Transcript ↓

In this podcast episode, host Michelle Frechette welcomes Carrie Dils, Mika Epstein, and Ryan McCue to discuss their roles in the WordPress community and the new FAIR project. The group explores FAIR’s mission to create a federated independent repository system for WordPress plugins and themes, focusing on decentralization, community-driven moderation, inclusive governance, and privacy. They address challenges like supporting premium plugins, reducing environmental impact, and fostering global participation. The episode highlights FAIR’s collaborative, open-source approach and invites listeners to get involved through GitHub and community meetings, aiming to shape a more innovative and inclusive WordPress ecosystem.

Top Takeaways:

• FAIR Is Reimagining Plugin Discovery and Trust for WordPress: FAIR is building a more open, decentralized ecosystem for WordPress plugin discovery—empowering both end users and developers. By enabling verified directories and authenticated plugin listings (via methods like DNS verification), FAIR provides an alternative to the limitations of the WordPress.org repo, while increasing transparency, user safety, and trust.
• Community Participation Is Central to FAIR’s Success: The FAIR initiative is deeply community-driven. Contributors are encouraged to get involved through GitHub Discussions, introduce themselves, offer help, or join working groups. The leadership team is intentionally building these groups based on people’s skills and availability, rather than predefined roles—making FAIR flexible, inclusive, and open to evolving needs.
• FAIR Encourages Innovation Outside Traditional WordPress Constraints: The project provides an alternative path for plugin creators who may not want to follow the traditional WordPress.org model (e.g., having to release a free version first). With FAIR, creators can request to be listed in aggregator directories that are more flexible, values-aligned, or niche-focused—fostering innovation and lowering barriers to entry.
• FAIR Is Still in Early Development—and Actively Growing: While the FAIR plugin and protocol are live (accessible via fair.pm), the ecosystem is in its formative stages. The team is prioritizing essential needs (the “MVP”) and building infrastructure to support future growth in documentation, marketing, design, development, and user testing. They welcome feedback on plugin issues, conflicts, and ideas, encouraging broad experimentation and iteration.

Mentioned In The Show:

• FAIR
• LinkedIn Learning
• Awesome Motive
• Lez Watch TV
• Human Made
• Aspire Press
• Gravatar
• Linux Foundation Project
• Bluesky
• WPCC
• Black Press
• Mastodon 
• Drupal
• Courtney Robertson
• Automattic
• MediaWiki
• Monster Insights
• Gravity Forms 
• Fastly

🐦 You can follow Post Status and our guests on Social Media:

• Carrie Dils (Independent Consultant & Web Instructor, Carrie Dils Consulting)
• Mika Epstein (Senior Developer, Awesome Motive)
• Ryan McCue (Director of Product, Human Made)
• Michelle Frechette (Director of Community Relations, Post Status)
• Olivia Bisset (Intern, Post Status)

The Post Status podcast is geared toward WordPress professionals, with interviews, news, and deep analysis. 📝

Browse our archives, and don’t forget to subscribe via iTunes, Google Podcasts, YouTube, Stitcher, Simplecast, or RSS. 🎧

Transcript

Michelle Frechette 00:00:02  Welcome to the Post Status Cache Up. It’s my little play on like catching up with people. In case people didn’t place, people didn’t cache that. It’s not like a cache me outside kind of situation. So, Carrie, don’t bring up those weapons of mass destruction of your hands there. But it’s really good to have you all here. And I’d like you to introduce yourselves rather than, you know, that formality of me reading something, and you have to sit there looking all like, oh, that’s cool, that’s all about me. Yeah. So we’ll just kind of go around the I. I love how we say room, like we’re all in our own rooms, but, Carrie, tell us first and then you pass it on and we’ll keep going.

Carrie Dils 00:00:39  We’ll go around the Brady Bunch squares.

Michelle Frechette 00:00:42  Yeah, exactly. We just need Alice in the middle.

Carrie Dils 00:00:44  There you go. I am Carrie Dils. So I’ve been working with WordPress since 2011. based in Fort Worth, Texas, and outside of FAIR, I mostly do client work.  I’m independent, freelancer, do development work and consulting. And then I also teach front end development courses for LinkedIn Learning.

Michelle Frechette 00:01:05  Excellent.

Carrie Dils 00:01:06  Mika.

Mika E. 00:01:08  Hi, I’m Mika Epstein. Most of you probably know me as Ipstenu still, which is actually just my last name. It’s not really all that deep, folks. Sorry. I currently work for Awesome Motiv. I am in their research and development, which actually means I’m not doing a lot of WordPress for work right now. I’m more like figuring out cool things that we can integrate to take off the load from our employees who are doing WordPress. So I get to do all sorts of cool things and blow things up. And right now yell at Google for, having an outage on the servers I’m working on. So that’s always fun.

Michelle Frechette 00:01:42  How dare they?

Mika E. 00:01:43  I know. But with regards to WordPress, I actually run a, a website with my friend Tracy Levesque, and it is entirely on WordPress. It is Lez Watch TV and it is the biggest database you’re going to find of LGBTQ, female, non-binary, and transgender characters on international television. And I stress this because it runs on WordPress. Every last bit of it is WordPress. So when you go and look at that site, you’re going to go, oh, WordPress can do that.

Michelle Frechette 00:02:15  And I will be looking at that site immediately after we’re done recording.

Mika E. 00:02:18  Oh yeah. Yeah, I always promote myself.

Michelle Frechette 00:02:21  I love it.

Ryan McCue 00:02:24  Thanks. Hi, I’m Ryan McCue. I think, people might know me from working on the WordPress rest API, which was merged into WordPress a little while ago, but I have been contributing to and working with WordPress for almost 20 years. At this point, I think my.org profile was created 2006 or something like that, but I’d been using it a little longer than that. Aside from the rest API, I also built the Request Library, which sends every HTTP request out from your WordPress install. I used to be the maintainer of Simple Pie, which was the RSS and atom feed reader. Worked on the Importer I helped build developer.WordPress.org. I am a member of the security team. I have done many things in, in WordPress contribution over the many years that I’ve been involved. And in my day to day job, I am the director of product at Human Made. So we are an enterprise WordPress services agency. We do agency work and also enterprise hosting. And I run the hosting division, which is, Altas Cloud. So, every day, having to deal with making sure that WordPress can, can scale up to do, you know, hundreds of millions and billions of views. So, it’s, sometimes stressful. Thankfully, we aren’t on Google Cloud, so or Cloudflare, so.

Mika E. 00:03:45  It wasn’t my choice. Yeah, actually, that’s not true it was my choice. I did the breakdown of what would cost us less and what would be more stable in Google one. I should have mentioned I used to run the WordPress plugin review team for. A long time. 

Michelle Frechette 00:04:00  I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t sure if we were avoiding that altogether.

Mika E. 00:04:03  No, it’s not that I forgot, it’s that I retired from it. So it’s like I don’t do it anymore. But I did do it and I probably reviewed somewhere around 60,000 plugins.

