Jeff: Welcome everybody to episode 344 of WordPress Weekly for Wednesday, January 23rd, 2019. I'm your hosts Jeff Chandler joined by the man, the legend, the myth, although I could see him, so he's not a myth. He's right there, John James Jacoby. How you doing, sir? John: Good. Jeff. How are you? Jeff: I'm doing pretty good, feeling pretty good today. John: You look good today. [crosstalk 00:00:41] Jeff: Still need a haircut then I'll look even better. We got a great show lined up for people today. We're going to talk a little bit about WordPress Governance, something that we've highlighted that in the show for the past couple of weeks. At times we probably sound like we don't know what we're talking about, so we've brought on two guest on today who know a little bit more about this project and we'll dive into it in a little bit, but I want to cover some housekeeping issue, and back in episode 342 Jan, we talked about a Pingdom, the price increases, some alternatives, Michael McGlynn [inaudible 00:01:19] shared a comment on the show notes post, says that one of the alternatives he uses is Uptime Robot. He says he also uses Pingdom and considers it the Cadillac of sort of site Uptime services. And he says to John's comment about WPCron, there are external services that provide this taking the load from the server. EasyCron is the one that he uses and there's a list of them on Pantheon site. So Pantheon has an entire document on one of their dark websites about WordPress Cron and how you can offload that to other services. John: Cool. Good. Great. It's hard to think of stuff on the show on the fly. It's like as knowledgeable as you try to stick with a lot of this stuff. When we're recording, it's impossible to come up with stuff, so I appreciate people following up in the comments like that it's supper- Jeff: This confirms that at least one or two people have listened to that show, when they come and give- John: I'd like to officially thank our one listener for caring and backing us up on the show. Thank you. Jeff: Well, thank you Mike for taking the time to share some of your examples and the Cron comment, we very much appreciate that. So without further ado, let's bring on our guest, first we start off with Rachel Cherry, who is the founder of WPCampus, WordPress education in higher ED, thank you. She's also an accessibility advocate and she's part of the WP Government's project, and Morten Ran-Hendrickson who is a friend of the show who does ... is an educator at LinkedIn learning and just overall one of the guys that when I listen to him talk I get smarter. So it's a very easy way to get smarter, to just listen to him talk, pretty cool stuff. Thank you both for coming on the show and especially thanks to you Rachel, I know you're feeling a little under the weather. Rachel: Yeah, will just being around you and Jeff, makes me feel better. Jeff: Let's see if we can get these cheeks red on the camera. Thank you both very much and I guess we'll start off with Morten here and we'll start off at the very beginning. What is the WP Governance Project, and how did it come about? Morten: The WordPress Governance Project is an effort that we booted up to surface all the conversations that are happening behind the scenes around WordPress Governance. If you've been around the WordPress Project for more than a couple of months, you would know there's a lot of ongoing conversations internally in the community around who makes decisions, how are decisions made, who are the leaders, who appoints leaders, where is the direction going and who decides on the direction of this project and so on and so on. And both Rachel and I have been part of this community for awhile and we've seen these conversations crop up again and again and again, and they never go anywhere, but they are really important conversations. And here's a need in our community to surface those conversations because we are in a position now where we need to start acting, taking on the responsibility of being 34.7% of the web and actually using that responsibility for something other than just saying it as a marketing campaign. Morten: So the project started as we need to have a larger conversation about governance in the project, but we don't want to impose on that conversation a specific idea about what that governance should look like or who should be doing all this stuff, we want to actually have an open conversation about it. So we tried to do it in the most open source way by announcing a project, inviting everyone in and then saying, let's figure out what this is and how we can work with it. Jeff: Would part of the initial inspiration for putting this together come from your Q and A session with Matt not last year, but the year before State of The Word when you sort of asked Matt about how do we get representation of WordPress at these larger events where decisions are taking place that affect the web and genuine. And Matt answered, not to paraphrase, but his answer was something to the likes of, well, if people show up and that's the route they want to go, I highly encourage that and we'll support that. Morten: Yeah, yes, that is where it came from to a large extent. I think, and I should very clearly state this is opinion, other people have other opinions and that's kind of the whole point of having this conversation. I think WordPress is uniquely positioned to have a positive impact on the larger web, not just our own little fiefdom, but the web as a whole and also how internet policy is created. I also think lack of participation in those conversations is irresponsible because it creates a situation where those who actually make decisions about how the web works and how the Internet works can say 32% of the web don't bother to be part of this conversation, so therefore what we're doing must be the right thing. Morten: And if someone else steps into that ring and says, "Hey, but I have opinions about what's happening," they can easily come back and say, "But you're not 32% of the web. You're like 1% of the web. So we don't care what you say. You want to hear all those other people who are doing that WordPress thing aren't saying anything. So that means that we're doing the right thing." And it's funny because this actually ties back to that mantra that all the people who are making decisions in WordPress keep saying the decisions are made by those who show up, yet we are actively choosing not to show up where it actually matters. So it kind of started from there and Rachel and I had a conversation about this two years ago that kind of started this ball rolling and then it just came to a head at WordCamp US in 2018. Jeff: John and I have talked about it where for many years now WordPress discussions, decisions where the project is going, it was described as a meritocracy where if you show up, you can participate, you can lead the project in a direction, have at least a little bit of influence on where WordPress is going and I'd say within the past maybe two or three years, we found out that it's not exactly a meritocracy, that there are people who show up and put in the time and the effort and at the end of the day, there's nothing that comes out of it because of whether it's decisions or lack of communication and what have you, but WordPress it's not a meritocracy. Just because you show up and do things, it kind of doesn't matter. Rachel: We've learned that a few times recently in a few high profile instances that people can show up and donate hours of their personal time, they think that they're doing something really great and they're contributing in great positive ways, they can work through all those motions that they think are the right steps to go through, and at the end of the day, someone higher up on the chain can decide they don't like that, they can step in and say no. And- John: Someone higher up in a chain is very opaque I guess. And that's the under whose authority thing that we've talked about on the show before and that I think Morten and I have heard you say in the past, and I don't want to misquote you on it, but that's the other side of this is it is a meritocracy until it isn't, and then we sort of we also bring up the benevolent dictator for life approach towards project leadership with WordPress and so to a certain degree there, it is possible to achieve ... we kind of have both mostly harmoniously until it comes time to try and do something that you feel your merit has earned you the, I don't know, you've earned the ability or responsibility or anything to make a decision that is sort of just vetoed anyways. So this is sort of something that has happened throughout WordPress's life cycle quite often. And not to rehash all of them, but I think the nice thing about what the Governance Project is trying to achieve is to bring more transparency to that process. So correct me if I'm wrong, but I mean that's the way that I understood it. Morten: I think it's important for people to understand that this idea of meritocracy is completely absurd and fundamentally debunked notion. Meritocracy on paper looks like a great idea, in reality it's a highly elitist system that promotes specific people and creates all the [inaudible 00:10:28] that can make decisions. I mean, if you look at, you go into the details and you look at very specific things within WordPress, you will see time and again examples of extremely talented developers or designers, whoever, who come in and say, "Hey, there's a real problem here, here's how to fix it." And their solution gets kiboshed by someone higher up in the meritocracy, not because the solution is bad, but either because the person who throws the solution out disagrees often on principle rather than fact or because the person who throws it out doesn't understand it. And because they don't understand it or because they misunderstand it, but they have