Half-Elf on Tech

Thoughts From a Professional Lesbian

Tag: wordcamp

  • Bummer Of A Birthmark, Hal

    Bummer Of A Birthmark, Hal

    I gave a talk in 2019 at WordCamp NYC about what happens when you’re the target. Anyone in any form of a ‘leadership’ or visible role of authority in any community has had a bad day where they woke up and found out everyone hates them.

    Not that they’re actually doing anything wrong, but people are targeting them for perceived slights. Regardless of right or wrong, all anyone wants is for their phone to stop pinging, their email to calm down, those Facerange and Twooter groups to stop attacking, and maybe everyone could have a beer.

    I have absolutely been there before. For the last decade I’ve worked with the support forums and plugin review teams in myriad roles, including representing those teams to the community. I’ve had a lot of bad days. The good news is I’ve learned that are things you can do to protect yourself and to alleviate the problems.

    It Is/Isn’t Your Fault

    If you’ve been in any sort of leadership or front-facing role, you’ve probably gotten this at least once. Someone has a bad day, maybe they got banned, maybe they got fired, maybe they just failed on their own. Whatever the reason, it’s YOUR fault. They shouted at you, they screamed in person perhaps, and they left you shaking and a little scared about what the heck was going on and what do you do?

    Before I jump into how to protect yourself, which will be the majority of this talk, I want to stress something. No matter what, these situations are not ever entirely your fault. Any time something like this happens, it’s from a breakdown in communication, and that speaks to both sides.

    However. You do have to take some responsibility here for your own actions. If you don’t, you’ll find yourself here again and again, over and over, and that’s really stressful. So when these things happens, yes, reflect on what you did, but also keep in mind you didn’t do this alone.

    Regardless of fault, you have a right to protect yourself. This isn’t an inalienable right. This isn’t a law. This is my firm belief that you have a right to take measures to protect yourself from people who have gone crazy on you. It doesn’t matter if it’s your fault or not, it matters that you should protect yourself.

    What Happened?

    In order to understand how to protect yourself, you need to be aware of what you did. That’s why I said it’s your fault. You did, or you were perceived to have done, something. Keep a hold of that word, perceived, because it matters a great deal. If people think you did a thing, it has the same net effect on their actions, but drastically changes your emotions.

    More than once I’ve woken up to my Twitter mentions and emails filled with people losing their minds about how evil I am. In 2018 it was all about Gutenberg. To be clear, I was accused of deleting bad reviews on the Gutenberg plugin. Since I hadn’t been doing that, it took a lot of stress and reading to figure out why the mob was actually mad at me. In one case, it was a developer who tweeted, at-ing me, complaining it was unfair that Gutenberg had reviews removed, but he couldn’t get his one-star’s removed. That one tweet, for some reason, infuriated the masses and I had DMs and @-messages demanding I explain myself.

    I had to ask myself “Did I actually do this?” Did I actually delete reviews in a way that could cause this reaction? This was false and I knew it, because I had not deleted a single review about Gutenberg. However due to my history as a forum moderator, the finger was pointed at me. Here, what I had done was act as a moderator of some renown at some point in my past.

    Now that I knew what was going on and where it started and that I didn’t do anything, I had to uncover what actually happened. I’m still a forum admin, so I logged in and looked at the posts and I could see who had moderated what. And then I privately pinged those people and asked for details. In talking to the other moderators, I determined that the removal of Gutenberg reviews were valid. The 1-stars were made by sock puppets, which is to say fake accounts made by people to unethically alter a star rating. It happens a lot.

    Now What?

    Okay great, now what? Now it’s time to take action and decide what to do about these people. You have two options though. You can respond to them or … not. They both have a lot of pros and cons, but there is one universal truth you need to know going in: Whatever you chose, to reply or not, you will be wrong.

    There is absolutely no way to ‘win’ or even come out ahead here. You just can’t. If you reply, people will hate your answers. If you don’t, people will claim it’s proof. There’s no safe course here. So you need to make sure you understand why you’re doing this.

