The Evolving Landscape of Core Contribution and Company Sponsorship

Adam Weeks:
Hello everybody. I have an incredible group of people to talk about core contribution and WordPress contribution and what all that means. I have. I’m saying things that I don’t even know what they all mean. So that’s why I’ve brought some incredible people to talk about that. This is going to be in our Open Source reach. So let’s start this off. My name is Adam Winks and I, I would like to introduce to you. Let’s start with Tammie. Tammie, who are you and what are you doing?

Tammie Lister:
Hi, I’m Tammie Lister and I am sponsored part time by a number of different people including BigScoots, Kinsta and also individual contributors to work on core specifically. And when I’m not doing that, I work in product.

Adam Weeks:
Fantastic. And we’re going to find out what some of those things mean in just a little bit. Core contribution, what is all that for? And, and I’m excited to get into that. Tim, would you like to share. Yeah. Your background a little bit?

Tim Monner:
Sure, absolutely. My name is Tim Manor. I am the Chief Marketing officer for BigScoots. We’re a fully managed hosting for WordPress company that also does performance services on the back end. So been around for about 15 years now I believe. But many of you that are probably listening to this may have only heard about Big Scoots in the last couple years and I’m sure we’ll dive more into that story as we go along here.

Adam Weeks:
Sounds good. And Zach.

Zach Stepek:
Yeah. I’m Zach Stepek. I’m the director of partner programs at BigScoots and I also am a co host of the Expanding the stack podcast on OpenChannels FM. I’m also a concert photographer when I’m not doing all of this stuff.

Adam Weeks:
Fantastic. That’s cool. We got a good group of people to talk about this topic of Contribution, how you can sponsor contribution. Why it’s important. What even is contribution? That’s actually where I want to start right now. Is it Tammie, what is contribution? Give us a. Just to set the scene, give us a little bit of a background for contribution.

Tammie Lister:
So the simplest way that I can think about it is we all gain from open source software and that’s amazing. But if we all took from open source software and never gave anything back, then there’d be dust everywhere, there’d be lines of code, there’d be bugs, things would not be dealt with. So, so contribution is paying forward, pay paying that you what you owe from having been awesome with the had this awesome software. That’s the simplest way. So it’s karma is the best way, like paying it forward and that kind of approach.

Adam Weeks:
There you go.

Tammie Lister:
But it scales from there. So on an individual basis you can do something quite small, but from a company perspective it’s how much have you gained from the software and then how much do you want to either like direct something like a focus and we can kind of talk about that a little bit more or how much do you want to contribute to the direction of a project as well. So I think that’s kind of the interesting way from an individual perspective. Many different people want to be paid to do their work in open source. That’s the dream of most people, be that part time or not part time and we don’t have infinite amounts of time and people aren’t sat on lots and lots of money. So part of this is being able to pay people for doing the work whilst maybe you have a business or maybe have a company that gains from that software. So it’s very complicated but very easy at the same time.

Adam Weeks:
I love it. Yes, it’s this, we benefit from this. An incredible piece of software called WordPress. 43% of the Internet is benefiting from this. And it doesn’t just happen on its own because yeah, I’ve got a couple hours on a Sunday so I’ll contribute. It’s like no, this is more than that, it’s more important than that and we believe in making that happen.

Tammie Lister:
And what you said there is kind of important. The inconsistent or like drive by kind of contributions are great and amazing but it needs consistent, methodical and like contributions that can be relied on for a large project like WordPress or like any large open source project. So that’s when the scale of needing to have people who are sponsored needing to have that infrastructure comes in mind because you need to make sure that the Lights are on. When you walk in the building, you need to make sure that there’s not cobwebs that are going to hit you in the face and all those kind of things. I don’t know, I have weird analogies for things, but that bugs aren’t going to go down. There’s a security team, that there are triage happening, that there are features getting worked on and that there are releases happening.

Adam Weeks:
Excellent. So all this work is getting done. People are contributing, they believe in the mission of WordPress and then companies like BigScoots come along and says, Tim, what do they say? You were approached by Tammie. Can you share a little bit about that story, how that came about and why BigScoots decided to be a part of contributing in this way? Not. Yeah, tell me a little bit more about that.

