Dear students, I am going to present to you the concept of the expected value of a real valued function of a random vector. And I would like you to concentrate on this one because there are a number of concepts involved. First of all, it is a straightforward extension of the concept of the expected value of a function of a random variable, which is an extension of the univariate case to the bivariate or the multivariate case. So let us consider the bivariate case and let x1, x2 be a random vector and let us define capital Y equal to G of x1, x2 as a real valued function of x1 and x2. G of x1, x2 can be any function. It can be very simple, for example, y is equal to x1 plus x2, y is equal to x1 minus x2, y is equal to x1 square minus e raised to x2, some combination of x1 and x2, which can be regarded as a function of x1 and x2. If we keep y as its name, we will note that y is a random variable, so x1 and x2, if they are themselves random variables, then obviously this combination of them, whatever it is, that is also a random variable. If it is a random variable, then we can determine its expectation by considering the distribution of this random variable. But students, first and foremost, let us determine the conditions under which the expectation of y will exist. Sometimes you might try to do it and it may not exist, so let us commence this particular discussion with first looking at the conditions that are required in the case of a single random variable. A random variable x will be said to have a finite or an infinite expectation, according as whether e of x is a finite number or is it not a finite number. If it is finite, then of course we will say that the expectation or the expected value exists. However, if it is infinite, if it is not finite, we will say that the expected value of x does not exist. If it is not finite, then we say that it does not exist, then naturally we would like to determine the conditions under which it will be finite. So what is the definition of the expected value of x? We all know that in the case of a discrete random variable, e of x is equal to summation x i into p of x i and in the continuous case it is the integral of x into f of x. So students, this e of x will be finite if our summation or our integral converges absolutely. If it is absolute convergence, then e of x is finite and we say that it exists. Then naturally the next question that comes to mind is what is meant by absolute convergence?  Well, the concept of absolute convergence is not so difficult. It is as follows, the term absolutely convergent describes a series that converges when all of its terms are replaced by their absolute values. Alright, let me say it in a different way. The term absolutely convergent describes a series for which the sum of all its terms remains finite when all the terms have been replaced by their absolute values. What I am now saying is also obviously to be represented in algebraic form and students, it is not so difficult. So if we let capital X be a random variable of the discrete type with probability mass function p of xk equal to the probability of capital X being equal to xk where k itself is 1, 2, 3 and so on, then if the summation of the modulus of xk multiplied by p of xk, the modulus of xk multiplied by p of xk, if this particular summation is less than infinity, in other words, if this particular summation is finite, then we say that the expected value of x exists and we write mu is equal to e of x is equal to summation xk into p of xk. Similarly, if it is a continuous variable, then if the integral from minus infinity to infinity of the modulus of x into f of x, the modulus of x, not just x, but the modulus of, in other words, the absolute value of x into f of x, isk integral, other if it is less than infinity, in other words, if it is finite, then we say that the expected value of x exists and we write mu is equal to e of x is equal to the integral from minus infinity to infinity of x into f of x with respect to x. So the same formula that we are aware of. Now, whatever I just said, for a single variable x, similar logic applies for a function of the random variable x. So if g of x represents a function of x, then we will say that the expected value of g of x exists and it is equal to the integral of g of x into f of x, if it is a continuous variable, provided that the integral of the absolute value of g of x multiplied by f of x, if this integral is less than infinity. So you have seen exactly what was before that extension and now I am in a position to talk about the expected value of a function of two random variables x1 and x2. So if both x1 and x2 are continuous random variables and they have a joint pdf small f of x1 x2, then we will say that the expected value of g of x1 x2, a function of x1 and x2, the expected value of this function exists and it is equal to the double integral of g of x1 x2 multiplied by the joint pdf f of x1 x2, provided that the double integral of the absolute value of g of x1 x2 multiplied by f of x1 x2 is less than infinity. Again, a further extension of what I said before and last but not the least, let us also consider the case when x1 and x2 are not continuous but discrete. So in a very similar way, we will be able to say that if y is equal to g of x1 x2 is a function of two discrete random variables x1 and x2, then the expected value of y, in other words, the expected value of g of x1 x2 exists if the double summation of the absolute value of g of x1 x2 multiplied by p of x1 x2, if this double summation is less than infinity. Apne dekha ke everything falls in place and I have tried to give you various concepts step by step, some general definitions and then applying in our situation. And this is the concept of the expected value of a real valued function of a random vector.


Hi everyone. Thanks for being here today. I feel really happy and grateful that I've been able to be part of some great conversations this week on diversity inclusion and I feel like there's a whole community of us. These are my people and so I'm really happy to be able to share in a more formal way kind of what's in my head on the topic of speaker diversity and in particular the story that we have of how in one year we went from 14% to 50% women speakers at our own local word camp and how we got three times as many women speakers to apply. So first before I start, I just kind of want to get a sense of the folks in the room. So by show of hands, how many have done public speaking about anything Drupal related? Okay, a few of us, great. How many haven't yet but have thought about it? Nice. How many here are organizers of Drupal events or on Drupal committees? Wonderful. How many wish more women and people who identify as women and other underrepresented groups applied to speak at their events? Not just hands but like enthusiastic hands, lovely. And lastly, how many have no idea what they're doing in this room? All right, everybody is intentionally here or too shy to admit it. Nice. Either way, you're all welcome. So I want to tell you a story, a story time. Once upon a time, I land far, far away in 2013 in Vancouver, British Columbia. It was my first time being one of the co-organizers of WordCamp Vancouver. And so WordCamp is the same thing as your Drupal camps. It's a locally organized conference about our technology. And there were three of us. It was our first time for all three of us to be co-organizing. And we were sitting there in one of our apartments with 40 speaker applications spread out before us. We actually had 52 applications and 50 of them were applicable. And so here we are with this daunting task, choose talks. We had 14 spots available. We had two tracks and seven women applied out of the 52. Six of them were a fit. And one of the co-organizers said, well, we're going to take all these. And I'm the one who didn't know that this is an issue. I'm the one who said, shouldn't we be like checking that the pitches are great? Oh, by the way, all the pitches were great. So that was already a non-issue. Shouldn't we be checking, you know, how they fit in with the rest of the conference and their talks and their speaker experience and all these things? And he said, well, their talks are great. They do fit in with our conference. And frankly, if we don't take as many as we can, we are going to get called out for it. This was back in 2013 when there was less conversation happening about it. And so this is the kind of viewpoint that we had. And so then two things happened. One is we added a third track and this increased our number of speaker spots to 28. And the reason we did this is we just had so many amazing presentations presented to us. And we were a bit greedy. We were like, we just want them all. And we were first-time organizers. That was a lesson learned. When one is doing their very first conference, don't have three tracks. Word to the wise, my WordPress community organizer folk here are agreeing with this. The other thing that happened, so then it became 6 out of 28 instead of 6 out of 14. And the other thing that happened is two women dropped out for family obligations. So then suddenly it was 4 out of 28. Before I go on, side note, who can guess how many men dropped out for family obligations? All right, so for the video, I'll tell you people have raised a zero sign. See if you're right, zero men dropped out for family obligations. Not that it never happens, but that was our case in that particular one.  This cat is not happy about that. I'll keep talking while you take a picture. So as you can imagine, we did get called out for it. We even had blog posts written about it, as we should. And so this is kind of what started the seed on my journey. And the next thing that added to the seed is finding out it wasn't just us. In that same year, I went to WordCamp San Francisco, and it was basically, at the time, our version of DrupalCon, they've now grown it to something else, WordCamp US, but this was the word press folk or reminiscing of the old days that before our giant WordCamps have become what they are. But this was basically at headquarters, what I called it, the WordCamp of all WordCamps at the time. And there was a WordCamp organizers brunch that I went to, and I brought up this topic, and I asked people what their experiences were, and they were amazed. They said, you had seven speak. Women and people who identify as women apply to speak. We had none at all. Tell us your magic that you got some. And they all said, we want more diverse speakers. We want more women and people who identify as women, and we'll get to that definition in a moment. But we wanted to accept more, but they're just not applying. So if they're not applying, then we can't bring them in. Before I continue in my story, I do have a little disclaimer. And my disclaimer is I'm going to talk for the rest of my talk about gender, like it is a binary, and like there are two blobs, like all women are exactly the same on the spectrum over here, and all men are the same at the spectrum over here, but I do want to address that that is not the case. There is a wide spectrum in between, and even the typical women and men experiences, often they actually have the same experiences and they overlap. And I also want to address that I kind of use women as a shortcut, and I know I shouldn't, but in the meantime until I figure out a better way to say it, I do mean, and this was something that Sage helped me with earlier this week, the terminology, possible terminology to use, cis and trans women, trans men, gender queer folk. Frankly, I mean not having only young white men be the speakers. I'll just say it. So I want to address that. I'll be saying women and men and addressing the blobs. I also want to mention that the last time I gave this talk, one of the men came up to me afterwards and thanked me for the slide in particular, and he said, you know, a lot of the issues that the women were facing, he was facing himself because he was a childminder of his family and things like that. So he said, you know, he would have been very put off had I not had the slide, and he thanked me for it. Okay, so moving on, why does it matter and who cares? Who this person is at the front of the room? Shouldn't it just be the best speaker? Which kind of the best speaker kind of means the person with the most speaking experience because there are a lot of