WordPress Community Collective, Collaboration and Support

Marcus: Hey, everyone. I’m Marcus Burnette, and with me today is Bob. How you doing, Bob?

Bob: Hey, I’m doing good. I’m pretty excited about this show with the topic we have lined up.

Marcus: Yeah, me too. We have a couple of amazing guests joining us today and I will get right into introducing them. First off, we have Sé Reed who is one of the co-hosts of WPWatercooler, and founder and CEO of Kerredyn Collaborative. How you doing today, Sé?

Sé: Oh, I’m doing good. I don’t know, did you get that off LinkedIn? What?

Marcus: I just stole that off LinkedIn.

Sé: No, that’s great.

Courtney: She’s also the marketing team co-rep.

Sé: Yeah, those are true. Those are just my… I was like, “Oh, non-WordPress credentials.” I have those, too. They’re really. They’re there. Yeah, I am marketing team rep for Make WordPress for 2023, one of the new marketing team reps. There’s three of us and I just led my first marketing team meeting today and it was great and I’m so excited for this year for so many reasons in the Make Community and just in general, the WordPress in general. There’s some exciting stuff on the horizon. Anyway, I’m Sé. Hi.

Marcus: Awesome. We’ll get to even more credentials as we talk about today’s topic. Everyone in the space seems to have four or five, six different titles, so that is kind of the way it goes. We also have with us Courtney Robertson, who is on the team that I work with at GoDaddy. She is the Dev Advocate at GoDaddy and Training Team co-rep, and probably also four other titles as well. How are you doing today, Courtney?

Courtney: Well, a slight update. I have served my two years as a Training Team co-rep, and now have handed those reigns over. I am still part of the Training Team’s Faculty Program, which means that I help create a lot of the content that’s going on. I’m not going anywhere from training. In fact, I’m digging in that much more, but it’s great, and I came to work with Marcus because as a contributor in WordPress, my first contribution was in 2009.

Joined a team in 2014 and I remember saying to our now manager, “Hey, the work that’s happening over on the training team is kind of life-fulfilling work and I need to dedicate more time to doing that so that other educational institutions can benefit from that and really multiply that effect.” I shamelessly went to our manager and said, “Adam, if GoDaddy would like to hire me to work on this, please let me know,” and so eventually that worked out.

Sé: I would go with confidently, confidently over shamelessly. That’s pretty badass if you ask me.

Bob: I agree. Well, back in November we had a show on here, a dev chat show, and we talked about supporting WordPress contributors and it was a really interesting conversation with two people that are very involved. I’ll just put a link in the show notes, but I want to say how this is a perfect segue because we talked about that this is a topic we got to continue to talk about on Do the Woo.

The backstory of WP Community Collective

What better way than to hear the backstory of what you’re doing, WP Community Collective. I mean, let’s get kind of a nutshell history of that and then we’re going to give into more around what this means for WordPress.

Sé: A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, just kidding, in this galaxy, and actually not so long ago at all, I have thought about this issue for a long time since there’s been various projects that have sprung up in terms of like structure around the project. I’ve watched those happen and kicked this idea around, but I never wanted to move forward with it because of the existing structure of the WordPress Project, including the foundation and the role that it plays within the greater WordPress ecosystem. It is the holder of the copyrights of WordPress, the copyright and the logo and some various other… they’re very important technical things.

On the back end, I think that that public-private relationship that has kind of evolved through the private nonprofit foundation or the public, well, it’s not public open source component and the various private companies of all sizes from automatic to GoDaddy, let’s just say just to pick some names out of a hat. How that plays together, I’ve always thought that’s been a really interesting dynamic and what has made WordPress so durable and so successful. I have thought about those concepts for a long time.

After WordCamp US this year, last year, WordCamp 2022, there was a conversation. There has been a greater conversation including The Do the Woo Podcast conversation you had and referenced, so a greater conversation around the support that is available for contributors and how people who are really instrumental to the functioning of WordPress and its extended ecosystem plug-ins that are really important or media outlets, let’s says all the different components that are there and how to support that or how that funding works, what that looks like. Out of that conversation came from a tweet thread in which Matt Mullenweg said that, “The foundation does not have any plans to pay contributors or to hire people in that context.

That was the kind of eureka moment for me in which I then texted Courtney and I was like, “So about those things we’ve always talked about, can we actually do that? I think we need to do that because this states explicitly that the foundation is not going to do that.” That was right after WordCampUS. What was that, September, right? It’s January, so this is what I mean when I say recent history. We happen to be well-placed group of people. Courtney is obviously knows just, I don’t know, how, but knows literally everyone involved in the Make WordPress team. My business partner Katie Adams Sparrow, is really an expert and write curriculum even curriculum even on nonprofit and grant writing, nonprofit structure, nonprofit strategy.

