#209 – Simon Pollard on Navigating the New Normal for WordPress Community and Events

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, trying to navigate the new normal for WordPress community and events.

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So on the podcast today we have Simon Pollard.

Simon has been building with WordPress for many years. Originally from Devon in England, he’s worked as a professional web developer across locations, eventually landing at Illustrate Digital, where he’s been for six years.

Simon’s not just a coder. He’s been deeply involved in the WordPress community, not only organising, but helping to grow the Bristol WordPress Meetup from a casual get together in a pub, to a thriving, officially backed event with dozens of regular attendees.

Like many in the WordPress ecosystem, Simon wears multiple hats. He’s a musician, a devoted dad, and an accidental community leader who found himself at the heart of local WordPress organising. But COVID-19 changed all that.

In today’s episode, Simon explains what happened to WordPress Meetups during and after the pandemic. How vibrant communities fizzled out. How hard it was to bring people back. And the new challenges of connecting when traditional social media platforms no longer bring everyone together.

Simon talks about his own journey, how he paused on events, shifted his social life to music, and struggled to hand the Meetup keys to new organisers. Eventually, a call from an old friend drew him back and he was faced with the new reality. Smaller groups, fractured channels, and the question of how to keep the in-person spirit of WordPress alive.

We get into the irreplaceable value of real life connection, the warmth in the room, and the need to rethink what gets people to in-person events now. Is it hybrid events? Perhaps it’s music? Something beyond pure WordPress talks? We discuss what’s been lost, what still matters, and what it might take to build the new era of WordPress community in a distracted, always connected, world.

If you’re curious about the future of WordPress Meetups, if you felt the ebb and flow of community during the past few years, or if you just want to know how to find your people again, this episode is for you.

If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.

And so without further delay, I bring you. Simon Pollard.

I am joined on the podcast by Simon Pollard. Hello Simon.

[00:03:42] Simon Pollard: Hello Nathan.

[00:03:43] Nathan Wrigley: Very nice to chat. Simon and I have met for the first time, just sort of 10 minutes ago. We’ve had a little bit of a chat. And as is so often the case, Simon has a musical instrument in the background. I don’t know what that is, but there’s definitely a thing there. WordPressers often have musical instruments.

[00:03:57] Simon: There’s more behind me as well. And randomly, I’ll bring in another fact, so I’m in a very casual band of predominantly mid forties internet developing type people. And, yeah, we’re all the same, we all play instruments. And randomly we all, without being connected in any way, can work in the same one building in Bristol, which is co-working in individual offices and we all found out we’re all in the same building. And that wasn’t how we met.

[00:04:21] Nathan Wrigley: I think probably anybody listening to this has figured out by your accent that you’re from the UK. And you mentioned Bristol just there.

[00:04:27] Simon: Well, Brizzle if I’m going to be correct.

[00:04:29] Nathan Wrigley: Right at the top of the podcast, we typically ask the guests to just give us a little potted bio, a moment or two just telling us who you are. And as it’s a WordPress podcast, just give us your background with WordPress, I guess, as well.

[00:04:40] Simon: Yeah, well, I’m from Devon originally, which the English people will pick up on the accent potentially. I try to hide that away, but every now and again a little bit of farmer will come out and it’ll be oh, argh. And then, yeah, so I was born in Devon, moved away into to Cheltenham, been to Cardiff and then ended up in Bristol and worked at various places amongst all of them.

Bristol was where I finally got my kind of proper web job, an actual proper official web job. And the first company I started used WordPress as one of the platforms, and that’s from where I started off my kind of professional career. Moved around a few places since then as developers do, but always kind of staying in the area. And then currently, I am now at Illustrate Digital. Been there for six years, joined at the start of 2020, so that was an interesting progression, we’ll cover that later.

During my time in Bristol, it was someone else who originally raised the idea of a Meetup for of WordPress devs to kind of meet up and have a chat. So myself and a few others met up with this one guy called Henry, and we just met at the pub, sat around a table and had a chat and said, what are you doing? What do you need help with? What would we like to talk about?

And it kind of progressed from being, so we had a few more kind of casual chats, managed to grow. I think there was about six of us met originally and we kind of grew a bit and then said, oh, should we try doing like talks and making it a bit more official? So we progressed onto that. Struggled to find speakers, which I think is the story of absolutely every Meetup is find someone to talk. So I ended up doing a lot of talks myself, which I didn’t mind, but there was only so many times I can involve cats and WordPress together in the same thing.

And then it grew a bit. The key point for me is we took on someone who was a project manager by trade, who was also a developer. And they created a Trello board, and then suddenly we got organised. And I don’t know how, we kind of reached out, I remember now as I’ve just literally spoken to Jenny Wong who works over at Human Made, and she was assisting and she said, you know, is there anything I can do?

And she came over, I was working in Bath at the time. So she came over in person, back in the day when you met in person. Came over to Bath and we sat down and had a coffee and a chat, and she gave me all the tips and advice she could to kind of help build the Meetup and get it bigger and try and get things working.

She also helped us get official backing. So we got the WordPress official backing for the Meetup, which is brilliant because that gave us funds. That allowed us to start hiring venues which is brilliant. So all the worry of paying for kind of costs or anything for the venues got covered by WordPress. We still reached out for sponsors, and the sponsors gave us money for food. Food is obviously a good tool to get people in as well.