    Why You ReplyWhy You Don’t Reply
    Reply if you want to have your say in the matter. That’s it. It doesn’t matter if you’re right or wrong, or if you’re apologizing or not. You’re trying to have your chance to talk. By replying you’re opening up the doors for a discussion. Don’t pick this option if you don’t want to talk to people!Don’t reply if you know it’s a muggs game and you’ll just waste time arguing with people who’ve made up their minds about you. Not replying feels like a safer choice, except it eats at you so much. You’re going to hear people rip into you over and over, and you will have to stick to your guns and not reply.

    And if you’re still not decided, remember that sometimes you can’t reply. That usually happens when you’re aware of a bigger issue that’s preventing public disclosure, or you’ve signed an NDA, or your company asked you not to… Those are really hard because you absolutely cannot engage with people when this happens. You have to suck it up.

    There’s one middle road here. You apologize. This is really hard, though, because no matter how you do it, someone will grab on your word choices and use them as proof one way or the other. Usually it’ll be how they prove you’re terrible.

    It is a good rule in life never to apologize. The right sort of people do not want apologies, and the wrong sort take a mean advantage of them.

    P.G. Wodehouse, The Man Upstairs and Other Stories

    How to Apologize

    I have three rules for how to apologize. Those three rules have served me well, because it reminds me to level-set that no matter what I say, I’m not going to come out ‘ahead’, and I should expect nothing at all in return.

    1. Be respectful
    2. Be sincere
    3. Expect nothing

    There are some things you can be mindful of. Don’t use ‘if’ statements, like “I’m sorry IF this hurt you…” Take ownership of the consequences, regardless of your original intent. It doesn’t matter why a thing happened, it matters that you actually apologize for what happened. You can use “But”, just be mindful that it’s not for making an excuse.

    You still should consider an apology when you’re not the reason for the drama. However this gives you a little room, because now you can use those weasel works. “I’m sorry you feel this way.” Notice the feel part? That should normally be avoided. Here, we want to use it because it’s actually the only thing you can claim auspice over. You acknowledge their emotions as valid. Which they are.

    The follow up to that is you need send them to the right people. “I’m sorry you feel this way. You should talk to X about that. Here’s how…” This is not the equivalent of sending someone to your manager, you’re just getting them to the right people. Oh, but be a mensch and tell the other person what’s incoming.

    And remember: forgiveness is not the point

    I know this is hard to swallow. When you apologize, you never do it in order to be forgiven. Never. Ever.. If you are, then you’re going about it all wrong. You apologize because you hurt someone. It doesn’t matter if you meant to or not, and it doesn’t matter if you can fix it or not. It matters that someone is hurt, and you did it. It’s up to them to forgive you if they want to, but you owe them a sincere apology.

    And just so we’re clear, I’ve screwed this up too. Just as recently as last spring. It’s going to happen. No one is perfect. Try not to do it again.

    Practical Defense

    Now that you’ve done some ‘active’ things, you need to take the steps to protect yourself. These are hard because it starts with not looking at it.

    Don’t look at what they say about you. Its in our nature to want to know what people are saying about us, but I’m here to tell you not to look. Don’t look. Ignore the comments on other forums and blog posts. Walk away from what’s out there.

    If you do look, document. And there will be things that come at you regardless. You’re going to want to keep a record. I have a spreadsheet with the title and date of every single email someone sent regarding an altercation with Plugins. 300 emails a month, on average, for three months. It was painful to record, but I did it to have a history of his behavior. Which is still going on.

    Are you getting emails? Block them. Did they make a secondary account? Block that. Did they make 69 accounts over multiple email providers and rotate through the accounts to try and talk to you? By the way, yes, that happened. You block them all and you report them. You keep doing this.

    Put their emails in your comment blacklist. Don’t dismiss this. If you use Jetpack contact forms, you can use the blacklist to block them from that. IP block if you have to, though I don’t recommend that. Do what you can stop them from getting to you. If you can’t turn off comments (like I did here), then I recommend requiring all first-time comments be approved, and using the Comment Probation plugin.