Michelle Frechette 00:04:13  I think you reviewed mine because you reached out to me and said, we’re only going to approve this if you promise to keep it updated.

Mika E. 00:04:19  Oh, that’s true. I do remember that one because we were having a I swear this had a purpose. We were having a bunch of people submitting the exact same kind of plugins, and they weren’t keeping them updated. I’m like, okay, I know Michelle, I trust her, but I have to keep it updated.

Michelle Frechette 00:04:33  Yeah, I change the colors sometimes.

Mika E.:  That’s fine. 

Michelle Frechette: And add new text to it so it keeps updated. It doesn’t look like it’s been, you know, abandoned anyway, so I promise to keep the puns to a minimum. However, I’m going to start by saying it’s fair to say that you aren’t slackers. Oh, see what I did there?

Carrie Dils 00:04:53  Wow, but we’re in Slack. Does that make us slackers?

Mika E.: We don’t have a group Slack yet so.

Michelle Frechette 00:05:01  I guess we’ll have to. We’ll have to give that some thought, Carrie. For sure.

Carrie Dils 00:05:04  That’s fair.

Michelle Frechette 00:05:06  That’s fair. Oh, yeah. It’s like a lot of words you can substitute in there. There. So it just kind of happens. What drew you to be involved in developing FAIR? And somebody could tell us what the F-A-I-R stands for when they, when they first talk about this too. How did you actually become attached to the project? Because I knew that something we could feel the grumblings but literally had no idea who was involved. So much so that on that Friday night I’m chatting with Carrie at the beginning. I say to her, have you so what? Have you been busy? What’s been going on in your life? She’s like, oh, not much. And then they’re like, and the people who are involved come forward. I’m like, that liar.

Mika E. 00:05:48  Good job. Carrie, the check is in the mail.

Carrie Dils 00:05:52  Sorry Michelle.

Michelle Frechette 00:05:53  No, it’s all good. It was. I was just like, wow, she can keep a secret, man. But yeah. So how did you become attached to it? And what drew you to be involved in the first place? And I’ll we’ll just pop 

Mika E.: Ryan should go first.

Michelle Frechette:  Okay. Ryan, over to you.

Ryan McCue 00:06:08  Okay. Okay. You volunteered me.

Mika E. 00:06:10 I volun-told you.

Ryan McCue 00:06:12  So I think, like very many people in the community, like many of the contributors, I think, you know, had been following the situation from the announcement at WordCamp US and the events that kind of followed from that. And, you know, as part of that, I, I, you know, I kind of looked into, you know, what is actually the, the kind of reasoning behind some of these things and etc.. And I decided to write a blog post or two, about that in which I said, look, I think, I think that there are a lot of good points made around the ways in which you contribute back to open source and the things that we owe to the software and the community that we use. But I think that this is the wrong way to go about it. and then I found myself blocked from wordpress.org. I never received any information about why. So we’ll never know if those two were related at all. Maybe I’ll find out someday. But, you know, contributing to WordPress is part of my job, right? You know, I, people that report to me who contribute to WordPress. We are, you know, one of the largest contributors historically Human Made. as contributors. So, you know, it really got in the way of me being able to do work. And, you know, I think a lot of contributors were worried about the events that happened. So, you know, a lot of kind of ad hoc discussions kind of started, where we all, you know, started chatting to each other and, you know, it was very difficult to work out who, who can you actually chat to? You know, who can you trust? And, you know, particularly with, with people kind of getting blocked left, right and center. It was it was very much a, you know, there’s these people that I really trust and there’s these people who I think I trust, but I like I can’t be 100% certain. And so we ended up bringing together a group of about 20 of us, that created the letter that we published in the repository, about, you know, here’s how, as contributors, we’re feeling, and the things that we’re asking for in terms of how the WordPress community should change, I think just after we had published that, Joost and Karim published, their posts calling for, you know, very similar kind of changes. And from that, we kind of all started talking together as, as kind of the group of groups I think is, how certainly Karim has phrased it. And so that’s kind of how I joined into the FAIR project. And, you know, how how we started kind of creating things, was was really that kind of merging of the groups together.

Michelle Frechette 00:08:46  Mika, is there a secret handshake in this group?

Mika E. 00:08:51  I’m not allowed to do secret handshakes anymore after having stitches in my hand.

Michelle Frechette 00:08:56  So tell us how you were drawn to the project and how you became attached.

Mika E. 00:08:59  So after the letter goes live and after the debacle with what went on with plug-ins. It was really awkward for me in a lot of places because people would be like, well, if you were still in charge of the plug-in director, what would you have done in this situation? And I always say, I’d like to say that I would have quit in solidarity with this is not something I condone, taking someone’s plug-in away from them. but I don’t know for sure. And, you know, that’s for me and my therapist to continue talking about for the rest of my life, I think. But, you know, while all that’s going on, I’m an opinionated me, and I’m like, I don’t think these things are okay. I don’t like what’s going on. And I was slightly vocal at the same time. I had recently been laid off. So I’m looking for a job, so I’m kind of keeping myself a little bit more on the down low. I got, the I got a job and then a couple of days later, someone who was on that letter reached out to me and said, hey, we’re doing this thing. Are you interested? And I’m like, you know what, yeah, I am. Because I love WordPress. I, it let me change my life. It let me change my career direction. I’ve made some amazing friends, some of the best friends in my life. I’ve learned so much about development and working with people from so many different countries, and how to make things for people that they’ll use. And I’m not talking about like developers, I’m talking about end users. Like, I’m I really care about helping end users be able to do the things that they want to do more easily without having to pay a bajillion dollars to companies like Ryan’s. No, I’m just teasing him. But in order to do that, I had been firsthand watching how the plug-in directory, which has perfectly reasonable guidelines for what it is, is actually now at the point where it’s starting to stifle what innovation can be.

Mika E. 00:10:58  And this is not to slight the hard work that goes on in the plugin review team. Those, the folks that have taken up the mantle after me are incredible and amazing, and I praise them every chance I get. I will not hear horrible things said about them because I know how hard that job is. But it doesn’t fit everything. There’s nothing that fits everything. There’s a reason that you know your your Mac laptop. You can still download things from other servers and install them because not everything fits in the App Store. Not everything’s going to ever fit on WordPress.org hosting. It just isn’t. And that’s okay. But there has to be a better way to help grow that. Because right now, to tell an end user, go to this website, download this thing, log into your website, upload this thing and hope that it all keeps working. That’s not a great experience and we can do better. And we can expand and we can grow and we can all together make something better. So when I stepped in and I saw what Ryan had written, I was like, I can work with this, this, this matches something that I’ve been thinking about for the last decade, basically, and that I’ve been refining for six years as a 40 page document, which I showed everybody this week.

