Jonathan and Luke have a chat with Jonathan Desrosiers, WordPress Core Committer and Principle Software Engineer at Bluehost. They discuss a recent episode of Crossword and a preview of Desrosiers’s now published blog post. Wold asks for clarity on do-acracy vs meritocracy and the three discuss the importance of both active and passive contributions. Desrosiers offers his guidance for new contributors.

Transcript#

Wold:
So Jonathan, when we were preparing for our final guests for the season, you were on Luke’s and my list. And when I reached out to you, it was funny that you’d mentioned that you’d actually been working on a blog post in response to a conversation that Luke and I had had. We’d been going back and forth with some speculation about some of how things have been done in Core. I think you’d called out, as I’m recalling correctly, you’d appreciated that we were trying to at least call out some of those assumptions because you’re also someone who knows a lot about what’s actually been going on there. But you haven’t published it yet. I’m Looking forward to when if and when you get the chance to finish doing so but that was a fun sort of fun context set when I reached out. So thanks for joining us today.

Desrosiers:
Yeah, of course, thank you for having me.

Carbis:
This is about the comments, isn’t it? The fact that this new feature where you can add little comments in line on each block. I think I was having a go, not exactly having a go, but I was a little upset with the implementation. And I think I’d said something like, I wasn’t around for the discussion, there must have been a good reason for this, but I don’t know what that good reason is. And it’s a bit frustrating that it’s stored as comments. So set the record straight, Jonathan. Why is it stored that way?

Desrosiers:
Ha ha. So I actually wasn’t involved with that conversation either. And ⁓ I do have the issue open in my browser to read through and actually understand that. I helped a lot with that feature as far as the polish and making sure that the overall experience of that was as good as it could be prior to release, right? We fixed bugs and we catch different things. ⁓ think one of the things I requested was the command enter to submit the note, which is standard in Google Docs and a lot of things. So I kept finding myself hitting that and I didn’t know why I wasn’t sending my note.

But what interested me the most was how you both are very self-aware of the dynamics of open source and you were being very careful to be fair to the people that did participate in the building of that feature and the feedback that you were offering and when you chose to offer that.

And so I got thinking a lot around, you know, who’s allowed to participate in open source and what are the expectations for you when you do participate and how can you participate in different ways while being mindful of this to help ensure you have a more positive journey and experience. And so I will publish this post, I promise. And I’m pretty close, but I keep going down different rabbit holes where I could write different posts and I’m like, this is too long. I need to cut this part out. But essentially I found that I was painting in many ways the same problem that Dries Buytaert had outlined around the Maker-Taker problem.

I stepped back and I was thinking about the types of contributions you can have. And I created two really large high level buckets of active and passive. so, you know, passive is everybody who’s, who’s using a piece of software is actually passively contributing in some way. And so the, the very basic level of that is you’re voting by saying I, the software solved a problem of mine and over time, if you keep using it, you’re saying it’s doing a good enough job solving that problem that I’m going to continue using it and it’s valuable to me. ⁓ But unfortunately, there’s a ceiling with passive contributing, right? There’s when you, another example is when you, which is more practical, where when you have a WordPress site, it checks for an update every so often. And in order to return the right result the WordPress.org server needs to know what version of WordPress you’re actually running right now, what version of PHP you’re running, what extensions do you have active for PHP. And this helps WordPress determine if you are compatible with the next version that’s available, if there is one.

But at scale, that paints a really detailed picture of what’s the percentage of sites that has a given extension available. We recently had that with bcrypt and adding password hashing, improved password hashing to every WordPress site where there was enough sites that had bcrypt where we were confident enough to be able to make that change. Right. And so that’s, that’s a very valuable contribution, but many people have no awareness at all that they’re actually contributing to the project in that way.

Carbis:
Right, with the passive contributions, they’re great and helpful and everything, but really at the end of the day, WordPress is a do-ocracy and passive isn’t really so much doing as the active contributions might be.

