Mary Hubbard & Matt Mullenweg WordCamp EU 2025 Fireside Chat

questions submitted. People are very curious and some really good conversations and debates that are happening. And so I asked if I could ask Matt these questions directly today. He was willing. So I'm going to start off with some easy things, if that'd be okay. Let's do it. Let's do it. So in general, we're in Europe, the beautiful city of Basel. There's been a lot of conversations about EU, climate compliance, regulation. How are you thinking about this for the project?

Regulation, real easy.

Yep, I wanted to, I wanted to just get right into it, you know.

I will say that y'all raise it to an art. So there have been, you know, EU, I think some fairly and unfairly, is seen as a place where some is very forward from a regulatory stance, and sometimes those regulations don't necessarily have the hoped-for impact. Although I feel like my index finger is much stronger here clicking all those accept cookie things. It's funny when Americans come to Europe, they're like, what is happening to the web? Has anyone had that experience? Do we have some folks who came? And I'm also curious for the folks in the EU, Do you feel safer, more secure, more private because of these cookie acceptance things? Okay, I heard some yes. Let's— I want to see hands for the yeses. So that's— you feel also more secure?

Yes, I feel more— I feel—

That's more than I would have expected. So for those who can't see, wait, go back up. I'll do like a quick kind of— 15%, maybe 20%.

Wow.

Well, y'all won. These banners are everywhere. I don't know if I feel as strongly because I feel like people just click through them. And this sort of reject all can be built into browsers like Brave and other things. So there's other ways to address some of that, but unintended side effects of some well-meaning regulation. There's a lot of stuff going through the the various parts of the EU right now. Um, there's a cool, uh, initiative called the Open Web Alliance, which I believe is what TYPO3, Drupal, and Joomla. Yeah. And, uh, and it's nice because a lot of those are a bit more EU-centric, uh, than us. Uh, but we're in touch with them. We're following it and we wanna support whichever way we can. I feel like that organization and these fellow open source GPL projects with, um, similar usage characteristics to us are very, very aligned. So it's in that we can bring our weight and our market share to bear. I think they already have the right policies and the right suggestions and feedback to these groups. I would also use this opportunity to suggest that there's some fantastic sort of European content hosting companies like SiteGround, Hostinger, many more. And I feel like those being very large taxpaying businesses with, you know, hundreds or thousands of employees are very, very well suited to influence their legislators, their politicians. Even their, like, country leaders to advocate for their users as well. Because it's all users, the hosting companies could be affected by some of these regulations if they go through as currently written.

Yeah. And another topic specific to the EU, which I'm really interested about this because this has been brought to my attention multiple times and with WordCamps and then the more localized local WordCamps. It's whether WordPress Foundation or the WordPress community support should establish a legal presence. In the EU. And so it kind of tailors or dovetails from there. But given our global reach, what is the complexity and the complexity of running events like this? Like, is this something that we should prioritize or even be thinking about?

It's definitely something I think we should consider periodically. And we've done some experiments here. I think it was in Nepal. But there's, you know, there's some downsides to this as well. Largely from admin overhead maintenance. We try to keep the WordPress Foundation and the WordCamp subsidiary fairly lightweight so we can focus as much time and energy on, you know, the good stuff. The things that we all come to WordCamps for and, you know, the bringing new people into the community and the do actions and all that sort of thing. So I would say that right now, I believe our current analysis is that the cost-benefit is not worth setting up more local entities in the various countries that the WordCamps happen, which by the way is different for WordCamp EU every year. I don't want to give away where the next one is, but perhaps a different country. Hopefully not like ruining any surprises there. And yeah, so I would say right now, no, but we can always readdress that. And there might be some countries where the overhead is lower than others.

Yeah.

You have to have like a really good like e-company creation thing, like Estonia I believe does. So there might be some that makes sort of some of the remote stuff easier. We don't need like to fly to the country and notarize 50 forms or—

Or good partnerships or good relationships that we might be able to forge or see something to expedite some of these issues.

If there's existing organizations, I think partnership is the best way to go with it. And there's many, many organizations that are very aligned with us. It's not unlike actually Charity Water. And I actually just met with the founder there the other day, but it's a fantastic charity. They now have— his company, the charity, only has 100-something employees, but they've now got like, I want to say it was like 9,000 on the ground in Africa through partner organizations. And that's scaled up from a tenth of that, you know, 5 or 6 years ago. Drilling wells and things.

That's great. So still a part of the EU, kind of theme-based, because I'd like to hit all of the EU things today. So yesterday at a side event, the announcement of Project FAIR came out. There's highlighted interest discussions that are happening. How do you see initiatives like this coexisting with WordPress, dot org's the infrastructure, et cetera? What would be your ideal outcome?

Well, it's open source, so everything can coexist with WordPress. And I think that's part of the beauty that something like this can be written with the APIs that WordPress has. I don't know if I want to comment too much further on it just because I kind of just found out about it last night. There hasn't been that much time. There's a lot of code and complexities. You know, I do wish if the team did want to collaborate, or the team says we want to be transparent and everything, but it did sort of drop as a surprise. It was worked on in secret for 6 months, but we can work past that and look at it. I do think things we need to keep in mind are You know, what are users asking for? What are the challenges they're facing around finding the right things, knowing it's secure, getting updates? You know, the stats around how many sites that are hacked are from out-of-date plugins. Those are the things that are top of my mind for a plugin directory and sort of the trust and safety elements of that. For the .org directory, I think it's actually a super exciting time. If you haven't been following the plugin scanner improvements, check it out. I think we're approaching a point where we'll be able to scan not just new plugins, but plugin updates. If you can imagine the way that'll increase security. There's also fantastic work happening, not just from companies like Patchstack, but also just with applying the frontier models, which of course are getting better every 3 or 4 months, um, to finding vulnerabilities. And they're gonna find a lot. So we're gonna need to apply them to fixing the vulnerabilities as well and figure out a method there for older or abandoned plugins. We can't just close the plugin because we're still going to leave thousands or tens of thousands of sites insecure. But we don't want to, you know, break any plugins. So I think we need to figure out something like if a plugin hasn't been updated in a year or two, it's abandoned but still active, or like some sort of way to again make the plugin directory like the most safe, trusted, and performant place. For WordPress users. And I actually got some cool stats around this from our systems and plugin team because I haven't heard it recently. So we're now up to 72,000 plugins and themes. This is about 3.2 terabytes of like zip files. That's not counting all the SVN history and everything like that. So there's a, there's a lot of data there, which also we need to make sure like if 500 mirrors are set up and they're all sucking down the directory, like, that could DDoS us. And in the last 12 months, we've done 630 billion requests. Yeah. With 17.5 billion downloads.