Mika E. 00:12:14  You know, I, I care deeply about WordPress getting to grow. And I want it to keep growing. And this is the way I saw of, we can go forward, we can go further. How far can we go once we start unshackling ourselves from believing there’s only one place to install. And, you know, I really hope that that, you know, we get a few dedicated servers and directories like WordPress.org that are like, this is a great safe place to install from. But also then this is my personal company’s directory. You can install all of my things from here. Just have a license key and that’s awesome.

Michelle Frechette 00:12:52  Yeah, absolutely. Carrie, same question to you.

Carrie Dils 00:12:57  What was the question? No, I’m just kidding. I was, I was not part of that contributor, anonymous contributor group that Ryan mentioned, but was involved in a different group. At that point in time that Karim had introduced me to and wanted me in the room as a representative of community and community interest and community has always sort of been the perspective that I’ve come to WordPress with. I’ve never contributed a line of code to core, but I’ve done many things over the years to support the adoption of WordPress and the health of the community. And after, You know, I don’t, won’t rehash. But just after WordCamp US and all the things that followed, I was just literally watching the community splinter and fracture. And so the, the opportunity kind of became when this group of groups started talking and I was introduced to some of these contributors that were part of that letter. And there was the opportunity to talk with these incredibly smart people. Some of them are on this call. And that was like eye opening that, oh my gosh, there is like, we’re not stuck. We don’t have to fork. There is something that we can do in the context of this current environment that can move WordPress forward and out of, this really ugly spot we found ourselves in. So it was exciting to me to get to be a part of it from from that perspective.

Michelle Frechette 00:14:39  Awesome. I do want to know at some point how you all kept it under wraps. So, so well. But before we get to there, because I have a lot of questions and. 

Mika E. 00:14:48 Honestly we just  just asked everybody to keep it quiet.

Michelle Frechette 00:14:50  And they did. And they did the that’s the hard part. Like I arrived to WordCamp Europe and and the first person I saw said, we’re going to be in Poland next year. And like, we’re not supposed to know that till the very last part. It’s like it was already being talked about. So I know how hard it can be to keep things under wraps. But I also know that this people’s like livelihoods are dependent on this and that there are people who are still attached to it who choose to remain anonymous because of that. And I respect that 100% for sure. What we didn’t do yet is talk about what is the FAIR plan. So, Mika, can you walk us through that a little bit? Because believe it or not, there’s probably people who will tune in to hear and go, what are they talking about? So.

Mika E. 00:15:27  Right. So hey, if you have no idea what we’re talking about and like, why are these three talking heads talking to Michelle about something FAIR. The concept behind. FAIR is, what did we say? Free and independent repositories. Is that what we say?

Ryan McCue 00:15:42  Federated.

Carrie Dils: Federated.

Mika E. 00:15:42  Federated, Federated and Independent Repositories. I will admit this is a back-ronym. We came up with the acronym after. It just fit so nicely. The idea behind FAIR is that instead of having a single resource for everything that is WordPress, by which I mean WordPress.org and its myriad servers that are all on WordPress.org services, instead of using just that to install for everybody. We have a what’s called a defederated, well, a federated group of servers, which is basically a bunch of different servers. If you’re familiar with Cloudflare, you can think of them as Cloudflare nodes that are all over the place, and you can install from any of them. And the, the, the starting point where we are today with our Minimum Viable Product, or MVP, is a plugin you can install on WordPress or a packaged WordPress install with this included, just like Akismet and hello, Dolly! And you will. Instead of being pointed at WordPress.org for everything, you’ll be pointed at an alternate repository. Right now it’s running on  Aspire Press. This alternate repository, our goal is to be able to change it so you can point to whatever repository. So let’s say you’re a web host and you want a very curated list of plugins and themes that your hosting platform installs and supports. Well, now you don’t have to worry about blacklisting and blocking all these things. Just point everybody to your repository. In addition, we folded in a bunch of GDPR and privacy protection for things like tracking, because that is a huge thing. People want to know where their data is going. And so we’ve done things where you can turn off Gravatar because that sends things back. It doesn’t phone home to WordPress.org and give updates. All it does is go to this repository to be able to download your updates and install your plugins and themes. Simple. Easy. Done.

Michelle Frechette 00:17:37  It makes sense when you talk about that. I think of as I don’t I don’t refer to myself as a plugin developer because all I did was for Hello, Dolly..

Mika E.00:17:45  You’re a plugin developer. Congratulations.

Michelle Frechette 00:17:47  Okay so I have ten plus, ten plus active installs. Yes. Right? So for those people who are really into the metrics and are watching those active installs, how does that work between the, the, you know, the the WordPress.org repository and FAIR? And is there a way for them to actually have an idea of how many active installs they have between the two?

Mika E. 00:18:09  Ryan, you want to handle that because I remember what you wrote.

Ryan McCue 00:18:11  Yeah. I, so I think there’s kind of two parts of this. You know, we have the, the kind of mirror system that has really sprung up since September with things like Aspire Press with host specific mirrors, etc.. And I know that there has been a concern around how that will potentially change, how some of those metrics work. The difficulty really is that in a decentralized system of any description, you know, how do you actually have any sort of trust of things like that? How do you design a system where you can’t kind of gain metrics? So for the mirror system, it’s really hard to solve that. And that really is kind of a, you know, the mirrors are kind of a stepping stone towards the fully, you know, decentralized system that we’re aiming for. In the fully decentralized system that we’re looking at. There really isn’t actually a way to solve, at least so far as we’ve seen, to solve, decentralized analytics. So instead, we are planning on running a centralized analytics service that is not mandatory or anything like that. Users will be able to opt out. And it will comply with all privacy regulations, telemetry regulations, as a Linux Foundation Project. We are actually subject to certain restrictions that they place on us in terms of what telemetry we collect. We have to actually have approval from, from the Linux Foundation for the data that we collect. But we’re going to do that in an open way. So whereas right now, WordPress.org, that all collects a load of metrics, not just for plugin installs, you know, things like browse happy that collect, you know, browser information, for example. You know, a lot of that data is opaque, right? You go to WordPress.org and you can see, oh, I have ten plus installs, or I have 10 million plus installs, but what’s that actual number? What’s the actual breakdown of that data? You know, people don’t actually have access to that. And people have been calling for that for a long time. So our intention is to run a analytics service that will be centralized. But because of that, it will be an optional part of the system. Users can opt out if they would like, where the data is collected neutrally and is also given out neutrally. So any vendor will be able to go and view their data.View, you know, basically everything that we have kind of stored on that, it’ll be run with open governance, obviously as part of our kind of governance structure. The plan is for all of that code to be fully open source as well. You could go and run your own if you wanted, but it kind of wouldn’t really work in that regard. And so that’s how kind of playing with the analytics. We know how, you know, crucial those sorts of metrics are not just to the individual developers, but also when doing kind of industry wide analysis. Right? You as a new developer might be looking at, hey, where are there potentially needs in the ecosystem? You know, what are unfulfilled, kind of problems that users have and where could I kind of fit in and, you know, maybe make the next really successful plug in business? So that’s that kind of intention with that. You know, that’s that’s on the roadmap, I would say. It’s not something where we have finalized the design for yet.