Wold:
Well, actually, just before you go into that, Jonathan, I was reading your post on Maintainers. And one thing that stood out to me, because I would have agreed with Luke, but you called out actually that it’s.. a do-ocracy by definition is more about like those who show up versus WordPress actually be more of a meritocracy. Because just because you show up doesn’t mean the thing gets done. But to me, it feels like we’re somewhere in the middle of that. Because if I go into a Trac ticket and leave comments, those may be useful.

Desrosiers:
Agreed.

Wold:
And it may be helpful and may have an influence, but just because I did that out of nowhere doesn’t mean that gets done versus we have this thing about like merit that is a part of it where it’s like, how much weight do we give to like the, folks who’ve been showing, not only showing up, but actually getting things done for a while.

Carbis:
So that’s interesting Jonathan. I’ve actually never made a distinction myself between a meritocracy and a do-ocracy. I usually use those synonymously. ⁓ So what are you saying? Are you saying that there’s a difference and you’d be right, right? There’s a difference between the people who maybe create a pull request, create a Trac ticket change set and then also the people who actually get those merged.

Desrosiers:
So go ahead, well, so I..

Wold:
Yeah, please go ahead, Jonathan.

Desrosiers:
I think we may need to come up with code names because we’re both Jonathan and, I think that was at Jonathan Wold, right? Is that correct, Luke?

Carbis:
Yeah.Well, I yeah, I was replying to Jonathan Wold. I’ll just call you Wold. All right.

Wold:
Yeah. Good enough.

Desrosiers:
Hahaha

Wold:
What I was actually doing is pulling up your piece on Maintainers. You talked about this and I was going to look at your definition there. So it’s like you said, as opposed to decisions being strictly made by those who show up a do-ocracy. WordPress is meritocratic. So you were talking more about like commit access. You’re not going to just give commit to someone who shows up, but it to me sparked enough of the distinction that was worth discussing where it’s like, there is value in showing up, but like, where, where is that on the sliding scale of influence?

Desrosiers:
Sure. And when you show up, there’s a couple of things that are very basic that help you have a good experience, right? When you show up and participate, the expectation is that you’re prepared, you’ve done some research, you’re at least knowledgeable enough about what you want to talk about that you can have a positive effect, right? And I think that the more people that do show up, the better the result in the end. ⁓

But we can’t let everybody have commit access, right? Like there has to be some level of do-ocracy blended with meritocracy. ⁓ You know, there could be someone that is very prolific with some other software, right? And then they show up to contribute to WordPress, but we wouldn’t necessarily just trust them because of their merit from this other endeavor to make good decisions in the context of WordPress. They could still show up.

We still want them to show up. We want them to work on problems and help us solve things in different ways because they have unique experience and ways of thinking. But they need to demonstrate some level of goodwill and ⁓ good decision-making in the context of our project in order to be granted that capability of committing.

Wold:
So something I’m kind of I’m thinking through here. I like this idea of classifying active versus passive because it resonates with something I have thought about for a long time too, which is that there is inherent value in usage and also just advocate like there’s something about when folks use WordPress and open source software in general. I think there’s a recognition that when you get others to use it with you that you also value there that you also receive value in it. That stood out to me for a long time.

Like why do people like show up at meetups and what’s what’s in it for them? And there’s a mix of different things. But I look at it, you know, I sort of set aside altruism and other things, set that aside. And it’s like, there’s an inherent value, because if I can get more people to adopt it, ⁓ that that benefits me as well. And that feels like that fits into that passive category. It’s like, how do we increase the passive contribution by more people using it?

Carbis:
The real question on everybody’s lips then becomes is sponsorship active or passive contribution?

Desrosiers:
Yes. So in my posts, I don’t aim to get into the types of contribution like financial, time-based or effort-based, whatever. ⁓ I more want to focus on, I do want to answer that, but I’m going to focus on how do you recognize which group you’re in? When is it okay to be in each group? So in the example of the notes feature, you look, we’re choosing to be a passive contributor there because you’re standing by and you’re learning. And even though you’re not submitting your thoughts to help improve the feature right now, you’re intentionally being passive for the moment, right? ⁓

Carbis:
Well, in that moment, yeah, but, but this was after I had already created a pull request, a changeset on Trac and submitted it, which, you know, it hasn’t got any attention and understandably so because, I think, I mean, I won’t get into the weeds there because I had to touch so many different things. I understand why this would never actually be merged. I understand why it wasn’t done in the first place by actually, by actually doing it. Because it gets complicated, which was my frustration, which then I was expressing. So it came from an active place.