really great speakers who haven't had much experience yet, and we just need to help them do that. So why does it matter? Well, I'm not sure the situation in Drupal, but speaking for WordPress, our audiences typically are about 50, 50 men and women. If the person at the front of the room isn't representing them, then they kind of feel like they don't belong there. There's also our users and our developers, the people working with the tools and who are using the tools. We also in WordPress are really lucky that it's, because there's kind of a low barrier of entry to start using it as opposed to things like Drupal that are a little bit more challenging to start with, and we have a really, really wide kind of people who start it, because they don't necessarily have to have degrees to start, and I'm going to stop before I say something stupid, but I think you get the point that we have a very diverse set of people who are using it, and if the people at the front of the stage are not representative of them, then that is off-putting as well. And also, our speakers help shape our technology, and specifically, when people are speaking about the technology and people are getting ideas from that, we want to have diverse ideas, both in making sure that different kinds of people's needs are met. Let's say it was only young white men who were shaping the technology, well, they wouldn't be necessarily accounting for older folk who can't read smell print and need to see contrast in the screen. They might not be thinking about the mother or father who is multitasking, feeding a baby and taking care of a toddler and trying to use a website at the same time and all kinds of issues that we might not even think of if it weren't for people speaking about them, as well as different kinds of people have different kinds of ideas, and so if we bring in more voices and more perspectives, it benefits everybody. And they also sometimes not only have unique perspectives, but might be doing multi-rolls. There could be power users who use it in interesting ways, front-end developers, business people who are using plugins or modules to make specific kinds of sites, typographers who use WordPress or Drupal to do crazy things with typography, how developers can communicate with designers, different things that you can do with websites, et cetera. All right, so here's a big question. What was stopping them from applying?  There's a lot of things in society that I see as the obstacles in the way. And as much as I would love to change all of society, I am only one person, so I want to address that there are more reasons than I can address today, but I figured out one tiny thing that we could do something about, and that is what my laser focus has become. That was when we would ask women, hey, would you like to speak at my conference? We would get almost always one of two answers. Any ideas, what do you think those could be? I don't have anything to say. I wouldn't be any good. Hand at the back. I'm not an expert. You guys are really already well educated on this topic. I don't even need to be talking about this. This is great. So the two answers, the way I phrase them is, what would I talk about? And I don't know enough about whatever topic to give a talk about it. Same thing as I'm not an expert. And so that became my starting place. And so one day I was given an idea. This happened... Of all places, this happened at a feminist blanket fort slumber party. As one would imagine, what we do at feminist blanket fort slumber parties is we talk about feminist issues. And so at some point I brought up the topic of this issue that we're facing with our word camp and said, hey, they're not even applying in the first place. These are the two answers that we're getting.  That was the thing that started me on my several year path since then. It was get them to brainstorm, show them that they literally have a hundred ideas, which is how many we generate in one of the exercises. And then the biggest problem becomes picking one, which is very empowering for people to walk in thinking they have nothing to talk about. And then in the first quarter go, they're all good topics. I don't know what to do. It's wonderful. And I also suggest to them pick something for the rest of the day. You don't have to stick with it. The next thing that happened is somebody let word camp central know that I was doing this workshop because they knew that this was something that they're interested in. And so then they and I started chatting and they started helping me shape what was going to be in this workshop. And one of the items in particular was talk formats. They told me about how at the time a lot of tech talks were kind of a brain dump how to session. This is how to build a module here are the steps and people would walk away, not necessarily remembering what they had learned. And so they wanted to promote more story based talks because then people might not remember the details, but they're kind of learn how to learn, be inspired to try things, et cetera. And so we talked about the different talk formats. So there's how to the standard way that tech talks happen, leading a discussion, you're the facilitator on a topic and the audience discusses it together, running a panel where multiple people answer questions on the same topic, story based like I'm doing right now. And this could be how you learn something mistakes you made or any other narrative format, case study, the story of how you created one thing in particular, and also workshop hands on learning experience where people bring their laptops and create a thing as you go. I just want to mention that there was a few years where I didn't really feel like I was able to do public speaking for a bit when I had some health stuff going on, but I did feel like I could stand in front of a room or sit with people and do workshops and kind of feel like I'm just chatting with friends one on one. I'm leading them through something and for me that was a lot easier than standing up in front of a room. I also would like to talk about myths. So the brainstorm idea was to tackle one of those questions which is I wouldn't know what to talk about and I also just want to cover a little bit of how we would help them through the question of I don't know enough to talk about anything.  Are they an expert? So myth one, I am not an expert. So the person in the front of the room may not be the expert. It may just be the person who said yes to speaking, especially at the meetup level. There's a little thing that the educated people in this room, which is everybody here, may have heard of before called imposter syndrome, which is that the person in front of the room is thinking that you don't really have the knowledge or skills to be here, but you've somehow managed to fool everyone and soon they are going to find out. Now it's an interesting phenomenon that women and other underrepresented groups tend to feel this a little bit more. Not saying that the standard speakers don't also feel it, but the men and other represented groups kind of feel like if they only know a little bit about a topic, they don't know enough to speak on it, whereas typically the typical blob man feels like if they know a little bit then they can get up and talk about it. And also I would like to argue that you're always an expert because you are an expert in your own experiences. Myths two through five.  In this workshop that we've created we have given template answers for like the smarty pants in the audience, people asking questions that are too hard, people asking questions that are completely off topic, etc. I'm too nervous to speak. I can pretty much guarantee that just about every public speaker is probably extremely nervous about being up there. I have panic right now, but I haven't died. You have no idea how much I'm panicking inside, but that's part of public speaking. And it's also okay if you actually are visibly showing it. It's okay to tell the audience what you're going through and then you kind of get them on board with you and often they become your supporters as well. I have failed if everyone in the audience isn't totally engaged. So there's a thing called resting face where people are just kind of absorbing the information. Also they might be tweeting about how amazing you are. I forgot to mention at the start my Twitter is Jill Binder. So if you want to talk about amazing things about this talk on Twitter, that's how to tag me. And also people can be taking notes or thinking about what you've said. And lastly a talk followed by Q&A is the only format that I can use to share my knowledge. So we talked about different talk formats, and so it doesn't have to be that format. Besides this workshop that we created, which I'm going to circle back to, what are other things did we do to get more women? And this is one of the things that I've talked a lot about in discussions earlier this week. So this might be review for some of you, but this is kind of a lot of things that I know about it. So basically, first of all, in the year following 2013, we not only wanted to get 50% women speakers, we wanted to do it at a developer edition. And even in WordPress there are fewer women developers than there are men, even now. That's something that other groups are working on, like Ladies Learning Code, other... That's a big thing in Canada, I'm not sure what groups you have here, I'm like, people are tackling that problem, I can tackle problems that people aren't tackling so much. So I spent the year networking with more women in WordPress. Whenever I'd go places, I would try to meet them and get their contact. So I met people online, in forums, in person. There's women of WordPress groups that have started since that year, and so those are people networking with now as well. Also, our team sent out personal invitations to apply to WordPress women of our Tri-City region, and our region is Vancouver, BC, Seattle, and Portland. And personal invitations is one of the most powerful things, by the way, for getting people to do things they wouldn't normally do, like public speaking. Other things that we did, we encouraged them to speak at small meet-ups first before getting up on a big word camp stage. So for our WordPress meet-up, and our WordPress meet-up is really well attended. We typically get max capacity, which in our room is 50. And so if people didn't feel comfortable with that, we encouraged them to speak at other meet-ups that are smaller in front of family and friends. And also in BC, it's pretty easy to move around and get to other meet-ups as well. So encouraging them to go to some of those small towns around and speak there. We also made sure that we had good language, languaging in our meet-up word camp and workshop descriptions. So we don't use words that encourage people to self-identify as an expert because of that imposter syndrome thing. So we don't use words like superhero, ninja, rock star. And for our workshop in particular, we made sure to word it to bring out the people who have imposter syndrome. We also, our meet-ups were happening in a venue with three flights of stairs. And so I wanted to make sure that our workshop was not at this venue. I made sure it was at a spot that had elevators and ramps. And I mentioned it to our meet-up, and they immediately changed to that venue for our meet-ups, which I'm very proud of. And we also requested that it be a sent-free zone because there are quite a few people who are allergic. So these accessibility issues, it's good in general as well as we wanted to make sure that we brought out all women, not just a select subsection of women and people who identify as women and trans and et cetera. And then there's also a couple things I wanted to mention that we added to the workshop itself. We let them know that they can get up and move around because some people have some physical issues where they get antsy in their bodies. And the way we were running our workshop was four hours, so we wanted to make sure people could get up. We don't promote that for everybody. There's versions that you can do one, one and a half hours as well. We'd also ask for the pronoun both in the introductions as well as the third time that we ran this workshop this year. We also did kind of a quick and dirty, different color name tags. And so you can see my quick. This is how we're doing