Welcome to Community & Code. I'm your host, Chris Reynolds. This is the podcast where we talk to the humans behind the commits. I'm here today with Sae Reid, who you might know from a lot of places if you're in the WordPress ecosystem. Sae has been involved in a whole lot of things. WP Water Cooler was a thing for a long time, a million years ago. Well, twelve years. twelve years of the water cooler really really okay um and and various word camps uh speaking doing stuff and is now ceo of a thing called the wp community collective say welcome uh tell us about yourself for those of you who have not met you hi uh Thanks for having me on. I'm excited about your podcast because I feel like it was inspired by Um, well, I, I feel like it was inspired by a sticker first of all, and I love that. And then I also love that. I like, like I sat next to you at press comp and I saw your sticker and I was like, that's a great sticker. And so to be on the podcast that you just started after press comp is very, um, I don't know. It feels really good. So, uh, yeah. Yeah. Uh, the sticker in question, the sticker in question, um, The sticker in question is a sticker I picked up at DrupalCon, and I've written about it in a couple different places. And the thing that jumped out at me, and I've been playing with the idea of getting back into a podcast for probably a couple months, but I was having trouble figuring out what I wanted it to be about. And I picked up the sticker at DrupalCon. And it spoke to me because the sticker, it says, come for the code, stay for the community. And that was the reason why I was in the WordPress ecosystem. And so it felt like really homey to me to see that in the DrupalCon. And then, yeah, you saw it and we talked about it. And then also PressConf itself kind of had this sort of more storytelling and more personal stories. And I, I sort of had like the epiphany is like, yeah, this thing, this thing right here is, is what I want, uh, what I want this to be about. I think that's great. Um, because the, I also believe that community is a really important, uh, part of what we're doing here. Um, the, this is actually something I'm going to be talking about. Um, not at word camp europe but at the alt control org conference that's happening um in in uh adjacent I don't I don't know what the right word is um on the free night the night that's not the speaker sponsor party and the night that's not the after party so in there shoved in there is a is a really interesting conference basically like a mini conference um with some really interesting speakers and myself um and I'm really excited about that I I think that um yeah so I'm gonna be talking about community a lot I don't want to I don't want to you know give too much away but obviously I like community I co-founded an organization called the WP Community Collective Um, so I, I appreciate that. And I think that, um, WordPress is community is special. I know that it's like exceptionalism, right? I'm I know the Drupal communities is special to Drupal as well. Um, but as someone who is, um, like half in and half out of dev, right? I used to do so much more dev and I still do do dev. I still do do dev, but it's so different now than it used to be when I was hard coding themes. And the WordPress community seems like it's always really had a lot of room for people who were not just devs. although that's controversial and it's, you know, it's caused lots of problems, but I, you know, that's something that I've always really has really resonated with me because I was never like a, like a dev head, right? Like I've never worked as a software engineer. So it was like a, It's not my particular culture. And so the WordPress tech culture is sort of like this hybrid culture that really, really works for me. So it's not that I'm like, I think Drupal is awesome. And I think that they have, especially, they've made some interesting choices in their governance. well, they've made, I don't know. There have been interesting choices in their governance. They have, you know, different approaches to things that I think, honestly, I wish we were all talking more, like the larger community. And I think there's some folks, yourself included, who are really bridging that gap. But that's only ever been kind of my, like my barrier to Drupal is that it was so much more dev heavy. And I... You know, so I think that's changing. Not that this is about Drupal, but I think it's changing. Yeah, I mean, I don't want to... We're not going to get into a Drupal versus WordPress podcast necessarily, but I do think, like, I... I was very much the same. I feel like whenever I opened Drupal, I felt intimidated by just the interface as opposed to WordPress where, I don't know, it felt simpler and felt like it made sense. I was also super intimidated by Joomla and Magento and stuff too back in the day. Oh my god, Magento. I haven't heard about Magento in a long time. Too many menus, too many things, too many clicks. Magento as well. I built some carts in Magento. Yeah, me too. That was a long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. I do feel like Drupal is getting a little bit better, particularly with their latest version and their emphasis on Drupal CMS, which is sort of like a layer on top of Drupal that just makes it seem easier menu system, a lot more visually pleasing and sort of like a recipe-based system that sort of tunes the site for what you want it to be. I think all those things are really interesting ideas um but uh but yeah very similar they're also doing some really interesting things in their community um yes probably because they but I I don't want to speak out of turn but probably because they didn't do as much heavy development of that side of it earlier I feel like they're able to iterate