We had this kind of dream team and everyone was like, “We could do that. Yeah, let’s move forward.” Then, we decided to move forward, and I’ll stop there in the history, but that’s basically got us up to the point of when we said, “Yes, this needs to happen and, how can we do that?” Then, that started a whole… obviously a different conversation, but that was the lead-up.

Having the non-profit status and Open Collective

Marcus: Not to oversimplify, not to oversimplify the actually really great history there, essentially what you’re doing is you’re connecting people who have money that they would like to give to contributors with the contributors looking for some kind of payment. You, I think, briefly mentioned it in there, but do you want to talk a little bit about how you do have the 501(c)(3) status and how it’s an official nonprofit and all of that?

Sé: Yeah. Courtney, do you want to talk about Open Collective Foundation, our fiscal host?

Courtney: Yeah, sure, so Open Collective Foundation is a platform that basically provides transparent banking. Every bit of money in, money out is visible on everybody’s screens, and the perks to that mean that there is that radical transparency in how funds get used, and that’s pretty important in a nonprofit endeavor. This platform enables many different organizations besides the WPCC in the WordPress space. A lot of folks might be familiar with the PHP Foundation and a few other organizations that are using Open Collective.

What this does is it allows us basically create buckets of her are the things that we want to get sponsored and people can give to that. Open Collective handles a lot of the things that are just logistically hard, both for companies, individuals to get that money where it needs to go, and also the recipients because people are around the globe and they want to get the paid for the work that they’re doing if they’ve contracted to do that type of thing. How do we transfer those money areas in Open Source?

Sometimes these are not employees necessarily of someplace. They might be independent contractors, and so there’s all of this logistical overhead that goes into, as I’ve intimately learned in my time at GoDaddy, and I say this with all kindness because I know that we’re working towards actually onboarding the WPCC as a vendor, which in a corporate sense is kind of a big process, right? The ability to get the money flowing from various departments inside GoDaddy to the contributors, we have already seen some challenges with that.

Open Collective serves as this amazing resource for us that if we decide to bring someone in at the WPCC, if the WPCC brings someone in full time that would live in the U.S. and would need healthcare coverages, Open Collective has the resourcing to make some of that type of thing possible. Really, they’ve figured out a lot of the challenges because this organization, the Open Collective organization, actually exists to simplify this process for Open Source contributors to get sponsors and to cover what needs to get covered for their needs.

Sé: The Open Collective Foundation is actually part of a greater Open Collective in general that is, was actually… I think it’s the parent organization that also runs a lot of… that is also the Open Source Collective, which is also a fiscal host. It gets into the weeds a little bit in terms of how that is all structured, but that’s exactly why we were able to move so quickly because we had planned, given the expertise that we have on our little starter team here, to go forward as a full nonprofit. Long term, it is possible that we would do that depending on how this plays out because there might be… we might want greater freedom in terms of advocacy or we might want greater ability freedom in terms of global payments that would necessitate us to move beyond the structure that exists.

Right now, it’s really a perfect home for us to be able to be radically transparent, like she was saying, like Courtney was saying, but also to take advantage of the taxes that they’ve already handled, the board of directors’ responsibilities. When we’re forming a board of directors, we don’t have to worry about those board of directors being legally responsible. We’re not going to have to transfer bank information to the new treasurer.

It really allows us to start and build the WP Community Collective in a sort of incubator, sort of like a little nonprofit incubator that allows us to really see how the community feels about this, get started with our developing our bylaws and all of the things would be and could be legally binding as a full 501(c)(3). This gives us the ability to start while we’re doing that. It’s really that is a big component of why we were able to go from, “Hey, let’s do this,” to launching a program and hopefully announcing our first fellow this week.

Bringing the ecosystem together

Bob: The huge hurdle of becoming a nonprofit you are now over that. The next big hurdle is this huge ecosystem or WordPress. What I want to know is we’ve got companies, we’ve got other individuals that have tried to create these little kind of smaller organizations that are kind of leading this same direction as far as helping contributors maybe travel to WordCamps. Now, we don’t all want to reinvent the wheel. I mean, I’ve had discussions with you on what Do the Woo is doing. We’ve got a little bit of fragmentation, so what is your future efforts here to try to pull together? Ideally, we would, I think, all love to see this area where we can go. It’s all happening there. It’s not, you know, “Who do I choose from?”, or, “Where do I go?” Give me some thoughts behind that because I’m sure there’s a lot in works and a lot of planning there, but at least your initial move towards that direction.

Sé: Oh yeah, and all of this is in progress because we are just getting started and really testing the waters and getting the framework up and running. This is going to be part of a… It’s not just going to be, say, deciding this stuff, but I am happy to speak about where we’re starting from in terms of starting that conversation and our approach, which is we have had a lot of conversations with folks within the community who have various endeavors, the Do the Woo empire included. I think our approach is across the board a collaborative approach and not in any aspect a competitive approach.