It just kind of grew. And I’m not sure what made it grow or how it grew, but it just kind of fed through. But this was back in the day when social media was less run by maniacs and you were happy to post on Twitter and Facebook and it kind of grew from that. I already had quite a good Twitter following, so I just kind of shouted there all the time and tried to pull in everybody and anyone who isn’t at all connected to the internet.

We went to Facebook, I got a friend of mine, was a bit of a social media guy, he set us up several kind of media accounts and added his advice. And then, yeah, just kind of moved on, and we were getting in a good crowd. Towards the end of 2019 into 2020 we were getting say 30, 40 people coming along to the Meetup, which is really impressive.

So we’d fill out a room, we’d get catering in, that would all get done. We had an account, we were that kind of organised, so we had an actual bank account to put our sponsorship money in. We were in profit at one point. So it was crazy. It was just going, yeah, going really well. Lovely kind of gathering, it was just a nice thing. We ran monthly. The organising team grew to about six or seven of us, because there was so much to do. So there’s plenty of us involved.

And yeah, it was going great, all going along lovely. 2020 came about and then suddenly COVID, and that was it. It kind of stopped because it had to, and none of us had the appetite to do the video side of things. We didn’t really have the technology, or the means, and it was just too much with everything else that was going on in the world. So it kind of petered out, and as did my involvement in the community, as much as in person involvement kind of faded out.

And I looked back and, yeah, the last meetup that I attended was in 2020, before just the other week when I’ve gone back, but like the last one was 2020 was the last, looking at my logs, the last Meetup I attended in person, which is quite sad to look back. But this all changed around. I’ve gone very off topic of what I actually do. I think I just went into this hole.

[00:08:49] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, no, it’s great because obviously what the listener doesn’t know is that you and I already know this is what we’re destined to talk about. So you’ve given us the full introduction. So I’ll just take over for a minute, if that’s all right? Because that’s really the case, I think you could map that across all of the WordPress Meetups within the UK.

So prior to COVID, things seemed to be going great guns. There were lots and lots happening. I don’t know the exact number, but there were many. I could pluck out of the air several, and probably, if you combined all of the numbers of those, it was hundreds of people, you know, getting out of their house, going to an event, sharing expertise but also, like you said, the social side of things.

And then this moment in time, this kind of sword of Damocles, if you like, suddenly that we didn’t know was there, dropped. Killed the whole thing overnight for good reason. You know, there was a really legitimate reason for everybody to stop moving around. But it seemed to have changed something for good.

Now what’s curious about that is I remember being in that COVID time, and I remember being utterly fed up and bored, and praying for the time when things would just return back to normal. And with great speed, actually, with the benefit of hindsight, looking back, that almost seems like I watched a COVID TV program. You know, it seems like, obviously I know it was real to me, but it all seems so in the rear view mirror now. It was almost like it was part of a fictional book or something like that.

But I fully expected that the minute all of the guards, and the protections, and the legislation came away, that I would just drop back into everything that I’d done before. And so for me, that’s what happened. I went immediately back to everything, you know, attending events, and all the other different things that I do in my own spare time that have got nothing to do with WordPress.

But the curious thing is, for me at least anyway, is that I appear to be different. You know, you’ve just gone back, within the last few weeks or so. What changed for you? Have you had the time to be introspective and think to yourself, why, Simon, did I not just resume what I was doing before?

[00:10:59] Simon: Yeah. So I mean it’s twofold for me. Yeah, I’ve been very reflective over the last kind of few weeks on this because I’m just reaching out again and seeing people. It’s like, I’ve not seen you in six years and it’s kind of crazy. Well I mean I spoke to them online and responded to comments here and there but, yeah, for me it was twofold.

So during the COVID times I was fortunate enough to have a baby, which changes everything again anyway. And that just became my focus. So whilst working full time and also having a child, that was my focus. The evenings, when I used to have the time to go to the Meetups and everything, in the evening, if I had any spare time, I would just prefer to sit. I didn’t want to do anything else. I didn’t have any energy. I was spent. I was enjoying a glorious moment of sitting, and if I was lucky watching a bit of TV. Yeah, it took it all out of me.

So I’ve put things on pause in that sense. I wasn’t really doing anything. Yeah, as you’ve mentioned the guitars and everything, used to go to gigs a lot as well, but that kind of went on hold. The music side ironically kicked off after. So that’s something that did come in first. So whilst I didn’t go to Meetups, some other people, when things got back reached out to me and said, oh, I’m running a band, do you fancy joining that? So that became my kind of social outlet instead. So my focus went on that, and playing in a band and just meeting up with them. So that was my social interaction.

Ironically, that was someone I knew through, not through Meetups but through events they used to run, I think it was Future of Web Design, or future of, one of those that was down in London. A lady called Michelle, who also has a child, used to live behind me, back in the day in Bristol. She’s moved away. And then she just dropped a message on one of the other social platforms, which I’ll go back to, and just said, oh, do you fancy joining a band, I do drums? I didn’t even know she played drums. Like, she’d been playing drums since kind of school and it just came out.

