eir ass in terms of making an investment decision but and they kind of they may rubbish WordPress but most of them don't but when WordPress comes into the office you know, is that XWP is it VIP is it some amorphous combination of things and then they go to research the ecosystem as well and they go okay well you know what is the WordPress ecosystem there's Adobe, there's cycle and break open things so I think the elements of WordPress as a solution for the enterprise buyer are all there but at some point we actually expect the enterprise buyer to put those together and I don't think that fundamentally has to change but we have to make it easier for the enterprise buyer to put those elements together and understand how the enterprise layer and the WordPress ecosystem there's a benefit I think to having modularity because at some point everyone falls out of love with their agency they say great take your code you know go to code company or whoever because you can but really you can't it's not that easy but it should the open source not only from the technology perspective from a business and the ecosystem perspective should be a strength that we're marketing to because if you go to really on stage he said to rubbish people you've got to arc there's nothing you can do if you go to Adobe you don't have really control of your own roadmap to a certain extent if you go to a hosted solution the data is not yours the code is not yours so those are the key elements you don't always win those battles because sometimes those are things that are not a high priority for the enterprise buyer but as a we should be trumpeting the benefits of open source as a kind of ecosystem to we don't do that well enough right so I don't have the solution but I don't have that I'm not going to prescribe a solution for that but that's where the embryonic gaggle and whoever wants to join the embryonic gaggle to get together I just saw I think it was Noel did it early in the week like even like Wix and Squarespace have like this full enterprise section on their side the whole journey took the bottom I don't I didn't see that I hadn't seen it before but was surprising to see that like something so consumer grade historically is even like got a very good narrative around Wix or Squarespace but like something so simple like that so they're definitely going after that as well Thank you very much for your questions Thank you all to the panel for joining us and sharing your experience and like see all of you Thank you Thank you very much Yes, thank you guys so much Yeah, let's give them an extra one Come on guys, yeah Alright, before you guys all leave there is just a quick announcement so lunch is actually pushed back to 115 So, yeah, at one just head out to the outdoor area to take the family photo I think there's going to be people kind of ushering you in that direction Sorry How was the Mia You're all coming in here Don't be shy So my name is Birgit Parlihak I'm your emcee for the afternoon and we have an awesome panel to come up here but before we start that and people kind of trickling in I have a few announcements So who's playing the WordPress the WordCamp Europe card game Who has exchanged some of the cards Alright, how many did you Aha, yeah You cheated No, but those cards are really cool So if you haven't looked at them yet they're actually printed work from the Museum of Block Art and it's a really interesting project and what you can do with block patterns and blocks that are not really content related So I really like that I want to remind you that you visit the sponsor areas between the panel and the next one 6x4 when Mad Mollinwigs event happens I think the sponsors are going to break down pretty soon afterwards So if you want to collect some more swag talk to the sponsors that would be your opportunity There's only two things on the wellness track left One is the 3 o'clock Tai Chi and the other one is the group hike from the sponsor area at 6 o'clock or 1800 And if you haven't yet from all the sessions please go to europe.workcamp.org slash 2023 slash feedback to leave your opinions about all the sessions because that helps everybody to get better get gifts feedback to the speakers that have spent quite some time to put it all together So it would be really helpful if you help them get better too I mentioned it already Mad's Q&A when you are so the people watching on the livestream if you want to send in questions for Mad or Matias or Josepha you can submit them through social media through the twitter or instagram or facebook of the official wordpress or wordcamp entities or profiles Then again a reminder on the after party and then I'm shut up It's a happy 20th birthday party starts at 2030 Well, half past 8 at the Lohan Athens nightclub bring your badge Otherwise you are not going to get in You will get a light snack and two drinks with tokens and if you need to drink more or somebody doesn't use the tokens that's okay and fine but you can also buy additional drinks So the panel format we have a panel contributing to wordpress without knowing how to code Just because there are many women here on the panel it does not mean that women don't code There are many good excellent coders that are women but it just happened that the panel came together like that So it's a 30 minute conversation Q&A for 15 minutes and then we have a 15 minute break before the next session starts I will turn it over to Birgit right away I just let you know who the other panelists are We have Birgit Olsson, then Patricia B.T. then Janko Nukaga and Alice Oru and Jussie also from Japan right? Well, Birgit Olsson is our panelist today a host of the panel today and she'll take it away Thank you Yeah Good afternoon I'm really glad to see you all here and welcome to our panel discussion like Birgit also said contributing to wordpress without knowing how to code As Birgit mentioned my name is Birgit Olsson and unfortunately the original host I met a a panelist who were original part of this panel couldn't attend due to the visa situation and on very short notice I'm really glad that Junko and Alice agreed on participating on this panel and sharing their stories and I'm also very thankful for the WordCamp Europe content team who were very responsive to deal with situation on short notice and yeah make the best of all So now let me introduce again Alice, Junko and Patricia I invite you Could you please introduce yourself for a short? Sure So I work as a content designer and software localization specialist especially for many things and wordpress things and plugins with a focus on inclusive and accessible writing and I started contributing wordpress in 2016 Hello, my name is Patricia I come from the French speaking part of Switzerland in Geneva I contribute to the community team by organizing event in my country Wordpress meetup now is 10 years for 10 years and co-organizer in WordCamp in Switzerland Hi, hello, my name is Junko Nukanga I live on a small island in Japan called Okijima with a population of 115 people Yeah I'm freelance web designer and with Wordpress I organize of WordCamp Kansai and WordCamp Kobe and I'm a deputy in the Wordpress community and one of this year's team lives I also do translation and report bugs when I notice them I'm not very good at English so today I'm supported by my Japanese friend Shusei I try to speak myself as much as possible but sometimes I may mix Japanese sorry, thank you Again Welcome to our panel and thank you for your assistance Ok, let's start with some personal experiences and your journey Could each of you share how you contribute to Wordpress project and what initially inspired you to get involved and why community What do you personally get from contributing to Wordpress but would you like to start by moving over to Alicia and then to Junco Do you want to introduce yourself as well first Ok, I call myself a Wordpress veteran because I've used Wordpress since the first release 20 years ago and I'm contributing to Wordpress over 13 years and I started translating Wordpress in German and then I also started a local translation platform on dewordpress.org Thanks to Robert Windisch who pushed me to do so and this when I started actively contributing to Wordpress but I also visited WordCams and now I'm focusing more on creating more awareness for diversity equality and inclusion in the Wordpress community so that everyone feels welcome and belonging to the Wordpress community Ok Can you just repeat the first question Yes Why community What do you personally get from contributing to Wordpress community So the first thing is I made friends from all around the world and by organizing local meetups I made long lasting friendship in my local community So that is the main good thing That is to contribute to community and organizing events and I get to travel to WordCamp Europe and nearby country WordCams for example from Switzerland I go to WordCamp in France in Italy and I try to volunteer all the time because it's such an amazing experience What I get is because every time every month when we do local meetups I learn something new all the time you know in the years also I learned how to organize events find sponsors raise funds and it's good also to have some diverse range of speakers who talk about so many topics so I learned a lot to meeting all those people Thank you So in my case I started contributing in 2016 and those times I recently joined a WordPress company WP Rocket so I was already working in translations and I met Laura Sarko who is one of the pillars of the Italian polyglots community and she onboarded it immediately because she said you can speak languages you can speak Italian I also speak Spanish and French so being a polyglot was my thing right away So I found the Italian community first then the Spanish one met the European one as well so I really first of all I'd say that the main reason why I'm here is because of as Patricia was saying because of people and I met a lot of friends over the years so speaking at work I'm also contributing via Slack and remotely where the community is a way to keep in touch with a lot of people scattered around the world so that's very precious for me and also professionally I'd say that the community has been my first training field because I learned about localization, internationalization very specific topics that it would have it would have been difficult maybe to pay maybe online course or going to university just to learn those stuff so the community was very supportive also in that sense so I own it a lot also in the professional side of things Yeah, thank you very inspiring Hi, I focus on WordPress community and support begging and orientation for people who want to start WordPress campus and thank you very much so as I understand you choose to contribute to WordPress because of the people within the WordPress community you found someone who had introduced you or you picked up your own profession within and found your field I would like to hear about your challenges and skills and how you overcome obstacles involved into the project What are the skills that I had when you started contributing when you what you learned through the process you told you learned so much English also to contribute and what are the obstacles you saw while contributing to WordPress Alice would you like to start and we move on to Junco and then to you The main obstacles I found I think was just getting used to all the I don't know many places where the community moves there is this lack there is the make or press there are a lot of places and channels of communication so at first maybe for me was a bit difficult to understand where my people were where the polyglots met but at the same time the onboarding process was pretty supportive so I always had people around that told me where to go where to find answers but yeah it was kind of I think it's natural