Desrosiers:
But you were self-aware enough to know that there needed to be a period where you were passive in order to offer that valuable feedback, right? And so I find that for me, passive contributors are the most exciting because there’s just a sheer volume of potential. There’s so many people in that group. And in producing open source software, the book by Karl Fogel, he says that each interaction with a user is an opportunity to get a new participant. And so when we think about passive contribution from that lens, it’s, you know, maybe there’s the next lead developer or the next plugin reviewer or theme developer. And we just don’t know it yet because we haven’t interacted with them in the right way to inspire them or show them the way or help them understand how.

Yeah, I really was focusing on how do you effectively balance between those two groups? Because it’s important that as an active contributor, you do at times remain passive, but you should be self-aware of that and understand that even criticism is important. And it’s easier to flesh things out and understand things better if we participate together rather than remaining passive too long and then you move on to something else or forget it or don’t have the same viewpoint in two weeks. And then we can never properly give that credence and consider it.

Carbis:
Right. And I guess it’s easier and more effective to be a passive contributor when you’ve also had experience being an active contributor too. I guess that’s the flip side of that. You can be more, more generous and more understanding, because you’ve been on the other side.

Desrosiers:
And there’s also dynamics around it, like sponsorship, like you said, ⁓ people that understand the requirements behind actively contributing and being reliable and being prepared, right? And there’s non-zero time requirements and resource requirements for that. so to that statement too is that, yeah, if you have been active in the past, you understand those things better. And so how can we make these more obvious or clear or educate more people about the dynamics of open source and how projects actually are maintained so that we can possibly activate more of these contributors to grow our project and open source in general.

Carbis:
That brings a lot more nuance to my default stance of if you don’t like something then just do it. Just change it. This is an open source project.

Desrosiers:
And we need people like that. Like we do need some people to do that, right? And the other aspect is that like when you do that, it’s important to approach it like, you know, don’t show up saying someone made the wrong decision. Show up seeking an understanding and context. And we can never know everything about a single thing. It’s impossible in the world of the internet and especially where there’s just so much information. There’s so many people participating in different things and discussions. ⁓

There’s history, right? Open source has been around for decades now, and so there’s people that have probably dealt with the same problems that you’re looking to solve now. But yeah, you just have to, yep, yep. But you have to approach it constructively. so knowing which group you’re in can help you do that more effectively and arrive at a better result for everybody.

Carbis:
A lot of it is offline too, yeah.

Wold:
There’s two threads here that are standing out to me that I’d like to pull on so to speak. The first, I’m thinking more about this idea of active and passive. And I’d like to talk about this, how do you better harness the energy of these passive contributors? I wanna talk about that. And then I would like to touch on like, how do you move from passive to active? Because I have some of my own experiences there that are standing out. But on the first one,

One thing that stood out to me that makes WordPress and open source like ecosystems and software unique is that there’s a lot of what I would what I sort of would visualize as like latent energy in the space that’s built up by folks that are using it that are having their own little worlds of of usage and experience with it. And I’m curious for your perspective on this. It’s like you’re I’m hearing you and I haven’t heard a lot of this advocating for like the value of passive.

And that’s resonating with my own experience and thinking on it. And one of the things that I’ve wrestled with is I think I’ve presumed this, okay, the goal is to move people from active or from passive to active, right? And that makes sense that you have a percentage of that. But what’s standing out to me is like, how do you, how do we, how do we can, how could we better think about the value of passive and harnessing some of that energy more effectively? You gave one example with the, just the value of making decisions based on usage.

which we’re getting that value. There’s an interesting question about how do you do that effectively in open source software? Because we don’t have this sort of, we don’t have all those usage insights. But that’s the first thing I love your input on. How do we better harness as a project and as an ecosystem all this passive energy that’s in the space?