So that was my social outlet for a while. So I was doing that, and that was good because that was like once a month or so we’d just meet up and have a few hours. My wife could look after my little girl. And so that was my focus for a while and that kind of kept me content for a while moving forward. But I think, yeah, I lost the kind of the urge or the will. I didn’t really have the capacity to run the Meetup that I used to be involved with.

And there were a couple of failed attempts to hand it over. Several people came in and said, oh, I’d like to have a go at running that. So it’s brilliant. So I kind of was like, here’s the keys, off you go. Even still had the Trello board and everything that we had.

And one tried and failed. I think another one did and I just kind of left it. So I assumed nothing really was happening on that. Until recently, it was last year I believe when some of the original team, a lady called Janice who was there at the very first pub round table with me, I think we’ve been to every Meetup ever since. She moved into retirement because she was a web developer and was like, don’t want to stop doing things. And she liked the community and she thought, right, well, if no one’s going to get this up again, I’ll do it again. And she was in the team at the end as well, so she’s already had the experience. She pulled together some of the others of the team. So still another couple of people, Michael and Rob who used to kind of be managing as well, they’re back in it as well and they started bringing it back to life.

And so I kind of saw this last year, the Meetups kind of started filtering through. And because I’m still connected to a lot of these people I found out, trying to remember how it came, it might, would’ve been something like LinkedIn or somewhere, or even emailed and that kind of came through. And it was like, oh, I need to go along to that one time, I really need to go along. And even one of my friends was talking, I was like, brilliant, I’ll go and see him, I’ve not seen him in ages. And then I had an operation that put me out of action for a while.

So that came in, so even when I was just about ready to go. And then finally, turn around to this year and then, yeah, another good friend of mine Ross Wintle, who is a developer, who I think a lot of people hopefully will know, he works doing stuff for ACF in particular, which is why I harass him all the time. But I’ve known him for ages. He was talking, I was like, right, I’ve got to go along because he’s talking. I’ve not seen him in six years, and it’s a great chance to see everyone. And I was so glad I did.

A lot of it, whilst it was smaller, it was still just a lot of the same people. So I think I kind of took in that seeing the people didn’t really appreciate the size but still it was kind of nice. It still felt the same. It was still the nice, friendly atmosphere which you get with WordPress. I think you get that across the board. Not just in Meetups, but devs talk to other devs which you don’t necessarily get in other industries. I would happily tell another dev, for what I would call a rival, inverted commas, company, how to do something if they were stuck, which you wouldn’t necessarily get in other industries.

And that filters through, for me, for the Meetup side. The atmosphere, it’s just very friendly and welcoming. And talking at it is a joy, because you will never get heckled. No one’s going to do that. Unless it’s a friend of yours and they’re teasing you, because you know them.

It’s just such a nice kind of crowd, and that’s where I started doing talks. And I don’t think I would’ve ever done a talk if it wasn’t in front of such a nice crowd and you knew you could kind of do what you wanted. You can make a mistake and no one’s going to pick you up on it. And then a lot of the time they were just interested to hear what you had to say. It was just, yeah, nice.

So I think I’ve already talked myself into doing a talk again. So there’s a good reason to go back. So got to think about that. Yeah, and then I said, well, I used to have a network of people, so how do I reach out to that network of people that I used to do and pull them in? Like, how do I go, right, okay, we are doing all right here but as always, looking for people to talk? So how do I reach out to those people?

And that’s kind of the next point is, the next thing that changed was the social network seemed to almost turn evil in places like Twitter, which used to be a nice go to, and you’d message everyone. Everyone kind of jumped ship because, for good reason. No one seemed to jump ship into the same boat, and everyone was doing their own thing and there was no confined next to step of where you get in touch. And that’s where I’m currently at is, six years down the line, what’s the way to kind of network now on the internet with these people and get in touch with those I may have lost touch with?

[00:16:34] Nathan Wrigley: That’s so interesting. I’m going to unpack a lot of what you said there. I’ve been making my little notes as you’ve been going along, but there’s a few things there.

So the first thing is that it’s curious you, for reasons that you’ve explained very well, you know, the family being the easy one to grasp. You know, you had a very, a different life out the other side of COVID. And so the constraints around that, and the possibilities of socialising were diminished regardless.

I didn’t have that, and so I did sort of just drop back into where I was before. But what’s curious is that clearly isn’t the pattern. You know, we hear about, not just in the WordPress space, but lots of sort of social enterprises, clubs and things that were going on all over this country, kind of lost their way. They couldn’t attract the people back.

So something happened, I think, to us during that period of time. I don’t know if we just became habituated to sitting in more and, you know, more accustomed to watching the telly. I don’t know if they’re ingrained into us somehow, was this fear of the outside world. That’s really overdramatising it, but hopefully you can grasp what I mean. You know, just this idea that outside, bad, inside, good.

[00:17:44] Simon: It was two years of being told to stay inside. And whether of not, that’s going to sink in isn’t? At some point, without even thinking.

[00:17:50] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. But then it just means that, when eventually the guardrails are pulled off, and obviously they weren’t just pulled off in one fell swoop. It was this sort of slow experimental phase, where you could be with a few people and then more people, and then that all got pulled back again, and then it all began again. Eventually, where we are now is you can do basically everything again. There’s no restrictions whatsoever.