when you start doing something new you feel overwhelmed a little bit by the many information and flow of information you can get but I mean the good thing of the WordPress community is that there's a lot of people doing this for so many years and they're very supportive so it's easy to find your way yeah that was the main obstacle I have to say in the Italian community and welcoming so I've always felt at home awesome yeah I think relationships can be very difficult most of us are doing WordPress things while having other jobs so communication in a limited time frame can lead misunderstandings we value dialogue but at the same time we try to make sure our honest opinions are hard for example when someone is struggling struggling thank you with someone else in the community I will not be really no but I will be as honest as possible about what I think yeah very important and if I am long I approach it I believe that even if the conflict is not resolved immediately immediately sorry no need for apologies we are all human beings yes and the most of the people who are attending to WordPress Europe are not native English speaking people yeah I think and honest so important yes absolutely agree so first Junko your English is better than my Japanese so thank you for contributing like this so about the struggle I think I'm a kind of freelancer or rather solo printer so one of my struggles was to work with a team when we were organizing WordCamping Switzerland so I had to learn to work with others and I got better at that I hope and on another level the struggle we faced organizing events especially WordCamps is about the multilingual part because the WordCamp site are not yet multilingual and in Switzerland we speak so many languages so thankfully this year we had the help of a great teammate Mark, Mark Owalsmid who used the great features of the site editor the full site editor and blocks to create as free languages WordCamp website so that was how we overcame this it's much better now with the site editor and yeah there is also struggles there is no budget for meetups monthly meetups so we have to get creative to find free venues and we somehow used to that now but it's now also because after the pandemic people get used to stay at home and sometimes it's difficult to even have people coming to the meetups so we have to get creative and that's good because we train our creative mind to find solutions that would be the struggle what do you think are also obstacles for new contributors to contribute to WordPress especially for people who are afraid or intimidated by having to know code because as we are seeing in the WordPress community there is some kind of celebrity around the core committers at the beginning how to contribute to a project like WordPress it's an open source project and so many talented people are also giving their time and effort and skills to it but I think we would like to have more people involved especially in underrepresented make teams for WordPress as you mentioned you started with translation you are organizing event what obstacles do you feel are there for new contributors to entry the WordPress ecosystem would you like to start yeah she's saying if there's too much things to do and get worried there might be an obstacle for the new contributors they don't have to be scared I have to do this I have to do that they can just start small so that could be one of the obstacles the she sees what do you see that's obstacle for new contributors to start yes there is this misconception that I don't know to code I cannot join or I'm not a designer I'm a beginner and I constantly repeat meetups and local wordcams you don't have to be so many things to do we need you I would say the first thing would be to attend meetups and local wordcams and join the contributor day where there is an onboarding process which is very welcoming also have a look at www.make.wordpress.org and look at the description for each team because you might find something that appeals to you and at the beginning when I started organizing meetups I didn't even know I was contributing to a large scale community I was thinking there is a local meetup about WordPress so I go there and they asked me the founder of this group were leaving the town and they asked two of us to take it over I didn't even realize there was 800 groups around the world and so many wordcams I didn't know about so I was contributing without knowing that I was contributing but when I say now to people please join we need it would be a dream if every WordPress user like 5% of their time to contribute to the project as we we talked yesterday about 5 to 5 for the future so it's good we have a free and priceless solution that is WordPress so it's good if we give back by any skill that you can contribute with Absolutely Patricia said it all but I wanted to add up that from my experience what I notice is meetup maybe contributor days local wordcams or even European ones are very crowded there's a lot of people starting from they want to contribute what I notice is that sometimes it's difficult to make people say so you have a lot of onboarding the first day and then over time it's difficult to keep up so what Patricia said about finding your local places your local people it's very important to keep the motivation of that first contributor day because it's easy to be onboarding on the first day but then when you get back home you get caught up with your job your family and your life and maybe the contribution is left a bit on the side so maybe as a community we should keep on strongly encouraging people to keep in touch even remotely and sharing the way we can do that without even being let's think about how many people live in little towns or remote places where there's not even a local meetup so finding community moments online and remotely is still very important Absolutely I got something to what Alicia said I just heard that a new meetup group has been created in Catalonia to be rural sorry rural I know rural meetup for Catalonia that will go from small towns to small towns because there is no meetups and that's a great initiative that should be shared and copied and also for meetup organisers sometimes we don't have an idea who to invite what to do but to say at next month's meetup so we could simply do contribution meetups So you would say the easiest entry point into the virtuous contribution is going to a meetup attending to a meetup or maybe organising a meetup but what's about the other projects and teams within a virtuous community which doesn't involve to have the knowledge about how to code as we see we have the documentation team the training team who are building LearnWetress.org who want to help to build more confidence we have also the WP diversity team who is very very passionate about to motivate and encourage new contributors to speak to be on a stage like this but also the testing for WordPress everything which every project involves development needs also other parts I guess no developer is really fond of it of the idea to write the documentation or am I wrong So what do you see are the most needed parts of the WordPress community contribution ecosystem to jump in when you are not a developer I struggle with this word sorry I'm not a native English speaking person what do you think it's the most vulnerable part of a community where we need more active contributors do you like maybe okay we are going not for example translations is one of the polyglots group is one of the groups that really is accessible to almost anyone knowing their own language that's what Laura Sacco told me when I started you know Italian you know Italian well of course you have to speak the language well but there's a lot to do even in the polyglots team without knowing how to code we translate plugins, themes we translate the core but we also do a lot of documentation and have translating documentation from other teams so there's really a lot to do of what the WordPress community has a whole produces there's a lot to translate and if you know your language well enough there's always need for a good hand to work on those documents and the many things that the whole community produces and would like to translate I started also to translate some years ago but it's not where I was the best so you know it depends what you like and you look at the list as I said before on make.wordpress.org and you see the list of all the teams whatever sounds good nice to you to participate but you just join the Slack and begin to talk with people at the office hours on Slack and read the chat maybe you will find something very exciting you will make friends as I love and yeah I think it's up to you what you are good at what you like sorry and in Japan original Slack region Japanese Slack, WordPress Slack and and one week one time gathering Slack translation time we have and so gathering and mentoring and so kind so you are doing some kind of WP translation days in Japanese where you onboard new contributors and also work on the project itself yeah sorry sorry so you do it weekly weekly not monthly or not yearly Friday from 10pm and we in Japan we welcome everybody to come in and translate plugins or themes or even the documents that's just amazing I'm totally jealous so yeah and whenever people come in we don't do it in Zoom or in person style we only do it in Slack so everybody can join from let's say home or their work or maybe somewhere else and if there are newcomers coming in we always welcome them and we ask them what they want to do and we try to guide them to how they can do it like sustainably I think Alice I think we were saying that sustainability for onboarding new contributors is key process so that's what we've been doing in Japan and part of that also so I think she said translations keep on going would be a good thing to do awesome yep thank you just one short advice for new contributors what would you tell when someone approaches you I would like to contribute to WordPress how can I get involved how can I do it be your takeaway tip for them would you like to start yes it's basically what I said before about looking what they like to do but I would emphasise on the fact that it's a very inclusive community that we try to to like help all diverse diversity diverse people to join and yeah make friends and eat good food but not kids food is always a good topic yeah we say go all in don't worry and for everyone who is also listening not only contribute sorry when you contribute to WordPress it's not only about bringing in your own time and knowledge money is always welcomed so we have some initiatives in the WordPress community not only the 5 for the future program where companies can pledge time or their employees can pledge time to contribute to WordPress but also we have the the WP Collective I hope I recall it right I will tweet about it where you as a company or a freelancer can donate your money so that contributors can get funded to pursue and continue their work and contribute especially if you are on a level with a high responsibility or be in a bottleneck because a big project like WordPress is sometimes really hard to stay consistent if you are working on it on your spare time and you don't have the financial backgrounds to give in more time so that's why I think it's important that we as a community also make room and say these are contributors who are very involved and passionate about contributing to WordPress we need to support them with room or even money to help them to stay on track so yeah that's what do you think about this? This is very important Esfa to be like find your people as Patricia was saying find what you like but also the people you like to spend time with so that's a very important part of the contributing experience and ask a lot of questions because there will be a lot but we have a lot of documentation and