#193 – Roger Williams on How We Might Reimagine Sponsoring WordPress Contributions

Transcription

[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

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, how we might reimagine sponsoring WordPress contributions.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wp tavern.com/contact/jukebox, and use the form there.

So on the podcast today we have Roger Williams. Roger leads community and partner engagement at Kinsta, a company specializing in offering managed hosting for WordPress. His role involves bridging the gap between Kinsta and the wider WordPress community, working closely with agency partners, technology collaborators, and open source initiatives.

Throughout his career, Roger has been deeply involved in community efforts and has recently played a key part in Kinsta’s implementation of a sponsored contributions program, helping to funnel time and resources back into WordPress and other open source projects.

Many longstanding members of the WordPress community have contributed out of passion and a spirit of philanthropy, but as the project has grown to power over 40% of the web, the need for sustainable funding and sponsorship has become more pronounced.

Roger joins us today to explore this shift. He shares insights from his WordCamp US presentation titled Figuring Out Sponsored Contribution. Discussing how companies can start funding contributors, why that matters, and how to balance the business need for a return on investment with the grassroots spirit of open source.

We begin with Roger’s background, his work at Kinsta, and how he became involved in WordPress community sponsorship.

The conversation then gets into the ever evolving dynamics of sponsored contributions. How businesses can approach funding contributors. Ways to surface and support valuable work, and strategies for aligning company goals with broader project needs.

Roger breaks down the practical arguments companies can use to get internal buy-in, and the importance of clear processes for both organizations looking to sponsor, and individuals seeking support.

Towards the end, Roger reflects on the challenges and opportunities of connecting those both from the philanthropic and commercial sides of WordPress, and he shares advice for anyone hoping to get their organization involved in similar programs.

If you’re interested in how WordPress sponsorships work, how business and community might collaborate, or you’re seeking practical advice as a contributor or company, this episode is for you.

If you’d like to find 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 Roger Williams.

I am joined on the podcast by Roger Williams. Hello, Roger.

[00:03:46] Roger Williams: Hey Nathan, how are you?

[00:03:47] Nathan Wrigley: I’m very good. We could pretend that we’re recording this at WordCamp US because that was the plan, but it never happened for one reason or another. So we took it offline. And several weeks ago, WordCamp US finished, but the intention was very much to talk about what you were presenting at WordCamp US. So we’ll get into that in a moment.

Before we do that though, Roger, would you mind just telling us a little bit about who you are, who you work for, what your role involves, all to do with WordPress, I guess.

[00:04:14] Roger Williams: Yeah, no, absolutely. So my name’s Roger Williams. I work at Kinsta, managed hosting provider for WordPress. Currently my position is partnership and community manager for North America. Very long title. What does that mean? My job is to interface with the public, with the WordPress community, with our agency partners and various technology partners, and just make sure that we’re all on the same page, and that whatever’s going on outside of Kinsta is getting communicated inside of Kinsta, and whatever’s happening inside of Kinsta is getting communicated outside. So I’m basically boiling the ocean. So a very easy thing. No problem at all.

Truth be said, it’s one of the, this is like the highlight of my career, I have to say. I get to travel, I get to meet a lot of neat and interesting people, I get to make amazing friends, and I get to talk about technology, the web, WordPress and Kinsta hosting, which are all things that I’m very passionate about and enjoy talking about this ad nauseam. You can ask my wife, that I am probably too much, need to turn it off a little bit.

But specifically talking about community and WordPress, gosh, it was January of this year, 2025, that we implemented our sponsored contributions program, and I played a role in that. I played a role in getting the conversation happening around that inside of Kinsta. And then once we got budget approval, actually figuring out, hey, who do we want to sponsor? What projects outside of WordPress? Because we also sponsor various open source projects that affect us directly and indirectly.

And so that has been a whole new aspect of my career that has really opened up new doors and opportunities and discussions and friendships that I’m still feeling like a bit of an interlocutor. I’m an outsider trying to understand how to best do this, and play a part in helping the projects that we all depend on to do all of our work.

[00:06:17] Nathan Wrigley: Nice. Thank you. Yeah, there’s a lot in there to unpack, isn’t there? It sounds like a full and varied role, but also you kind of sound a little bit like you’re figuring this out over the course of 2025 and into 2026 and who you are sponsoring and what have you. And that was very much the tenor of the talk.

So the title was very simple. The presentation that you gave was simply called figuring out sponsored contribution. But I’ll just read into the record the blurb, not all of it, but much of it because it will give everybody who’s listening an idea of where you were going with that. So it says, open source software runs on passion, but passion doesn’t pay the bills. WordPress powers over 40% of the web, yet many people maintaining it aren’t funded. That’s starting to change and your company can be part of it. In this talk, we’ll explore how sponsored contribution works, why it matters, and how companies big and small can participate. We’ll walk through my experience, AKA your experience, working with companies to sponsor contributors from promoting the idea internally, identifying key areas of the WordPress project to support, finding and interviewing contributors, and building an internal framework for long-term sponsorship. And there’s a little bit more, but that basically sums it up.