Unreal.

So the scale of this is— yeah, thank you. Round of applause for the plugin team and the systems team that keeps this going. And thank you to Barry for getting that to me while you were under the weather.

Well, it's funny because it kind of all tailors into one another, even the plugin reviews, because I met with that team today. They are doing phenomenal things in how they're incorporating AI and how they're looking at what the long-term success of that team will be is going to be great.

Thank you very much to the plugin review team.

Thank you very much.

Unbelievable.

And we do talk a lot about the future, future WordPress. There's been a lot of conversations around Five for the Future and what that will look like. So the landscape of contribution is changing and we're seeing more companies exploring how to sponsor maintainers directly. Not just in a way that you check a box that, hey, it's Five for the Future, I'm putting my hours up, but understanding how critical work gets done. And so at the same time, conversations are heating up around how we balance this. With all of these proposals on the table, how do you see Five for the Future evolving? Maybe some short-term, I'd love to hear your perspective short-term, like what we can do now as we push forward, and then your vision of the long-term Five for the Future plan.

I think we made a classic mistake, actually, that a lot of managers do, a lot of companies do. And it's funny because I actually talk about this a lot, which is we were measuring input, not output. So I think an interesting way for Five for the Future to evolve is not just showing the pledge or the commitment, but then also putting right next to that, like, what are the results? At least that are legible to us, which most things are. Because, you know, work generally involves a change somewhere on WordPress.org that's in a database. It's in SVN, it's in a ticket, it's in the forum, it's in a translation, it's in a something. And I think it would actually be really cool to enhance the badges. You know, there's the badges on profiles. Put some stats in those. It'd be kind of fun. Show some rolling stats, GitHub-like stats. So I think just putting a lot more analytics and stats in there would just kind of make it more fun. And I'm curious about that myself. You know, okay. Also just comparing like input to output. And it's, so I think that's where we can go a bit with it. And it will tighten it up quite a bit. One frustration I've heard from some people sponsoring 5 for the Future folks is, how do I know they're working on the right things? Or what's the impact of this? Or is it even aligned with the roadmap? Or is this just kind of in some corner somewhere and it's never going to go to core? So, you know, at the sponsoring level, I think people also want to have the highest impact per dollar.

Absolutely. And understanding where that money is going, how they're sponsoring, and then on top of it, what you can actually work on and deliver, which is great. And so a little bit about Five to the Future, it's more tangible execution of WordPress Campus Connect. So we've recently— the rise of WordPress Campus Connect, we recently expanded it. Do you see similar opportunities in universities or students? What are you thinking or what are your thoughts around WordPress Campus Connect? And how do you think that's going to reshape the project?

We have a little bit of an announcement there, which is pretty exciting. So, it's 150 hours. Mary's actually the expert on this, you should really talk about it.

I'm not the expert, I didn't do it, I'm just here to announce it. So, there's been a program that we recently went into a pilot for, and it started at the University of Pisa, but Eazy has gotten a signed agreement where 150 contribution hours will equate to 6 credits to graduate college. It's actually a—

I'm gonna jump in. It's required, isn't it?

It's required for the degree, but it really is one of these pet projects that she has been working on behind the scenes for quite some time, brought it to the forefront, and it really does interconnect. It's— there is opportunity for a feeder program, there's an opportunity for internships, there's opportunities to get people, younger generations in and looking. And because it's a part of an educational system across Europe, there is not only interest to expand different majors, but there's interest to go to other universities. So she's been driving this. I'm not taking the credit, but I'm very excited about it. And Matt will go and speak to the chairman of the board and the board to try to get this to expand. But the pilot will actually launch June 25th.

So think about that for a second.

5,000 students at 150 hours mandated for 6 college credits. And so if you think about all of the individual pieces that are going on with education, we know a lot starts with education. But Anand, who's launched Campus Connect, and we've expanded that, and that's all over Africa, and that's in the EU, and India, obviously. And as he's working through that, and that program starts to develop, and develop into something larger, we have the ability to tie these in. We can take Campus Connect to kick off the WordPress credits program. We can actually get people aligned. The endowment from Automattic actually enables people, once they're in these programs, they can apply to come to WordCamp and meet with all of you wonderful people. And increase that community vibe, right? Like, I like being here. So we're hoping to create a flywheel, right? A flywheel of new ideas, of younger people, which means we need a stronger or a more elaborate, larger mentorship program.

Also, we can go to them, which I think would be pretty exciting. When I first heard this, I was like, oh my goodness, what are we going to do with that many people? Like, that's too much. Then I started to think, wow, the opportunities for mentorship, the opportunities to also, you know, convert people to be contributors in other areas. If even 1% of that per semester or per year, per graduating class becomes a long-term member of the WordPress community, that would be very incredible. Also, you know, sometimes a question that's come up, actually it comes up in Europe more than anywhere else, is like, oh, our WordCamp's getting older. Where are the kiddos? And we have programs obviously in schools, including as young as like elementary school and everything. But I think this is very much has the opportunity to just blend our demographics a bit more. And again, so many opportunities for mentorship and growth.

Yeah, so many.

And for us to learn.

And for us, just for us. That is great. Now, with that, we talked a lot about AI. We recently announced the AI team, and it's a combination of different companies have come together within the project to push AI forward. And so—

Who's here from that team? Can you stand up? Okay, we got James.

Pascal. There he is.

Yeah.

Of course he's here. He's an organizer.

Oh, there we go. There we go. Thank you. We've got 75% of the team here.

Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, I think everybody is really interested in understanding, you know, what your vision is, not only for that team, but AI within the project. And then I'll let you answer that one, but then I want to go a little bit more broad with AI and vision of AI and your opinion on it in general. Yeah, send my girl back up.

Well, it's hard to drink the water and— Yeah.

It's okay. It's okay. I'll put it here.