What we’re hoping for is that we will actually be able to partner with these various smaller organizations to either bring their program into the community collective or work with them to facilitate whatever it is they’re trying to accomplish as long as it aligns with the fairly narrow scope of what we are doing within the WP Community Collective. The idea really is that the WP Community Collective is… I was about to say, “It’s like a big dish.” It’s a container. It’s a container for projects and fellowships. We basically created two types of funding that we’re going to be pursuing.

The fellowships and individual and organization contributions

One is for fellowships and that will be different types of fellowships that can have one or many fellows depending on… really, it’s all depending on funding.

Fellowships will be things like our initial fellowship, which is our Accessibility Fellowship, which we think is one of the most important and undersponsored areas of WordPress and underfunded in general in terms of things like let’s say accessibility testing, which is another issue that was raised at WordCamp US this year. Actually, accessibility is a great way to speak about both of our two types of endeavors because on the fellowship end, we have our Accessibility Fellowship, where we are starting with an Accessibility Fellow who is going to be basically supported for work that they’re already doing on the team.

They will be able to get paid for their work so they’ll be able to actually really focus on it and not feel like they’re doing it in the little in-between times and just know that they can do that work and that that money is going to support them for that work for a specific amount of time. We’re building into our fellowships blogging.

Our plan is for all of our fellows that they will be blogging about their experience, which will really give another perspective and a window into the process and into the work that’s being done, which also speaks to our transparency goals. That’s the fellowship side. We’ll be working with individuals in that way.

It won’t just be like… On one hand it’s slightly like Kickstarter or crowdfunding for contribution. It is crowdfunding for contribution, but it won’t be just like anyone can sign up and be like, “Fund me.” It will be based on a fellowship format, which is more like there’s a specific term with a specific focus, and that’s not to say fellowships can’t be extended, but the idea is that it’s not a permanent position like going to work somewhere would be. That’s sort of the difference in the fellowship individual side.

Courtney: The other part of working with individuals is also working with individual contributors, noting that thus far we’ve raised more than $3,000 U.S. towards various parts of WP CC funding. That has been largely by individuals that are providing those funds.

Sé: That is all individuals, actually I think at this point, yeah.

Courtney: Yeah, yeah, and shout-out to Scott Clark, fan of Do the Woo I know who was our very first inaugural donation. Thank you very much, Scott. Scott’s been funded in open source projects and felt very strongly about funding this as well, so thank you for that.

Sé: Also, Bob, thank you for funding us.

Courtney: Yes.

Sé: No pressure, Marcus.

Courtney: Yes, yes, yes, but also, so individuals and organizations alike are welcome to contribute to the work that’s happening here and we’ll certainly partner with both sides of that to make sure that the work of building WordPress is available for those that have for various reasons need that financial backing to contribute. I know that I have very much been in that place where there is a lot in me that I would love to give into this project, more than I have hours in the day, but certainly being able to focus on that as part of my job, not as the things that I do instead of sleep is a big help. There have been times where I’ve given up the sleep for it, too, but that’s because I so much believe in the cause and the purpose of democratizing publishing and helping individuals be able to contribute to that same cause, helping the recipients of all of this work that we do for their endeavors, too.

Marcus: You can’t see me, but I’m opening my wallet now and contributing. I wanted to get a little bit into the weeds, though. You briefly mentioned global. Is it indeed possible to provide funding for folks globally? If so, what does that look like? I know there’s different currencies, different hourly pays, all of that, and then, do contributors come to you and say, “Hey, I need X amount of dollars for this amount of time?” Or is that sort of already set up?

The pain point for funding open source

Courtney: Well, Marcus, you need to get an envelope and put your bills in it and put a stamp on it and then hope that you’ve got enough shipping. This is the problem, folks. How do individuals that want to help back others get them that money? That’s a legit problem, and then in corporations, that would be the same problem in any kind of a company as well is, how do we get this? That’s not payroll, it’s not HR, but yet… This is a pain point for funding open source.

Sé: This is going to be a big part of our partnership program, so we’ve already started having conversation with some of the bigger companies in the WordPress space about partnering with them to streamline their contributor funding so that it’s not coming all over the place and can’t be tracked. We will be able to provide that structure that won’t then put that burden of reporting onto a person who’s contracting with a company for just a very limited amount of time and trying to fit into some corporate structure.

We’ll be able to be that go-between between if someone wants… For example, let’s say GoDaddy wanted to bring someone onboard, they wouldn’t have to necessarily hire them as a contractor or hire them as an employee as their only answers. They can work with us to have a fellow that can be dealt with in a part-time way without having to be that part-time process in terms of payroll on the company side, so that makes sense?

