Ladies and gentlemen, this section will start in three minutes. Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Amy, the emcee for this section. Our first speaker is Chavonne Mackeon. She's a WordPress expert hailing all the way from northeast of England with over a decade of experience. Today, she will guide us through finding ideal clients, adding value in sales, and mastering the enterprise sales journey. Let's welcome Chavonne Mackeon. It's very loud. Hello, everybody. I hope you enjoyed the keynote. And thank you all for coming and for being here. I'm just going to adjust this a little bit so I can't hear myself so much. And thanks just for coming to my presentation. I really enjoyed being in Taipei. I've never been here before. It's been wonderful. I've eaten a lot of food. It's been great. My favorite thing to do. So this was my original talk title, how to catch and retain a WordPress enterprise client. But when I started to get into it, I realized actually there were so many talks packed into this statement that I've cut it back a little bit. So I'm actually just going to focus on how to catch a WordPress enterprise client. Just the sales process itself takes up the length of a talk. And actually, as I've been going through it, even different components of the sales process could take up whole talks. So, but if you want to talk to me about how you retain clients or anything to do with this, feel free to come and chat to me through the WordCamp. So a little bit about me. I've been involved with WordPress for about 13 years. I used to be the rep for the docs team. I was one of the founding members of WordCamp Europe. This is me and my friend, Hani, after the very first regional WordCamp, WordCamp Europe in 2013. And all of the organizers will appreciate this feeling of just lying on the ground and feeling like we did it and we are exhausted. So these days I'm the COO of HumanMade. HumanMade is an enterprise WordPress agency. We also have a cloud hosting platform, Altus, where we offer enterprise hosting to banks, universities, to media organizations, among others. And just to begin, I just thought it would be fun to look back at where HumanMade started. Hello, everybody. I hope you all enjoyed the keynote and Noel's talk was great. So we all have to start somewhere. This is the first version of the HumanMade website that we could find on the way back machine. At that point, HumanMade was one word. We've got a very nice carousel there. I don't think the telephone number works, but if you want to give it a try, feel free to. Maybe Joe or Noel or Tom will pick it up. And also, we're not just UK based having gone remote in 2013. But something that we still do, I'm going to have to read it because I can't see all my notes, is we love building fantastic things for fantastic people. And if you want to do something with WordPress, speak to us, we can make it happen. So here are some of HumanMade's very first websites. I could only find very poorly cropped versions of these in our WP Media Library from way back in the day as evidence of the work. We've got Ardman Animation. We've got Awkward Family Photos. I don't know if anybody remembers that. Digital Trends, geek.com, and they're very, look very dated now. But these are kind of the early versions of what we were doing at HumanMade. But this is what we're doing today. We work for big organizations, for enterprise, companies like Siemens, Google, with YAL, TechCrunch, Red Bull MediaHouse, banks, universities we've just launched a new site for Harvard. And we've come a really long way since that. But it's step by step. And you know, we've all got to start somewhere. We all at HumanMade love to share. And I think this is one of the differentiators of HumanMade is that we're made of open source contributors. We have so many open source contributors as part of our leadership, as part of our staff. And we really love to share. So we share our staff handbook. We share our engineering handbook. And we also love to share how we approach things. And that's what I'm going to do in this presentation is talk a little bit more about how we do things as a business. So what I like to do with this presentation is to help some of you catch your first wheel. So to do that, I'm going to tell you a story. And we're going to see what we learn along the way. The story is going to take you along the sales funnel. We'll cover it in broad strokes. And as I said at the start, when I was putting this presentation together, I was like, this could be its own talk. And this could be its own talk. And this could be its own talk. So at the end of the presentation, I have going to share a QR code. If you follow it, it will take you to your blog post. And it's got links to what I think are good resources at different stages of the sales funnel. So funnel is a really good representation of the activity because it follows a journey from creating awareness to closing a deal. And a really common way of phrasing it for you, and this is called Ada. Thanks to Petra for helping me make this diagram yesterday. So it starts with awareness. What is it? Just creating awareness of your product or service. I like it. That's generating interest. Desire. I want it. At this stage, your prospect is motivated to engage with you to more interest in buying what you've got. And action, which is, I will have this. So I'm going to take you on a story. This is Joy. She looks a bit like me. I got some help from my designer. I'm probably much more snarky and sarcastic than joyful. Just to put that out there. Ryan's very sarcastic and laughing at me. So Joy was a web developer. Not like me. I was never a web developer. I was involved in WordPress and other ways. She did a bunch of freelance work, building websites for small businesses. Those businesses got a little bit bigger. Then she got more work than she could do herself. So she asked some friends to join her. Just a few other developers at first. Then another developer. Then the designer joined her team. Then a project manager. And before she knew it, Joy was no longer doing any development herself. She was running a business. This is not in a language I understand. So Joy has got a problem. Joy's engineers are looking for more challenging work. They're really sick of building brochure websites and customizing themes. They've seen that other engineers are doing much more interesting work with WordPress. They're using the block editor to streamline organizational workflows. They're integrating other tools, using the REST API, building complex integrations, building really customized front-ends. And first one leaves. Then another. They love working with Joy. Everybody loves working with Joy. She's happy all the time. But they want to grow, which means Joy's business needs to grow too. Not only that, but Joy herself is ambitious. She wants to grow her business. She wants to have bigger challenges, to learn more. She'd like to get some stable income. And she's heard that when she gets her foot in the door at one of those big organizations, that she'll keep getting work from them. So chapter one. How do you get that foot in the door? How is she going to get an enterprise client? First of all, if she doesn't even know what type of enterprise she wants to work with. Enterprise is a big word. It contains a lot within it. So you've got to really think. Joy needs to think, what is my ideal client? Joy isn't really sure what her ideal client is. At this stage, she really, really would like to work with anybody. Anybody who's going to give her money, great. However, there are some things she does know. She knows that one of her engineers previously worked at a university in their digital services department. And they've been doing like themes and customizations for some schools. This means education could be a pretty good industry fit. She knows that she'll need to work with a big university. That is profitable. So she needs to look at an intersection of her team's expertise with technology fit, ability by, and geography. So this is creating an ideal client profile. I started with one bullet point, but not the others. Oh, that's making me cringe. So, when you come up with your ICP, think about the following. Industry, is it an industry you're familiar with? Think outside of the box, not just clients you've had, it might be industries that your team has experience of. Size of the company, a good indication of the overall revenue and the complexity, a good indication of the overall revenue and complexity of the organization. Although when you're looking at the company size, remember that you'll just be working with one team within it. A company could be huge, like a bank, for example, but they have things like bank tellers. And people like working within their high street branches. So there's all sorts of, like, different types of roles within those organizations. Potential budget. So you won't know the budget that all of these organizations have offhand, but you can project what size of budget is ideal for you. Your costs and your team. Is it $50,000? $20,000? A million dollars. And then geography. Are there geographical regions which you are better suited to work within? Have you got a team there that can work? Factors might be things like whether your team is located there, whether you speak the language and sort of purchasing power within that locale. And then finally business goals. So what are the ideal business goals? Could it be digital transformation? Could it be moving onto new platforms? Could it be speed and performance? There's lots of different goals that actually you could be well suited to work within. So once you've got your ideal client, you need to go and find them. So Joy realizes she doesn't really know anyone who works at an enterprise organization. She loves going to word camps. We all love going to word camps. Word camps are great. I'm meeting word pressers. But enterprises don't really go to word camps. And in our experience at human made, it's very rare for us to be doing client meetings or meeting new clients at word camps. And I think this quote from Seneca is really helpful and instructive when thinking about how you can position your business to grow. Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity. So you need a combination of preparation and opportunity. Through defining her ICP and understanding what her team can offer, Joy is prepared to talk about the value her team can bring. And then the opportunity is just putting yourself into the right types of situations where you might encounter people who are interested in what it is that you have to sell. So this means going where she knows they will be. So she searches for conferences and events focused on digital marketing for universities. There's some local events that connect her into the local community. Bigger ones were, if she's honest, she does feel a bit overwhelmed. But she puts herself out of her comfort zone and she starts speaking to the people. She has a go at speaking at a local meetup. And when she builds up her confidence, she speaks at a one day tech event focused on people who work in digital marketing at universities. She starts to write posts on LinkedIn about innovations in word press, particularly in education settings. She shares useful plugins that people at a university might want to use. She comments on case studies and other people's posts. She broadens her social media network and just generally gets herself out there. At all times, she's trying to bring value to people through the interactions that she's having and demonstrate her expertise. Her team, like the team at HumanMid, her team doesn't exist, so I've had to use HumanMid's team as an example. Our WordPress contributors. So she posted about that and shares their contributions. And in terms of our experience at HumanMid, having so many people at HumanMid be contributors to word press, be vocal within word press, take leadership roles within the word press community has had a huge impact on HumanMid's business. And that's not why we all started contributing. We started contributing because we care about open source, we care about democratizing publishing. But these are definite fringe benefits to us as a company, so I highly recommend that you think about your contributing strategy. Then one day, she gets an email from Jeff. He works in digital marketing for a business school at a university. He has an RFP that he'd like to send her if she's interested. Of course, she is. After two, a journey of discovery. So Joy needs to learn about this prospect and if she has a good discovery process, it will help her to make sure that she can craft her pitch to the prospect. So this is thinking about how you understand the prospect, how you understand their business deed. It's also an opportunity to demonstrate professionalism. Throughout this discovery process, you want to really not just learn about them, but you need to deliver values to them. Every touch point with the prospect, they should come away feeling enriched and feeling good about the experience of having that interaction with you. So first of all, she has a discovery call in this hypothetical story, which goes the wrong way. When it goes wrong, Joy hasn't done her research and she doesn't know anything about the organization that she's told her. This means she could waste time on pointless questions that she could have found out elsewhere. She also wastes a lot of time talking about her and the prospect's shared love of dogs. I love dogs. I've got a labrador, she's very cute. I look her up on Instagram and I love her, but spending 10 minutes of a 45-minute sales call talking about your dogs is kind of wasting yours and their time. She also doesn't spend time digging into the problems that Jeff has. For example, Joy asks, what's your biggest pain point? Jeff says, our site is really slow right now. She doesn't ask what problems this causes, the team or the business. She just goes on to ask, how big is your team? However, Joy doesn't do that. Before the call, she does her research. She finds out that Jeff is the boss called Susie, who is the person who will make the final decision. Jeff is just the person doing all of the research. She's gone to LinkedIn to find out Jeff's role and his position in the organisation. He finds out that they're hiring two new members of staff, which means that they are a team that's growing, which is a great thing to know. It means that they likely have budget. He finds out that he leads a team of four in Singapore and they're going to hire two new team members. She opens the call with a warm but brief opening, which she expresses her appreciation for the person for Jeff. She checks in on time, asks if 45 minutes still works for you, and she outlines the end goal of the call to understand their business goals and how they can work together. This is, if you're in sales or curious of sales, find that there are a lot of acronyms for everything. This is a little process called S, a appreciation, C check-in, and E end goal. In the post that I'll share at the end, there's a lot of acronyms. I have lost my notes for this. So, whenever Joy asks Jeff, what are your pain points, Jeff says, our site is slow. And she says, what are the problems that that causes for you? And he said, well, our ad revenue is going down because people aren't staying on the site, people are bouncing on the site. But it's also causing problems for our editorial team. There's a lot of inefficiency because we're waiting for things to load all of the time. So she understands that they're losing their revenue and they want to improve on their efficiencies. So she's got a good idea of the change that they need to create within the organization. So now that she has everything she needs, she can go away and put together the estimate and the pitch. She has