Tim Monner:
Yeah, for sure. And I mean, I think that the philosophy of Open Source is sort of embedded in the DNA of most of the people within our organization. Just a little, you know, background on myself. This is actually the fourth hosting company I’ve been at and I have been at different types of hosting companies from cloud infrastructure to data center, co location to infrastructure. And you know, my background originally in this sort of philosophy came through the Open Source Infrastructure foundation and other groups associated with that where we were building like Open Source Private cloud as an example. So this idea of once again contributing to a larger community so that we can all sort of benefit and create new and different exciting technologies for the world as a whole is something that we definitely believe in with WordPress. What’s interesting is that I mentioned earlier, I kind of alluded that we’ve been around for a long time and people haven’t really heard about us. One of the reasons for that is because the company never really marketed itself for 13 some years. I’m actually the first person they actually brought on board to do what I will call a real committed effort to market or brand the company externally. Those first 13 years we’re really committed to developing a strong product, developing good customer service, making sure that we, we were bringing the best of what would be a hosting provider to WordPress users in the community and so forth. So there was a lot of work being done sort of behind the scene a little bit. We have engineers and developers that were contributing and doing different things with WordPress, but never really talking about what they were doing sort of on a public platform. So as Fight for the Future came aboard, we got more and more engaged and we came out, we decided that we needed to show a little bit More of that, you know, the marketing guy, right. Shamelessly wanted to promote a little bit the fact of all the good work that the team had been doing. So, you know, we really started looking at that and we started reaching out to the people that were doing stuff, making sure they were involved with the program. And then, you know, fortunately I ran across Tammie. We had some great conversations. We learned of the great work she’s doing within the WordPress community. And we said, you know, we also want to sponsor that too, because, you know, we really believe, once again, wholeheartedly that this is a community platform and we all need to kind of build it and achieve success together.

Adam Weeks:
That’s great. Yeah. No, I love that story. That’s fantastic, Tim. Thank you. So we’ve seen, you know, WordPress, what are we at 20, 20 years old now? It’s been around for a minute and it did start for some people as kind of this hobbyist sort of thing. And it evolved and grew to this giant monstrosity of, you know, huge project has impacted the lives of everybody on the planet, whether they know it or not. And we’re at this stage where companies like BigScoots are saying, hey, we need. It is valuable for us to, even from a branding standpoint, say that, hey, we believe in this software. Zach, I’m going to jump to you for a second. You’ve been around for a long time in a lot of different contexts. Could you speak to a little bit of the story of the evolving contribution landscape of WordPress and how that has changed over time? There’s parts of this that I don’t know about.

Zach Stepek:
Yeah. You know, the first thing to make sure that people understand is that contributing to WordPress doesn’t necessarily mean you’re writing code for Core. I’ve never written a line of code that is in WordPress Core. It’s just not something that’s happened. It may at some point, but I’ve been focused in other areas. So, you know, I’ve done work with the training team. That’s where I started as a contributor, working alongside people like Josepha as a training contributor. And that was a great time. Beth Soderbergh was, I believe, our training team lead alongside Joseph at that time. And we were working on what eventually would become learn.WordPress.org and that’s all contributor built. Now, there are other things like the hosting team that I contribute to. The hosting team is really currently focused on creating a test suite that will automatically test hosts with new versions of WordPress to ensure compatibility across the Entire hosting landscape, which is a really important challenge. That test suite will make sure that people are ready for new versions of WordPress as they’re coming out. And then the other area where I get involved and where I’m probably the most visible as a contributor is my volunteer work with the photo team at WordCamps. We have a team that goes and takes photos at WordCamp US or at local WordCamps all over the world or, you know, and the team is global. So they take photos at WordCamp EU, at WordCamp Asia. And this is a way to document and bring that experience to other people. I look at that contribution a bit like a photojournalist. My job is to be there to document, document and to capture these moments. And that’s a big piece of all of this. You know, somebody has to be there to tell the story of what happened in the room where it happened. Right.

Adam Weeks:
That’s excellent. All right, so thank you, Zach. So we’ve got this kind of developing the story around WordPress, you know, 20 years old, it’s for many people, started out as a hobby. It has been strongly supported by some of these larger companies that can put in tons of hours, all the way down to someone who is just individually doing it for themselves. And what I think is interesting, this story here with BigScoots and with Tammie, is that BigScoots may not be ready to jump in and have tons of people doing all this work because at the end of the day it’s volunteer and where does that come from? And there’s a line item here. But I’m curious about, Tammie, your perspective on kind of this fractional idea is tell me a little bit about how your contribution is being sponsored and if you see this as maybe the future of WordPress sponsorship.