Michelle Frechette 00:21:13  Okay. So, I think of the three of you, Mika can probably speak best to the fact that there are bad actors in every community because she’s had some major experiences over the years in that way. So what safeguards are in place to prevent abuse of bad actors in federated repositories like this?

Mika E. 00:21:31  See, this is almost like you notice that I dropped a 40 page document about how to moderate the community. So moderation again, this is our proposed plan. This is not something that we’ve locked down and said this is everything that we’re going to do. And it’s really hard to summarize what is actually 40 pages of checks and balances and guidelines and whatnot. But the ultimate thought came down to this, which is in a federated system where everything is decentralized. You need to rely more on the community as a whole than you do a small group of gatekeepers. So first of all, there are going to be technical requirements in order to be able to useFAIR. Your servers are going to have to meet the requirements of an open API, public and private contact information that can be used. So, you know, if you want to join in. You’re going to have to have these things. Otherwise, what’ll happen is if somebody adds your directory to their WordPress site, it’ll get automatically flagged as uncertified, unverified, whatever term we end up coming up with. So step one is if you don’t meet the technical requirements, you’re going to get flagged. This goes for plugins as well. If your plugin doesn’t have a public license statement it’s going to say cannot confirm this is GPL use at your own risk. The next thing that happens though is you start building in a moderation system that allows people to say, hey, I’m using this plugin, you know, Hello, Donny. And I don’t like it. It’s, it’s Donnie Wahlberg quotes, and I just, you know, sorry, Donnie. Donnie Wahlberg quotes and I don’t like it. And you can report the plugin and it gets reported to where you install the plugin from. And where the plugin was listed. So remember we’re talking about kind of two stages where I’ve got a server with all my plugins and then I’ve got another server that has a list of all the plugins that I can install. So, you know, just like you can have a host can say, I will allow plugins from Human Made from Carrie and from Mika, but not from Joe Smith over there. I don’t like him and that’s fine.

Mika E. 00:23:48  But people then using the plugin and be able to say, well, I’ve used this plugin and it’s got a security issue or it’s not meeting the guidelines and it can report it. It’s reported to the people that are hosting and saying, you can install this. It’s getting reported to the people who provided the code, but it also is something that gets shared back. And here we are back going, going. We’re going to have to have a centralized server. And the centralized server is just a moderation server that collects all these things and randomly goes and checks all the little things you have out there to make sure you’re actually tracking these reports. You’re actually doing what you’re supposed to do with them. And when something gets reported, you know I’ve started baking in logic for things like if 75% of the people who use this plugin as detected by the metrics, we’ve determined, which is like you’ve had the plugin installed, it shows up in your option tables as either installed or recently installed. An automatic flag goes up and says, hey, a lot of people are saying this plugin is bad.

Mika E. 00:24:48  Now you’ve got the information because one of the problems that WordPress has, and this is a legitimate problem, is that there’s really no way to say what’s going on. You know, yeah, we’ve got people that can leave reviews, but as developers constantly point out, anybody can log in and leave a review. There’s no way to verify that they actually use the plugin. People can make multiple accounts and do that. Well, now, if we’re requiring the report to be sent from WordPress, your WordPress admin, it can detect what you’ve got installed. Oh, you’re not actually pointing to this repository. You’re not actually using this plugin. You know what? We appreciate you wanting to contact us, make sure you’ve actually used it yourself and have a point and have verified these things before you send them over. It’ll hopefully mitigate some of that. And the overall moderation tool isn’t there to tell you what you can and can’t do. It’s to tell you what’s going on with everything. So, you know, communication. The one place that WordPress really needs help with. I mean, imagine if all of you can see all of the reviews on your admin dashboard and say, oh, okay. This is a good thing. It’s akin to that, but with a few safeguards built in based on my experiences doing forum support and plugin reviews for 15 years, I try not to think about that.

Michelle Frechette 00:26:12  So you made me think of another question though. Ryan, maybe you can answer this one before I let you jump in with your other answer. Is as I as you were talking about, people being able to give that kind of feedback is also that the support forum is a huge way. Especially on free, you know, plugins and I’m assuming seems to have never actually had to use it for themes, but to be able to get help from the developers who created that. Is there a way for that to happen through FAIR as well?

Ryan McCue 00:26:42  So that’s one of the parts where we are looking at the different ways that this might be handled. And, you know, that is kind of breaking away from the WordPress.org model, where WordPress.org acts as basically kind of this oversight and everything all in one. But the reality is, for a lot of, you know, the more professional software vendors who are, you know, offering plugins, you know, the very big kind of companies, they already have their own support systems, right? And so can we instead just encourage people to use those, get a better support experience out of that. As part of that. Now obviously we have to balance that with, you know, making sure that those privacy safeguards are in place. For example, you know, making sure that things are kept secure, etc.. So, you know, we don’t necessarily want to tackle it the exact same way that WordPress.org has where it’s there’s this big central forum where everybody can kind of talk about things. You know, one of the with a lot of what we’ve designed, we’ve taken inspiration from a lot of the decentralized protocols that already exist.

Ryan McCue 00:27:44  And I think the biggest one by far for that is Bluesky’s, at protocol, which powers their kind of decentralized network. They have put a lot of thought into moderation and how some of these services get built up. And so they have this approach, which they call Stackable Moderation, where you kind of have different moderation services that you can kind of subscribe to. And so we can see a model in that where, you know, we can offer a moderation service. Maybe that’s opinionated, maybe it’s less opinionated. And then you can subscribe to a different, you know, moderation service where you can subscribe to multiple. So, for example, you might subscribe to a moderation service from a security company or something like that, where, you know, they are going to make sure that everything that you’re installing is scanned and verified. You know, maybe there are opportunities for paid services and that sort of thing as well. And so for reviews, for example, we’ve talked a bit about, you know, maybe, maybe this is actually something where we don’t need to create a solution. But actually the community could, you know, is there an opportunity for something like the TripAdvisor for plugins? Where a separate service entirely, one that we don’t run, is actually looking at, you know, handling some of those things. And so we’ll have to decide as we go throughout this, which of these services do we want to build ourselves? Which of them do we want to make sure that there are ways to kind of handle. But actually we’re going to leave that to the community. And that’s a delicate balance as well, right? We need to make sure that we are keeping things secure private. You know, kind of still somewhat controlled while also allowing all the benefits of the decentralization. And, you know, having things go directly from vendors to users, without us being in the middle. So, you know, all of those things are there’s a lot to think about. All of our repositories are open. Our discussions are open. We welcome, you know, feedback and comments from everybody as we go through designing this and working out some of those solutions.