the requests for proposals that's been sent to other agencies. I don't know how many of you have received these, but often they're huge. They're massive documents that you have to respond to. But she has got her discovery call, which gives her information that other agencies don't have access to. She knows exactly what the business goals are. She knows how her team can help Geoff achieve those goals. As well as the art of responding to the RFP, Joy has to estimate how much the project will cost. So work on this scale is new to Joy. And while they can easily estimate how much a brochure site will cost, a migration with new editorial workflows, a full performance audit and optimizations and a refresh of the front end, that's a whole new thing. They've never estimated anything like this before. So they're going to get it wrong. They are going to underestimate what it's going to cost. It's going to ultimately cost them money, but every time they estimate, they're going to get better. Estimation is really hard. I've shared some posts about it. There are things that Joy could have done. She could have got access to WP admins. Their engineers could have had a proper look around. She could have asked for access to the code base. Some prospects will do that. She could have built in a discovery phase so that they could better determine the full scope of development. So just sell that discovery with the phase two, which is actually the build. She could build in contingency and she could have gotten a higher on top of her estimate. But she doesn't do any of these things. She gets it wrong. She also was thinking about pricing models. There are loads of different pricing models you could adopt. Joy continues with her hourly-brace pricing model, which is what a lot of agencies do. You can do daily. That's human-made charges by the day. You can do value-based. You can do project-based. You can figure out how much things are going to cost. But she breaks the project down into stages and she and her team break those down further into specific tasks to figure out how long each task will take and then how much it will cost. There might be situations, and this isn't one that Joy is thinking about because she doesn't know yet, that you might intentionally price low. It could be your first project. You want to get the logo on your website. It might be, and this is an approach that we have taken, is that you want to land and expand, which is that there is a small opportunity at a really big organisation and you want to get your foot in the door so that you can deliver really well and you know that that organisation is going to have loads more money to send your way. In that situation, you need to be realistic about what's going to cost you and also what the future opportunities are. Joy is delighted when she's invited to pitch because she's done so much prep work already through the RFP and the discovery. She feels really ready to answer any questions that are thrown at her. When you go into a pitch, if you've done your prep work, it's actually pretty easy because you know it all inside out and it's really just going in, having that conversation, delivering value, making people feel educated by that process. This is still the RFP down to a 15-slide deck. They tell the story of how Joy and Jess' team are going to work together. She paints a beautiful picture of collaboration and Jess thinks this is wonderful. So this is not the time within a pitch to focus on how great you are and I think this is a mistake that people make. You know, you establish that through the RFP response is your own credibility. You want to focus on what the prospects future, how they will be different and better by working with you. You want them to see that and feel that through the pitch. So, off it goes. Done the pitch, got the RFP, and Joy wits a few days. And then she wits a few more days. And then a few more days.  And the board is struggling to get it approved because they have an off-site followed by an all-hands and then when the board does review it, they have a bunch of feedback. That gets sent back to Jeff. And Jeff has to take it to IT. And IT is like, why are you even using WordPress anyway? Oh, we've got a phone call. And then he has to make a whole business case again to the IT department, who begrudgingly say, fine, it can go ahead, but only on this side over there and we don't want any responsibility for it. And it goes back to the board and they can only arrange a meeting in two weeks. We should do, and it gets signed off, finally, and Jeff finally, finally emails Joy six weeks after the last spoke. And I can tell you, in enterprise sales processes, this happens all of the time. The amount of times that we have, like, done a pitch, they've got an email saying, oh, we've got to hire someone new before we can go ahead, or it just goes completely silent, and then three months later, someone messages you, this is part of enterprise sales, is patience. She almost given up. She was sad because the lady looks so promising. But what Joy will learn is that the process is that enterprise sales is a marathon, not a race. Any touch point that you have with a big organization is not just a contact with one individual. It's a point of contact with all of the complexities of that organization. Whoever you speak to has a boss, and they have a boss, and they have a boss, and they have a board, and your stakeholder is managing the demands of multiple department and opinions. Things take a really long time, and things will be very challenging for your stakeholder. But she gets an email from Jeff saying, you're the preferred vendor. Yay, good for Joy. But the story doesn't end there. The stakeholder might be happy, but it's not the end of the story. There are some monsters to overcome before the project is in the bag, and these can tank a project. So you might get the email saying, yes, we love you, we really want to work with you, it's going to be great, I can see our future together, but it's not over, and you need to prepare for these. The first monster is procurement. Procurement is a team that determines whether a vendor is going to be safe, secure, and deliver the best value. They will always look for ways to drive down costs and mitigate risk. And they decide whether an organization can work with a vendor or not. They go hand in hand with compliance. Compliance team will make you assess, will assess you to see if there are any risk factors associated with working with you. So Joy is sent an enormous 300 question questionnaire where she's asked about security awareness training and endpoint security and network configuration and encryption and development environment security and data handling and all of these things that she just doesn't normally have to think about when she's doing these smaller, small to medium sized sites. In the end, Joy gets through it all. The compliance team decides that Joy's security is not up to scratch. So they tell the stakeholder, they tell Jeff, if they really want to work with Joy, they'll have to send laptops to the team to work with. And this happens. Which they do, they send them, and now it's finally time for the contract where they encounter their next monster, legal.  Eventually, when it comes back, it is covered with red lines. The legal team has pulled out their claws and been able to use the project and marketing activity. It's disputing the payment terms. The jurisdiction where any disagreements have been mediated. They have no clue about the GPL, so all references like open sources completely written all over. And Joy feels completely out of her depth. At this point, she brings in a lawyer who helps her navigate this whole situation. Of course, she has to spend time finding a lawyer who is within her budget, so that adds another few weeks on to the whole thing, but she finds someone, they understand her organization, they understand the GPL, not many people do. And they work through the red lines. And finally, finally, she wins the... Oh, am I looking at the wrong one? Then the work begins. Yes! So my time's up, so I'm going to run through the last bit really quickly, and maybe you'll be able to take photos of them. So the work begins. She hands the work over from sales into delivery, a whole talk that many people from human made could come and give, I'm sure. She's got some top tips, which I'm going to fly through, but I'll share the slides. Now that Joey's a pro, she starts speaking at an event, she comes to work camps to share her knowledge, to get more people selling to Enterprise, and here's what she tells you. Enterprises are big multi-department organizations. You will work with one small part of a big organization, and you won't have anything to do with the rest. They won't know who you are. WordPress is often the secondary CMS, which integrates really broadly with a broader tech snack. It's very integration heavy. You're going to need to be very clear about how you handle data, how you secure your environments and your computers, and how you vet your people. There are lots of stakeholders and decision makers which is exhausting and difficult to navigate. So some of her tips, am I on the right one? Yeah, network widely, share your knowledge, do this.  Don't just go to word camps.  Understand the business value of WordPress and open source. Another talk in itself there. I would love to give that talk. But why should the prospect buy WordPress when there's so many other options out there that have huge marketing teams like Core and DOWA and all of those things, they could buy those? Land and expand. Start small, get your foot in the door, maybe even under price, although make sure that you're very confident in doing that before you do to get your foot in the door. Learn the organization chart and build relationships with all of your stakeholders. So you'll have the person who gets in touch with you, but you should be drawing a map of all of the people who are related to them. Start to understand how that organization works. Ask the right questions to understand the prospect business goals. They're not just buying a website. They're looking to implement a change and you're going to help them create that change. Be patient. The enterprise sales process cycle is very long. Sometimes it's very short, always great. Sometimes it's very long. Be persistent. Follow up. Don't let them forget about you. You're still there. Pet you've worded this for me. I thought it was great. So you may have caught a whale. We still need to get it on the boat. And the compliance, procurement and legal can completely scupper your deal. I can tell you that's happened to us and that is really guiding when you put months into a sales process for something like compliance to bring it to an end. Engage a lawyer who understands your business. I've worked with a lot of lawyers. A lot of them don't understand your business. You need to get someone who works for you, how you do things, your values, understands open source. Get ahead of compliance expectations. The main things that enterprises care about are how you handle data, are your computers and development environment secure and are you budding your team. And that's especially important if you're working with freelancers and contractors and if your team is remote. Remember the funnel? The activity needs to happen throughout at each level. And that's it. I'm done. Before I finish, I just want to give a shout out. We've got an enterprise panel on Saturday at 1 in the main track. We've got Lorna Lim from Human Made, Kim Cole from Yoast and Raul Bansal from RT Camp. And they'll be talking to Petja Rakowska about how WordPress can better serve the needs of enterprise and you'll get more great insights on enterprise there. So thank you everybody. If you've got any questions, I think maybe a bit of time. Maybe not. That's right. Thank you so much, Siobhan. This is such a great talk. Now we are open for question for five minutes. Siobhan, actually I have a question for you. Great. What makes a great client? That's a good question. What makes a great client? Somebody who's communicative, who will engage properly with the process. Someone who understands your delivery process, it's one of the challenges that comes up at Human Made is that we use scrum for delivery and sometimes we don't have a really engaged product owner on the client side that can lead to challenges within the process because they are kind of waiting for the end of the process for the thing to happen, but we need them engaged throughout. We do have a really great client and this makes a really good client is that every time she's left an organization she's re-engaged us at her new job. I think we've been through like four different companies with her. So that's a really good sign of a great client. Somebody who takes you with them. Hello. So when you have a large project, how do you typically break up milestones for payments and delivery? So we usually have a roadmap which is drawn up at the beginning of the project because we use scrum, then we're working with the product owner to deliver in sprints every two weeks and we tend to then stage the payments dependent on the project. It's usually like 30-day terms or whatever. So it will depend on the deliverables, it will depend on the project. Smaller ones will be related to the actual launch, but other ones will be dependent on deliverables. Okay, thank you. We've got one here. Such a wonderful talk. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. So my question is, most of the time the decision makers at Enterprise does not understand the technical talks. Yes. So they're maybe having issue with the site speed and this is why bounce rate is going up and whenever I'm going to tell them this is happening, I don't understand that. So how do you overcome that situation actually? That's a good question. Whenever we are, I guess, working with the stakeholders, we have a great team of engineers who are good at getting that balance between the technical stuff but also communicating that well to the client. You can do page tests and stuff to show them. So the Google one that shows your site speed and actually just showing them things like that. You can share articles with them, ideally ones that aren't too technical about the relationship between speed, site performance and bounce rate. But it comes back to what I was saying through the presentation is like, you can educate that person and you can help them to understand. Yes, some of the technical stuff might be difficult but actually conceptually, if you can get them to understand that, then they've learned something through their interaction with you which is really valuable to them. Thank you. So one of the questions I had that like, how do you explain to the customer that the project might take a little longer than what they estimate because often times stakeholders have a timeline in mind but the scope of the project is actually larger than what they have in mind. So how do you reconcile that? Because you realize it's going to take longer but they don't. Yeah, I mean this comes back to what I was saying about the engaged product owner. If you've got a product owner on the client side or any stakeholder who's fully engaged and helping you make decisions throughout, then they should, there should be enough part of the process that really they should be seeing that coming as well. What we aim for at HumanMid is there's three sort of vectors for a project, there's scope, there's time, and there's scope, time and budget and usually one of those is going to have to give. So if you're running up on a deadline and that's not going to, you're not going to hit it so you've got a de-scope, something or they're going to have to add another engineer which increases the budget and if the stakeholder's been really part of the project then they will understand the need for that. So you really need to go to the clients team to manage those types of situations. Thank you. Thank you so much, Siobhan. I'm pretty sure if anyone have questions feel free to meet Siobhan at the conference later today. Thank you again. On behalf of Warcam Asia we would like to give you this thank you gift. Thank you so much. Thanks everyone for coming and thank you for having me. Thank you. Our next section in this meeting room will start from 11.15. Ladies and gentlemen, this section will start in three minutes. Three minutes, thank you. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Amy, the emcee for this section. Please welcome our next speaker Ann Mika Bovlet. Helling all the way from the Netherlands and now residing in Germany. With over 25 years of web development experience she's a seasoned expert in digital accessibility. Her talk will focus on bending arguments against accessibility by making it relatable to daily life. Let's welcome Ann Mika Bovlet. First of all, I'm stoked to see so many people here today. And before I start talking to you in here is already working in accessibility. Who is planning to work in accessibility? I love you. That's wonderful. All right. I'm Ann Mika Bovlet like I was so kindly announced and I'm going to talk about how to argue how to counter arguments against accessibility when designers and developers or decision makers give you a hard time. Right? A little bit about me, but not too much because then you'll be bored out of your mind. Most people call me Ann because Ann Mika is hard to remember so feel free to do so. You can always come to me and talk to me through any channel possible. I welcome that very much. I'm also very direct. If I'm too direct, please let me know. I'm trying to find the order what you see and what I see. Okay. So I created my first commercial website 26 years ago. I had no idea what I was doing. It is horrible to recall front page. But at that time, that was the thing. Everything worked. It looked great. And I've been self-employed since 2008 because I figured out if I want to go my way in this work I have to be able to decide for myself what I do. I'm part of the target group of accessibility. And something that is important to know is that many people think, oh, you have to be in this job for 100 years to understand what it is about. I didn't discover accessibility until four years ago. There was a tweet about accessibility. It made me cry. I'm not going to tell you which one you can find it on my website because I do like traffic to my website. Who doesn't? Okay. I am part of the group that is what I call the lesser suspects because we all know that in accessibility. Everybody thinks this is for people with visual impairments, people with motoric impairments, but the group of people that accessibility for is way bigger than people think. This is the base for what I'm talking about today because we need to work on getting the assumptions that people have out of the way. I have ADHD, ASD, dyslexia, dyscalculia. I can't read a map if my life depended on it. And I'm 53. That's not an impairment. But my eyesight is really bad. So what you will learn today is how you can motivate developers, designers, content creators, and how you can use that knowledge to motivate decision makers because making things accessible is the right thing to do, right? We do this because we're social creatures. But the hard fact is in this world it's not about how social we are but how are we going to eat? Who is going to pay for that? Small changes happen through love and kindness. Big changes, unfortunately, through greed and capitalism. This is one of the bases that I use in my arguments to convince decision makers. Okay. So is this talk for you? Well, we already established that we have a very mixed audience. Yes, it's for all of you. And of course, I base the talk on the assumption that you already know things, but if you hear me use expressions or anything that is new to you, please speak up. I'm one of those speakers where you can just rattle into her talk and say, hey, I have no idea what you're talking about. It's fine. Okay. My share are based on my personal experience, which is only like four years old. Some of you have many years more of experience in your pocket. So if you have not heard the arguments that you struggle against, I would ask you to note them down now and share them with me and with the entire audience here and let's discuss how we can counter them at the end of this presentation. Okay. So that's what I just said. This is typical Anne. I don't know where I'm at all the time. This is the reason why I have a ton of slides. I have to. Otherwise I'll be talking here for the next two hours and you'll be sleeping. Okay. So I refer to blog articles on a few occasions and at the end of this presentation I'm going to share one short link where you can find all the articles I refer to including a couple of bonus resources. All right. This talk, like I said, is a two-way street. You get to share your arguments. We talked about this. You can make a list of arguments and share them with me. Right. The arguments. Okay. The first set of arguments is based on disbelief. Arguments like these can feel like the toughest ones. People who say, when you say this website needs to be adjusted, people say, it works for me. Right? We all know that one. It works for me. Yeah. Or we don't have any disabled visitors. There is this lady in the Netherlands. Her name is Rhianne Rietveld. She's from the Ali Collective or the Accessibility Collective. She wrote an article called Blind People Long Visit My Website. It's one of the best articles I ever read. It gives you a battery of arguments because she went to Twitter and she asked people, hey, for anybody who knows that they are not hindered by any impairment, what bothers you about the web? And the number of arguments that she got was overwhelming stories. People who said, I cannot read the font too small or when the sun shines, I can't read the screen or tons of it. And this whole list, in the end of the article, she concludes, those are all accessibility issues. Okay. So another argument, when you tell a designer, for example, you need to make this design accessible and they will go like, what? I've been doing this for so many years and I went to school so and so and training so and so and this is how I learned it. What is very important is that we come with bad news, in essence, to these people. We tell them like, what you're doing is wrong. Nobody wants to hear that. It's smothering your creativity. Another set of arguments of disbelief. Are you saying I'm a bad designer or a bad developer?  Who are you to tell me I'm a bad developer? And maybe we didn't even say they're a bad developer. We just said, hey man, sorry, but there is no focus on the links in this page. That doesn't make you a bad developer. It means you have to adjust something in the code. It's very hard to reason with people who are in a state of anger. We all know that. They do not process any information. Now, what is important before you even start argumenting with people is to take a step back and actually see what is happening with this person. Why is this person so defensive? Why are they angry? And then try to relate with this person. Like, I am not trying to kick your shin here. This is a thing that we do together. Okay. Another one is, hey, you know there's a plug-in for that, right? Many of you know what's coming here, right? We're talking about the overlay plug-ins. That's a topic that I could do five talks in a row about. Does anyone not know what an overlay plug-in is? Yeah? Okay. An overlay plug-in, sometimes you get onto a website and then you see this very obvious disability symbol. Usually it's blue with a guy standing like this. Sometimes it's a wheelchair. And then when you click that button, it's going to give you a gazillion of options and you can change the contrast and the font size and most people are not aware that this actually hinders accessibility. I have friends who use screen readers who say, if I turn that on, I cannot use this website anymore.  We're so angry with all these overlay plug-ins and they're like, they're bad and they're commercial and they just want to make money over the back of handicapped and impaired people. What is important is that we need to remember that everybody is coming from a good intention. The people who create these plug-ins originally came from a good intention and then they needed a lot of money and then they got a ton of investors and then a couple of millions and billions flew over the counter and suddenly they're forced to make money and they cannot make the choices that need to be made. That's as much as I would say to overlay plug-ins, but we don't need overlay plug-ins.  And again, it's the financial argument. I'm going to come back to how to counter those in a few, right? I'm just building up here. Okay, then we have fear. Fear of restriction. You cannot do that. No, not. It's all these negatives. Or fear of repercussions. People say, uh, accessible websites can't be beautiful. They're always ugly. Look at that government website. Look at that tax website. They're all boring. That's not because you can't make a beautiful accessible design. That's because the designers and their bosses are afraid to do it wrong. So they're going to stick to the absolute minimum and the WCAG guidelines and try not to take any risk. And this is something we need to get away from because if we can get designers to have their creative flow and to go crazy with what they want to do but in a way that form never goes over function, we can create beautiful sites. I know of work winning accessible websites with beautiful designs, right? And then there is fear of the unknown. Because we all know that if I make my site accessible, it's so much work because we live in WordPress, we live in an all-in-one culture. We are given tools with which we suddenly are the developer and the designer and the content creator and the marketing and the CEO person all-in-one. Which is nice because it means you as a solo person can actually set up a complete website. But still, all these jobs are different disciplines and people are not being educated about what they might do or should have to do differently. We have a tendency to use no and not a lot. Okay, we all want to do things right. So when we see something that isn't right, don't do it that way. You cannot do this. You shouldn't do that. You cannot use that feature. Who here likes sliders? Nobody likes sliders? I have a room with 100% people who don't like sliders. What do you do when your customer likes sliders? Are you going to tell them you can't use sliders? What? You don't like sliders but you're not telling the people around you that you shouldn't use them? This is going to be an interesting session here, guys. You cannot use that tool. I'm drifting off again. It happens to me all the time. Telling people no and not is decapacitating at practice for half an hour before I can say that word. Okay. The fear of legal liability. Are you all aware of the legislation around accessibility, the upcoming European Accessibility Act in Europe in June that is actually going to bite private companies? Did it ever occur to you that, for example, a hosting company that sells a domain to a private person has a business-to-consumer process and has to be fully accessible? Do you know that? Do you know how much business we can conduct in the next couple of years? I know that sounds mean to use that argument but this is the argument that you need. Okay. People can also be afraid of getting sued. I'm not going to mention the fines you're going to feed. Then people who are afraid that they can get fired and it's overwhelming, right? It feels like rocket science. And why should it? Why should we worry when we are content creators about the development part or the other way around? These disciplines need to work together and getting people to work together is what is going to help you to counter arguments. The documentation is drier than the Sahara in mid-summer. Has any one of you ever tried to read the WCAG guidelines? Right? Yeah, me too. I was like, I don't get it. I really didn't get it. I panicked. Anybody will panic in the beginning. And then I found that there are people on the web that absolutely rock explaining this from what I say, geek speak to human speak. I have a link on my page from a company that creates lovely videos that are like one minute, two minutes, and you can show these videos to your colleagues and to your friends. And you will see that all of a sudden they go like, it's not that hard. Right? Okay. Let me tell you a secret. The basis to countering arguments against accessibility is that everybody wants to be liked. If you understand that, then you will realize that you want to be liked. It's difficult to say something that is negative or can be perceived as negative. But the person sitting in front of you has the exact same issue.  Or they're going to laugh at me. So again, there is always this fear surrounding this. So that is the first thing to get out of the way when you are working in accessibility. To motivate, you need to understand what demotivates. Creating people identify themselves with what they do for a living. So if you say it's not right what you're doing, it feels like you are not allowed to be here. I don't want you around here. And then someone is mad and doesn't process any information.  I wrote a blog article about that where I said, it's perfectly fine to have an inaccessible website. It's not fine to have an inaccessible website when you know that it should be accessible. But you have to create that ease. Okay. So again, the basis for countering voiced and unvoiced arguments, love and empathy. And some people will say to me, Anne, that is such a soft topic. Why are you talking about love? We cannot speak about love in business. Business is hardship. This is money and this is hours of work. And again, remember, people want to be like it. Okay. What is important is your empathy towards them. Your empathy about their worries and fears. And this doesn't only go for accessibility. This goes for everything in life. Okay. But then also, you start to establish their empathy or motivate their empathy towards the end users that they develop and design for. The clarification of the joy of what they've done instead of using cat. You have to come from yes instead of no. And every time you get opposition, step back into yourself and just think, did I just come from yes or did I just come from no? Because it's easy to come from no. And the most important thing for people to understand what accessibility is, is to understand the why. So there are a lot of unsolid arguments, right? Because I and the official guidelines say so. Did that ever motivate you? If someone was talking to you like that, you got to do it like that because this is the rule. Hmm? I don't see yes. Okay. And saying because it's the right thing to do, it's not as solid as you think. Like I said in the beginning, everybody will say, yeah, yeah, it's the right thing to do. But as soon as they think it costs money or it's not going to bring them any money, they'll say somebody else's right thing to do. Okay. And then remember, your why may differ from their why. My why is a social one. My why is an egotistical one because I hate 80% of all websites when they're going bling, bling, bling and moving and the buttons are too small and I can't navigate a website with one hand when my shoulder is inflamed again, right? And then you have to get into what they know. Now, what does everybody know? Everybody knows or understands what it's like when you can't read the newspaper without glasses because if they don't know that, they can even imagine that, right? Hearing. Is there anyone in the room here who feels that with age their hearing is going down? I'm one of them, right? Especially in rooms like this, when a lot of people are talking, I'm like, eh? Did you know that people who grew up without hearing have another perception of text than we do? Who knew that? Oh, you're learning stuff here today. This is why closed captioning is so important in videos. They need to have the time to read something and they need to be able to stop and start the text. Fatigue. Don't we all know this experience? You've been going out on Friday and Saturday and Sunday. The lights are too much.  