now um sort of in the more like aware space um where exclusion is not necessarily the norm anymore or at least people are aware that it shouldn't be the norm so I feel like they're developing sort of um they get like a little bit of a a blank slate that they've been able to start with it's not a totally blank slate they have their history as as do we um but we've really been you know, solidifying these community operations in WordPress for a really long time. And so when you get that sort of it's not even legacy code, right? It's legacy community. Right. That that it can be legacy. Anything can be complicated. So but they are really doing some interesting things. I am particularly interested in funding contributors just even the concept that people should be paid for their work when it's volunteer, I am not against volunteering. I think this can be really complicated, but I think that there has to be, that can't be the, well, it's already the foundation of everything, but it can't be built on the backs of people for a long time you can't grow what we've grown and just be like we're just gonna extract more value from these people continually and you know for me and the work that I did especially um on the marketing team in I was really active in um I was really spearheading moving the contributor What's it called? The contributor questionnaire. It's sort of like a, what team are you on? Like sort of an onboarding questionnaire. It had been created for WordCamp Europe, and then we were able to like get it fixed and do all this stuff. We did, it was a lot of work to move it through the system, but we created a slash contribute page on Make. that allowed you to look through the different things and put in some of your interests and you could get a little, it's like a little quiz, right? And here's what teams might be good for you. So I've been especially invested in getting folks to join as contributors, as volunteer contributors. So I, it seems almost sort of difficult to reconcile that with the idea that I also believe that people should be compensated for their labor, but it's really more about the level of work. And it's about the fact that if the only people who are able to put in the time that it takes to spearhead something or to be the rep for a team or take a leadership role on a component or on a release. And if that time isn't, you know, someone who's been around for a while can't dedicate literally like their entire, at least, you know, twenty hours a week or even, you know, the equivalent of a full time position to that work. then they become, they're basically like they can't afford to take a leadership position in the community. And so at that level, what ends up happening is that all the only people who are able to take a leadership role are people who are sponsored. And if we have a situation where the only people who are sponsored are, or at least sponsored in a way that's sustainable for them, not like, you know, periodic bursts of GitHub sponsored money, um, then that becomes it's only being funded by. companies who are paying their staff to contribute. And then what we lose is that independent component. So I feel like there's, I mean, obviously there's growing pains in all of this, but I think that even though those are sort of conflicting ideologies, yes, volunteerism is important and yes, you know, people should onboard and can give back and give their time. And then at the same time, how can we make sure that at least the foundations of this are sustainable and aren't, um, extracting value from its own community? Just sucking it up. Yeah. I want us to go back to your, uh, marketing at some point in a minute, but I also want to talk on touch on like the idea of, of volunteer labor. for an open source software. I was, for a long time, used Linux for a while. From the time that I knew that it existed, I was interested in this idea of free and open source software and that there's an operating system that was just totally free and just community contributed. And it was this amazing anarchist, ideological, raw thing for me, punk rock thing. And then I think about something like the specific sort of products of that is like, okay, so you've got an application like GIMP, which is the new image manipulation program, which is like the open source version of Adobe Photoshop, right? Adobe Photoshop, obviously, everybody knows what it is. It costs hundreds and hundreds of dollars or it's, you know, Adobe Creative license that you have to subscribe to. GIMP is totally free. I don't have a subscription anymore. Yeah. Yeah, right. Who can afford that? GIMP is totally free and you can just download it and run it on your computer. But the interface is not as easy to use. It's not as pleasing. It's a little bit, I don't know, janky. Legacy. Right? Yeah, the reason why is because Adobe can hire tons and tons of very talented UX engineers and have AI built into the thing. And if you're just doing a open source thing, it's always just going to kind of be at that level of almost like there's a level, I don't want to call it hobbyist, but it feels like if you compare apples to apples, GIMP versus Photoshop, GIMP feels like Okay, somebody just threw this thing together. I don't think I'm supposed to say that anymore. I don't think that's appropriate to say, actually. I apologize. Not to get on a tangent, but I think that some of the names in tech are just so clearly... They're awful. They're really awful. We've changed some of them. Well, whatever. I think GIMP is still pretty bad. Gulp. I'm just like, can we stop? Gulp is... Yeah. really just not a fan. But yeah, it's, I think that it doesn't have to be like that. It doesn't seem like it does. Yeah, it could be different. I think it could be different. I think that man, there's so many