information to provide so yeah ask questions and find your people to I mean we try to be a valuable community so I feel safe in giving this tip you will find somebody you like Thank you I guess there's also the mentorship program rolling in into where new contributors of WordPress can get a personal mentor to guide them and Hari Shankar is currently hard working on it so please reach out on makewordpress.org reach out on Twitter to us any questions I would like to invite you and I'm really glad that you all attended to our panel and I would like to open the floor for questions from our beloved audience please Well thank you so much a big hand before for all the panelists and when you get ready for your questions line up behind the microphones because the live audience will hear it and we have the first question over there one two three Hello my name is Tobi I'm one of the global mentors for the polyglots team so a couple of people in this room may have seen me before wanted to ask does the community team have any obvious place where you would collect good ideas about how to do things in a different way or what could be improved because I have a feeling that there are so many different things happening there are so many people involved that I a little bit lose track on ok if I just have some idea is there any kind of virtual box where I could just drop this idea so it doesn't get lost Do you mind? First on Slack make WordPress Slack you find a channel corresponding to the team you want to suggest things to and then there would be a post posted on make.worthpress.org Publicly you can comment and bring new ideas I think in every channel there is office hours as well so at that time there is a lot of people to reply to you Thank you for your question and thank you also for your dedicated work as a polyglots and we worked together for a long time on a polyglots global polyglots mentor team so thank you also for your contribution and your questions please Hi my name is Olga possibly some also saw me before anyway I'm wondering what is your next big WordPress desire what you wish like big wish you can like accomplish with help of all this audience who are looking for us right now so what you want Would you like? I hope Run World Camp Asia in Japan Do you have any ideas what's your best because wish for WordPress in the community I would like to I mean we keep on talking about diversity and inclusion and accessibility which is the three topics that I care a lot about but a lot of people in the community care about this and we had some interesting panelists yesterday and talks about this and we are talking about that it's a hot topic I mean it's been a hot topic for years and so I hope that this conversation keep going and we find more places and times to to speak about it like face to face or even remotely but like taking really good care of this I would love for WordPress to be more European it means for example last year in Porto at the Thursday event there were Portuguese dancers that bring a lot of local feel instead of only English international feel maybe in the future we can have translation tool automated tools and have more something more European rather than only cosmopolitan I think Yes Yes Multilingual translation Yeah Would be great My biggest wish is also to have some kind of entity within a WordPress community to ensure the diversity, equality and inclusion not only on WordPress camps but also within the contributing groups so that there's a dedicated team who have the knowledge and work intensively to make sure that everyone despite of color or gender or sexual orientation or skill set feels welcome and finds a place within the WordPress community Thank you Olga Great question Olga One more question Harry Hello Hi everybody, my name is Harry Shankar I am a community deputy and as Bergen mentioned I am trying to build a mentorship program for WordPress So my question is to all of you Alice you mentioned about the contributor journey about how somebody starts contributing at the contributor day then they are not able to go forward like life comes into it but I found it very interesting and that's the problem that I am trying to solve first of all point one get more people to come into WordPress and point two get them to stay So my question to all of you is I mean you are all basically non-code contributors so my question to all of you is I would like to hear your thoughts on how to solve that problem how can we get somebody who comes into the project to stay based on the paid points that you faced what are the ideas that we can do to sort of like fix that problem Thank you First of all Thank you for your question It's really a pain point to keep contributing or contributors on track and keep them motivated to contribute For my experience we started in Germany the marketing team twice and it dried out because they couldn't stay longer on the project and I think we need more involvement and as you mentioned the mentorship program I think it's important that we stay in touch and communicate on a regular basis and ask for their needs also what obstacles do they face during their journey first of all we learn as mentors and experienced contributors but also to maybe solve issues we didn't see as an experimental seasoned contributor Yeah, I have the same experience in the Italian Polyglot team I think we were one of the first teams to organize a mentorship program inside the translation process so every experienced translator had one of you new contributors to follow during their journey at the beginning of their translation journey and this worked very well because you have instantly you have a reference inside a community somebody to speak and ask questions to and that's very important for people knowing where to find that person that can solve the questions maybe not in the common channel but we can be intimidating sometimes not posing that question in the whole group so having like a direct channel of communication with your mentor it's very important also for operational tasks like translations Do you have any I think you said it all Yeah this and what you mentioned before to be sponsored because for independent workers it's a bit more difficult to balance with your client work Yeah Do you have additional ideas? I agree you and I believe size of contribution does not matter everyone can contribute and let's encourage each other and it's nice to each other These are the two Thank you very much Folks I don't know if they have this time I wanted to ask one more follow up can I ask one more question Well Quick Not to everybody Very short, very quick question So all of you One answer So it's related to this Many of you mentioned that life comes in the way that is a pain point which stops you from contributing I mean generally Other than that Is there anything in the project at this time that makes the process of contributing slower prevents people from contributing continuously I think that's overwhelming of information we need more guidance on the onboarding process on a WordPress site so make it more visual from every make team I feel overwhelmed and I'm a seasoned contributor WordPress and I can't imagine how it feels for a newcomer So I think like you also did for your proposal for the mentorship program to visualize the path the contributor journey have some visual guiding how they can start and where can they jump into the project but when you have some designers you don't need to have to code or a project manager you don't need to code to contribute to those user journeys and contributive journeys to WordPress Does this answer your question? Absolutely. Thank you Well, that's all the time we have I'm so sorry I keep talking with everybody here for another 2 hours I think I have the little presence for you exploring newanıs. Every attendee has a set of four cards and if you have it in your swag bag, mingle network meets these other rules. Meet new people and trade your cards. Each other four cards from the block art museum you will get from the community booth and that's the perfect segue if you want to learn more about 21 themes για να μην χειροκρότητας να γνωρίζει αυτό. Η τελή ευρώπη για την πρόσφυγή του μητέρα, γιατί αν είσαι στην κατάσταση, γιατί δεν θα έρθει πιο κλείο, γιατί είναι πιο κομμασιασμένο και δεν είναι πολύ δύσκολο. Γιατί εκεί, ο μητέρας δεν θα δει εσύ. Πριν, ναι. Γνωρίς μου είναι Πιρκη Πόλι-Χάγκ, είμαι η κοινή κερία. Έχω δεχτεύει τρεις εξογητές για εσένα. The first, and very important, because this is one of the last sessions of the two days, please give feedback about the sessions that you visited, that you listened to, and that you participated in, go to the WordPress Europe website for 2023 slash feedback, and you feedback, and then you can fill out the form for each session that you participated in. For the livestream audience, if you are watching on the livestream, you can also submit questions via social media for Matt's Q&A that happened at four in an hour, roughly in an hour. Just you can submit them to Twitter and Instagram, both is WC Europe, is the account, and also on the Facebook page. Very important, for the after party, it's the theme is Happy 20th birthday WordPress. It starts at 9.30, which is 2030, at the Lohan Athens nightclub. Very important, bring your badge, otherwise you will have trouble getting your snack or getting your two drink tokens, and you can also get additional drinks purchased. So we can start on time. I am happy to introduce the next speaker, which is Petya Rykovskaya, and the talk is leading with cultural intelligence strategies for breaking the invisible boundaries of global business. Petya is joining us from Bulgaria. She is the director of agency operations at HumanMate, a globally distributed WordPress agency. In 15 plus years of experience in software development industry, Petya held roles in product marketing, event management, enterprise media, product development, business operations, project management, and resource management. Petya has volunteered, led and enabled global open source communities, one of which is the WordPress polyglots, where we heard so much about it in the previous talk here. She played a key role in developing their passion for breaking the boundaries of cross-cultural communication. Give it up for Petya Rykovskaya. Thank you. Hi, I'm just going to drop this over here. All right, last session, let's be on time. First time I'm using this, excuse me. So let's see if it works. Starting with a story. It's 9.03, and I'm late. It's not a new thing. But exactly 8 minutes ago, all my notifications started popping up. I have all of them set. Calendars, Apple, Watch, Phone, Desktop, Google Calendar, iCal all started popping up. And yet, I'm late. I went to see the call agenda. I got carried away. I'm jumping on a call three minutes late, and my colleague looks very pissed. And she's right. I mean, I shouldn't be late. But the issue is I am always late, and she says that. This is turning into a thing, and I'm getting really... that this is turning into a problem for me, so what are we going to do about it? I try and take a deep breath, and I try to calm down. Because to me, three minutes shouldn't be that big of a deal. They shouldn't. They really shouldn't. And I know that. And we're wasting time discussing something after I'm already late. I try to keep composed and apologize. That's the simplest way to move forward. But inside of my head, my grumpy Bulgarian is angry. Three minutes should not be a big deal. The thing is, my colleague is American. I know for them being on time is important. She's right. I'm being disrespectful. But I was born in communist Bulgaria, and I spent the first seven years of my life under the regime. And the rest of my life, like rebelling against anyone or anything that tried to put me in a strict border. So time was one of the things I was actively rebelling against. In my teenage years, it's cool. Trying to convince my teachers, it doesn't matter. I'm late for class. I'm still going to be top of the class. I went to an extreme where I almost didn't graduate, even though I was on top of my class, but something in Bulgaria would call an excusable absence, and I had too many of those. So yeah, time. Time is one of the things that makes a big difference between how people perceive situations and behave across cultures.  