers and stuff like that, but it’s an ecosystem. It’s not just WordPress. There’s a free rider. Matt loves the free-rider problem, but the free-rider problem is not just WordPress core. It’s the entire fricking thing. If anything, that’s why there’s tickets to include more things into Five for the Future and it should. Being a WordCamp organizer, especially for the regional like Asia, US, Europe should definitely be in Five to the Future. There’s no question about it. You could tell me, but I mean, just for a regional WordCamp, for my local WordCamp, it was four months, so I assume for you it’s at least half the year, if not the whole year.

You take two months off after to wind down and you’re like, “Let’s go again. Off we go.” So it’s almost like a full year job. For sure, that should be in Five to the Future. You need to maintain that knowledge. You need to maintain that expertise. It’s insane. If imagine you worked at a company and you’re like, “Oh yeah, in two years we’re firing you. And then you’re leaving and we don’t need you to keep anything. You can leave with all your knowledge, all your expertise,” that’s insane. It’s like pure insanity. That’s really how you have to think about it because it’s institutional knowledge. When you have institutional knowledge that leaves like that, it hurts.

Before I was in WordPress, I managed developers and you’re better off giving them a… I mean, it goes against everything. You have to always fight management around this, but you’re better off giving them a raise than having them leave. Rehiring somebody, all the knowledge you lose, it’s priceless. We’ve done that for so long and it’s especially critical for the large WordCamps. I mean, the local ones, they die on the vine and that’s it, but I don’t think Central can afford to be like, “Oh yeah. No, we’re going to lose half our team of WordCamp Europe. We’ll be fine.” It’s like, “No, you’re not going to be fine. You should make sure that these people are satisfied, that they’re happy to work.” It’s okay to have some turnaround on the staff, but it’s critical. It’s critical and it needs to be expanded.

Carole: Or at least, I mean, I can see behind some reasons why they want to have more turnout, but then at least you have to make sure that there’s proper documentation because that’s a huge pain point for WordCamp Europe at least.

Carl: I think it’s a pain point for everyone if I have to bet. If I have to bet, I don’t think any WordCamp has that solved. If Europe doesn’t have it solved, then I don’t think US has it solved because I think Europe was the first one and you’re way more ahead.

Carole: Yeah. So maybe there’s a way in the future to have documentation team involved into that for WordCamp organization as well, so a team that has seen very little support until recently, so I’m really, really happy to see that this team is going to have more support and more direction already now and in the future. But yeah, we should make sure that the knowledge stays in some way if people have to leave.

Carl: Yeah. I mean, that would be another good one to sponsor, documentation, accessibility tutorials, developer onboarding, all that stuff. There’s so much you can do. You could definitely fund a team, the performance team just around that, I think. Without a question, I think that would be a really… You love ROI, I think that would be a very high ROI investment because that’s where it’s going. That’s the number one complaint now is like, “Oh, WordPress is not as easy to get into as it used to be.” How do we make that more easy to get into? Documentation is the number one thing. WordPress used to have amazing documentation, but everybody’s utter documentation game went up and ours didn’t really follow where everybody else went in terms of the quality, tutorials and all that stuff that you have around that. So yeah, 100%. We were talking about other teams to fund documentation.

Carole: There’s cookies. There’s cookies. I heard rumors. Everybody that contributes to documentation will get cookie rewards.

Carl: That’s great.

Zach: I mean, that’s definitely compensation right there.

Carl: So you wanted to bring up a GitHub sponsor.

Bob: Yeah, I wanted to go back to supporting contributors, touch on Github because you mentioned it Carl, and I know that Alain has some experience with it as well. So can you tell us a little more more about what you are doing over on Github and maybe some of the backstory.

Alain: Yeah. So let me just give a bit of context before talking directly about GitHub sponsors. So when I started development, I tried to do as much open source as I could, but that usually meant I took on client projects while I saw a huge value in making reusable parts of the code. And then I clarified with the client that whatever I would build, that I could build part of it as open source work. That was how I initially created open source work when I started professional development. Right now, I’m in a very lucky situation, where I make several models of sponsorship working for me.