power, they choose to just assert that power arbitrarily and create unfortunate situation where things don't get solved. Morten: And there's also this whole conversation around the notion of decision being made by those who show up and those who show up a lot get power, holds within this idea that everyone has equal ability to show up and actually invest the time to do it. And there seems to be this idea from a lot of people higher up in this hierarchy that if you don't show up and don't do the work, then you're not interested in the project. And you hear that, like you heard it from Matt this year at WordCamp US where he said something like, imagine having meetings where random people fly by and start taking up a lot of time and chats and basically derail the entire conversation. You can't make decisions like that. I'm paraphrasing here, but that's basically what he said in an answer. And the response to that is, well, number one, if you had proper leadership, those issues would have been bubbled to the surface through proper channels, you wouldn't have that flyby type situation. But more importantly, this notion that someone who quote unquote has never contributed before, by default, has nothing valuable to say because they haven't contributed before is absurd. That simply is not how the world works at all, right? It's not like you must have contributed X amount of hours to something before your input has value. That's not how this works yet that is how it works in this community. John: There's, and I feel like I've tried myself multiple times do the full time contributor thing and ultimately don't really know if that's a healthy direction or really it promotes sort of unhealthy behavior through good intentions of like if you show up, if you have 100% availability, then you will show up 100% of the time and as a result you will earn 100% all of the influence or merit or whatever in your ideas that you want or have or are looking for or whatever else, but I don't know that that's really realistic or healthy and that the ideal goal if there was to be one, in my opinion, I guess looking back is really like the opposite or like a much more federated, transparent sort of approach towards all of this where we are all able to move the ball an inch at a time without necessarily the idea of any one of us earning our lumps by being present and accounted for five, 10 years at a time and having put that time in. John: Because it makes it impossible, like you said, for a new contributor to compete, I guess, or to level up. They'll just never be able to do it. So they're instantly at a five year deficit compared to anyone else that has come before them and that's, I mean, wrong, unfair, what have you. So in my experience, I would tend to agree and believe that the whole idea of a five for the future and letting individuals, companies, what have you, put in a little bit I think makes a lot more sense than the full-time contributorship direction that I think a lot of companies and people really are trying to go and put towards. And so for initial charges, like getting the Governance Project off the ground, you need to put in a lot of time and effort, it's expected that you're going to and I think that that's fine. For feature development of WordPress core, do you need to put in a lot of time to get something off the ground and get patches put up to get on board? Sure. But afterwards, I feel like we should all be ready to idle and let everyone else jump in and change it and evolve it and take it over. Jeff: And I'll ask Rachel this and one of the elephants in the room lately when this project was initially announced is that this is described as a coup or a way to overthrow Matt and to unseat him and provide more people at the table. That's not necessarily what this is about, is it Rachel? Rachel: No. And governance is a funny word and it's really complex. And something that we have discovered, it doesn't take long to discover is that when you go around asking everyone what governance means to them, you get different answers. And so I think also is a really great thing about it is because governance can be kind of whatever you need it to be and whatever you need it to be in order to make the project healthy. And our goal in all this is not to, I think some people think we're just kind of coming in and just raising a coup or whatever to bring down Matt, which is totally not what we're trying to do. Rachel: What we are trying to do is to start this discussion going in the community, do some research, look at what we are doing, what we could be doing better and things like that and so that we can get to a point where we can see what WordPress needs as far as governance is concerned because there is some now like WordPress has like some governance but it's not very well documented, it's not transparent at all, it's frustrating and confusing. So how can we fix that and what comes out of that can be a wide range of things, it could be something super basic to something ... our proposal could be something super basic to something extreme, depending on what we find and so kind of want to make that clear to everyone involved in that our goal is not to just uproot everything going on but to look at it and to have that larger discussion. Excuse me while I cough. John: I know we've talked about it and we've joked on the show with the governance project about being a coup or overthrowing our benevolent dictator for life, but on the other side of this, I mean Matt himself has recently been quoted and I'll paraphrase a little bit that he thinks that someone that is a strong leader in the WordPress community is someone who's willing to take risks and break things a little bit or try and do the hard work and make the tough decisions. And so as much as I ... the metaphor of taking somebody out or down is not something that I think is healthy or that I agree with, but on the flip side of that, I would personally love for there to be more people that are up higher or as high as someone like a Matt figure is. I think it's fine, I think that and selfishly, again, my own opinion I guess is I think most groups of people do look forward to having strong leadership in one direction, it offloads a lot of processing. John: For me specifically, if there is someone pointing a direction and if I agree with that direction then I don't really have to consider it ever again and I can look at and concentrate on doing other things. And so there are many things where I appreciate strong leadership and there are other times where I want to go my own direction on something and I'm willing to take the risks or put the time together to do that myself. But in a project like WordPress 34% plus of the web, we have many leaders that are in the community, there are many teams and many initiatives, but knowing what the ceiling is and that that ceiling always comes down to the direction of one individual regardless of who that individual is, Matt or otherwise is one of those things where it's not about taking someone down as much as I would love to see other people lifted up equally or in a position where there's just more than one mind at the wheel I guess. Rachel: Well there's nothing to say that the project can't be kind of steered by a small group of people and their ideas and maybe that's something that we determined is fine whatever, but I mean basically right now the direction of the project and a lot of areas and aspects of it are controlled by the whim of one person and how they feel that day or whatever they think is good. And something we have learned over the last year or two is that is not healthy for the project and that lack of transparency and conversation and openness about where we're going and what we're doing and why in the world we're doing it can disillusion, can frustrate a lot of people can, I mean you take a lot of our ... We are a project for the most part dependent on volunteers and their time and that kind of behavior as we are learning is what really pushes people away. And if we want the project to keep going, I don't think this is behavior that we can continue. Jeff: And Morten, you've described at WordCamp US and you've written about this that, and we all agree that with Gutenberg now in core, WordPress has made a huge jump, put a line in the sand and to tie some of this governance back into something that is relatable, if we look at sort of the past two years of how Gutenberg was developed and how decisions were made and fast forward two years and you're at the State of The Word Q and A and you're asking Matt, "Who is this we? Who was the we who made this decision and who made that decision? Who was the we?" If we somehow had governance in WordPress where we had other people sort of representing others, do you think maybe we could have avoided being in this position where ... that so many people are asking, "Well, who made these decisions? Where were these decisions made and who is this we you're talking about?" Morten: Hold that thought. I'm just going to open the door for my wife and I'll come back. Jeff: Okay, well, Rachael, if you have any thoughts on it, I'll let Rachel and expand on that. Rachel: Well, I mean even something as basic as saying, all decisions had to be made clear like who the we was. I mean even that is the basic of governance right there. Like even if we change nothing, but we decide, hey, when decisions are made, it should be published, like who made it and why. The leaps and bounds of that would even help on top of other changes that could be made. Jeff: I thought Morten question was awesome and I also appreciated [Mansour Sponsee 00:21:44]. He answered the question and he sort of explained who the we was and he mentioned that some of these decisions were made in an area where it's not a public chat room where you could have people coming in drive by sort of derailing