So basically, I guess my first question is, what exactly are you trying to do here? Are you kind of regarding this as a sort of philanthropic thing? What I’m really kind of asking is, do you kind of expect things in return? So if Kinsta, for example, sponsor somebody, do you have like a tick list of things that we need to see that you’ve done? Or is it more, you are a trusted person, we’ve seen you interacting in the WordPress space for many years, here’s a bunch of cash, go off and just do whatever you like?

[00:07:53] Roger Williams: Yeah, excellent question. And thanks for reading that blurb. I don’t think I’ve read that blurb in quite a few months and it sounds really good.

[00:07:59] Nathan Wrigley: It was a great talk.

[00:08:00] Roger Williams: Somebody really put something together here. Really interesting question and I think this kind of gets to the core of what I was trying to talk about in this talk, in the exploration that I’m trying to figure out in my own head, figure out inside of Kinsta, and possibly figure out in the larger community.

There’s a lot of humility involved in this Nathan, I hope you can appreciate. I feel a lot of the times very, the imposter syndrome, right? Wow, I’m coming into a project that’s over 22 years old. Many, many thousands of people have been involved. Many, many companies have been involved in this. Here’s this new guy, you know, I mean I’ve been around for a little while, but relatively new guy on the scene just coming in trying to tell people how all this is done. And I really hope that it doesn’t come across that way. I’m really trying to explore this topic and understand it better for a few reasons.

The first one is the most immediate. How can I get Kinsta involved in contributing and sponsoring WordPress and other open source projects? And so there’s a combination of things happening there, right? And you brought it up in terms of, are there tangible things that we’re looking for here? Or is this simply just philanthropic, hey, we’re giving money away and everything will work out?

And I think that there’s a spectrum. And we’re playing on the spectrum with it. Traditionally, and this is something that I talk about a lot in the talk is, traditionally in open source the argument has been that I’ve seen, hey, you’re using this software, you should give back to the software and to the project.

But then you have on the other side the business that is very much, hey, we need to generate revenue from our activities so that we can remain a business.

And so they’re a little bit at odds in some ways, right? But it doesn’t have to be that way. And I think that’s what I’m exploring in this talk, and I’m exploring in this conversation, and as many conversations as I can have with people is, how do we play on that spectrum of finding a happy medium where for a company, a lot of times you go to the executives and you’re like, hey, we need to be giving back to this thing that we get for free? And you get a very perplexed look. And so I think we need to adjust that conversation.

I think that the people that are inside of the project, it’s very obvious. Hey, we put a ton of time and effort into making this happen. Whether you give back in terms of time and actually help us work on the project, or give us money so we can sponsor people and pay for hosting costs and different things involved in it, to make the project happen. I think it’s very obvious for people inside of the project how that works.

It’s less obvious, and I kind of see there’s three groups in all, right? You have the people inside of the project, very obvious. There’s very little argument needs to be made.

You have the second group, which is somewhere like, a Kinsta will fall into, or someone like myself, who I’ve used open source software for many years, but I don’t necessarily see exactly how to contribute back, or the immediate benefits, or the need, right? Hey, this thing’s already here. I can go to the website, click download, and I’ve got it. There’s that group that kind of see it but they need a little nudging.

And then there’s the general public or people that just don’t really interface with open source software directly and just have no idea. They’re just like, whoa, what is going on over there? People are just working on stuff for free and giving it away for free. That’s crazy. And so there’s another conversation that needs to happen there.

I think with this specific talk, the group I’m trying to get to is that second group. The people that are just right there, it’s just in a little bit of nudging of like, hey, you’re really close to understanding the benefits of sponsoring and contributing back to the project. What are we missing in the conversation to really get them to understand it? So the answer I’m proposing is we need to talk more about return on investment and ROI, and how do we frame that?

So really long-winded answer here, but I think that there’s a mixture of what are the things we’re trying to achieve by giving back? How can we bring that back in a business sense to show executives, hey, look, the money that we’re putting out here is benefiting us in certain ways?

But then also being like, hey, there’s also just kind of this nebulous aspect to it of, if you help contribute to it, it will give you some benefit. So how do we balance and how do we find the spectrum here to land on? I hope that that made some sort of sense.

[00:12:36] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it does. And it’s interesting because where you got to about a third of the way through the answer, I think you said the word tension or conflict or something like that. But I think that’s a really interesting part, because if we were to rewind the clock to, let’s say 19 years ago when WordPress was still relatively new. I wasn’t around in the WordPress space, but I was involved in other open source projects at the same time. And philanthropy was the word.

There were just people donating loads of time because it was more or less this hobby thing. And then in some cases the hobby thing collapsed and nobody ever heard of it again. And in the case of some software projects, WordPress most notably, it took off. It just absolutely skyrocketed and became the underpinning of, as you say in the presentation notes that you made, kind of 40% of the web. It became this critical piece of the puzzle.

