Josepha Haden Chomphosy joins Jonathan and Luke to discuss ecosystem thinking, municipal government, influence versus control, potholes, bathrooms, data centers, and AI in WordPress. Josepha shares her perspective on the three things everyone in WordPress wants and her hope for its future. Jonathan asks the easy question thirty minutes in and pulls the thread one more time. Luke complains about kids on e-bikes and appreciates a stretched metaphor.

Transcript#

Jonathan:
Josepha, how would you explain what ecosystem thinking is to someone if you’re at, like, a dinner party?

Josepha:
Ooh, my dinner party pitch for ecosystem thinking. I’ve had to do this a lot recently. So on the one hand, you have this concept of ecosystem thinking, and on the other hand, you have this concept of systems thinking. And systems thinking is a little bit more understandable, in my experience, just because people understand that to have any sufficiently large, complex organization, you have to have some systems to make sure it works. Like if you’ve got a train, you need some rails, you need some tracks. But for ecosystem thinking, you can kind of back your way into it from there and say — if you have this product that is extensible, that you can build on, that you can do things with, you also have to have a way for people to figure out that it exists, what to do with it, how to do things with it, where they can create services, what holes there are, what gaps there are in the infrastructure that exists. And sort of bring around this whole concept of the roads and bridges of what you’re working on, and applying that to whatever sort of product or company you’re working with, I think, is an easy-to-grasp thing. Most of us live on a street. Most of us have to get on public transit at some point. And so I like to look after the streets and future storefronts of any sort of community that’s building up around a product.

Jonathan:
So for someone who might be building a product on the open web, whether it’s open source or proprietary, from your lens and experience, what’s the relevance or importance of ecosystem thinking? There’s so many things you have to do to build a product. Where does ecosystem thinking come into it?

Josepha:
The relevance of ecosystem building, and thinking through systems as you go, is to make sure that, one, anyone who comes to use your product or take part in your services doesn’t have to know exactly the right person to get the best answer for something. But on the other hand, it also gives you an opportunity to make fertile ground for other, more brilliant people than you to do things that you hadn’t imagined yet. And so knowing what the foundational elements are certainly can help you to, I don’t know, make space for future genius. That sounds so wild when I say that. It sounds very woo-woo. But also, I know that I’m not the smartest person in any room, and honestly, you shouldn’t be if you’re gonna be trying to do something great.

Luke:
So it’s been a minute since you left the WordPress project. What have you been doing since?

Josepha:
I am currently hanging around in municipal government. I’m getting very involved in — ..

Luke:
Hold on, hold on. Sorry, for an Australian here, what’s municipal government?

Josepha:
Sure. So I’m on my city council. I was appointed and then elected to the governing body for the city. And so we have staff that does a lot of the enforcement of rules and regulations, but then we have a city council that pulls together policy and — not advises, sets the plan for the city. So that’s what I’ve been doing.

Luke:
And how do you enact ecosystem thinking in that role?

Josepha:
Yeah. So on the one hand, a lot of it is sort of there by default, because the infrastructure has to exist for a city to exist. It’s rare that you have a city that’s just like, we’re here now — we used to be a farm and now we’re a town. Although my town just had its seventy-fifth birthday on July second.

Luke:
Happy birthday.

Josepha:
So, young by United States standards, I suppose. And global standards. But what really became crystal clear for me as I started doing this work was that there is nothing that a city is planning to do — nothing that a large organization like this is planning to do — that started planning two months ago and definitely is gonna get done in the next two months. Everything is on a five-year cycle, six-year cycle, ten-year cycle.

Luke:
It’s so similar to the ecosystem you left.

Josepha:
Exactly. You have to not only always be looking ahead to what might come in the future — and trying to predict the future for anything is obviously hard — but then also being fully aware of any partnering group that you’re gonna have to work with, and what’s on the horizon for them for the next ten years. And so that’s anyone that needs to partner from a land perspective or from a financial perspective. And just know, like, are you gonna have more money for the following types of things in the future? Is that a thing that we can also then have some of the money of? Is that land that you’re using gonna be a thing that we need in the near future so that we can move utilities around, things like that? And it really has made me have a really wide lens that I don’t think that I really had before. Just because when you’re leading WordPress, you’re the only WordPress in town. And so everybody’s really watching what you’re doing, and you kind of live in a fishbowl. And now I have to sort of be on the other side.