Michelle Frechette 00:29:43  Now, I will say that, that what happened at WordCamp US last year, in the final moments, for example, was a huge catalyst. But projects like this have been talked about and been part of the conversation for quite a long time. So as she takes a sip, I’m going to ask Carrie you my next question is what values and principles are shaping this project’s architecture and governance that are helping us move forward now? If that was a catalyst or not, what is bringing all of that together for? For the FAIR project?

Carrie Dils 00:30:15  That’s a great question. And my colleagues might have differing or things to add, but from my perspective, WordPress serves this massive ecosystem. And actually who’s on the call is really representative of the span of that. So at one end, I’m educating the end user and educating independent developers on how to build a small business around it. And then on the other end of the spectrum, you’ve got someone like Ryan who is serving enterprise clients and running WordPress installs that do some really bespoke things and, and bespoke ways, and have a whole different set of concerns than maybe the kinds of installs I’m working on.And then you’ve got someone like Mika, who’s working for a company that’s actually building products on top of it. So you’ve got this, this wide span of people, and each of them have very different concerns, for what comes out of WordPress. And so I think when we’re talking about, some of the principles and the values, it’s taking into consideration all of those things and not just the concerns of one particular commercial entity, or one particular segment of the community, but the, the breadth of that and trying to, create a governance structure that respects the input of all of that, but also has checks and balances to, make sure it’s not weighted too heavily in favor of, one entity over, over another, if that makes sense.

Michelle Frechette 00:31:55  Yeah, it does make a lot of sense. Which also brings me to my next question then. This is not lining anybody’s pockets with, like, none of you are making a ton of money and lining your pockets with cash?

Carrie Dils 00:32:05  Oh girl. If I stood up right now, you would see the dollar bills flooding out of my pockets. 

Michelle Frechette 00:32:12  Hahaha! Now, before somebody believes you, correct that statement.

Carrie Dils 00:32:15  No. To date, nobody has made a dime off of this. And I think Karim in his post pointed out that just this, this group that’s actually the 50 or so that have been building, if you were to put a price tag on this, if somebody came to an agency and said, hey, build us this, this would be a high six figure project. Like, it’s been a ton of volunteer hours and efforts and skills that has gone into it. And none of it is, is because we’re making money or getting rich off of it. It’s my motivation and I can only speak to myself, but I think just in conversations, a lot of people share this. What we’re looking for is a future for WordPress. And we are building our livelihoods and have built our livelihoods on WordPress, and we hope to continue doing that. So this investment at this point, while it’s not directly making us anything, hopefully ensures the longevity for the platform that does earn us a living.

Michelle Frechette 00:33:18  So WordPress is global. We know that, this project, just from the vision of who I saw at the front of the room, tends to be fairly North American Eurocentric at this point in time. What kinds of principles, and decisions are you making to make sure that there is representation globally, but also for underrepresented groups ethnically? You know, all the different ways that we think about underrepresentation in WordPress and what are we doing for that within FAIR?

Mika E. 00:33:50  That’s that’s a really tough thing to ask, because you start by saying, well, we’re open for anybody. But the reality is that it’s hard to, to want to jump into something like this and from a minority perspective, it’s actually scarier. It is harder for women to get jobs. Women over 45. It’s terrifying. It is harder for minorities to get jobs, regardless of the industry. And to ask them, hey, come on over here and risk it because we’ve seen how bad things can get. We’ve seen people get, you know, banned and blacklisted from WordPress.org. It’s a big risk and it’s scary. And I suspect that that more than anything right now is sort of, people with the grace of privilege were able to step out and be public. People who were willing to take a huge risk, regardless of the cost, were the ones who were able to step out. And that’s kind of why it is, North American, European centric at the moment is because, well, that’s where.

Michelle Frechette 00:35:02  That’s where for the privilege.

Mika E. 00:35:04  That’s that’s where the privilege is at. But, you know, baked into our code of conduct, baked into our guidelines, baked into everything we’ve written is a place that is intentionally welcoming to people from every aspect of life, every language, every belief system, every sexuality, every gender, every country, every, you know, are you a cat person or a dog person? You’re still welcome. You’re a gecko person? Great. Come on in. You know, provided you can follow our code of conduct. Welcome aboard.

Mika E. 00:35:39  And you know at this point now it’s really we’re just going to have to start reaching out and saying, hey would you like to come over here. And that, you know that’s going to be a concerted effort. But thankfully we’re partnered with people like the WordPress WPCC, which say is running and it is just outstanding community coming together to sponsor community, and tying in with groups like that will actually start bringing in those other groups and minorities who feel that that’s a safer onboarding, perhaps. But I have heard directly from people from minority groups, of which I am a member of a few of them. That they’re scared. And and honestly, I can’t I can’t say they’re wrong to be scared, but they’re worried about their future ability to make a living, and that matters a lot.

Michelle Frechette 00:36:30  Yeah. So that brings me to another question then is, is what kinds of opportunities are there for people to be involved? And can they continue. Like if if I wanted to sign up today or if, you know, some somebody in one of the, let’s say, from Black Press wanted to sign up to help out today.Can they continue to remain anonymous if they participate in this project to protect their, their place in, in any of the communities? And they’re.

Mika E. 00:36:59  Absolutely.100%. We have a few community members who are doing just that. In fact. And, you know, you asked earlier how are we able to keep this a secret? It’s honestly, it’s because we’re all coming from a place of equitable trust that we all understand, even if we are privileged enough to not have to worry about that. None of us are post economic. We all have to worry a little bit about what’s going on. We recognize the risks people are taking. We accept them and we will do whatever we can to protect them. Like if I found out tomorrow that Ryan was leaking private information, I would be, you know, I know Ryan. Sorry, I just picked on you because that’s it.

Michelle Frechette 00:37:39  Ryan. You’re done. 

Mika E. 00:37:41  This is what happens when you wear red. My eyes go over there and I’m like. Oh, it’s a red flag.

Ryan McCue 00:37:46  literally. Literally. Look, I’m in Europe anyway, so you could just report me under GDPR, so.

Mika E00:37:52  I could. And honestly, I would.

Michelle Frechette 00:37:55  Much easier.

Mika E. 00:37:56  I mean, you know, from my personal experiences, I take privacy super seriously. I take the requirement of anonymity in specific roles. Very seriously. I wish there were things we didn’t need. But you know, the truth is, bunch of people be wild out there. You got to protect. You’ve got to protect your community. And that means from the top down, that means everybody who contributes, everybody who comments, everybody who uses FAIR and WordPress have to be protected. And I that that’s like a lot of that is my driving motivation for why I want to do this. I want to make a place that is safe for people to install and run and make a living. Safely.

Michelle Frechette 00:38:43  Now, Mika, you said something. I’m going to oh go ahead.