reasons that things like that happen. But community dynamics are a big part of why things don't flourish. And because, because it takes it takes, I don't want to get too far into my, I'm going to give my, my whole talk away about at all control. But the, how do I say this without saying this? Basically the, the important part of the community in general is that we are working together, right? It is that like, like, That's a big part of it, right? You have all these people. And if those people can't get along or if there isn't a structure for those people, then everyone kind of does their own thing, flails around and doesn't work. to a singular purpose and doesn't, you know, if there's the reason that it works for Adobe is because Adobe says, hey, person whose paycheck I am signing, whose employment and life, life, I said, fun, do this. And that person says, yes, I will do that. Right. That's not. I think that we actually. right now in the WordPress community well over the past year and a half we have really seen that come to a head in WordPress where what the community wants and what is being paid for is not is diverging right and that's been happening one might argue that's been happening since Gutenberg but One could make that argument. I will not make that argument right now. We are where we are. But it's really about what we value, right? Because if we value having this access, then we need to prioritize that. But it's hard, I think, for us people, human beings in the now, to imagine just the timeline of those things going away, right? So we don't necessarily see the immediate value of contributing to let's just say GIMP, right? As opposed to just buying Adobe. So if we can't see that value, then the daily cost benefit that we're all doing in our daily lives of time versus energy output. You can be like, well, I could work to make this better or I could just pay Adobe and go on my way. And Ironically, I think as we have less and less time in this late stage capitalism era that we are in, we have to work harder and hustle to make rent, to make our basics, to pay freaking health insurance, at least here in America. I don't know how it is in other countries where they like free health care and stuff. I don't know. Anyway, but here we really have to hustle. And so that cost benefit analysis really starts to skew. And it's ironic because it's like a self-fulfilling prophecy, right? It's like, well, we could all work on this and make this better together, but because of capitalism, we don't have time. So we're going to put more money instead over here to fund the capitalism, which then makes it like keeps going and now we still don't have time and they raise their prices and you know, whatever. So it's this weird cycle that, I mean, honestly, we're, we're sort of stuck in. Yeah. I've, I've thought about that recently too, about the idea that in order to actually contribute your, yourself, your time, your skills to some kind of an open source project as that is as all encompassing as a WordPress or a Drupal or, you know, whatever, you kind of need to be in a place of privilege. Like, just have the freedom and flexibility and time to even think about that, because everyone else doesn't have that. So, like, it's exclusionary by default, right? Yes, exactly. And that is really, that that's really the problem because then you're working with a, you know, you've got this, this user base is global user base and this potential, you know, all of these people are using it, potential devs, whatever, but the actual. amount of folks who are able to contribute is much smaller and they are much more similar and so you lose right off the top a ton of diversity and then just in thought and approach and life and needs right like even there was a a dramatic argument about um on Twitter by some community members about the value of small business websites, small, small business websites, and whether or not, you know, taking a five thousand dollar job was worth anybody's time. But like, that's a huge world, right? That's a huge world of people who only have five thousand dollars or five hundred dollars to pay for a website. And then there's a whole world of freelancers and small folks out there who are like happy and making their bread and butter. and on these smaller websites. But because they're doing that and meeting those needs of their clients, they don't necessarily have time to invest in WordPress. And so the people who don't even see the value in that world start to become the only people who are contributing. And that really starts to skew. So now we have a place of, like already people are coming from privilege. And then we also have the people who are able to take the lead, who are able to show up to the meetings, who are able to like track all the information that's happening, are generally the people who are doing it as a job. So then, you know, you have the question of, are they contributing as a user? Are they contributing as just an individual as a volunteer? Or are they contributing on behalf of their company? And I don't begrudge a single person who works for their company, even if they work for automatic, by the way, and they're contributing for them to, you know, meet the needs of their employer is makes sense. Like that is It's their job. And I am not mad. Like, but, and that's fine. But we just have to accept that. We can't like sit there and pretend that that doesn't exist. Just like pretending that volunteering like is something everyone can do. It's not. And, you know, we're, we've, definitely we've definitely lost plenty of contributors who have passion and talent and um wonderful perspectives because they they have to go you know make their money and pay their rent and do the grind and especially when we have companies in the wordpress