Jamie Marsland Joins Automattic as Head of WordPress YouTube

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• • Nomad Skateboarding

    August 23, 2024 at 6:31 PMView in Forum

    Where is the separation between .org and .com here? How does Automattic appoint a paid employee to spend that money running the .org resources?

    Even being on board with the method and Jamie, how does the person being payed to run the .org resources still get to market their own brand under the blessing of the Open Source WordPress community, when the community wasn’t involved?

    As fantastic as Jamie’s content is, these types of decisions are exactly why I stepped away from the training team. The day he was brought into the team without ever having contributed, and put in a position of power, I contacted the team leaders and said this is a move by Automattic as he’s going to be a paid employee soon and running things.

    That turned out to be true within a matter of months, and now his position of power is only expanding.

    I’m so conflicted overall, because I’ve been one of the biggest supporters and defenders of Automattic and the people behind there for over a decade. But being on the .org side, this doesn’t feel anything close to open source or like anyone’s voices matters unless they are a paid employee of Automattic. 😕

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    • Anne McCarthy

      August 26, 2024 at 8:31 PMView in Forum

      Mark! I wanted to speak to some of what you shared specifically because I actually just recommended another YouTuber, Barna, to join the training team and Learn WordPress team to help create videos in Hungarian. You can see me say this here for transparency: https://youtu.be/66CqBSWiNfM?si=Q4DVQ1b5Kx3zRMMR&t=4395 Expect me to do this more often as I think it’s a neat way to reuse a talent folks have to benefit the entire WordPress project in an unbiased way.

      The day he was brought into the team without ever having contributed, and put in a position of power, I contacted the team leaders and said this is a move by Automattic as he’s going to be a paid employee soon and running things.

      Jamie and I connected after I saw his videos and shared my Sources of Truth with him. Back in the day (WordPress 5.8-6.0 or so), I used to keep the doc private and shared with various individuals from release squad members (like training, docs, marketing) to educators/influencers. As Learn WP got underway, it came to mind as a great effort for him to be involved with due to his training background. This was back in early 2022. I’m sharing this as context for how contribution pathways sometimes work where current contributors can connect folks and get feedback/ideas/offers of help to the right places. It’s similar but in a different direction to how we worked together in the Outreach Program to pass on feedback to the Jetpack app that impacted your experience but didn’t apply to Core: https://wordpress.slack.com/archives/C015GUFFC00/p1681317035899669?thread_ts=1681012517.852989&cid=C015GUFFC00 Since I’m an Automattic employee, I wanted to help where I could. For Jamie, since I’m a sponsored contributor and I hadn’t yet started up the dedicated YouTuber space, I wanted to find ways to encourage contributions directly. I approached it the same way as a plugin author who runs a business with their plugin contributing code back to the project (aka having folks contribute in a way that aligns with interests and skills). I hope this helps clarify things!

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  • Matt

    August 23, 2024 at 6:32 PMView in Forum

    As one might guess, I’ll flag the continuation of his personal channel and plugins a bit controversial here.

    If you’re an Automattic employee, are you able to continue to sell your WordPress themes or plugins? In the YouTube world, this arrangement is akin to having your own personal plugins featured on the user dashboards.

    One of the biggest challenges with Make teams marketing WordPress is the formality or access to critical .org data. Aside from that, how can you formulate a brand around such a massive open source project — the whole of which is represented by so many contributors.

    Which leads me to the sudden appointment of “Head of WordPress.org YouTube.” A title I find quite extreme given…well is there a “Head of” anything pertaining to .org?

    While I appreciate Jamie’s efforts, also realizing my own critiques of the project/leadership do me no good to earn brownie points to be considered for roles like this, there are dozens of other YouTubers, podcasters, and bloggers that could have been interviewed for the role.

    Which reinforces the challenge of a true Make Marketing team: the hot spots (like YouTube, social, data) are not up for the community.

    Lots of us having been giving back to WordPress for 5/10/15+ years, a more open roll call approach would have been the more community thing to do. I’ll highlight Anne McCarthy’s great efforts to be an unbiased voice as she wrangles many YouTubers to aide in the mission of making WordPress thrive.

    Same for Reyes Martines who leads the official Media Corps experiment that myself and others who critically cover the WordPress news space participate in.

    To get ahead of the comments: Am I jealous? Absolutely. I’ve spent 15 years creating content in the space wondering how special access like this happens.

    YouTube (content in general) is a massively competitive space. The uphill battle of creating great content, broadcasting it to an audience, and monetizing it to have a sustainable business is no easy task. Becoming the face of WordPress will pay out over time, with a natural growth in subscribers to his own YouTube channel. An investment that pays out years from now or if he leaves the position.

    I hope to hear from Head of WordPress.org YouTube soon on the future plans for the channel. How others will be able to participate to share in representing the community & software they love just as much as the next WordPress content creator.

    Here’s to WordPress thriving!

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    • jamie

      August 26, 2024 at 2:46 PMView in Forum

      I officially start on September 2nd and plan to reach out to the community shortly after to discuss future plans for the channel.

      As for my own situation, new sponsorship deals have been stopped for my channel, although I do have a few pre-signed agreements that I need to honour. I will not be promoting my own plugins or developing new ones going forward. It’s possible I will sell my plugin business at some point, but in the meantime it’s important to continue to maintain plugins for existing customers.

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