Those are things that make people walk away from a website unconsciously. And this is a big factor in your arguing with managers, for example. Because they always want numbers. And then you can ask them, okay, do an A-B test. An inaccessible website with bad color contrast. It's like a bad smell. You know these, you come into a shop and it like stinks a little bit. And you have to stand in the line and after a few minutes you start thinking, buy that online. I'm not going to stay here and you're walking out. This is an unconscious process. On the web, this is a conversion that didn't happen. And if you start talking conversions to the people who are handling the money in a project, then suddenly you're talking on another level. Oh, packaging frustrations. You know those packaging where you need concrete shears from them, these wonderfully plastic glued packages. Shopping frustrations, no labels. An annoying lack of information. You can't find your way around. Those are experiences if you find the analogies to that with which you convince everybody working on a website to make it more accessible. Does anyone here know IKEA? You all know IKEA, yeah? You all know how wonderful it is in IKEA if you have to go to the bathroom. They're going to make you run through all the lanes until you get to that bathroom. Three stories down. If you're sitting with someone who doesn't understand what an accessible website experience means, someone who cannot relate to that because they have all their faculties working fine, take them to a website with a mega menu without a skip link because then they will see that every time they change a page they will have to tap through that menu five million times. It's what I call the IKEA experience. All right. And then, very important, if you are coaching a group of people in this regard, show them their power. We have the power. We create the web. We are the ones that can say, if we're in the development side and say, hey, listen, underline that link. This is the CSS for that. This is how you do that. And suddenly that site becomes usable for a lot of people. You show them the power and show them their joy.  This is so empowering. So, are you already thinking of ways of how you can convince the decision makers? You're not asking any questions here, huh? Okay.  We're going to come to the questions now. Is that people using assistive technology cannot be measured? It's not measured like a browser. It's not measured as a persona. You cannot measure this for privacy reasons. So, the management is going to come and ask you for the numbers, and you're going to appeal to their common sense. I was speaking about conversion before. If you manage to explain that accessible websites convert better. Like, I have an example on my site where a British supermarket invested in making their webshop accessible. They threw in 35K, and it got them 13 million additional revenue every year, 20 years ago. Can you imagine what we can do now? Okay. So, I brought on a couple of arguments. I've told you some of the arguments. What are you? Do you have arguments that you hear from the people around you against accessibility? Not my target group. Oh, I love that one. I love that one. So, let's think of a case. They're not my target group. A company that sells running shoes. People in wheelchairs are not my target group. I don't know. I mean, walking on high heels is not my favorite thing to do. So, I will say, there are women who don't like to walk on high heels, but they still have to go to a nice event, and then they have to walk on high heels, and they want to look pretty, and they'll wear high heels. Why wouldn't people in who cannot walk not wear running shoes? What convinces you so much that they are not your target group, especially in shops that are making a lot of money where only half a percent more is a lot of dough? Have you ever tried using that argument, Bernard? Yes, that's a good one as well. Yeah. This is also a great one when I speak about colorblindness. Did you know that one in 12 men is colorblind? That's 8 percent. And then you add this wonderful color picker to your website, and as a designer, you think, I don't want to write that orange is orange. Anybody can see it's orange, but someone who's colorblind doesn't see it's orange. Maybe this colorblind person wants to buy a present for his friends. He or she, because they're also colorblind women, need to be able to see what they're buying. All right. Anyone else? Yeah. Oh, yeah. I know a firm plug-in that does that. This is a very sad thing, actually, right? This is companies treating accessibility as a popularity contest. Like we add feature requests. I'm using this social media tool, for example, and I've been begging them for 18 months. Can you please give us the possibility to add alt text? And they were using this Trello board. And the Trello board was a popularity contest. And this is a really difficult discussion. So I like that you bring up this point. And this is where I would implore all of you to learn about the power of analogies. Like I have given you some examples of that and speak with these developers because they don't know what's heading for them with the legislation, but also they don't understand that they are actually missing out on a fantastic selling argument and selling point in their own product. And again, of course, it's all about money again. But that's in our business the argument that works. And I saw a firm plug-in, for example, that will not allow us to change the labels. We can turn them on, we can turn them off, and we cannot change them in such a way that they are accessible. So this is getting in the way of a good website, of a good experience. And now the lawmakers are tired of it and they're going to force everybody into doing it. And this is where you are bringing the fear argument as the last one. But don't make it the main argument. Say, like, okay, you can be very afraid and wait and wait and wait and wait until you have to do it. Or you can start doing it now and you break it down for them. Like, the content team can make sure that not all the links are clicked here. For the people who are new to this topic, why is click here a bad thing to do in a website? Imagine you're in IKEA again and you ate some chili that was a bit off and you have to run for the bathroom and all the signs say here. Wouldn't that be a great experience? And I know this is a very, very... How do you say that? Very visual example. But it's one that people will remember. Right? Does anyone else have a great argument against accessibility that was difficult? Yeah. There are arguments that you can't win. I was hoping to hear an argument today. What do you tell them? I think there would be a lot of power in large companies creating products for people to create websites with if they also would start to co-educate their users. That would be a great thing. Wouldn't you like to have that? Did you, by the way, all know there's a fantastic plugin called the Accessibility Checker? It's a free plugin. You can download it from the repo. And if you install it, it's going to tell you while you are creating your website on your own server. It's not going to some other funky server and it's telling you live, hey, you can adjust this and you can adjust that. And then you will see that it's quite easy to do so. And if you show a tool like that to your friends and your colleagues and your coworkers, it's going to become a lot easier. It's going to become less stressful. Right? So does anyone else have questions or remarks? Thank you so much. This is such a great talk. Thank you for sharing your journey with us. Now we are open for Q&A. We just did the Q&A. Official Q&A. I forgot to give you one slide. Hey, it's not there. Okay. That slide is missing. No. I created one slide with a very big link written on it. It's an link slash meetup dash en. This is the page where all the resources were and the slide is missing. I'm very sorry. If you want to have this slide or this link, come and find me on Twitter. I'm there at the bubble. Come find me on LinkedIn. I'm here in work camp. I'm here for the next three days. I'm five days here in Taipei. If you're staying longer, just come and find me. Okay. Thank you. Questions? Yes. Okay. Most of the time, as a manager, I have to deal with designer and developer. So developers are like, it's a really complicated task to do. And the designers are like, okay, you have to do it just because of accessibility or you need to make this more user-friendly. Yeah.  And I'm just seeing here. And sometimes it's a little bit difficult to manage them together because the designer is the expert in designing sector and the developer is definitely I respect him or herself because they're the expert in development end. At the end of the day, so it's a fear growing into me that I'm going to lose them if I talk too much. So how to manage that very well. I want your experience in this case. Yeah, I get it. Thank you. This is a wonderful point that you're bringing up here. Again, so this is listening to someone from a managing position and this is a point of view that we rarely hear. So thank you. Again, this is about mutual understanding. Right? And the developer gets this angry is usually because he's like you're disturbing my time or maybe he doesn't really know how to do it or she. I use he a lot, but I always mean everyone, right? So when you have this situation, it means you need to create a mutual understanding. It could also be the other way around. So when a designer, for example, says it needs to be done like this and the developer says hey buddy, but that's not accessible if you do it that way. It's the same situation. So what is important here is to sit down with all of them and explain again like I'm not attacking you. This is what I need to do. This is what we need to do to accomplish this mutual goal. Are you in an agency? So you are with your agency, you're trying to achieve this goal and the person buying the website wants it to be accessible, right?  So trying to find ways to find that they are empathizing towards each other for developers like it's really hard to find the right resources on how to make something accessible. So this is more like it's too much work, I'm pushing this away. So this is where I would say to you if you are a non-developing manager then get them to explain to you why they think it's hard to ask them if they need time and resources to research it because most of the time this is a matter of deadlines and what is most important for everyone here who is managing teams and is walking into this, please understand learning about accessibility takes time and more and more resources are created online. One of them if I preach for my own choir at the Hackathon next week in CloudFest we're going to create a central resource for accessibility and frameworks but it's hard for most developers to easily find the resources so you can help them by finding those resources for them or ask your developer like what do you need how would you like me to help you and support you to learn about this. The same thing like a marketing department that says we cannot add out text to the images because it takes way too much time that's not for the content creators to decide because time is money that's for the management to decide so this is a problem you take to the management and if you have someone over your head in the management this is also a direction that you need to go in and talk to them because it's time to study this subject so you can ease back and say hey easy peasy man I know how this goes and it's the same thing with designers it's one thing I forgot to tell you during the presentation where designers say yeah you know I just created this corporate design and these are the colors that we have to use and I will say something like cool but when are you going to get creative and this is passive aggressive this is me contradicting myself saying you have to come from yes but sometimes you have to rattle someone and make them think in new ways and the same goes for developers how do I find a way around this how do I use this color set in such a way that the function is not pushed away by the form did I help you with this answer or would you like to know more because then you have to come to me after the presentation thank you this is the thing look at everything from a different perspective step into the shoes of your users and of your colleagues and even of your competitors because if you're doing accessible things you're doing better than your competitors if they're not any more questions thank you so much Ann and I'm pretty sure if anyone has any more questions feel free to find Ann at conference later today and thank you again Ann thank you thank you on the behalf of Workcam Asia we would like to give you this thank you gift thank you for this amazing presentation thank you very much thank you for a great organization thank you all for coming here and see you around ladies and gentlemen this section is finished now is a lunch break welcome everyone welcome to Workcam Asia 2024 so this next set of talks are going to be lightning talks so there will be no Q&A you can talk to speakers later on and ask your doubts and with that let me start by welcoming our next speaker she's from Philippines and she's going to talk about importance of showing up and leveraging modern technologies for branding so let's welcome Darlinia on the stage hello good afternoon everyone how are you taking your lunch already yes okay so again good afternoon my name is Darlinia and I'm from the Philippines Philippines so yeah hello Filipinos so a little bit of backstory so I have grown my digital agent digital studio rather in the past three years and we have helped more than 50 businesses with branding and website design and development through WordPress so these are the media outlets that our clients were published and also our works are published as well so today I'm going to talk about the power of personal branding in the AI era just a raise of hand anyone here are service providers yeah business owners or agency owners yeah there's a lot of hands here working under an agency okay at one point have you had a hard time marketing yourself or getting inbound leads getting clients or even applying for a job okay so I'm going to help you out today so before anything else let's start off with what personal branding is so when we talk about personal branding it is the intentional and strategic process of creating an identity a positive identity or image around oneself so it is communicating your values, your skills your expertise to everyone basically but hey, Jolinha is branding just a trend no it's not it existed for a long time already are you familiar with these themes the television, magazine newspaper before personal branding still through in-person connections your reputation and also media outlets such as televisions magazines and newspapers but eventually it had a drastic change so what happened with the internet personal branding had a drastic shift with internet and with the rise in transition to digital platforms such as websites social media platforms such as LinkedIn now