So first of all, there’s WP-CLI, where there are six hosting companies that are sponsoring the ongoing maintenance of WP-CLI that basically ensures that I can stick around, provide the continuity and the boring chores that are needed to just keep the project running because it’s always easy to find people that are passionate about this one little thing, this one little feature they want to add, but maintaining a project actually requires a lot of very boring, very repetitive work and that’s usually where a lot of projects get stuck. So they start with the initial love phase of the project where you get to build all the fun things, but then as the project matures, there’s less fun and more support and maintenance and things like that.

So this sponsorship actually takes care of that, which is really great, but that is only happening because WP-CLI managed to achieve the critical mass that was required on its own through free contributions already to become a infrastructure critical tool for the anti ecosystem. Only after it had been that was their sponsors that were willing to just send money along the way without requiring direct return in investment because all of them, they make heavy use of WP-CLI and their business relies on WP-CLI keep chugging along. So that was only achieved because WP-CLI already had this critical momentum.

Then there’s another model that works for a lot of people. I work with XWP. As part of my work, I get to spend a part of my time giving back to WordPress through the Five for the Future project. Right now, I’m working on the requests library through that program. Just as an example, the requests library is not a very critical piece of the puzzle of the WordPress puzzle. It is the HTTP abstraction stack that WordPress is using very security relevant, very critical piece of software. It was initially built by Ryan McCue, but after he didn’t find the time anymore to maintain it, there was just nothing happening with it anymore. There was no one willing to help out with maintenance and so on. We recently did a few releases to push security fixes.

Up to that point, there was no release since 2016 because nobody bothered about it because even though it was critically important, it was not something that was fun for people to work on. So projects like these, they are hard to find people to spend time with them if you don’t actually pay for their time. Then there’s other approaches, for example, GitHub sponsors. Personally, I have a GitHub sponsors account, but I never even advertised that fact. I had plans around it with a different type of software I wanted to work on, but I still haven’t gotten around to it. I only have a handful of sponsors, I think. It’s great to see that people care about this type of thing.

For me, it’s less about the money I get and more about actually feeling that I’m supported in the open source community. That is a big thing because it makes it much easier for me to motivate myself to work on something if I know that people not only rely on it, but also appreciate what I’m doing. Even if you only have sponsorships on GitHub, sponsors like $5 per month or things like that, it’s not about the amount, it’s about the appreciation and just the common care that you get a sense of that is very important. For GitHub sponsors, for example, there are a few people that make very good use of it because you can, for example, do things like create a repository that is only accessible to people that are sponsoring you via GitHub sponsors. So GitHub has extended it so that there’s functionality to make it more valuable so that you actually have something people get more if they sponsor you. So that’s very interesting.

Another model that I also dabbled with and that brings me back to the larger PHP ecosystem and how unbelievable it is, how some people keep investing in that system and get almost nothing back, I was approached by Derick Rethans because he knew that what I was doing with WP-CLI and he’s the maintainer of Xdebug. That is a fundamental tool in the PHP ecosystem. It’s what you use to debug your code and it’s being used by other systems as well, like code coverage and things like that profiling. He was having trouble because he wanted to invest more of his time into Xdebug, but it was really hard to figure out how to actually get some of the money that was generated by the work he was doing to get back to him so that he was able to afford that time.

What he’s doing right now, for example, he created a Patreon account and he is pushing updates and extra information through his Patreon account for patrons that support him on that platform. So there are these different types of models that can work, but all of them, they have in common that you need to put in the work first. You need to prove yourself for sustained amount of time to reach critical mass before people think that is worthwhile to support you. There’s so many people that create random code. Of course, it makes sense that you need to somehow prove your value before they buy into your product, you’re offering, but what we’re talking here is not that people create something to sell. So what we’re talking about here is people joining the common effort to keep something working, something as important as WordPress.