it. Green is she, her, red he, him, they, them, mix, et cetera, for other pronouns. There's probably better ways of doing it, but I just wanted to make sure that it was covered. Other things, when we would ask people if they would like to apply, if there wasn't workshop that they could get to or they didn't, or they, either there wasn't one happening or they couldn't get to it, what we would do is mentor them on the spot. And so we'd suggest things that we know that they could talk about. We would explain that we didn't want how-to sessions so much as stories, and we would ask if they have a good story to tell about something that they've learned. I also learned this week in one of the conversations I was part of, not just suggesting things that we know they could talk about, but telling them, you are going to apply with this topic, maybe not quite that forcefully, instead of just making a suggestion, making it like, this is what's happening. And also, duo talks, which is a great format in general, especially for somebody who's newer, as well as lightning talks, the shorter talks. But the thing I learned about duo talks was pairing up somebody who might be newer to public speaking with somebody who's already inexperienced and a comfortable public speaker. So, how did we do after this effort? After all that, we still didn't have many women applicants. And so the night before, in a desperate last-minute attempt to do something about this, I put up a tweet. It is my not-so-secret goal to get more women speakers at WordCamp YVR Dev know anyone great. That tweet got the most retweets I have ever had. Eight. But something, it worked. We got a handful more people apply to speak. I'm going to go over what our results were after I cover a little bit of, I've learned a lot, there's a lot of things I would have, more things I would have loved to have done that year, as well as things that I would love to do in general. And I've built up a wish list of, if I could wave a magic wand and have my ideal situation where I have all the time and money in the world to make everything happen, I would make sure that we have mentorship for our speakers, offering to help them with their talks, their slides, et cetera. And I'm so happy to see that more and more events are doing that. Drupalcon offered all of this when I spoke in Seattle's last year. They offered this. They offered child care, which I pushed for really hard in one year and it was too complicated for a lot of reasons we couldn't actually do it. But magic wand scenario, it happens. Meeting at different times that work for women with families, so not holding events always at 9 o'clock at night. We had our workshop Saturday afternoons. Seattle started a group for women in WordPress that they hold every or every other Saturday afternoon that's really well attended. And there's also other groups that are doing women of WordPress as well which may or may not be at those kinds of time slots, but kind of a side note on that I want to mention, if you do start running a women of Drupal group or any kind of specific underrepresented group, make sure it doesn't become a silo where they just kind of meet together and don't participate in the bigger group. What these groups have done is make sure to encourage people to use that as a launching point to participate in the bigger group. And also what I'd love to do is reach out to specific communities out there and form relationships with people of those communities and send out invites. So for example, we haven't started working on getting more people of color out and so I would try to find out where the... Oh, diversity is so hard to speak about. I would try to find out where black coders were in our community and if there was such a community that existed and reached out to them or even if there wasn't specific coders, just finding out the community in general because I'm sure there might be coders who are hidden in there or people who might not be coders yet and who want to learn all kinds of things we could do. Also giving people a chance to opt out of photos. People in general and particularly often the women blob might have reasons that they don't want their photo online, particularly often for safety reasons. And also taking care of... Is washrooms the right term in the US? I'm Canadian. I think that's right, the toilets place. I think this bathroom is that gets confusing to you guys, people, friends. I'm not sure. Anyway, making sure that single stalls are available for the people who don't want to identify with the gender blob toilet places and also making sure that the general ones are trans-friendly and making sure that they're big enough to be power wheelchair accessible as well. Offering clothes captioning would be amazing and having sign language interpreters which is a thing that I'm seeing more and more even at the local level word camps. And also something that we talked about earlier this week, having a volunteer to make sure that new faces feel seen and heard because one of the people was talking about how she was the only woman who came out to this event and nobody even noticed that she was there and she didn't feel supported or seen and she just left and never came back. And lastly, something that I know we've talked about a lot this week and something that we're putting a lot of focus on right now, which is having a code of conduct. So, WordCamp Vancouver 2014, our developer edition, how do we do? We got 60 applications in total. We had 18 spots because we were not going to run three tracks again. 20 women applied. That was almost three times more women applicants in one year from 7 to 20. Pretty proud of that. And I'd like to remind you it was the developer edition as well. So, I pushed for us to select fully 50%, 9. So, if there are two talks that were similar, I'm like, let's take the lady. And then for a brief shining moment in time, we had exactly 50%, 9 out of 18. And then last minute, one woman and one man dropped out and of course our other co-organizers were men. They were networked better with the developers in our city or who are coming from the nearby cities and so the backup speakers that they had were men. And so then we had 8 out of 17, almost 50%. I'm counting it as 50%. I want this one. So, if you take a look at this, we went from 14% to 47% in only one year. This cat is happy about that. And I want to talk a little bit about what has happened since then. So, other cities, before we made our workshop public, just saw our meetup description about the workshop and were inspired to create their own versions. And so Seattle, Portland, Montreal, and then Montreal also ran it in New York. So they created similar work. And then Workshop WordCamp Central asked us to create a workshop script for not just women but all diversity so you can run it for any particular group and asked us to gather all the best content from the cities who had created their own. So we created a big version with the best of everything, of everyone. And this is the agenda that we created in the end. So we talk about things like why do we want more of this particular group to be speaking at our events, the myths of being a speaker, which I mentioned, my favorite one finding a topic, and we also go through some exercises to further refine that topic. And then some things that we added on in our first year, we did this and tips on being a better speaker. And we found people walked out, they didn't necessarily have great pitches, and so they weren't being selected. So we added in how to write a great pitch and everybody's favorite, writing their bio. And also they left it feeling a little bit like, so now I have a great title, but where do I go from there? And so we added in creating an outline. And then we also have tips on being a better speaker and also one of the contributions from one of the other groups was creating great slides. And another thing that we do kind of throughout is leveling up their confidence with public speaking. So we start off having people introduce either themselves or their neighbor, and after each section we go around the circle and anybody who would like to do a little bit of public speaking, saying their talk or their pitch can do that. We also let anybody say pass at any time.  So no matter how comfortable people have become with their new chummy friends for the afternoon, they get that experience of what it's like to be standing in front of everybody. And it's great to feel that initial, whoa, with a comfortable group before they start speaking at events. So I'd like to report on how that has gone. So in 2017, in the Vancouver World Camp we typically have 50% women speakers. Montreal for several years in a row got 50%. Pretty sure Portland had 50% as well. I'm looking at the person who was... No, okay. I'm pretty sure I talked with them and I'm pretty sure that's true. Brighton confirmed that they did. And also this year, for the first time, we had a record breaking in Seattle, 60% women speakers. This cat is extra happy about that. And so I want to talk about where we're at now in 2018. Now we have a new challenge. And our new challenge is at... World Camp Central came back to me and said, okay, we know this is proven, this workshop works, but nobody knows about it. This is the next thing that we want to work on. And so somehow by the end of that conversation I found myself creating and leading a team called the Diversity Outreach Speaker Training Team in WordPress, and we created a goal. We felt it was an achievable but slightly stretched goal to try to get 27 meetups to run this workshop material and that's 5% at the time. When we said it, it was 5% of our meetups worldwide. We've had quite an increase since then, I'm not officially raising that number at this point until there's a reason to. And also, we're kind of promoting it about women, but we're also encouraging people to run it for other groups as well. So we're making sure that there's also resources for people of color, queer folk, people of different physical abilities, different mental health, older folk. There's underrepresented groups that I've never even heard of. I never even thought about older folk until I gave this talk a few months ago and two people came up to me and said, hey, what about us? And so I'm learning about new groups all the time. So I'd like to report on how our team is doing with that. So far in 2018, the groups that have run it have been Vancouver, Canada, a few cities in Brazil, a few cities in Italy, and internally at a few private companies. And we have a form, where we have people sign up who would like to run it, countries who have expressed interest in running it. More places in Canada and the US, Greece, Spain, Germany, Japan, Nigeria, South Africa, India, UK, Malaysia, Bangladesh, Netherlands, Lebanon, Liberia, Philippines, Venezuela. So far, that's in the first two months since we've launched this form. I feel like this shows that the world is hungry for this work. And I also like to mention that that's just listing the countries. It's not even listing individual cities. We have 30 signed up as either having run it or wanting to run it this year. So we might even exceed our goal, and we might even do that early in the year. That's amazing. We've had some amazing changes back to Vancouver for a moment. We've had some amazing changes in our community in particular. First of all, the workshop that we had brought out not just women, but brought out diversity in other ways. There were people of color, people with different physical abilities, people with different pronouns. I cannot speak to if there were queer folk, but I'd like to think maybe there were, but that's of course not something that we would find out in any visible way. Also, several of the people who went through and started speaking at our meetups and our work camps, stepped up and became leaders in our community. They created things that we didn't have before that benefited everyone, such as a couple of the ladies created a user track in our meetup. It also benefits local businesses. I have one story in particular where there was an agency who attended our work camp, loved one of the women speakers and hinted her down to hire her, and she became the first woman web developer that they had at their agency, and now she's actually leading the team. The thing that's really exciting to me that I really