I think one of the things the team's going to be doing is figuring out where we're going to apply our initial efforts. Where is the biggest bang for the buck? Uh, generative AI has an opportunity to influence a lot of things that we do, and, um, I'm sure it's started to affect many people's lives in here already, especially if you listened to me a few years ago when I said to learn AI deeply prior to the launch of ChatGPT. Um, the areas I'd be most excited about are, you know, sort of plugin scanner type things, enhancements, um, particularly perhaps applying and testing, writing tests for possible fixes and things. I think there's a lot that could be automated with agents there to allow our volunteers, our members of those teams to scale. Within WordPress, it's hard to imagine a screen that couldn't be, or an area that couldn't be enhanced. Obviously a lot around the writing and creation process, brainstorming, prompting, You know, the generative AIs are getting quite good at images and video, which is, the creativity that's being unlocked there with some of my friends is so exciting. A chat interface to WordPress. Yeah. A programmatic way for AIs to interact. We can expose capabilities from both core and plugins and expose them so the AI can say, hey, what can you do? It says, oh, I can do these 100 things. And it has a programmatic way to do so securely with authentication. You know, ways, hooks essentially standardized ways for plugins to hook into things. So both like all the e-commerce plugins could expose in the same way to AI, the products they offer. So those products can start to show up in answers for different questions, which by the way, these different systems are starting to actually drive a fair amount of traffic, which is nice 'cause Google isn't sending anything anymore. They're still sending some, but it's definitely like a lot more value is going to the search result page, right? —which has been a trend, honestly. It's not a new one. It's been happening since, I think, like 2017. And there was one last— oh, developer.

We talked about developer productivity.

What's the one I'm missing? Oh, project administration. Yeah. Yeah. Scaling ourselves, essentially. Which I feel like that sort of center model, which is human plus AI, where you're using more as a productivity tool versus something running on its own with the output's not checked is the most powerful and safest way to use it, particularly today. So, but y'all know if you follow my Twitter, you know, like a good third of it or half of it is all about AI. I've been very excited about this. Started to see the impact and we launched some things at Automattic, including AI Site Builder, our biggest guide builder. I've seen a number of hosts launch some things. Elementor has some cool stuff. There's a lot of things. Actually, if you look at just AI plugins submitted to the directory, It's huge. Yes. And people are using it for translations and so, so, so many things. So I think the open ecosystem of WordPress also, where plugins are very, very free and open and the backlog's gone. That's right. You remember I was here a year or two ago and we had like a 6 or 8 month backlog on plugin approval? Yes.

I remember that. And I wasn't even a part of, part of the project yet.

So, yeah, it's a very generative time, I think. You know, we've talked before about sort of moments of like Cambrian explosions in WordPress's evolution. And I think we're in one. And in fact, I don't have the stat in front of me, but someone might know it, like the increase in number of plugin submissions that's happened.

It was, it's staying at 6,000.

Is David in here? It doubled from last year. And there's no backlog anymore. About a week? Yeah, that's nothing. Cool. That's amazing. And also, you know, when some people are sort of like throwing hate array that like WordPress is dead or it's slowing down or something, I think a really great counterexample.

Yeah. Well, but every example you've just given, there's a ton of low-hanging fruit. I think it's time that we, what's the team with the AI, I think we all recognize how much can be done now. And it's all about Planning it, getting it, and then assigning, I guess, was like giving visibility into where WordPress should be going, what we should be doing with all of this, and letting people contribute actively. Everybody's talking about AI though. So step out of WordPress. I've had a lot of conversations around AI in general. And I keep saying over and over again, it's like, it's time to put on your futurist hat, as generic as that sounds, because we're not in an area, I think, a lot of companies are playing catch-up and they're not at that point, but we are going through a major revolution. So I don't wanna just think about WordPress at this point. There's going to be a ton of products in the ecosystem that spin out a ton of different directions. What, what would you say today that you should be paying attention to? Not the prompting, but like AI as a futurist, what do you think is gonna be happening?

Oh, well, I'm very, very excited about, I mean, one cool thing that when you start building this stuff, you get a tailwind of things getting better for free because the models are improving so quickly, or you can just switch between them. So if you talk to teams that have been doing this for, call it, a year, almost all of them have an example of like something they built that like kind of half worked, then a new model comes out and starts working really well. So that's very cool, those tailwinds. Something I'm most personally excited about are essentially new interfaces. I feel like we're kind of in the command line stage of, of AI interfaces. I think chat's great, it's amazing, it's good for a number of ask, but I'm very, very curious to see and experiment with what other interfaces could be. And I know OpenAI is working on some hardware versions of that. Um, the final thing I would say is sort of, uh, materialized AI. So things that are with a physical presence— robots. And, uh, that could be as simple as like the vacuum cleaners getting way smarter. And there's actually one called Matic— no relation to automatic— that my friends are all raving about. As well, these robotic vacuum cleaners. You know, I can't imagine there's going to be that many people mowing lawns and things in the future. It's just so much more convenient to have this done sort of every day with a robot that recharges and docks and everything and hopefully doesn't run over your cat. You know, the bugs in this need to be— when you get into the physical world, you can't have, uh, mistakes. Um, when I'm gonna say, who's taken a Waymo? Only a few people. It's in Phoenix? Yeah, yeah. Like, so anyone can call it in Phoenix? Yeah, I think in Austin too. It is incredible. So in San Francisco, they were all there for a while. And so Cruise was there. And Cruise, you know, we know how the story ended. It shut down. But I would say that I would try them all. And being in a Cruise felt like a teenage— it should have a student driver sticker on it. Do y'all have those here? Oh, in America, people start driving at age 15, their learner's permit, and they get it at 16. And they usually have a sticker on the car that says, watch out, essentially. This is a kid. It felt like that. The Waymo felt like the most professional driver you've ever been in, like the best London taxi cab driver who knows every turn and is aware of everything and is just confident. It, uh, it's so much better. Actually, right now in San Francisco, people are paying more for Waymos than Ubers, um, just because of the preference. They actually take longer to come and they cost more, and people are still choosing it more. They've already passed up Lyft in their usage in San Francisco, and, um, and they're catching up to Uber. It's growing incredibly quickly. And that's the thing that happens with this AI stuff. It goes slowly and then very, very fast. And then finally, the robots. Whether it's humanoid robots like Optimus or other things, I think are going to be very interesting. Because much like the operator models for like OpenAI, where they kind of use your computer and click around, the world is built for the human sort of form factor. And so when we can start to automate more of that with robots, I think very cool stuff could happen.

Awesome. Well, I want to ask one more question because I know everybody has been asking me this, so I think it would be great to hear from you. We recently launched the AI team. We have an automatician that is on it. And so I think it was a few weeks back now, there was an announcement about returning to WordPress core contributions. And so what does this mean in practical terms for the community as well as does it make sense to release or to have a 6.9 or another release in 2025? Yeah.

Also, I just realized you can't spell automatic without AI. That could be your team's new tagline. Um, uh, yeah, I think we can get a 6.9 out this year. And, um, I'm personally very excited. There's so much I want to release and there's so much we can do. And I think there's a pretty clear, uh, pathway to 7.0 and beyond. And, um, yeah, we just gotta get together and work on it. Um, I think it's very easy to become distracted. Mm-hmm. And, but I want us debating, arguing more about software and interfaces and code. And sort of like testing things with users and shipping code and seeing how it goes. To me, that's where I'd like to get like 80, 90% of my conversations to.