Desrosiers:
One thing that I was considering is that in education, there’s something called the student teacher ratio. And so, you know, it’s usually like 10 to one if it’s really good or 20 or 30 to one if it’s not so good. Uh, but it’s essentially just a metric to measure the, uh, density of students in each classroom per adult. Right. And so the, theory, the more, the less students you have per teacher, the better their education ends up being because they have more one-on-one attention.

I, and it doesn’t track that way a hundred percent because there’s other things at play as well. But, uh, so. You know, what about. There may be, what if there’s a third group where it’s kind of people in limbo or people that are aware of this tension between the two groups and they’re not quite sure which way they want to lean, but we need a certain ratio of active to passive or active to this limbo group where we’re able to effectively give the attention that these people need. ⁓ I’ve written in the past that, you know, activated contributors that don’t receive the guidance or attention that they need are just future ghosts that are going to haunt your project. And so that’s just as important.

Carbis:
That’s a nice metaphor.

Desrosiers:
Yeah. And I built off of Tammie Lister. She had a post about that. ⁓ And it inspired me to write that where it’s, you know, we can activate people as much as we want, but we need to be prepared to harness them. And this is particularly important right now with the WP credits program, where these schools that are, when I first heard about it, it was, ⁓ there’s 80,000 contributor hours coming our way. And my first spot, my first response was, holy cow, like what, what are they going to do? Who’s going to help them do that? Where are they going to find this work? How are they going to ensure they have a good experience so that they continue, you know, contributing the WordPress? You don’t want them to.

Carbis:
Were you able to find those answers?

Desrosiers:
I, so I know I’m still kind of thinking about that, but, the, was encouraged to know that it wasn’t all at once. And so it’s spread out, but there’s also mentors in place that are helping classes with that. And so it’s a bit more distributed, but there will be situations where we get an influx of people that need help.

My talk at WordCamp Asia is about automation and how it’s worth 10 times the amount of effort to put in. And one of the things to think about automation is yes, it accomplishes tasks, but it also documents a process because automation is very finite. It either fails or it succeeds and the requirements are really clearly spelled out. Right. And so when you automate things, you’re also documenting your processes and just, just things like that, that we can do to make things easier for people that are more novice or learning to pick up things and run with them. Right now, I’m documenting the process to update the version of Node.js that WordPress uses. And so we’re on 20.x right now, and it still has support for another six or seven months or so, but 24 just became ActiveLTS. And there’s a few contributors that were opening pull requests to update that, which is good, but we had to step in like, wait a minute, this isn’t as simple as it seems. know, if you update it in Gutenberg, you have to actually update it in core first. And to do that, you have to have Node.js that version installed on the WordPress.org build server, which creates the actual packages for, to distribute WordPress. And they have to be done in a specific order.

And then there’s the, there’s a file that says what version should be used. And then there’s version constraints, which controls that. ⁓ and you also have to consider things like the hosting tests, that run distributed. So different hosts can run the unit tests on their own servers. And they also have to have that version of, of node installed. so getting all that stuff out of my head and documented in a, in the handbook somewhere is just one way that I can, I can free that process and, and let that historical knowledge from participating in that task over time free so that others can actually learn about it and take it on themselves.

Wold:
So I want to come back to this idea real quick of harnessing the passive, because I love what you’re calling out there. I want to talk more about the active side of things. With passive, here’s one example to me. What I heard you call out is like you have all these folks that are using WordPress, and their usage can help determine decisions that are whatever limited input that we do have that we can use that to make decisions.

A good example to me would be like, okay, well, how can we do that more effectively? Another thing that comes top of mind is even though we have limited data, I could see, for instance, a hosting company ⁓ who has different policies about what they collect or don’t, or a particular product, maybe in a position to offer even more insights to the project, being able to offer like, hey, here’s what we’re noticing about how this particular feature or functionality is being used.

Do you feel like, there other examples like that or even with just that example, are there ways that we could more effectively harness this category of passive contributors?