But the community, the WordPress community in particular, I do wonder if we probably went into our screens a bit more than the typical person might do. Because, you know, we’re on our screens doing the work. Six o’clock maybe would’ve rolled by in the year 2018 and we would’ve closed the laptop, shut the computer down, and then done the other things. But then for a period of three or four years, we just carried on, on the screens and met on Zoom, or just carried on watching Netflix or whatever it may be. And then untangling all of that on the other side, proved hard, hard to do.

But then the bit that you just said, I’ve never thought about that. The social media, the shattering of social media where people have decided that this platform over there is not for them anymore. And, okay, I’m going to either discontinue using social media, or go to somewhere else and there really isn’t that, what do they call X? They used to call it the town square or something like that. And that’s a long time since that happened. But there’s now, there’s no replacement for that. There’s no one place you can go to. Everything’s shattered over multiple accounts. There’s no question there, but I don’t know if you wanted to respond to any of that.

[00:19:15] Simon: That’s where I am at the minute was I moved on, I tried different things and that’s randomly how I got the band notification was off one of those. But I can’t even remember now what platform that was. And I think I’ve closed the tab on my browser, and I’ve long since forgotten and not really gone back into it because it was a handful of people. And I spent a lot of time building up my Twitter following, and I just lost the urge to kind of do that all over again. And followed enough people for a while but then kind of lost the interest in that.

And, yeah, I don’t know, it’s weird. It’s just because there isn’t really anywhere that’s taken over that was, I mean Twitter was the key one for me. That was because I managed the account for the Meetup as well. So I could post on their behalf, but I could also kind of tie in and connect myself. I could retweet myself and retweet other people, and you could get those connections in place which is harder to do now.

That was my go-to, and then I don’t really know now, yeah, where to reach out. And even, one of the things raised at the Meetup I went to was, someone asked a question. It was like, well I’m not sure I can answer that for you immediately. We need to kind of sit down in front of a computer or something. But how do we communicate in between this and the next Meetup? How do we talk? What is the way to communicate now, that’s standard? You give out an email address or something that, I don’t know. Is that the way you communicate? I seemed very lost and almost forgotten how to socialise outside of actually being there in person. The in-betweens, which I’ve been doing for years and years, what’s the in-between way of talking?

[00:20:40] Nathan Wrigley: It’s strange that that’s a thing really, isn’t it? But it definitely is a thing. I suppose the piece of the jigsaw puzzle where it fits into this podcast is that if you are new to WordPress and you’ve never been to any of these events, and you’ve recently started going, a bit like you have done again. You go and you look at the event and you’ll think, okay, this is nice. Here’s the collection of people. But if you were to go pre 2019, so 2017, 2018 in particular, you were probably looking at the same event with, I don’t know, five times the number of people, 3, 4, 5, maybe even 10 times the number of people.

And so whatever that period was, whether it was COVID or a variety of other things, the numbers have dropped. And I think, whilst it’s not, I’m using air quotes at the moment, whilst it’s not necessary to have community for an open source CMS software project, certainly helps.

It helps that these people gather. It helps that they gain empathy. They sort of start to understand each other. It helps so that they feel a connection. You know, they’re going to join different teams because, oh, that person’s in that team and I know that person. It helps because it enables you to share knowledge and hopefully, instead of 10 people falling over the same problem, one person does, and shares their experience to the other nine. And yada, yada, yada. On it goes.

And it does trouble me that that component is now missing. It makes me think this isn’t good. And I don’t know what the answer is. I wish I had a magic wand that I could wave and bring it all back. Does it bother you? Do you feel that the community should still be important? Or can we just say, this is now where it is, just accept it. This is what we’ve got.

[00:22:26] Simon: Having dipped my toe back in properly into the community as it were, recently, it’s kind of reminiscing now what it was, and there’s still elements there of what it is and knowing people. It is almost networking. It’s kind of knowing those people, and someone knows someone. There’s a very kind of small world. Those relationships and people I used to speak to a lot that I didn’t so much, and it’s weird why that kind of stopped.

And I think, yeah, it’s definitely the kind of the sharing. And it’s particularly relevant I would say if you are a freelancer or work on your own or you are even part of a smaller team. But the networking helps you kind of expand out, and expand your team without it having to be in the company you’re working for. Because as I previously mentioned, the rare thing in the WordPress community is that a developer can speak to another developer about an issue for say, it might even be for a client, and they will work together to resolve it. Offering back is how it was, and I think it still is in some areas, which you wouldn’t say get in others. And I think that’s the community side of it that’s very different.

And I noticed that with the Meetup because I’ve been to other Meetups. We even did a collaboration Meetup as well. And the other ones I went to, it just didn’t feel the same kind of warmth. It felt very fixed. There was no kind of welcoming.

So the one thing that has always been relevant that the Bristol one, is we’ve got a welcoming team. So as soon as you step through the door there’s someone there. Get a little name badge as well. And if you’re new, they’ll ask a few questions and find out what you do. And what we always do is, oh, what do you do? Oh, I’m in project management. Ah, go and speak to so and so, they’re a project manager. Or, I’m looking for a developer. Or kind of find out what was their reasoning, and then direct them because we knew who was there.