Global pay parity

I did want to talk about, to your question, Marcus, about two things. One, global pay parity, and two, how does that money actually get out? You actually asked three questions, global pay parity, how does that money get out? Then, also the kind of how do fellows come onboard or how do people become part of… How are folks funded through us? Three separate questions. For now, the process that we’ve adopted right as of this moment, which could… not probably, but hopefully will get a lot of more thought put into this, not that we haven’t put thought into it, but will be continued to be discussed. That process will hopefully be refined, but we found global pay pay parity calculator that takes into consideration the expenses where you live basically down to like the city level, the expenses of where you live, cost of living standards, all of that stuff and puts it into a little formula, and then calculates the equivalent wage to another place.

That’s what this calculator does. It compares those two things. We have adopted as the policy that our contributor, our fellows will be paid $75 an hour as is equivalent to Los Angeles, California, which is essentially where I live. Incidentally, also where the Open Collective Foundation is based out of, so seemed like a reasonable location to start from. I’m pretty familiar with a $75 hourly rate in California. It’s not like tech gold, but it’s also a… it’s definitely a livable wage. It’s not insulting. Then, you put that into the calculator, and then you determine the wage rate for the place that you live based on that calculator. That’s how we have addressed the global pay parity problem. I think that that, again, so interested in learning more about that and hopefully we’ll be able to have some discussions about that and maybe even host some discussions about that as an organization.

How fellows come onboard

Global pay parity, what was the second question? I help mine them and then I forget them all. How fellows come onboard, so there’s a program that GitHub launched, GitHub Sponsors, where anyone can basically sign up and say… It’s sort of like Patreon where anyone can sign up and say, “Okay, support me, support this project, support whatever I’m working on.” That exists, so we’re not replicating that format. Our format is really going to be, as I was saying earlier, based on for individual contribution, mostly based on the fellowship model, which is a set amount of time. It’s like a term essentially that you have as an Accessibility Fellow or whatever that might be. We will… As we’re in this round, our initial round, we actually did it backwards to what I hope we will be having as our process in the future.

Ideally, we would raise all of the money for a fellowship and then do the process to get the fellow for that funded fellowship. We’re not offering a fellowship to someone that isn’t funded. The way that it works with Open Collective Foundation is in order to hire somebody through their systems, we basically take the amount of money that it will be in total and we put it with them and they pay that person out of that bucket. That means that we have to have all of the money that we are committing to pay them for in that arrangement. We can always have more. We can always add more hours and be like, “Okay, now you have 10 hours a week instead of five,” and that would be lovely, but we will have a minimum amount of five hours of contribution a week for six months.

That’s the minimum as like the size for the fellowship. This one we did a little bit differently because we wanted to be able to hit the ground running with both a fellowship and a fellow, which we’ll be announcing this week. In the future, we will be launching the fellowship first and then funding that fellowship, and then going through the process of fellowship application and then deciding on a fellow for that fellowship. Again, this is to protect the fellow and the organization that we will have already… It’s not Kickstarter where we’re waiting to raise money. It will just already be there and we’ll be able to start that process, so that’s the plan.

The process to put your name in the hat is coming

Courtney: Noting in there a couple of pieces. Say you mentioned devs earlier. We’re in the Gutenberg era, everything is nested blocks, so nested blocks all over the place. Okay, but really, so I get approached pretty often by others that, like me, we’re seeking ways to do this work and be paid while doing this work. I would love to keep doing this. How did you get to that point? Those of you that have reached out to me, thank you. Yeah, we don’t have a process yet. We will be getting a process together. Those of you that I have spoken with already, I have personal notes that I’ve not shared so that I remember because there’s a lot of information that flows past me of those that have reached out and said, “I am interested in being sponsored.”

Now, how do we match the people that are interested with what the project needs to happen? That’s where things kind of get pretty interesting. Initially, as I said for the accessibility, we knew that this is work that absolutely matters. We need that editing experience to be a WCAG 2+. We need to really improve that editing. Maybe it’s 2, too. I am not the accessibility expert as you could tell, but we need that to meet a certain level of WCAG from the editor, from the editor, so that using WordPress, creating content in WordPress is not just accessible from the final front end view, but that that edit experience is also accessible.

That’s an obvious part. That was something that we knew someone that would be an ideal fit. As this continues to grow, as WP CC continues to evolve, we’ll get a better process together for people to put their name in the hat, apply, et cetera, but also members will be able to speak up a bit about what they feel should be prioritized. Likewise, then the board will help direct that saying that, “Out of what we have heard, here are the things that we’re going to prioritize in funding.” Then, those areas that are special or uniques like the fellowships or the unique projects that… We’ve got a lot of projects in WordPress funding. Funding these special areas of projects like someone selected to speak, but they need the funds to get there or they’re a contributor and they need to get to the nearest international camp because they’re regular active contributor.

We’ve thought through a lot of that and so, yes, those things are all… Anything that is related to make.wordpress.org or official WordPress-related events would be part of this umbrella. We’ll be figuring that out over this next year, but we’re out of the gate at least getting some action underway before we have every little nuance figured out. We invite folks to come along with us as we are sorting through policies around those things, and folks that are interested in creating processes for some of these unique special projects. Or if you’ve got talent skills in helping set up processes for people that want to apply to be sponsored, well, then let’s talk, too.