want to underline is creating more diverse organizers and leaders. This is the thing that is really exciting to me about this work. There's all kinds of reasons to have diverse public speakers, but the one that really gets me going is seeing more organizers and leaders of this work. Seeing more diverse organizers and leaders shaping and leading our technology, and depending on how far I can go with this work, maybe even shaping the rest of the world as well. Personally, I would love to see a world that was led by more diverse people. And so, thank you. I'm almost done the talking portion, but I would like to talk for a moment. Basically, I would love to see this kind of work happen in Drupal, and this is something that I've spoken about a bunch of times in conversations this week, so some of you are hearing this again. I would love to see this workshop and some of the other action items for getting more diverse speakers happen, and this is something that we have the materials to support you doing it if you don't want to be reinventing the wheel. As a starting place you might change a bunch of things, but our workshop is available up online at diversespeakers.info and it's something that I created in the first place as being really easy to swap any kind of technology for it, so all you need to do is replace a few words, change plugins to modules, a few little things like that and you're good to go. Even within WordPress, sometimes the language isn't quite right. Like in Italy they ran it for WordPress marketers and she said, oh these questions are too technical and I'm like, you can change it write your own questions and we also in addition to the workshop the other thing that we did is we created a place where people could read about it, learn about it and sign up to get more information from us and if they want also get training from us. So whoever I wind up speaking to about doing this work this is something that I can offer as a starting place suggestion as well depending on how Drupal works but that's something that I'm sure we can figure out. If you wanted to see ours it's at tiny.cc slash wpwomenspeak and so I just wanted to oh yeah, so I am looking for someone to champion this work in Drupal and I also wanted to mention that this isn't just about getting more speakers of different types, it's about what happens when you give different voices a voice and I'd like to challenge you to think what would be the positive changes in Drupal if you led the charge and you helped people around the world do this workshop. End of my talking session section. Oh do I only have, no I still have 20 minutes, okay great. Thank you thank you. So before I take questions, comments, discussion I did want to kind of address what kinds of things you could ask about so anything I've talked about women, diversity men, not all men which is a hot topic what you could possibly talk about if you wanted to start public speaking our workshop, our community answering your questions about public speaking me, anything else related etc. So we have a microphone at the front. Good afternoon and thank you for coming Jill. Frankly, notice I'm a white guy. And thank you for being here. You're welcome. As the white guy and business leader how specifically can I better promote talking about diversity given that in some of my meetings frankly I've got 13 white guys they're all business owners how do I start in a way raising the stick we've got to be more diverse more diverse. So the question is when you and your entire team are all white guys and this might not be a topic the thing that they've ever thought of how to approach how to even start approaching bringing it up and having them see that this would be a good thing. In this particular case there's 13 of us that are different from the agency owners or leaders within the agencies and frankly there are times in which I'm not able to get women or other diverse groups of people to be able to come in because they feel uncomfortable being around all the white guys. Wow, okay. So diverse folk aren't comfortable coming in because it's a group of white guys. Excuse me for a second. We're asking that question. That is a fantastic question and that's not a question that I've ever been asked or thought of before. So I'm going to think and while I think if other people have answers please come up to the mic I'm sure I'll think of something. I know for our workshop itself one of the things we encourage we have quite a few white men allies who would like to help us with it and one of the things that we say is can you help with it and if possible please don't be the one leading it please ask a diverse person to lead it. If you're going to say something can you get back to the mic? So I just recently kind of shifted in a way to that model frankly I'm just going after it's like I find people that of basically non-white males that I consider that would be a good champion to work with and frankly I just go for supporting them making introductions to other people and allowing them to be speaking on the diversity topics and things like that to try to encourage. Great, so you're doing the reaching out and you are getting more diverse folk to start speaking sort of. It's like within the business community it feels weird I'm specifically targeting targeting female business owners it's like hey I really would like to try to make this be a more comfortable environment for you.  I have a couple thoughts and then it looks like Mark and some other people are lining up in the queue so I can speak to you know for meetups if the meetup is all white guys how to comfortably bring people in and speaking about that might give some ideas one is extending invitations to people to come and then when we're when they're there making sure that they feel seen and heard making sure that there's I like I would love to have say a volunteer or a couple volunteers be the people who make sure that the new folk who come in especially diverse folk get greeted welcomed ask how they're doing I've participated in some groups where I've been the only woman and they've come up to me afterwards and said you know how how are you finding it being the only woman are you comfortable if anything ever comes up please tell me as well as there's a thing that tends to happen in a group of guys that the the woman or other non cis born male might not they might express some idea and might not get heard often what happens is they'll say an idea and then a while and nobody pays attention and a while later somebody else says the idea and everybody goes that's a great idea and so one of the things they can do is hear people give them credit for their ideas things like that lineup of people who either have answers for this or other questions if they have answers for this let's start with that mark sure I don't have definitive answers but I think you know one of the things I think about is you know I have this unearned privilege right so how can you at least try to you know not give that privilege but like make use of that in a way that's positive and helps others and so I mean I think all the things that Jill just said there are fantastic I think I think you know lifting up others voices is great I think you can speak out I mean first I think it's important like to do the work of learning you know for white guys to do the work of like learning and trying to understand everything before speaking I think is important but then when you you know I think be judicious but like you talk about racism talk about sexism and say it's bad and you know like and like if in your room with other guys I mean maybe this never happens but I mean comments get said sometimes that are inappropriate right so raising your voice if that happens it can be really uncomfortable but like if you do it there might be somebody else there's like I wanted to say something but I didn't know if I could or not and if you raise your voice other people will too so but I like the model of being supportive and not trying to be the one in charge and but being there and doing the work I think is important so yeah I finding ways to get involved in a way where you're lending your voices in your time in ways that are positive and help you know not just thinking about like mentorship is great but like sponsorship is like is this term that gets used that's even better where you're like not just saying hey I'm going to be your mentor now and help you out but like you know trying to like hey I'm going to help suggest you know you as a speaker as for hiring for working to help people get promoted like and especially like I'm if you're in a group of a bunch of business owners you have a huge opportunity to make a huge impact and like if you can speak up and talk to business owners like it's honestly about you know putting you know changing who's in power but also like get in the people who are at the top and are in power like on board with all of this stuff so you have a huge opportunity to help do that so awesome that you're here and are thinking about ways to do more stuff so yeah great thank you yeah so I don't know how to answer your question exactly but you know my wife is black and we work together and we started the company together and sometimes I'll just wear a t-shirt with her face on it two events and that I find that really helps I'm actually joking that's not I would not recommend doing that I was unsure how to react to that thank you for telling me how to react to that it was a terrible joke but but I do think I don't know that I would lead with talking about sexism or racism at any you know event or thing that you're trying to do with people but I would maybe start small and just try you know following or you know listening to people on social media you know kind of I empathizing or seeing things from somebody else's perspective isn't something that we do is like humans by default like it's hard you know it's hard work to think from somebody else's point of view so you know I would probably start there I found that that's pretty helpful to just see what you know other people think of you know that are in a minority group are struggling with and having to deal with and just you know being being available and there for them when those situations arise you know maybe not trying to just like tackle it as like you know let's solve this and let's you know let's just start bringing people into you know to our group but you know just be a little bit more patient I think. Great so paying attention to their different perspectives and bringing them in probably a lot more than that as well yes. Thank you for this discussion I just I've been living in this country for about five years now I have a particular question and the question is when you have this kind of discussions and you invite say the ladies to submit some topics and they are selected do they sometimes get a sense that they have been selected simply because they are women and not based on their content because I get that a lot sometimes I would prefer that I'm selected based on the quality of my content rather than how I appear and when I'm filling in job application forms or forms of government and where you have to specify your race whether you're black or white or whatever but I feel that by selecting that maybe they are trying to meet some quota and just select me for but not necessarily based on what I know of based on my resume or based on the content of my work do you sometimes get sent to get that from some of the people you tend to work with yeah this is a great question so the question is in your experience you sometimes feel like you're filling a quota rather than being hired for your skills and experiences and you're wondering do we have the same issue when we have women speakers I have heard a lot of different opinions about this women have come to me saying I hate being selected because I'm a woman and I've had women saying I love being selected because I'm a woman and my argument for that is it's not just about filling a quota it's also about hearing diverse voices and getting more unique ideas and so for me it's more than just ticking off a box of we have women speakers it's actually having more unique perspectives voices and all the things about chipping technology all the things I mentioned earlier so basically we get mixed reviews and this is my answer to them thank you you