That’s opposed to other ones where you go in and you almost kind of sign in and then you’re left to your own devices, and no one approaches you, and it just felt very kind of awkward. Whereas we would try and engage everybody, and we were lucky with the people who kind of organised it, with people like Janice who’s just a naturally approachable person and she will go out and talk to people. And we had that kind of mixture of people that, it just made it nice, and it was nice to go along. And you would go along for the people as much as you would for the talk itself.

I would go to talks which had absolutely no interest to me on paper, but I go along anyway because I wanted to see everybody. And then I ended up finding out that these talks were actually sometimes even more interesting when I thought they wouldn’t be any relevance to me. And it helps you kind of expand your kind of knowledge, and appreciate other elements, and other factors that you might not know about. Which in person is just a lot better and I think it’s more engaging as well. So you can kind of stare at a screen watching something. It isn’t quite as engaging as it is being in person.

And also, once you finish, it’s the debrief after that I really like. So when the talk is finished and everything’s wrapping up, you can go and speak to the talker and query something with them and go and speak to other people. And you kind of have that little social bit afterwards, and it’s all just nice and relaxed. And you don’t really get that on a video call because you can’t really go and mingle on a video call, because how do you go and talk to someone else. And it isn’t the same in person, it’s just a lot easier to kind of do that.

Yeah, how do you sell that for something that wasn’t there for a few years? It’s twofold. How do you bring in the people who used to come? And how do you introduce people who may have been born into never having that? The younger generation who lived through COVID, and didn’t really have that Meetup experience before it to know that this exists on the other side. And what would make it appeal to different kind of levels, really?

[00:25:43] Nathan Wrigley: So I’m not entirely sure, again, if we could rewind the clock. So this is going much, much further back. Let’s say the year 2003, something like that, when WordPress was really little. I don’t actually know the date of the first Meetup, but let’s imagine it was around there. And nobody had, in the WordPress community had ever thought to meet up.

If that just never had become a thing, I wonder how the project would’ve fared. I wonder if it would have been as successful. Because, you know, there were things like Skype and these platforms were coming along where you could do project management and things like that online. It feels like there was no, there would’ve been no inhibition to it being successful.

But I’m more or less willing to predict that it would not have been successful. I think the glue that binds the project together on some completely unquantifiable level is that community. And a certain proportion of that community in the past required the in-person meeting. You know, whether it be the WordCamp events, where they get on a plane or in a car and drive a long distance for a few days and lots of talks. Or whether it’s the more kind of informal monthly Meetup scenario, where it’s probably closer to home and a little bit quicker and one evening only, something like that.

I just have an intuition that the project wouldn’t have been successful. It was those people, and I think I’ve heard the word maven. Maven being this sort of description of somebody who is like a hyper connector. They’re really good at connecting the dots between people and saying, you should meet this person, and you should meet this person. A little bit how you described.

I think there’s some jigsaw puzzle of that going on. There’s some tapestry of these community members making it successful in a way we’ll never fully unpick. And now that that, in the year, so we’re recording this in March, 2026. Now that that seems to be somewhat in question, it then raises the question of, well, what does that mean for the future of the project as a whole?

My anticipation is that if we were to, let’s say nobody from this moment forward ever attended an event again, I think the project would not be as successful. There would be less development, there would be less interest in it. So I think it’s important that we do get these things back. But again, moving on to your point about how, that’s the tricky piece. You know, has life changed? Is the advent of everything online all the time, you know, so go back 10 years, there was no Netflix. Well, maybe there was, I don’t know. But the point is the entertainment that’s available through everybody’s TV now is so compelling, it’s kind of hard to fight against that.

But I don’t know how we get the young people in. I don’t know what it is about, you know, what the competition is. We’ve obviously got AI painted into the mix, and all of the interesting things going on there. So I don’t really, I’m not really pressing you for the answer.

[00:28:36] Simon: That’s fine. One of the reasons for joining is to kind of ask that question to the people listening and saying, has anyone else got that kind of magical wand and jigsaw missed piece? Has anyone got any ideas to kind of move forward with it? Because I say, I’m going to be looking, moving forward now, what I can do and how I can connect and get back in touch with people that I’ve not spoken to. I’ve already done it with a few people I hadn’t spoken to in a while. It’s like, oh, I’ve not spoken to you, oh, you’ve got a child as well. Oh, lovely. Those things you talk about which you just kind of left.

But yeah, I completely cut short on it and it’s just bizarre. But it is kind of coming back. It’s nice to know that whilst it’s quiet, it’s still there. It hasn’t died out, it’s just a little bit smaller than it was. But like you say, whether it can rebuild to where it was, or even partway to that is the query. I’d hope it can because I think it helps.

And the project itself, as you mentioned, WordPress wouldn’t exist without a community because it’s built by a community. It’s not built by a singular development company, and we wait for them to do it, you get involved. If you want to work with WordPress, you can do. There’s nothing stopping you getting involved. You can get in, you can be involved, you can be a tester, you can be a developer for it. There’s no like barrier to be involved in it, and it needs that community to keep it going. As you said, it wouldn’t probably have progressed to where it is without that community behind it.