we can showcase our skills globally so this created an avenue and also an opportunity for us to engage in a wider audience globally think outside a box and establish our online presence so any simple formula with personal branding your target audience can one, know who you are two, understand how you can help them with their problems three, know what you stand for and four, why you are worth choosing over your competitors at the end of the day your personal brand attracts people to you now let's go down to business how can personal branding help me so with personal branding it can help you to one lead more two, win more three, show more and four, earn more who doesn't want to earn more so when people recognize so let's start off with leading more so having a personal brand means you can lead more so when people recognize your skills your expertise and your values these people are going to trust your judgment then this would lead to leadership opportunities so like the senior job, creative director roles and I have an example here who knows this person Chris is very popular in design and marketing so Chris is an educator for creatives and marketing so he has this educational platform called the future so he teaches design, marketing anything about creatives to designers and designers now where does the lead more take interaction so as he expertly engage and tells you his knowledge he eventually became an expert and a leader in the field next, win more when we talk about win more if your personal brand would help you to bring out if you're someone who brings the meat to the table who brings value to the table whether it is landing a job getting a new client closing deal or maybe getting results for your clients so another example again Chris though here so he became a valuable asset in the industry and he has been winning the hearts of his target audience meaning getting more leads getting more people into his platform next, show more so apparently research shows that 67% of employers and business owners use social media to cite opportunities and also job listings so when we talk about show more you show more of you and eventually this would help us attract more eyeballs to you and again Chris though here with his social media platforms just his videos this type of attraction marketing helps him to be seen everywhere and whenever we see him in our YouTube, in our feeds we recognize this best person and oh this person is a leader in this field and that's called brand recall so lastly earn more so with the combined effects of the leadership opportunities winning opportunities and also visibility well there's going to be earning potential because a high value service provider equates to people are willing to pay premium okay so now how are we going to leverage AI for personal branding there's actually a lot of ways but number one thing that we could maximize it on is content creation so with AI we could be able to generate written contents generate topics maybe create the signs and graphics and also edit videos so what are these tools have you tried using these tools yes okay so for chat GPT it can be used for concepts and themes and also Gemini and for Canva AI for graphics and also Adobe Suite you could also use that Grammarly for your grammar basically for checking and also for videos we have your cup cut and your Adobe Premiere Pro if you're someone who is keen on creating talking head videos it's going to help you out because it automatically translates your script now with all of these tools how are we going to stay relevant how are we going to stay authentic and genuine you know because AI is it's robotic sometimes the results are meh not so good so in maintaining a genuine and authentic touch involves one aligning your values make your voice shine through and actions consistently meaning with no consistent actions there's no progress so when we think about it like oh I'm not showing up online so there's no progress okay so now what are the tips on maintaining a genuine or humanly touch or authentic brand one you need to have human touch and what is that we need to put out your personal insights your thought process your creative direction your unique perspectives your stories everything that's the human touch to review and edit please if you're someone who copy, paste and post everything please don't do that let's review and edit accordingly and to make it as your own like put out your brand voice out there put out your humor and let your messaging shine through such as your values and the topics that you are passionate about next be transparent okay so if we are using like AI let's create content on how we are going to leverage it so if you are let's create content on how you are going to leverage it if you're someone who goes to who is frequent in LinkedIn you're going to see a lot of industry leaders create content like this because a lot of people needs or a lot of people wants like tips on how you could leverage AI now down to the last part how are we going to show up Julina how can we show up so here's what I've been doing in the past three years so in the past three years I've been consistently doing content and I've been consistently putting out my source and knowledge and support to my colleagues and peers so we can do this by creating valuable posts valuable insights market tips doing educational webinars and also doing like workshops with your colleagues another thing that we could do is embracing vulnerability it's like putting in a human touch to your content because it is something that people could relate to and create a shared experience so in here like my experiences having my big talk in Philippines in Manila I talk have the jitters I've gone through like my struggles as a business owner and lastly be present and just show up so show up for commitments show up for events show up for conferences build connections build relationships as this would help you in creating that value of respect and commitment to others your working dynamics so I just want to feature here like in Sibu we are building a community of freelancers so we have been showing up and giving value to these freelancers who have went through the same journey as us before and after the planting season what are we going to do we are going to reap the fruits of our labor so now I got offers here and there so this is in LinkedIn and other like media outlets out there so just a little backstory that first square there opportunity there that was the first job that I worked for after I graduated college but now they are asking me or they are giving me a creative opportunity or a creative director role so just a full circle moment and also I was able to talk and do branding workshops locally in the Philippines and even featured in LinkedIn in the Philippines as one of the 100 most influential women and lastly this one this is one of my own here this event opened me up to WordCamp this is a WordCamp Sibu and that's the first time I talk there so one of the speakers here in WordCamp Sibu is also here around the crowd but on a deeper note like personal branding helped me to engage to more qualified clients and it helped me grow my business eventually and change the trajectory of my life who would have thought someone from the Philippines would be talking here today in front of you internationally so yeah um personal branding is not optional or optional it is essential and inevitable in this time of day but I just want to give you a heads up personal branding is a long term game and you better start now okay so again thank you everyone my name is Rudina Galgo and if you have branding and marketing questions you could also connect with me at my socials at Rudina Galgo thank you good afternoon thank you Gelinia thank you thank you oh I got a free bag so how many of you have built a plugin or submitted to WordPress repo good I have and I'm happy to you know call upon our next speaker who is among many things member of the plugin review team and he's going to talk about common mistakes that plugin developers do when submitting the plugins to the repo so let's welcome Luke on the stage hi everyone these are all of my slides and you know have you noticed this it must be AI do you think because it's really accurate and if you don't mind I just thought I'm just going to mumble and I just want to see I'm just curious thanks for indulging me Gelina that was a great talk and very high energy I don't know how I'm going to follow that but we don't have time for Q&A today so actually if you want to just throw at me some heckles and vibes and questions and jibes while we go then please feel free to just interrupt me and I'll repeat your question I'm looking at you Tom okay so hi I'm Luke I'm a member of the plugin review team so who is a plugin author today is going to be a bit of a technical talk there's going to be some code on the screen so get ready for that does anybody have a plugin in the plugin review queue right now great that's really good the answer is no nobody seems to so it looks like I've done my job I joined the plugin review team because I felt that in general developers in WordPress could use a little more dev rel in their lives WordPress could I was feeling like WordPress could do a little bit more for developers a bit more for plugin authors and so I did what we should all do when we're feeling a little maybe disappointed with how something's going or how something could be improved I volunteered to help try and improve it so that's why I'm on the plugin review team and what we do is when you submit a plugin to WordPress.org it has to be reviewed we check for security vulnerabilities we check for guideline violations we're trying to get people to stop some of these dark patterns that you sometimes see in plugins you know so we check for this sort of thing make sure the plugin works doesn't break your site and that's a great thing because I think in general a lot of WordPress users feel a lot of trust for the WordPress plugin directory you know it's pretty safe to install any plugin that you got from WordPress.org on your website and so that's our job and we get a lot of plugins sent to us for review and the truth is that it takes about three or four weeks before a plugin typically passes on average now you get some authors who are just sensational some people who really have been doing it a long time and know their stuff and they might get through with just a couple of passes but more often than not we're talking about maybe five, six back and forth emails with plugin authors to try to get them across the finish line and because of that I thought well why don't I do a talk where I just go through those back and forths commonly are because there is a lot of stuff that comes up that's always the same you know what I mean so that's what this talk is about so let's get right into it trademark violations this is quite common I reckon maybe like one in ten plugins that you submit will inevitably have some trademark violation and sometimes it's something that you wouldn't expect but what can and what can't you do so here you can see in my examples the word App Store you may or may not know is actually a trademarked term by Apple so you can't have App Store in your plugin name so it's always good to do a little search if you're creating a new business around a particular plugin name around that name and you're going to go and buy the domain it's an already trademarked term we can't accept it so we prefer more generic terms when it comes to naming your app we won't let you put the name of a different plugin at the start of your plugin name we don't want anyone to be confused right so you can't say WooCommerce payment gateway instead you say payment gateway for WooCommerce that structure the four other plugin is the sort of standard terminology and that's how we prefer you do it this one we see a lot of so typically why would you make a plugin to integrate with some other service maybe you're integrating with Google Fonts or maybe you're integrating with whatever sass flavor of the day it is so if you're integrating with another service maybe you're calling an API we're going to notice that you're doing an external call in your plugin and that's allowed that's totally fine but it is required that you include that in your readme file so in your readme it's really good to just put the terms of service and the privacy policy of the third party services that you use some people like to use like an analytics service or something like that of course it's got to be opt in for the user for that but if you're using services like this in your plugin include the terms of service and the privacy policy I've gotten through with no heckles or questions which I guess that's a good thing plugin tags so the tested up to you know what there is a website there's a documentation page on WordPress that goes through your readme.txt and main plugin file that shows you everything that you need in there properly but we see this a lot is tested up to version and it's the plugins version but what we actually want is the version of WordPress I've tested up to version 6.4 for example and then sometimes we'll see the readme.txt and the plugin header they'll have different versions of what is the stable tag I've done this before too I'll update my readme and forget to update my plugin and that sometimes results in a mismatch licensing is another one make sure you're using the correct GPL license string or that will cause a problem and actually while I'm at it Gagan reminded me of this one yesterday is the slug that you're using for your plugin it's good practice to name your plugin file that slug this should be the same as your slug.php essentially is your main plugin file alright internationalization we see this one a lot yesterday when you're translating a string which is a great thing to do you're going to use underscore underscore function or underscore e or like in this example escape html underscore underscore and sometimes understandably people don't want to put that literal string in as the second argument for their plugin slug it makes sense on a certain level to just let's just make that a variable and then we could change it if we needed to but actually that's not permitted and the reason why is because a lot of translation tools the tooling that we use internally with WordPress.org and other translation tools like PoEdit I think it is they use these underscore functions to pick up all of the strings in your plugin and in that sense the plugin slugs actually do matter they do make a difference and because these tools that we use don't actually run any PHP it's just string matching you need to have the literal string of your plugin slug as the second argument of your translation functions sanitizing and validating is another big topic which I will refer you to WordPress.org for we see this is the main thing we see sanitizing and escaping lots of people miss the escaping they'll do like escape HTML for an attribute so I'd encourage you to just look at all of the escaping functions available on WordPress.org and learn about WP K I call it WP kisses other people call it WP K S C S what do you call it kisses yeah well let's call it kisses that's cute I like it learn about WP kisses as a function or WP kisses post lots of times and I'm guilty of this people just choose to ignore nonces because it's kind of a pain to implement but the reality is if you're ever taking any post data or server data we're going to require a nonce so you just have to do it sorry unsafe SQL calls make sure you're using WP db prepare correctly you don't want to include any variables in your SQL statement except for the table name and prefixes so don't use the two or three letter prefix even you need at least four letters in your prefix it's important and then try to be consistent