Ryan McCue 00:38:49  So I’m just going to say being kind of part of the Linux Foundation as well. You know, there’s a wealth of programs that we can kind of, you know, join into. And, you know, we are only just starting to explore what that looks like. You know, I’m really excited to see, you know, something that we wanted to be really clear about when we were doing this project is, you know, WordPress is often quite insular. And actually, there’s a lot of great things that are going on, particularly around diversity and inclusion initiatives in the broader community. How can we be part of those sorts of things and, you know, bring them to there?

Michelle Frechette 00:39:32  I’ve lost Ryan. Oh, there he is.

Ryan McCue 00:39:34  So you know, I’m interested to see make use of some of those.

Michelle Frechette 00:39:38  Yeah.

Ryan McCue 00:39:39  Hi. I hope I’m back.

Mika E. 00:39:40  Ryan, maybe you should turn off some of those Docker images.

Michelle Frechette 00:39:45  I got. We got a little bit of lag.

Ryan McCue   All of them. Okay.

Michelle Frechette 00:39:49  So. So, Mika, you said something about top down and that we tend to think of top down as being an organization that is controlled at the top and down. And I know that’s not what you mean. So can you. Can sure. One of you jump in and say, how does how is this governed? Is it a board? How are they elected? Just kind of the brief synopsis of how. Governance happens.

Mika E. 00:40:11  Somehow we made a tech, so we made a technical steering committee. And there was concern at the beginning that people would be like, well, technical. I’m not a technical person like you were saying. I’m not a plugin developer. The reality is WordPress is a technical product. At the end of the day. What is it? It’s software. So we have a technical steering committee that is sort of in charge of steering the boat. And the captains currently are me, Carrie, and Ryan. We were nominated for being the chairs. We accepted this position. I’m still trying to remember why. No, I actually had a long talk. And this, is this is for people who are wondering, like, how seriously are we taking this? I sat down and talked to my therapist and my wife before I said yes. Like when the nomination started going out, I said, there’s a real good chance I might get nominated. And do I want to do this? And my therapist for years has been informing me she will drop me as a client if I was to try to lead a WordPress release. So this involved a lot of talk and a lot of talk about what are we doing? We’re not trying to lead a WordPress release. We’re trying to make sure that all the groups that need to happen, like we call them Working Groups, WordPress folks are more familiar with them as Make Groups. That’s right. The equivalency is about the same. But like, appointing them, like, like we have a technical independence group that Ryan is, particularly steering, which is going to, you know, get us away from WordPress.org and they’ve released their MVP plugin and, that’s great. And then then the next steps are we got to build the protocol. We’ve got to build the servers. We’ve got to build all this stuff. That’s one working group. We had one that was working on getting the initial documentation done. We’re probably going to have to spin up another one for ongoing things like that. We’re going to need one for all sorts of aspects of this. And our job is to get those things rolling. We also have a board, but the board doesn’t get to decide what we do, per se. It’s I think I called it a Parliamentary Democracy, where we’ve got a House of Lords and a House of Commons. We’ve got a Senate in a. And a House, theoretically. And we’ve got, you know, I guess arguably we’re the Supreme Court in a very weird way. Because we get to, you know, decide.

Ryan McCue 00:42:35  The metaphor might break down a bit if you.

Speaker 5 00:42:37  It does.This metaphor, these don’t really last entirely far. But instead of having a single person getting to decide this is the direction that we’re going. We have to decide as a group, and we have to bring it to the board and say, this is what we’re doing and this is why. And if the board doesn’t like us, they can stop funding us.

Michelle Frechette 00:42:56  Right.

Mika E. 00:42:57  We got checks and balances built in. and more of this, as we work to acquire funding because we’re going to need it. You know, more of this will be coming to light, but it’s difficult to speak of something that doesn’t quite exist yet.

Michelle Frechette 00:43:12  Yeah, I can understand that. Carrie

Mika E. 00:43:15  Carrie, I know has an explanation that also helps this. 

Michelle Frechette 00:43:20  Well, I was going to ask Carrie if, if you looked at other federated type projects like, Mastodon, Drupal, things like that. As far as how you built the governance here, did you look at other similar projects so that you didn’t have to kind of invent the wheel?

Carrie Dils 00:43:35  Absolutely. And I want to give a huge shout out to Courtney Robertson, who’s part of our Technical Steering Committee, and she has broad, exposure to many open source projects and did a great job of kind of collating what some of those different governance models look like and presenting those to us. I come from, WordPress is the only open source project I’ve ever worked with. So, my perspective, I mean, my perspective was shaped entirely by WordPress. So it Courtney helping bring some, some things to light and then also just being part of the Linux Foundation and looking at other open source projects that they, that they house. We reviewed many of those and looked at what’s the we know what we, just to be blunt, we know what we don’t want. We don’t want to BDFL so what is a governance structure that does involve these checks and balances that we talked about. And we came up with one and it’s not unique. These are you know, these are governance models that have served other open source projects. What we did do is, work with the Linux Foundation to make sure that it was WordPress flavored. So making sure that, for example, Mika mentioned earlier, you hear Technical Steering Committee and you think, well, I’m not technical, how do I contribute to this? So in our charter, we specifically deviated from a Linux Foundation norm, to say that you can contribute. These are all the sorts of contributions you can make to this technical project. And all of those are technical in nature. So I think there was definitely a leaning on what are some best practices from other projects out there. And then how do we customize this to, to fit, what, what we want as a group.

Michelle Frechette 00:45:36  That makes sense. We’re closing in an hour, so I do want to wrap things up. I know we could talk all day about this. But, Ryan, I’m going to ask you this next question is, what would you say to developers who might be hesitant to adopt FAir because they perceive potential conflicts with WordPress policies?

Ryan McCue 00:45:55  Yeah, it’s a good question. You know, I think that we are going to see some hesitancy of people kind of adopting this. But, you know, ultimately we don’t see this as being, you know, this is not a break away, you know, from what WordPress is. This is a continuation. And this is bringing together the community. You know, the way that I’ve phrased it is kind of the community is actually already a bit splintered, both organizationally with the way that, you know, particularly events since September, but just in general as well. And also, technically, we already have plugins that are distributed outside of .org. And so we see this as a way to stitch things back together on both sides. So, you know, we definitely think that we can kind of coexist with WordPress.org. We would love WordPress.org to be part of the protocol and to join into that network. And we’d love for, you know, Automattic and Matt to, you know, support the project as well. You know, in terms of kind of direct conflicts or anything, we’re trying to design things so that there are as few of those as possible. So for developers to opt in to using FAIR in their plugin or theme, they’ll add a single kind of header and that’s it. That’s all they have to do. So they can continue distributing via wordpress.org, as well as still opting into the FAIR system. And that applies for, distributing, you know, people who are using things like GitHub data, for example, or using EDD, they will be able to add a single header, opt in to the FAIR system, but still have those fallbacks. So, you know, we are trying to make sure as much as possible that these things are compatible with, you know, kind of coexistence, cooperation, but, you know, giving users that kind of better user experience, the better security, you know, the better privacy, things like that. You know, when it’s available and opting in.