Tammie Lister:
Yeah. So maybe I can start with my kind of history, which is pretty much every single combination of contribution I’ve done from full time to being embedded in agency an to fully doing myself to now doing this part time. I think everybody who wants to contribute and do work finds where their happy space is. For me, I actually find both making and doing, being sponsored contribution is the right balance. And the reason for that is I can take that knowledge of the work that I do into my contribution work. And I think that is also very important. There’s a couple of reasons with a sponsorship like this, I can talk to BigScoots, I can listen, I can see their needs. And that’s something we, through the relationship, we’re starting to kind of get to know each Other get to know the system, get to know what their requirements are. For instance, we shared a love of triage. One of my absolute passions is things like that which is leading me into things like the AI team, which is can that solve different things. There’s many adventures you can go on with these pairings that you can have with people. But you do that through growing a relationship and starting to listen to the companies that you’re partnering with. And that’s what you’re doing. You’re collaborating, but also sharing that knowledge of contribution because you take that within and sometimes a company will not have that. And that’s inside and that’s absolutely okay. We have a shared channel and in that I can share things that’s of kind going on. I can go off to webcam Europe and I can be like, hey, this I found this amazing contribution spoon. Have a look at it, right? Like this is super exciting or this feature’s coming out. Have you seen this or this post? And there is so much going on, so many make blogs. Having someone like me be able to just say like this is a cool thing that I think is really cool. Would you like to pay attention to? It is really good for some companies. So being able to do that. But there’s so many benefits both sides. But it’s not a forced benefit. And I think that’s a really important thing. It has to be like a natural benefit. For me personally, I set goals in my contribution. So one thing I learned from Aaron Jorbin is this monthly post and I do this like monthly summary of what have I done? What am I going to do? What’s my dreams to do? And in that thank everybody that’s contributed to me and that sets out clearly what I want to do. And I also ask what people who are sponsoring me want me to. I will say, hey, I want to focus on this. Is this of your interest? Is this an area you also have an interest in? And I also listen and have those conversations and generally that works. There are many people to get sponsored by and you’ll find that the partnerships will happen from that. That was quite roundabout way of answering your question, but there’s a lot of kind of choosing froze on this one.

Adam Weeks:
Well, no, I think that’s helpful and I want to go ahead and jump in with my own little analogy here because I think of you, Tammie, as in some ways a race car driver. So let me unpack that. In the U.S. NASCAR, my father actually lived near when he was a kid where they would do these races and he would peel the stickers off of these NASCAR racers and he put it on his headboard. I remember going and looking at it and I asked him, dad, why are all these stickers from these race cars? And he’d tell stories. Yeah, he wasn’t supposed to do that, but he pulled them off. And what it was is that all these companies that believed in racing, they thought racing was so cool, they couldn’t have their own, their own car by themselves because it was very quite expensive. Expensive, massively huge undertaking. And the car has lots of places where they can, yeah, put a little sticker on there and say, yep, we support this race car driver and they would pay to, to be on there. And Tammie, you’re like, you’re a superstar, like race car driver in my mind.

Tammie Lister:
And that you’ve not seen my driving. But yeah.

Adam Weeks:
Well, you did tell me a little bit about, well, we won’t get into that, but that companies may not be at a certain point ready to, you know, sponsor the whole thing. We’re going to do what we can at this time and I think that’s such a cool thing that Big Scoots has partnered with you and your sponsorship of. We believe in core contribution. The code needs to get done. We don’t want the cobwebs, like you said, growing on the code. It has to stay relevant, updated, all these things and people need to spend their time to do that. And time is money and your time is valuable and you can’t do it, you can’t do it on your own. Did that analogy work for you, Tammie?