Desrosiers:
I think we need to be better about telling our stories. And so I think that as a project, we’re not very good at that. We do have some..

Carbis:
You’re saying the WordPress contributors aren’t great bloggers?

Desrosiers:
Yes, in many ways, yes. We all need to be better bloggers, I think, just like we need to contribute more whenever we can. I think HeroPress is a great example of being outspoken about our journeys and it’s ⁓ incredibly diverse. We love Topher. And I love how it’s such a diverse and varying list of people that share their stories there because there’s so much there that…

Desrosiers:
There’s so much variation that someone could find something there that resonates and inspires them, right?

Another one of my favorite examples is the keynote at WordCamp Europe last year with Noel Tock, where he talked about ⁓ how WordPress was empowering people in war-torn Ukraine. And, you know, that’s a very impactful and incredible story to share about how people are able to accomplish things in such a torn up world that’s in flux, not knowing where their next meal or if their bomb is going to hit them the next day, but they’re able to use this free software to save dogs or feed people or rescue people. so those are the stories I think that we need to do a better job of telling, not just the individual stories of the people building the software, but also what it empowers in the world.

Because to me, that’s what makes it really rewarding to be an open source maintainer of WordPress is that I never know who’s using it for what. know, some people build a living on WordPress. They have a store, they have a website, and it’s their primary way to get customers or their primary way to generate income to feed themselves and their families. And so ⁓ that’s really motivating for me. And it’s not for everybody, but it’s just one of the ways we could be more vocal about what we’re building with WordPress, what it empowers you to do. Why should you be a part of this community, ⁓ what’s in it for you and how can that help you in whatever your journey is, wherever you’re at in that.

Wold:
What I’m hearing you say is that the stories of like how these folks are using it, these passive contributors would be helpful to those that are active. I see a bit of ⁓ a tension there in like, how do you do that at scale? And the answer may just be that you can’t. Like one thing I would worry about is like would be maybe 10 stories come in about how a particular feature has all this impact. And then that would skew decisions being made in favor of that at the expense of the underrepresented ⁓ majority ⁓ who just because the way we work as humans, we tend to not think well about really big numbers and we have what’s in front of us. But maybe that’s a small concern.

What I’m hearing you say is like the stories is the starting point to help us better understand.

Desrosiers:
Well, so to circle back, your question was focused on how do we encourage people to become active, right? Not so much how we make decisions, but more how do we activate people, right? And so…

Wold:
Well, that’s where I wanted to go.

But the first part was this like this idea of like, how do we better harness the energy of the passive? And one thing I’m hearing you say that’s practical is draw out more invite more stories, encourage more stories of those letting them know that their story is a form of contribution that’s valuable.

Carbis:
It’s reminds me a lot of what we were doing in the early, early Gutenberg days of like the beta period of Gutenberg. I like to think of those as the good old days where we were shopping around this plugin and getting lots and lots of feedback. And there was a whole bunch of contribution in the community around, and people were excited, but specifically around user testing around.

Like recording videos of people using it and taking highlights from that. And man, imagine what could be done these days with AI. And I know that you did a bunch of that with the notes feature, right?

Desrosiers:
So I think that that was a great time and I really wanna get back to doing more user testing like that. But I think at the time, it was a bad student teacher ratio there, right? We had too many people that were heads down in the weeds building the thing. We had some people that were out there finding feedback and then we didn’t have enough people in the middle that were reacting to that feedback and blending it into what was being built and harnessing that middle ground of people who are becoming more active, right, through their feedback and being more vocal, but we weren’t able to harness all of that to the best of our ability because our ratio was off there.

And so that there was a great example of, you know, there’s no one size fits all formula and it likely changes even between a project given times of year or what’s being worked on, but being mindful of what that is is very important because it can help you more effectively accept feedback and improve things, or it can help you more effectively take those people that might be the next all-stars of the community and onboard them and guide them to the right way to do things. It’s just something that’s so important to be mindful of.

Carbis:
And it almost gets back to what you were talking about earlier with automation. know when you talk about automation, when you talked about it earlier, usually we think of processes that run in the background scripts and whatever. But also when I think of automation, think of workflows, manual workflows that we execute by hand. And I think that that is a kind of automation too. So I wonder if there do need to be some kind of processes around that.