Yeah. Let's debate about product features. We all have opinions on those too, right? Well, that's great. And these are all of the questions that have been submitted. And so I think at this point, we have about 30 minutes left. We can turn it to the audience. And there should be some mics. Oh, there are.

We're a little ahead of schedule, actually. So. All right. Let's start over there. If you don't mind saying your name and where you're here from.

I don't mind. My name is Milena Zap. I'm from Serbia. I've been contributing to documentation team for 14 years and contributing to plugin review team for a couple of years. And my whole work in documentation was serving a user. Every decision we made, we made to serve user. And in plugin review team, we also include plugin authors. So everything we do, we do for plugin authors and users to make their lives easier and better. Now, you said you didn't have time to take a look at the FAIR project.

So let me give you a gist. Deeply, deeply. I took a look at the announcement and everything.

Yeah, yeah. Okay. Let me just give you a quick gist of the— I don't think you need to read it right now. No, no. So the FAIR Project is actually federated and independent repository of trusted plugins and themes. And it is under Linux Foundation. So that means a lot when it's under Linux Foundation. And what it means for users and plugin authors and theme authors is actually making their lives easier and better, more secure. It makes all the products more discoverable. And also developers can choose choose the source where are they using their supply chain from. But also it is helping WordPress.org because these are mirrors. So it will reduce the load from WordPress.org for every updates and all of that. Now that you have a gist and you heard me saying, I don't know if you trust me, but it seemed to me that this aligns with the idea of having user and developers first in mind. Would you, you as WordPress.org, consider collaborating with this project?

Of course we consider everything. Okay. But even in what you said, I think there's a lot of challenges to it. Okay. So for example, right now a supply chain attack needs to breach WordPress.org. Which has never been hacked. What? What? Now all of a sudden, there's n places that could potentially be compromised. That's, you know, there's ways to do that, many ways. There's n places with uptime issues. There is— makes it much more difficult for— I don't know if it's actually better for WordPress.org because it makes it much more difficult to do things like rollouts, phased rollouts, where let's say we give plugin authors the ability to ship to 5% of users and then see what happens, which means we also need things being checked back and then we can roll out to the rest, which is something I've heard a ton of plugin authors ask for. It'll break all the analytics and stats that we provide. And also that we currently use to make decisions. For example, which versions of PHP we support or how we do databases. So I think that it's a big part of why WordPress is where it is today is because of the infrastructure and the sort of feedback loop that we get from WordPress.org. Also the trust that we're able to engender by having that be a resource. When you look at marketplaces, people aren't asking necessarily for, I want it to be downloaded from more locations. They're asking for, how do I know this is trustworthy? How do I know these reviews are real? Who's moderating? Who's checking the IPs on these different reviews? What's the plugin rating? What's the compatibility for it? How is it compatible with my other plugins? These are the things I'm hearing from users, not I need it hosted in a different place. So just as one example. And again, I don't want to get too far into it because I want to read the code. I want to dive more into it. I want colleagues to look at it. So I think it's kind of premature, less than 24 hours in, to say like we're going to contribute or use this or not. But I do think it's awesome that people are shipping code versus just arguing or talking or writing blog posts. And I think that's a pretty productive way to sort of channel possible disagreements or anything. And then we can see how it looks. Might be a super niche thing that a few people use, maybe one or two hosts, or it might be something that Maybe there's something in there that becomes like ultra popular. But like things like, you know, something that we probably need to do in the plugin review team is something about these admin banners. Right? Now, how is that enforced in a distributed and fair system? Well, probably it's a lot worse.

There are a lot of problems that you just mentioned, but if they are solved, You know, maybe we could actually collaborate with all of that. But how would you solve, like I plug it in, I'm not the smartest person here. I have no idea how, but I know that we have a lot of smart people and, you know, if we talk to each other and collaborate, we can come and there is AI. We can always ask ChatGPT.

I actually saw someone, I think it was Katie, was like, what is Matt going to think about FAIR? She asked ChatGPT and it was a pretty good answer actually. Yeah.

Okay. Thank you.

Hello, my name is Jaap Wiering.

I'm from the Netherlands. Tomorrow is World Ocean Day and our oceans are in danger and they have an immense influence on our world climate. The WordPress team that was working on our environmental impact of WordPress was dissolved in January and the Slack archive— the Slack channel was archived. But new recent leadership has come up and contributors over the last two days. We worked on Contributor Day on the new team for that. And we'd love to get going again. We can't do that without Make WordPress, and we can't do that without our Slack channel. Mary already got a petition about it, and we have this question for you: please, could you reactivate, make WordPress and our Slack channel so we can make WordPress more environmental friendly? I asked you the question, Matt.

Should I just drop the mic?

In these Q&As, we often pass things to people that know more or are more qualified.

I'm sorry, but I already know Mary's answer and I'd like to know your answer.

Well, everyone else doesn't know Mary's answer. Mary, will you try— will you repeat the answer you already told him?

I believe that sustainability, environmental sustainability, needs to be embedded throughout the WordPress project. I think that sustainability for the WordPress project, as in Five for the Future, what we're doing for a contributor base, how there's many different initiatives that have kind of gotten together with environmental sustainability and the sustainability of the project. One, I think, should be embedded in all teams. I think that there's a— it's a much wider conversation, one of which I did sit in on for a while today. But we need to start reflecting and thinking about how things get done within the project. A lot of times, people will start with a team. It's an idea and then goes to a team. And my request about sustainability was sustainability should be in everything we do. It's environmental sustainability. This is a no-brainer, it must be done. And so if that's the case, let's take what we have and what we've built, or the handbooks, or the— with regards to events, and let's plug in sustainability in that, and let's have a team that holds those WordCamp organizers or specific teams accountable. But let's not mix sustainability of the project when there are ideas that have come up around how we're gonna contribute or reorganizing contributors or how we're going to fund or how we're going to get funding. Let's not combine it because as I heard Courtney Robinson say today and I heard Say Reid say today, we've been having the same conversations over and over and over again. So I have asked to switch. I've said, hey, let's rethink Five for the Future, which is why I asked that question for you today. Let's rethink about how we're gonna move the Five for the Future forward, how we're going to reshape this project and reset that for how we're getting that funding and what we're thinking about contribution. And let's separate what was sustainability for environment and let's let that environmental safety or the environmental impact of WordPress go forward in all of the teams. So I actually asked for a rebrand.

What's an example too of something that, you know, you feel like an environmental team would focus on or hope for as a result or measure?