world who are there's lots of layoffs you know they're like oh go chase the ai you know we lose those people even more. So now we're even losing people who, who weren't necessarily even, um, being sponsored full time, but we're in an, in a, at least in a company where being a part of it was good for their job. Right. So we're losing people out of the WordPress industry altogether. And it's the, it starts to become what, what product are we actually making? right? Like, and who are we making this for? We ask this a lot. I've been asking this a lot. Everyone asks this all the time. Who is WordPress for? And as we, if it's being made for the people who are this small, small, small sliver of folks, unless they're doing some super duper research focus group, like inquiries, like really getting in there and talking to people about their needs, there's just not a possibility for them to understand the scope, right? And I've seen that a lot in some of the folks who are sponsored, that's just, I'm just gonna say it, buy automatic, who are like, well, I'm making a hobby website to see what it looks like, or just test this out. And I'm like, turns out that's not generally the websites people are making. Like those, that's a blog. WordPress is really good at making a blog just like right on out of the gate. Just turn it on and you got a blog, right? But it's all the other stuff. You know, like, format, custom post format. We're getting there with, you know, blocks and whatnot. But I think part of the reason it's been such a slog is because the people who are able to build it, able to show up, empowered to show up, paid to show up, are... I almost said something that probably wouldn't be nice. It's not that they're LARPing. LARPing, that sounds wrong, right? They're not totally LARPing. But if you are making a demo website to test it out, not just for testing purposes, but to like, you know, I don't know. It's just not a real world example. And it could be solved. Like there could be... You know, let's say, let's take, for example, the annual survey that is no longer done. Um, that was already controversial, you know, that, that survey had every opportunity year after year to really find out about features, about the software, about what people were using it for, to really ask questions to understand not even just what the community, the contributor community of users was saying they need, which I still think we should listen to those people also, but also even just the bigger bucket, right? But that was not that was never even on the docket. So I think that's probably really frustrating for me in general is just like, if it's just being made, I mean, that's really the impetus for this, right? If it's just being made by this small sliver of privileged people who are just being employed and to do this thing and aren't in the real world solving the problems, then what what is this what is it what are we doing you know then it's what what's the difference between that and proprietary software at that point right right let's rewind uh a bit you can interrupt me by the way I'm going to let you roll. No, let's rewind to what sort of got you started thinking about this? What drew you to WordPress in the first place? What's the trajectory from, say, starting even knowing what a WordPress was into building this? Yeah, what a WordPress was into building a- What a WordPress, what a WordPress. a non-profit organization uh around this yeah well that's quite a journey actually um yeah I my wordpress origin story which is on my bio by the way um which uh on my wordpress uh profile which you can now go see because if you have a I think it's right now you're activated your bio is available unbanned we can see our origin story because yeah my origin story it's so Anyway, so essentially, I have a super geeky brother and I had a super geeky best friend in high school. And I, I, my super geeky brother told me I would like CSS and he was right. So I got really into CSS when it when it first started, just ye olde original CSS. And then I had a bookstore. I opened my own bookstore in two thousand three. right after I graduated college here in Long Beach. And you know, I had, covered I was into tech the whole time I had covered tech as my like journalism beat that was my major um so I you know two thousand three was still pretty early on I've been making you know html websites since geocities so I needed a website for my um business right right for my for my bookstore super fancy um and my fabulous bestie um made a wordpress site for me She had a hosting company at the time and basically was like, here, you know, we got to set up and then I just started using it. And then, of course, I, because of my CSS background, you know, an HTML background, I was like, oh. I actually remember the first, I was trying to do something in it and I kept calling my friend, her name's Brianna. I kept calling her and asking her what to do. And finally she was like, oh, get this developer tools thing. I think it was in Firefox still. I don't even know what browser it was in. And I was like, oh my Lord, the world has opened up to me. And that was my, I was like, oh wait, I can do this. And I, you know, PHP is very language-based. And I was able to like learn to speak PHP. I already knew HTML and CSS. So again, this is me coming from it, not from like a, like I didn't come from C++ or like, you know, whatever. Like I came from it from a, a language place a place of language and and design I guess from css so um really that's that's where that started and then all the small business owners in my in the city needed websites and I was just helping them because they were my friends and fellow business owners and then they were like well let me give you some money for this and I was like well okay