The line between fellowships and partnerships

Bob: Taking that like if a company, let’s say some podcasting company started some fellowship for something, then it sounds like the process is at the point where as far as possibly choosing the recipients for it, let’s say it’s speaking at WordCamps. I’m just going to throw that out because that’s a common thing you hear, that that will be something that will be worked through that process and it probably will be some kind of a collaborative effort between the community, collective view, whoever is there and the company that is so-called “sponsoring” this fellowship.

Sé: I have an answer for that and I’m really glad that you brought that random podcast into the example tool because we’re in conversation about some other ones and it’s hard to talk about this without using all the proper nouns, so I’ll just call it the podcast. Let’s say a certain podcast wants to have, let’s say, a podcast fellowship for whatever needs to happen with that. Those will be part of our partnership and our partnership fellowships will be different. You can kind of think of them as sponsored fellowships, and those will be different than our WP CC Accessibility or whatever they happen to be Fellowships that are focused on Make teams and contribution on that side. There’s two ways that that random podcast could participate. One would be to create a branded fellowship that would be that podcast fellowship.

Then, that would really be not part of a… Obviously, there are some standards for the people that will be paying. For example, to answer some of your global question earlier, Marcus, we cannot pay anyone who’s being sanctioned by the United States of America or if their country is being sanctioned by the United States of America, or if they’re on the international terrorist list. The money can go wherever Stripe can go and the payments can go wherever it’s legal for us to pay people is essentially how that works, but in terms of the Partnership Fellowships, those will be not the same as I guess we could call them Community Fellowships. Those will be different.

For example, in one of our conversations we have right now, we actually have folks who are already set up to be fellows brought over by the organization that we are working with. Those will be that organization’s fellows and part of that… and that has its own little structure of how that works and how we are going to… We’ll still have the same expectations of our fellows in terms of transparency and blogging. I’m just going to keep calling it blogging because it’s so fun to say. We’ll still have those same requirements for fellows because that’s a big part of our ethos and that transparent process, and everyone’s seeing what we’re doing and doing it out in the open. Say that podcast had people in mind they wanted to have as fellows, that podcast would be able to do that.

Courtney: With the general goal of it connecting to a Make team or related to a .org official event, et cetera.

Sé: We have so many announcements that are pending. I hope that as we send… We’ll be sending out press releases to everyone, so hopefully you’ll want to talk to some of those people and we can talk about those different announcements moving forward. We are a small team of working mothers, actually the three of us, and we all have jobs and clients or jobs that we have and we’re also really trying to do this in a systematic, process-based way. Everything takes a little longer than if we were to just make a bunch of decisions and go with that, so we’re really trying to take our time and do it right.

Marcus: It seems like you need to find a way that you can get people to pay you to do this stuff.

Sé: Well, not yet, but there is.

Courtney: It is worth noting that Sé is not being paid at this time for this kind of work, nor is she sponsored at all for her work across .org things that she does. Yes, she is self-sponsored. She is receiving no money from other organizations to do this at this time.

Sé: You did mention Kerredyn, so my own company pays me, I guess you can hire Kerredyn to make your websites. Yes, because I need more to do.

Thanks to our Pod Friends Avalara and Yoast

Projects and opening the door to support contributors

Sé: So I did want to touch real quick on projects. I know we’ve been talking a lot about fellowships and that is a huge part of what we’re doing. Another big component of the landscape that we’re helping mapping out is that projects could be essentially groups of contributors who are paid to enact certain projects, certain initiatives within the Make World that just aren’t getting enough attention or need some focused work to be done on that. Just no one can find the time to dedicate 10 hours during a spring. However that ends up happening, projects is going to be a way that we will work to create short-term initiatives that solve specific problems.

For example, Amber Hines brought up at… well, I don’t know if it was at WordCamp US or after WordCamp US, but brought up the point that folks who do accessibility testing are not usually paid. That gets into a values question of if the whole point of accessibility testing is to help people who have accessibility needs, then is not paying those people for their feedback using those people essentially and also diminishing the amount of people who are able to participate in that testing? Then, it has to be people who are able to do that without being supported for their time.

That is a question that’s been brought up also recently. We’re hopeful that something like that will be able to put together for programs like that where we could create a program that’s plan is to just, “Okay, let’s do some accessibility testing. Let’s get a company together that’s going to manage that process. Let’s let them outline some formula for that testing process. Let’s get some people in here who can get paid for their testing time.” Then, we put out report, and then that project is done. It’d be like a one-off project where we have all chipped in to make that project happen. All the documentation is online the whole time and being shown to everyone what we’re doing with the money and what we’re doing in terms of the project. That’s an example of an ideal project for the WPCC.