So imagine in the GitHub for Gutenberg, if where we’ve got like little tags for needs design feedback, we could have a little tag for needs user testing and then someone can grab that and, ⁓ or maybe like make a couple of different variations of it, mockups, or, ⁓ maybe a few different pull requests to test. That’s one feature that, that I think a lot of people don’t know about is being able to spin up WordPress playground of a pull request, I love and then test it exactly and feed that back.

Desrosiers:
And that could be an easy way to activate contributors, right? They see something that’s affecting them. They look at that and they, I can actually just test this right now. And then maybe that’s their on-ramp to contributing.

Carbis:
I think in general, those GitHub tags are one of the most effective ways of attracting contributors. And I know that Trac has similar things, but they’re not colorful and they’re not pretty and it’s not easy to find. And I mean that genuinely. do. And so like, if I’m trying to show somebody, you’re not technical. Here’s how you can contribute.

I’m going to get up and looking for the needs design feedback tag or needs whatever, you know, like we can look through the tags and go, ⁓ this is a tag that could be for you. And that’s just such an easy on-ramp to actually starting to contribute. you’re a bit of a developer, but you’re still new to the project. Try this first time ticket.

Desrosiers:
Yeah, agreed. And part of that is documenting what it is, right? And the other part is making things more approachable. You know, we have, what, 8,000 open tickets on Trac and at Contributor Day, the number one thing that you deal with is, can’t find something to start with. I don’t know what to find to start with, right? And there’s a good first bug keyword, but a lot of those are half done or half patches and it’s not clear that, you know, they might not be right. You should test them or you could contribute your own patch. You know, that’s part of the process is different approaches to fixing it. ⁓ But yeah, that’s definitely, I agree, they’re definitely good. I would argue that the Trac versions of those are a little bit better documented and they’re easier to find. ⁓ But you have to kind of know which labels to look at in GitHub. It’s not as, and there’s so many more labels to go through on the GitHub instance, but.

Carbis:
Well, then Trac has the also has the advantage that you can more easily browse like a blessed list of this is these are the issues we’re targeting for the next release. I think that that’s a little bit harder to do also on GitHub.

Desrosiers:
Yeah, there’s milestones, but it’s difficult to… They’re not surfaced very well in easy to find ways. You have to kind of know which area to go in and get up and even then you have to know what each one, how each project uses each one of those.

Carbis:
And I guess just the fact that we have this split, right? There’s a split in the project. GitHub obviously is the one that most people are used to working with. So it’s more in theory, the interface is more modern and user friendly, I guess. ⁓ So that also causes a bit of a dynamic where you might have some like more old school contributors going, I’m just gonna stick to Trac.

And you might have some new contributors that I don’t really feel comfortable with Trac. I’m more of a, of a GitHub kind of guy or girl. And so I’m just going to stick to this one. Yeah. I don’t know how to resolve that, but I guess like passively contributing by calling it out.

Desrosiers:
Well, I think that the one way we’re trying to solve that is just to reinforce that ⁓ core is Gutenberg, right? And Gutenberg equals core. So even though they’re in two separate places and the code base is divided into different ⁓ areas, it’s still a part of the same software and we’re all in the same team. And so as much as we can, it’s important to remember that. And it’s just a matter of having different expertise or different experience in a different area.

Wold:
I like that.

Desrosiers:
In the past, there might have been, oh, these people work on the multi-site component, right? But I’ve never used multi-site. I don’t really care about it. But their input’s still valuable. What they’re working on is still important to the greater piece of the, to the greater pie. And it’s just a matter of reducing the friction between those two from a process perspective. We, for 7.0, there’s going to be some new admin pages in 7.0 and we had to redo part of the build process to support that in a way that the plugin could have those pages and they would be copied over to WordPress core and trunk in order to be tested within ⁓ trunk itself. And so now that that syncing process happens more often and it’s aimed at making it ⁓ less of an undertaking to merge all of the changes from Gutenberg that have been worked on over the last 10, 15 plugin releases into WordPress core right before beta.