So in the global world that we live in working today, where people are remote and all over the world, we all speak English. Somehow that became the language of our business. But what also happened is somehow, along the way, Western cultural norms became the norm of the business world. And even though we all speak English, miscommunication often happens because of that. And it happens because we have differences in our cultural background. When miscommunication and misunderstanding happens at work, it's usually due to differences in our cultural programming. In your personal and professional life, cultural awareness should be the next big thing. Especially if you need to run, and especially if you need to lead across cultures. But in any role in our kind of new global reality, post-pandemic, I guess a lot of businesses have gone remote, regardless of whether you're building a business or actively contributing to WordPress, it helps. Cultural intelligence will give you an edge and the ability to understand the people around you. These are kind of the three pillars that are important today. Obviously being smart is important to run a business, but not even remotely enough. The emotional intelligence became a thing when smart people realized that they need to work with other smart people to be able to actually achieve something. You know, how easy it would be if people weren't involved in the things that we wanted to do. And today the new thing is learning to work with people who are not like you. And that is where cultural intelligence comes into play. The Dutch social psychologist whose name I perpetually have not been able to pronounce, and I'm going to try now, and the Dutch people among you, if there are any of you, excuse me, who is probably going to be familiar to those of you who have dealt with the issue of cultural differences. He introduced the cultural dimensions many, many years ago. He said that culture is the software of the mind. It is the operating system that invisibly runs our lives and the way we have been programmed to see the world. And cultural intelligence is often the missing piece when people from different cultures work together. That or the willingness and ability to understand colleagues due to benchmarking their behavior with your own culture. This is where this disclaimer comes in. Very often, when I talk cultural differences with people, I get confronted with the following. You shouldn't really talk about culture here. You should just get to know the individual. It's important to know who you're speaking to. It's important to get to know the person in front of you. We're all unique. The cultural difference leads to stereotyping. Stereotyping is bad. You should be looking and judging people as individuals, not as a product of their environment. Which is all true. It is. We are all unique and this is important. But understanding someone's cultural background is not about you. And it's not about the person that you're talking to. The issue is that if you ignore cultural context, you judge everyone's behavior with your own culture as a benchmark. So your standard is what you know. One of the definitions of cultural intelligence in an outsider's seeming ability to understand and perceive the behaviors of others, the ambiguous gestures and the puzzling things that they do, similarly to how that person's co-patriots would. So over the years I've held two primary jobs. The past ten years I've been a part of the WordPress community and eight years ago I joined HumanMade. Both distributed global companies that gave me the opportunity to work with people from everywhere and to be puzzled as a person coming from a specific part of the world. When HumanMade was created, it was Tom and Joe freelancing for a British newspaper. So the majority of the employees over the years were a part of the Anglo cluster, similar to them. They're both from the UK born and raised. And as the company grew, we acquired small Australian agencies, then they started hiring people from the Americas, they started expanding the number of people. Almost all of us in the beginning came from the WordPress community, so they were following kind of the model of how the open source project was built, hiring the best people wherever they were, working with clients all over the place. And then the polyglots team is probably the biggest WordPress team. It has thousands and thousands of people, probably like in the tens of thousands, translating into more than 200 languages and language variants, also coming from all over the world. So when I first started working with the WordPress polyglots team, I was completely petrified, because it's almost like being thrown into a meeting of the United Nations having to be a big representative, and very quickly they gave me a lead role, which also meant that I needed to resolve conflict. So how can a complete rookie that has no understanding of a lot of cultural differences really do that? I was really, really scared, because I knew nothing. What turned out throughout the years was this knowing nothing when you're in a position like that and being curious is way better than if you think that you know everything and you know how things should be done, because you can't know all things about all people. Also, you don't really have to. We'll repeat this quite a lot throughout this talk. Cultural intelligence is not how much you know about others. Cultural intelligence is your ability to suspend judgment based on the way that you perceive the world, to accept that there is not a single normal, not only in business, in your communication with all types of people, and to have a general awareness about key differences in the way people think when they're in front of you. If curiosity is the key, let's start with this theory. The global cultural clusters as defined by David Livermore in his CQ inside series highly recommended, if you're curious about that sort of thing, they will teach you how to behave with people and how you're travelling as well as how to talk to your colleagues coming from other places. They're very interesting and very American, as in they were written with the American context in mind, explaining cultural differences to an American audience. So it's sometimes very funny to listen to that as somebody coming from a completely different culture. And it's important to acknowledge that, you know, cultural clusters can be dispersed, they're not geographically necessarily focused. There are some cultural clusters that are all over the place, there are some geographic regions that only have a specific culture. In the current global world, everyone is everywhere, and culture is not only where you come from. It's also how you are raised, what religion you are in, what profession you chose and how you pursued that. It's important to acknowledge how high level these definitions are and how diverse and mixed the world is. You might be born into one cultural cluster, but highly, highly influenced by another, just like me. I have worked quite a lot in the last ten years with people from all over the world. Most of the lessons that I've learned, I've learned by doing, and I've made quite a lot of mistakes and broken quite a lot of relationships along the way. This is the hard way to do this. But I never really found a good framework to put all of my knowledge into until I read the culture map by INSEAD professor Aaron Mayer. It's great because it gives you a simple, simple 8-scale to differentiate cultural differences. And we're going to go through those now. So these differences shape how people communicate, make decisions, lead, provide feedback, disagree, perceive time, decide and trust across cultures. And based on those, we're able to create a map of relativity that can help you navigate this complex environment and understand situations, build strategies around choosing how to approach challenges. Just build a basis of a point from where to go. So we won't have time to dive really deeply into all of them, but I want to take you through some stories from colleagues and friends through most of them and hopefully you can relate to some of these situations. Communication. The communication scale divides into low context and high context cultures. In low context cultures, good communication is precise, simple and clear. Messages are expressed and understood at phase value and repetition is appreciated. It helps clearly define communication. In high context cultures, good communication is sophisticated, it's layered, messages can be both spoken and implied and body language and obviously different factors play a very, very, very big role. And on the one end of the scale, you can see the Anglo clusters and on the other end of the scale, you can see the East Asia and Confucian Asia clusters. So communication as the big, big thing in the cultural differences is one of the things that we get wrong very often. And if you think about it, what remote work did to the business, people coming from high context cultures very often cannot read the cues that they are used to in day-to-day communication. They can't read body language, our cameras are off, so sometimes you can't even read facial expressions. So they're at a little bit of a disadvantage, which is why remote work, in remote work in multicultural teams, we need to create low context processes and non-native English speakers need to be invited to speak. Because in high context cultures, people are used to your reading their whole demeanor, not just what they're saying, sometimes that might even be a different thing. You need to be able to perceive their behavior and judge about what they want to communicate from that. It strips people from specific cultures. Remote work strips people from specific cultures being able to perceive and understand situations. And the Japanese are famous apparently for being able to read the air in a room. So environment surrounding the person is extremely important. So it's important when you're creating your company cultures and culture and values, and your behavioral framework to have that in mind. When you're in a situation and people from various backgrounds in the room defaulting to low context communication is one thing. But also being very clear that that's what you're doing is the next thing that you need to do. And it's not just enough to say, this is how we do it now, you all do it like that. Because some people are not going to speak unless invited. And asking people whose default is to speak up when they're told to and people who need to be invited to speak to do the same thing is actually asking for a completely different level of effort if you have a cross cultural team. You know, it will be way harder for some people to be initiative. The next scale is the power distance. This is where I have numerous examples. But first of all, let's go through what one and what the other is. So egalitarian and hierarchical are the two ends. So when egalitarian structure means low power distance, the ideal distance between a boss and his burden is very low. The best boss is a facilitator among equals, organizational structures are flat, and communications keeps hierarchical lines. You can talk to anyone, it's fine. It doesn't really matter. It's okay to disagree with your boss openly.  