new content creators slack channel

As part of my passion project of uniting WordPress YouTubers and growing stronger connections between the WordPress project and content creators, I’ve petitioned and kicked off a new slack channel dedicated to #content-creators. Since posts on Make Core have a much different audience than my site here, I wanted to share some bonus thoughts about why this is so important to me.

Having worked on various release squads, I know first hand how much hard work by so many people goes into our official release content, posts and videos included. These might get tens of thousands of views but I noticed pretty quickly that a single influencer’s video can surpass that in a single day. Let that sink in! This is the reality of today’s media landscape and it’s something that we as a community need to embrace. It’s why I care deeply about this topic because it goes straight to the heart of telling the story of WordPress and bringing open source to the next generation. My mind nearly spins when I think about it: Who is telling that story? What story can we tell together? What parts of our story are missing? What stories do the next generation find compelling? How can we bring content creators closer to those building our products? What feedback do content creators hear that the project might miss? On and on.

In the same way contributors like myself blog about working on the project and offer their unique take for what they want to see next, I see such a big overlap in how content creators embrace their authentic voice and become the guide to WordPress for so many people. When running the FSE Outreach Program around growing adoption, awareness, and feedback loops for the, at the time, in progress site editor work, I found how powerful it was that we had such a WYSIWYG experience. Increasingly, I leaned more on video content to show rather than tell about what was coming next. This led to my creating a YouTube channel mainly to share videos for those creating content to have accurate, detailed information about features, both shipped and in progress. I have no intention of being an influencer but I have every intention of ensuring influencers have what they need to share accurate, compelling information about what’s happening in WordPress. This overlaps directly with my source of truth work that aims to offer the same for WordPress releases as a whole for all who write content about what’s new (educators, marketers, podcasters, meetup organizers, content creators, etc).

At the same time, I also found in running the outreach program how important it was to both go to where folks were to meet them where they are (online meetup groups, forums, Facebook groups, slack communities, etc) and to have a dedicated space they could easily participate in. This often meant a lot of manual work and I struggled to understand how best to scale myself. How do we get the word out about what’s been worked on? How do we ensure it resonates with people? We’re building really cool things but how do people find out about them? I tried a range of ideas (like this post series) but nothing I could create on my own could reach the necessary scale… until I started to switch my perspective.

While we do need to grow official WordPress channels across the board, WordPress has also always thrived on word of mouth and person to person connections. Matt talks about this often in his keynotes at WordCamps. Often the magic of WordPress happened when someone taught someone else how to use it. As I got deeper into YouTube and watching videos of people using the Site Editor to gather feedback, I saw a growing amount of inaccuracies and missed opportunities, partially due to the projects need to do better story telling from the root. Instead of just focusing on growing our own messaging, what if we also reached out to those already invested in and telling the story of WordPress? What if we all got a bit closer and made it as easy as possible for folks to learn about what’s new and how it fits into the broader work happening in the project? What if we created spaces for folks to record content during flagship events? What if we had stronger feedback loops from creators and the pain points their audiences run into? What if we built community amongst creators in the WordPress space to encourage more collaborations and knowledge sharing? There’s a beautiful flywheel that can be created in coming together that has the chance to bring more folks into open source and the open web as a whole. That’s what makes me most excited and that’s been behind the various ideas I’ve had in over the last year, from hosting hallway hangouts to an in person event to a panel at WCUS this year. As my DMs and emails grew, it felt antithetical to how the WordPress projects works with transparent communication and pockets of momentum to drive ideas forward.

This is just a small behind the scenes look at the creation of #content-creators: a place where we can build the flywheel together. If you’re a content creator, or just care about how WordPress tells its story, come join us. It’s an experiment and one that is ready to be shaped by those who show up. See you there.