Bob: Essentially, if you get that process and when it’s in place and these start coming in and you start running through them, you could in a sense add to the speed-up of development in a lot of areas that would otherwise maybe fall behind or… I think that’s important for people to kind of wrap their brains around because, I mean, all of this great stuff, but that is really something that is going to affect everybody that’s even listening or hearing about this. This is adding another whole new level to it that helps the implementation, and maybe some of the things that people are frustrated with you’re solving through, being able to monetarily push it forward, and that’s pretty huge. I mean, that alone, I think, is something people need to cogitate on a bit.

Sé: Well, I hope they do. Yeah, and you know what happens is that because of the way that contribution works and most of the contributors that are putting in time in between their jobs or part-time and it makes it hard to contribute in a leadership role if you’re not actually being paid to be there. It’s hard to be able to say, “Yes, I can be at this meeting every week for the next year,” and say that confidently that you can show up knowing that you don’t have to be somewhere else at that time even. It’s not necessarily a problem because there are sponsored folks within the space that are able to take on those roles, but what ends up happening then is that the leadership roles are all by default people who are being sponsored by specific companies.

I don’t even want to argue or get into it. It doesn’t even matter if those companies have good intentions or bad intentions or if they’re trying to take over something or not takeover something or whatever it is. We need the ability for people who aren’t in that employer-employee relationship to be there because then they can representing the project in a different way. They won’t necessarily have to put the needs of their employer first, which at the end of the day you have to do if that’s who your paycheck is required is coming from. I am not at all saying that there’s like split loyalties, but that’s at the thing. That’s an ethical dilemma that might happen in the hearts of some people sometimes.

That’s not going away obviously because there’s so many sponsored contributors, and I think that that’s, again, like I said in the beginning, that’s one of the big reasons that WordPress has been so successful and able to sustain itself is because of the people that have been sponsored to move the project forward. I’m just really hopeful that this project will enable the community to also be a part of that discussion. Maybe even just someone being a fellow means that they can be a team rep for a year and that’s awesome. That means that someone who isn’t being sponsored by a company is there representing a team and just bringing a different perspective. I’m very hopeful about that.

Then, the projects can really reflect the needs of the community in terms of, for example, a bug scrub. I am obsessed with this eight-year-old ticket that’s at the top of track. Have you see it? It’s bright red and it’s eight years old and it’s about revisions. It’s about how revisions, if you’re able to view revisions on the front end in order to enable translation because if you can see the difference between the two versions of an update, let’s say we’re updating for 6.2. Someone is making a translation and they want to look at the old version and the new version to see how to translate whatever it is they’re translating, they want to be able to see that.

That’s what this ticket is based around, and everyone who I’ve talked to about it says that’s not actually so complicated. That is something you could do, but no one is able to put in the dedicated time to make that happen. Even though it’s not a ginormously complicated process, it still takes X number of development hours and X number of people to be paying attention to it and manage the different moving parts. In this particular ticket’s case, it’s been eight years it’s been kicking the can down the road for a while. I want to unkick that can. Really, it’s just that one track ticket I want to get. I just want it not to be read anymore.

Courtney: Sé, I want to jump in here and give an example. GoDaddy has stepped into top up Joe Dolson’s sponsorships. Joe has been a longtime contributor. I met Joe in 2015 I think, might have been ’14 at WordCamp US, no, it was 2014. WordCamp US, and we had a long walk chatting about how we both play violin, so there’s the topic you could ask Joe about, Sé, say also please. Joe and got to talking and some years go by, we drift in and out of contributing, and Joe had announced his GitHub sponsorships page.

I’ll tell you, sometimes as someone that was a contributor, it’s awkward sometimes to just know… I know my manager really well, so when I hit Adam up, I was… it felt comfortable and fine, but it’s awkward sometimes when you’re like, “I want to keep doing this work and I don’t want to be begging for handouts, but people should be paid. If they’re allocating work hours to do something, they certainly should be paid professionally to do the thing. I love what Joe had done. Joe actually did set up GitHub sponsorships and, by the way, Open Collective does have a method, I believe, that can transfer into GitHub sponsorships, Stripe, and a few payment options as well. There’s additional ones.

Sé: Lots of ways to pay to get the money out.

Courtney: Yeah, yeah, so Open Collective has multiple ways of which protocol is it going to use to deliver that money into someone’s account, right? That’s one thing, but Joe started and said, “I have a goal of getting sponsored 500 a month,” and a lot of individuals kicked in a little bit of cash every month. GoDaddy saw a need and we were able to help breach that initial 500 goal and then we set an ongoing goal of let’s bring that up even more.

What that’s allowed Joe to do is to cut down on the number of client projects, and it wasn’t a sudden transition for Joe. Joe does this, but is also an accessibility consultant, runs WP accessibility with Amber and others. That gradual ease in approach was perfect for what Joe needed, and that also let GoDaddy come in and sort of test the waters for how sponsoring goes because we firmly believe that that is something that should be happening.