um and i It just turned into a thing because I'd always made websites and I was like, oh, this is easy. I'd done lots of marketing, had lots of marketing experience. At the end of the day, a website is marketing. And I really just got into it as a user and to build it and to use it. It wasn't until that I found the community I had gone to a really boring business conference and I was like, that was boring. And maybe there are other conferences that are interesting, like for things that I like. And I was like, oh, I really like WordPress. And I looked it up and there was WordCamp Phoenix was happening in like a month. And I was like, you know, I'm just going to go to that. No kids. I don't think I had a dog at the time. I was just like, bye-bye, going to Phoenix. And there I actually... And this is actually funny, I was just telling this story to Aaron Campbell, or recounting the story with Aaron Campbell, because he was there, about that fateful WordCamp Phoenix. I just sort of stumbled into, like I just met the community, and there was this awesome WordPress contributor named Sarah Cannon, who's, I don't know, she's not really involved anymore at all. She did this awesome presentation that I actually still have parts of it printed out. It's just been on my wall for a long time. Be the unicorn. And what is the other one? Trust your instincts. Those are very important things. So stay with me forever. But anyway, she invited me to dinner. And her friends just happened to be, you know, Aaron Campbell and Mark Jaquith and Helen Husandi. And just literally, those were her friends. So I just went to dinner with them on literally my first night in the WordPress community. And I was like, oh, I did not know that this was like, I was suddenly like knew all the people who were like in the inner circle of WordPress. So I just kind of jumped into the middle and I worked my way out that way. The SoCal WordPress community was super active. We had Phoenix there. There was WordCamp LAX. No, it was LA at the time still. WordCamp LA, WordCamp Orange County, which just was going for so long. There's just so many little word camps that were happening all over the place because it's very, you know, tight knit place here. And so I found my people and hung out with them. And then we started those that group of people led by Jason Tucker started a podcast because he wanted to start a podcast. And he was like, let's start a podcast. It was like, OK, let's let's do it. And then, you know, it was just, we just did it. And then we just kept doing it. And I spoke a lot. I love teaching. I love talking to people. I was started to teach small business owners, you know, how to, I used to teach people how to, how to install, you know? Here's a go to your quick install and do all this stuff before managed hosting or hosting for WordPress that is managed or whatever we're supposed to say. So I was making themes. I was showing people how to hard code stuff. So that's how I was involved in the community. In twenty eighteen, I applied for Matt Mullenweg put out a little, hey, if anyone wants to, I'm thinking of putting together a growth council, talk about the future of WordPress. And I had so many thoughts about small business owners. I knew all of their pain points for onboarding, which I talked about a lot and is still being talked about. Onboarding, usage, updates, like just all of the things, right? And I really, you know, I think small business and small businesses have been our, continue to be like the lifeblood of the internet in general. And I really wanted to espouse that perspective because I did not see it being reflected even then, even in twenty eighteen. So I was nominated, or I was accepted, I guess, to the Growth Council, the Consumer Growth Council, where I met a bunch of other sort of leaders and thought leaders, whatever, in the community, like Yoast. Just some of the, it was a lot of executives, so I'm just showing out. But we all have the same ideas about that. It was not necessarily the most fruitful of exercises, but got more involved with that and just continued to get involved. I actually took a took a long break after I had a baby in twenty twenty and also was covered. So there were no word camps. And then I got back involved. At the same time that I basically like actually got more involved and then attended WordCamp San Diego. it was after word camp san diego that I realized I'd already always recognized this problem like from back in the consumer growth council days but I always thought that the foundation could solve this problem and I always thought that the foundation should and would solve this problem like You know, I understand that there are five OMC three, like I work and have done a lot of like strategy development. I've just worked in nonprofit world a lot. So, you know, I know what is possible, what is impossible. And at that, at that word camp, Matt Mullenweg got up on stage and said explicitly that the foundation would never pay anyone to work on WordPress, would never going to hire anyone, was never gonna have employees, was never going to do that. Explicitly, just I was like, done. And I was like, well, I guess we won't be conflicting with the foundation if we do this. And so that was, it was really the, culmination of many years of thinking about it and musing about it and trying to solve these problems um but it wasn't until matt said that that he was never going to do it and confirmed it that I was like well we can do it then because we won't be stepping on any toes we won't be causing any problems so that is how that started that was a very long story I just gave you yeah and that's that's the origin of the the wp community collective which I think that for a lot of people myself included didn't realize that it was a thing