Michelle Frechette 00:47:41  One of the questions that I’ve heard people say is there’s like there’s like almost like two, even before FAIR. Right? That there’s like two ecosystems. There’s the free through the repo and then there’s all these, premium plugins. And is there an opportunity through FAIR to include premium plugins that wouldn’t necessarily be part of the repo? And everybody’s nodding. So who wants to take that question.

Mika E. 00:48:03  That’s that’s that’s that’s my hill to die on. Yay. So I mentioned in passing that there are two different types of servers. There’s the server that basically acts as a directory and lists everything, and there’s the server that has all the actual code. So we’ve got these two servers. And let’s say I run a listing one. And I actually say I really love Awesome Motiv, I work here, I want to for my clients. I love Human Made as well. For my clients, I want to automatically include all of their premium plugins. They’ll have to put in their own keys and licenses, but I can connect directly to Awesome Motiv and have it be installable. Now I don’t have to send people to a bunch of different websites. As a company, I would be able to say, if you want to buy our license, here’s a license that’ll give you access to everything. Install this on your server, just paste in this line and automatically you have access. This is pie in the sky, by the way. I don’t actually have a paste in the URL and have access to everything yet, but this is like how I envision a nice world.  And then going even further, we can say that like from FAIR’s point of view, we’re not going to be policing the GPL because we can’t. write.

Michelle Frechette00:49:19  Right.

Mika E. 00:49:20  It is a categorical impossibility to vet every single repository in the universe. It’s just that that is unsustainable. So instead, we’ve got our checks and balances, our little moderation and flagging system. That’s going to say this doesn’t say it’s GPL, can’t promise it’s okay for you to use it. But also by not locking ourselves into that, we’re able to say, hey, hey Drupal, are you interested in using this? You can. So, you know, we’re we’re we’re kind of building it out in what Ryan and I have been calling agnostic, which is we don’t care what CMS you use. The concepts that we’re building are beyond just WordPress. This is something that we’re hoping other CMS tools, especially ones that don’t have a way to install extensions and add ons. MediaWiki I am looking at you because manually FTP is just such a pain. I’ve been involved in a lot of different projects. Open source. They’re not all as good as WordPress with installations. In fact, most of them aren’t. But could a company deploy all of their own things and make them discoverable so that when I go to my WP admin and I’m like, you know, I’m looking for a, an alternate search plugin and I can type it in and it’s going to check the trusted directories that I’ve listed and it’s going to say, oh, hey, did you know Awesome Motiv has this, blue, blue tooth. And I was trying Bluehost has this, DreamHost has this, GoDaddy has this. You could use these and it finds them all. And it says, but this one’s going to cost you money. This one’s free. This one’s free to try. And, you know, suddenly you have all that information there. And you can do it from inside WordPress.org or your WordPress install, instead of having to go to Google or having to go to DuckDuckGo or whatever you want to use, we’re bringing it in and we’re making it easier for the users and the developers. Now, you don’t have to worry about spamming WP Admin to say, hey, check out my other products because they’re searchable and they’re findable and they’re listenable. You can even just have a very simple link. You like this, check out the other things we’re doing. Click here and you click and you’re still in WP Admin and.

Mika E. 00:51:34  Shows you the list. And all of a sudden those wonderful features that you get, like these Monster Insights. And I’m picking on this because I work for the company, but I’ve also been looking into it lately. There’s a thing where you can install extensions. You can once you’ve put in your license key, it tells you which ones you can click here and install. And Gravity Forms does the same thing. I don’t have any affiliation with them. I just like them. Yoast SEO does the same thing again. No affiliation. I just like them. You can go in and install add ons from within WP admin. Well, we’re just making that easier for you. We’re making it easier for you to find these things. We’re making it easier for a new company to be discovered. Because instead of having to say, well, I’m a company that’s premium, I have to release a free version and WordPress.org because otherwise no one will find me. This is no longer the case now. Hey, I’ve made this cool thing. Would you list me on your aggregator directory? And, you know, somebody will say, well, I’ve got these policies in place where I accept open submissions, so let me take a look and someone else can say, yeah, I only like to list the things I love. Okay, that’s fair too. We’re giving the freedom to be your own directory, and we’re giving the freedom to make more directories that can talk to each other and share things and have accountability. Because if you use Bluesky, they’ve got this great thing where you can verify yourself by editing your DNS. Imagine doing something like that with a plugin to be able to say, yes, site kit really is owned by Google. Now it is unquestionable. This is the official plugin. I don’t have to ask questions or wonder if they’re trying to trick me, or somebody just using a really dumb name that violates trademarks. I can say, oh, look at that. Their official cool. I can trust them more. And those kinds of fail safes are great for companies because you can say, well, did you see this picture when you installed it? No. Okay. You’ve installed a bad one. Let’s help you. And then you went over a customer and they’re like, hey, I really like these people. They helped me when I was in a bad place. WordPress is, Carrie pointed out, is the community. Without it, without all sides of it, the end users and the developers and the people that are writing core and the people who are building hosting platforms and the people who are making, you know, videos like this. Michelle, writing articles, all of us together is what’s making WordPress great. And we’re just as Ryan said, we’re trying to stitch it all back together. And show the awesome quilt we can make together.

Michelle Frechette 00:54:05  Absolutely. Ryan, I’m going to direct my next question to you. And it wasn’t in the original ones because things are popping up in my head as we go. But there is there has been over the last ten years. You know, I used to think that if it’s on the internet, it’s not really creating a carbon footprint because it’s not spam in my like, actual paper. What does something like FAIR do to a carbon footprint? is it somehow making it better. Are we paying attention to those kinds of things? Can you talk about that for just a brief minute or two?

Ryan McCue 00:54:37  Absolutely. I’m glad that you asked me that question, in fact, because, you know, this is like one of my passions really. So when we were looking around at decentralized protocols, we did have a look at, you know, what is the difference between, say, Mastodon versus something like App Protocol? And, you know, some of the ways in which decentralized protocols work is they’re kind of a mirroring system, right, where you kind of copy everything around. One of the key insights of that protocol was actually, you don’t have to copy things around. You can kind of, you know, reduce that down. And so there’s much less data kind of flowing back and forth. There’s much fewer CPU cycles being burnt on things. So there’s a couple of key ways in which we kind of tackle this in FAIR. One is that we don’t have a full system where, you know, we’re kind of taking mirrors constantly, and servers have to send data that might never be used. You know, to each other and things like that. The second is, that by building in, kind of cryptographic security into the entire protocol, we can safely, kind of cache packages closer to the source where they needed. So our CDN is powered by Fastly. That’s already an improvement over, you know, a site that might not have a CDN at all. But we’re also going to build into the protocol the ability for host to have mirror and caches inside their own data centers, where, you know, if this is a common package that people are installing. You know, maybe a jetpack or something like that or even need to leave the data, right? Right now, still having the same safety guarantees and being sure that this package hasn’t been altered. We can now guarantee that, we can build on those pillars of trust. You know, like the things that Mika mentioned, things like domain verification etc. and we can really help users understand this is exactly the same thing. This is what the vendor wants you to receive. And in doing so, reduce the amount of internet traffic that’s going back and forth across the world. You know, so I think, you know, we’re making some big strides forward in that regard. You know, it’s possible to do those things today, but it’s very difficult to do them in a secure way. And so by marrying those two together.