sometimes plugins will use one prefix half of the time and another prefix the other half of the time so try to be consistent in that as well and that's it thanks for coming to my TED talk this is the next part this was quick we still have five minutes of the schedule time if you want to ask questions so how many of you felt no of anything I have I have had FOMO for Indian wordcams and I try to make sure that I attend all of them so I'm happy to call on stage our next speaker who is from Sweden and she is going to talk about how to prioritize so that you can convert your FOMO to joys of missing out right? so let's welcome Hannah on the stage please good afternoon wordcamp Asia lovely to see you all hi my name is Hannah I'm based in Stockholm Sweden and I work for automatic in WooCommerce happiness I love figuring out how to do more with my time I'm sure this is something that you all have thought about productivity methods time management the more I can get done the more I have time to spend on what's interesting right? it turns out that's not really the case and I don't usually get to those more interesting things this has been a really meaningful topic to me over the last year so I'm looking forward to sharing this with you today we're going to review FOMO the fear of missing out and then look at how to move towards JoMo let's get started so what are all of the things that you do because you're afraid you're going to miss out do you watch one more episode of that TV show to find out what's going to happen stay up really late and forget to be late to work yeah do you go to meet friends even when you're tired because they could be doing something cool and you don't want to miss out when you're just about to sign off for the day a new GitHub issue comes in do you stop to check it because it could be something that you'd want to know about and help fix do you go to one more word camp one more event just because you could connect with interesting people or see a helpful event these are the things that you do because you're afraid of missing out sure you do them because you want to but because you also want to make sure you don't miss something interesting how many of you have experienced FOMO yeah that's just about everybody thank you me too and the WordPress community is helpful it's kind it's supportive that makes it really hard to let go and to not be deeply engaged and to say no I'm going to step away and do something else FOMO leads to pressure on yourself to do just a little bit more and it's not sustainable over the long term because you aren't sticking to your own boundaries and you're not doing what you really want to do so that brings us to the next concept the efficiency trap you know the concept of a Sisyphean task according to ancient Greek myth the gods punish Sisyphus for his arrogance by sentencing him to push an enormous boulder up a hill up all the way up and then it rolls all the way back down and he is condemned to repeat this over and over and over for the rest of eternity what a horrible punishment and today's version Sisyphus would empty his email inbox or maybe Slack lean back take that deep breath and then hear the familiar ping have new messages I see smiles and reactions you know this one no matter how often you clear your inbox there will always be more email no matter how many different productivity methods you use be that for email be that for anything else you'll get faster you'll be able to process it faster but not necessarily more impactful because again always be more email so it's an efficiency trap the important thing here is why do you clear that inbox is it your job is it FOMO is it because you're clearing your deck so that you can get to those bigger more important tasks and I can't answer this for you but it's up to you to figure out what that is so that you can move past this Sisyphian task recognize that it's easy to get stuck in tasks like this and understand what's pulling you into it why is it important for you to do this the next step is what is it that you actually want to do with your time is it answer that email or is it plan create implement something cool and that brings us to hopefully something really cool Jomo's opposite of Jomo the joy of missing out Jomo is about the quality of what you're doing rather than the quantity I'm doing a lightning talk we're definitely bringing it down into efficiency it's about switching your mindset from I have to be here to I'm happy to be right here this is where I want to be it's okay to not be everywhere all the time it's about finding contentment and fulfillment in the activities and moments you choose to engage in for me it's the joy of giving what I'm doing right now my full attention because I know it's the most important thing that I could be doing right now it's okay we've got Jomo how do you get from FOMO to Jomo whenever I think I'm missing a slide we'll figure this out whenever you say yes to something you're saying no to something else and this is a really important concept because your time is finite you can't say, you can't do everything you want you can't say yes to everything so instead you're saying no to something else so your time and energy are finite what's also important here figure out what are your bee hogs I know it's a funny acronym it's your big, hairy, audacious goals and if you don't know them, think about them what are those really big, complicated things that you want to achieve and then once you know those you can set your boundaries you can decide what you're going to be passionate about you can also one moment please hmm sorry about that I think I am missing a slide and I'm busy trying to remember what was on it yes, we've got it choose what you're going to fail at I know, failure is totally a loaded term and you don't want to say that you're going to fail at something but I'm saying it that way because it's important because if you decide what you're not going to do then you can spend the rest of that time on what you are going to do and that's important because otherwise you're trying to do everything so what are you going to fail at aha, there we go we weren't missing a slide, I just got confused so we go from FOMO to JOMO we figure out your be hogs your big, hairy, audacious goals you decide what you're going to fail at you do what's going to give you joy even if it's not technically good use of your time not every hobby needs to become a side hustle and I'm saying this because this is a hard one for me I've been learning obscure writing short hands and alphabets not because it is remotely useful but because I can write in code that nobody else can read and I find it really fun so what do you do just because it's fun if this is a tough concept let's get a little bit philosophical and think about the concept of cosmic insignificance our lives are blips in the eyes of the cosmos our actions right now matter to those around us our friends, our colleagues our families but in 100, 500 a thousand years will your actions actually matter for most of us probably not and in many ways that's wonderful because it's freeing it means that what you do right now matters not that you have to get everything right for the rest of the future figure out what's important to you and do that so what do you do to get from FOMO to JOMO in your life thank you very much for your time word Kampasia it was lovely to talk with you and we can come back again at 3 thank you everyone our next session will begin in another 3 minutes and it's a very interesting session by a very good speaker good afternoon okay so 3 o'clock we have a very interesting topic it's a very very long name the topic has a very long name but to say to state it in short you will not be alone anymore there is a famous song by Michael Jackson you will not you will not be alone I'm here with you so AI has been with us for some time but since last year it became more than closer than before and so AI in back in India in our language many people say AI they read it together and they say AI so AI can help us do many things and for many people it's just fascination for many technology people it's a wonderment for many people it's business opportunity but if you are a developer you are a designer or you are a writer or anything AI can help in many different ways but not the way everybody has been telling you but it can really make you understand for example there are some jobs which we have to do real life example would be to do laundry you have to do it because if you don't do it it piles up and it can cause trouble so this tedious jobs which can be offloaded to somebody who is equally intelligent to know that what has to be done and what kind of laundry needs to be done so I really want an AI powered laundry assistant for myself but our today's speaker is Paolo Belcastro and Paolo is interesting man it looks like Paolo the name means humble but all the Paolos that I know are extremely talented really really famous like Paolo Maldini people so Paolo is from Italy like Luciana Pavarotti but he says all the famous opera singers took away his voice talent so he developed his talent in WordPress he works for automatic and Paolo is here to tell us how AI can help us so that we have our time to do what we enjoy more hello good afternoon so you'll never be alone anymore before we dive into that I would like to introduce myself very briefly I'm Paolo and I work for automatic I'm Italian indeed that is all true I do live in Vienna Austria though and I want to talk to you about AI today but we're not going to make our laundry together here today I so why are we here we are here to look at AI a little bit differently out of the hype out of the technology out of the worries or the big hopes of a futuristic tool that would do everything for us I want to look at it just as a tool we can use every day to reimagine your art craft and most of the examples I will use today come from creating content they apply equally to designing website to coding just I wanted to narrow the scope a little bit and to narrow it even more I want to look at three particular areas where the recent AI tools can help us and they are practice collaboration and diversity so remember those three things we're going to get to those and explain in detail how this can happen for you there is a point I'd really like to make and it is I'm sure most of you are familiar with the legend of Archer who became king by pulling the sword out of a rock some of you may have read the old legend some of you may have watched the Disney movie if you're French you might have watched Camelot there's a number of movies and TV shows about that what it says is that the sword was critical like the only the person who could remove the sword from the rock could become king but the important thing to remember is that it's called the legend of King Archer and not the legend of Excalibur and so I want to explain how AI is that for us it's something that enables things that are unimaginable before but it's only that so before we dive into the three principle let's look at a little bit at what is AI today I would say that AI is more than just code and algorithms in the same way that I would say that printing press is more than just screws and knots and levers and gears it's made of those things but it serves a purpose that is much more important and by the way AI has been around as many of you probably all of you know for many many years it's not something that was invented three years ago we called it machine learning for a long time because AI was kind of the aspirational goal the aspirational target when it would actually become sentient or something like that and then at some point we decided that well it's not sentient but it's good enough that we're going to use AI everyday that's probably more marketing than anything else but really what is interesting is that it's a sort of mathematical representation of our language and it enables us to manipulate transform and generate text and what's very interesting is that text can be text as in content but text can be text as in instructions and so with those tools we can also program machines it's not just limited to writing English, French Chinese or any other language and with similar tools we can also manipulate pixels and manipulate images and so we expand the possibilities of what we can do as humans because one of the characteristics of AI although a lot of people say it's low it's much, much faster than we are it's not as fast as we wish but it's very fast so it's a tool that can manipulate language and images and language can become instruction and so it can drive machines and like every powerful tool there is a potential dark side so I want to get this out of the way so that then we can talk about the really interesting stuff before we dive into really the scary stuff let's talk about what AI is not beyond the hype AI is not this sentient tool that is gonna put all of us under a bridge and take all our jobs and do everything we do today and like magically that's not gonna happen anytime soon at least and when I say soon personally I doubt it will happen in our lifetime but definitely it's not gonna happen in the next few years it's not the opposite either it's not that magic one but you can use and will make of you a billionaire without doing anything and without bringing any value it's not that because again it's a tool it's not really a tool that is gonna make you successful by automatically creating tons of content for SEO purpose or linking farms or things like that that's not gonna work very well because we have to remember as we build the tools that could technically create all that content we also build the tools that can understand that content has been created that way and so without the human creativity in the middle it's gonna be very easy to clear up the field I think that we're in a position now where like it always happens like there's a bit of a gap between how a technology is used through potential but I don't think that automatically generated content will be successful for a very long time because but anyway the fact is every sword going back to Excalibur has two edges and AI is not an exception and that leads us to the fact that your responsibility as the user of those tools has been created now you might have heard for example about all the copyright problems around AI there are issues with image creation, with text generation there are different trials going on there's like questions about hey is AI stealing the work of artists or writers or creators and I don't have an answer to your advice and I'm not a lawyer but what I can say is that we as the user of AI or in charge of what the output actually is we are at the end of the process the ones hitting the publish button and deciding this is okay this is not okay I would argue that a normal keyboard or a pen doesn't commit crime but it makes it possible like a tool is a tool depending on how you use it you can actually be infringing on someone copyright or you can be infringing on someone's terms of service but the AI is not responsible for that I go back to the fact it is just a tool so we have to inject our creativity and we have to commit our responsibility to use it in a way that amplifies us, enhances us but doesn't infringe on anyone on anyone else's rights so I wanted to introduce with all that that is sort of those are questions that people have and I wanted to get them out of the way because I want to talk about something a lot more important that these tools can allow us to do and three principles I think can be underlined here the first one is that quantity leads to quality the second one is that collaboration enhances quality and the last one is that diversity improves quality and we are going to go through those one by one so quantity leads to quality you might have heard and if