until uh well shortly after september of last year for some strange reason when it became perhaps a little bit more important. What has changed for you for the WPCC in the last six-ish months or a year? What's new with... Because, yeah, like you said, it's been around for a couple of years, but there is definitely a renewed sort of focus, I think now. Well, what we did was we were a five oh one C three project of a nonprofit sort of entity called the Open Collective Foundation, just separate from the Open Collective. It was his own thing. And in january or february of twenty twenty four we got a letter that said they were shutting down and the reason they were shutting down is because basically they had said they had brought on too many sponsored projects and they weren't being able to manage them and the irs was like you were breaking rules um and so they're like okay we closed bye-bye um so that's what they were doing so starting in march of we weren't allowed we weren't able to accept any other funds and I we tried actually to get um become a sponsor project at various other sort of these entities that sponsor different types of projects there's there's there's a there's a handful of them for tech, but there's lots of them for nonprofit in general, where they just basically serve as like the parent fiscal host and then have sort of broader like, oh, these are, we sponsor projects that are social good. And then you can write your grants or whatever and get your grants for that. So we tried to do that. But because of our desire to, because of the proximity to open source, everyone is like, nope, sorry, can't touch that because the IRS has, the United States IRS has been very selective and narrowing what is able to count as public interest um and so open source software in general basic by itself does not meet that threshold which um makes sense which we won't get into but it really does make sense um but so all of those projects were like we can't you know that's not gonna work so we spent most of twenty twenty four trying to like figure out what are we doing like so we had to like stop and stop kind of working on our projects, working on fundraising, working on developing and try to figure out where we were going to go. Like, are we going to continue the project? What do we do with this money and the expectations that people have given us? And I did so much research, so, so, so much research about nonprofits and open source specifically because of the nuances there in US law. tax law, you know, like tax law that got Al Capone, like, arrested and stuff. They take it seriously. Unless you're a church, which we are not. I was out of the picture. That's the next step. Yeah, it's already a cult, so next to be a church. It's fine. Right. didn't want to make it a cult uh I'm not reading religious organization that's not happening uh so basically we landed on the uh structure of the mutual benefit membership organization uh with our designation which we're applying for which is five oh one c six which enables us to um work for the benefit of our members and our industry so we don't have to essentially prove to anyone that our actions are benefiting the general public. The really narrower world for that has to be educational, scientific, or I don't remember what the other one is, but it's not just like, oh, open source is science. It doesn't work. I think that OpenAI recently switched from being a five-oh-one C-three to a five-oh-one C-six or they're in the process of doing that for the same, similar sorts of reasons. Same reasons. Justifying OpenAI and ChatGPT as a public good is a little bit trickier than justifying it as a good for the people. The industry or itself. Exactly. So I did the same research that OpenAI lawyers did, did not get paid for it the same way. But we developed this whole thing and literally it was so last minute. It was really sad. Like the last date for us to transfer our funds to be able to keep, like if we didn't transfer our funds to a qualified nonprofit, if we couldn't find a qualified nonprofit to hold our funds, they were going to donate them to a nonprofit of their choosing. I was like, so we're just like scrambling. I'm like calling clients. I'm like, so... Want to spawn fiscal hosts to hold some money for my tech product? So anyway, we finally found someone to hold the money and transferred it on the last day, the last day that we possibly could. So that went over there and we're like, okay, now we can't touch this. And then because we had done the research and figured out we were starting the same organization, but the new structure of the five Oh one C six membership organization. So that didn't start until we actually filed the paperwork in November. And then we were also simultaneously working on our partnership with GoDaddy. because we had already been working on the partnership for the other organization, but they were like, okay, well, this is fine. We'll just, you know, they didn't, it was just the same thing for them. So we were literally scrambling to get our bank account and all the paperwork done and everything for the end of the year so that they could transfer those funds to us because they were bookmarked, earmarked, not bookmarked, earmarked for that year, right? Yeah. I think the final transfer went through on December twenty seventh. So it's like literally like someone's on vacation, like sending a bank wire or something. So that was wild. And we really put together this organization because we went from having all of the stuff made and we only had to worry about our programing. So now we have to worry about all of it. Right. We are responsible for all of it. Taxes. filing the taxes, all the paperwork, you know, the Open Collective Foundation, they were the board, right? So our board