mentioned for bringing new people into group is someone showing up not necessarily feeling welcomed and included and then potentially never coming back and especially if that's their experience in the past they're probably going to be really apprehensive about a new group as well or coming in again and I think that's a big burden to ask on them like hey we would really like to include you because you're different than our current group but that really presents them very directly with that fear of I'm going to be the odd one out I think one way maybe to address that is to leverage that to say well I'm not going to ask someone to come into this group but say I know a couple people if they don't know each other can I connect them, can I get them to come together as a group to this larger event so that they're not odd one out and at least they can feel I have someone to talk to even if it's not as inclusive as the larger group right so what you're bringing up is a great suggestion of not just asking individuals to come back but actually asking multiple people two or three and so they don't feel alone and not wanting to come back again did I get that right? and preparing people so they know preparing people so that they know in advance that there's going to be somebody else of their diverse group there as well so they won't be feeling complete especially if they've had this experience before and don't want to come back again knowing that it's not going to be the same as last time thanks for that so I wanted to specifically address you I'm also a business person whenever someone asks me would you like to join this group I would like to hear your perspective as a business person I always have to ask myself what's the ROI on that what am I going to get out of this meeting because a lot of times people ask diverse people to come in to improve their group but what am I getting out of it so maybe also turning that into how can we help you what does your business need that might be useful the other thing as well is that some local businesses improve diversity by allowing those diverse groups to have space so a lot of meetups need a space they need especially accessible spaces that we talked about so if your business or business owners can host some of those diverse groups they get used to your company and you're more recognized as maybe trusted so thoughts lovely so that was looking at what's in it for them and not just what's in it for your group so what's the ROI for them and also what am I getting out on because I'm tired diverse meetup space so with accessibility and all the other things that we talked about physical accessibility as well as those things we have two minutes so depending on how one maybe two more depending on how long it is I'll try to be quick I was just thinking about your comment and I wanted to mention too that we are seeing a person from an underrepresented group and for example a cis white male because the person from the underrepresented group may have been passed over before that sort of compounds upon itself and they are less likely to have their resume actually reflect their abilities so bringing in people from underrepresented groups might give them the thing they can put on their resume to sort of pat it a little bit and help them be seen in the future so I think it's important to remember that your resume doesn't say a whole story right yeah thank you for that it's kind of a self perpetuating circle but it would be great to have some place that helps people break out of that cycle so they can put their experience on their resumes totally thank you thank you so we are calling it a day you can reach me on twitter and also for the next hour I'll be having a lunch you are welcome to join me to have more discussion ask me things I'm particularly interested in the people who haven't spoken and who would like to start speaking as well as as I mentioned getting a champion from the group to start doing this work so that is where I'll be for the next bit and thanks everybody thank you so much for spending the hour and finding this topic worth your hour and finding it important okay bye


In our shader programs, we can have an optional geometry shader, which is executed after the vertex shader, but before the fragment shader. And if we also have an optional tessellation shader, that's executed in between the vertex shader and the geometry shader, so the geometry shader is executed after. Whereas the vertex shader is executed for every vertex, the geometry shader is executed for every primitive. So in the case that we're rendering triangles, the geometry shader runs once per triangle. What we can do in the geometry shader is modify the vertices, or possibly even remove them and add more vertices, add more geometry. This does make it possible to perform tessellation to a degree in the geometry shaders, but they're not really appropriate for that task. Instead, for that purpose, you should use tessellation shaders, which we might cover in a later video. For your geometry shader, you have to declare what type of input primitive you're dealing with, whether they're points or lines or triangles. And you also have to declare what type the output will be, whether it's points, lines or triangles. And so your geometry shader can say, take in points as primitives and spit out triangles, but having declared that it takes in points and spits out triangles, you can't in that shader then say, take in something other than points or spit out something other than triangles. That is fixed in the shader's type declarations. In example 9.1 geometry shader houses, our geometry is actually just defined as four points, and the geometry shader is taking those four points and generating triangles, producing the four house shapes you see here. So now in the code, we're dealing with three shader files. The third is the geometry shader here. And our vertex buffer data here, this points array is simply two dimensional clip space coordinates for the points. And each point has an associated color. Top left will be red, top right will be blue, bottom right will be green, and the bottom left will be yellow. When this gets rendered, it's simply an ordinary call to draw arrays, like we've seen many times before, except note this time the primitive type is GL points instead of triangles. And our vertex shader is not doing anything interesting, simply passing along the color value into a color output and simply setting GL position to be the clip space coordinate of our x and y. And our fragment shader likewise is not doing anything interesting, it's just taking an input color and setting that to our output frag color. But now we have this geometry shader in between, which at the top note, we've declared it to take for input here with the word in. We're saying the shader expects points as input. And then for the output, it's triangle strips with a max of five vertices. The idea of a triangle strip is that the first three vertices represent a triangle, but every additional vertex represents an additional triangle sharing an edge with the previous. So if my triangle strip has three vertices, I just have one triangle. With four vertices, I would have two triangles, and with five vertices, I would have four triangles. So triangle strips are a way of representing multiple adjacent triangles using fewer vertices, rather than having to specify three for every single triangle. So here with max vertices equaling five, we can have up to three triangles. If we produce only four vertices, we would have two. With three vertices, we'd have one. And if we produce fewer than three vertices, then you won't have any triangle at all. We'll have no geometry being emitted, which is legal. Sometimes you want to discard geometry. Maybe for some of these input points, we don't want to produce any geometry. And that is an option. Anyway, you'll see that we'll be emitting an output color from this geometry shader, but as input, we're getting an array of VEC3s. This corresponds to the VEC3 output of the vertex shader, where note, it's not an array. It's received as an array input in the geometry shader because the geometry shader is run only once per primitive, and those primitives may be made up of multiple vertices. In this case or not, in this case, our inputs are points. Each one just being a single vertex, and so when we index color, we're only going to access index zero. But if our inputs were, say, triangles, then we could also access indexes one and two of the input arrays. Because in that case, we'd be dealing with the output for three separate vertices. In this case, though, it's just the one. And to access the GL position emitted from the vertex shader, there's a special struct array called GLN, which is always defined for us. We access its first element and get its GL position. And this is the GL position emitted from the vertex shader. So pause here is our point. Now to produce a vertex, we call the emit vertex function, but first we set GL position for that vertex, and also for all the outputs, we set a value for that output. So here we are emitting four vertices, four calls to emit vertex. Each one of them has the same value for color, so this is only being set once here. But then each of them has a different position. All of them offset from the input point to form a rectangle, the base of our house. And then for the last vertex, that's going to be the point of our house's roof. And for that, we set a point in the middle of the rectangle and above. And we'll set this top vertex to be white. Now that we're done producing all the vertices of our output primitive, we call end primitive. Let me quickly demonstrate again what the output looks like. We have these house shapes, each defined by a point, center of the rectangle, and the top point of the roof notice is white. Now if we were to emit just four vertices, and here I'll rebuild on the program. Now we don't have the top of our roof, but the geometry shader still runs. It's okay to emit fewer than the max five. If instead we were to emit only two vertices, rebuild, and run the program. Well, now we're not seeing anything because the expected output is triangle strips, and two vertices don't make a complete triangle, so we see nothing. Example 9.2, geometry shader exploding. Gives us something a little more interesting. We've loaded the NanoSuit model like we did before, but now in the geometry shader what's happening is, given a time value, we are translating the triangles up each of their own normal vectors and then translating them back. So they're just shifting in and out each one along their normal vectors. And you can see here how many triangles there are in the hand as they fly apart.  