That phase-in is also something that I understand people may need because if you are taking client projects, you’re going to have to gauge that against what your current workload is with your clients and what’s reasonable. You may have scoped a big project that’s not deliverable for some months and you can’t just drop everything to now pivot, but WordPress has initiatives going on all the time. We’ve got releases happening all the time, so that’s something that is also there as well as a consideration is that both that those that are bringing the money and those that are receiving the money can ease into the pool as they need to.

Bob: You’re giving those who want to help move the needle forward an opportunity to do so where normally they wouldn’t have the resources as others might have them and, yeah, you’re just opening the door for those because I’m sure there are a lot that want to help and want to do this stuff, but they just don’t have the resources to give that kind of time,.

Sé: Yeah, and it’s also going to make a difference when we’re working together. Someone may be able to contribute a hundred dollars a month or $50 a month to accessibility because they think it’s important, but that $50 a month is not going to be enough for that person to dedicate that time and have that ease of mind knowing that’s handled and it’s in the bank. That could go away at any time.

You can cancel your Patreon or your GitHub sponsorship at any time, so it’s not the same thing as being like, “All right, I know I’m doing this for six months and I’m getting this much money and this is what’s happening.” The structure, I think, of the fellowship is really different from that sort of individual, not really a drip feed, but that individual one-to-one process. We can combine people’s dollars together to make sure that something steady and dependable is happening for the fellow.

The other thing that that can help with for fellows is that the collective organization can do the marketing and promote our partners and talk about al of the work that we’re doing and even promoting the work that the fellow is doing and then that marketing work and that development work and that connect… not code development, but relationship development work doesn’t have to also be part of the job of each individual fellow. They can focus on their job of their contribution, whether it’s accessibility or it’s core or whatever it is, and they don’t have to also make sure that they’re monitoring their GitHub sponsors and making sure that they’re having the meeting to make sure that money’s coming in or whatever it is. It can really streamline that really from going from a one-to-one relationship to a one-to-many relationship and make that process just so much easier.

Marcus: Yeah, I’m super excited to see what you all do with it this year. I know it’s a baby project, it’s just gotten started in the last couple of months and the possibilities, I think, are pretty endless. I think we’ve gone almost the entire show now without saying the URL, and it is thewpcommunitycollective.com, correct?

Courtney: Correct. You’ll find a link on our actual site over to the Open Collective listing where you actually get to click the button and bring the money.

Where the Woo builder community fits in

Marcus: Yeah, I know that the point of this episode was to kind of share and give a lot of information about the Collective and all of that, but the Do the Woo audience is a community as well, so I just want to kind of wrap up a little bit by asking you all what the Do the Woo audience can do to help.

Sé: Well, how much time do we have left? I could talk about this for so long. I’ll try to make it brief. Sure, I can do that. I think that WooCommerce is a really, really interesting… is in a really interesting position within the plug-in market. It is obviously essential to E-commerce and WordPress. It’s pretty much the default. It’s open source, it’s GPL. It’s available for free in the repo, but it also has this other sort of commercial extension land component to it that happens. It’s kind of got its foot, much like WordPress itself, kind of has its foot in both camps.

This is actually a topic that came up recently in the training team channel because it was a bit of a discussion on whether training and learn materials could be created for WooCommerce and whether or not it falls within the… like how does that play in terms of Make teams working on that. It’s so essential, but also, is it a commercial plug-in? Hmm. No one knows. There’s that, and then there’s the idea that this new taxonomy has been introduced really recently by Matt Mullenweg at The State of the Word. He introduced a new taxonomy both for plug-ins and themes that indicate whether something is a community plug-in or a commercial plug-in.

This has a lot of implications across the board, but it’s also a really new conversation that a really new thing that’s been introduced. Right now, Woo is designated as a commercial plug-gin, but I think that that is an interesting conversation to have, especially considering the dependence upon Woo that the E-commerce world has, really. I’m not saying that’s bad, I’m just saying it’s there. That discussion translates into the WPCC because our scope is that we would working on anything that is directly affecting the open source WordPress project. That is the focus and predominantly that goes to anything that’s happening within the Make teams, but this community plug-in community theme concept actually introduces a new component of that, not just for the training team, but also for the WPCC and our mission.

I think that’s a conversation that is really important for the Woo Community to have, so I am not… I mean, I use WooCommerce on multiple sites for folks, but it’s never… E-commerce is not really my like primary bread and butter. I think people who are reliant on Woo and using Woo and love the Woo need to have that conversation about where is it within that community because on one hand, I would like to think that it is open and part of something that we should be making learn docs on and something that we could fund through the WPCC to help build out components for it or whatever it might happen to be. That’s a bigger question, so that’s why Woo has kind of this other status.