In that regard, we somehow need to get away from this only people who have a 15-year track record will actually get sponsorships. We need to get a cultural shift, where it’s just that we have more than enough money in the entire space to make this thing work correctly. Why is it that this money is currently being distributed in such a way that people who are doing the work, they burnout and the money ends up buying pens and T-shirts and stuff like that? So there’s a disconnect there. I think it has a lot to do with the WordPress culture. For example, Carl mentioned in the JavaScript space, for example, that money flows very differently there.
In the JavaScript space, most people enter that space for purely monetary reasons. They go to a bootcamp to learn development for six months and then they build a career on top of that.

From the start, they expect that they need to be able to have a living wage while they’re working that space. So the entire culture around that is different. In a WordPress space, people misunderstand what free software means. They think it’s free like beer. Yes, it’s also free like beer, but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t cost anything to create it and to run it and to maintain it. People get the wrong idea about that everything in WordPress is too cheap. Everything in WordPress is undervalued in both its monetary value and also how people appreciate it. People come with the weirdest ideas when you look at the support forums for all these free plugins that do wonderful things.

The support forums, it’s sometimes really hard to just read through it, how some people just go in there with very weird expectations of what some volunteer developer is supposed to offer you when use their product for free. So there has a lot of entitlement that immediately sits through and when you read through these forums, and we need a cultural shift to get away from that. There are models to make that work, but I don’t think the models are what is missing in the WordPress space. I think it’s an open conversation about cost and money, about sustainability, about the economics of open source is what is needed and slowly shifting away from everything that’s not free is to expensive mentality that we currently have going here.

Carl: Yeah, I agree. I just looked up Derick because I didn’t know about that and it’s like he has 150 sponsors. He has a goal of making $2,500 a month. He’s only halfway there, to just give you an idea of the scale of contribution, because most people are just going to give you… I think there’s a marketing aspect. This is where I’m a bit more business-savvy. Don’t put three, five, $7 increments, put one small one and then some higher ones. Patreon has the same problem. It’s 170 people on his Patreon and it’s like it’s still not enough. Yeah, Xdebug is huge. I think most developers that are listening to it use Xdebug in some capacity. He’s just literally trying to basically survive and work on that. He loves his thing, and it’s clearly useful.

I think there’s a challenge too. I’m in that boat right now. I rely a bit more on my brand because what I’m building is new and untested and everything, but it’s tricky, basically. There’s no clear way. It’s not because you don’t have a brand or you’re trying something new that you shouldn’t get some contribution. It’s just how to build that is tricky. It involves marketing. I think of Caleb, who does Livewire with Laravel, there’s just a lot of marketing involved with it, and not everybody’s good on marketing. It’s just like some people just need to be supported. Those ones, at least them, their track record should at least show something. It’s like Derick with the Xdebug and stuff like that. I mean, I started on 2008 and Xdebug existed then. It’s not like a new piece of software, but it’s the same problem with PHP, with PHPUnit.

I agree, it’s a mindset shift. I’m going to do it next week. I mean, I only have 20 subscribers, but basically, I’m going to get 5% back to open source, or basically every 20th subscription is going to get that because I have to basically bake it in. I have to bake it into this idea, I give 5% to Stripe Climate and I give 5% back to open source initiatives and then it’ll be baked into the company and then that’s it, but we need more of that. We need more people that are like, “Okay. Yes, there’s Five to the Future, but what am I doing to support a lot of the stuff around me?” It’s good to promote. It’s good to share all these things and matter, but at some point you need some money more than ever. It’s just the time commitment is going up and the financial side is not following.

Alain: Yeah. Most of these tools like Xdebug, for example, or PHPUnit, they are being cross financed by some other thing. With PHPUnit, it is a consulting business. With Xdebug, for a long time, Derick was working for MongoDB and they just allowed him to spend some of his time that he was working on MongoDB to work on Xdebug, which is not even really related. It was just that his company was interested in his expertise and that was valuable for them even though they didn’t have a direct return on investment, but pretty much everyone that uses Xdebug doesn’t actually give anything back. So it’s really weird how skewed these relationships are sometimes with open source projects like that.

Zach: Yeah, it’s really interesting because there is a solution here, I think, that’s pretty simple and that is for us to get the message out to the end users, the people who are using these projects that if you love the work that somebody’s doing, see if they have a donation link, go look, see if they have a support link, see if they have a way that you can support them. If you’re using their work and it’s making you money especially, give them some.