things and he sort of express that. But at the end of the day, and I told John this, I said, "It would be awesome if in the future, anytime that word we is used, I would hopefully explicitly see a definition of that we is." Speaker 4: The danger of the word we unfortunately is that it is very simple and it is easy for everyone to attach their own idea of what the word is implying. And I think generally, I mean, for most of us and again, correct me you both if I'm wrong, but when you've been involved in something like WordPress for a long time, it's hard not to use the word we for things because you feel a sense of ownership over something like WordPress pretty naturally because it's been a part of your life for, I mean, you have 34% of the web, but probably 30% of our lives also where we do feel a sense of ownership of it, we meaning all of us on the call and others that have contributed to it. And I know for a fact in the history of WordPress, people have fought over someone saying the word we thinking they were a part of a team when other team members were like, wait, you're not on our team. Speaker 4: Well, how does someone become a part of the team? If I'm using the word we because I've been contributing patches to components for four years, at what point am I allowed to use the word we? And we are able to throw it around pretty casually, but because we don't have governance, because we don't have a process, because we don't know at what point someone gets a handshake, or a pat on the back, or the hug, or congratulations, welcome to the team, Ra, Ra, chat and conversation happens, then we together don't really know when it's appropriate to use we or not use we. It's just an easily confusing word in general. Morten: I think what Jeff said is key here that when the term we is used, there has to be a clear statement of who we is, right? I ideally, I understand the thinking behind using the term we, but realistically it should not be used in this context at all because there are two ... it is vague, it also has translation issues, when you were translate it into other languages, the term we gets translated into things that don't necessarily mean the same thing. And because of exactly what you're talking about in some context we refer to WordPress, but then what exactly does that entail? Does that entail the core developers? Does that entail the community that shows up at events? Does that include all people who use WordPress? Or does that include all people who use WordPress, including those who visit WordPress sites from the outside? This isn't well defined at all and it's one of those clarity of language is essential, clear language is becoming a policy at a political level because it's so important for people to understand what's being said and who it's being said about and it's one of the pieces where we need to do work. Morten: We as a society need to do work and we as a community need to work and we as the people who have opinions about WordPress need to do work. And I mean the reason why I brought it up at that event was people often ask me or people asked me at the event, "Did you have that question planed?" And I said, "No," because it was literally something I sat there and listened to Matt talk and he kept saying, we decided we did, dah, dah, dan, but he never at any point explained who that we was. And a lot of the decisions he was referring to were decisions that no one had ever seen happen. Were a lot of these decisions were made, they were publicized on a mag blog saying we've decided that, and then people in the comments would ask, "Who? Were? In what meeting?" Because it was not done publicly and there was never- Jeff: Repeatedly. Morten: Yeah. And there was never an acknowledgement that this was happening behind the scenes, which then raises a bunch of questions around how were the people who were in the close meeting appointed to that meeting? How were dissenting voices heard? Are there minutes from that meeting? Do we have any insight into what options were picked and chosen from? Which opens that whole can of worms, right? So, but what I want to make clear, which is also something Rachel mentioned is this project is not an effort to create some sort of bizarre system of democratic voting on WordPress features, and it's also not a project that came about because we or I or anyone else say that Gutenberg is a disaster, therefore we must change leadership as a consequence. From my perspective, it's a project that comes from a concern over how the larger landscape that we work within is changing and our lack of participation in the conversations around that is detrimental to our own ability to succeed. Which is what I was talking about at ... which I brought up at the talk I did at WordCamp US, this idea of if we believe in this idea of democratizing publishing, we have to define what that means beyond just the term democratize publishing. Morten: We also need to define what are the necessary conditions for us to be able to democratize publishing and from there comes a set of policies. So we can say things like for us to be able to democratize publishing, we need net neutrality globally. That means that WordPress needs to work actively to promote net neutrality and that means that WordPress can go into politicians and special interest groups and other places and actually say, "Net neutrality is important for these reasons and these reasons apply to anyone using WordPress." And we can do the same thing with a bunch of different issues. To do that, we need to define policy and we need to appoint people to promote that policy into decision making bodies. For that to happen, we need internal governance, because we need to have a system in place so that we can make those policy decisions, agree on those policy decisions, agree on who gets to go and represent WordPress and make accountability so that if someone goes and represents WordPress and says the wrong thing, they can be pulled back and replaced by someone else or they can be told to say something different. And this is where we get to that statement from Matt, if someone wants to represent WordPress, they just go into it. That's just irresponsible. And it shows that, it gives you insight into how our leader of the project thinks about external representation. Morten: I can't speak on behalf of Matt because I'm not Matt, I can only speak based on what he has said in other interviews in public. And what he has said for instance, in the interview he did on the other podcast, the Pull Status Podcast, right after WordCamp US, was he thinks that these types of decisions are better handled by the web foundation. In other words, he doesn't see WordPress having a role in those conversations. This is important because that is Matt Mullenweg's personal opinion about whether or not WordPress should have a role. That is not ... And then we have to ask the question, is Matt Mullenweg WordPress or is WordPress something bigger? So does Matt Mullenweg's personal politics around involvement in the larger web conversation dictates the policies of the WordPress project as a whole or just the WordPress project as a whole have a say in those matters. So for me, this is a much bigger conversation that has very little to do with responsive images, although that is an important part of it, and much more to do with our responsibility to ensure that our goal, democratizing publishing, can actually happen at all in the environment we work in. Jeff: Well, if we look at open source managers, Joomla, they have bylaws, Drupa Foundation, bylaws, Open Source Initiative bylaws, WordPress, no bylaws, just whatever Matt says, Matt does or that's where we go. So I wonder, so at least with the governance project, I think with the research that goes on in the project, maybe we could figure out how WordPress could have some bylaws and maybe even the WordPress Foundation so to speak, we could have bylaws that sort of sets the stage on representation and try to get more people involved for ... represent the views of many. But I mean, if we looked at Drupal, well, I've talked about this with John, when I think of governments, I think of government, and then I think of red tape, bureaucracy taking forever to get things done, and all the negative stuff that comes with it, but if we look at like the Drupal Project where they have a Drupal Board, association, directors, people who get voted on, seems to be working well for them. Morten: I can't really speak to Drupal because I'm not involved in that community. And I've heard many people say that what they have doesn't work. I think the larger point is exactly what you said before, that when you hear governance, you think of government and you think of red tape. When I hear governance, I think of society functioning at all, we have roads and fire departments. And the reality is a lot of WordPress policy comes from a political standpoint, which is quite strongly tilted towards American ideals, American libertarianism, techno utopianism, and specific viewpoint of how the world works. Now, the majority of WordPress installs globally are non English speaking, meaning they don't fit under that umbrella of ideology and you come to a point where you need to say, although there are different understandings of what governance is and there are different understanding of how power is appointed and who gets to decide what on behalf of whom, we also have to acknowledge that there are governance models in effect in WordPress right now, they're all ad hoc, they're all happening under the covers, and anytime you ask anyone who clearly has power, if they have power, they will vehemently deny having power and will fight to the death to prove that they don't have power, but meanwhile also making decisions that affect everyone. Morten: And it bubbles up in these bizarre circumstances like the endless