And so during the last 18, 20, 22 years, whatever it may be, the project has evolved. It’s become critical. Like it or dislike it, companies both big and small are now relying upon it. They require it as part of their business, Kinsta being one of those companies. And so this tension exists. How do the companies do their bit and how do the individuals do their bit?

And the tension that I feel is, on the one hand, the people who’ve got that heritage of the more philanthropic side sort of saying, can’t we just go back to how it was? Can we never talk about finance? Can we not think about money at all?

And then on the other hand, you’ve got places like where you work, who are, with the best will in the world, it’s about making some revenue, and making money, and paying the bills and all of that. You’ve got to figure out, how the heck do you make contributions? How do you justify that to your bosses? How do they communicate what they’ve done effectively?

And presumably part of your talk as well is about finding people that you would like to just give some money to as a helping hand to say, okay, off you go. You’re not a part of the Kinsta organisation, but we would like to help you. And in return, presumably there’s a bit of mutual back rubbing. We’ll pat your back, you pat ours, and so on and so forth. So hopefully I’ve parsed that about right?

[00:14:39] Roger Williams: Yeah, no, I think you’re laying it out very much as I’m going through in the talk is, we need to talk business. And I know that for a lot of people inside of open source, this can be cringey and not pleasant and not what we want to do. And my argument is we have to get over that phase. We have to learn to start talking business and thinking business, thinking about return on investment.

And so to me it’s becoming practical, right? We have this optimistic idea of like, well, people will just come to their senses and realise that if they sponsor and contribute to the project, it’s going to help them. And we need to be much more strategic and more practical about it. And I break it down into three reasons to start kind of looking at when you’re talking to executives, you’re talking to businesses. And so there’s strategic, operational and second order benefits.

So when I’m talking about strategic benefits, I mean this is where it’s just obvious, right? For a hosting company that does WordPress, it just makes sense. Like, if WordPress isn’t working well, then we’re going to have trouble with our product. So strategically, it makes sense if WordPress works well, if it’s performing, if it’s secure, this is going to lower our cost as a hosting company. So those are arguments to be putting forward there.

From an operational perspective, you can start talking about technical debt, right? And this is where the CTO’s eyes should light up, because technical debt is a real problem for any company that builds software. As you’re building software, you now have to maintain that software. Well, if you’re able to offload part of that software into the open source project, it now becomes something that the open source project maintains. It’s the technical debt of the project.

That now creates a vicious cycle, or not even vicious, but just a cycle of, you now need to contribute to the project to help maintain that technical debt. But you’re now, as an organisation, offloading that to a larger organisation and having more people being able to help maintain that software. So I think from an operational perspective, those are arguments that you can hit people with.

And then finally, the second order benefits, and this is really where it kind of encompasses the arguments that have been traditionally the philanthropic argument, the just maker taker argument and stuff like that. With second order benefits, you start seeing these additional benefits that maybe you can’t exactly measure.

This is where networking is happening. People are meeting and talking to each other. Maybe your developers are talking to their developers, or in the case of sponsoring contributors, those contributors can come into your organisation and help the organisation maybe understand how to use WordPress better and these different benefits.

And so breaking it down into these practical arguments, these practical reasons for contributing can really help people who are not necessarily as well versed with open source or don’t directly see the benefits, see that a little bit better.

And then getting into what you’re also talking about, finding contributors who, maybe they align with your values, making sure that they’re working on the stuff that you need them to be working on. The parts of the project that could use attention as far as your organisation is seeing.

And then also, you know, one of the big things I look for is contributors who are mentors and are helping other contributors get into the project and help to grow the project’s contributions overall.

There’s direct, tangible things. Hey, there’s this ticket, could you go work on this ticket? I’ll be honest, I’m not that in depth yet. I’ve had contributors be like, hey, usually organisations are that pointed. And I’m like, okay, well there’s a goal for me to achieve at some point.

But for me it’s more like, hey, are you doing good work? What are other people saying about you in the project? And then, are you mentoring people and helping other people do their first bug squash, and do their first push and commit and things like that? And I’m butchering the language of course here but, you know, I hope that that kind of helps answer some of those questions.

[00:18:36] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s interesting because I fear that there’s a possibility that the community kind of bifurcates along these lines at the moment. So you get the people, and I was using the word philanthropic, so the people that have been contributing their time for gratis, just because they saw that as a useful thing to do for humanity, let’s put it that way.

So there’s that on the one hand. And then on the other hand, you’ve got people such as yourself who are talking about the necessary things in order for your job and your institution to function, the money. And I suppose I’m kind of worried that we will have these two sides that kind of can’t figure out a way to communicate with each other, that can’t see across the chasm that has been created. And so figuring out ways to make those work to sort of have a happy balance so that the two sides can communicate, that they can be back in touch with each other.

So that’s kind of a concern that I have, this sort of two tier system. The fear more broadly is that, if the money side of things becomes more prevalent, and people find that intolerable, that ultimately will push people away who have been philanthropic and amazing in the use of their time and pushing the project forward. They’ll see this as something that they can’t cope with in the future, and they’ll wish to step away, not contribute to it. That would be a shame.