So what's going on in the C++ code here is nothing we haven't seen before. We're passing time in as a uniform to the shaders. In the vertex shader, the text coordinate needs to be passed as output to be received by the geometry shader. And for geol position, we're actually not transforming all the way into clip space. We're not factoring the projection matrix in here. We're only transforming into view space here. We'll wait to factor in the projection in the geometry shader. For the text coordinate part, so we're getting the text chords as an array because remember for the vertex shader it's one output, but then in the geometry shader that becomes an array. In this case, because our inputs are triangles, this array will have three values and our outputs in this case are also triangles. Notice it says triangle strip as output, but with max vertices of three. So it's either going to be one triangle as output or none. We can't simply just say here that the output is triangles because for whatever reason, it was decided that there are only three kinds of valid output points, line strips and triangle strips. So if you want to output triangles, you have to output triangle strips. Anyway, so we're going to be emitting three vertices and for the text coordinates, we're just passing it along verbatim. As for the geol positions, well first we need to compute the normal of the triangle and this is done by computing the cross product of two edges of the triangle. Here vector A is one edge and vector B is another. We compute the cross product, normalize and that gets us our normal. Now for each vertex, we call this explode function passing in one of the vertices plus the normal and this function computes an offset vector from the normal multiplied by the sign of time plus one so that it's never negative value and then divided by two just to slow it down. Without this division, it was just oscillating too fast and I thought it was hard to look at so I divided by two. We add the direction offset to the position and return that so we get our modified vertex but lastly we need to take that and transform from view space into clip space so we multiply it by the projection matrix which is passed in as one of the uniforms. So that gets us the geol position for that vertex and then do the same for the other two vertices. So this is one potentially useful thing we can do in our geometry shader. We can compute the normals which we can't do in the vertex shader because computing the normal requires us having all three vertices at once. Alternatively, we could just pre-compute all the normals and pass them into the vertex shader as vertex attributes and so we can get the same effect without a geometry shader but in some cases it's more convenient or more useful to compute the normals on the fly so in those cases, we'll need a geometry shader. In example 9.3, geometry shader normals we are rendering the nanosuit as just a regular model like we've done before but then we're also rendering with a separate set of shaders including a geometry shader we are rendering all the normals as these lines. In the C++ code, we're just drawing the nanosuit as usual but then we're drawing the normals with a separate shader program. So there's nothing new in the rendering of the nanosuit so we won't look at those shaders but looking at the normal visualization shaders first the vertex shader we're taking as input the positions and normals of the nanosuit triangles just like we do for rendering the nanosuit and we're going to set glPosition to be the clip space coordinate for the vertices of the triangles just like always we're also outputting the normal transformed into clip space we compute a normal matrix that'll transform our normals into view space like we've seen before using inverse and transpose of the mat3 rather than the mat4 in this case though we want to output the normals in clip space not view space so we're going to apply the projection transform and then in the geometry shader we're taking triangles as input three vertices as input but then we're outputting lines so we say here line strip and we're outputting three of them one for each of the vertices so it's max vertices of six each line is two vertices so they can be entirely disjointed they don't have to be connected at all anyway so what we're going to do here we're going to generate the three lines one for each vertex calling this generate line function passing in an index for the first vertex it's just the glPosition verbatim but then for the second vertex it's that same position but offset by the normal multiplied by some magnitude which here is just this constant of 0.2 and note that we call n primitive for each pair of vertices if instead we were to call this only at the very end let me rebuild here what we'll see are a bunch of connected lines for each triangle we have five line segments defined by six vertices all of them connected to each other so because that's not what we want we should make sure to end the primitive after each pair as for the fragment shader we just want our lines to always be yellow so we set frag color to yellow here last thing I'll say about geometry shaders is that they do notoriously have performance problems at least for NVIDIA and AMD hardware Intel apparently actually has some advantages there even though otherwise their GPUs are far inferior so it's commonly recommended to avoid geometry shaders unless you're doing something very specialized but generally in the context of say a demanding triple A game they're used quite rarely because of these performance issues tessellation shaders on the other hand have more performance benefits and so those are used more commonly in some cases for similar purposes we'll look at tessellation shaders in a later video


So this session is about communication during redesign. You don't need to follow the other sessions. So I'm Mike Kirby. I work at University of Maine. I've been working on websites since before there were websites. My first website was a big yes in the 1980s that people were dialogue into and actually read text and not look at papers. And then through some redesigns it went well and others that did not. And the common theme with the ones that went well is good communication. And the ones that did not, they were trying to work in a vacuum. So a little bit about University of Maine's website. We are a multi-site. We have two multi-site environments that are public at the moment. We're looking at spinning up a third one. The primary one that we work on is umane.edu. There's about 350 public websites in it. 425 actual websites, some of them are in progress. Decentralized content management. We support a team of 900 or so different users of one sort or another that are in there with other websites. But we centralize the application management. So we don't let anybody install their own plugins. And we now just have the one theme that people use. Public extension, which is our statewide outreach to the community. That is on another multi-site network that has about 40 to 60 websites. And it's separate for a variety of needs, but here's the code base. So I'm not going to go too much forward into this. Our digital communications team, we're a team of three. Brandi's in the room here. All three of us are down here at WordCAP today. And we support a campus of 12,000 with focusing on training and communications as opposed to actually doing the content work for folks. So the detail is not to go over the project itself, but to talk about the communications. So this is just a quick timeline of the redesign. We started in the summer fall of 2014 with pre-planning. Winter-Spring was the communications piece. And then summer to fall in 2015, we launched. And then there was some post-launch communication. And of course that was several years ago. So I've updated a little bit for this talk. As an opportunity to migrate to a modernized WordPress implementation, we eliminated legacy plugins and audited every website for web accessibility at the time it was migrated. This process was just completed for the main websites last spring. Our follow-up to extension websites continued to be migrated. That project's managed by their communications team, our support. And some migrating sites were using specialized WordPress themes. Our goal was to get everybody into a single theme, not even have child themes offer that. And that was achieved. At times we added options to the theme's customizer so that we were only available to super-admin. So we can tweak the site a little bit for sites like University of Maine, using the art, over the library, et cetera. But individual users don't have access to that kind of high-level changing of the theme. Positive word of mouth about how this went has gotten a lot of outlined sites into our theme. So we had the Climate Change Institute, the Marine Sciences School, other sites that were large that were outside of WordPress altogether. They had their own content management systems. And they didn't want to come into WordPress before we started this project because they saw it as restrictive and not up to stuff for what they wanted. They came on board because they saw how well the project went and built a great thing for it. So, pre-project communication. This is where you really have to start is taking stock. Get to know the land of the land. It's important to reach out to your stakeholders, obviously, but that's hard to do because you want to even get a earful from them when they, especially if you have a site that you aren't grousing about, determine what the pain points are. That's important. That's what you're doing to reach out before us to address these pain points. But it's also important to look at what's working well because you don't want to just throw something out that you didn't think people were using and they were using. Our big example was the A to Z directory that we had on a website. I thought, oh, this is silly. If the site's well-designed and has good search, who needs to go to A to Z directory? But no, that was consistently the top thing people said they liked about our website and to go to a directory and not just rely on search to tell them where the student records department website was. At UMain, we have some of the web advisory group. We brought in to the table constituents from administration, IT, resources, education. It's challenging sometimes because some of these groups are going to be very busy and they don't have time to give you time. So it's good to find proxies for those faculty. We didn't really have faculty at the table for the redesign. Instead, we found people that had the same mix of needs that did have time. So people that were in professional development groups at UMain came in and they filled the same needs but they were able to make time for these meetings. This group that we have continues to meet six times a year. As I said, a lot of special pain points help us understand what should be addressed. It's equally important to understand what's working well. Sending scope, that's the key with this. Let people know what they're going to be expected to try to get on and also let them know what you're doing. Because when you say a redesign, people insert their own opinion as to what that means. And then when you don't meet that, then to them you fail. You never intended to address that. So begin with your end in mind. Stick to the scope you set and make sure the project is clearly communicated as the project is finished, approved, and kicked off. You don't want to pitch a redesign project and people will say, yeah, we'll pay for that. And then they say, what do you mean search wasn't included? Or what do you mean e-commerce? We don't have e-commerce with us. So make sure that at UMain, we made it very clear we are not changing from WordPress. WordPress was working for us. We just needed to take it to the next level. We made it clear that we weren't going to adopt a new search engine. We were using Google Custom Search Engine. That would stay the same. If we decided later that we needed a better search engine, we would do that as a separate project. E-commerce, we weren't going to spin up world e-commerce into our theme all of a sudden, because that would be a little bit too much for this project. We're now working on coming to orders.umain.edu, a multi-site environment that's going to be a separate project that will help for workshop registrations or minor e-commerce forwarding campaigns. Most importantly, yeah, we determined that we shouldn't try to launch everything at once. With UMain, we had a large multi-site environment. We decided it was an opportunity to migrate to a better WordPress stack altogether. So we identified a set of key sites that would help us shake out any shortcomings in our solution. And we followed up with a course launch project to migrate the hundreds of sites into the new theme. So we had a set of about 20 or so sites. So our core news, calendar, home page, admissions, those types of sites, we brought them over all of once and then reached out to the community and started a migration project. That might not be possible with every redesign. If you're a small shop, then do the whole thing at once. But if you're in a large, if it's daunting to even think about launching your whole site into a new design at once, see if there's an opportunity to do that a pace at a time. So during the project, this is where you loop back in those people that helped you discover what you needed to do and make sure that you're hitting what they needed. You're designing with your audience in mind. Ensure that you're addressing their pain points. For UMain, decisions were on the design remain within our broader department, marketing communications. And we had to run it on the flagpole stuff, the senior leadership. We were actually at a great point there where senior leadership really wasn't interested in micromanaging the website. So we didn't have to show them. Here's the three different directions. We're going to go pick one. We chose that. And then it was