Tammie Lister:
You did and I think this is one of the things. There are so many different people wanting to be, to do different things and to do different areas as projects. It is essential to keep the lights on and I think sometimes we forget about that. So I’m a core committer and that doesn’t, that basically means I’m trying to work to keep lights on along with other people and there are certain teams that are trying to do that. Does that mean it’s very specific work that we’re doing and that’s great and that’s awesome, but we can kind of combine up if we have a couple of part time people doing that, it also means different skills. So maybe I’m kind of more on the front end kind of development and then I’m also on the design and product. So I would pair up with someone who is a core Commodore who is heavily in kind of the back end work and that would be really good. So yes, we’re pairing up as drive as maybe it’s rally driving rather than it’s pairing driving. But also I think these sponsorships go that there’s bonds that happen and there’s bonds that happen from a product and there’s product knowledge sharing. One of the big examples I have are things like data views. It’s a brand new product area, so I’m learning about it because I’m making it and then I can share about it. So similar to the design system that’s coming in for the app and redesign now, big scoops, you might not use all of that, but there might be a case where you have to do a dashboard or there might be a case where you, you have a client that does a plugin. Now I have that knowledge so I can share that or I could surface a bug ticket more easily or I can have that knowledge because you have that way to also have that interaction. So it’s like having someone you can ask about the car. This analogy is getting a bit stretched, but I don’t know if Tim has something about that as well because I think that relationship is very kind of from my perspective, but I’m really curious from that like company perspective as well.

Adam Weeks:
Yeah, let’s take a minute so to talk about that. So, Tim, with your marketing hat firmly in place from brand development, we have Tammie here who is contributing to core. She’s doing good work. You want her to do more, Speak a little bit to the entity or the company that is thinking. Yeah, we would also like to contribute. We would also like to get recognition for this and show that we are in support. Could you talk a little bit about how you view the value proposition to your company and. Yeah. How you can make the most of that.

Tim Monner:
Yeah, I mean, I think ultimately at the end of the day, this is sort of a reflection of the passion around WordPress, right. That our company has at the end of the day. So we, you know, we are not the largest hosting provider out there for sure. However, we have an amazing staff and dedicated talent pool of engineers, developers who are working in WordPress every single day. So, you know, they have their own projects they need to work on for sure, for clients and so on. But, you know, we definitely try to contribute how and wherever we can because once again, we know the value of WordPress and we know what we can bring to the table as well. What’s interesting with our organization is because we’re slightly different than a lot of other hosting providers in terms of we actually own and operate our own infrastructure footprint. So we actually have our own data center footprint within a large tier 3 world class data center facility out of Chicago. We are also dabbling in open source technologies on the background from CEPH storage and things like. Like that. Like we’re committed to the infrastructure part of open source too. So we’re kind of an open source philosophy all the way through, from infrastructure up through WordPress. Working with Tammie, which by the way, I was going to say earlier, she’s exactly right. Like we contribute a lot, we collaborate a lot on Slack, she sends messages all the time. She has full access into some of our team and engineers if she wants to ask questions. I think Tammie is a great way for us to also learn how to collaborate a little bit more broadly in the WordPress directly as opposed to sort of indirectly like we’ve been doing for the last number of years. To your point, ado, I mean, once again, the value proposition obviously is there. You know, we want to be seen as good stewards within the community. We have been for a number of years. We just never really talked about it. So you know, being able to kind of show and demonstrate, you know, our commitment to it. We’re going to be committed either way, but it is nice to show a little bit more of what we’re trying to do for the organization as a whole or for the community as a whole, I should say.

Adam Weeks:
Yeah, no, that’s great, I appreciate that. And yes, I think the important point there is like we’ve been doing it, but now we also have to talk about it and let people know because there is an important part of this. You don’t want to be the best kept secret in WordPress. You don’t want your good works. Like no, don’t look at me, I’m doing amazing work. But you don’t want to come across. You know, we’re not bragging about this, but being clear that hey, we support this, this is important to us and yes, we are a part of this large thing is larger than any one of us.

Adam Weeks:
Jump to you real quick talking about agencies. So we’ve talked about hosting companies. BigScoots is a hosting company. But you’ve been around WordPress a long time and right now I believe that you’re working a lot with agencies. How do you think agencies might see core contribution and this type of sponsorship?

Zach Stepek:
Well, I think one of the best ways to look at this is to look at how companies like ten have approached core contribution, how they give back. Just in general. They have dozens of WordPress contributors and four out of the 100 core committers for WordPress work at 10 up. That’s a pretty big number. And so for an agency looking at contribution, first of all, in order to run a successful agency, you have to have a deep knowledge of the platforms you’re working with. Right. Especially if you’re building highly custom projects, which most of these mid market and enterprise tier agencies are doing. So having people that have that knowledge of core contribution internally at your agency is a huge win because they’re the experts that your team can turn to for why does this work the way it does? And you know, that’s a huge question that honestly we ask a lot when we’re building things, right? Why was it done this way? What is the history of why this is this way? Yeah, and there are a lot of things that people just explain away as being the WordPress way. But why is it that way?