Jonathan:
So I have limited background and context for municipal government — it’s something I’ve found interesting for as far back as I can remember. I’m curious, do you interface with, like, economic development? Are there groups that are focused on recruiting businesses to the area? It’s been a long time since I’ve been involved — my context is getting involved with some of these economic development initiatives and seeing them trying to recruit big businesses to the area and what that looked like. How does that intersect with the type of work that you’re doing?

Josepha:
For me — we’re small and landlocked, and so this city does not have a lot of recruitment that happens. But we do work with a lot of land developers, retail developers, things like that, to get the land that we do have revitalized. Our town is old, old. But certainly there are towns around us that have people who specifically go out and develop business opportunities and bring those to those cities.

Jonathan:
So the reason why I ask, or what’s top of mind for me — it’s interesting, there’s this incentives piece within ecosystem thinking. And at least what I’ve always found intriguing about it is, sure, you could take an approach where you’re trying to control it — this is how it’s gonna happen, this is where it’s gonna go. But because there’s all these different parties and all these different incentives — for any number of reasons, there might be a large business that wants to relocate or locate into it, maybe they grew up there — there’s all sorts of reasons that are outside of your control. And when I think about an ecosystem, it seems to be so much more about understanding its shape, and what are the key parts of it, and understanding how it works and interacts. And ultimately the focus, at least in my head, is on how do you influence its growth. But at the end of the day, you can’t force it, you can’t predict what’s gonna happen. You can try to look ahead. And I’m curious — you’re in it. This is something that I just think about, but you lived it for a long time in the WordPress space, and you’re now looking at it through another lens, in municipal government. When you think about all these different parties that have interests in it, how do you think about the role of those who are responsible for that ecosystem and how they relate to their influence on it? It’s that question of influence versus control. Where do you sit on that?

Josepha:
Yes — your circle of influence versus your circle of control. Always an important thing to know. So one of the things that is really different with what I’m doing at the moment is the incentive structure in general. There are incentives in open source that are so rooted in impact, right? Like having the right set of people with the right mindset who care about the right future of something really matters. And so it’s a collective incentive system. But the incentive structures that exist here are almost entirely monetary — and not always all your money, right? So you have public money, you have private money, and then you have philanthropic money. Those are the three kind of areas where you can get some leverage in any project that you’re working on. And so finding ways to make sure that it is enticing enough as an incentive to bring in businesses that are what you want — what you want your storefronts to be filled with — while also making sure that everybody who is living in your city also wants those businesses there, and also wants their money to go to those businesses. And it is a really hard sell. I say often that potholes are not partisan. I’m not here to figure out how anybody is aligning on our biggest political issues. But there are things that we always can predict from a future perspective. And I know that I said that like four or five years ago in WordPress — these are the things that we always know people will want more of, we should try to aim for getting those really good. And for a city, they want more amenities, they want fewer crappy streets, and they want better schools and parks for their kids. That’s what you always are going to be able to tell. So any time that you’re balancing incentives to get something while giving away other things, the things that you have to figure out are the top three predictable items that everybody’s gonna want, no matter where that future takes you.

Luke:
So for us living over here in WordPress land, what do you think those nonpartisan issues are that we can all get behind? ‘Cause I think it’s safe to say there has been a little political strife over in our part of the world.

Josepha:
I’ve heard. I’ve heard. Yeah, I think that the three things that are always predictable for the future of WordPress are that people who are building websites or building apps on top of WordPress would like it to be more secure — both from a core perspective and everything that you can bolt onto core, like both of those need to be secure. I think they always want it to be fast — sometimes not faster, just not any slower is gonna count as well. And then also easy to use. And that’s not in an “I have my scissors and I know how to use my scissors” way, but easy as in: I know exactly what I wanted to do, I was able to figure out the gaps to what would make that possible, and then it was easy for me to get it done. And the “get it done” part is negotiable. Like, you personally can do it, you can vibe code it using your favorite GPT, you can pay somebody — it doesn’t matter. The question is, from an ecosystem perspective, again: is it easy for people to tell what comes in the basic bits? Is it easy to tell how far away their preferred future is? And is it easy for them to get there? That’s everything that everyone ever wants.