telemetry debate, right? I keep saying we need telemetry in WordPress, that conversation keeps getting shut down by Matt because he disagrees. At the same time, Matt keep saying that he has tons of telemetry that he's not willing to share with the community through, or that they share when they want to from WordPress.com, the hosting companies have telemetry, just last week, a decision was made about features in WordPress based on telemetry from a hosting company in a very arbitrary way in a chat. So the decision- Jeff: We won't even get into the data that they have and that [inaudible 00:33:17] Morten: Yeah, but the conversation around this feature is being hampered by the ideology of a single person. So we can't actually have a conversation about whether or not telemetry is happening because it gets shut down by a single person who has decided or who has been appointed the ... who has the title benevolent dictator for life, right? And is exerting the dictator part of that statement, which is fine because that's how it works. Now the question is, can we make a system where some of those decisions can be better informed? Make them more diverse, give alternate viewpoints into the conversation so that when those decisions are made by the dictator, the dictator has all the information required. It comes down to accessibility and privacy and security and all these issues that a single person with a cadre of people around them who are saying what that person wants to hear cannot necessarily make the right decisions all the time, but if we don't have a system in place to actually bubble the right information up to the people and create an environment where informed decision making can happen, then we are running the risk of possibly creating either bad decisions that take a long time to percolate into something bad or missing huge opportunities to do something good because of the ideology of a single person, right? So Matt built WordPress, Matt changed the world with WordPress. Morten: Without him, we wouldn't have these conversations, this community wouldn't exist. His vision is truly revolutionary to the web and I will never do anything to in any way minify what he has done. What I'm saying is, with the power we currently have and with the complexity of the community we have, I believe that creating a system where we can surface more opinions and make better decisions that are better informed, will improve the project as a whole and will help Matt make better decisions and possibly this will take some of the responsibility he doesn't want away from him so that he can focus on vision, driving the project forward and everything. Now he will respond and say, "Well, that's exactly what I'm doing by appointing you as the head of marketing and giving Josepha the title of executive director." But then we get into this conversation of how did that happen? Jeff: How long are these terms, how do you get them? Morten: Who else was under consideration? Why wasn't this communicated to, for instance, Bridget Willard, who was basically told in an email that she didn't have a job, and then why did that conversation end up being, well, you weren't the leader anyway, and we need to make sure that everyone understands that no one is a leader in this project. It's unhealthy environment, communication wise, I mean, Josepha being part of this project is enormously important. Her role is undefined as opposed to a title. Joost has fantastic ideas about marketing and I have no doubt he'll do a great job, but his role is undefined and was appointed through some sort of single person pointing someone into power. So all of these are examples of things not being done in a transparent way in a so called open community. Jeff: Yeah, I mean I think, [Yustvank 00:36:46] wasn't even part of the marketing team and he was nominated or appointed the leader of the team. I guess there's team reps and there's team leaders and- Morten: Apparently were not the team leaders until now. Rachel: Well, now we seemingly keep having that same conversation over and over again whenever we have some kind of team lead designated that Matt and others have to remind people the team reps aren't leaders, but I mean who else is leading the teams? On a day to day basis, team reps are the team leaders. It may not necessarily be in their title, but they are the ones putting in all the effort and the work leading the day to day. John: That's right. You're a 100% right because rep is short for representative, which sort of implies that you are representing the other members of your team, which is a form of leadership. Rachel: Then raises another question, where are you representing them to? Because it's not really clear, what is the structure here of like where do you reporting to up the chain about progress of your team or what you're doing? Where do you get direction from when you have ideas, how do you present them or where do you present them to? I think basically what happens now is people will just write a blog post when they want to do something and if no one says nay, they work on it, but then who's to say that Matt won't come in and say he doesn't like it and shoehorn it. So that whole process is really untransparent and very confusing and usually frustrating. Morten: And I think one of the things I'm really excited about with the WordPress Governance Project is the research that is being done into how WordPress is currently governed. To actually documents these processes to figure out how are decisions made? What kind of ad hoc structures do we currently have within each of these themes to get work done? Because what I've seen a lot of ... because I've looked in a lot of these chats, is that many times in the groups that don't have any kind of leadership structure, meaning that everyone is on the same flat plane, everyone has the same role is decisions never get made. You have this endless punting of issues because no one wants to be the one to say, "Okay, this is what we're doing," and no one has the power to say that. And then what ends up happening is you have a bunch of conversations that never lead anywhere, and then someone just arbitrarily or through their own willpower makes a decision and pushes it in, and then that becomes the guiding star. Morten: So rather than having a conversation about, okay, we need to make a decision by this time, this person gets to have final say on this or whatever, you just get these bubbled up things. Like the endless thing I keep arguing over with responsive images is actually a good example of this because there are very few people in the community who actually understand responsive images and how they work. Joe McGill is one of them, I'm one of them, there are a couple of other people who truly understand the SPEC, and the SPEC is very stupidly written so it's hard to understand how it works, right? And we flagged this issue almost two years ago and it's still not resolved because every time we try to bring it up, a bunch of people come in and question the validity of the subject matter experts opinions on it because the subject matter experts don't have any say in whether or not this actually happens. Morten: So you keep having this conversation of, we need to fix this because it's an actual broken problem. No, it's not. Well, I can prove to you it's a problem. No, it's not because I don't see it on my computer. Well, you just don't understand how it works, that's why, let me show you. Well, even though you show me, I don't really see this as a problem, so therefore we're not doing it. And then eventually it comes up and says, "Well, oh, it is actually a problem," but no one has the power to make the decision, okay, we're fixing this. So therefore it just gets punted endlessly. So when you go into the ticket that exists, you'll see it gets punted from 4.8 to 4.9 to 5.0 to 5.1 to 5.2 to 5.3, and nothing gets done because no one is making decisions, right? And when Matt says there's 6,000 open tickets and track, that's why. Morten: It's because no one has the power to make decisions about what we're going to do. Except for Matt, no one can actually sit and say, "No, stop this, we're doing it this way, the end move on." Right? And for that to happen, we need some sort of transparent governance structure so that people can say for this month or six months or whatever, these people or this person has the power to actually make these decisions on behalf of this part of the project. And then we entrust that- John: We kind of have that now. Morten: We do, exactly. John: Except it's so early days and there's so much to do that all of the things- Morten: But that's the thing. We have ad hoc systems that work exactly like this, but if it gets surfaced that this is what's happening, then the hammer comes down and says, "No, this is not how it's happening." Right? We need to establish systems that work because this idea of flat structure management doesn't actually work. It's not a functioning model for leadership. It just works if we're very, very small team, but even then you still have one person at the top and a bunch of other people underneath on a flat structure. John: Well, this ... Oh, sorry, go ahead Rachel. Rachel: I was just going to say then you can also bring up the topic of accountability and that we don't seem to have a lot of that either and I bring up like accessibility example, we have a role in core of meeting a certain level of standards for accessibility, but we don't have any accountability to make sure those are being met. We don't have any tests in place, we don't have any kind of oversight of that at all. And so that is something else that I feel super important and for any kind of decisions that are made once something is made, who has the power to come along and make sure it's enforced? Morten: Yeah. And who has the power to tell another contributor, even