Carl: Yeah, I think that’s the important aspect is the making money, because I feel like too much of this stuff is just guilt individuals. Really, look, you’re Automatic. You’re GoDaddy. You’re WPEngine. You’re making a lot, a lot, a lot of money. It’s a trivial… I know you guys, I go to all your parties. I can guarantee you that you could spend pretty much the equivalent of one party to give back to open source instead of marketing expense and it would probably not even freaking do that much of a dent on budget and that would be a tremendous amount of money. If all the big hosting companies did that, we’re probably talking close to a million dollars that we can give back to… I’m throwing numbers like that, but I’m just saying, it’s just… That’s why I’m trying to bake it into my freaking company that I’m building because I’m just like, “I’m going to start from the beginning doing that,” but for how critical a lot of these things are, it’s really not a lot. It’s like an engineer’s salary.

Alain: Let’s make sure that I got that right. Carl, you actually advocated for few parties. Did I hear that correctly?

Zach: I didn’t think I actually heard that right either. No.

Carl: No. I mean, I just probably just got myself cut off from all the parties. They’re like, “Oh, Carl, you think we spend that much on party? You can’t come. You’re half our alcohol bill anyways, so we don’t care.”

Zach: This is a really important topic and one that I think we could really dig into even deeper than we already have. I want to try and as a community figure this out, right? How do we make it so that people who are contributing to the community in a way that is making other people money can get something back out of that contribution? Right now, it requires the kindness of strangers really in order for there to be that channel. I don’t know if there’s a solve for this. That’s not a simple one.

Bob: Zach, I’ll just add in here before we close this out, too, is that… And I can’t give away a lot of it, but that moving into this next phase of Do the Woo, we got a big investment going into the community. The podcast is about half, but Do the Woo will be doing the other half is looking at this. You said it is a challenge and I think one of the things that I’ve learned as I’ve listened to a lot of people, and I don’t talk a lot, I listen, which often helps quite a bit, is that like you said, there’s monies out there. Carl has mentioned, companies have it. I work with a lot of sponsors. We have quite a few sponsors here. We have 16 sponsors. A lot of these companies, especially the new companies that are coming into space, don’t really know where to put their money. They want to support it and they’re still trying to understand the ecosystem.

Sometimes I think there’s a chance there to build a different, how do you want to say, mindset, where we are going to start being more of a conduit of some of their monies and some other people that are trying the same effort and actually financially putting some money back in. So Do the Woo will be putting money back in come next year and we have it set for a pretty high standard through our sponsors. I think that it’s going to be an education process and I hope through this that, I’m not going to say lead the way because it’s too lofty of a goal, but we can open some eyes and maybe show that there are ways to do this and that sometimes I think people need to be a little bit pushed and guided towards those ways. I think this conversation has been a huge piece of it. There’s a lot more to be said, but I’m pretty excited about what we’re going to be doing. It’ll come apparent more as we get into it, but I just wanted to throw that in before we close out.

Zach: That’s really awesome and I’m excited to see what’s coming and all of the things that’ll be happening through Do the Woo in the new year, and I’m just happy to be here and be a part of it. One of the recent conversations that happened that might be apropos here is Jonathan Wald started a conversation about creating a WordPress guild and what that would mean and what a guild even is because this is kind of a term that’s… Its meaning as a whole has been lost over time, right? The true depth of what a guild did has been lost over time. He took a really deep dive into some historical books and really understanding what a guild did to support tradesmen in the past.

It’s how do we make this ecosystem, because we are an ecosystem of ecosystems, right? Our entire industry in the WordPress space is an ecosystem of ecosystems that interact, that support each other. How do we add some semblance of order to all of that, right? How do we ensure that nobody gets left out in the process of making that all happen? So really interesting discussions and things that I think are going to transform our landscape in the WordPress space and in open source overall as time goes on, as we still are learning how to properly support these projects. So with that being said, I want to just give everybody, all of our guests here a moment for a last word.

