I’m excited to share that my submission to speak at the second edition of WordCamp Asia in Taipei, Taiwan was accepted!
Traveling to Bangkok, Thailand to speak at WordCamp Asia in 2023 was one of my highlights of the year. I’ve covered my talk “Migrating WordPress Core to GitHub Actions: A Retrospective” in previous posts, so I won’t talk about it here. But if you weren’t able to attend and want to learn more, here are some links to dig deeper:
The fact that I am speaking has been announced, but my talk title and description have not! So what will I be talking about?
Properly Recognizing Contributors in Large Open Source Projects
Ensuring contributors feel appreciated is essential to the success of any open source project. In its 20+ year history, there have been over 5,400 unique contributors listed on the Credits pages for each version released. But even as one of the largest current FOSS projects powering 43%+ of the Internet, this number is inaccurate and low.
Have you ever considered what a contribution actually is? Where does it come from? Who is contributing and how? How are contributions tracked? What does recognition mean to contributors? And why is the number above lower than it should be?
Come learn about the types of recognition the WordPress project currently has, where the blind spots are, what the challenges are at scale, and what’s being done to overcome these obstacles in order to ensure every contributor feels appropriately recognized to create a more stable supporting community.
This is a topic that I think about a ton. As someone sponsored full time, I frequently take on foundational work that requires significant chunks of time to work through. Many relate in some way to improving the contribution experience for anyone and everyone that wants to give back to this amazing project.
One of the tasks that I take on leading up to each release is collecting credits or “props” for everyone that helped make a release possible. But as our tools and workflows have changed throughout the years, our attribution practices have not evolved sufficiently making a portion of the process highly manual.
I’ll talk about why it’s so hard to accurately track every contribution to the project, how the scale of the project makes that even more difficult, and what’s being done to modernize the way we think about OSS attribution.
Will I see you there? If so, drop a comment so I can look for you at the venue!
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