later that we said, this is the one we chose. And then they said, yeah, that looks good. Also, the web advisory group that we set up, we made it clear that we weren't going to be expecting them to chime in on every little decision about the project. We just were going to give them status updates. And that status update was an opportunity for them to say, you know, I have concerns that I don't see being met. But you get into analysis paralysis if you make people think that they have to chime in. At a previous job, I had a co-worker who shared that whenever she's given something to review, like a document, she always finds something to change to show that she looked at it. And if you have somebody like that, then you're going to just be getting somebody that's going to focus on this one little thing that they may not even care about, but they wanted to show that they were paying attention and looking at what you guys were looking at. So yeah, our web advisory group is going to be regularly for progress reports updates on the emerging look of the site, but on the occasion, occasionally, where they asked to go in on a site basis. The communication plan for the general internal audience outside of our core folks. That's, you know, when your developers are working on actually building the new theme, usually your communicators are not having to do as much about deciding what to do. So this is your opportunity to take this thought and tell everybody what the developers are doing and share the excitement that the new site is coming. This is a great time. Yeah, map out the key dates in this plan and ensure you have adequate time to prepare and present so the community has time to digest and accept the coming changes. Really, with our project, we kicked it off in earnest in February of 2015 and it was by June of 2015 that we had all the design choices made pretty much, so July was when we really started that push out to tell people this is what's coming. And by then you had screenshots, hopefully, of what it was going to look like. So yeah, map out your key dates and then plan an informational session, something like this, where take all commerce to come and sit and listen to you talk. That's, you know, we did that in mid-July. We sent out invitations to the campus community. It was a great time during the summer. Students aren't here. Faculty actually have some doubt. They'll argue that they never have downtime. But at least they weren't having to convene classes usually. So that informational session, that's, you know, start with why. People are going to wonder, why are you doing this? So tell them this is why we have to redesign. For us, it was very clear. We had to redesign it because mobile. We had a website that started organically in 2009 in WordPress. And by 2015, it was just, we couldn't just shoehorn mobile into the game so we wanted to start fresh. Share screenshots. Don't try to do a live demo of the site if you can at all help it. Not just because Murphy's Law, if you do a demo of a product, that's when the errors are going to pop up and it's going to look like they're always there, even if they weren't. So just use screenshots. But even more important, if you're using screenshots, folks are going to look at the screen and they'll realize that they can't click to go in deeper and they'll just say, okay, I'll look at it later when I can click and go deeper. If they see you can click and go deeper, they'll say, I want to see what that is. And then all of a sudden, you're a whole talk of derail as everybody starts to wonder why is this page doing this instead of that? It's like, well, that's because we had to flush that out there because this is just a demo. Yeah, give them a handout to take away. That's very important. It helps structure what you're going to say.  If you just give a talk and somebody takes notes, they'll write down something and then they'll get back to, and they'll be asked, what wouldn't they talk about? And they'll see what they wrote as a note and they'll suddenly expand on that. And when they expand on what they wrote notes on, they might not be accurate at all in what you meant. But if they have a take, a handout, they can put a copy of the handout or even better point you to, point their co-workers to a website to get their own copy of the handout and you have control of that message. At least they're going to say, see the handout, that's what we said we were doing. Also, you want to make sure that you give them kind of a nice structure to that handout. Tell them what's changing, tell them what's staying the same, tell them when it's happening and then end with what they need to do because that's probably why they were there in the first place. So communication during the project, post-communication plan once you're launched. As the launch approaches, you want to alert your audience. Update your home page, home pages of science effective, because we have these full sites that we're watching and we want to make sure that people that were entering the site for those sub-sites were aware that something was going to be changing soon. To communicate that the coming change is going to be there for your frequent visitors. If your whole site's flipping at once, then you probably want to look at Google Analytics and identify your entry points to the website, the most common ones. If you're anything like a campus like this, I know some of the people at WordCamp came in through the door that was open that had the vendors and all that, and somebody came through another door and had to wander through and find their way over here. Well, your website's the same way. Not everybody's going to come through the home page. They're going to come through the page that they got to their Google. Google Analytics will tell you what those pages are, so you can put alerts on them so that even if they didn't come to your home page, they're still aware that the change is coming. It's a lunch day. That's clear your calendar if you have a wonderful website, but you're not the developer guy because you're going to be hearing from others. You announce the launch to your campus community. Do not assume they're going to open the home page and notice the update on their own. We actually had somebody a year and a half after we launched, and we were doing this migration. And I contacted them and said, hey, would you like to get your site migrating to the new design? I said, who's the new design? And we assume that everybody always goes to the home page, but there's lots of constituents that only open their page. Involve your campus news team if you have one. This talk was originally for the university, but any company that has public relations, press releases, or whatever, involve those folks. They're your communicators. They'll have a good hand on getting the word out. Keep them up to date with the site's migrating from what we think to new. For us, we made announcements on campus news as each site was getting launched to kind of help show these sites were changing. To a degree, after the first year of migrating sites, we'd gotten all the big ones and we stopped doing that because it seemed a little silly to say, hey, the Black Bear Marathon website has now changed into a new thing. And expected, expected. And we launched the site went up, new site, and immediately crashed because we had tested the new stack, but we hadn't tested the new stack totally with the live traffic. And we set up the old site again while we did some fine tuning of microcaching and all sorts of technical things that I had nothing about.  So that was the other thing, making sure that your communicators are out there. And now the press release, the moment you set out the new site, that might not be the best idea. Wait till you've got it up. It's been up for a few hours. It looks stable. Then you can get the word out. You can watch the new site. But if it went up, came down, and then goes up later in the day, later in the day is the time you want to send that word out. So post-watch, support and training. Which project results in the redesigned site will all swoop. Post-launch communications are going to be focused on support and for the training support. It's not a web publication that's pushed out the door on a deadline and you work out other initiatives. It's a communication channel that must be constantly fed and managed. Visible ongoing training and updates on the success of the website will reinforce this perception among those who are not as focused on the web as you are and your media team. So site migrations, that's what for us, if you didn't go all at once, this is not pertaining to you, but you'll be launching new sites perhaps in your multi-site environment. So if you did not flip the entire website's private screen design, you'll have more sites to migrate to. Managing the migration process involves communication pieces. Develop templates for emails we'll be sending out as part of the process. So we'll be sending out as part of the process. So migration kickoff, proposed timeline, status updates, check-ins, approvals. Develop a training website to showcase the new features and things so that as you're training people you have a training website that you can throw content in and show how these different features work without affecting live content. As you review sites that are ready for relaunch, they'll be helpful to have for site improvements. Pre-launch review kits so that if you find yourself telling everybody over and over again you need to put all the text on your images, have a canned response for that so you're making sure you're saying the same thing. And that canned response gets better and better over time as you find it. So the migration process that you made was lengthy. The 80-20 rule comes to mind. 80% of the site migrations took 20% of our overall time and sites making up a majority of our web traffic were migrated into this design by the start of the fall semester 2017 one year after 2016. One year after initial launch. In comparison, our last year migrations focused on niche sites that made up less than 5% of our overall traffic. We finally kind of set a line in the sand and said, we've got to shut off this old WordPress server and we actually had some sites that disappeared because either people couldn't be bothered to get in touch with us or it turned out that the site was no longer needed because everybody that had worked on it went away. So some of these sites were migrated into our new design and still haven't been launched. You may. We had a number of notable websites outside of work I see. I mentioned the Graduate School, Climate Change Institute, Center for Aging, and Sciences. All of these were proactively contacted by our team to migrate into our design. They contacted us. Each was its own project where we drew upon the communications framework to ensure we could accommodate the site into our theme. Climate Change Institute website was launched in August of this year as the fall semester began. So we now have really everything that is you may.edu So where to go next? If you may, we can see a whole week of WordPress training. That's been a game changer for us. Previously we would have a series of these, like six times a year we would do WordPress training. But by doing it weekly and on the same time every week it just, you know, I go places now at campus and they'll say, oh yeah, you're famous WordPress training. Word has gotten out that it happens on Thursdays at 10 a.m. And we take walk-ins. We like people to tell us they're coming but people just show up. It helps the community see digital communications as a resource. And each team member has had the opportunity now to be seen as a subject matter expert in matters pertaining to the web. It gets us visibly out there that you see that you're the people that they go to for web. That isn't WordPress. They'll still want us to chime in on it. We now, just at the beginning of this year send out a monthly email newsletter to all administrators on our multi-site network. We use MailChimp for free. And my server administrator sends me an updated list of administrators every month which I use to automatically add new subscribers. We have a big board at the very top of the newsletter that says you are receiving this because you are an administrator of our WordPress website. There is an unsubscribed button and people can, but we ask if you don't want to receive this newsletter basically we don't say if you don't want to receive this newsletter anymore.  