And that community is still there in some context, but where are they in terms of, how can I to them and talk to them? Because there’s definitely people I want to reach out to again. And what’s the way to reach people these days? What’s the platform now? What’s the way to reach out to people? Where are people talking? Are they talking anymore? Or is it all just looking at TikTok? This is where I’m going to sound really old. Looking at like TikTok and just looking at short videos of things and that’s where. Or do people still communicate, and how? What’s the way to do that?

[00:30:20] Nathan Wrigley: I get what you’re saying by the way. I am of a certain age and things like, how do you even do TikTok? What even is that? I’m not entirely sure. But again, rewinding the clock, the website was the thing. That was the fulcrum of the internet really. It was, you know, suddenly you had this capacity to publish things online, and in order to do that, certainly prior to Facebook and MySpace and those platforms, you had your blog, you know, that was the way to do it.

You had to go through the process of setting it up. And the process of setting it up would pull back the curtain on, oh, so this is a bunch of files and a thing called a database. Right, okay. And that’s now on my computer, is it? Oh, right. And then that means I can mess up out with it. Oh, that’s interesting. And I can do this. And so this loop of curiosity gets created.

Whereas now, and again, this is where I’m going to sound old, the internet feels like a very different place. You know, you’ve got a billion platforms that you can just log into, no money down. There’s maybe some, you know, quid pro quo in terms of advertising or selling whatever it is that your attention can demand. And you can create your stuff over there, and it’s fine. And that platform has a reach of 3.6 billion people and yada yada, on you go.

So whether the incentives for younger people has changed because they just don’t see the need for having a website. Because that’s all been taken care of by these platforms that you log into. And, oh, just go over there, username, password, I’m all done. I think there’s something there.

[00:31:48] Simon: Yeah, I guess it’s the questions when you’re working on something. Because back in the day you would speak to someone, it would be someone’s response. If I had a question I would need someone to have answered that question on the internet. So developers will, of a certain age, will know Stack Overflow is kind of the go-to. That’s where we spent most of our time on the internet. You’d ask Stack overflow because you’d hope someone else had the same issue, and they responded or they’ve posted it, someone’s told them how to fix it or that kind of thing.

And I got to the point where even I started, I made it as a goal to hit a certain score on Stack Overflow. I was like, right, I’m going to hit a certain score, I’m going to respond, I’m going to answer questions, just because I want to feel like I’m giving back because it felt nice. I’d consumed so many answers from Stack Overflow, it felt rude not to give back. And the same thing for me I think with WordPress is I was consuming so much information I wanted to kind of give back, it was nice. And it made you feel, there was a nice thing in the community thing was, if I knew the answer to something and I could explain that to someone else and help them, it was a nice feeling, it was a nice thing to do.

It was like, I’ve learned this thing, and you are looking to do that thing, oh, I learned it, do it this way, this is how you do it. And that kind of helped me. So all of my Stack responses were WordPress. And it was nice to kind of respond to someone and them say, oh yeah, that’s great, and then several other people would like it. It was just a real nice, positive thing as well.

But now, again, there is a lot of reliance on AI coming forward, because it’s like, you ask AI and AI gives you the answer. And whilst AI consumes information from people, it doesn’t tell you who it consumed it from. So your answer is coming from the AI agent you are using, not from whoever’s actually come up with that answer. So you’ll get your responses, you don’t have to reach out to a person anymore so much as you did back in the day. And whether that’s a factor that the community isn’t needed because it’s being replaced. And you aren’t exposed to the community so you are not getting the answers through the community, you are getting it kind of channeled through an AI agent who’s consuming that.

So they’re doing all the stuff you used to do, and giving you the answers without you having gone into the community and found out that, oh, it was Joe Blogs who answered that question. And it might be that you reach out to them and say, actually, you knew this, do you know that? I’ve made connections through kind of these things as well, and if the answers are no longer attributed, and it’s like the AI agent is the one who’s responded, you don’t know who actually did that if that came through someone because it’s got this information.

[00:34:07] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s just the void provided the answer for you. Yeah, yeah.

[00:34:11] Simon: Exactly. And that’s the community’s kind of gone on that sense but, is that how people are kind of, that’s what they like or do people still enjoy asking others? I still like responding to others internally in my team. If one of my fellow devs has a question, I love to kind of speak, screen share, go and talk through together, because it’s a lot more kind of enjoyable than just asking the internet.

[00:34:32] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So I wonder if that’s the bear bones of what we need to sort of aspire to. So it’s to realise that there’s a proclivity to, so, okay, rewind a bit. To realise that the community has taken a hit. There’s no question that’s happened. But also to realise that there isn’t a panacea for this. There’s no red pill that we can take which is going to fix it over time.

It’s to recognise that there’s value in these things. It may be that there has been a dwindling in the audience of these things, but also that little avatar that you just painted of the person who’s curious about the code, but also has a desire to hang out, for the multitude of reasons that that could be, you know, they want to just hang out because that’s a nice thing to do, or they want to do networking, or they want to just make connections that they can chat to when they’re not in the room. To recognise that those people are still out there, and maybe those numbers are smaller.