though you spent a ton of time doing this, you need to redo it because it doesn't meet our standards for accessibility, or privacy, or security, or whatever, right? Because when that happens, there's always this pushback that says, well, you can decide what I need to do, and then there's this response which is something like, well, everyone is a volunteer so you can't force people to do a bunch of extra work. But the reality is sometimes that's necessary, right? Because some of these things are not trivial, they are mission critical and they result in actual money or legal action. John: The accessibility team must be particularly frustrating because over the years it has constantly sort of been the caboose on the train of development and features that happen and so it usually is the last thing that gets bolted on once the dust has largely settled because the rest of the folks that are working on things aren't necessarily all the time looking at things with accessibility in mind. And so the frustrating part of it being at the end is that by the time that the dust has settled, someone is already working on a newer, shinier version of the thing. And now the cycle repeats itself because there's a new, customizer, there's a new way to do widgets, a new way to do menus, a new way to do theme options, a new way to do everything where just as the accessibility team has kind of given the go ahead like, okay, go ahead and make this accessible, now it's too late. It's far too late to be motivated to try and work on something that isn't going to be the thing that people are going to be using the next time around anyways. Morten: And there's also a missed opportunity there because as we started working on ... as people started working on Gutenberg, in the very beginning of Gutenberg, two and a half years ago, wherever, one of the very first conversations was we need to make sure that accessibility is front and center in this. And then a bunch of people said, "No, it's too early for accessibility." And then we ended up where we are, right? And I'm looking forward to seeing the results of the WPCampus accessibility audit because I'm curious to see what it turns out because we've never done accessibility audit on any WordPress component ever, which is crazy, but that's a sidebar to this. Morten: We had the opportunity and I say we as in the community, because community could have done this as a whole, to say, hey, there's a bunch of react components that are not accessible, since we're already working on this, we might as well contribute to the wider web community and say we're going to figure out accessibility here for react components, contribute them into react and then let other people work on it. Instead, we went the opposite route, which was to say if we run into accessibility problems, we should try to recruit people from outside the community and get them to contribute into WordPress to fix problems, which was a nonstarter to put it that way. And it's an unfortunate position to be in because we could have established WordPress as an accessibility contributor and a contributor into a larger project and really manifested a position within the web community as people who care about accessibility and are willing to move accessibility forward. We didn't, and now we're in a situation where we're patching issues that were created to make them accessible and we've invented a whole new way of doing things on the web, which isn't really meeting accessibility standards and that then needs to be iterated on to make it more accessible later on. Morten: Meanwhile, we're trying to add new features to this and we're in the same conversations again where the accessibility team comes in and says, "Hey, we need to be front and center on accessibility on this." And then a bunch of people are saying, "Well, you know, accessibility is really hard and it's too early in the process." So it's like never learning from the mistakes, just keep doing the same thing again. John: And we, again, on the cusp of web components and things that are going to revolutionize, again, the way that the web and all of these pieces work, and so, I mean, to tie things together a little bit, there is something ... that is why accessibility is largely a component of government responsibilities is, I mean, in the real world, I guess is to make sure that things are accessible, to make sure that doors and entrances and things are sloped correctly. To make sure trails are wide enough, to make sure that sidewalks have four feet on both directions or whatever, so that there's enough room, not just for people walking, but for a wheelchair and there's going to be more than three steps, it has to have a handrail and all these things are like part of government. They are part of governance, they are part of making sure that the social construct that we live in is accessible for all of the people that are living within it. John: And so the governance and accessibility in my purview really do end up going hand in hand because one of the most difficult tasks in the world is making the thing that you are inventing be accessible to all people. And I read kind of an interesting related blog post that we should put in the show notes that the title was like the move fast and break stuff is dead, and so if that's true, there's a part of me that's going to be kind of happy about that. We've enjoyed for probably the past 15 years kind of the renaissance of the web of like we've been able to invent new components and new UI and things to make the web fancy, fun, engaging place to work, but we have, in doing so, abandoned all of the things in an operating system on a computer that brought accessibility to all people in the first place, check boxes, radio buttons, lists boxes, text boxes and buttons. Those things are dead and everything is, a radio toggle is unfocusable div, JavaScript react, list box that just abandons all of the core fundamental accessibility features that are built into computers at their core. So we've just given up on those as part of this 15 year web renaissance that we've been enjoying, but I think that we're all now looking back at what we've done and being like, oh no, I made a mistake. Morten: And what do we need then? We need exactly what Matt is talking about, which is strong leadership that actually takes important decisions, moves them forward. But to make those decisions, you need to have leadership that trusts in its people, that trusts that when the accessibility team says there's an issue here, that's not because the accessibility team is being difficult or nitpicky or whatever. It's actually because they are subject matter experts and should be listened to. Morten: Or if you doubt the veracity of what they're saying, reach out to the wider accessibility community and say, hey, is this a valid argument? And the same thing goes for privacy, if a single point like if a single leader thinks that privacy is not important, it might be a good idea to reach out to the wider community and ask, "Hey, is privacy actually important? Are there places in the rest of the world, outside of the United States where privacy all of a sudden becomes a legal issue?" And if so, how do we do this in the right way? And then recruit the right people and actually make strong choices and strong decisions, but those decisions have to be informed by the entire community because we design software not for us, not for North America or the Western world, we design software for the entire planet and this notion that WordPress is built by the people who use it sometimes isn't true anymore because the people who use WordPress don't build WordPress. The people who use WordPress never show up at WordCamps or meetups, they don't listen to this podcast, I'm sorry. Morten: The people who use WordPress are everyone else, right? They're regular people who just use the web and keep dropping into WordPress sites without knowing it, is the people that run small businesses that try to boot up new lives after being displaced, it's huge corporations and individuals that don't partake in this conversation and we are actually responsible for their ability to access content on the web. We are responsible for meeting the promise of the web, which is to make content accessible and we need strong leadership to make that happen. Jeff: So I'm glad I had you two on the show to talk about governance because I was really trying to wrap my mind around it. And right now I feel like Jake Blues and the Blues brothers when he's in the church and he sees the light because ... it's awesome I finally get a blues brothers' reference on the show I've been trying to work that in. But if you look at the main WordPress core teams, there 17 different teams there and there are little teams and little groups that are showing up and as we've talked about in the show, it's ad hoc. Jeff: And there's no really way your system or progression or any documents that outline how these teams work and how their reps work, and I think what government now, I think I really support the ideas is that the Governance Project would create these systems and documents to sort of outline what's a team rep? Who's the team lead? How do you get nominated? It would be the fabric that holds all this together and sort of provides this a sort of direction. And I want to read this because it's exactly what you've outlined in the scope of the project where it says the project will provide a model for policy making, decision making, oversight and accountability within the WordPress project. This may include solidifying existing governance structures and teams, introducing new governance structures for parts of the entire project and/or creating new governance roles and responsibilities. All of that now finally makes sense to me. Let create order for this chaos. John: Yes, exactly. And let's do it together