Well, there is a framework of subjects to think about, and they already did quite good work. And it was mentioned, for example, in how to make an environmental neutral or friendly WordCamps, for example. So there was a handbook for that, and it is already used, but the team already then was dissolved. And I think it's quite disrespectful to the team using it, and at the same time having the team dissolved.

I did— I am aware of the WordCamp side. And that's when we get together in person, I think where we have a lot of opportunity for these environmental things. I also saw a lot of work around like trying to measure the carbon impact of every WordPress install and Some of the things I felt like were a little more abstract. Also, it felt like the WordCamp guideline had a lot of contributors from the WordCamp organizers, not just people on the sustainability team at the time. But do you have any other examples besides this thing that's already been done that a new team would hope to accomplish or we would measure its success by? There should be done a lot of research.

And as long as we can't communicate with each other, that'll be hard. And as long as we can't change the information, it'll be a team outside WordPress, and I don't think that's a good thing. And if you say it's be a rebranding or we have to think about it, then it's a lot of talking about the team and not about sustainability. And this is what I want to get going.

And so you feel like the people working on this need a Slack channel on the .org Slack, not anywhere else, not on the Discord or anything like that. To do this research?

If you put it that way, of course not. But we want to be inside WordPress, not like a group outside WordPress, because we love WordPress and we think we can add something to WordPress.

I agree, but it needs to be a more concrete proposal. And like Mary said, there was neither. And why was it dissolved? So, and this is going to potentially for any team that we need to measure results. And I think that one thing that's been happening is, you know, we have teams that spin their wheels. But what is the result? And they had a lot of people doing meetings every week. And you look at what actually comes out of it. And including I talked to a number of people on the team, I read some reports, I reviewed, I think, 12 months of like blog posts. We want to make sure that when, for example, volunteers come, that they're focused on the teams that are moving quickly, iterating, have a good sort of output culture. And I don't think the sustainability team had that, if I'm really candid. And so it's important as, you know, project leadership, myself and others. And by the way, this was not a solo decision. It came from a number of people that, hey, this might be an area that needs a reboot. Also sort of separating out this environmental side. Of, to like more like the contribution side, which really should be more in a growth mindset versus just sustainability, right? We don't want WordPress to just sustain. We want to grow and thrive and innovate and create great software. So even that word, but the word's easy to change. I think what we really have to change is our mindset. And I appreciate you breaking out the sort of environmental impact side from everything else. I think it's really helpful. Because again, we can embed it in everything we do. But it is tricky. It's an area I've spent a ton of time on, on a number of environmental nonprofits over the years. I deeply care about this. I also feel like— doesn't feel like WordPress, at least for me, is the place to have the biggest impact in the world there. Okay. Well, thanks for your answer.

Hi, Matt. My name is Urs. I'm from Serbia. This is my 9th year organizing WordCamp Europe.

Woohoo!

Why I'm mentioning that? Because you said you like the QR code on back of the badge, and that's not part of the data that we are getting from Comptix. What did you say?

Sorry, I missed that.

You said you like the QR code on the back of your badge going to Gravatar and all those things. And that's not the data that's coming from CampTix that we use for the events. And CampTix is getting old, let's say 9 years. And can we get more wind in the back to make it better? Because all the questions that we have or PRs that we need to raise, they are going slow and we have WordCamp every year.

Were you saying CampTix?

Yes, that's the plugin we use for the event, buying tickets, selling tickets, printing tickets.

And so the request is to—

so there is currently no one that is contributing to that project, and we want to take over if there is no one from Meta team that wants to do it. But like, we need help from you or from Mary, it doesn't matter.

Sure. Where's it hosted right now?

Somewhere on wordpress.org, but we don't have access, and we people, we don't have anybody to ask for Nobody is answering.

Okay, sure.

Okay, thank you.

And also let me know where you asked so I can follow up on like why that wasn't responded to or where it went, what happened to it. Thank you. Hello there. Maybe we can really— it's not— I guess it's not released so other events can't use it, so maybe there's something we can open source there as well. Get in the plugin tray. It's used for all WordCamps, I know, but like, but is it released so like other events could use it? Like could DrupalCon use it or? Yeah, yeah, improve it first. Yeah, that would be great. Cool. Thank you.

Hey there, Matt. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you. For the guys with the transcription, just transcribe that I am Matt, but I'm really Matteo. Nice to meet you, Matt. Nice to see you again, Matt. Hope you are doing good and hope you'll do back in the after party. Last time, if you remember, we discussed about meetup sites. Today I want to ask you another question still about meetups. So basically, after the recent acquisition of meetup.com I, as a meetup organizer, I have found that meetup is evolving to something that, tell me what do you think about, Matt, but I don't think it's what we want to expect by, you know, the platform we want to use for organizing our meetups. So I have seen that some people, around here are organizing the community, are creating a completely new platform that it basically replaced meetup.com. What actually I have seen talking with people is it's still not really that much. So you have, for example, the fact that there is like legal like issues maybe because someone is worried about posting that on a specific owned website. And there are also issues with having in the widget of the dashboard the name of the list of events closed you have on just Meetups.com. So I want to ask you, what do you think about the whole situation about Meetup.com? What do you think about how Meetup.com is going ahead? And well, what do you think about the future of, you know, organize or, you know, ticketing, meetup ticketing?

Thank you. Sure. Well, we just talked about tickets a little bit. The widget in the dashboard drives a huge amount of attendance to a lot of different things. And it's like really one of the only ways that someone can go from just a random WordPress user to part of the community. And I think we actually need to look for more ways we can tie that together. Not be removing them. The widget probably could use a design refresh though and be a bit richer. Also how it incorporates online events is a little clunky. And if anything, we should be doing those a lot more and exposing them perhaps in a parallel way to the geolocated ones. If there's a meetup.com parody replacement that's open source, yeah, we'll totally throw it on wordpress.org and switch over. Particularly, it'd be great if we could import stuff. I don't know what the rules are there. In the meantime, we got a lot of irons on the fire and maybe not enough cooks in the kitchen. So yeah, it's just one of those things where it's like, okay, this is working, so we'll get to it later. But if some people are working on it now, fantastic. And happy to evaluate it as the project evolves or support it however I can.

Thank you so much. Thank you.

You'd be amazed how much of the stuff we rely on today that's like part of core, part of WordPress, part of everything started just someone being like, man, I'm annoyed by this. I'm gonna fix it. It's basically like the whole plugin system and directory. All right, right over here.