    What about social media? If they’re ‘friends,’ I recommend you unfollow and possibly mute. There are people in WordPress whom I’ve muted, because we don’t get along and will argue about everything. It’s not worth it to fight, so I block and I mute very fast. This is for my own sanity because emotional attacks hurt worse.

    It someone calls you names, it hurts. If someone attacks your choices, it hurts. Well when someone continues to belabor a point, argue past the point of sense, and absorb hours of your time, they’re hurting you. You are allowed to ask them to stop and leave you alone. Of course, this doesn’t often work.

    The Warning Signs

    As many people will tell you, asking someone to stop, even a simple “I don’t want to continue this conversation here, please email X,” can result in unexpected explosions. This is an escalation in behaviour, as someone is demonstrating a distinct lack of respect for you, and human decency. Usually this is because they’re hurt too and lashing out, and it’s hard for people to look past that.

    Bear in mind, a threat doesn’t just mean “You better not walk down a dark alley alone” — and yes, someone said that once. Sometimes a threat is “I sent a package to your office.” Now, I bet nearly every non-male reading this just nodded. For those of you who didn’t, let me elaborate.

    When an online conversation crosses into the ‘physical world’ (for lack of a better term), it’s a major red flag. If you’ve been tweeting or emailing someone, and they send you, say, an apology letter, or email a photo of their company apologizing, you need to worry. This is because they’re attempting to play to your emotions.

    When they make that next step, though, claiming to send you flowers, that’s when you need to get a hold of authority figures and friends. Fast. I will warn you, if the person making the claim is out of state or out of country, it’s very hard to get legal help. You can, but it’s hard. If you work at a specific location, make sure they know. Make sure people you live with are aware. Anyone you think might be targeted, you need to warn.

    There are a number of micro-aggressions that indicate this behavior, from Sealioning to Gaslighting. But that’s a talk in and of itself. What you should hang on to here is that you need to trust your gut. Women, people of color, queers, any minority, we’re pretty in tune with that bad feeling that a conversation is going to go sour. Trust that. If someone turns to you and says “Hey, this person looks like they’re escalating,” then you should listen.

    Get Help

    I said it before, let me say it again. Give your teams a heads up. I had someone follow me all the way to my company, and we had to get legal involved because of threats expressed. I’ve even had to have a security officer on site for a WordCamp talk because someone went far enough that I felt concerned for my physical safety. These aren’t jokes. These are people who have lost the ability to see reason.

    You need to tell people in charge. If you’re afraid to tell your boss, you can try this with them or your HR rep or a trusted co-worker:

    I’m sorry to bring some personal issues into work, but there’s someone who has been harassing me, and I think they’re going to bring it into the workspace.

    No template is perfect or nuanced enough to handle all situations, and if you need help figuring out how to tell your employers, grab a trusted friend and ask for help.

    Beyond warning people you work with, get help. Ask for what you need, even if you know it’s the wrong person to ask. They may know who to talk to. I needed a new feature built into WordPress’ tool for plugin reviews to blacklist people so we stopped getting 30 emails in a day in our inbox. Speak up. Your teammates and friends should have your back. And if they don’t listen, go louder and over their heads as high as you need to. Go public if you have to.

    Practical Defense

    Even if you do all this, you have to keep in mind that once you are pointed at as ‘the bad guy’ people will go bonkers. They will be obsessed with every single thing you do. And this means you cannot bait them. Look, I love a good subtweet as much as anyone, but for the duration of this drama, you must not poke the bears. Don’t even drop a hint. While being harassed by said the aforementioned serial emailer (we’re up to 1000 emails now by the way), I complained about someone else, my cable company as it happened, but he took it to mean I was talking about him. It sucked.