Whilst you were talking also, it sort of occurred to me that maybe we’re just in flux. You know, nobody’s writing on cuneiform tablets anymore. Nobody’s using a stylist to write on papyrus anymore. Things change, you know, over time. And it may be that this is just the new normal, this is what we now have. I’m not entirely sure. But I kind of long for halcyon days. I’m looking back to those sort of 2018s, 2019s and thinking that’s the bar I’d like to have set. Whether or not that’s possible, I’m not sure.

[00:35:59] Simon: Yeah. It leads to me onto the level up on the Meetup was the WordCamps where it was a big kind of weekend event. And I was lucky enough to be involved. So I was the speakers organiser for the WordCamp that was in Bristol in 2019. Ironically booked my boss before I joined a company just as one of the speakers, and someone we employed as well I booked in for that.

And that was just, yeah, it got so big that we could actually run an entire weekend of stuff. But because the Meetups are now going down in size, I see there is still the appetite. It seems in America and other kind of countries around, but would there still be the appetite in England specifically, where we’re both based, for there to be a WordCamp? Would there be enough to warrant one of those? Or would it have to be very scaled back? Because I remember back in the day, I’ve been to like the London ones and you’ve got multiple tracks. Even the Bristol one had two separate tracks running. But now would it be something a bit more stripped back? Would it just be one track and a small kind of event? What scale would it be? Would there still be the interest?

[00:36:56] Nathan Wrigley: And also, does it have to be kind of mixed up with other things? Like, does it have to be part entertainment, part information, part hallway? Because again, I just wonder if that’s the diet that we’ve created ourselves with. Our always on culture, where entertainment is so readily available, I do wonder if, you know, we’ve got to just acknowledge that those things are of importance.

If you want to attract an audience of people, you’ve got to have the social afterwards, you’ve got to have the band, the live entertainment, the bits in between, the, I don’t know what that is, but just some aspect of gimmicks to make these events fun. Not just, okay, let’s go to a talk, watch the talk and then all go home.

[00:37:36] Simon: Yeah. There was always, I mean the thing I liked with a lot of these was there was the kind of a developer day or, that often preceded so you could get involved a bit more for those who wanted to. So there were kind of certain things. There were the socials as well that was always key to some, and that was just a nice way to kind of unwind afterwards. Because a lot of the time people would be traveling, so you didn’t want to go to the event and then go back to the hotel room and sit on your own. You could stay out and chat.

And as mentioned before, the community is a lovely community. So it’s people you want to hang out with because they’re nice people to hang out with. They’re all really lovely. And I’ve met a lot of really nice people at Meetups, at WordCamps. Just afterwards in particular and just chatting, chat about anything because after a while you get bored talking about WordPress, you’ll chat about whatever you want.

I mean if I get talking about music then I’m away. But it’s just, you build those relationships. And there are connections that I’ve made back, six, seven years ago that I’m still in touch now and I’m reaching out again and going, we lost that touch in between. So I’m kind of reaching out again and just catching up with people. It’s just nice to know like, oh, you’re still in the industry. What are you doing? What’s happened to you? And that kind of just disappeared almost. There wasn’t a way to stay in touch in between.

[00:38:42] Nathan Wrigley: The sort of glib comment that I made at the beginning about the fact that if we were to switch on the cameras on this podcast, we’d be able to see that Simon has a guitar in his background.

[00:38:51] Simon: I’ve got more if you look further up.

[00:38:52] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, there’s many musical instruments there. But the point being though that there seems to be a, certainly from my perspective, doing these interviews on a, multiple a week. There’s a high correlation between musicians and WordPressers. And so I’m going to drop this bomb. Maybe that’s a channel for these events is to combine other things. Like combine cinema with a WordPress event. So, you know, there’s a track for watching films at the same time as there’s tracks for speakers, but there’s also live music over there. You know, I’m not suggesting we invite Coldplay or anything. But, you know, some local acts. Maybe some of the people that are involved in the event themselves, many of whom we know are musicians. It’s gimmicks again, but it’s fun.

[00:39:32] Simon: It’s a nice way, yeah, I mean it’s on our, so our band’s been going for a while and it’s still on our bucket list is to actually perform somewhere. We get together and rehearse and it’s one of my bucket list things is I would love to actually perform. Even if it’s just in a small pub in front of a handful of people and I know them all anyway, but just to kind of do that performance in front of things.

So that could be tied in. I wouldn’t be against kind of suggesting it to the rest of the guys and saying, there’s going to be this event and there’s all sorts of things taking place. There’ll be some technical talks or whatever and all these things. There’s also some music so we could perform. Definitely an idea. Yeah, like you said, there’s a lot of musicians around.

[00:40:07] Nathan Wrigley: Like a hybrid, arts meets technology kind of event.

[00:40:11] Simon: Yeah. There’s a lot of creativity. One of the best people I got speaking at the Bristol Meetup, bare in mind this is just a very small handful of people, a guy called Gavin Strange who works for Aardman. He is just amazing, and he’s done some brilliant speeches. I lucked out working with him on a community thing where we got together on a weekend and built websites in the space of a weekend. So thank God for WordPress, I basically built a site in, I don’t know, about five hours, we built a website from scratch.