Luke:
Hm. So secure, fast, and easy to use. Jonathan, I have a question for you. Do you think WordPress is making progress in that direction? Is it becoming more secure and faster and easier to use?

Jonathan:
I don’t know — as a constituent I think it’s an important moment for this ecosystem. I’m noticing, and Luke continues to give me a hard time about it, that I’m doing less with WordPress and more with just static sites. I’m taking things off of WordPress. We’ve been talking over the arc of this season about how it feels temporary, and there’s this part of me that’s like, I’m expecting that WordPress is going to get easier to use. I don’t generally think that much about the security side of it, for better or for worse — I’ve sort of taken for granted that it’s pretty secure. And the performance I do care about. But we’re in this moment right now, as I’m listening and thinking about it, that I’m not sure that those — I don’t see explicit evidence that those remain key priorities. Right now we’re trying to figure out where does AI fit into this stuff, and are we making that, I suppose, easy to use? But it’s unclear to me. And when I think about it, I see this tension between — in a proprietary ecosystem, you’re either paying attention to these things and trying to guide and influence them or you’re not. And then in open source it’s like, well, who is doing that? And how do you measure whether that’s being effective or not? What’s interesting to work on is kind of what gets the attention, and we’re not necessarily connecting that to how it’s impacting the ecosystem. There’s a lot of good work that happens. It’s just hard to know — at least as an observer, if you’re not in it all the time — what direction is this taking us? So yeah, as someone who has a vested interest from a personal and professional perspective in the WordPress space, it’s a bit painful to me that I don’t know the answer to that. There’s a lot of activity. There’s a lot of things that are happening. But I’m still sort of waiting to see where this is going to go.

Luke:
And I was hoping to get through the podcast without mentioning AI, but you did it first. So, adding on to that — it seems like the current big push, the current big focus within WordPress, the current interesting thing to work on, as you put it, Jonathan, is AI tooling. And I’d suggest that these AI features that we’re working on are making WordPress less secure, no faster, and harder to use.

Josepha:
For what it’s worth, number one thing from me is that I remain a strong supporter of WordPress. My whole life, and my family’s life, was changed by being able to learn how to work with and in WordPress. And so I always hope for its best future. I really do think that I’m not the only one whose entire life has been changed by that piece of software.

Jonathan:
Yeah. Absolutely.

Josepha:
And also by the basic concepts of open source. That truly changed my understanding of how economies can work. So, number one, I’ll say that right away. And number two, I am not doing anything with it right now. So I actually don’t know anything about the way that AI is in or not in WordPress at the moment.

Jonathan:
I think, through the lens of ecosystem thinking, what I find interesting about this is — let’s take the WordPress ecosystem before AI. Right now what we’re seeing is how it’s trying to adapt to this, and there’s a lot of energy and there’s been a lot of effort, and ramifications of that. Luke is on the plugin review team, and there’s been direct impact to their workflows — they’re seeing all these submissions go up. So I look at this through the lens of: when a technology comes into an ecosystem, it’s going to have an impact on it one way or the other. And there’s, I think, a difference between how a proprietary ecosystem might approach that, for better or for worse, and then in the case of open source — to me as an observer, there’s a bit of this feeling that it’s just happening to it. I could imagine in the municipal context, for instance, a large event outside your control. Right now, where I live up in the Pacific Northwest, there’s a lot of talk of data centers coming in, and the locals are saying, hey, I don’t want anything to do with that. And I’m looking at this through the lens of technology, and I’m like, I don’t have a general opposition to data centers — but then suddenly I’m hearing it through the lens of what local constituents are concerned about, and it’s like, oh, this AI thing is having a direct impact on that as well. And the question becomes, if you’re thinking responsibly about an ecosystem that you’re caring for, how do you relate to these big events, these changes in expectations and understanding? So yeah, I’m curious for your thoughts on that.

Josepha:
It is so difficult. We are going through many of those types of events here in the city that I am in, where we have people who are like, we want the best for what we have, and to keep what we have. And we have people who are saying, we want to be prepared for whatever is coming up in the future, and so we also need to be forward-thinking about how to solve our problems moving forward. And that is one of the hardest things when you are thinking about how to build and maintain any ecosystem — or, if you already have an ecosystem that’s up and running, how to make it more efficient. It is so difficult. For instance, right now in my city, we have a number of streets that are absolutely failing, because this town was built in 1939, before there were laws. And so we just kind of put concrete on the dirt, and that’s not how you build a road. And now there are also rules about how you build roads. A lot of those streets are really close to full-on failure. And having the conversation with people who live on those streets about, okay, if it’s a year away from failure anyway, let’s let it fully fail so that we can have the most benefit out of the two, three million dollars that it’s going to take to make that happen — no one enjoys the reality of an ecosystem maintenance moment when you’re like, the best choice right now is to let that break completely, and then we’ll fix it. That is the least comfortable exchange that you ever have to work your way through. But also, it is the smartest use of time and money. And isn’t that terrible — when people are like, look, I can see the dirt in my street where my child is playing, and you have to say, yes, I know, and also it’s going to cost more money if we don’t let it fail first. Or there are other things that are more pressing immediately that cannot fail — we can’t have an entire water main fail or something while we’re working on this. Those balances that you have to take into it are really difficult. And it sort of gets into that issue that anyone has when they’re working on explaining things that are complicated or invisible or just kind of generally boring. The distance between what you said, and what you thought you said, and what people actually took away with them is vast, right? Because like I said: it is going to cost us slightly more if we leave this for two years and let it fully fail and fully reconstruct it. And what they heard was: we’re gonna let your stuff break. And technically that part is true. They don’t care where the money comes from. They don’t care about what our efficiency of budget is, you know? And I think that we ran into that a lot in WordPress. And there’s another thing — one of the first philosophical changes that I took into the WordPress project that really was unpopular, to cycle all the way back to Luke’s earlier thought there, and Jonathan, yours as well — this idea of participating without an agenda, but also with an aim, right? It is great to work on only the fun stuff. We see that here in my city also. The metro area that I’m in is a World Cup host. And so everyone’s like, yeah, World Cup! And also there are some people who are like, okay, but we have to make sure there are bathrooms, we have to make sure there is public transit. There are people who are doing the parts that make sure all the fun stuff can happen. But if you only ever look at all the fun stuff, then you don’t necessarily get to a point where you can enjoy it, just because there’s too much energy kind of in a diaphanous, cloudy, “we’re in the right direction” way — as opposed to working on some stuff that we know we have to do, even if it’s not fun, or even if it is the most boring thing you’ve ever done. Who likes to talk about the public toilets? I mean, me, obviously. I do it.

Jonathan:
Right. But people would notice if they weren’t there. That’s something that becomes an issue pretty quickly, right? Where it’s like, we’ll get to that, we’ll deal with that later — and suddenly you have an influx of people and you don’t have facilities for it. It’s gonna become a problem.

Luke:
What’s the public toilets of the WordPress world? That’s what I wanna know.

Josepha:
Gosh, what were the public toilets when I first brought that up? I can’t remember what it was, but I do remember that I met a bunch, all of a sudden, of long-tenured old WordPress people at the time — this was ten years ago — and they’re like, now listen, you. And I was like, yeah, I get it. I would hate me too. But also, I think we still have to do it.

Luke:
Yeah, people can be like that. They can have their mission, their thing that they’re banging on about. And sometimes those are important things. But I encounter this a lot, actually, in plugin review — people who just won’t stop on “WordPress needs to change this.” Responsive controls, I think, maybe is one of those, which is being worked on now.

Jonathan:
I wanna come back for a moment to this data centers example that I referenced. When it first came up to me locally, I saw it as a positive. I’m like, cool, data centers — I like data centers, and it’s gonna bring some opportunities to the area, et cetera. And then I was surprised to see these strong negative reactions from folks. And I looked into it a bit, and okay, there’s some interesting points. It’s hard for me to evaluate how legitimate the concerns are about, like, water usage, et cetera. But I think it’s a good example where, yeah, I can see how in an ecosystem you’re gonna have people who, whether they’re accurate or not, are gonna have big feelings about things. And that seems like an important thing to navigate. In open source, it’s something that I think is a bit counterintuitive, because if you pay attention to the loudest voices, then it can seem like you’re making progress. But from my perspective, I feel like you could end up missing the bathrooms, so to speak. You could end up missing some core things that need to be addressed. And when I think about the data centers example, I don’t actually have a strong enough — I don’t know whether it’s a good thing or not. ‘Cause what I hear people say is like, “not near me.” I’m like, well, where then? And it’s like you’re just kind of punting this problem — someone else needs to deal with this — which seems like the path of least resistance. I’m curious if you have any thoughts on that, through the lens of your experience.

Josepha:
The not-in-my-backyard attitude of things that we have to do to make progress? You’re asking the easy questions thirty minutes in. Good job. Yeah, gosh. That is a real problem, especially because sometimes — in any ecosystem, in any organization, in any city — people moved there. People chose that thing because they liked what it did, and what it’s doing now. And so when you look at, okay, but we have to change it in order to tackle this problem, whatever that problem is — it is so hard to see how that problem relates to you at all, and therefore why you should be in favor of a change, or at minimum concerned that the change is happening, right? And so, in the case of data centers — and this comes up a lot for cities around housing. Housing inventory is at a bit of a problem state across the US. I don’t know if you knew that, Luke — there’s no reason for you to know, but it is a true statement.

Luke:
I think it’s global. Yeah.

Josepha:
A global housing inventory issue. And so there are some obvious answers to it, including apartments. And so if you moved to a city or a suburb to feel like, I’m in a tiny town, but I’m close to a city so that I can still see basketball games or go to the opera, and I’m close enough to an airport that I can leave easily, or whatever — when someone shows up and they’re like, all right, we’re gonna increase population density by adding 400 apartments — that feels wrong to you, right?

Luke:
Yeah. This sounds way too familiar to me.

Josepha:
And you can’t quite put your finger on why you don’t like it, but you do know why it’s not currently a problem for you.

Luke:
I know why. It’s because of the kids on e-bikes. That’s why I don’t like it. Those gosh-darn kids.

Josepha:
I am currently in our local working group about e-mobility — small mobility devices. Guys, let me tell you something. This particular one is one of the things that has the closest intersection between my open source background and my current policy, municipal governance work that I’m doing at the moment. Because, one, I am absolutely a hundred percent in favor of assistive technologies that help people have equal experiences. I am a recent adult return to bicycling, and I don’t want to get stuck on a hill. So I have an e-bike that I use, so I never have to worry about being stuck on a hill. My husband, when we first started doing this, was just on a leg-powered bike. That was very brave of him, considering I had a powered bike. And there are e-scooters, which are a real problem. There are all of these mobility devices that are borderline ungoverned, and you don’t want to take them away from the people who need them or use them as primary transportation, but you also don’t want to leave them ungoverned and run into the issues that we keep seeing around the US, which is a lot of child mortality incidents — which, to say it less politically, kids dying on these things. And here’s where it all feels like everything I’ve ever done in open source. Partially the answer is about the rules. And partially the answer is helping people who are enforcing the rules know what they’re looking for in the way of what’s good and what’s bad — what behavior we want to incentivize versus the behavior we want to disincentivize. But also, the long-term solution is getting more kids walking. Which sounds crazy, but it is. Because people who are on two feet, people who are on two wheels, people who are on four wheels are all part of traffic. And if your first experience of being a going-fast-enough-to-harm-yourself part of traffic is on an e-bike that will go forty miles an hour, then that is actually incredibly dangerous. It’s going too fast for you to make the decisions that you have to make to be a safe part of traffic, and you didn’t have any experiences with it prior to that. And so we need to get kids walking on streets so they know how traffic flows and how to do it safely, and when to look across streets — and not, always, by the way — and have the basic knowledge so that that is in their bodies and memory before they’re going forty miles an hour with nothing around them, and then before they are in cars. Now, if you’re driving a car, you have a lot of schooling you have to do. There’s training — people don’t let you just get in it and use it immediately. You have to be licensed. There are lots of regulations around it. We don’t want that for bicycles, because not everybody can get that. And so this is the way that ecosystem development works. You have to get down to the heart of the matter, both from a philosophical standpoint and a long-term standpoint, and try to get it all to work together simultaneously. And that particular work absolutely reminds me of the work in WordPress all the time.

Jonathan:
It’s interesting how hidden so much of this can be. As I heard you describe that — Luke, I thought about this — I was out walking recently with my infant, and with no warning, an e-bike zipped past me, and it was a child. And so I can relate to that, because what we’re used to with bicyclists is they’ll signal, they’ll say something like, hey, I’m coming up behind you, or whatever else — there’s a whole series of things. I imagine everything that you just said, Josepha, is something that most parents purchasing, or grandparents purchasing, the latest e-bike for the child is not thinking about. They’re not thinking about these long-term ramifications or the risks, or why it would be important for someone to walk before they’re getting on one of those — which makes a lot of sense to me. If you haven’t experienced someone zipping by you and what that feels like, then how would you be sensitive to it? So there’s a whole series of things. Meanwhile, there are people manufacturing these, and people selling these, that have incentives to just do more of it and get more of them out there. There’s all these things around that. And if you’re thinking about this ecosystem and what’s good for, in this case, the citizens within it — it’s like you just get overwhelmed with a problem like that. And when I think about this through the realm of building products and open source — as it grows, there’s an order of magnitude of complexity that just continues ramping up, that as a human, an individual cannot keep track of all of those things. So it seems to me it becomes really important to be clear on those things that matter. Generally, people agree that we don’t want our kids dying, right?

Josepha:
Yes. I mean, I hope so. I hope we all agree on that.

Jonathan:
Yeah. So you can take that as a general truth. And from there it’s like, okay, that becomes a lens through which you may be able to successfully advocate for those rules, or to help parents be more thoughtful, or to talk to manufacturers about making sure that they’re putting governing devices on these. There’s a whole series of things that could be done. But that’s quite overwhelming. So if someone is starting to think about, “I should put more thought into this ecosystem around what I’m building” — where do they start?

Josepha:
So for one, if you have no idea — if you’ve been listening to us now for thirty-five minutes and do not have any idea what we mean by ecosystem thinking or systems thinking — number one, my elevator pitch did not work. Number two, read the book Brave New Work. It is by Aaron Dignan — probably saying his name wrong, it’s fine. It’s very easy to find. And it’s a pretty steep curve figuring out what’s going on there, but it’s written in a way that makes it first clear that systems thinking can apply to any sufficiently complex organization, and then also helps you to understand what “sufficiently complex” means. And in general, it means if you have more than four stakeholders — if you have more than four different-appearing types of people involved in your thing — that’s complicated. Which feels like a really low threshold, but is also basically true. And so I think that’s a great place to start. There are, I think, podcasts also, if you’re not a reader — but I did not listen to them, because I read it.

Luke:
Reading in general — I highly recommend learning how to read. Yeah, it’s helpful.

Josepha:
Yes. Learn how to read, find a book club — they’re all the rage right now. Thank you, Dua Lipa.

Luke:
As you’re talking, I can’t help but make the connection between these people who are just very obsessive about injecting AI into every part of their lives, and kids on e-bikes. There’s a lot of similarities there.

Josepha:
I’m so excited. Tell us the connective tissue.

Luke:
Well, they’re both going way too fast. That’s the main thing. And not aware, and completely inconsiderate, of the people around them and the community around them that’s going, what are you doing with this thing? Are we sure we want to be doing this? Slow down. Sometimes I feel just like an old man sitting on his porch. I don’t have a porch — I’m just imagining myself in the United States, imagining myself in your municipality, Josepha, sitting on my porch with my great big patriotic flag there, shaking my fist at these kids on e-bikes as they go past. And that’s how I feel a lot of the time in WordPress, because everything all the time is AI, and it feels like there’s very few people — there are a few people, and there’s very few people — that are calling for that to slow down. Have you experienced that in your part of the world?

Josepha:
I’m pretty skeptical of AI, but I also see that it is a tool that is essentially requisite at the moment. Like, it’s required for people to use it.

Luke:
I hate that. No, no, Josepha, stop. I wanna disagree with you. Can I disagree with you?

Josepha:
Okay, of course.

Luke:
We have agency. We can choose. I’ve heard other people say that a lot — that it’s a requisite, and if you’re just sticking your head in the sand, you gotta keep up with the times or you’ll be left behind. And that feels so wrong to me. Because I wanna say, no — if we don’t like it, we can choose to reject this. And I have a feeling, it’s a gut feeling, I can’t actually give you facts and figures as to why, but I have a feeling that the people who are a bit slower on AI will turn out to be more employable, more useful, more valuable, and just generally a lot more connected — both to their community… I don’t mean connected in an internet sort of sense, but to themselves, to their family, to their community. Maybe grounded is the word. So I just wanna push back against this idea that it’s a requirement. What do you think?

Josepha:
So I use AI in specific cases, and very plainly opt out of AI in others. Because I agree — there are areas where using it as a tool to accomplish a task makes sense, and there are also areas where I think it cheapens your experience of doing the thing.

Luke:
Like cycling instead of walking.

Josepha:
Yes, like cycling instead of walking. Or using one of these overpowered e-bikes versus one that just has general support so that you never get stuck, or whatever.

Luke:
Hm. Yep. I didn’t mean to be anti-cycling there, sorry. That’s what I meant.

Jonathan:
Would it be like, for instance, the difference between walking through a park versus speeding through a park? If the purpose is just to get to the end faster, sure, the bike is great. But if the purpose is actually to —

Josepha:
Right. Or surface roads versus highways. Like in the movie Cars, right?

Luke:
I appreciate you both helping me to stretch this metaphor far beyond where it was meant to go, but that’s okay.

Josepha:
We’re gonna get there together. Yeah — so I absolutely do use AI sometimes on a long read, to tell me if it’s worth me actually reading it. But I don’t use it to read it and then spout information from it, because I don’t trust that. But if it gives me a summary where I’m like, that seems useful, I will then go read that. I’ve done that. I do not use AI in my search — at all, in my search engine choices. I’ve opted out of that entirely, because I feel like the majority of the world’s internet experience is like a Facebook portal and an Instagram portal, and I like to see more of it than that, you know? And also, they’re very easy to trick. And I’m looking for things where I definitely want to make sure that the statistics are not made up, or the safety and health elements that I’m looking at are as accurate to whatever study I can find. So I opt out of it in those cases. But there are areas where, like, put these two things together and find the differences — like a diff checker for my writing, because, you know, I’m a prolific writer over the years. That’s really helpful, so that I don’t have to personally go through and be like, did I already say that? I said this ten thousand times — was this one of the ten thousand times? That is helpful. I know I’m not convincing you. It’s fine.

Luke:
No, no — I paused because I feel like I’m monopolizing the conversation. I have more to say. But I’m also not sure we wanna keep moving in the direction of “AI is bad.”

Josepha:
The one where Luke and Josepha have fought about AI to no end.

Luke:
Well, no, we agree with each other. We’re not fighting. I think we agree.

Jonathan:
I think, as I’m listening — pulling back one final time on this thread about the impact of external events on an ecosystem. Right now in the WordPress space, I would describe it a bit as: AI is happening to WordPress, and there are motivated, well-intended, and smart folks who are putting energy into trying to harness that within the WordPress context. It’s gonna be interesting to see what comes out of it. And for me, I think the thing that struck me over the years is that, especially in open source, there’s more opportunity to have an influence on an ecosystem than I think people would recognize. There’s a general sense of, oh, I can just leave that to someone else. A product can have a big influence on the ecosystem — the choices that they make, the way that they decide to talk about something, or execute. We’ve seen this with things like pricing in the WordPress ecosystem over the years, where a lot of folks will just do what they saw someone else do. So, to Luke’s comment about agency — when I think about broader movements and changes, on the one hand, you can’t control it. As much as you might like — hey, I don’t think anyone else should be using AI — it is gonna just continue to happen, for a mix of different reasons. But you can decide how you relate to it. And then you can decide how you relate to it and talk about it in the products that you’re building, in the tone that you’re taking, and how you talk about those things. And that can have an influence on the partners that you’re working with within an ecosystem, on the customers and the experience that you’re giving them, and how that affects the expectations they have about the products that they work with. And it’s interesting to see also the products that decide to not just go along with a given trend — which can inadvertently become the start of another trend. So I don’t know, I find it all fascinating. I’ve not read Brave New Work. I’ll give that a read — that sounds quite interesting.

Luke:
Local government must be an interesting sort of balance. I’ve always framed my work as favoring decentralization over centralization. In local government, you sort of have both, right? Because government is centralization by its very nature, but also, in the local context, each household, each resident is sort of a node in a decentralized network of community. And I feel like that’s how we could also frame this AI topic — how you say, Jonathan, it’s happening to WordPress. To me, AI is centralization happening to a decentralized web, especially in the context that you brought up, Josepha, of search results. So I guess what I’m asking is: in your city, in the work that you do, is there that consideration of centralization versus decentralization?

Josepha:
I’m gonna answer an underlying part of this question first that applies to both of these contexts, which is that open source and cities are currently experiencing this issue with being able to get information to people, but also being able to get information back from them. It is so hard to hear the people that you’re working for right now. And that’s true in open source. While I was the ED, so much of my time was begging people for opinions, and begging people for information — clear information that went with their feelings — and gathering folks together to just listen to them talk to each other. Because they’re more honest with each other than they are with, in my case now, their city government, but at the time, with me. My very presence made people slightly less honest. And so when we look at a centralized thing that is happening to something that was meant to be decentralized — on the one hand, no one likes this answer, and WordPress didn’t like it when I started doing it either — but if you want to get much further than you were when I got there, you have to have some centralized resources, just to make it all make sense. And also for efficiency’s sake, which is uncomfortable.

Luke:
The plugin directory is a great example of that.

Josepha:
And it’s super uncomfortable, especially for open source. It’s really uncomfortable for people who find themselves in a democracy — because it’s not a direct democracy in a lot of cases. But in our city, we would absolutely love it if people would show up to our town hall meetings and just be like, I don’t love that my taxes go to parks, and then we could figure that out, right? I was desperate half the time in WordPress for someone to show up and not only be like, I hate this thing, but then say: because of this. Just tell me the because. If you say that everyone you’re talking to is hating that thing because of the color of that button, tell me how many everyones, and tell me what the better button might be, and I’ll see if we can make those things work out. But the decentralized nature of things is also, in a situation like this, entropy — which can be a catastrophic state for a large organization. I don’t know much about the movement of information in WordPress at the moment, but I do know that if you’re looking at 43% of the web, that is a ridiculously huge number of people that are actively engaged in the thing that you are working on, and passively experiencing the thing that you’re working on. And our next frontier was getting to those passive people, because we had made a tent for them and still couldn’t get them. And so the question of how to keep the decentralized value — the value proposition that that brings — while also making it easier to accomplish tasks on behalf of those opinions, is a really, really complicated proposition. It is plaguing many open source communities, and certainly it is showing up in local government as well.

Jonathan:
Josepha, thank you for the perspective and the context that you shared, and looking forward to seeing the work that you continue to do. If someone wants to get in contact with you, what’s the best way for them to do so?

Josepha:
Gosh, if you want to get in contact with me, you can pop over on Bluesky — I hang out over there a little bit. I’m a little bit over on Threads. It’s just Josepha Haden, like you’ve always known me — I’m not on Twitter these days. But yeah, those are my normal places. If any of you have me on LinkedIn, you can also send me a message over there anytime.

Jonathan:
And are you writing? You have josepha.blog — do you have a site?

Josepha:
I do have josepha.blog at the moment. It’s like bread — it’s my recipes for bread. Which is not as interesting as the other things that I’ve written. But I do have a lot of things that I am writing. And gosh, let me tell you, publishing stuff is not easy. Everyone makes it look easy, because you only see the final mile, which was already the hardest, most expensive mile you’ve got. But beyond that, that’s where all the energy goes.

Jonathan:
You could just do what Luke does and have AI write it for you.

Luke:
I hate you, Jonathan. You’re the worst.

Jonathan:
Thank you for joining us, Josepha.

Josepha:
Thanks for having me, guys.