    This is the scary thing, and the reason you’ve got to walk away from them. When they get obsessive, reading thousands of tweets deep or dredging up a forum post from before you were a moderator to prove a point, they’ve gone past sense and into obsession. This is terrifying. Which is why you’ve got to put your shields up.

    I want to point out the specific things you can do here. These are generally easy to do from a technical perspective, but not emotionally.

    Twitter

    First you de-friend. If they’re not a friend, you mute. If they escalate, you block. Some people you will jump right to a block because they’re just so wrong. But do it and walk away. The nice thing about a block and a mute is that it prevents you from reading their tweets at all.

    Turn off Twitter notifications for young accounts and people who don’t follow you. Use the quality filters. Disable DMs from people you don’t follow.

    If somerone attacks you or is vulgar, report the tweets and block them. Blocking an account you’ve reported will increase the chances that Twitter will actually do anything. Also ask your friends to report and block anything else they made public. It will help.

    Facebook & Instagram

    So I hate Facebook for a lot of reasons, and this is one. See, pretty much all you can do is build a wall. Facebook cares more about selling your personal information than protecting you from harassment. All you can do is lock your account away and block people. Report, yes, but if my wife’s death threat is any hint, they will do nothing.

    Still, I recommend you report content. You need to report the individual posts as well as the user account.

    Also curate the hell out of your friends. If you can’t remember why you friended them, it’s a good time to un-friend.

    Everything Else? You set your account private and block judiciously. You don’t have to worry about Google+ any more, but lordy, I promise that was a nightmare trying to block people. Snapchat is pretty ephemeral, things don’t stick around long, so it’s not an easy place to manage but still report and block.

    I have to mention this because we use Slack for WordPress.org work. And here, there is only one thing you can do when someone’s harassing you. You need to find an admin. Go into the Slack group and click “Customize Slack.” Then pick “About this workspace”. Click on the “Admins & Owners” tab. Ping one, explain the tl;dr and make sure you have logs of your harassment. Good luck.

    On a forum? Ask for moderator help. If this is an in-public ask, keep it simple. “I need a moderator. Someone is harassing me. Who can I speak to about this?” If you’re on WordPress.org’s forum, tap the ‘report topic’ button after you post and a Moderator will be alerted. Or come to the #forums slack channel and ask for help.

    I Hope You Never Have to Do This

    I really do. I hope none of you ever have to do this, and that your takeaway is “Gosh, I should make it easier for people to protect themselves on my systems!” And if you are going through this, protect yourself as best you can and remember, just because you’re the bad guy doesn’t mean the other person is a hero.

  • LGBT+Allies At WordCamp US – 2017

    LGBT+Allies At WordCamp US – 2017

    Yet again, Tracy and I have gone a little insane and we’re throwing another fabulously big queer party at WordCamp US. This year the venue is Nashville, which made an interesting turn as Tracy’s in Philly and I’m in SoCal. We drafted some local help and, after a series of emails, phone calls, and one text in all caps, we are happy to announce our second ever LGBT+ Party.

    Friday, December 1, at Suzy Wong’s House of Yum.

    Grab your tickets now before they’re gone!

    And we’re still looking for sponsors to cover the cost of the food and drinks, so please contact us if you’d like to chip in.

    Back for the second amazing year is the faaaabulous LGBT+Allies Meetup for WordCamp US!

    WordPress as a community has been welcoming and inclusive to people of all backgrounds, sexual orientations and gender identities. To celebrate our wonderful diversity, we’re bringing the party to Nashville, for an evening of honky tonking at a brothel of epicurean delight.

    This year, the party will be at Suzy Wong’s House of Yum, located in the heart of Nashville’s trendiest alternative night life scene. Suzy Wong’s House of Yum is a creation of Chef Arnold Myint (and his alter-ego Suzy Wong). Prepare yourself for a cornucopia of vegetarian friendly Asian delights, creative cocktails, sleek décor, and of course seriously campy music.

    We will have the entire venue to ourselves with delicious food and drinks!