[00:19:52] Roger Williams: So I can absolutely empathise and understand the argument that you’re putting forth there. I think the way I would counter that is to say, hey, currently if we’re only going to talk in a philanthropic sense, are we just going to exclude everybody from what you’re talking about, the second tier, right? The more money focused. So we’re just not even having a conversation in that case.

[00:20:15] Nathan Wrigley: Right. That’s the concern, yeah.

[00:20:17] Roger Williams: So what I’m trying to argue is, hey, by bringing in more people into the project and maybe starting to talk in these practical ROI business terms, were now at least having a conversation that before wasn’t even happening. Because just to kind of back up a second, the way I’m looking at it is, if the only argument is, hey, this is philanthropic, you’re doing it for the good of the project, kumbaya, then we’re just going to exclude a lot of the business community who’s going to go, well, yeah, I volunteer time on the weekend at my church, or do different things, but I need to do business during the week so I can buy groceries and pay the rent.

And so I think what I’m trying to suggest is, hey, if we expand the conversation beyond just philanthropic, beyond just the second order benefits, and we talk about operational and strategic benefits in addition, we’re now adding more people to the conversation that weren’t in the conversation before.

And eventually we’re bringing them into the second order conversation, but we have to start by bringing them in with the strategic and the operational, because that’s where their mindset is in the nine to five. And so to me, I think this is the opportunity to actually expand the pie and expand the amount of people in the project and talking about the project.

The concern I see that is a fair argument and concern is, are we going to turn open source projects into just commercial enterprises? That is definitely a concern. I don’t see that happening because you still have the core people in the project. They’re doing it because they believe in what the project is and they have passion for it. And if they are able to expand and have these conversations, these larger conversations, or additional conversations, about strategic and operational benefits, we’re going to bring more people in and hopefully help to influence those people to see the second order benefits, and hopefully eventually it’s all just philanthropic, right?

But I think right now, the argument that has been put forth by different people in open source and in the WordPress community, is that we don’t have enough people contributing. We don’t have enough sponsorship money coming in, and so we need to figure out how to bridge that gap. And my suggestion is the way to do that is to expand the conversation beyond just the philanthropic, beyond just the second order, and talking about strategic and operational in addition to those.

[00:22:40] Nathan Wrigley: I have so many thoughts about this. So the first thing that comes into my head is trying to bridge a gap between the people out there at the moment who have been contributing. But you go around on Twitter, X, I guess, and you see people, don’t you? You see it all the time. They even sometimes change their Twitter handle to, you know, seeking sponsorship or something like that.

But periodically you’ll see somebody who you know has been in the WordPress space for many years and, I don’t know, maybe they have been contributing in some way, shape, or form, but it’s pretty clear that they would like to be sponsored for this particular rabbit hole that they’ve gone down. And so building a bridge to them is something I think really useful about what you’re saying.

Because maybe there is no way of these two sides talking to each other. Maybe there is no kind of like a la carte menu, if you like. If you are one of these philanthropic contributors, and you’ve never sought sponsorship before, but you’d like the idea of, well, wouldn’t it be nice if, for these two days a week that I typically contribute my time, wouldn’t it be nice to get some finance? I’ll do the exact same thing, but I’ll actually receive some money for that.

But I don’t have the time to go out to a hundred different companies with my, I’m going to use the word begging bowl. That is probably the wrong term, but you get the point. To these a hundred different companies saying, look, I’ve been doing this for ages. Can you help me out?

That kind of feels, there’s something quite icky about that, isn’t there? I think we can all identify that going out and sort of saying to companies repeatedly, please can I have some money? And then getting the inevitable 99% pushback. No, we haven’t got any money for you.

But I think what you are saying is you are going to build a system where that kind of stuff will be more obvious. Where you’ll say, these are the kind of things that we’re looking for. Here’s the application form if you want to sponsor. This is the kind of process that we’re going to go through. These are the interview questions that we’re typically going to answer. This is the pot of money that we’ve got available. This is how many people we want, and so on and so forth.

So it’s kind of bridging the gap, so that the people who have been contributing, who are maybe nervous or don’t see a way forward, can suddenly step into something more obvious, more a la carte, more straightforward and easy to kind of cherry pick.

[00:24:46] Roger Williams: Yeah. I think that, you know, this is getting to the heart of it, right? How do you individually sponsor people? How do individuals find sponsorship? And how do we make this all work? And backing up just for a second , there’s two ways to look at contributing to open source projects.

We’re talking a lot about sponsoring individual contributors, which I would argue is the best way for an organisation to get started, because it’s the easiest way in some sense, right? There’s an established person who’s working in the project. You are giving them cash to do that work.

The other way to contribute to the project is to actually spend time working on the project, right? So maybe you’ve got engineers inside of the company and you’re like, okay, 10% of your time is, or 5% of your time you’re going to actually work on this project. That’s a much bigger ask, right? Because usually when you hire an employee, you have a very specific set of tasks that you need to work on them for the company.