as an open source community rather than having a small group or individuals making all those decisions. Jeff: And sometimes I sort of chuck on myself, WordPress is open source, DPL, it's code, you can see it, it's there. But over the years, how many times has that word transparency come up? I mean I just of chuck on myself, how often? This is an open source project, yet we talk about transparency. So it's just kind of weird that relationship there. So- Morten: When you talk about that with government specifically, I mean, American government right now is definitely, but in general, there will always be a lot of things that end up happening outside of a public meeting or the transparent openness of the world, and that's the ... governance doesn't necessarily bring transparency because people are still responsible for enforcing and keeping things transparent. If you're having a conversation in private that you think is more appropriate to have with other people, people need to be responsible at the bar after a WordCamp together and say, "That's a good idea. Let's have that conversation in slack next week instead of right now here." So there is still a lot of ways to go in getting the culture caught up with enforcing that and policing one another because one of the things that government provides is law enforcement, and we don't have taxes, law enforcement is taxing, we need to hold each other accountable then. Morten: So, one of the things that initially led to these conversations from my perspective was that I've been involved in trying to figure out how to do codes of conduct for WordPress, so we have codes of conduct for meetups and WordCamps that were kind of bootstrapped after series of incidents that made it necessary and those codes of conduct are adopted from other open source projects that introduced them for similar reasons, but we don't have a code of conduct for the community as a whole. So that means the codes of conduct that exist are for just the events and we don't have separate codes of conduct for like contribution or for the forums and everything like that, and everything becomes really ad hoc. And then when there is something that exists that's called the escalation team, which is the team of people, appointed people, who are responsible for handling complex code of conduct issues. The problem is that team has neither mandate nor any power because there is no existing policy or any type of structure around it. Morten: So creating policies to enforce codes of conduct requires a larger conversation about who is in the community? What spaces are the community in? What can we expect from people who are in those spaces? What are the reprisals for breaking codes of conduct? In what circumstances? Under what purview do people have this ability, right? And these conversations are conversations that come up in every community when something bad happens. You mentioned Drupal now has a governance structure, they have a governance structure because bad things happened in Drupal and they were forced to do something about it. And that's what you're seeing across all these open source networks is that this conversation around governance usually appears when something extremely bad happens where the community falls apart because of it. And I would like us to have the conversation before something bad happens. Not to say that something will happen, but to say it's actually responsible governance to have the conversation around how to manage a community properly ahead of anything bad happening rather than as a result of it. Rachel: Is there [inaudible 00:57:01] code of conduct for the WordPress slack or track or anything? Morten: I don't believe so. John: I don't believe so either. There is for WordCamps specifically, but not for when ... and I think that that is what the escalation team would generally default to is what's there for word camps, but it is not written as intently or broadly to cover everything else. Morten: There is a code of conduct, a community code of conduct project that I've been involved in for two years, but it's stagnated because it rests on this, or it falls apart because of this lack of definition of what is WordPress? Who are the community? Where are the WordPress spaces and who has the power to do anything about it? So that would be one of the outcomes of this would hopefully be setting some ... creating a system in which those policies can be created so that we can create a code of conduct from those policies that can be referred back to. So when people get challenged on a code of conduct issue, you can say you are part of the community, because it's defined here, you are being challenged on this behavior or whatever you did because of it's in breach of the code of conduct as based on these principles that you've agreed to by being part of this community, because that's how it works, that's how society works. We just lack all of that definition. Jeff: There are so many people out there who are using WordPress in a daily basis, they're publishing thoughts, images, selling things. They have no idea any of this is going on, they have no idea of the decisions of the project, what's going on beneath. All they know is WordPress, they're trying to make it work, they are trying to make it not break. So I want to say thank you to you, Morten, and thank you to Rachel and to all the others out there who are thinking of the larger picture, who are thinking about these people, these users who have no idea about any of this going on, because they're just trying to get things done and it's nice to have folks like you thinking about these people and trying to do right. [crosstalk 00:59:10] John: Morten said it earlier in the show, I mean all of this is for them, it doesn't exist if they don't use it, if we don't use it ourselves also. But like every decision that the people, we the community make is for the 34 growing percent of the web that does use it, and if we're not making the decisions for them, why the heck are we? I guess like that's what it's for. Rachel: I also think about everyone in the community who are giving so much time to make all these things happen and to make the web ultimately an easier and better place to work in. I mean, and to create this platform where we can quote unquote democratize publishing, we wouldn't have these a lot of people wouldn't have the opportunity to easily have a website and have a platform to publish their ideas and their research and their products and whatever if it wasn't for this ginormous community of people giving so much of their time, whether it's paid or not to do all this work and without healthy governance you don't have a long term healthy community and you have a lot of problems that come out of that. And so for me a lot of this is also looking out for our community and for people that spend so much of their time doing all this stuff and how can we make it better for them as a whole as well. Morten: And that's why I'm so happy that Rachel is part of this project. Jeff: I know you mentioned on trying to solve this problem together, tell us a little bit, I know the WP governance you have your own website, your own slack instance, how can people get involved with this initiative? Rachel: So we do have a nice shiny get involved page, WPgovernance.com, where we try to get everything up on there and we publicize all our meetings which are, we have a calendar, but the get involved page kind of gets you through the front door. We have a slack, we have a mailing list, we have the calendar, we have ... become familiar with our own governance, which we are working on expanding. We now have a few working groups that you can get involved with to do specific sets of research and so that's a great way to get involved. We have one group that's researching existing WordPress governance, and then we have one group that's researching other governance models from similar projects. And so those two groups, those are really great channels to follow along, the stuff that they're finding, it's really informative and interesting. So definitely hop in our slack and join those groups. And we have weekly meetings, right now the meetings are every Tuesday and then each working group has their own recurring meeting as well. And so we've been posting all that info on the site, so hopefully it's pretty easy to figure out how to get involved and if not, please message me and let me know if something is confusing so I can make sure that it's clarified. Jeff: Awesome. And one more point I wanted to bring it up, it's a bit controversial, but I know and Morton you can talk to this, but I guess you try to get this project as sort of officially sanctioned and to make WordPress sites to have it sort of been official project but it sort of got taken down or unsanctioned so now you and Rachel are doing things on your own. Do you think that'll detract at all from any of the progress not being part of the make WordPress core, like under the umbrella of official projects? I think that sort of opens up more opportunities or gives you more freedom to expand on other ideas. Morten: It introduced some technical challenges, not like purely technical as in, we had put up a website, [crosstalk 01:03:05] get people to register to the alack site. I think the communication around the issue is a good example of why we need governance in the project, but outside of that, I'm not really interested in commenting on the situation. It is what it is, you can read into that whatever you want. Jeff: Communication is oxygen and boy, there's a lot of people's faces turning blue these days in open source project. I don't know, I don't get it, all this remote work and all this communication and communication I guess is hard, it's hard to get right all the time and I don't understand. I mean I thought maybe we'd be good at communicating by now, but obviously