you have been in any internet course in the last couple of years you'll probably add that example especially if it was a writing or a creative course where you have heard this parable of the teacher that gave an assignment to students in the class but it didn't give the same assignment to all students they gave an assignment to half of the student that was over a month please produce as many pieces as you can you will be graded based on weight of the ensemble of pieces you have created to the other half it said bring me the best piece you made this month and you'll be graded on the quality of that piece and the month went by so half of the class came with like trucks full of pots and dishes the other half came with one piece each and what is very interesting is the fact that the best pieces were actually among those what made a ton of pieces as opposed to the ones who tried to perfect one now this parable is in a book from 2001 that the funny story is that it's actually not true in the sense that James Clear published Atomic Habits a few years ago and mentions the same story with the photography teacher and so this photography teacher did the same thing though asked half of the class to make as many photos as they could over a month and bring them and they would be graded on the quantity whereas the other half would have to bring one photo same end of course as you can imagine and the interesting part is that the photography story is actually the original the writers of the book in 2001 decided to use pottery instead the funny thing is they were photographers and they would try to diversify their examples but the gist of this is the more you do something the better you become at it and if you have ever created any content you know that this is how it works if you do that every day you become better and better and better now how does AI allow you to do that more and more frequently let it do all the groundwork like in every creative act there is a ton of little tasks that are not really creative if you're writing it can be proofreading and checking for typos and it can be translating because maybe you want to publish in English but in English it's not your native language so you need a translator tool or maybe it's if you're publishing on WordPress you need to create an excerpt every time you write a blog post and the excerpt is not really a creative exercise the content is in the post so if you can automate that part you can save time or maybe you want your post to have featured images but you're absolutely not good at creating images in any way you can use AI tools for that or if you're writing code for example you might realize that every time you start to work on a new plugin there's a lot of like steps that are sort of mandatory you have to prepare a lot of boilerplate content and file structure that is not really creative so by removing all those pieces you can do more and more of the part that really contains the value and really improves you and basically is use AI as your creative partner you don't ask it to do the creative work you ask it to relieve you from all the little tasks that are actually not bringing you any value and that can take many many shapes I'll give an example something I do personally quite a bit I have learned over time that when you write it's really important to limit a post to a single idea if you want to be strong if you want your message to be strong you should limit your post to a single idea the problem is that AI tend to fall in love with my ideas so I have a hard time discarding them I don't know if anyone here experiences that and the second problem is that sometimes I even have a hard time finding the line between the ideas so a method I found that is practical is that I'll write a draft and then I'll give it to AI to say create an outline out of this draft now in the outline it makes it a lot more visible for me which different ideas are expressed and I can then split them I take these three different outlines for example and I go rewrite a post for each one of them you can move one step further you can actually tell the AI okay give me an outline then you split it manually you find where the lines are and then you say well in my original text organize the pieces based on these new three outlines so I'm not talking about here AI writing for you as much as having a sort of back and forth that allows you to improve and go faster the key is go faster like something that is incredibly hard in writing is to shorten takes a lot more time than writing a lot so any tool any assistance you can get in shortening is really welcome collaboration that is the second one collaboration enhances quality is anyone here who has already used friends or family or colleagues to get feedback on some post or article you wanted to write raise your hand if you're here yes I see a few hands wouldn't you agree that in general those are your best pieces when you take the time to get back and forth with people you have incredibly good insights in what you're writing and they really help you and sometimes something seems obvious to you maybe it's not problem is that unless you're a professional writer it's hard to do that all the time because you want to write frequently but also your friends and family well it happens that they have lives and jobs and not that much free time so you can't keep going over and over to them and the more you do it the more you have to be flexible with the time they take to do it so now suddenly they give you feedback later and that's not really manageable but those tools are available for you every day and they never sleep and so use your friends and family whenever it's possible but don't hesitate to ask the tool for feedback AI can give you pretty good feedback on your text it is kind of mesmerizing that it works but it does work and by giving you feedback it will trigger your brain and will lead you again to improve the quality of your of your text so this is a way to democratize feedback another point that is really interesting is that we live in a world where we write something we put out a few ideas but then there's multiple places where we're supposed to share them we probably have a blog I mean if you're in this room I do hope it's on WordPress and then we might have social media maybe Twitter or maybe not Twitter anymore maybe LinkedIn or anything else and you want to adapt your content to the format of those different platforms they might work better with certain length of text or certain approaches certain tone and so you can get help from AI for example let's say that you wrote something that is on your blog and it has a fairly informal tone because your blog is your property and you're talking to people who follow you and then you want that same piece of impact on LinkedIn you might decide that that tone was a little bit too friendly, too informal you can easily ask AI to help you with that and what happens there is that again we're talking about your input your ideas, your content you're not asking AI to write for you you're asking AI to help you with your writing so you can get a sort of assistant that is constantly there for you constantly working with you and constantly helping you and I was going to say free they're not free but they're extremely cheap and then another point is diversity and I think this one in 2024 is really important to stress because what happens when you even if you have access to a lot of friends and colleagues that are ready to give you feedback and dedicate time to help you very often they will be fairly similar to you in terms of ideas they might work in the same company, they might live in the same city they might be around the same age maybe you went to school together it's very easy to be in a sort of social bubble in which there isn't so much confrontation of very different ideas but when I write something I'm not overly interested in convincing people who think like me already that is a marginal value what I'm really interested in how do I make my message heard by everyone else and it's actually completely possible to ask the AI to sort of counter you and counter your arguments so basically you say hey I wrote this draft tell me all the ways I'm wrong or I wrote this draft impersonate that type of person and tell me where I'm wrong or tell me what is missing tell me which points are not clear tell me which assumptions for example I'm making that would not match that type of person extremely well because again you're not asking the AI to generate content which is always going to be a bit average because of the way it works it's a probabilistic machine it takes the most likely word to come after another word and another word so it doesn't create a lot of novelty unless you have a parameter that is called temperature and then it becomes like almost impossible to follow but that's not interesting but here you're giving your content and so you're asking the AI to push back on your content you challenge yourself and you challenge yourself in a way that I have to say is a lot more comfortable than with people because when you ask the same thing to people that you have in your circle the right people to ask to then it's very hard not to enter into an argument with those people because now suddenly you're not giving feedback about a piece anymore now you're debating your ideas with a machine that doesn't happen it shouldn't happen you shouldn't get angry at machines so that's actually a really powerful tool to improve and increase diversity and then there is the idea that sometimes you're writing text that you know is going to be attacked like maybe you're writing a press release, maybe you're writing an announcement for a new product and you know that you have competition maybe you're writing an opinion maybe your career is in politics and you're writing about your platform but there are moments where you're like okay there's going to be specific people that are actually my opponents I'm competing with them in this context and it would be perfect if I could have people playing the role of what's called Red Team to attack my content but again it's not always easy to have that available or it costs a lot of time and money these tools can do that LLMs are really good at that remember though you should not get angry with them there is no point in doing that so quantity, collaboration and diversity are three additions that these tools bring to you in which you don't ask the tool to create for you you're actually doing all the creative part and you're letting the tool provide input provide services and provide challenges in a way that your content becomes better and better and I really encourage you to do those things you can very interestingly there's more and more ways to sort of pre-program an LLM so for example in chat GPT you have the GPTs that you can actually set to do a specific task and so then it becomes even easier you don't have to write a lot of prompts you just give your draft and then the dialogue starts there and of course there's a number of other tools so I wanted to take a moment to talk about the tools briefly I realize it's hard because if you start an AI presentation based on tools it's up to date when you start the presentation it's outdated when you finish it so I'm not going to go too deep into the details but fundamentally you have all those tools through chat interfaces that are ready for you at your fingertips you have chat GPT you have Claude from Anthropic you have Gemini I think is the name today of the Google thing although it changes often but I think it's Gemini now you have a number of tools that bring that into your editor so you have Lex we are Jetpack as something like that Microsoft has integrated the tools in office so you can find those tools generally where you work you don't have to go left and right simplifying a lot of the sort of copy paste and formatting problem that can be annoying and you have of course the coding side you have tools like co-pilot that is available for everyone I think now and many others it's like there's a new tool coming out about every few days but they're all right now we're all in the same area roughly these L, M's large language models that are able to generate, transform and manipulate text and then we have the image side with the stable diffusion majority or the lead that are able to generate images that is sort of the state of what we have access to as normal users regular users nowadays of course what this is going to look like tomorrow next week a year from now we don't know yet there was an interesting thing very recently on Tropic Launch cloud 3 that apparently recognizes when it's tested so we're getting into a strange territory we don't have time to go into the details here the one thing I want to mention is that those tools are constantly changing and this is the only constant is change so fundamentally we look at what doesn't change and what doesn't change is that we humans are storytellers from Lascaux and the caves where people painted on the walls tens of thousands of years ago to today with LLMs and in the middle with you know wax tablets and papyrus and then the printing press all those are tools at the service of telling stories and telling stories are about creating, about sharing, about convincing everything we do as humans is telling stories whether we sell, whether we are in politics, whether we teach and so the tools don't matter that much today we have this tool to use think I go back to the printing press the printing press was probably one of the biggest advance in human history today they're in museums nobody uses them anymore today they're beautiful and they were incredible but we don't need them today, we have digital printing and then we have online we read on screen, we can generate audio video so look at these tools like today this is how I accelerate think about the painters of the Renaissance who had to be chemists and you know they had to mix egg yolk with some flour and some iron to make colors and then someone invented industrial paint and they opened a shop and they start selling the paint well it didn't reduce the ability of the previous painters to paint what it did is open that to many others and so this is what those tools are doing is they're opening the door for all many many more people to actually become storytellers and improve their craft so in conclusion the future is not written so we don't know what's gonna happen but we can use today AI as a companion to become better and better at telling stories which are the core of our essence as humans and the important thing I think is that in our legend, the legend we all write every day about ourselves we can be archer and not Excalibur we can be the hero and have the AI help us as a tool that's it for me today thank you very much thank you very much Paolo we have 10 minutes for questions and answers I think there is a question I don't know if we have a microphone that goes around thank you very much for sharing your experiences and really working and collaborating to create content with AI I find that actually a pretty unique perspective in utilizing chatbots these days as a question, I'm sort of wondering how are you finding some instructions, styles and tones to be modifying the work that you are wanting to be creating and I admit not just talking about a tone of professional or empathetic but actually going into an extensive nuance tone or style so these are good questions what I've been doing is two-fold on the one side there's these sort of custom instructions that you can give at the beginning and I have a collection of those I use like I use expander snippets to replace them quite often because if I'm writing for my blog for example I'm not going to give the same instructions as if I'm writing for work what I find especially now that the context windows