And so asking the manager to figure out, hey, how can this person give 5% of their time to something that’s outside of the company? That’s a bigger ask. So I think, for companies and organizations that are starting to dip their toe into contributing to open source, sponsored contributions is a great place to start.

So that was a long way to get around to the question that you’re posing here, is how do you actually do that? There’s a chicken and the egg kind of situation that you’re bringing up, right? At what point does an individual contributor know that, hey, Kinsta is a company to reach out to, and ask for sponsored contribution. And then on the flip side, how does Kinsta know who to reach out to to sponsor?

And so my suggestion is to create a couple of different systems. So first, from the organisational perspective, really understanding, what are the priorities for the organisation? What would benefit them the most by sponsoring individual contributors?

My argument is it’s a pretty wide swath. A lot of people get focused on core contributors and, actually working on tickets and things like that. I think it’s a much broader effect. I think sponsoring people that are on the Polyglots team, Kinsta, over half of our customers don’t speak English. So having WordPress in non-English versions is huge for us. So sponsoring the Polyglots team.

The documentation team is huge, right? People need to be able to use WordPress . So are they going to contact Kinsta support for how to use WordPress, or can they just go to the WordPress site and look at documentation?

So as an organization, you can get really strategic on this, but my argument would be, don’t overthink it at the beginning. Just get started. And I think that’s how I kind of end my talk is, my biggest piece of advice is don’t wait. Just get started. Set aside some budget that you’re comfortable with, that your executives are comfortable with, and then go and find some contributors.

And then have kind of a process, right? Have an intake form. You mentioned having an intake form. Have an intake form. Ask them questions about, what do they currently work on? What have they worked on in the past? What are their hopes and goals and aspirations on the project?

And then, you know, some very practical questions. Hey, would you be open to doing a blog post about your work and how Kinsta has helped with this? Very low level asks, right? We’re not trying to ask people to get a tattoo of the logo on their forehead or something insane. It’s very low effort, and my argument to companies is be very cautious. Step lightly into the marketing aspect of all of this. That should not be your primary focus.

The primary focus is contributing to the open source project, not getting all this marketing benefit out of it. And so, you know, make sure to frame it that way.

From the individual contributors thing, one thing I do point out is, up until recently, I’ve never actually been formally approached by somebody asking for sponsorship to contribute. You kind of talked about, hey, if someone needed to spend a time reaching out to a hundred different companies, you don’t need to go that crazy. Just reach out to like the major hosting companies to start.

But my argument is you need to do more than just say, hey, I work on WordPress, you need to sponsor me. You need to put together a little bit more of a pitch of, hey, I work on X, it accomplishes Y. I see this benefiting your organisation in these specific ways. And if you’re approaching it that way, that’s going to catch someone’s attention much better.

You know, and then just ask also just simple questions. Hey, do you have a formal sponsorship contribution project for WordPress? And if they say no, maybe, hey, would you like me to help you set that up? If they say yes, then it’s, hey, what’s the process for getting involved in that?

These are just very simple questions. It’s just a conversation, right? I say this, I’ve been in sales for decades now. It’s second nature to me. I understand that for a lot of people, this isn’t second nature for them. And that’s also what I’m trying to help with in this conversation is, it’s not just the organisations I’m trying to educate, but it’s also the contributors and the people that are in the project. Helping them to understand how to speak business a little bit more, so that they can get the businesses to really understand the benefits of this.

[00:29:58] Nathan Wrigley: There was a few things that you said a few moments ago where the implication was basically just get started. So put aside some cash, decide that you’re going to do it, so this is from the business side, and then just begin and see what happens. I don’t suppose you’re going to be able to simulate the perfect system first time around. It’ll be an iterative process, but just commit to it.

But the ROI thing was also kind of interesting because you know, if you are senior management in Kinsta or whichever hosting company you want to imagine, there’s got to be I suppose some aspect of that in the back of your mind. Okay, we’re going to give away, I don’t know, a hundred thousand dollars this year, but we’re not going to ask anybody at all, at any point to sort of mention our company name. That’s probably unrealistic, but I like what you said there about the gentle approach to it, the write a blog post about it.

But there’s something to be explored there because there’s got to be a way of surfacing good work. So it doesn’t have to necessarily be a big clarion call. Look, I did this because Kinsta paid for it. More tangentially, I did this great work and I did this, and WordPress benefited as a result of this, and I would just like to thank Kinsta for making that possible.

I guess we’ve just got to figure out what that piece looks like because, you know, you can’t give away money for free. There does need to be some ROI, but we have to figure out how gentle that approach is, and how gung ho it can be or not. That’s going to be interesting to figure out.

[00:31:22] Roger Williams: Just to kind of elaborate on that for a second. So the way I would say to companies to approach looking at this is, this is branding, right? And so when you’re doing brand marketing, it’s very nebulous, right? You’re kind of putting stuff out there and there’s a little bit of goodwill to it, I guess, you know, the philanthropy part plays into it a little bit. This definitely, I would say, falls under your branding budget. And so you should treat it as such.