    But we wouldn’t be able to bring you all this without the help of our amazing sponsors. In 2016, thanks to the help of our sponsors we not only had a private room, but drinks, food, and amazing exclusive t-shirts. The event is fully funded by the community, and all help is welcome.

    Venue Sponsor: DreamHost

    Sponsors

    If you would like to support the community and sponsor this event, please contact us.

    We hope to see you there!

  • You Are Not Your Code

    You Are Not Your Code

    This is not exactly what I said at WordCamp US 2016, but it is a great deal of it.

    I started my slides for WordCamp US so many times, I probably have enough content for a week of blog posts. The weight of what I was going to say there sat on my shoulders like I’m Atlas. Trying to dredge up the pain from the rejection and harassment I’ve felt over the years, all in order to write, reminds me of the carrion birds, ripping apart Prometheus, while he heals only to be torn anew each day, all for presenting humanity with the gift of fire.

    Perception: We Are What We Code

    Too often, when we think about our contributions to WordPress, we think of them in the literal terms. I have written code. I have fixed CSS. I have beta tested. I have created a plugin, a theme, a blog, a store, a book, a career. We make the fatal mistake of boiling down what we are to one thing. The contribution. The code.

    Reality: We Are What We Create

    We forget something crucial, that these creations are just that, creations! We have invented something out of nothing, purely with the power of our minds! We’re artists and dreamers and believers and builders. Anyone who’s studied art, music, journalism, knows that there’s a strange dissociation that we have to build in our hearts. The separation between what we create and who we are and what the reviews will be.

    We Can’t See the Forest For the Trees

    Artists are, often, seen as temperamental. Capricious creatures who fall to the whim of our desires and passions. People who obsess over one thing to the exclusion of others. Who trash hotels when frustrated. Who lash out. Who take the rejection of a bad review so closely, so personally, they cannot separate themselves from their art.

    If you saw my talk at WordCamp Europe earlier in 2016, or read my post about it, that sounds familiar. We, we contributors to open source, are exactly the same. Which is why it is hard, so so hard, to separate our hearts from our heads. We wanted to bring fire to earth. We wanted to share our joy. We wanted to do the right thing and change 26% of the Internet for the better. Give or take.

    Instead, we’re told our code sucks. If we don’t offer free help for our work, we’re called greedy and vain. Being driven to fix one part of WordPress is wasting our time, no one uses it. Creating new features? We should fix what’s broken, even if we don’t know how. We are pulled by a million masters, our users, and we can never do enough.

    And what about when our contributions are less visible? What about the people who spend hours making sure this WordCamp flowed smoothly? The ones who ensure funding? The one who fixed the inline documentation for core? The people in the support forums who help people for free? The people who review your themes and plugins and try and keep things fair for all. Oh, oh yes. I know that one.

    The problem here is that we all do things for good. Everyone you see at a WordCamp, everyone who is a speaker, a volunteer, a contributor, is doing this for good reasons. Maybe not entirely altruistic, we’re not all socialists and software communists like me, but I promise you, every single one of us who steps up and does things for the greater good of WordPress is doing so with the best intentions. We care.

    And they don’t see that.

    “Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself.”
    — Aral Vorkosigan in A Civil Campaign, by Lois McMaster Bujold

    One of the points I wanted to address in my talk was that there are a LOT of days when you know you’ve done the right thing, and your reputation tanks. While a lot of people here like me, appreciate my work, and respect me, I’m not so naive as to think that’s universal. I know very well that there are people who watched my talk, who read this blog, who dislike me for, say, closing their plugin or deleting their reviews. Or worse, not deleting a review.

    The Cost of The Greater Good

    I want to say the good of the many outweighs the good of the one, or the few. And there are days where you’re the one. You’re the 20% minority. These days, as my father taught me, will outweigh the ones where you are praised, thanked, lauded, and cherished. It’s the dark part of human nature. You will, you WILL do things for the best intentions, and you will NOT be appreciated for it.