Michelle Frechette 00:57:00  So before I let you all go and thank you for that answer, I do want to know what I see needs. Right? So you do need people to be participating in this? Is there isn’t a website, website yet? At least that wasn’t as of last week. It points to a GitHub repository. I assume that you’re going to need marketing people. You’re going to need documentation people. You’re going to continue to need developers. What do you see in, like, let’s say, the next six months as to how people can get involved? How do they, if they go to the GitHub repository, is there a way for them to say, hey, I want to help? And how are you looking at some of the film forming some of those teams that might not be formed yet to help, not just create the, you know, the project itself, but tell people about it and document it well.

Mika E. 00:57:49  Carrie want to take that one.

Carrie Dils 00:57:52   Yeah, sure. So right now we’re, everything is taking place in what’s called GitHub Discussions. So if you go to that repository, click on the tab that says Discussions. Anybody could start a discussion. And we have several different labels on there like ideas or general. And so anybody is welcome to do that. We also have a thread called Introduce Yourself. So if somebody just wants to come literally introduce themselves and say that they’re interested in being a part of this, that’s a great starting point. There are already discussions coming up already, and Ryan and Mika probably speak to this on the on the technical repositories request coming in, pull requests. On the documentation side, we’ve got some movement there. We have discussions starting absolutely on the marketing and the website end of things. We haven’t formed any new working groups. I don’t know why I quoted that. But we we haven’t formed any.

Mika E. 00:58:52  Work is subjective.

Carrie Dils 00:58:55  Since, since the announcement last week. But I think that’s certainly on the horizon as we identify sort of the scope of, of, of needs. Because you’re right, Michelle, there is a lot to tackle. I don’t know, Ryan or Mika, if you want to add to that.

Mika E. 00:59:09  I mean, there’s needs and then there’s also us trying to define, okay, these are the needs, these are the wants, and these are the people we have who are willing to help us. Where can we fit people in best? Because like for example, you say, I’m not a plugin developer. I challenged that thought you wrote a plugin. Congratulations, you’re a plugin developer. You’re now a technical person. But like, if you wanted to say I want to just write documentation, okay, we’re going to see what kind of people want to write documentation first. We’ll just have them doing, you know, pull requests or just bringing up issues saying, hey, this is unclear. I think it could be better like this. And letting someone who’s more familiar with GitHub, you know, write the pull request and do all the coding, and that’s fine too. But then as we see more and more that we’ll be able to go, okay, these are the people we should say, hey, we’re going to be making a working group that handles the documentation of how to install plugins. Let’s just say, I mean, we all know how to do that. But, you know, maybe we need a better directions. Great. We’ll make a working group for that. Would you like to be in on it? And we’re kind of at the stage we’re collecting. Okay, I’ve got a designer, I’ve got a writer, I’ve got someone who’s really good at writing hosting setups. I’ve got somebody who’s really good at write at how to already call other systems and pull things in. You know, oh, you’re an expert on this. Great. And we’re just sort of slotting people in and then build the working group based on who do we have? And what is most important? So a lot of needs and wants. I went to a high school that like very specifically focused on understanding the difference between your needs and your wants. You need to take a shower every day. This was something that you had to teach the freshman boys. They didn’t believe you. You need to take a shower every day. You want to take a shower with hot water. You have to take a shower with hot water. It’s just a little bit more convenient.And it works better.

Michelle Frechette 01:01:08  It’s more pleasurable. Sure.

Mika E. 01:01:10 Right. We made fires to heat the water, to be able to have hot showers. Because it was a want, not a need.

Michelle Frechette 01:01:17  That makes sense. Yeah.

Mika E. 01:01:18  You know, I will say that they broke down on that when they were like, food has to be good because if it’s not good food, you’re just going to be miserable. And that’s and that was fair.

Michelle Frechette 01:01:26  But like let’s you can survive as a miserable person. There are plenty people who do it.

Mika E. 01:01:31  Like we didn’t. We don’t have, we didn’t have heating in the dorm in, in your cabins. And they were cabins. You wanted to have a warmer cabin. Congratulations. You chopped the wood and made a fire and warmed up your cabin. But because of that, I. That’s why I was, like, so pedantic when we were on the MVP. I’m like, that’s great. We’ll do it later. That’s great. Let’s make a ticket for this later. Because the need was the MVP and the want is things like, oh we could put in a doing it wrong here. We could go extra mile and do this okay. Let’s stub that out and pin it in the board for later. We need this. And so right now we’re collecting the need and the army.

Ryan McCue 01:02:08  Yeah. And now that we’re kind of transitioned to working in the open working with the community, we’re starting to pick up a lot of those. So one other way that people can also get involved is that we have regular meetings as well which are open to everybody to join. All you need to do is create a Linux Foundation open profile account. We post the agendas for those on the organization discussions on GitHub. You’re welcome to contribute to that agenda. And, join into the calls whether just to listen in. See what’s kind of happening and keep your finger on the pulse or, you know, whether you want to start contributing. So that’s also a great place to kind of dive in and see, you know, what exactly is happening and, how do I help out?

Michelle Frechette 01:02:52  Excellent. Well, I want to thank you all for meeting with me today and helping us get some more information out about the FAIR plan and what’s happening with it and how people can view it and also become involved if they want to. I’d love to have you all back in, like, six months, eight months, something like that, where we can talk about where the needle has moved to. And I think, I think we’re going to see things happen pretty quickly as far as the documentation, the marketing, all of those things. So we can talk again about how it’s going. So hopefully we can find, I can’t believe how quickly we were all able to come up with the same time today to record I. The stars aligned. Let’s see if they can do that again. And you know and.

Mika E. 01:03:29  Until then go to fair.pm which will redirect you to our git repository for now. and take a look. Install the plugin. If it has a problem let us know. We would love to know about that plugin conflicts, theme conflicts, conflicts with, you know, things we haven’t even thought about yet, like somebody brought up on with Classic Press just completely fell out of my mind. But now we’ve got to fix in for that too, because everybody’s welcome.

Michelle Frechette 01:03:55  Excellent. Well, thank you so much, Ryan, Mika, Carrie for spending some time with me today. We will definitely keep watching what’s going on and have you back at a later date just to see how where we’ve come from today till then. So thank you very much. And everybody enjoy your weekend.

Carrie Dils 01:04:11  Thanks, Michelle.

Ryan: Thanks for having us.

Mika E. 01:04:12  Thank you very much.