And we've had people do that. It's been great. Seriously we have 900 people in our WordPress environment we used to have about 1200 people all sorts of administrators. When we first started this process I got bounced backs from people who were no longer on campus and nobody had told us that they were still an administrator in the system. They could have gone and logged in using their credentials and done who knows what to that website. It's just, you know, just has security talk. You just, you know, we're lucky that it's a very ethical community that doesn't do that. Now we get announced we get bounced backs with people and we can take them out. And, yeah, we get we hear from users that no longer need access and keeps us up to date on that. So that's the spiel it's going to be about 25 minutes I've got 10 minutes for questions so yeah. How easy or difficult was it to migrate the non-wordpress sites into the Humane WordPress community? Was there, did they come kicking and screaming or was it very easy? Or somewhere in between? I could say they some of them came big gradually but I wouldn't characterize it as taking and screaming. In all cases they came to us. Notably because they had all with one exception they had all been in another content management system by a company in Maine that was great when they came up, they built their sites in the mid-2000s and that company said, hey, WordPress is great we're not building our own CMS anymore. So finally in 2016 or 2017 they were told there's not going to be any more updates to this content management system we really should move to something else and touch with us to say, yeah, we got to move anyway so let's move to WordPress. We were able, our focus for those sites was to get their news into WordPress automatically so Climate Change Institute is an example where there were hundreds of news posts over the years and we made some changes to their content management system RSS feed so it was giving us everything from the beginning of time and then we used that RSS feed to create posts in WordPress and that worked out great we were able to save them a lot of time on stuff that was very low value for them to manually migrate Pages, we had them manually recreate because it was an opportunity for them to make sure they were moving things that actually they needed and that was part of our kind of archange feel for site migrations in general was before you move audit your site and pull down anything that's not needed you don't want to pack up something in a box to take it to a new house and then wonder why you packed it when we moved to Maine in 2000 I was opening up a box of kitchen stuff and there was a juice here an orange juice squeezer for oranges and I was like why did I pack this and bring it to Maine I don't care Of course, great in Florida, not so great in Maine so Thank you When you guys did the migration and launched this site, did you see a big dip in traffic or analytics in the site after launch? It's tough to answer that We kind of did but we're not sure how much of it was actual traffic changes due to the site moving and how we're measuring traffic and our old Maine theme had a Google analytics code hard coded into it every site was getting this one analytics code and it was an opportunity to put your own code in so we had some domain sites like english.umain.edu who had necessarily had their own analytics code but also getting our catch-all Google analytics code so an about us page for english.umain.edu and umain.edu we're getting counted as the same page so there were some traffic changes but I was just telling everyone that it's becoming more accurate I would say just in general we did see bounce break going down within your site we saw a much better experience we measured mobile users and our news site now we get a majority of traffic for mobile and that just wouldn't have been possible with the old theme because people would have come to us for mobile but not stuck around because it was a terrible mobile experience did the event with the internal communications that you've outlined as far as in the stakeholders involved there was that all? that was in our wheelhouse we were focused on coding and we picked a vendor that was specifically WordPress centric because we didn't want a higher vendor that would want to take us a step back to reinvent the wheels should you be using this content management system instead and that was really the key they went on to do their work they weren't really pinging us for input as much in that June time period which really gave us breathing room to really flesh out that communication plan I will say the vendor did do a great job of trading the trainers and we used that training session that they gave us in the new theme as the basis for our WordPress 101 training as to what order to do things in we really had a nice blow to it and we still use that framework today yes I find the hardest thing is that people to clean up their old site and all the content how did you manage that and how did you get people to do that on a timely manner and the other question I had was about redirections did you do a lot of that or like if they were getting rid of a pay did you make sure that they were being redirected or not so for the first part we had a batch process that we would have people in a timeline of week one you're going to prepare your site by legal content week two you attend our training we've migrated your snapshot and given you access to it in the new site and then we give you two weeks and we want to launch you that was wildly optimistic for the majority of sites small sites they were ready sooner and we launched them but other sites took maybe a year to my pay full can of words because they had been making changes to their live site that needed to be reflected in the in progress site we actually had one site that had to do a snapshot a couple of times to refresh before they could make that time to launch we really wanted to make sure that our point to them was we wanted it to be at worst a step sideways in other words we didn't want them to be feeling like they were taking a step backwards and how their site was functioning instead but at the same time we told them don't try to make this like it's going to be amazing that we're at the new design because look how much better our site is get your site in the new design and then work on the amazing part because that time period where you have two sites is really a headache as far as redirection a little bit but we didn't go crazy, what we would tell people for large sites in particular was that Google Analytics for entrance pages and the entrance pages we made sure that URLs would stay the same because they're migrating from WordPress to WordPress and we tell them don't change the names of your site pages arbitrarily if they're a good entrance page so we would make redirects for entrance pages that were changing but a lot of those we just let the search engine submit site maps to Google so that they knew where all the new pages were but we didn't make an exhaustive redirect list thank you did you have to chase people down for new content and people look at this as an opportunity to freshen their content because sometimes that's really such a bug of those trying to get the content from the client yeah so because we were migrating all your content as is it was a heavy lift but we did tell people we gave them some tools because back in the day we would tell you when pages were created you have to go into the page to see what was last updated and we exposed that last updated date into the page dashboard and it would tell people sort your pages by last modified date and that's where you start is the pages that haven't been modified since 2010 not that they were a page that was created in 2010 is fine if you're keeping it up to date take a look at it and decide oh my gosh this talks about president Kennedy you may have had a president Kennedy but instead of president 3D Mundi that was what we really geared people towards look at your oldest content and then we did really try to get them to do a good job with their home pages so that they were a better experience for those I have to get in here and


In this video, let's talk about the difference between go back and come back. This is a question I get all the time, but there's a very simple way to remember it. Of course, I'm Jennifer from jforsenglish.com, and this channel is dedicated to helping you sound like a fluent, confident, natural English speaker. Now, before we go any further, make sure you subscribe and hit that bell icon so you're notified every time I post a new lesson. Now, let's dive in with this video. Today, let's talk about the difference between go back and come back. Both of these have the same meaning, which is to return. The difference is, where are you returning to? Now, when you use go back, you can think of it as there, and when you use come back, you can think of it as here. And you need to ask yourself, am I returning to the same spot? If your answer is yes, then you use come back. If your answer is no, then you use go back. Now, the thing you need to remember is that it's the person who's asking the question. It depends from their perspective. Where are they now? And are you coming or going to the same spot or a different spot? So keep that in mind as well in question form. It depends on where the person is. So let's look at an example. Let's say that Bob and Sally are married. Now, Sally's at home. Bob is at work. So Sally's at home. That's the reference point. Now, Sally calls Bob at work and she says, when are you coming back? When are you coming back? Now, you have to remember that Sally's the one who's asking the question. So Sally is at home. At one point, Bob was at home. Now, he's at work. So Sally's asking when he's going to return to the same spot, which is home where she is now. So you have to remember that it's the perspective of the person asking the question. Sally's at home. She asked Bob, when are you coming back? When are you coming back home or when are you coming home? All three of those would be interchangeable. Now, let's imagine Sally's at home and Bob's at work. Now, Bob goes home for lunch. So he's only there for lunch. Remember, his starting position in this example was work, but he goes home for lunch. Now, Sally could say to Bob, when are you going back? When are you going back to work? And Bob could say, oh, in 20 minutes, because Bob is going to leave the place where Sally is now. When are you going back? Now, Bob's at home on his lunch break. His boss is at work. His boss calls Bob and says, Bob, when are you coming back? Because remember, the boss's perspective is, he's at work. Bob was at work. Bob is not at work. But the boss wants to know, when is Bob going to return to the same spot, which is work? So he leaves work and he comes back. So Bob's at home, his boss calls them and says, Bob, when are you coming back? When are you coming back to work? So notice that in this case, it was always the person who was asking Bob the question and their position, whether or not they use going or coming. So it might seem a little complicated, but just keep it simple. You just need to ask yourself the question, where am I now? If I'm returning to the same spot that I am now, then you use come. If you're returning to a different spot than you are now, you use go. So the best way to get comfortable with these is, of course, to practice them. So I want you to leave two examples in the comments, one with go back and one with come back. And if you found this video helpful, please hit the like button, share it with your friends and of course, subscribe. Now, before you go, make sure you head on over to my website, jforsenglish.com and download your free speaking guide. In this guide, I share six tips on how to speak English fluently and confidently. And until next time, happy studying. Awesome job mastering the difference between go back and come back. I know you can do it. Just make sure you leave your example so you get really comfortable with the scenarios and figuring out where the starting position is and where the person is going. So make sure you leave your examples and I'll see you in my next video. Bye.