And then inevitably something gets forgotten and it’s not anybody’s fault. It’s just that the sheer mass of what’s being included is so large. And now instead of only having the beta period to test that code in the context of WordPress itself instead of as a plugin, which is substantially different in some cases.

We have anybody running the nightly every time that that’s updated. They are actually testing the latest in the Gutenberg plugin within the context of WordPress core itself. And so the benefits there are reducing that friction, reinforcing that we’re all in the same team, but then it also just opens the door for higher quality testing and more of it over a longer period of time.

Wold:
I like that a lot. So last thing that’s the top of mind for me at the moment is how do you like how do you help folks? How do we reduce the friction to moving from passive to active? As I think back over some of my experiences, one one highlight for me was at WordCamp US. ⁓ I’m forgetting who did it, but someone did some amazing work to pull together a bunch of ⁓ I went over to the hosting team table and someone to pull together in slack like hey, here’s a bunch of first things that could use attention today. And because I’m like, I got a couple of hours, I want to jump in and do something useful that’s going to be valuable. And I was able to take a couple of those and get something done. And it stands out to me how important it is, the effort that goes into making contribution accessible for those expressing the desire to be active. What I want to touch on though, and this has come up a couple of times in some of the conversations Luke and I’ve had in previous episodes.

I personally feel this gap where I’m like, I’m like, for instance, I’ve been actively using the Site Editor lately. ⁓ I’ve been working on a project that’s had me like doing a bunch of building and like, so my familiarity has actually gone up a lot. And I’ve been taking that experience to sure.

Carbis:
I can just hear all of the contributors when you bring up the Site Editor go, what’s he gonna say?

Desrosiers:
Hahaha.

Wold:
I’ve then had the experience of teaching someone else how to use things in it. Just earlier today, I recorded a quick video showing how to use a particular block. so as I’m thinking about that, there’s a few times where I’ve noticed things that didn’t quite work as expected or there’s a bug there. And I’ve noticed that my assumption is like, someone probably knows about this. It’ll probably get resolved in some future release. And at least for me,

I felt that there’s a what is probably a much bigger gap than actually exists between my ability to notice that and give feedback on it. And that’s that can just be on me, but I feel like others would experience the same thing where it wouldn’t occur to them that their input would be valuable or could be valuable in the right place.

Desrosiers:
Mm-hmm.

Carbis:
This, I want to jump in before you ⁓ JD, Jonathan Desrosiers, ⁓ because I think that this is something I’ve encountered a lot too, is there’s a search problem. There’s a discovery problem. How many times on Trac are things being closed as a duplicate? And same on GitHub, because there’s so many, so many issues.

It’s just sometimes really, really hard, even if you know what you’re looking for to find the right one. I think who was it? Somebody recently, ⁓ launched a AI search, ⁓ like an LLM integrated, ⁓ MCP endpoint for being able to search Trac. I think, and I kind of hope that AI is going to be able to step in here and maybe make that particular job easier.

Desrosiers:
Yeah, the Trac search, well, the search within Trac is notoriously not great. ⁓ I know some older contributors from the older days where they would funnel all the emails from the fire hose into their email and they would use their Gmail to find what they were looking for. Sometimes I ⁓ fall back to Google and I’ll do a site colon and I put Tracs URL and search that way sometimes. ⁓

Another thing I had seen was a colleague of mine had built something called Trac Search, which was an Elastic Press instance that consumed Trac and you could find things better that way. That’s not up anymore, but I think it was someone on the AI team that was playing around with that with the MCP connection there. I don’t know. I looked at it and then I never returned to it. So I need to research that again and see. I need to be passive there for a minute on my response and come back to it.