Hello, Mary. Hello, Matt. First of all, thank you to both of you for being here. And I guess my question is gonna be for the both of you, and I would love to hear both answers. So my name is Lily. We run a web agency specialized in e-commerce, e-commerce automation and compliance in the context of e-commerce in France, based in Paris. And in the past year, I mean, it's always been the case, but in the past year we have been facing mounting and I would even say like severe competition from SaaS solutions like Shopify to the point, you know, they're obviously like very commercialized and extremely well marketed to the point that even like potential prospects that are not necessarily tech savvy, they consider Shopify even if it's not adapted to their project. So I guess my question is, what's Automattic's like short-term and long-term plan in regards to competition with solutions like Shopify? And is there going to be a heavier investment in promoting solutions like WooCommerce? And in general, what's Automatic's stance on brand advocacy in regards to WooCommerce?

Thank you. Sure, thank you. Yeah, WooCommerce is incredibly important at Automatic. You know, it's our largest business now, I believe. And so we invest a lot in the development, the marketing, the usability. I'd say that performance is also a big gap I think we've had in some previous versions, and you've seen a lot of investment in that over the past few releases. I think there's still a ton of work to do, and also partnering with— partnering better with hosts to make sure they have great onboarding experiences. I think there'll be partnerships with page builders to make Woo more accessible or customizable to them. We've had some huge improvements to checkout and Woo Payments that are getting that to parity with all the Shopify checkouts, which I think Our kind of best in class is Shopify, Stripe. I want Shopify, Stripe, Woo to all be parity on the checkout experience. And of course, we'll always beat them on customizability. There's just things you can do when you, and control. You can run, you can customize things and also just know every line of code that you're running in ways that you can't with any SaaS service. So those are the main things there. I would also add that something we can do more on the community side is more work on the data liberation project. 'Cause right now they make it way easier to switch from Woo to Shopify than from Shopify to Woo. And so we need to work on our importers and other things there. And that's really what, when I spoke about data liberation, really the things I had in mind. So it's actually not bad if someone gets started with a different platform, if you make it really easy for them to upgrade to WordPress. And if you look at the early history of WordPress, including when we had some of our biggest amounts of growth, we had really good importers for the biggest other platforms at the time, like MovableType, Blogger, LiveJournal, right? You don't hear about these anymore because we had really good importers. So most of their users switched over to WordPress. I think we need to do that. We don't have good importers for the current generation, the number 2, 3, 4, or 5 in the market, which I don't even know if we have a good importer for like Joomla. But we're certainly not for Shopify, Wix, Squarespace. And so I think we need great, you know, as part of the data liberation, we already make it very easy to get data out of WordPress. There's some things we could improve there, you know, with the WXR format or backups or things like that. Let's do that as part of data liberation. But we really need to make it infinitely easier to get data into WordPress. And then it can become your hub for everything. And maybe even use it alongside Shopify. Or alongside, you know, do sort of the multi-distribution thing. Where you're sort of publishing your products to different ways to do it.

Okay, thank you. Thank you.

Hi, Mary and Matt. It's Courtney Robertson. I love the work around sustainability so much that I went and found an open-source group that works on just sustainability. Community Health Analytics and Open Source Software, spells CHAOS. And the website's chaos.community, if anyone wants to look at them.

I love a good acronym.

Yeah. This group is unique in that what they do is look at metrics and create practitioner guides for other open-source projects to adopt. So we don't need to create or reinvent that wheel. Out of that, uh, as I got involved with them, I learned about a few different open source tools they made available, Growmore, and a few others that led on to me chatting with Hari about this as it relates to using Vitergia for the WordPress project. That's what we used so far for the contributor dashboards initiative that began. And some of Matt, what you were saying about on individual contributor profiles. There could be ways to better get some of this data instead of promissory pledges to get the data of what are we achieving, what are we getting done. Some of the tools right now, it's publicly able to scrape what's coming out of GitHub that's public, right? We could hook more data points up to it. We have interest from folks that want to even port it so that Track ticket comments could go through, Slack messages, Help Scout, Free Scout, et cetera. The last that I touched base with Hari was before things have shifted in his roles. But where things last stood was that we're— we need permission to be able to hook up Slack or Help Scout or some of these to get some better metrics of just numbers, not so much the content of the messages, but to start tracking those numbers so that we know what stories we want to tell from individual contributors as well as from the sponsor side. Sponsors want ways to know what are we— are the people doing what we're sponsoring them to do? Is that creating a measurable result? There are other tools than Matrícula out there. That's the first one that we selected that fit closest to our needs for the contributor dashboards. Do you feel that it would be possible to get the permission needed to hook some of these other input sources up? And in addition, when we first began this research, the follow-up is who covers the cost of Paturja or some of the tools that do some of this for the project. Would you be open to other organizations besides Audrey or Automatic helping fund some of that?

Helping fund some of— The tooling. Oh, the cost of the software? Yeah.

How much is the software? I think if we were to hook up more, it keeps scaling up. So, I don't want to speak ill of the number that I vaguely remember from a few months ago. But the more connections we put into it, the more costly it becomes. But I think that the compelling data of having data-informed decision-making would be a win.

So I, I can take this cuz I've actually been looking into it. So from the dashboard specifically, cuz with Harry, um, and, uh, so you read my mind. Yes, I would love it to be funded by somebody else. Automatic currently funds it and it's very expensive. So if we were to put more data points into it, definitely I would really appreciate that, and then it could be a lot more transparent. I shared this before when it came up. I think it's great to think of other data points that are going to feed into this dashboard, but I wonder about the quality of the data points. And we start entering Slack messages. What does that mean? When we're trying so hard to think about an impact, I could text a 50— thing in Slack and I've said absolutely nothing. So, like, as long as we balance that effectively, I think it would be really good. Same with track tickets. Sure. But this came up this morning with Five for the Future as well, because I do, I really do believe in the fact that we need to get to an impact and we need to have that represented in data. And we need to be able to tie that back into our roadmaps. And then it's that much wider conversation around what is an impactful contribution. How are we going to measure that? What does that mean across the teams? An impactful contribution for a developer, impactful contribution for a marketer, very different. So, I would love to continue these conversations. I'm really excited about it, which is why I came today and I've been in those Slacks. And I would love if you, if others can start to fund specific things. Thank you. So fantastic, yeah.