    What you do when these things happen? Well you have choices, like I mentioned this summer. And there are downsides to each one. Otto, who’s somewhere around here, spends time talking me down from correcting people. I have a strong urge to “Well, Actually…” the people who insist I have evil in my heart and I’m power hungry. Other people listen to me vent a little. And sometimes I subtweet.

    But this is the part that hurts. You can’t win. It’s impossible. People won’t believe you if you defend yourself. They won’t accept your explanations, they’ll see them as excuses. Silence will be seen as proof they were right. Fighting back? A show of weakness or a cover up. There is, literally, no way to win it. Ever.

    Outsmart, Outplay, Outlast

    Outsmarting them can be a pyretic win. Outplaying? You can try but I wouldn’t. But what if you keep going. Then the win is not a win but sort of an eventuality. Awesome, I know.

    You can’t teach a pig to sing. It frustrates you and annoys the pig. That’s a Southernism from my inlaws. There are some people you just can’t reach, no matter what you do. That’s where the remark of “I’m sorry you feel that way.” comes from. When I say that, I’m not giving up, I’m accepting futility.

    And yet. You know that saying? The one about serenity and accepting what we cannot change? I hate it. I don’t believe there’s a single thing we cannot change, just perhaps not as quickly as we’d like. Accepting futility means I accept that there is no way I can, right now, explain myself well enough to change a mind. Yet.

    It’s not about being smarter than someone else, it’s about being smarter than yourself

    If you can convince yourself not to be stupid, you will protect yourself from just about everything. Outsmarting yourself is hard, though. You want to believe that you’re right. You have to remember that there is always someone smarter than you, somewhere. And no one is stupider than past you. That’s why we leave ourselves notes in documentation. To make sure future you remembers. Not being stupid means not picking fights. It means recognizing when you’re wrong.

    The secret behind outplaying is you’re outplaying your own tendencies and habits. You know yourself. You know when you snap off a reply you shouldn’t, or when your humor is more biting than it should be. You have to play yourself and not do those things. Fool yourself and you’re the fool, but play to your strengths and you can keep yourself humble while preventing your inclination to be stupid.

    If you outlive everyone, then you get to write the history. That takes a lot, A LOT of patience. More than most of us have. And it requires being able to tell someone you’re sorry you can’t help them, or you’re sorry they feel that way, and you walk away. And you wait. And wait. And wait. The being quiet part is the hardest, because people like to fill silence, especially you. But you must wait to survive.

    Survival is not about the Fittest

    I could tell you how I survive. I could tell you to subtweet, to blog, to scream, to ride your bicycle until your lungs feel inadequate and your legs are on fire and your blood pounds so much, your Apple Watch wonders if you’re having a heart attack. I could tell you to talk to someone, a loved one or a professional, and maybe to try meditation. The Breathe app? Pretty nifty.

    Remember how I said everyone at a WordCamp wants to make WordPress better? And remember how I said you’re not code? I lied a little. You ARE code in that you, me, everybody is WordPress. And while I cannot tell you the right answer for you and how YOU can survive the storm and the hate that you will face, I can tell you that you are not alone. That you are one of us. And that WE are here too.

    As a team we are stronger. We can rely on each other. We can lean on each other. We can take our shared love of sports, or food, or a same birthday, and find connections with each other.

    What I Don’t Know…

    The one thing I cannot tell you is why people hate. I don’t understand it myself. I suspect I never will. But what I can tell you is that we are better together. The way to make it past the hate is together. I am strong, mentally, because I turn to my community, sometimes quietly and sometimes loudly, and ask for help. There’s no shame in that.

  • WordCamp US – LGBT+Allies Tribe Meetup

    WordCamp US – LGBT+Allies Tribe Meetup

    Thanks to the undying energy of Tracy Levesque and the dollars from many donators (including DreamHost), there will be an LGBT+Allies meetup on Friday night at WordCamp US. Yes, NEXT Friday. So if you don’t have plans, or if you just want some big gay friendly hang time, we’re inviting everyone to come hang out with diverse WordPressers at Philly’s most welcoming gay bar.