become bigger and bigger what I find very effective is that I will take two or three of the posts that I consider my best I might be wrong but I like them and I will provide that as examples and so I will again with expanding snippets I will say for example one example where I get the eye to write is when I give a draft and then break it down into pieces and then I ask it to rewrite I tell it A use the content I provided at the beginning try not to go out of that B here's an example of two or three posts that I wrote really happy about to give you a sense of the tone I tried something that doesn't work so well at least not for me is that I tried in the past to do that sort of once and for all sort of giving content to the tool and say describe my style and tone and this and that so that I could reuse it that didn't work because the description was very generic again for the reasons we know so you end up having to provide content more and more now what's interesting for example we're talking about cloud 3 that was just launched it has two things that are really interesting one is a 200 thousand token context window that means that you can that's probably about 160,000 words so you can really load a bunch of content and what's interesting is that there is one test that is popular when testing those LLMs is called the needle in a haystack you sort of say well can it find a single reference in a very big text without having to repeat that thing over and over again and often times they used to fail because if there is only one mention of say pizza in a text of 160,000 words then you ask a question about that you won't know and cloud 3 has scored super high at finding that the scary part is that in the reply he also said it's odd there is only one reference of pizza in this very long test it's almost like you were testing me which it's a little bit scary but let's assume it has explainable causes but yeah so with a bigger context window and the ability to retain everything it becomes easier typically the previous model up to GPT-4 cloud 2 they really over index the beginning of what you share in the end and they tend to kind of overlook the middle like humans in a way but yeah sharing examples is the best way I found so far providing content I have a couple of GPT's that do the same thing whenever I ask for advice they go to my blog download the last 3 articles and ingest those and then reply to me if you have any more questions if you want to get in touch you can scan that how do we find you on social media scanning that but that's not AI assisted is it no no that's not that's just plain old QR code so for me I look at AI as Sancho Panza to Don Quixote minus the skepticism with the appetite and yeah so thank you very much for a fantastic informative talk as Paolo has told us you are not alone AI is with you okay hi thank you Paolo one minute we have a thank you very much thank you very much for 20 minutes break and after 20 minutes at 4 o'clock we have the next session good afternoon our next session starts in 5 minutes our next session is website accessibility why how and why when and how and is the speaker is Charming Ricky Blacker we start in 5 minutes good afternoon once again top of the hour we have our next session website accessibility why when and how accessibility is very very important because as Rick wrote in the introduction to this topic that one in six people in this region at least need some kind of you know they are they need they have some accessibility need and if you spend thousands of dollars on building your beautiful website and is not accessible to some people for whatever reason then you are basically you are building something exclusive you are excluding some people and it's not inclusive and that means you are saying okay I built it only for this group of people and the stuff you cannot enjoy my creative work and whose loss would that be are we excluding those people excluding yourself from their attention so you can exclude yourself also from the attention of people at and this is very important topic one of the topics which are close to my heart and it needs people with passion to advocate stand up and talk about this topic at every stage and so Ricky Blacker from Australia he Ricky has many hobbies and some of those hobbies his wife doesn't know he says so I am going to disclose I am going to disclose some of those hobbies so he loves drones and he loves racing cars and he is into music production and recording so and he is into smoking meats and barbecues and he really knows how to throw good parties so here we have a person who is enthusiastic about things like child like enthusiasm you know drones and cars and recording and at the same time he is he is doing very responsible work at WPA engine so he has got the knowledge the know how and the responsibility of running a very big large company where people trust okay so we have a person who has got passion and knowledge together so Ricky we are all here to share your passion and learn from you why, when and how we can think about what this website accessibility before I get started can we get a big round of applause for Yogesh and all the volunteers in here please one thing before I start I just want to make as you look around and you see all these volunteers working here this weekend they are all giving up their time to help us have an amazing experience so whenever you get a chance say thank you shake their hand give them a hug and just appreciate what they are doing for us just wanted to get that out there okay let's get on to it website accessibility why, when and how I got it right that time so who am I my name is Ricky Blacker my passions are wordpress I love wordpress working with wordpress for quite a long time and telling everybody how good it is I'm a musician, love playing music that's the thing that really keeps me centered and makes my life worthwhile apart from my wife I'm a serial hobbyist we were disgusting we've got lots of hobbies that I do and I keep collecting new ones and my wife keeps saying why you haven't got time for the ones you've got but you keep collecting new ones I work for WP Engine I'm a partner and age enablement manager which is really hard to say so we just call it PEM and one of the things I do is help people understand our platform and technology but today what I want to share with you is the three things why, why is it important to implement accessibility in your web projects when should you be implementing these accessibility things and how, how can you do it I'm not going to show you everything but I'm going to get you on the right track but first, before we get started I have a disclaimer the one and only video in my presentation I just want to let you know I am not a website accessibility expert I have been a web developer in the past I work for WP Engine now I'm passionate about accessibility and just recently it got reignited and I really thought it's important to make people aware about accessibility and why it's important how to go about it but I'm not one of those people who are really doing all the hard work with accessibility so I just want to let you know that when you're asking questions I might not have all the answers but I'll try and answer them all the best I can so let's get started firstly, why why should we have accessibility in our websites that's a really good question one of the things I like to do is go to concerts, I'm a musician I love musicians playing music who likes to go to concerts so when we go to concerts you see those people with the lanyards that say access all areas the ones who can go backstage meet the band, stand on stage do all the cool things, go anywhere that's the dream if you go to a concert you'd want to have one of those lanyards and go anywhere you like but in reality you're sitting in a seat or standing in a wash pit and sometimes and this has happened quite a lot recently sometimes you might be sitting in a seat and somebody might be a couple of rows in front of you holding up a big sign you've paid your money to go to a concert you want to see the band but you can't see the band because somebody is holding a sign up saying oh I love you I don't get that very often some musicians do so hang on, we're not on the right one let me go back I was looking at the wrong one so with the access all areas we want to have that access but we sometimes don't get that and that's the same websites we create websites and we want to show people all the things on the website and have them interact in a certain way and as people who go on to websites we know sometimes when you go to a website you can't do all the things you want to do you might want to do something and for some reasons it might be hard it might be it's something that can't be done for example if you ever go to websites especially like an airline for example and you go looking for the contact us the contact information sometimes it's buried in a some weird page that you can't find that's an accessibility issue so when we're talking about accessibility we're not just talking about making it ready for screen readers doing all the things for disability it's about everyone absolutely everyone having accessibility to your information on the website so the issue is like from a disability perspective I did some research and 1 in 6 people are living with some kind of a disability so that's 1 in 6 of the potential people looking at your website 650 million and this was stats coming from 2017 it was intended to grow so it's probably much higher now the last official stats I could find 650 million people across APAC who could potentially have a reason why they can't access the information on the website so that's one of the reasons that we look at accessibility and unfortunately it's probably the thing that most people fix ADON they think that they're just doing this for people with disabilities people with vision impairment things like that can be considered disability for gaining access to a website mobility issues if you've got unfortunately broken both your wrists for example and you can't use your hands you no longer can use a mouse to navigate around the website how do they navigate so you've got to think about all the reasons that people besides vision colour blindness there's all these reasons why people can't access the website or be able to interact with it in the right way so when we're designing that's the main driver but also everybody and this is the part everybody needs to have access to the website there's been times when I'm trying to do something on somebody else's website and I can't do it because while they think it works for them it might not work for me another reason we might go into accessibility so there's a lot of legal reasons why you might need to do this or want to do this so certain websites do have a legal requirement to be accessible so you need to look at does my website have a legal reason and what's the implications of not doing it can I be sued can I be fined can I lose accreditation when we were talking about legal there was actually a time if you go looking for legal cases against websites for accessibility you'll find lots of use cases in fact there was there was one in Sydney the Sydney 2000 Olympics back in the 2000 something like that and there was a person who sued the Sydney Olympics because they didn't have alt tags text on some of the images which made it very hard for them to access the information on the Sydney Olympics website that will find I think $20,000 so that was quite a lot of money it might have been $200,000 a lot of money so it was a failure to provide text alternatives for non-text content so that was like there are hundreds of cases thousands of cases like that across the world Australia, Asia especially in the US you don't want a website in the US they sue over anything we also have the economic reasons so what would be economic reasons for having accessibility the more people who view your site especially if you have a site that's generating income for you or leading them lead generation websites like WooCommerce stores but anything that's going to be driving revenue to your business if you can't allow access to everybody you're going to be leaving money on the table if you have a brick and mortar store there's a lot of rules around accessibility and you want to make sure your store is accessible you put in wheelchair ramps and things like that to make sure that people can get in you've got to make sure that your store is accessible for everybody as well so when when do we need to start doing all of this that is the big question so when we're talking about when we should be doing it it should be from the very start how many people here currently putting accessibility into the websites when do you start doing that do you do it at the very beginning in the middle or the end and be honest what I get from a lot of people is it's at the end you design the website you do all the things you make it look beautiful you make it do all this stuff and then you go okay now we're going to make it accessible whether it's because you want to because you have legal requirements you start doing it at the end what happens at the end is you've now got all this technical debt and then this is why it gets so hard for people is because they wait till the end and then they're like this is going to be really hard because now I have to go back and change things that I've already done and I don't want to do that so when you should be doing it is at the very beginning when you're designing a website start off by thinking about how can we make it accessible right from the start how many people have been developing for more than 10 years so if you go back 10 years ago and when I started developing we just started getting mobile phones that could access the internet does everybody remember that? remember before that we were playing snake on their phones and all of a sudden we could actually look at websites if you remember that you also might remember the buzzword of mobile first so we started developing and the idea was hey let's develop these websites so they look really good on mobile phones first and then make them look really good for big screens second and that way everybody on the mobile phone has a good experience and people on big screens have a good experience and everybody's happy so we all started doing that, it was like this is cool so why can't we do that for accessibility why can't we go accessibility first look at accessibility how can we make this website accessible to everyone right from the very start and then make it look amazing for mobile phones and for desktops and for KTVs and smartwatches and everything that we see websites on these days why can't we do that so that's what I'd like to see everybody do when you're designing, building working on a project think about accessibility first how can we make this website as accessible to everybody and once again I'm not just talking about making it work for screen readers or you know making sure that you have captions for videos which is all important but also is this accessible for everyone can people navigate around this website easily can they find the information that they need easily and then you make it beautiful after that so how how do we do it how do we make websites accessible so we're already starting at the beginning so we have the WCAG principles so there's four guiding principles or poor for short perceivable operable understandable and robust so they're our guiding and they are guidance so you can use this just to guide you in making an accessible website or you can use these for conformance so conformance is when you need to be accredited maybe you have legal obligations maybe it's for whatever reason you might need to get some kind of conformance and there's different levels of confo