I think that there’s a few different ways that the marketing, and I’m using air quotes around marketing here, because I understand that for people in open source this can be a little bit of kryptonite, a little bit repellent to talk about it this way. So I’m trying to be cautious or gentle here.

But I think the marketing benefits are, there’s a ton of indirect benefits, right? So if I’m sponsoring a contributor, and they’re working on the project, it means they’re interacting with other contributors of the project. They’re going to mention, oh, hey, by the way, Kinsta is sponsoring me, in conversation.

And now you’ve got that one-on-one marketing, as it were, happening where that’s getting put into the project and that gets noticed. And I think that’s my big urge to companies who really want to step on the pedal of ROI. Like, hey, we need to really maximise the ROI here. Is it’s like, hey, the community notices as soon as you do something, good, bad, or indifferent. But as soon as you start sponsoring people, it gets noticed inside of the community right away, whether you immediately see it or not.

So allow that to happen, for sure. I think from like the blog posts and things like that, there’s two ways I approach it. I love it if a sponsored contributor writes a blog post on their blog and mentions Kinsta. That’s amazing. I’m not expecting that. So instead what I’ll do is I’ll invite them onto the Kinsta Talks podcast and, hey, let’s spend 20 minutes and just talk about what you’re doing on the project.

I mentioned Kinsta at the beginning of it, in the fact that that’s where I work. Other than that, I don’t talk about Kinsta at all. It’s all about this individual and what they’re doing on the project, what they’re excited about, how they would suggest people get involved in the project. And so using that as a promotion, and again, the indirect branding benefits. My fingers are crossed, I’m sure my CMO’s watching this and going, either he is loving it or he is gritting his teeth. I get the sense everybody’s very happy. Hey Matt, how are you?

The way I am approaching this is very much as an outsider and I’m trying to be very respectful of the fact that this community’s been around for a very long time. I am sure this is not the first time that these conversations have happened. I’m not the first person to bring these things up. I just see it as, I’m here as a unique person in this point in time and I see a need and I’m, we’ve gotten our organisation to help, start helping. And what I’m trying to promote is getting other organisations to also realise this, and also start promoting and sponsoring and contributing to the project.

[00:34:13] Nathan Wrigley: I think one of the things that will be really interesting is if, let’s say that you become the fulcrum for all of this, and so Roger Williams is known at Kinsta. He’s the person to go and speak to. Having that clarity is going to be really beneficial. So you don’t have to go through those email hoops of, okay, you just use the contact form on the website and then get put through nine different people who all say, actually it’s not me. Knowing who you’ve got to speak to, and having that clear process, that contact form, whatever that may be, that intake form that we talked about earlier, that’s really interesting.

I’m just going to pivot it slightly, and I’m wondering what the kind of contributions that might fall into scope for you at Kinsta. So obviously the software itself, the core project, WordPress Core would I’m sure be in view.

But what about other things like, oh, I don’t know, people who write documentation, you mentioned Polyglots? There’s obviously people who do event organising. There are people who do content creation, podcasts, YouTube channels, those kind of things. Do you have any constraints around the kind of contribution that you’d be interested in looking at, or will you listen to anybody?

[00:35:16] Roger Williams: Excellent question. And before I dive into that, I want to make sure that I’m not the only person taking credit for this at Kinsta. I have two amazing colleagues on the front lines with me. Marcel Bootsman, as you’re very familiar with, I think he’s been on your show before, he handles for Europe. And then Alex Michaelson, who is in APAC region. These are both amazing individuals who, we all three of us are on the front line, talking with contributors, sponsoring them, figuring all of this stuff out. So I definitely don’t want to take all of the credit here and make it seem that way.

As far as figuring out who to sponsor and who to contribute, this is the big question. The amazing thing is that this point in time, my bosses, our bosses at Kinsta have given us amazing leeway to really choose who we want to be sponsoring, and who we want to be working with.

And so there’s a bit of objective focus for who we’re sponsoring. Core contributors obviously, like they’re directly impacting the project by actually changing the code and adding features and fixing bugs. So that’s obviously very important.

But just as important is these other groups that are making sure that when a new person wants to use WordPress, there’s documentation that explains how to use the WordPress. When they want to go to a WordCamp and meet somebody, I mean Aaron Jorbin has a great story about meeting someone at one of the first contributor days that he went to. And they then became a core contributor within a short amount of time. And so that contributor day didn’t just happen, right? Like, people had to make that event happen, and organise it and have coffee and treats and lights and all of the things that go into that.

So I think that there’s a lot of levels here. Whether it’s directly sponsoring a contributor inside of the open source project. It’s sponsoring WordCamps, it’s sponsoring amazing podcasts that help to spread the word and market WordPress.

There’s people that have brought up that WordPress has kind of a marketing issue because it is this open source project that has just benefited from just a ton of people realising, wow, this is amazing software to build websites with. And they just started doing that, and 40% of the internet runs on WordPress.

That’s happened very, very organically. And I think though that we’re now at an inflection of the internet and the web where we maybe need to start becoming a little bit more intentional about the marketing and the promotion of WordPress.