    You don’t have to be gay to come, but you have to be gay friendly.

    WordPress is welcoming to people of all cultures, beliefs, and sexualities. In celebration of our community, we decided to have an unofficial (non WordCamp sanctioned) meetup of the LGBT WordPressers and their straight allies. The celebration will be during WordCamp US at Stir Lounge, Philly’s most welcoming gay bar.

    We’ll have most of the place to ourselves with delicious food from The Khyber Pass Pub and an open bar.

    This event is made possible by our generous sponsors!

    YIKES, Inc.DreamHostWPEnginertCampCornershop CreativeAutomattic1SEO.com

    Bring your rainbow pins and your smiles.

    Personally, I think now, more than ever, it’s important to know where your tribe is and that we’ve got your back.

    You can get a ticket (for a whopping $0) at lgbtwp.ticketleap.com

    hero

  • WordCamp Elevator Pitches

    WordCamp Elevator Pitches

    When I go to a WordCamp, I bring a little notebook. We had a DreamCon and there are about a vigintillion little Scout Books branded for it and no one at the company wants them, so I have 20 at my desk and a couple boxes more at home, and every month I burn through one. But I also bring a fresh one to each WordCamp:

    Both of those notebooks are 90% full right now. At the end of a month, I copy over everything that wasn’t done in the previous book and put it on the first page. After that everything gets a new page and I X out the page when it’s done.

    But this isn’t about how I take notes, or not, it’s about how I learn something new at every WordCamp I go to. Often I learn about new products from people I know, but other times I learn about new methods to coding, tricks I can use to improve my development processes, or just understanding a feature a little better.

    I stress everyone should unplug at a WordCamp, turn off the laptop (unless you can just take notes without checking Twitter and Facebook compulsively), and listen. I take notes by hand because it forces me to focus. I have to listen and write and pay attention. By hand I can doodle as well, so I give myself visual clues to what I was thinking later on.

    One thing I also do is that I take notes on sessions from the front to the back, but from the back to front I write down all the new-to-me products and features. Sometimes it’s just ones I know about and need to look into a little more. Sometimes they really are brand new. This is why I don’t take your business cards. I write down what I need to know, what I think about it, and your URL. If you can’t give me a URL (or your URL is too long) maybe I’m not going to look at your site.

    After a camp, in my ‘downtime,’ I go back through the notes I’ve made, look them up, and decide if I like them or not. From that I’ve sorted out some tips for vendors and people trying to give me their elevator pitch on why I (or my company) need to pay attention to them.

    Make It Short

    If it takes you longer than 5 minutes, I’m tuning out. You’re at a WordCamp, people are generally checking you out in between sessions, so we want the tweet version of what you’ve got.

    Our product compresses images better than SmushIt.

    That was perfect. That got my attention and immediately had their name in my notebook.

    Make It Easy To Find

    If I go to your URL, the one you gave me, and cannot find the ‘WordPress’ product in one click, you’ve failed and I’m not looking at you anymore. The aforementioned image compression tool failed on that one. I went to their company site, the one they gave me a URL to, there was no information on that specific product. In fact, it’s been a few days, and I googled for it, and I still can’t find it! I know it started with a V, but I assumed that they’d have a link to their WordPress related products on their webpage.

    If the main URL of your site is not the one with this product, make that clear.

    Check out example.com/product-name/

    Oh and that’s a great URL.

    Have a Demo

    I want to see how good this is. Period. With the exception of ‘I’m a new webhost’ if you have a product, let me see if and if possible play with it. This is incredibly true of people who have proprietary code, like a service. No demo? Not going to look further.

    Be Ready for Tech Questions

    You’re at a technical conference. I’m going to ask things like “Have you benchmarked against TinyPNG? What’s the improvement over the similar functions in Photoshop like XYZ? Does the plugin hook into an API on your end? How do you handle network latency and speed? What happens if it times out? What’s the failback?”