meetings, we didn't have to file board meeting minutes with the state. We didn't have to do any of that, like administrative management. And now we do. And so we sort of like, we're like, well, this is what we're doing. Throw it all together. and got that settled and then as for the past you know few months we've been working on what month is it may we've been working on getting all of that together um it's just it's a very slow process to write you know we had to we had our first board meeting where we had to First, we had to write the bylaws and you have to write the Art of the Corporation and fix them. And then you have to approve them in a formal meeting. And there's just, you know, we're really trying to, like, in addition to there being rules that we need to follow, we are also very much conscious of the fact that we're setting the precedent for this organization, right? Like we're trying to do it right the first time so that, you know, as this organization grows, as the processes grow beyond just like, you know, me, Courtney and Katie that we can bring on more people that the members can be more participant in it. So I think it's been really, I think we're building something really strong and really solid. I know we are actually, I don't just think we are, I know we are. And I'm really. I'm really proud of that, but it is also very slow. What do you hope to, uh, what do you hope the WordPress community or WP community collective, um, like, what do you, what do you hope for the future? Like, what do you, what are you striving for? What do you, what is the sort of the, the goal or the, uh, like a mission statement? Well, I mean, we have our mission statement, which I should probably have memorized and be able to recite to you now, but I do not. But I can, you know, our... I can talk to you more about our ethos and our values. Sure. Our ethos in terms of the community, though, is really... We want to be able to be the voice of the community. We want to be able to have a space where the community, and this means the human beings in the community, are able to... communicate, collaborate, work together to, you know, figure like, like speak with a unified voice as well, because this is a lot of that, that, the issue that's come up, right? Is if, you know, you've got individuals speaking over here and then you have a big company or a big company over here, you know, those, those things speak louder than the individuals who like, you know, have to go to the store to get dinner later and don't have, you know, all that. It's for the same reasons we were talking about earlier. So that is really important. And then, you know, it's, it's also this, the idea that together we, we all have, especially for WordPress. So we've expanded so that we are able to work with other sort of adjacent areas, open source in general. So, you know, we can support the downstream and the upstream and also, you know, we could collaborate with Drupal, for example. But our, I totally got distracted because I just collaborating with Drupal and I wanted to say something about that. But yeah, it's, At this point, it's not just about the voice, it really is about the humans, because it's easy to just brush off the community as this entity, right? The community does this, the community does that, but we are all a bunch of individuals in here. in this community, right? And we're not a thing, we're people. And we need to be able to support ourselves as people, be understanding as people. So we're really just sort of leaning into that, that we are the community collective and not the software collective, right? So we're not... And ultimately, one of the things that I think that, I mean, you talked about it a little bit earlier, but just to be absolutely clear for anyone who's listening who hasn't had conversations with you or isn't in the WPCC Slack like I am, I know that an objective or a goal is this idea of like, if you like... actually sponsoring like in fiscal like dollar bills people to contribute to the project as a whole like that's that's something that that as you said the foundation and matt said that that will never happen we have this new organization where it's built and structured in such a way that would actually support uh support that so that that money from GoDaddy and anybody else who's contributing to the financial-ness entity of the collective, what they're contributing to is potentially being able to sponsor projects like the Drupal Association is able to do for projects within the Drupal ecosystem. Yeah. And, you know, going back to that same, like, what do we have to contribute? Like, if we don't have five percent of our time or whatever, even just using five for the future as a framework. Sure. Why not? You know, five percent of either my time or my money is like, you know, this much. And it's like, I can give that to the project in fits and starts, but what if I combined that with yours? And then we were able to make that into something that supports someone to do those things. So it's really about, it's not, there's another, there's not a, it's not exactly crowdfunding in this concept. It kind of is, but there's a, I think it's called, is it called Kiva? It's like the loan. I don't know if that's the right word, but it's like micro loans where it's like, you know, everybody, yeah, everybody puts in like two bucks and then they're able to give this loan to, obviously we're not loaning people money. We're giving them, we're paying them, but you know, they're able to combine that money and then give that loan to somebody. And then, you know, so it's like, many hands make light work or a bunch of drops of water make the ocean or whatever that is, I combine my time in the form of dollars and you combine your time in the form of dollars. And we put those