People are more likely to move kind of to action without getting permission, just being more and more initiative. Where in hierarchical structures, everything is very, very defined. The ideal distance is high. And the best boss is the strong kind of director who leads from the front. Status is important, extremely important. Organizational structures are multilayered and very complicated. Communication flows a very specific line. You cannot just jump over somebody's boss.  So power distance is such an interesting thing, because human-made is the most egalitarian company I've ever worked from. Nobody, it would never ever occur to anyone to call our CEO Tom. There he is over there, Mr. Wilmot. That would be extremely sarcastic if anybody did that borderline passive-aggressive. Tom runs barefoot around at company retreats in pants. We've seen him in like five years in a row, and he can talk to you about Age of Empires and his kids and the state of enterprise WordPress publishing in the same conversation.  As an example of our egalitarian structure, I once gave feedback to our CTO, the other partner in the company, Joe, on stage at WordCampUS about a very shitty website that he built that deprived me from being able to edit the back-end. This is how open our feedback process is. And when they created the company, the values and the behaviors that they expected kind of transferred to everybody else. So the company they built is like very low power distance, very egalitarian, very flat. We only started introducing Yarraki the moment we started growing very, very much. And at some point I became somewhere in the middle of that Yarraki, a person that had to hire their team. And I hired two allocation managers from opposite sides of the world because as a global company we needed to cover three regions. To be able to do that, I hired Shannon from Chicago and Vanita from Bangalore, both really skilled, amazing women who I thought had very similar aptitude to work and were very much alike one another. They were both initiative, fun, very outspoken, very diligent, just really, really, both seemed really great. And in terms of communication, their interviews went in a very similar way. We were just chatting and when I hired them, I thought that I have a team that will be pretty easy to manage. And I mean, big mistake number one. I had the same approach towards managing both of them. The first thing that I do when I start working with somebody new, especially when they're a part of my team, is I talk about feedback because I used to not receive feedback well and I know how touchy that is. And it's been a point of friction for me for years. So I sat them down and I told them, I love feedback in context. We give and receive feedback in the open. You're open to criticize me and kind of contradict me in public. Like if I'm saying something stupid, just like call me out on it, it's fine. That's the most normal thing. But please, please, just like don't wait for feedback review to come in to kind of tell me what you're thinking. And if we're working on a project, you're absolutely welcome to just disagree with me. And they were like, oh, this is amazing. This is so great. Thank you. You know, they enthusiastically said that that was something that they loved. And we started working and with Shannon, I had no issues. She was, you know, really kind of boldly kind of giving suggestions in discussions in public. We were talking about options. She was agreeing, kind of contradicting and all that. Oh man, the first time Bonita and I were on a call. And I publicly disagreed with her. And I told her that I think that there is a better way to do it. We went on a 101 call after because I saw her face blank out. She did not speak until the end of the common call that we were having. And we went on a 101 and she burst it crying.  I was like, what? I want to understand what happened. You know, what happened? And she said, I mean, she said I was wrong and you told me I was wrong in front of everyone. Like how can you, I thought that was it. She was still, you know, on probation. So like that kind of makes sense. And I asked her, but we just a couple of days ago had this conversation. Feedback in public, you know, the public disagreements, all of that. And she said, well, you're my boss. Of course, I'm going to say that's okay. Trust, the big thing. So task-based and relationship-based trust. And you have countries on both ends of the map. The essence of this is that for low context egalitarian cultures, trust is built by doing things.  On the other side of that is the relationship-based trust. And there are people who only build trust through relationships and through doing things together. And throughout my years in the WordPress community traveling all over the world, I guess the most valuable lesson that I've learned is, you can't do business in Japan without going to karaoke. You cannot do business in Portugal or Italy without overeating. There's no way. They just won't work. Multicultural remote teams need FaceTime. They need to be able to build relationships and personal relationships. So getting them live in person is important. And if you can't do that, like we couldn't during the pandemic, create an environment where these things can happen even remotely and in person. The decisions, the decisions scale is very interesting. The consensual versus top-down decision-making. So decisions and consensual decisions are made in groups through agreement. And in top-down decisions are made by individuals. Obviously, cultures with high power distance usually do top-down decision-making and countries with low power distance do consensual decision-making. The worst thing you can do if you have a multicultural team is your egalitarian consensual teams to enforce a top-down decision on them. Oh man, they will fight you on that and trust will be broken. In multicultural teams, the first thing you need to decide is how you're going to make decisions and do not apply the same approach in all your regions with all your people. Disagreeing confrontational versus avoid confrontation cultures. We tried at human-made last year, not we tried, like we started embedding the principles of high-performing teams. And one of those principles is embracing conflict as a way to move past an obstacle. This is a very kind of egalitarian low power distance cultural norm and it was extremely heavy and difficult for our APAC region who were concerned very silently about it at first. Three months later, somebody raised their hand and said, actually conflict is not something that we are very comfortable with and it's true. Where in some cultures conflict is accepted and embedded within the mindset, there's no way, like unless you disagree, there's no way to constructively move on. In others, it breaks relationships, especially conflict in public. It breaks the harmony, it's embedded in their, like from their religious, all the way to kind of their mindset believes shouting in public is not acceptable. On the other side of that, like some of my French friends and my Greek friends for that matter and my Italian friends will shout at each other and fight openly at the dinner table and then go dancing together. If that happened somewhere in East Asia, these people would never speak to each other again. And feedback. That's a tricky one as well. Do you give it in public? Can you give it in public? When you give it in private, how are you supposed to give it?   If you do direct, very abrupt feedback blunt to a person that is used to a soft approach, you're going to demotivate them and make them cry. So think about where the person you're talking to was born and how they were raised. Try and get to know them before you have to provide feedback. Direct negative feedback versus indirect negative feedback, frankness or diplomacy. Is speaking frankly a gift or is it a burden? Is it a slap in the face? On the one side we have our APEC team who we have to approach everything very cautious with, and we need to be very careful about defending someone.  Persuading is one of my favorites, but I'm kind of running out of time here on the scale, which is why I'm going to tell you that it's roughly related to how the educational system is where you grow up. So if you were taught theory first, then you do principles first approach, and if you were taught implementation first, like let's do and learn by doing, then that is the application's first approach. But based on where you grew up and how you were taught, how somebody else can persuade you that you were taught, how somebody else can persuade you is very related to that, which brings us back to time. Punctuality versus my slide is wrong, it needs to say flexibility, or how late is actually late. In linear time project steps are very consecutive. If you're familiar with the waterfall approach, this is basically what linear time means, everything needs to be organized. Time, one step follows the other, nothing can overlap. The focus is on the deadline, sticking to that. The schedule, following the schedule is a must, it's very important. Conscious, everything is conscious of time. Emphasis is on promptness and good organization, not flexibility. With flexible time project steps are approached in a fluid manner, changing tasks as opportunities arise. Many things are dealt with at once and interruptions are okay. The focus is on adaptability and flexibility, and that's valued. So, with scheduling, how late is late is actually quite relative, and it's probably okay that three minutes late means nothing to me, but means everything to my American colleagues. The important thing to remember, however, is that the culture map is a scale. Everything is relative, and you have to judge situations by the people that you have in the room and adapt. Developing your cultural intelligence is actually not that difficult. It doesn't mean knowing everything about every person that's in front of you. In looking for a formula for this, because of course I will look for a formula, a one, two, three step to developing your cultural intelligence, I happened upon this talk by Julia Middleton, who's also a professor, and she talks about the two things that we have in our self, which is one is our core and one is our flex. And our core is, when thinking about your core, you should ask yourself, what is the most important thing for me? What are the most important things for me? What are the things that make me me? What are the things that make you you? What are the values and behaviors without which you're not going to be yourself anymore? And that's your core. And everything else, if you want to develop your cultural intelligence, needs to be in your flex. These graphs here, on your left over there, is a person that changes their core values and behaviors so often that there's no way for you to trust them. That's too unacceptable. On the other side of that is my grandpa, who never ever changes anything that he thinks and believes and who, until his dying day, insisted that I needed to know my place in life and how dare I deviate from that. And in the middle, somewhere in the middle, is that flexibility that we all must have. And on the borders of that are our knots. At some point, during your journey, you're going to, as you meet people and learn things, you're going to happen upon things that make you uncomfortable.  And these are your knots. So, that same, my place in life thing that my grandfather really wanted to kind of push upon me was my knots. It's so deeply engraved into how I was raised that I actually fight with it every day. So, my natural cultural programming is telling me, no, don't speak up, don't want more, know your place. My knot is kind of, and me questioning my knots, is just telling me, move on. It's not to you, this can be in your flex. So, CQ is developed by having the courage to have those conversations that make you uncomfortable. And having the willingness to admit your knots and either move past them, or accept and acknowledge them.  