He was working with us doing some animations and things and was such a positive, really great person. He works outside of work. He’s insane. He never stops. I reached out on a whim and said, do fancy doing a talk? And he goes, well, I don’t do WordPress. It doesn’t matter, it can be anything. And he came along and did a really good, positive, energetic talk. And that was my biggest coup was I got him to speak to us.

[00:40:57] Nathan Wrigley: And it was nothing to do with WordPress. Okay, that’s so interesting.

[00:41:00] Simon: Absolutely nothing. Nothing to do with WordPress. He just talked about, I can’t even remember, it’s a long time ago, but it was just interesting because it, just talking about what he does and a lot of kind of what he does outside of his working day and keeping busy and just.

[00:41:14] Nathan Wrigley: There’s a lot of overlap with soft skills and things, isn’t there? And to be honest with you, even just learning about the animation process and the tech, no doubt, involved in that. It’s kind of interesting. Okay. This is fascinating. This is going in an unexpected direction.

[00:41:27] Simon: That’s my thing now is maybe I can reach out to him again. And then through my other ways I’ve, I know someone who’s done a TED talk. That’s just probably a little level too much, but he’s a mountain biker. But I wonder, can I tie in that into somehow? And can I pull in that crowd that way? There’s all those kind of connections. It’s like, it doesn’t have to be. I think that’s the thing, we managed to get across that it doesn’t have to be WordPress. You can talk about anything if it relates to the internet, and then it might just aspire that that connects to a site that runs WordPress.

That’s how we kind of got a bigger crowd because we dabbled. We did do a technical focused one and it just, that was my thing. I really wanted to get techie and nerdy and it’s like, but you just cut down to too much of a niche and you’re cutting people out. It’s better to kind of have all sorts of things, and as I mentioned before, getting people to see a talk about something they might not think they’re interested in and realise actually it is very interesting and put across and try and get people in.

[00:42:17] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I think that’s the perfect place to sort of draw a line under this one. So what we’re saying is that WordPress events, Meetups in particular, I think we’re talking about mainly, they’re definitely going through a state of flux. We don’t necessarily have the answer, but we’ve definitely floated what the problem is. And there’s a few towards the end there, interesting ideas of ways to possibly make it more engaging to people who’ve, I don’t know, just lost interest, or have never come across WordPress.

So, oh, that’s fascinating. I really enjoyed that. Simon, where do people find you? Where are, you mentioned earlier how the entire world of social networking has been shattered.

[00:42:53] Simon: That’s my issue. Yeah, well, I mean you can find me on illustrate.digital. I’ve got to give a slight plug out to the company I work for. We are a WordPress agency. We do loads of stuff for WordPress. At the minute I seem to be living on LinkedIn. I got addicted to a game on there, and then I kept kind of pulling back. That’s my kind of way to reach out at the minute so you can find me there. I think, yeah, otherwise I don’t really use the other socials. I am on Facebook, if you find me, good luck. But otherwise I think LinkedIn is the way to get me initially. But if you’ve got an example and say, ah, you should join this platform, do reach out and let me know, I’m happy to have a look.

[00:43:22] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you. I will make sure that anybody listening to this is able to find that. If you go to wptavern.com, search for the episode with Simon Pollard in, you’ll be able to probably scroll to the bottom of the show notes and there’ll be links to his LinkedIn.

So Simon Pollard, that was a really curious and interesting chat. Thank you for chatting to me today. I appreciate it.

[00:43:41] Simon: Thank you very much Nathan.

On the podcast today we have Simon Pollard.

Simon has been building with WordPress for many years. Originally from Devon in England, he’s worked as a professional web developer across locations, eventually landing at Illustrate Digital, where he’s been for six years. Simon’s not just a coder, he’s been deeply involved in the WordPress community, not only organising, but helping to grow the Bristol WordPress Meetup from a casual get-together in a pub to a thriving, officially-backed event with dozens of regular attendees.

Like many in the WordPress ecosystem, Simon wears multiple hats. He’s a musician, a devoted dad, and an accidental community leader who found himself at the heart of local WordPress organising. But COVID-19 changed all that. In today’s episode, Simon explains what happened to WordPress Meetups during and after the pandemic, how vibrant communities fizzled out, how hard it was to bring people back, and the new challenges of connecting when traditional social media platforms no longer bring everyone together.

Simon talks about his own journey, how he paused on events, shifted his social life to music, and struggled to hand the Meetup keys to new organisers. Eventually, a call from old friends drew him back, and he was faced with the new reality, smaller groups, fractured channels, and the question of how to keep the in-person spirit of WordPress alive.

We get into the irreplaceable value of real-life connection, the ‘warmth in the room,’ and the need to rethink what gets people to in-person events now. Is it hybrid events? Perhaps it’s music? Something beyond pure WordPress talks? We discuss what’s been lost, what still matters, and what it might take to build the next era of WordPress community in a distracted, always-connected world.

If you’re curious about the future of WordPress Meetups, if you’ve felt the ebb and flow of community during the past few years, or if you just want to know how to find your people again, this episode is for you.

Useful links

Simon on LinkedIn

Illustrate Digital

Bristol WordPress Meetup Group