Yeah, I think that any signal is a good signal, even if it’s negative, right? In the example you used of a lot of duplicates, at worst, it’s just a signal that multiple people are having this issue and it’s impacting them enough that they’re finding Trac and they’re making a ticket, right? And there’s always going to be some level of gardening that happens. Ideally, there’s a reasonably low amount of friction for someone to create that ticket, right? So they have to register as a WordPress.org user and then they can create a ticket. We probably don’t want just a form that’s just open to the internet for anybody to show up without logging in or doing anything to submit a problem that they have because that would be crazy. ⁓ We would probably get way too much volume, right? Our ratio would be way off on that and how we’re able to handle that. But we want to accept feedback and be ready to accept feedback as much as we can.

And many times it’s way faster for someone that’s in the weeds contributing already to see something and connect it to something that already exists. so in my opinion, it’s better to have those duplicates and that stuff because it’s almost like casting a wide net, right? We’re collecting as much feedback as we can, as many reports as we can, and eventually it just gets whittled down to the keepers, the ones that we don’t have to throw back in the ocean for whatever reason.

Wold:
What I’m hearing you say then is, and part of why I’m bringing this up is that I want to lower the barrier of thinking in my own head for this. What I’m hearing you say in the case of like the site editor, it’d probably be to go to the GitHub ⁓ repo where it’s being worked on, check and see if there is something there, check for a process about submitting feedback, but then just open something up. for me, my go-to would be to like, describe the issue and like record a video of the issue being demonstrated and like try to give some basic context to it and then hope that that’s useful. ⁓ But until I would know better, I would look for someone to say, actually, it’d be more useful if you did it this and this and this way. I’m like, cool. And then, I could have read that over here. Well, then how can we reduce the gaps so someone else could have found that as well? Because I made some efforts and couldn’t. So anyway, yeah.

Desrosiers:
Well, just by reporting that, I maybe it’s true that it’s not written down somewhere and you’re just discovering this nuance that is missing docs or missing user docs or something. ⁓ I guess, you your whole thing is it’s, you’re assuming that things that you discover are already known by people using it more than you, right? And I think that sometimes that’s reasonable, but we should never make an assumption to that because WordPress is so great because it’s so flexible, but it’s also so bad because it’s so flexible, right? You can have all these plugins or something and they all interact differently. They don’t do things to the same quality or the same way and they build their own, reinvent their own mousetraps. But ⁓ it’s great in the way that it helps us discover more edge cases and more ⁓ use cases that we may not have even thought about.

Maybe somebody’s running WordPress on their fridge or something in there managing their grocery list with it, or it could be anything like that. But I never assume that what you’ve discovered is so basic that it’s already known. ⁓ One thing, I do speak at a lot of work camps, but I get stuck in this cycle of, ⁓ I didn’t like homework as a student, slide decks make me feel like homework, right? And so I get in this cycle of I’m doing my deck and I’m typing my notes out and stuff.

And I get in this, this lull where I say, this is nobody’s going to care about this. It’s kind of dumb. This feels obvious, right? Everybody’s already knows this. But then, you know, you come out of it, you finish and you give your talk and the feedback after that is always rewarding because you, you realize, wow. Like I know more than most or more than some, or like there’s some level you’re not at the bottom with this knowledge. It’s not where you’re just picking up the low hanging fruit.

If you’re in here and you’re building and you’re using the software every day, like we do, then you know more than most of the users. so reminding yourself of that fact is helpful to actually getting over that hump of just sharing what you want to share and what you think, what you’ve found, because it’s likely that it is important to someone, even if it’s not something that’s been discovered fresh. The way you describe it could be a way that resonates with someone else and helps them understand the feature better or the response you receive and yeah, it’s better to have an abundance of ⁓ details rather than none at all because you didn’t, you chose not to.

Carbis:
I can definitely relate to getting that positive feedback after a WordCamp talk. My wife always does a good job of shrinking my head back down to size when I get home from a WordCamp. ⁓ Jonathan Desrosiers, thank you so much for coming on Crossword. Could you please tell listeners where they might find you online?

Desrosiers:
Yeah, my website and my blog is JonathanDesrosiers.com ⁓ and I’m pretty much DesrosJ, just D-E-S-R-O-S-J on every social network, also on the WordPress.org Slack. And maybe I’ll see you on WordPress Core Trac or the Gutenberg repo on GitHub.