[00:37:44] Nathan Wrigley: What I’m gathering from this is that, certainly from Kinsta’s point of view, you just want to make this whole bi-directional thing just clearer. Kinsta’s got some intention to sponsor, and we know who the people are, we know the kind of things that they want to sponsor. Maybe there’s going to be some sort of landing page for that or some intake form. And so hopefully people who have it in mind that they wish to be sponsored, they’ll be clearer on what kind of things are in scope, what kind of things are out of scope. How many people they need to jump through the hoops to get that sponsorship sorted out. So that kind of thing is really interesting.

What do you think about the idea of, so we haven’t discussed this, I’m just going to throw this in there. Do you think this is a company by company thing? So in other words, is Kinsta always going to be siloed in its approach to sponsoring? Or is there any kind of, I don’t know how this would work, but some kind of more overarching approach that may be required? So let’s say for example that, I don’t know, Kinsta do, they sponsor person X, person Y, person Z, as we say in the UK, but obviously that leaves all these other myriad people without sponsorship. Is there a way that you could communicate to other organisations?

Look, this person, they came to us, it was very close, but we didn’t manage to get them on the sponsorship roster this year. But we feel that they were really credible. Here’s somebody else that you can go and talk to. Do you know what I mean? Something just a little bit, a bigger umbrella organisation above Kinsta, maybe. Organisation, substitute that word for any kind of structure or governance as you like.

[00:39:12] Roger Williams: Yeah, there is a lot of stuff already around this. Courtney Robertson has WPCC.

[00:39:18] Nathan Wrigley: WP Community Collective.

[00:39:20] Roger Williams: Thank you. And so the idea with that group is kind of to create an organisation that handles the mechanism aspect of distributing funds and finding people to sponsor and contribute. I could see a consortium of hosting companies coming together and somehow working on this, but that adds additional complexities, right? You have now more organisations, you have more bodies deciding things and making decisions.

And again, going back to what I propose at the very end of the project is, don’t wait, just get started. My worry about having consortiums and larger organisations is it’s going to slow the process down, it’s going to complicate the process.

That’s mostly just because I have a big phobia of organisations and meetings. This is a personal kind of thing rather than, you know, I’m sure there’s ways to figure this out more. I have a job, right? I have to balance all of these things between working on what I need to actually work on inside of the company. Working on sponsoring contributors and focusing on the open source. So there’s a lot of balancing that goes on. I am open to having these discussions with people and organisations and seeing what can come of it.

Again, going back to feeling like an outsider and knowing that there’s already a ton of people and a ton of organisations involved in doing all of this work. I’ve reached out to many of them. They’ve given me great advice. They’ve really helped me get our program organised the way it is. They help me with my presentation and kind of figuring out what to talk about in here. And so I want to remain mindful that I don’t have all the answers, I’m not the only person that’s doing all of this, and I welcome people to come to me with suggestions and ideas, and I’m always open to talking.

[00:41:03] Nathan Wrigley: I don’t think there’s one size fits all really, is there? Because the WPCC feels like a really great initiative. It has more of a kind of escrow kind of service feel to it. In other words, Kinsta, you put in your X amount of dollars and then the WPCC will figure out where that might go. But it may be that, you know, you guys at Kinsta would like to have more of a kind of one-to-one relationship with the people that you are sponsoring. And so that’s fine.

Maybe you will have back channels to the people who do similar work at different companies. And so it will be more kind of laissez-faire than something a little bit more organised. Maybe it’ll just be more back channel kind of thing.

But that’s really interesting. Honestly, the time has got away with us. We’re at 45 minutes so far, so I think we’re fast approaching the amount of time that we’ve got available for us. Is there anything in this that we missed out? Was there any kernel, any little nugget somewhere that we failed to mention, or do you think we’ve covered the whole thing off?

[00:41:57] Roger Williams: You know, I think the one thing that maybe we skipped through a little bit is how to get your organisation bought into this. We’ve talked about the reasoning. We’ve talked about how to sell it from the outside. We’ve talked about how to deal with the individual contributors. Inside of your organisation there’s, again, three ways that I approach this. I like the number three, I guess.

So when you’re making your internal pitch, this is all in the slide deck as well, understanding your organisational goals. So understand like, hey, we’re a hosting company, what’s important for a hosting company? Well, performance and security are pretty top things. So maybe that’s where you want to focus.

Again, also we have a ton of customers that are non-English speaking, so Polyglots makes a lot of sense. Understand the organisational goals so that when you go to your executives, you go to your leadership, whoever’s got the money, you’re framing this out in terms of how it benefits your organisation.

The second one is being patient, but being ready. So I started this conversation, I want to say late 2023, inside of Kinsta. And then about a year later, suddenly, out of the blue, hey, here’s your budget, go get to work. And so I needed to be ready. So we all needed to be ready. And we were. The good news is Marcel and Alex and myself, were already out in the community talking with people. We already were having some conversations about, ooh, who would we like to sponsor, who could use the sponsorship?