Courtney: Woo very much is a part of the WordPress Community. It’s a large part of the WordPress Community. The policy Sé was referencing is that in a training team, we had the discussion around, “When can we mention brands in the lesson plans? How do we stay impartial about this?” This first came up like 2015, no, 2014 for Camp US and at Contributor Day, which I recommend that people come to because we wanted to mention Jetpack before additional CSS was an option outside of the Jetpack plug-in for those into history of WordPress. We said, “This is the way to be able to get additional CSS in there was when customizer hadn’t added additional CSS yet. We said, “If you mention a plug-in, then provide a few others that are alternatives as well in what you mentioned, specify why you’re picking this one for right now.”

Again, we don’t want this to turn into promotional things all over the place on .org. We’re not there to promote folks upsell into other things or we refrain from putting our own usernames in many of the screenshots if we can and good common practices across the project. Woo relies at this time upon WordPress, and so it very much is a subset within the WordPress Community. It’s in the best interest of the WooCommerce Community that even their clients, who my not be developing things on Woo, but are using WordPress as the base of the site. They might have Woo running. The client still needs some basic training to things. They need some ongoing resources and development at the WordPress level because if Woo is reliant upon WordPress, then it matters for all of us that we advance the work of contributing for sure.

Marcus: Yeah, definitely. I would absolutely encourage everyone. I have no doubt that the link will be in the show notes, but it is the wpcommunictycollective.com. Go there. I believe you that you can become a member for free, but also please do give for those that are looking for contributor dollars because it will push the entire project forward, everything in the WordPress space.

Sé: Yeah, we really… At the end of the day, this is all dependent on how much money we are going to be able to raise. I’ve never been great at asking folks for money in general, but I’ve learned to move past that hesitation, and for something like this project, I’m like, “Yeah, you should chip in.”

Marcus: Yep, every little bit matters.

Sé: Yeah, this is to help all of us keep WordPress. It’s like you have Keep Austin Weird or something. It’s like Keep WordPress Happening, Keep WordPress Healthy, Keep WordPress Funded. Let’s… This is a tool we all use every day and we all… our clients use and 40% of the internet uses and it’s a big part of our lives and our work. This is a way to really keep it healthy, keep the ecosystem healthy and a place where we’re going to be able to have that dialogue that the objective world of WordPress make and the official project really has to keep separate.

We hope to be able to be that kind of like that third space. Starbucks is like the third space. You’ve got your home, your work, and your third space. Well, the WPCC hopefully will be the sort of third space. We’ve got all the different parts happening and we can just help connect the community and really all be in there equal together. You know, really have it be the WordPress Community’s Collective is really what we’re going for here. Hopefully if you’re hearing this, you’re into it and you will come join us because we need you and we want you.

Bob: Very cool, and if you don’t, I will come and knock on your door personally and hang out with you for the entire day, and it’s best to avoid that situation. I knew that we could easily hit an hour on this one. I think we could talk even longer, but we’ve told everyone how to go and donate, which we are going to depend on everyone to do at some level if they’re able to. What if they want to contact both of you directly and just talk, hangout, whatever on social? Where’s the best places for you? I would say… You know, I didn’t say Twitter. I did not say specifically Twitter, so you tell us where you plant your flag these days.

Sé: One of my favorite things about, well, I have so many favorite things about Courtney, but one of my favorite things is if you go to her website, the bottom of her website has literally every social icon that ever existed. She’s like, “Do you want to contact me? Here.” It’s just like any method you choose is there.

Courtney: I’d like to say to Sé I don’t have a page that has all my links on it and looking all fly like that, but I’m basically say read media on all things, so Post Status Slack, WordPress Slack. The Watercooler Discord Channel is a popular one these days. It’s a great place to talk to me if you want to just chat or send memes. That’s great, too. Mastodon, I’ve over there hanging out in the Fediverse. You can do Twitter, too. I’ll DM. I’ll still DM on Twitter, but yeah.

Sé: Courtney, what’s your favorite one? Like your preferred format?

Courtney: My favorite one? Oh, that’s hard. Probably honestly iMessages, but I’m not giving that out to the world. Sorry, I do have some boundaries. Just go to my website, courtneyr.dev, and you can get the links to all the things. I think GitHub may even have a couple more. I just didn’t need all of that. GitHub, if you really want to see what I’m… Anyone still using Last.fm and then you can listen to your music so you could see what I’m listening to in Spotify. I mean you could do it. It’s a thing. It’s been around since like Web 2.0 back… I lost my address to that one when they reformatted, but yeah, so I was there. Yeah, courtneyr.dev. You can find all the links that Sé mentioned, and I’m in all of those same Slacks, and I’ll be at a WordCamp near you in the near future. Next up will be Asia, and I’m really looking forward to having some conversations with folks there, both from my training team hat and also to be PCC and all the things.

Bob: Well, this has been great. It’s been a pure joy talking with you two, and yes, do visit the wpcommunitycollective.com, and thank you, Courtney and Sé, for the wonderful show.

Marcus: Thank you both.

Sé: Thank you.

Courtney: Thanks, Bob. Thanks, Marcus.

Bob: Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit