Emphasizing Community and Mentorship in the WordPress Ecosystem

In this episode of WP Minute+, Matt interviews Angela Jin, the Head of Programs and Contributor Experience at Automattic.

They discuss Angela’s work overseeing community training and events like WordCamps. Angela shares her perspective on making WordPress thrive, not just as a CMS but also as an open source community.

They talk about bringing younger generations into the WordPress world through education initiatives and pathways for contribution. Matt and Angela also discuss some of the challenges facing the community events, including rising costs and the increasing need for official roles like an incident response team.

Here are some key takeaways:

• Insight into Automattic’s vision for helping hosts and supporting the WordPress open source community
• Ideas for how to attract younger generations to learn and engage with WordPress
• Perspective on the rising operational complexity of running community events and governing a large open source project
• Commentary on gracefully handling conflict and disagreement within an open community like WordPress