Thank you. To the left, or—

uh, hello, Matt. This is Abdullah from Pakistan, and I would like to share one news about WordPress community in Pakistan, and I have one further question as following. So basically, I am contributing to WordPress community since 2017 and organized and part of team for 3 WordCamps. And recently I led a WordCamp in Pakistan, in Lahore. And Lahore has a very vibrant community. So one thing I have a question is like that event we organized, that was a bit different from the other WordCamps in the world. And I would like to tell you how. So we have raised enough money, enough sponsorships, like we don't request for a sponsored community fund from the WordPress Foundation. So this is what we have done, and I think there is no WordCamp in the world that actually raised too much fund to cover the conference expense for the WordCamp. And like, obviously WordCamps needs community funds. Like, there are many global sponsorships out there. Where the funds actually flowing to the WordCamps. So I think it's like that fund that was approved for the WordCamp Lahore 2023. So my opinion on that, like that's a proposal for, for the foundation, like that budget was allocated to the WordCamp Lahore team and that should be invested to that community and the organizers who was like contributing to the communities voluntarily for many years, and they are, they want to attend WordCamp Europe, WordCamp US. Even I am trying since 2018. So 2024 was my first WordCamp Europe, Global WordCamp. Even before that, I could not attend due to many reasons. It's financial, it's about visa and many things. So my proposal is the fund that was allocated to that community, that must be spent over there. Like if they have done a very good job with the local sponsoring, and even I tried to raise this concern, but it was not heard. And one thing I would like to say very openly, you are sitting here, WordPress is the 45% part of the internet, and that is due to the community, that is due to us, that is due to all people sitting here. So obviously WordPress, Automattic, and other Brands contributing and global sponsors are contributing, but those people who are part of community in any way, either contributing to the core, either contributing the community, they are actually part of it. They are actually adding value to the WordPress on daily basis. So I have a proposal, so we must like spend that budget to the allocated community who have approved for this. So that's my first thing. And the second thing is about like, obviously it's—

I'm sorry, Rolf, it's just it was a longer story. And how about we— and how about can we just cover that before and then give maybe more people a chance to ask a question? Yeah, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Yeah. No, it's totally fine. That is a story I haven't heard before. It sounds like one that probably is best dealt with, with the WordCamp team. And I certainly wouldn't want to override their decision. Onstage with 30 seconds of hearing about it. I do know that there's, you know, just things we have to navigate. If sponsor funds for a camp are used for individual benefit that wasn't explicit beforehand, you know, like if the sponsor is saying, okay, we're gonna, anything extra is gonna like try to sponsor someone kind of like the WordCamp Foundation does or WordPress Foundation does to visit, you know, that's fine. But if it's kind of changed after the fact, it's a little weird. So, Could be something that changes going forward too, or just get the sponsors to separately do this, you know, with the individual versus it going through the WordCamp, which obviously has a lot of rules for good reasons. You know, we have to worry a lot about misuse of funds and other things. So that's just off the top of my head, and I will defer the actual answer to this and decision to the WordCamp team. So I will— if you felt like— I'm sure they heard you before. You might not have agreed with the answer, but you could always maybe contextualize it differently or appeal. But ultimately, it is the decision of that team. They deal with these things more closely.

And we do actually have WordCamps that turn a profit. A good amount. There's a good amount of them. But it's great to hear because I'm happy that you have turned a profit. But there are many.

Not a goal. It's like, we should just have better food or music or something. The goal is to put it all back in.

Pull it into the party. Lots of parties.

That was actually— you saw that the word The Wikimedia Press Foundation did a larger grant to Internet Archive. That wasn't from donations, that was from excess from WordCamps accumulated over, I think, a couple years. Maybe a year or two, I forget exactly. Now we want to keep like a little buffer there, rainy day fund. But yeah, the whole setup of that organization is like, if there's extra, ideally it went back in at the time, and if not, we grant it to other great nonprofits. Alright, right over there.

So one last question, like, I have, if you don't mind.

No, let's move on, let's move on, because we're actually over time. I want to get a few more people in line. So, alright, thank you.

Hi Matt. Hello Mary. First up, I want to thank both of you for taking Campus Connect officially within the WordPress project. If you remember, I asked you a question at WordCamp Asia Manila about the students. So having recognized the efforts of Puja, Anand. Also, there's, uh, we have Ganga, we have Shiv running GoWP initiative in Nepal. Also, we're running, we're also running open source NextGenBD in Bangladesh, which has started 6 months ago. I am one of those person who's taking it forward. Now, my question to both of you individually, I want to hear from you, what do you envision now that Campus Connect is official and we have smaller events running in multiple parts of different parts of the world. So what do you envision now that it's official? Are we going to have possibly a bigger event which is other than WordCamp with students and involving universities and educational institutions worldwide?

Yeah, I mean, this is, I think, one of the bigger opportunities we've had in a long time because it's very, very scalable. We can train the trainers, as Mary put so eloquently earlier,. And then that can scale out to a really large number of students through an existing framework, which has accountability, has testing, has all those sorts of things built in there. The university systems across the world. And again, once this works in some places, I think we have a great opportunity to get this into other majors, particularly engineering would be the one I'd be most excited about. And of course, other countries. I think this could easily be a worldwide thing. And then yeah, a WordPress accreditation, like all that sort of stuff.

I have a lot of opinions on this. I'm really excited about Campus Connect. I've never actually shared this with you, but you know, when you interconnect all of these pieces, right? And the reason we haven't tied them together yet is because I think it'll stall forward momentum. I think it'll stall the progress. But look at everything that has been launching. You've got the WordPress community or WordPress credits, which are actually in the university. And then you have the Campus Connect initiative, which is live. But then you have the idea of events. And I've heard multiple times, the events, the events, we need to scale up the events from WordCamps to local WordCamps to flagships. How are we changing the events? And then WordPress Campus Connect launches as an event, right? And all of a sudden, so much attention came to it. But it didn't just come for the people who are on the ground training and exciting to engage with younger generations and teaching people. It came from companies who it's like been reinvigorated as how they can fund it and how they can be a participant and then how they can create that stickiness. And like I said with the endowment around bringing people and actually getting people, it's similar to what the gentleman had just said, like, "We have an excess amount of funds, it should stay within Pakistan." It's like, or we should figure out a way to fund people to come to a WordCamp who haven't been here and experience it. So the flywheel that can connect The impact here is phenomenal. It brings new blood into the project. It brings new ideas. It brings education. It brings everything that we need to make this project holistic long-term, right? And I think one of the interesting things is I've been around for the last couple of days and I've been all around talking to folks. And I don't know if anybody's here, but I didn't meet anybody with less than a year at WordPress. I didn't meet anybody. Actually, the earliest I met was 5 years. Can you, can anybody tell me that they've been here for less than 5 years? Or less than 3 years, actually, it's probably a smaller number.

Less than 3 years. Less than 3 years. There we go.