And there are some things that you can do, can listen, learn to listen, actively learn and show interest in others, not perceive otherness as threatening, can be aware of your knots, learn to make a fool of yourself, and recognize and stand up to cultural intolerance. Can tune your body, head and heart towards listening, and maybe you will never understand, but at least you will learn. Because cultural intelligence starts with understanding your own culture. Am I out of time? Yeah, I'm late. Oh, I'm late. Okay. I have two more slides. Can I do them? Okay. So reverse engineer yourself and challenge your culture. Because apparently, I am late, and for at least some of this, for some of you this will be outrageous. Thank you. Thank you. We have time for Q&A. So if you took something that you wanted to ask Petya for about cultural intelligence. About anything, really? Or other things. Yeah. There are two microphones here, left and right, and if you want to line up there, we have about 10 minutes for, 7 minutes for Q&A, we have about 10 minutes for Q&A, 7 minutes for Q&A, before we make everybody late for math. Okay. So are there any questions? Toby. Yes. Hi, Toby. Hi, Petya. Thank you. Great speech, really. I mean energizing. Okay. You said that you were, you got a very rough start as a global political mentor. Okay. This is an internal joke. Toby is the other, yeah, I pushed that role onto him and kind of left for a while, which is why he is on mic right now. Just threw him in the bin after I was thrown in the same way. It's okay. I can deal with it. Okay. Now. Yeah. So I think one thing you should just show the public here, how a typical Bulgarian will show with their head, yes and no, because I mean, India is a bit separate, right? And Bulgarian is another place. Okay. Yeah. Well, so Bulgarians shake their heads for yes and not for no. It's very similar to how Greek say ne, which means yes in their language and in our language that means no. So we're very close, but it can be a part of that. Thanks, Toby. Yeah. Hi. First of all, compliments for your Dutch pronunciation of Geert Hofstede, I think it was. Oh my God. Are you Dutch? I am mortified. Three Dutch people tried to teach me that in the last two and a half days and I probably... Don't worry about it. One question I had. You talked about the values within human made and also the differences you have with the teams in the different regions. So what is your number one tip to make sure that those values which are, well, let's say a little bit Dutch, so straightforward, out in the open, how do they translate and how do you translate them to those teams in other regions? Well, it's a converse. It has like the most important thing is for it to be a conversation, for it to not be something that you push on them, but you for whoever you're onboarding into your company, we have like really paid attention to our onboarding processes. Those values need to be a conversation. These are our values, not just like these are our values, follow them. These are our values. How do they make you feel? Do you have any questions? Is there anything that maybe worries you? And then ask those questions over and over again as you see people struggling with some of them. Because as I said, some people will say everything is okay. But maybe you can also approach those conversations a little differently by unfortunately having to use stereotypes. You know, knowing it specifically which team you're talking to, some things you can invite in to the conversation a bit more broadly. But basically that just don't push them down, just discuss them. Thank you. Yeah. Time for one last question, George. Hi Pat, yeah. Hi. I have a question about when, you know, trying to have these conversations who should be responsible for initiating the conversation? If there's a group that is, you know, like you talk about at Human Made, it's a very Anglo-oriented company, should it be the Anglo-focused people that are initiating these conversations to better understand the people that are from Southeast Asia? Or is it the people that are more of the outsider should be initiating the conversations about their needs and how they're doing it? Yeah. You know, it's interesting because actually in our American region we have representatives from several clusters now, which you think, you know, Americans can communicate and talk to each other and all that, but like when the Brazilian team joined all of these things kind of became very, very apparent. You know, people that struggle a little bit with that English or weren't, were from a different cultural background, weren't that open to speaking up, etc. The great thing about Human Made is we are very enabled from the get-go to initiate conversations at any level who should be responsible, whoever notices, who should be responsible for embedding a culture of understanding diversity and cultural awareness and cultural intelligence. That's definitely on the head of the company. We need to have those conversations. Yeah, there he is. Well, not just you.  But yeah, I think that it should start with the company, why their company values, why they think that it's okay to be different. And it should kind of cascade down, cascade down towards everyone. But we've had so many amazing examples. Human Made's gone from a egalitarian towards a hierarchical structure. But throughout the years, the people who have been a part of our very, very flat company in the beginning have felt so enabled because we learn by doing and we copy behaviors and try and lead by example in the company, I think people just naturally kind of soak up. But there are definitely situations where you see that there's something happening or something isn't happening and that's where you question why it isn't happening and when you find the answer there, you initiate the conversation. And it should happen at all layers of the company, I think it shouldn't be the responsibility of a single department or even a single person. Alright, that's all the time we have today. Okay. Thank you all for coming. Thank you. I have a little present for you. Thank you. I'll be outside if you'd like to for the chats. There's quite a lot to talk about, I guess. Alright, thank you so much. So, yeah. And that concludes the session here at Track 2. I will ask you to all go over to Track 1 to listen to Matias Ventura and Josepha Hayden Jean-Foussi talking about variations on the 20th anniversary and then followed by a Q&A with Matt Molenveig. For those on the live stream, you can submit your questions for Matt or others through Twitter, Instagram and Facebook and Twitter and Instagram, the account is WCEurope, one word, small letters. Well, thank you all so much. And I'll see you over there. Track 1.


What's up everybody, Jason from jazzym from jazzymscasewrakes.com 2020 Immaculate Collegiate Football Picture No. 3 sold out with this random number block here for the Chargers, Dolphins, and Bangles. And again, works just like any other random number block break on our website, but only for these three teams in this specific break. And I'm sure most of you guys know, you get a number from 0-3-9 with every spot. And as an example, if you get a No. 3, randomized to you as Block 3, you'll get any cards from these three teams hit above if No. 3 is the first number next to the dash on the left side. So for example, if we hit any of these three teams hits and they're 2-43-2-99, that'll go to Block 3. 13-99 goes to Block 3, 3-25-43-49, and 93-99 and so on, No. 3 block would get that card. So there you go, just for these three teams, let's roll the dice. It's a 6 and a 1, 7 times. Good luck. Here's Nicholas, down to Matthew, 7 times. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. All right, 7 times, fouled down to Regimel. There you go, 7 times. On the numbers now, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7 the final time. 7 down to 9. All right, fouled with 7, Reno with 3, Matthew Hedges, last one more to the 0. Any of our redemptions, Jared with 2, as well as 4, Nicholas with 6, 8, Alex with 5. Kurt, you have 1, spot 1, sorry. Any one of ones would be yours from these three teams. And Regimel with spot 9. So there you go, guys. This was just for these three teams. We have one more round of normal block that's sold out that unlocks the break officially, and we'll be running that in a separate video. Appreciate you guys, Jaspy's Case Breaks.com.


A fiery horse with a speed of light, a cloud of dust and a hardy high old silver, the lone ranger. During the years of unrest that followed the Civil War, a powerful secret organization called the Legion of the Black Arrow sprang up in the western United States. Its members were to be found everywhere, defying the law, or using the law for their own purposes, working toward the ultimate goal of revolt and the foundation of a despotic empire. It was the masked rider of the planes who led the fight against this band of outlaws and traitors, and for once his great strength and courage, his daring and resourcefulness were taxed to the utmost in the cause of democracy. And with this now-to-those thrilling days when the West was young, from out of the past come the thundering hoof beat to the great horse, Silver. The lone ranger rides again, The rain whipped by the wind beat hard against the face of the slender girl who fought her way toward the small one-room telegraph office. This is a little more than I bargained for. I can't complain though. Waited a week for this stoner. Oh, I asked.  Sarah, I spoke that way. Well, that's all right. I thought it was one of the boys that gently drifts around to talk a little evening. Rotten night. Oh, terrible. It's soaking wet. My sakes are alive. Here, sit yourself down with a stool. We've got a pot of coffee here.  It is pretty cold. Yeah. Take this blanket and wrap it around your shoulders. Get it chilled. It's likely to give you a bad cold. Got some cold medicine here. Oh, no. I'll be all right, thanks. I saw your life. You don't live in Ashton, do you? No. I didn't think I'd seen you around. Ashton's just west of here. Can't see it on a night like this, of course. I want to get to Ashton. I'll go on. You better wait a while.  You riding? No. A foot? That's right. Oh, that fire feels good. I don't mean to be curious, Miss, but how far you travel on foot in this storm? Far enough to be dog-tired and soaked through and through and cold. Poor yarn. Here, now, drink this. Oh, thanks. It tastes good. This must be a pretty tiresome place to work. All by yourself all the time. Well, the boys drop in to talk. I'm not alone so much. I suppose you get some pretty strange messages on that telegraph. What made you say that? What made me? Why? I've been having the dog gone this time, figuring out what some messages mean. The funny part of it is I don't even know who they're for. Oh, you don't? Well, then how can you deliver them? It's trouble I can't. It's only a week ago. I was complaining about it to the lion boss. He said he didn't know what to do about it. Just hold him here till they're called for. It's all I can do. Well, I heard of a man in Asheville that was waiting for a word from the east. Maybe the message should have gone to Asheville instead of Ashton. This man's name was, um... Oh, dear, what was it? Larby? That doesn't sound familiar. What's the first name? Tolman Larby. That's who these messages are for. Oh, no. That wasn't the man. I don't expect you know anyone named that, do you? Uh, what are the messages about? Well, that's a thing of it. The dog-gone things are just a jumble of words. Don't make head or tail. They're as mixed up as a needle in a haystack that's caught up by a hurricane. Oh, they couldn't be that bad. Maybe they're in a coat of some sort. I thought it might be something of that sort. I can't make it out, though. Here, I'll show you the last one that came in. I showed it to several of the boys that came in here, but none of them could make sense of it. You take a look at this. Thanks. I'd like to. While the girls studied the message in the telegraph office, two men were talking in the back room of the cafe. The smaller one seemed to dominate his big, burly, bearded companion. I'm giving the orders, Red.  