And so as soon as the budget was given to us, we were ready to go. And the reason that I recommend being ready is, these can be fleeting, right? Just because the executive has approved it this month doesn’t mean it’s necessarily going to be there the next month.

[00:43:37] Nathan Wrigley: And also the contributor might not be, you know, I’ve got two weeks now, I can do something right away.

[00:43:42] Roger Williams: Yeah, so be ready because they’re going to want to see results. And the results should be, the way you framed it, the results should just be, hey, we’re sponsoring contributor X, they’re doing Y and Z, oh, and I had them on a Kinsta Talk, and here’s actual proof of we’re doing stuff. So have all of that ready to go. Have a spreadsheet that tracks everything so you can track where the money’s going and it’s all clear.

Understand how your organisation wants to handle these things, right? Is it going to be as simple as, hey, here’s a credit card and here’s a GitHub sponsorship page? Is that going to be okay? Or does it need to be a little bit more, I say complicated, involved, right? Do you need to have a non disparaging contract, right? So that it’s understood, hey, we’re sponsoring you, it’d be best if you didn’t say bad things about us, please. Get that cleared, like figure that stuff out.

And then be ready for common objections, right? So they’re going to immediately come to you with, hey, why would we spend money on this? It’s something that we get for free. And be ready with that strategic and the operational and the second order benefits conversations. And know which of those is going to land with which manager, executive best. So getting that internal pitch ready and really creating the project so it’s ready for success from day one is really important.

[00:45:03] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s really interesting because a lot of it, most of what we talked about in this conversation didn’t really dwell on that. It was more about the nuts and the bolts of trying to connect the two different sides. But you’ve obviously laid out the groundwork inside Kinsta to have this ready. And then the minute that the CEO or the CMO or whoever it is, says, right, Roger, here’s some money, you’re off, you’re ready to actually go and start seeking this stuff out.

I very much doubt that this conversation is going to have a perfect outcome. I don’t suppose there is a perfect system, but I appreciate the fact that you’re giving it a lot of thought over there, and you’re trying to figure out how to make these two sides collide in a way that is mutually beneficial. Because it certainly seems that with WordPress at 40% of the web, the money question is not going away, the philanthropic side of things is not going away, and we do have to have ways for these two sides to communicate successfully with each other.

So, okay, I will put links to anything that we have mentioned in the show notes. So if you go to wptavern.com, search for the episode with Roger Williams, you’ll be able to find everything there.

Just one last thing, Roger. Where can we find you apart from kinsta.com? Is there a place where you hang out online if somebody wants to pick this conversation up and run with it?

[00:46:11] Roger Williams: Yeah, absolutely. I am a big user of LinkedIn. I post there pretty regularly. If you interact with me in the comments, I will love you forever, you’re my best friend. I love it when people ask me questions, or challenge me in the comments like, let’s have conversations there. Feel free to reach out to me and let’s talk, I wanna figure this stuff out.

[00:46:30] Nathan Wrigley: Roger Williams, thank you so much for chatting to me today. I really appreciate it.

[00:46:34] Roger Williams: Thank you very much, Nathan. I appreciate everything that you do for the community and thank you for the time and letting me be on.

On the podcast today we have Roger Williams.

Roger Williams leads community and partner engagement at Kinsta, a company specialising in offering managed hosting for WordPress. His role involves bridging the gap between Kinsta and the wider WordPress community, working closely with agency partners, technology collaborators, and open source initiatives. Throughout his career, Roger has been deeply involved in community efforts and has recently played a key part in Kinsta’s implementation of a sponsored contributions program, helping to funnel time and resources back into WordPress and other open source projects.

Many long-standing members of the WordPress community have contributed out of passion and a spirit of philanthropy, but as the project has grown to power over 40% of the web, the need for sustainable funding and sponsorship has become more pronounced. Roger joins us today to explore this shift, he shares insights from his WordCamp US presentation titled ‘Figuring Out Sponsored Contribution’, discussing how companies can start funding contributors, why that matters, and how to balance the business need for a return on investment with the grassroots spirit of open source.

We begin with Roger’s background, his work at Kinsta, and how he became involved in WordPress community sponsorship. The conversation then gets into the ever evolving dynamics of sponsored contributions: how businesses can approach funding contributors, ways to surface and support valuable work, and strategies for aligning company goals with broader project needs.

Roger breaks down the practical arguments companies can use to get internal buy-in, and the importance of clear processes, for both organisations looking to sponsor, and individuals seeking support.

Towards the end, Roger reflects on the challenges and opportunities of connecting those from both the philanthropic and commercial sides of WordPress, and he shares advice for anyone hoping to get their organisation involved in similar programs.

If you’re interested in how WordPress sponsorships work, how business and community might collaborate, or you’re seeking practical advice as a contributor or company, this episode is for you.

Useful links

Kinsta

Figuring Out Sponsored Contribution – Roger’s presentation at WordCamp US 2025

Polyglots team

WordPress Documentation

Kinsta Talks Podcast on YouTube

WPCC

Roger on LinkedIn