The night before PressConf, a bunch of us ended up at the same restaurant. We mostly got there separately, in that way where a hundred people descend on a small city for a conference and everybody wants tacos. We arrived in different clusters and contexts, engaged in different conversations, some of us knowing each other well, some of us not knowing each other at all.
And then some of us looked at two big tables sitting next to each other and just … pushed them together.
No agenda. No planning. No checking badges for company names or titles. Just: There’s more of us than we thought, so let’s make a bigger table!
The moment stood out to me immediately. Of course, it warmed my heart, battered as it has been over the last few years. But more importantly, it struck me as the perfect metaphor for what I have long believed about the WordPress community, and what I believe makes us different from other tech communities.
At our best, the WordPress community has been a paragon of pushing the tables together. We are welcoming. We are inclusive. We relate to each other as humans more than customers or competitors. We are a motley collection of people who made the choice to think about more than their bottom line, who were willing to make room for something bigger, and messier, where profit isn’t always the underlying motive.
It’s (finally!) trendy to talk about community and contribution. Hooray! But here’s a fun fact: Community is, at its core, a feeling. A state of being. A state of belonging. And while anyone can pretend to create a community, the feeling of community comes from individual people sharing that mutual state of belonging. And the WordPress community has, uniquely, against all odds, created that authentic sense of belonging, across the entire world.
I think that is why we are always so shook when we are reminded about the stark realities of the “official” WordPress structure. Because the “great man” theory that keeps being shoved in our faces is the opposite of what we have experienced. What we created.
A community doesn’t hide its work. A community doesn’t vilify its members. A community isn’t a secret table in the back. It’s not secret deals or secret rules or secret bans. And, most importantly, a community is not centered around the whims of a single person who is revered as an infallible visionary. (That’s a religion, or a cult of personality. Your pick.)
A community is, by definition, a group of people united by something bigger than their individual selves. A community is greater than the sum of its parts, because the collective spirit is more than any one member could hold alone. A community looks to heal, and tries to help. A community meets you where you are, then offers to walk you to where you want to go.
The form of “WordPress community” that is being tossed about these days is, oh-so-ironically, WordPress community in name only. Turns out, you can trademark a name, but you can’t trademark a feeling.
For the last few years, our community has been facing an identity crisis. And now, we need to ask ourselves some hard questions.
Are we the community we thought we were, pushing our tables together and working to support all of us … a beautiful, real-life example of a rising tide lifting all of our boats? Or are we a privately owned commodity, good for free labor and as leverage for extortion, but otherwise a bunch of idiots stifling the singular vision of a self-described dictator?
I know what I believe. And judging by my conversations with WordPressers around the world, and the warm glow of the PressConf wrap-up posts, there are plenty of others like me, who still feel the pull toward the bigger table.
We are strong enough to keep our community. We just have to be willing to push.
P.S. This wasn’t intended as a promo post for The WP Community Collective, but since it sort of is, I might as well give you the link: thewpcommunitycollective.com
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