Adam Weeks:
What does that mean?

Zach Stepek:
Why is it that way? Why was it built that way? And when we stretch those boundaries of where the WordPress way ends and traditional architecture begins, why are we doing that in an informed way that we know is going to be future proof? Continue to work with core now as those projects then have to be maintained. Because anytime you deviate from the norm, you have to maintain that deviation. So having those people internally at your agency that understand WordPress core at a deep level matters a ton. But it’s not just core contribution that matters. Right. So if you have somebody on your team that’s contributing to say the training team, and they’re at your agency, they can be the go to resource at your agency for people who want to learn more. Right? So it’s all of these various roles and there are a ton of make teams. If you go to make.WordPress.org There’s a whole list of ways you can contribute there. And I think it’s important for Agencies to have that same level of contribution back to the platform that they’re making all their money off of of now do I think it’s always going to be 5% of all of their work. It’s a good goal to try to attain. Sometimes it’s going to be more. Sometimes you’re going to have people that are at agencies that are full time contributors. Right. Because the agency has gotten to a point where they can support that level of activity. At smaller agencies that may not always be a reality. But know that giving back doesn’t just help other people, it helps you. And you know, as an agency, as you’re growing. When I started my agency in 2017, one of the first things we decided to do was enter as sponsors for every WordCamp that we were attending. It was a huge differentiator. As we were starting out, we were this new company. Nobody knew who we were. Nobody had ever heard the name before. All they saw was this brain on this marketing material and they’re like, what is this company? And so it started a ton of conversations. And that’s another way you can contribute is by sponsoring. And so it makes sense that if we were able to sponsor WordCamps and get some interaction from the community from that, then sponsoring contributors like Tammie would have that same add on effect. Right. Tammie’s going to be out there doing the work and people are going to be looking to see what she’s doing and who’s helping her do that. So even if your agency isn’t at a level where you can contribute yourselves because you’re just so mired in the product work or the client work that you’re doing, or if you’re a plug in company and you can’t contribute yourself because you’re just too busy answering support tickets, that’s a good problem to have. And it’s also a good reason to look at people like Tammie and, and others in the space who you might be able to help with their contributions. And that counts toward your goals. Right. Of trying to be part of this five for the Future world. So, yeah, I just, I think there’s a lot of benefit to agencies of just getting involved.

Adam Weeks:
Right. I think it’s, you know, the, on the front lines people who are actually, you’re building with it, you know, they’re answering client questions or solving problems and then having that access to, to be able to help in core. And I want to go a little nuance here and I’ll go back to you, Tammie. All right. You’re an agency, you’re a host, like, yes, we want this specific feature into Core. So, you know, what we’re going to do is we’re going to sponsor Tammie and she’s going to make sure it gets in there. So that’s how it works, right?