there is still times where it's like, oops. Morten: I think Matt actually said something really important in a tweet last week, I think where he, and I have to paraphrase this because I can't find it on my broken computer right now. He said something along the lines of we need to use deescalation as, or introduce deescalation as a policy in the way we communicate. And that's something that a lot of people have been talking about for long time and I think I'll expand on that and say in our community, and in just in our communication in general, especially across nonverbal communication lines like chat, twitter, slack, whatever, it's really important to always remember that the people who are involved in this project, pretty much everyone wants the best for the project and are trying to do good things and try to read what people say with the thought that the person who's saying this is doing it because they want to do good things and if you're not in agreement with them, approach it in a constructive way. So you have the principle of deescalation as in if something starts getting inflamed, try to walk it back rather than make it more intense. Morten: And the other part is adopting this principle of calling people in instead of calling them out. So when something happens rather than going and, what is it called? Sub tweeting or calling [inaudible 01:05:13] oh my God, I can't believe you said that. Try to contact them first and figure out, say, "Hey, maybe you want to roll that back," or, "Hey, when you said that, this is how I understand it." And if we all adopt a more conciliatory line towards communication and accept that especially text chat is extraordinarily bad as a communication platform and it's prone to horrendous misunderstanding and lack of context. I think a lot of the drama that we have in the community can be dissolved simply by improving conversation. So starting from a point of, I think this person is trying to say something that is positive, I'm just not sure it's been communicated right, and then assuming that people are coming at it from a positive perspective will help us move forward. And I think Matt is on board with that, he's saying it out loud, so it is a principle we should follow. Jeff: Morton, how many dumpster fires were started and fanned on twitter this last year regarding WordPress stuff? And guilty as charged, I've participated in conversations and retweets and discussions and I'm probably responsible for fanning some of those flames but one more reason to quit twitter, I guess. John: Yeah, no kidding. Rachel: But to bring back the project moving off of WordPress and all that stuff into a governance like Morten mentioned just a second, but there's not really a process in our community and in the WordPress project on how you kind of introduce new ideas and new things or new initiatives or whatever, we thought we did it right. We thought we were creating this initiative and we thought we were going through all the right steps as far as we were concerned, but apparently we were not, but I think it just kind of brings to light that there is no structure for how people go about creating these kinds of initiatives to introduce new ideas to the project. And so how can we make that better going forward? John: I have a different thought on that I think because I think we all probably know what the process is, we just don't like it because I think we've talked about Matt Mullenweg the benevolent dictator for life and we know how decisions get made. I think we just don't like it, I think we know that if you want to get something done, you just ask Matt, you just talk to Matt and you say this is a thing that I think is important and I think that we should do, and then Matt decides if that's a thing that happens. I just think that maybe we don't or we the people, we the general consensus or the group or the community or I don't know, but I think that is maybe something that is being outgrown because I think the governance project is so good of an idea and that the timing is probably so right that the problem with it is that it isn't something that Matt is implementing, it's something that other people are implementing kind of like everything is a bad idea until it's a great idea. John: If you look at like WordCamp US or other really big great ideas that had eventually come to light, these were ideas that other people or the enterprise project WordPress and enterprise stuff, this is something that folks at agencies have been trying to get together and work on for the greater part of 10 years, but really were kind of told not to do it on their own. There just is a lot that happens that won't happen because of our current governance structure. So I think that just like any good government, I think I said this on the show jokingly before, but as much as it's maybe not a coup, because a coup kind of implies hostility, pretty much every good, healthy, strong community is born out of independence and go sort of starting in your own direction and then hoping that either that gets adopted or brought back in or inspire, the people are inspired by it or so forth. Morten: So it's interesting because when we originally started talking about this project, we were planning on doing this off the platform. So we weren't planning on doing exactly what we're doing now and then we at WordCamp US, when we announced that we were going to do this, a bunch of people from a lot of centrally placed people and a lot of just random people said, "The right place for this is under the community channel." Right? And then we did, like Rachel said, we did exactly what we thought was the correct thing to do, which is just to reach out to the community group and talk to a bunch of people and say, "Hey, can we have access to this thing? This is what we want to do," blah, blah blah, right? We checked with meetings like meeting schedules to make sure everything works and we followed what appeared to be the correct methodology for doing this, right? And then we were told by people that that was not correct and that we needed to offload off the platform and we then figured out a way of doing that in a structured way so that the information didn't get lost because you couldn't simply just delete the message off the [inaudible 01:10:58] blog that would be very damaging to the community, and we formulated some language and made sure that that language was something everyone agreed on and published that. Morten: So in case anyone wonders, I was the one that wrote that post that was posted that explained that we're going to get off the platform and we moved it. And within that, there's this larger conversation around how exactly did all this come to pass and why. But I don't think that is a worthwhile path to go down, which is why I'm not talking about it because I'm like we need to move on from this, we have a platform to stand on, it works, this project might live better outside of the .org platform simply because then we have more room. So that [crosstalk 01:11:50] John: But the irony of the governance project, and what I feel is maybe it is ironically a very good example that you're being very diplomatic, the both of you, about why governance is a thing that is necessary. The project itself is the example for how complicated and, I don't know that bad it can be or feel. I don't know. Speaker 1: Well, I want to thank both of you, both Morten and Rachel Cherry for ... Morton Rand-Hendrickson and Rachel Cherry for being on the show to give us a primer and sort of an introduction in the WordPress Governance Project. Like I said, I have a much better understanding now and I'm in full support of it. If we can find a way to clarify a lot of things and provide a path for people who may be interested in taking on these leadership roles because they're very passionate about a specific area of WordPress and there is a way for them to go forward instead of just hoping they get appointed one day because they became the Pokemon that Matt wants to choose, I choose you, the whole Pokemon thing, but hopefully we provide a plan forward and I want to have you two on in about three months because I imagine there's going to be a lot of good stuff between now and then, and I wouldn't mind bringing on one or two people maybe involved with core and just have a general conversation about what you two have discovered, you two and the community and the project, where it's at, and just have a general conversation about governance within WordPress and core and how things all shake out. Speaker 1: So I hope you two accept the invitation. We'll have [Jaan 01:13:14] again in a few months and thank you very much again to the both of you for coming on the show today. Morten: Thank you for having us. Jeff: And now before we wrap it up here, Morton, I want both you and Rachel to give out information and where people can find you or get in touch with you. Morten: You can find me at wpgovernance.com or you can contribute to the WordPress Governance Project. Otherwise you can also find me on LinkedIn learning or on twitter at more10, that's M-O-R10, more10, because that's my name. Rachel: You can find me also on twitter and most all things social at bamadesigner and bamadesigner.com Jeff: And WP Campus online at the end of this month, right? Or is it this week? Rachel: It's next week, next Thursday. Join us, it's a full day of free sessions, all kind of focused on WordPress and higher education and we also have an accessibility track. So we're really excited about that. So join us Thursday, January the 31st at online.wpcampus.org. Jeff: Awesome. And one last thing before we go, I want to say that Morton, what you did at the WordCamp State of The Word, your presentation where you offered the stage to three other people, you did what you weren't supposed to do. I thought that was an incredible gesture on your part