Oh, no, Mr. Dorn. I didn't mean to make no argument with you, but if it's just a capture of a girl, one girl, what, Jiminy? I can do it. Yes?  That's why I want the whole gang rounded up. Are you sure that you read the right meaning and the last message that comes through from the East? I'm sure. I only asked. The head of the black arrow learned that this girl is out here to try and discover who he is. Why is she here instead of where he is in Washington? Because the lone ranger is here. She's supplying him with information all the time. Oh. What's more, the girl is likely to learn about the telegraph. Mr. Dorn, she couldn't learn about the way we get messages, could she?  No one but a fool underestimates an enemy. I know, but she hears that messages in code come through the Ashton office. She'll investigate. But even so, would Lefty tell her about the messages? That operator isn't one of our men. He'd tell if she was clever in the way she questioned him. And she will be clever. But Mr. Dorn, even if she's seen the messages, they wouldn't make sense to her. She might decode them.  I want you to get the men together and surround that telegraph office. Starting at daybreak, huh? Yes. You can count on us. Very well. You sit still, Red. Yes? Who's there? I've got to see you. It's Jake. Just a minute. Where did you leave, Jake? Well, he rode east to visit a friend of his this afternoon. He was going to come back tonight. Why does he want to see me? Golly, Mr. Dorn, I don't know. Oh, she better hurry and let me speak to you. Come in here. I have to hurry. How are you, Jake? Hello, Red. What do you want? Dorn, I'd come by the telegraph office. I'm away from calling on a friend. Well... You know what that last message said? I wanted to come in yesterday about keeping an eye out for a girl. Yes? Well, there's a girl talking to Lefty right now. What? Yeah, I peeked into the windows. I come past. Thinking I'd stop in and keep up a friendly relation with Lefty. When I seen her, she was reading telegrams. What were the telegrams? I don't know. I couldn't see that close. What was being said? I couldn't hear. The wind and rain was howling something fierce. But I thought you should know what was going on. You get over there right away. Me? Yes. Red, you get the rest of the boys. One number in the other room, playing cards. The rest will be in the hotel. Get them together and capture that girl. Right now, huh? At once. And you, Jake, get back to that office. And don't let that girl escape. Leave it to me. She and the lone ranger stand between success and failure, the Black Arrow. I'll get going. You ever see such a mixed-up message? No. I better be going now.  I can see that you get to town. I can find the town. Those storms as bad as ever, though, you'd get old. I don't mind, really. Now you hold on, miss.  Whatever gave you that idea? Watched your face. It went pale for a minute. Now you've got to leave here in a hurry. No. You'd better stick to your telegraph and not try to be a detective. I know things, miss. I know to just what I said. I want to know what was in that there message. Things have been too... That door, I... Don't move. A robbery. Hey, Jake, what's the matter? Lefty, this girl's a criminal. She is? There might be a reward for a capture. If there is, I'll see that you share it. You don't say, well, I never... You know that isn't true. Lefty, is that what they call you? Listen to me. Don't believe what that man tells you. Let me show you what I have here. But it's still Miss. I got my orders. And so have I. Jumping juniper. Well, Missy, looks like you carry a gun, too. I do, and I can fire just as fast as you can. I reckon so. Sort of a stalemate, eh? We got to drop on each other. But that's only because I don't like to shoot a pretty girl. Well, I'll shoot if I have to.  I don't have no shooting in my office. Lefty, listen to me carefully. I can't prove it now, but I'm on the right side, and this man is not. You aren't in league with him and his friends, or he wouldn't have told you that you might share in a reward. He wouldn't have had to tell you that I was a criminal. Don't go, and I don't know what... But listen, I tell you, there is someone you can trust. I'm giving you a message. A message only you will be able to understand in your own code. You better not. Stop me by shooting if you dare. But I'll shoot at the same time. Take care of the drop on her, and she has the drop on him. She's sending the message with that telegraph. Get in there fast. You two go to the rear door, we go to the front. Hurry and get her before she tells all she knows on that telegraph. Come on! Grab the girl! Take her gun! Move, get her drink! We'll talk, and we'll know the reason why. Come on, Lefty, speak up and save yourself a lot of trouble. I've told you, man, I've got nothing to say. That girl sent a message on the telegraph. Ask her what she sent if you want to know. I'm asking you. Where'd you take her? None of your business. You tell what she sent her, I'll...  I'm a Western Union man. I don't tell what goes over my wires. But that girl sent didn't go over the wires. I saw the switch. She sent a message to you and to no one else. Then ask her what it was. I wasn't paying particular attention. I was watching Jake with that gun in his hand getting ready to duck at the shooting started. You're sure about that? I'm not sure about anything. I thought you fellas were my friends coming here to talk from time to time. Now, dawg, go on it, I don't know what to think. Why'd you capture that girl? If you're on the level, why don't you let the law take charge? Don't you ask questions, Lefty. Then leave me alone! Ah, he's right. Come on, boys, leave Lefty alone. Several days later and some distance to the north, the Lone Ranger and Tonto race toward a small mission. There's a mission, Kimosabe. Honey, hard ride all the way in here. The summons from the Padre was urgent. That's what the Indians say. The Padre often gave aid to the Lone Ranger. When he had information for the masked man, he passed the word to friendly Indians. Like magic then, the news traveled far and wide in ever-expanding circles until the Lone Ranger was notified. Hey, Silver, hey, boy. At last. Gate open now. Padre? As you came at last, I hope it is not too late. Too late? It has been two days since I sent the first word. We were far from here, Padre. You must have been. Come, though. Come in. Me take horse. All right, Tonto. Tonto, you know where to find food and water for the horses. Uh-huh. Me know. You come with me, son. Padre, why did you send for me? Come inside. We can talk as well while you're resting. You know what I've been doing for these past weeks? I know. I pray for your success. What I have may help bring that success. What is it, Padre? Waiting till we're inside. Come. Sit down. I'll get food for you. Not now, thanks. First tell me what happened. Very well. The other day, a man came here. He asked if I knew anyone who was called the Lone Ranger. Who was he, Padre? He told me that he operated the telegraph near a town called Ashton. Yes. He showed me a ring. Not a valuable ring, but an interesting one. Here, let me show it to you. Gold. It has a United States emblem on it. Yes. Have you ever seen it before? I once knew a man who... Yes. A ring like this. It can't be the same ring. Why can't it not be the same ring? You mean, Padre, is this the ring? See? Yes, it is. It's the same one. Or can I find the one who owns it? I do not know. But find that one you must. If it is not already too late. The curtain falls on the first act of our Lone Ranger story. Before the next exciting scenes, please permit us to pause for just a few moments. Now to continue our story. When the Padre showed the Lone Ranger the ring that left he had brought him, the masked man recognized it at once and demanded further details. Padre, Padre, tell me all you can. But first, my boy, I must know where you last saw that ring. On the finger, one of my closest friends. A Texas Ranger with whom I used to ride. One of several Texans who, well, who were murdered from ambush. Was he wearing the ring at the time of the massacre? No, he hadn't worn it for some time prior to that day. But it was his, and Indian made it for him. And it couldn't be another ring like it. Seeing it now is like seeing a part of the past. Tell me, where did it come from? Please sit down. My story may not be as brief as yours. I will. I told you that the man who dusted a leger for near Ashton brought it here. He came a few days ago. His manner was uncertain when he first came in. I don't know just where to start, Padre, but I had to come here. Start anywhere. You will find it easy to continue. Well, it's this ring. I was told to bring it here to you and ask you to find the Lone Ranger and give it to him. The Lone Ranger? Have you heard of him? Yes. Well, can you get this ring to him? It is possible. But tell me how you got the ring. Well, a girl came into my office during a heavy storm. I thought at first she'd come just to get out of the wet. But the more I thought about it, the more I was sure she'd come to ask questions. Questions? About some telegrams that had coated ones. I showed them to her and she got pale. She was about to leave in a hurry when men came in and captured her. Padre, did this operator say the girl had been captured? Yes. Several days ago? Several days ago, my friend. And I should... But you have more to tell. The ring. While the girl's captors held a gun on her, she tapped out a message on the telegraph son. She told the operator that she was leaving a ring on the table. He was to bring that ring to me and ask me to hand it to you. I have done some. Couldn't the operator tell anymore? No. I've told you all he said. I've got to speak to him. Hello. Don't unsaddle. We're running again as soon as the horses have been fed. I don't know who the girl is. I've never seen her face. Padre, she's been helping me. She's been against the black arrow and all its dangers as much as I have. If she had the ring, she must be someone near and dear to your friend. Yes. But how did she know I'd recognize the ring? Does she know who I am? If she does, and I doubt it, your secret is safe with her. But your horses are tired. Do you want to borrow a fresh one? No, no, thank you. Silver and Scout will carry on. Padre, did that operator return to Ashton? I assume he did. He said nothing of doing otherwise. And the sooner we can get there and question him, the better. More straight in now. Good. Padre, do you mind if I take this ring with me? Take it. Wear it until you can return it to the owner. I hope that will be soon. I hope it will be. Goodbye, alone, Ranger, until we meet again. Goodbye, Padre, and thank you. Come on, palo. Are you ready? And let's go.  