    75% of the vendors I talk to at WordCamps tell me “I’m not the technical person…” That’s disheartening. If your sales people can’t answer the basic questions, or you don’t even have a white paper with some tech dirt, you’re not thinking about your audience. Selling to WordPress people means you shouldn’t forget the devs. You can sing and dance your cool factor all you want, but if someone asks a technical question, you should have a technical person around.

    Show Me The Code

    This annoys me a lot. When people are selling a plugin, I have to buy it to see the code. So when someone asks me to eval, the first thing I ask is “Is this a service?” If it’s not, I’m annoyed I can’t see your code. Moreso when I ask you “Well I’d eval but it’s pay for. Can I look at the plugin source code?” and you say no.

    If you’re at a tech conf and they want to see your code before committing, you may want to consider who you just asked to evaluate the code. I do explain that I’m a plugin reviewer for WordPress.org and I work for a webhost. Now if you’re interesting enough, I’ll buy your plugin and check it out. Still. A lot of us want to see the code.

    Your Product Beat Your Swag

    There were two vendors at a recent WordCamp where the swag they gave out was more memorable than what they were selling. That’s just sad. I don’t care that you were giving away notebooks or watches or cups or shiny balls. I care what you’re selling.

  • Working With A Translator

    Working With A Translator

    Well I messed that up.

    I’ve never been on a panel before, and I’ve never worked with a live translator before, except once and that was ASL which is different. This time, at WordCamp Tokyo, I was on a panel to talk about the Worldwide Community of WordPress, and other things, and we had a wonderful translator with us, Shinichi Nishikawa. But I’m afraid we made things very hard for him.

    My father, who’s more experienced, gave me a critique later and I have some points to share with everyone.

    • Speak one sentence, wait for it to be translated, then move on.
    • Keep your English simple.
    • No cliches, idioms, or slang. Not even technical slang.
    • No jokes. They won’t translate. Don’t even try.
    • Don’t laugh at yourself either.

    It’s remarkably hard to do this. I’m getting a little better at it, because my father’s wife is Japanese. While she understands some English, I would say her English is better than my French, and she’s mostly fluent in French. So we dance between three languages to try to communicate. With that in mind, I find myself trying for the smallest, easiest, most common words when I want to explain something.

    For example, at dinner she was trying to say that my father has no sense of direction. This is true, but in Japanese there’s a word to mean ‘you lack this skill.’ You can apply it to anything, and as we were talking about it, she asked what the word was, in English, for someone who has no sense of music. We explained it was ‘unmusical’ or ‘no sense of music’, but I also mentioned ‘tone-deaf.’ This lead to us saying things like “You are tone-deaf in driving!” Where English will put a modifier on the word, the Japanese have a second word to add in front that puts the proper emphasis.

    Understanding that one, small, thing changes what words I want to use when explaining WordPress (or anything) to someone who doesn’t speak my language natively. I’ve done this before, with normal conversations and travel, but doing it for WordPress was very hard because we’re used to things like ‘doing_it_wrong()’ and even ‘Howdy, Ipstenu.’ Those are small words we think of as normal and simple, but their concepts are so large they lose something in the translations.

    Besides just words, I’ve learned we definitely need to translate our brochures into the language of the country we’re in. Not having the pamphlet be in Japanese was a killer. Also our little DreamHost Robots need names!

    Our DreamHost Robots

    Everyone thought our mascots were adorable, but they needed names. Since we have three stickers, one of them being tiny, I said we should call the little one “Yume-chan” because Yume (夢) means Dream in Japanese, and ‘chan’ is a diminutive. My father calls me ‘Mika-chan.’

    Wapuu Just for an example, Wapuu is the mascot of WordPress in Japan. So really anything small and cute like this needs a name.

    Knowing that, I feel more prepared next time not just should I come again to Japan, but also in general for how I present at a WordCamp. Every time I come to one, I learn a little more and a little more about myself, WordPress, and how we all communicate.

    WordPress democratized publishing in more than just your website, after all.