That's a problem. And it's a problem that they're not at WordCamp. So I'm not going to say, oh yeah, yeah, well, you know, but I've never been to a WordCamp and I'm— and I was at Automattic for 3 years and I've never been there. It was COVID. And then I get here and I want to come to so many more. And then there's faces to the names. And then I understand how to interact with people because I'm, you know, I'm what you call a special type of personality. But that's the— that's what gets me excited. It's like you get all of these new people in here And then you get to connect with the community, you can hear them and you can interact with them. And then you, you get hallway conversations, the plugin team, right? Like these are all, these are all conversations. And soon as, soon as they told me their plans and their ideas, I'm like, you have to meet with Ryan. Where's Ryan? You have to meet with James. And all of that is exciting. It's exciting. And I guess even, even the Media Core conversation and the marketing conversation, I met with multiple people from that at the event. And it's that mindset shift, like, well, how do I get started? What do I do? And it's like, let's just do it. Let's just do it. And then once it gets going and going and going, let's see, it's all, ooh, maybe not, maybe so. But that's what it is. And we're going to expect that 5,000 students coming into this project. Let's expect to get real bothered real quick because they're going to challenge everything that has been done, right? You've got younger generations here. Short form, like how they even accept educational content and training. It's like, I just came from TikTok, short-form video. I don't want to sit through an hour of you training me, right?

By the way, I would be disappointed if they don't challenge it. Yeah, right? It's exciting.

So I'm really— I'm stoked about this. I'm stoked about Campus Connect. I'm so glad that you guys are all doing it and launching it. Excuse me, you folks. But yeah, yeah, heck yeah. I was going to say something else. I was going to swear.

Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Also, thank you for all the early work. We are a bit over time. So do you have short questions or long questions? Short question. Raise your hand if it's short. Yeah? All right. Lightning round then. Super fast. Okay, so hi, Marie.

Hi, Matt. First of all, thank you for your time. My name is Alejandro. I am a technical student at CERN at the web team. We are now developing a custom theme and migrating around 700 websites from Drupal to WordPress. So, well, I'm very happy that you like the project. My question is not related to that, but this is— as a student, I'm very, very interested in learning. Well, I have learned a lot from other people here, so I expect with my question to learn a bit about management, specifically to Mary the question. The question is, is it very different to manage a private company than an open source organization? If not, why not? Because my intuition would say that yes. And if yes, what are the differences in the mission, in the motivation, in the priorities, in the problems?

Lightning answer. Lightning answer.

It's very— ooh, it's very different. It's very different because you need to bring a lot of people along for a journey and for a ride. It's not top-down, and it's not, "You should do this and you should do that." And so accountability is difficult when you're dealing with volunteers because it's all self-motivation. And so it's very different, and so I'm learning to work within that. And thank you all for the grace while I learn that.

Thank you very much.

Hi, Matt and Mehdi. First of all, thank you so much for everything, for doing the WordPress community. And I'm actively active on the training team last few years, and I'm working also the repo. I am doing the job, but I'm like, you know, after the job doing the, you know, providing the training for new, new developer or who are interested to get the training for the WordPress, how to connect the WordPress. So last, when you pass the contribution from your team, I have lost all the plan with the team repo. But right now, you know, I feel like the, you know, very slowness based on, you know, pass the, your contribution for the training team especially. So what the plan for about the training team for the in future? Because I am here because, you know, I'm just, you know, try to provide the training for the WordPress for the new users. This time also here, the 32% new users who don't know what is WordPress and how to start the contribution. And I have shared the knowledge. So you have started WP Connect, WP Campus, whatever. You also started this training team, which is learn.wordpress.org. So what is the future? I need to reply for you. Any sponsor or anything for your side for the training team?

I'm afraid I think the answer is longer. And also part of my answer is I don't know. So that's just the honest one. It's not just because it's lightning round, but thank you for the question. And if you want to follow up by pinging me on Slack, I'm happy to look into it.

I know, always you're avoiding use Slack. So of course I will 100% message you again.

Oh, thank you.

Hi, Matt and Mary. I'm Shukrat. I'm from Ukraine, I live in Portugal, own a small marketing agency. I have the same base as you because I'm writer and musician, and I started to use WordPress as a writer because I like to write. I tested Joomla, I tested Drupal, it sucked, so I went for WordPress. Yeah, but that was many years ago, and now we have to keep up because there is Webflow framework, and I think there are more competitors to WordPress than, like, Wix and other stuff. And now everything happens, and over years everything happens thanks to contributors. Big round of applause to people who organized this event. It's awesome. Another big round of applause to people who contributing to WordPress many more than 20 years now. You created this. This is awesome. And now my question is, how do we make and keep WordPress sexy because we don't have like— we have patterns, all right, they are not finished. Uh, you started to do experiments with having interface for custom post types, for fields. It's awesome, it looks amazing. It's not finished. We have AI team that starts to work on AI, but I can't change the hover state of my button and I don't have breakpoints. Let's make WordPress sexy again.

L— what is that? LMSA? Okay. Well, first we're going to have to redefine the definition of lightning. These are long rolling thunder claps. —so, but thank you for the question. It was a great one. The quick answer is we need to roll up our sleeves and do the work. We talk a lot about meeting, and we meet about meetings, and we talk about which meetings we should have, and which Slack channel. And sometimes you just need to sit down and write some more code. And that is where I'm really going to try to focus all of my contributions and Automattic's contributions as we restart. It's part of the reason we wanted to reboot, actually, because we felt like ourselves, we have become a little diffused and detached from results. And what we were seeing relative to the amount of time and people that were working full-time on Core. And I want to see a lot more. So some of the things you mentioned, you know, we'll bump those to the top of the list. All right, next. And make it actually quick, actually quick. Next question. Thank you. Just a question. Just a question. Hello, I am from Georgia. I have a very small question. I feel that it's very nice to have AI in WordPress, but I feel that it's very little bit late.

And my question is, what is the main reason, as a main reason for this?

I do not think we're late at all. Like I said, I think we're in the command line era. Like chapter one, inning one of AI. And I know that seems hard to believe, but let's look back at this at WordCamp, you know, 2030, and we'll be like, wow, we thought that was good. What's happening now? I think part of the reason it hasn't happened until now is the APIs are still growing. Things like MCP didn't even exist a year or two ago, or maybe it was a year, but it's a lot of stuff is brand new and it's moving really quickly. So I think the most important thing is that we are reactive, that we're adaptive, and that we build the primitives that allow the ecosystem, plugins, themes, and the broader people who customize WordPress to build on the rails and play with it. So that is the quick answer. And I must— I'm going to end this as well as saying, like, I've actually never been more optimistic because the tools and the capabilities that this unlocked, combined with the creativity in this room, the creativity of all the contributors and users of WordPress, we are in I think, on the cusp of a golden era. So thank you so much. And thank you all, WordCamp Europe. Thank you, organizers, for the extra time. Thank you, Mary.