Tammie Lister:
Yeah. Being sponsored doesn’t mean a guarantee that something’s going to get in. And again, I’m speaking for myself, every person has their own thing. For me, when I’m sponsored, I’m taking the information. I User research is a big thing. So if I was working on a performance feature, I go directly to all you awesome people at the. Excuse me, like, hey, there’s something here. Could you give me some stats on this? Because there’s something here and I know that you are the people for this, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right. And that’s part of being able to do that. Or when we’re talking about triage, you’d be like, ha. And be able to do. But it wouldn’t be. And I’ve never had that from a sponsor. I’ve never had someone be like, oh, this is the. I definitely had evidence given of why different features. So a good example is extensibility in the core editor. And this actually goes back to agencies and even product makers and even anyone who wants to make anything. If you want to do anything, you need to extend it, you need to have. And in WordPress we generally think of hooks and things, not APIs and different things. You want to be able to do anything. The editor is great, but it’s not as extendable as you would hope it could be yet because it’s quite new in certain areas. So the sensibility project there is great and amazing, but generally we need evidence and strong evidence in order to get something in, because everything that we put in, we have to do maintenance on. We need evidence on more than one person needs it. If only one agency ever needed it in one case, maybe not a reason to put it in Core. If it had a high performance cost on all hosting, maybe not a reason to put it in Core. You know, all these kind of evidence things you need to be able to see before something can get put in. So being able to get access to that also helps. And we do have these programs, even Core. But yeah, just being able to have that, it just gets that. Just been able to coordinate and be able to talk with people and be like, hey, how do we get this? I find it invaluable. That’s also why for me, this, the cool kids call it fractional. I’m old. That this part, you know, variable time way of doing it works perfectly for me because I get that research, I get that input. And then when I’m working on extensibility check, I can be like, you know what? This really matters to BigScoots Because I’ve seen why this really matters. So this ticket, it’s not that you’re telling me that this ticket is really important. I know I’m seeing a real customer or I’m seeing four real customers that this had a real impact to. So I can actually add that onto the issue rather than be like, well, I think it might be important, but I don’t have any real cases for it. That’s the kind of thing that this gives you. And it gives you. If you’re in an agency and you’re able to do it. I’ve actually been contributed about when I’ve been in an agency and I’ve had exactly the same experience, I’ve been able to take that evidence. And the curious thing is if you’re in an agency and you’re also being a contributor, everybody comes with their bugs to you. You are the bug gatherer for that agency. So you, everyone wants you to report everything and generally you find it’s already being reported. So even if a contributor did someone sponsoring you and they were like, hey, can you do this feature spoiler, it’s probably already getting worked on. It’s probably blocked for a reason. And that reason probably is not something that I can change. So all of these kind of things at play that not one person can necessarily change everything, but collectively we can find evidence to move the things forward that really benefit the project. And I think that’s the thing like surfacing the use cases that are really important that matter to people today that are hurting with the product, to be, let’s be honest, and then putting those onto the issues and then moving like the core forward. Because core is always going to be like the middle ground of functionality and it’s always going to be tested by hosts, really tested by hosts, but really tested by everyone who extends on hosts. And the thing about hosts is they then have people who are building in the setups and then they have connections to agencies. So they’re a great source even more than agencies because they have everybody’s feelings in that space.

Adam Weeks:
So yeah, yeah, that’s important that you are in this fractional, as the cool kids call it. You know, you have these different people that are sponsoring you. There is this very like, I’m not going to take orders. Yeah. What can I put in court for you today, it’s not that, but you are able to have in the Slack conversations what things are important to you, getting feedback because this software is for everybody to use and it needs to benefit and for hearing from different places like, yeah, this is just a really, a big pain point. Having the opportunity to make that difference.

Tammie Lister:
And you’ll generally find that the sponsorship will align with the areas that people are working in. So one of the things that I do in my monthly posts, I’m pretty obvious about the areas that I’m working in. I am not working on this training team came out, I’m not working on the training team at the moment. I’m very obvious about the areas I’m working on. I also, if I’m going to work in a new area, I will say, hey, I found this shiny spoon over here that I would like to work on. So someone could find, look at that and go, oh, I like that spoon. I’ve got thinking about spoons and then sponsor you for it. But that’s the way there’s a project. Collectively we can do it a bit more. And as someone who’s looking to be sponsored, we should be doing a little bit more. We should be a bit clearer about those ways. And the moment that I started doing that, it’s been a little bit easier for me for my own goals and my own objectives as well. So just doing that, I think is really important and helps sponsors as well. So you can have those conversations and get those evidence of the areas that you’re going to work in.

Adam Weeks:
Ah, that’s great. As we’re wrapping up, I’m going to just do kind of a quick round robin. We’ll start with Tim, then Zach and I’ll end with you. Tammie, just a quick moment from your perspective, like people who are sitting in a seat similar to yours, you know, whether it’s at an agency or at, you know, hosting company, we’re talking about branding, marketing actually for you, Tam, you know, being a contributor, this model of fractional contribution, if that speak to that person who may be on the fence as to whether or not that’s a good idea and give them a little persuasion as to why we should do more of this. Tim, I’ll go to you always like.

Tim Monner:
A dare in headlights with the day on this one. Yeah. I mean, once again, when you’re looking at this thing and you’re considering doing some sponsorship of these type of programs and so on, just always keep in mind, you know what I think is do it for the right reasons. Right. From a marketing standpoint, yes, there’s value to be gained from these kind of things, but that’s really not the right reason to these kind of programs or sponsorship. Do it because it’s the right thing. You mentioned we’ve said repeatedly, again and again, the platform is there for all of us to use. We’ve all benefited from it and so on. So we all should be contributing back to some degree. So if you don’t have the team support to be able to do this right now on your own, definitely consider sponsorship of it so that you can contribute back. Because once again, at the end of the day, that’s what Open Source is. That’s what this whole program is about. It’s about everyone coming together so that we can all succeed a little bit better. So do it for the right reasons is kind of how I would leave my statement.