to share the spotlight or to give the spotlight to three other people on those three, I think it was privacy, open source, governance and accessibility, right? Morten: Mm-hmm. Well thanks. We will see how well that will play out in the future. Jeff: There may be an amendment somewhere some document somewhere, but it's interesting because John said he was going to go to your session and when he got there you were not on stage. It was one of the three people that you brought on stage and so he didn't know what happened. John: So I left. [inaudible 01:15:57] I came to see Morton, where did he go? Morten: In full transparency, I need to say this because it's important. In hindsight, I should have informed the organizers of what I was doing. I was in an odd Headspace couple of days before that event and there were some tactful errors made on my part that it caused problems for the organizers and for that I do apologize, but what I wanted to do was just show that I don't want to be the guy who goes up on stage and goes, there are huge problems, I know how to fix them, follow me, right? That's [crosstalk 01:16:39] what I want to do at all. And I'm hoping that people understood it for what it was, at least that's what you're saying, Jeff, and that it wasn't an effort to create some sort of chaos. It was just I wanted to make sure people heard from differing voices and diverse voices about this issue. Jeff: And what was the name of that session again so people can look for it on WordPress.tv? Morten: Moving the web forward with WordPress. Jeff: Okay. And I watched it this morning. Very, very good presentation. So you two are free to go about the rest of your afternoon, thank you for spending about an hour and a half of your time with us. And John and I, we're going to wrap it up. Rachel: Awesome. Thank you. Jeff: Thank you again. I hope you get better soon, Rachel. Rachel: Thank you. Bye. John: Bye. Jeff: So there you have it folks, an introduction into WordPress Governance and like I said, I'm glad we had them on the show because now we can actually talk about it and know what we're talking about. I have a much better understanding of what the project's all about and I'm very much in favor and in support of it because of what I explained earlier that there is chaos and to me it's interesting that I have a sort of pushed back on government stuff, but- John: You're not alone there. Jeff: Increasingly over the years WordPress both ... the internal policies of WordPress is more and more seemingly turning into it's own like mini government. John: Absolutely. I think it's a completely normal thing that happens to groups of people. I think it's totally normal. I mean and every new government I think try something different and gets some things right and get some things wrong and what works for one group definitely may or may not work for a different group. So I think the project is in good hands with Morton and Rachel, I think they're trying to do, they're doing what Matt has joked about online and on the show with us is they have positive intentions, they are putting in the hard hours to try and get something going for the betterment of everyone else. Jeff: And before we go, I do want to mention that over the weekend there was a breach with the WPML plugging. This thing is active on over 600,000 sites. So this was kind of a big deal. WPML customers received an unauthorized emails from someone who claimed to have half the company's website and gain access to customer emails and WPML founder, Amir Helzer, suspects that the attacker is a former employee quote, and this is what he says, "The customer is an ex employee who left an exploit on the server, not the WPML plugin before leaving. Besides fixing the damage, we will also be taking legal actions," and quote. So the team worked around the clock. Apparently their product pages were defaced. I mean it's not funny, but the defacement on the product pages where they have the ... you can see the different versions, this person added security issues and made a check mark box across, I mean it's not funny, but to me I thought it was a bit humorous considering what they could have done with the defacement, so what they've done is they've rebuilt the website, admin is now built behind two factor authentication and they're looking into legal action. So if you use the plugin, keep an eye out for ... well, actually, I don't think there's anything wrong with the plugin, it was actually just based on their website, so- John: I mean, I was going to mention that and I don't ... there's a lot I don't like about how all of this happened. Aside from the obvious, which I feel like is worth stating, which is it's bad deal when anything like this happens to anyone anywhere all the time anyway. So trusting people by hiring them and having them not workout or having them retaliate afterwards, it's a bad, bad deal. But we don't even know if that's true, right? It sounds like according to what's here already going on is that's going to be up to a court of law to decide which frankly is more information than I feel like I need to know about. I don't know. And I don't want to be critical because I don't really know that I have nice things to say about- Jeff: I think in the WordPress space, so many people are working remotely, and I think the lesson here is, if you have to let someone go, an employee, you revoke their access first and then you let the employee go, John: But we don't know if they did. We don't know if it was even an employee. We don't know if it was them that put something up there, we really have no- Jeff: Allegedly, if allegedly, I don't know, I mean- John: But then even the announcement didn't really say that the plugin was safe, like in the email and the reply didn't say, don't worry, our plugin is fine. There was nothing about ... there's no clue that they're doing a code audit, they're not paying anybody to ... I mean if there is all I'm saying about it is that I didn't really think that what I read was helpful and that I only had way more questions afterwards, like what about the users of this plugin? What are they supposed to do? Are they actually safe? Do they even know if they are? Was a security audit performed on both the website and the plugin? Are there 600,000 websites out there that should it be concerned? Nothing seemed to answer any of the questions I had and there was ... I only had more questions afterwards. So the lessons to be learned, I agree with that, how do you let someone go? How do you revoke their access? Those are all business problems that everyone is free to handle on their own. But the email, the recovery, is a weird, weird situation all around but a big deal. I agree. Jeff: Well, we'll keep tabs on it and if they published a followup and maybe who knows, maybe in the future they'll actually publish that they did a security audit or [crosstalk 01:23:19] tell us the results of what happened here. We'll keep tabs on and publish it on The [Tavern 01:23:25], we'll talk about it here on WordPress weekly. John: You had anybody from WPML on the show ever that you can remember? Jeff: No. John: No. Jeff: Nope. I haven't had them on the show. Let's see, WordPress 5.2 beta two was released the other day, so there's that. I believe Gutenberg, there's a recent post about what's new in Gutenberg, so there's still improvements coming into the black editor and there's information out there, there's a great post by Bryan Garner, I believe it might be in the Studio Press Blog or the WP Engine Blog about atomic blocks. And Nick Hams brought this up and I think he's right now and then we need more articles that explain the why you should use certain blocks instead of just the how or just to use the block. Jeff: So Bryan Garner takes a look at the atomic blocks which they acquired or WP Engine acquired and kind of explains, it gives situations into why you should use or suggest why you should use certain blocks in certain situations like the call to action black and what have you. And I just recently came across the block I'm going to test out that gives you a before and after, so you can compare images. I remember a few years ago I used a plugin where you put the two images together and it had a slider so you could see the before and after and use the little slider. So I want to check out this block and see if it's a bit more accessible or at least easier to use because the slider thing, depending on how it was implemented, was a bit difficult to use. So I want to see how this before and after feature is implemented in a block, so I'm looking forward to that. Other than that- John: A friend and I built a thing using a react component with a slider on it. He got a, I think it's probably still there, nopoles.com. We could show off some people how the downtown village square looked without utility poles, so taking all the power lines out of it. So the image sliders like that, they're pretty cool. But again, it's one of those things that's like definitely not accessible. You have to have the dexterity to be able to use a mouse, you need to be able to drag the slider back and forth, but there is a react component out there for that that made doing that work pretty easy. The hardest part about that was photoshopping all the utility poles out of that. That was not easy, but yeah, a block for that would be pretty cool. Jeff: So without further, that's going to conclude this week's edition of WordPress weekly. You can find show notes for this episode and all the other episodes and WPTavern.com. You can follow me on twitter where I will assume the best intent of people's tweets most of the time at J-E-F-F 0, and John? John: AJJ.blog or at JJJ on twitter and GitHub. Jeff: And everybody enjoy the rest of your week, have a safe weekend and we'll talk to you again next Wednesday afternoon. Say Bye, John. John: Bye John. Bye everybody.