Scout, come soon! Holey! God bless him. As the days passed and the telegraph operator did not return to Ashton, Dorn's anger had increased. He paced the floor of his room in the hotel and when he spoke to Red, his voice was almost a snarl. You don't do anything. I see lefty. All right, boss. I was only asking that, so who's watching the office now? Oh, Jake's there. I was to take his place at sundown. I want lefty here as soon as he gets back. Why was he allowed to leave in the first place? Well, golly, Mr. Dorn, no one said anything about not letting him leave. No one does any thinking. Pack of dull-witted food. That's what I've got to work with. The girl's being watched, I hope. Oh, sure, Mr. Dorn. We've got a heavy guard around the cabin day and night. If she escapes, I won't. Who is it? Mr. Dorn, I've got lefty here. About time. Now we'll learn a few things. Here he is. This is pretty high-handed, Mr. Dorn. Shut that door. Where have you been? I don't know. Is that sitting in your business, Dorn? I took a few days off. My helper ran the office. The telegraph company don't complain. Don't know as anyone else should. Sit down there. They call you lefty, don't they? That's right. Perhaps my men were a little crude in bringing you here. That galoot was standing in my office. He drew a gun on me as I came up. You should know better than that. Enough. Just what do you want of me, anyhow? I didn't have a chance to tell you, Lefty, about the girl who was taken in the custody in the office. Yeah, where is she? Oh, she's been turned over to the law. Federal prisoner. You see, Lefty, we have to work in a mighty different way than the local law officers. Are you trying to hint that you're law officers? Well, not exactly. Dorn, just what do you want of me? Well, that girl was captured. She said something to you in code on the telegraph. You left town for a few days right after that. I want to know what she said and where you went. So that's what you want to know, eh? I can pay you for the information, Lefty. I'm not interested. But if you... By the time being, I'll keep my information to myself. I'll tell you one thing, though. Well? I would advise you to have your men get rough with me. Just remember that the whole of the telegraph company's behind me. I'm sorry, Jake. Treated you like you did. And there's one other thing, Dorn. Yes? I aim to find out more about that girl. I won't ask you because I don't know as I could believe anything you told me. But I'm going to have a talk with the sheriff now that I'm back in town. See what he thinks. That's all. Unless you figure to keep me here at the point of a gun. Oh, of course not. You can leave anytime you want. And I'm leaving right now. I've got to be careful how we handle him. He was right when he said the telegraph company stood back of him. But he's going to talk to the sheriff. That's why I didn't press matters. I've got the sheriff in my pocket. He'll tell Lefty that whatever I do is all right. We've got to find out what the girl told him when she used the telegraph. I can't find out any other way I'll make the girl herself tell us. What was she? She will. If she thinks Lefty's life depends on her telling, I'm going to keep her nearby until I'm convinced that she's told us everything we should know. Lefty talked with the sheriff. But when he had finished, he was more confused than ever. He considered the contradictory fact as he walked toward his home. The sheriff says Dorn's all right. You didn't mean the girl's done something wrong. I can't believe that. She seemed to figure the Lone Ranger was on her side. The Lone Ranger wouldn't be on the side of anybody the law was after. You've got to do plenty of thinking on this. Plenty of thinking. It mustn't make the wrong move. I'll get to bed and sleep on it. Lefty found a candle on the shelf beside the door. But before he could light it, a voice stopped him. Are you the telegraph operator? Take it easy. They call you Lefty, don't they? Yeah. Go ahead and light the candle. I'll talk to you. Yeah, but who are you? Candle Lefty. That's it. Come over here near the window. May I ask you? I brought this ring with me. The Lone Ranger. Later that same night, Dorn was pleasantly surprised to see Lefty at his door. Come in, Lefty. I didn't expect to see you again tonight. I had a talk with a sheriff. Oh, so I heard. I guess he set you right, didn't he? You still want to know what that girl said to me the other day? Oh, if you want to tell me. Sit down. Thanks. She asked me to get word to the Lone Ranger. She did. Yeah, that's why I left town for a time. Did you get word to him? Not only that, he's coming here. If you're on the level, Mr. Dorn, I sure had the wrong idea about the Lone Ranger. When is he coming? Real soon. Are you going to have men enough to take that girl away from you? He is, huh? Does he know how many friends I have to help me? I guess he does. That's different. I don't like that. But look here, Dorn, if you're sort of working for the government, the soldiers would be on your side, wouldn't they? Soldiers? Is that what he's going to do? Hold on. Doggone, as you look down right, scared. You've been lying in your teeth. You're not on the side of the law at all. The Lone Ranger is. I'm going to tell him where you've hid the girl.  Up with him and hurry. Jake, come in here. Out the back way with this man. You better watch yourself, Dorn. Remember that I have the Western Union back in me. Never mind what stands back of you. You've blundered into something in the carjadown. I'll get going or we'll pour lead in you. Do what he says, Lifty. Get going. Lifty was taken out the rear door of the hotel, then forced to ride between Dorn and Jake. Outside of town, Dorn stopped at a rambling ranch house. All right, inside with you. Take him in, Jake. Yeah. Call them in together. There's no time to lose. He lost himself. Now all of you, listen to me. The lone ranger is coming here with a cavalry. I never said that. Too late to deny it now. This man's too dangerous for us. He's got to go with the girl. Get that rope tighter, Jake. I'll try. But it's a plenty tight now. What are we going to do now? We've got to get the girl lefty out of here. Fill him. That's what I said. Leave evidence like that. Leave proof that the girl was on the right track. No, you fools. She can be valuable. We can make her write letters and reports. That'll throw everyone off the trail. We can make lefty send messages that will help us. What do we do? Red, Jake, you two will stay and help me. The rest of you write out to meet this band. Hold them off for one hour. That'll give us time to get a head start. Get moving now. Hurry up, boys. They leap to the saddles and rode on to the north trail. Dorn meanwhile packed saddlebags. I'll be ready in another minute. Jake, you keep watch on lefty. I will. Red, take this key. Unlock the door of the girl's room. Good enough. Get her hands tied before you let her out. If she makes any trouble, hit her on the head with your gun. She won't make trouble. I'll be ready. Get those hands up. He's here. I'll show you. What are you doing? You got him. There's the Redskins, too. I don't know. Here, one for Redhead. Good going, Redskins. Oh, you don't. This for you. This for you, Dorn. Well, don't go in if I didn't knock him down. Good work, lefty. I couldn't do much with my hands tied this way, but I did get the chance to charge that rat-faced door with my shoulders. I didn't dare fire at that gun. See, I didn't know where the girl was. You're in that there room. Red was just opening the door. How are those all knocked out? Get ropes on them, Toto. Some of the gang are at large. We have these three for prisoners. Dorn, I think, is one of the ring-leaders of the Black Arrow. Here, I'll cut those ropes, lefty. That crook can tell plenty. Why, Ginger Cho worked out just right, just like you hoped. Dorn's scheming mind filled in the spaces I left, and he sent the gang to meet you. Then he never stopped to wonder how I could know where the hideout was. He just brought me here so you could follow. Well, you got that sheriff, too. But first, I... The girl isn't here. Well, she was there. Oh, wait. She left a note. She must have slipped out while we was fighting. Hey, what's the note say, eh? Keep the ring. Dorn can name... Toto. Dorn can name the leaders. Dorn not talk now. And dead. Dead? I didn't hit him that hard. Let me see. I just should have knocked him down. No marks on him. He must have had a weak heart that couldn't stand the excitement. Oh, good. Another trail of the headman clothes. I hate to think I'm the cause of Dorn dying. Now you aren't lefty. His heart was bad. Any excitement might have had the same result. Now what do we do? Well, too. These men are alive to be jailed. I'll go for the marshal. And me, you ain't here? Yes, Toto. I'll be back soon. I'll stay with Toto. Farewell, lefty. Steady, silver. Maybe these poor cats will get conscious for you. Get back and I'll have the chance to tell them what I think of them. Toto, silver! Hooray! The story you have just heard is a copyrighted feature of the Lone Ranger Incorporated.


Commuting is a huge worldwide issue. With urban populations increasing there are more people commuting to and from work than ever before. Now we know a lot of statistics about commuters. We know where people are traveling from and to. We know the times involved and we know what mode of transport people are taking. The problem with these sorts of statistics though is that they don't tell us very much about the impacts that these journeys are having on people's lives. And that's where this study comes in. For the last three years I've been doing in-depth fieldwork with commuters in the city of Sydney, Australia. Now Sydney signers have the longest average commutes of any city in Australia and a study released a few years ago indicated that commuters in Sydney experienced more stress than commuters elsewhere in Australia making it a really apt field site. So I've been conducting in-depth interviews with a range of different commuters who traveled by car, by public transport and by bicycle. I've been doing participant observation in the city. I've also conducted a range of key stakeholder interviews with people whose professional lives are about the commute in some shape or form. Now what the study has found is that commuting is having profound impacts on people's lives and it's changing people in all kinds of ways. And this is significant because previous research has emphasised the relative stability of people's commutes understood in terms of the mode of transport that they take or the times that are involved. So what this study has shown is that commuting is changing us. It's changing our behaviours towards each other. It's changing our tolerances and what we can cope with. It's changing what we desire from our home and work lives and it's changing what we desire from our lives in the longer term. Now on an everyday scale a stressful commute in the morning can have impacts on how we are at work and this obviously has impacts on workforce productivity. But a stressful commute in the evening can also impact negatively on home and family life, making it difficult for people to relax at the end of the day. Now what the study has also found is that over longer time periods a build up of little events every day during the commute can lead to large tipping points where people make much more dramatic decisions about their lives. People might retrain into different jobs. They might move house. They might even leave the city of Sydney precisely because of the commute. Now commuting isn't all bad and many of my participants commented on how commuting can be a positive experience. For a lot of people it was the only time of the day that they can actually get to themselves outside of the demands of home and work responsibilities. But I think taken together what this study shows is that commuting is changing us in very, very profound ways. It's changing our relationships to the cities that we live in and it's changing what we want from life. So what these findings give us is a bit of a wake up call. It's a wake up call firstly to governments in terms of providing better investment in transport and also for providing more affordable accommodation nearer to workplaces. Secondly, it's a wake up call to employers in terms of providing more innovative solutions for working possibly through more remote working or through more flexible practices. And lastly, it's a wake up call for commuters and for all of us in terms of appreciating how experimenting with our commutes for making little changes to our commutes can have really positive impacts on our sense of self and on our everyday routines.