Adam Weeks:
There you go. Thank you, Zach.

Zach Stepek:
Yeah, I think it’s important to recognize that any financial benefit you’ve gained from using open source software came from somebody else’s work, right? And so if you can give back to that by Simply going on GitHub and finding a core contributor that you have enjoyed the work of, and they have a sponsor button on GitHub and you can hit that button and give them money, do it. It’s not hard. And then you don’t have to be an agency or a hosting company or a plugin company. You can be an individual contributor who just isn’t at the point where they’re ready to be a contributor to WordPress. And you can contribute to WordPress by just financially supporting a few of the people whose work has impacted you. And I find that GitHub is a great way to do that. I sponsor a few people on GitHub myself just because I appreciate their work. And I think that they need to be valued for that work because that work has provided value to me. And so, you know, I think that’s really the way to look at this, is you’ve gotten a lot. This is your way to give back. And if you can give back in a way that’s fractional, I support three or four different people just personally myself. If a company is able to sponsor 30 or 40 different people in various ways, you know, even with just these tiny micro sponsorships that are monthly, that makes an impact. You may think that 10 or $20 a month doesn’t go very far, but when 50 people are giving 10 or $20 a month, it goes a lot further. When a hundred people are giving $100 a month, that’s a livelihood, right?

Adam Weeks:
Yeah.

Zach Stepek:
So don’t think of it in terms of the size of your contribution, but just the fact that you’re starting to give back. And if you look at it in that manner, it’s really easy to start fractionally supporting people who are doing great work.

Adam Weeks:
That’s great. Cool. Thank you, Zach.

Tammie Lister:
Tammie, first of all, I want to say everybody’s got their own path on contribution. So whatever you want to do, just be clear about it. But also, each month, write a post. Say thank you to the people that are sponsoring you. It doesn’t take much. Say thank you to the people that sponsor you. Big amounts of money. Say thank you to the people sponsoring small amounts of money. It does all add up, it does all matter. And you’re going to be so thankful for it. But also use it as if it is paid work. And I’m saying that with an open heart. But log it, monitor it, and take it in that manner. That’s the best way that you can do it. Like have tasks for yourself, have goals. And I’ve seen some awesome people doing that and some awesome people raised for things that way. And that is probably the best way. If you are looking to get sponsored for things, that’s the best way to get sponsorship for particular projects as well, to do that. The other one is, if you want to do it fractionally using the word, make sure. You’re also trying to find roles that align with doing that as well and fill you to be able to do the contribution. But just find a path that works for you and find a path that means that you can be a valuable contributor as long as you need to be. Contribution can be free and you can give back. You’re going to give back your own stuff. So I also contribute back my own work without I don’t pay myself. That’s strange. But WordPress gives me things. It gives me a lot. It’s given me this livelihood, it’s given me a long amount of years, so much time I owe things. So I give back things from that. So there still is that. But you are also justified to be paid for your contributions. And I think sometimes we need to hear that. But when we do that, we need to say thank you. When we’ve done that. And just that post holds you, you get to kind of move forward with that and take that information and put it into your issues, put it into your tickets. Make WordPress better from that information that you gather and use everybody that sponsors you for the resources that you have meet them at work camps if you can from those teams, listen to the stories of what they’re building and what they’re making, listen to the products, listen to the hosting companies because you’re going to get insights that you would never have unless you work there from that and things you might not understand but you over time if you listen like it might not be your area. Like back end hosting is not my area of expertise but I’m getting to learn about things like that that I can then take into tickets and be informed of those things. So just take those opportunities as well as you can do that.

Adam Weeks:
Awesome. Thank you so much for those final words on that, Tammie. That encouragement, that motivation to yeah, get started, go and do be a part of this incredible community by contributing or supporting contributors. Do what you can because the work is important. I assume that Tammie, Tim, Zack, everyone can find you on a Slack channel near you on a LinkedIn, perhaps at a Word camp or an event and that everyone is open to. Yeah. Learning more about how to help contribute to this incredible project. All right. We’re here to answer questions. We’ll be doing more of these in the future and I hope you guys all have a great day. Thank you all so much.

Tim Monner:
Thanks, Adam. Thanks, Tammie.

Zach Stepek:
Thank you.