things together and we put those together with our, the rest of our collective friends, maybe some sponsorships from some companies. And then we're able to do things with that, that we all want to do with that. And so a lot of our process has been on, or a lot of our work so far has been on developing the process for our membership our organization to be able to weigh in on that and say what do we actually what do we the collective want to do what what do we want to fund what is important to us um and so um we're developing ways we're hopefully launching those soon for um we are launching this soon not hopefully uh ways that the the membership is allowed to not allowed to, but empowered to discuss those and approve things like and be like, yes, we want to do this. And so it's not just fellowships. So fellowships are a more long term investment in like a person and their expertise. So, for example, if someone was working in, let's say, security, right, they would want to that's an important area. They might not just be working on the security team. Maybe PHP code sniffer needs some help with some feature that's happening, right? So they could really be sort of representing that topic, that area of need, as opposed to just being funded to do this one thing. So that's more of a fellowship. And then we've developed projects And the projects are much more contained and specific where we're saying, all right, we're going to do this thing, whatever that is. And it doesn't have to be, it's not like we're doing this thing forever, right? We're doing this thing for the next, we're going to do a three month project. Here are our goals. And we're going to pay more than one person to work on this. Like, it's not just, they're not like a fellow. It's like, we're going to fund this project. And so that's, I think, really powerful in terms of, having that contained defined focus that we can all get behind so it's not like we have to all agree on every philosophy of where we're going in the future it's like if we can all agree that we should do you know do xyz for four months and we need we want to accomplish this and we think it'll take this much time and here are some people for it right and we're all like yes that sounds like a good plan and then that's how our dollars combined can actually make a change that we're not all having to do it ourselves you know I'm not in core dev you know putting patches in that's just not where my expertise lies um but I do still want to fund important things like and I want to lend my support to those things so this is really a mechanism for us to do that and not just like a kickstarter where someone over there comes up with something and then we fund it right? This is we, the collective, are coming up with things ourselves and then funding our own things. And yes, other people can fund them, right? Or they can join and fund them and fund, you know, and it's going to actually take a lot of work on behalf of the members also to fund things that we want to do. But if we're all we all wanna do it and we're all working on this together. It's really like breaking down the bigger picture into these smaller projects so that we can align because we can align and we can do things if we all have a narrow enough scope that we feel confident that it's not gonna represent or do something that we don't want it to do. Like, I think that is, you know, for me, that's always been sort of, not even a concern necessarily, but like why I don't necessarily see super value in like random, like the Patreon model, like the Patreon model is also awesome, like the GitHub sponsors, but I can't expect to get anything out of that. On Patreon, I might get some posts or whatever. But really, when you're sponsoring someone like that, it's not to get something. You're just sponsoring someone. that's great there's nothing wrong with that but it doesn't necessarily accomplish the goal of getting the things done because you're not telling that person what you know you're not you're not like instructing that person so you lose that they're working on whatever they want you're like go you but this way we will all be able to really define what we want to work on do sprints you know it's a thing um and and and build things that are like small fixes, you know, small little features, you know, canonical plugins, you know, things like that, that really we all want, but we don't when we're all working separately, we can't, we can't make them happen. So that's that. That's my... Well, thank you very much. Thanks for coming on and talking to me and being one of our first guests on Community & Code. What events, where can people find you in person or online in the next few months? Well, I will be at Alt Control. I will also be at WordCamp Europe, though not at WordCamp Europe Contributor Day at this point in time. You can Google that. The best way to talk to me is to join the WPCC. You just go to the wpcommunitycollective.com, click join, just do that. We'll pop you into the Slack. I love DMing with members. I think that that's really kind of exciting that that's my job. If a member wants to talk to me, I'm like, your interests and what you want to talk about are actually... really important to me. And so I get to talk to people. It's kind of exciting. I'm kind of into it. So that's really the best way if you want to talk about WordPress stuff. Or you can follow me on all the socials at Say Read Media. It's all of them. I'm on them. Whichever one you want. Well, thanks a lot again, Say, for coming on. Thank you, Chris. And yeah, looking forward to the future of the collective, of hearing back what happens at WordCamp Europe and Alt Control Org. I think that that's a really cool sort of side thing. And yeah, looking forward to chatting again. Me too. Talk soon. Yep.