Alain: Yeah, I would like to say I’m always happy to talk about this topic. I think it’s a very important one and I hope that this will trigger some further discussions and tie more people into the discussion from here on. Just a quick note, something that you triggered in my thoughts now with the term of WordPress guild, Heather Burns, a very wonderful person that was involved in WordPress space for a long time, but since then has moved on, has been advocating for a long time for the WordPress folks and the web worker folks to actually get together and properly represent their own industry politically speaking, because that is not really the case.

So for a lot of industries, for a lot of professions, you have so associations, you have regulations and things like that, and that doesn’t really exist for the space that we work in. That means we don’t have the same protection than other professions. We don’t have the same impact in politics like other professions. Given that we make up large percentage of the active working population, it would make sense to finally figure out a way of professionalizing our profession in the end. So just to put that out there as well, because I was now reminded of that when we were talking about a WordPress guild.

Zach: That’s awesome. Carole?

Carole: Yeah, I would be very interested in having conversations with Bob because I was really listening closely to what the new plans are for the Do the Woo project in the future, and also supporting contributions with sponsor money that has been collected. I would very much like to talk about how can we support new and already existing sponsors and create sustainable sponsorships besides sustainable contributions, because in the end, we need those sponsors and we need the sponsorships and the money coming from these companies so we can support sustainable contributions eventually. How can we do that? Me as a WordCamp organizer, I’ve seen situations where new sponsors have been showing up, and this could have been local WordCamps or regional WordCamps, and nobody was actually there to support them on how they can showcase their brand and create positive brand awareness during a WordPress event because they have never been to WordPress events and they don’t know much about this community.

Of course, there’s a handbook and organizers usually refer to the handbook, but I think there’s much more that we can do. I take them by the hand and show them like, “Okay. This is our community. These are our values. These are the dos and don’ts, and this is how you can create a great event for yourself, for your brand, starting finding your way within the community in the best possible way,” because we want those companies to stick around. This is not only true for WordCamps. This is true for a whole ecosphere. It’s important to help sponsors creating sustainable sponsorships and also according to their KPIs in terms of return investment. Yeah. So this is something I’m open to talk to everybody, not only Bob, but you can find me on Twitter under my name, CaroleOlinger. This would be some type of contribution to the community. I would be very interested myself in diving into the future helping our community getting better in creating sustainable sponsorships, so eventually they will lead to sustainable contributions.

Zach: Awesome. Well, thank you Carole for that. Like I said, it’s a really important topic. We’re going to have to come back to it in six months or a year or once Bob rolls out his changes next year and we start to be able to talk about some of that. I think this is something that we should come back to and really explore again in the near future. So Bob, we’ll talk about getting this back on the calendar in an appropriate time, and we’d love to have you back as we start to roll some of the stuff out just to discuss community impact and what it’s going to do overall for everybody. So I think that would be great. Thank you both for joining us. Thank you, Carl, as always, for being an amazing cohost and having opinions that drive the conversation forward.

Carl: Vomiting words both literally and vocally, I guess.

Zach: Both literally and figuratively, yes, at all times.

Carl: At all times.

Zach: And that’s part of what we love about you, man. And then, Bob, thank you for actually joining us this time on a Woo DevChat. It’s nice to see you here with us.

Carl: I would like to take most credit for just… That to me is the largest achievement of this episode is we actually got Bob to join an episode.

So, I’d like to thank the Academy. I would like to thank the Academy for this opportunity to get Bob onto the show after multiple attempts. I’ve managed the impossibles, so I’d like to thank you and thank you.

Bob: Yeah, something off your bucket list, so that’s good.

Zach: Yeah. We have a lot of Bob bucket list items that we need to take care of over time, and this is one of them, so awesome. Well, it’s been great having all of you. We will be back next month with… Well, are we back next month with the Do the Woo, a Woo DevChat?

Bob: No, there won’t be one next month. It will be January.

Zach: We’re coming up on some things. So Bob’s got some big life changes. We’ve got Do the Woo changes coming and we’ll have more about all of that on the Do the Woo website and through the podcast in the near future. So, we will see you all in the new year for a new DevChat.