I worked very, very hard. It could be a very long way to entertain y'all today and teach y'all a little sum sum, okay? So when we get started, I'm just letting y'all know as I go on the presentation, you're gonna see the energy gradually go up right now. We gonna be calm just so I don't scare y'all. But as things go, we gonna go up, okay? Like planes in the air. We ain't coming down till we done. I hope y'all not shy either. I don't know how many people are going to be here. At this point, it doesn't matter.    And I have created a chant that I'm looking at everybody's eyes intentionally right now to see how daring you're going to be today to sing a short chant with me on WordPress. And if people feel like they don't want to be involved in that chant, that's okay. You don't have to say anything, but I will look at you sideways, okay? All right. No, no, no pressure on me. I'm making sure I'm in pressure on y'all. It's just hot. Athens is hot. You know what I'm saying? I'm sweating because it's hot, right? It's real hot. But I thank y'all for joining. We're at the one minute I was letting people kind of trickle in and stuff. So I'm gonna just kind of get into the introduction and all that stuff, all that jazz. And then as people come in, we'll really get deep and dive, deep diver into everything we're talking about today. How's everybody feeling, first of all? Everybody all right? All right, all right. Everybody came a long way, pretty short. So nobody traveled hundreds of thousands of miles to get here? Yeah, we have William as well too. Nobody else, huh? All right. So yeah, I've been waiting for this day for almost two months. I've prepared really, really, really hard. I've been through a lot to be here. I was just in Albania two days ago. And let me tell you, that was a trip. I had to take a train to a plane to a taxi to a ferry to get to Albania. Lovely people, lovely people here in Greece as well too. But I've been learning a lot about different cultures since I've been in Eastern Europe, which is a little different than the Western Hemisphere. So my mind and brain has been open to a degree that has never been before from an experience standpoint. And that's something that I'm aiming to bring to the table for you all today, every single person here. Yes, the topic is about templates. And I'm gonna tell you right now, a lot of you guys know about templates already. Let's be honest. But I'm gonna put a fresh perspective on it, give you guys a little bit of jazz, a little bit of entertainment as well. Because one thing I did, and I studied everybody's workshop for the past two years. Yes, I did. I watched every single one. I wanted to see what people were doing, their mannerisms, how excited people were in the room. I wanted to be different. And I also wanted to model what worked. And one thing I didn't notice was I felt like a lot of the workshops were a little monotone. I'm not sure if that's a WordPress thing or that's just a geek thing or that's just an art thing. But I want to bring a little cultural flavor, if that makes sense into this. I don't think we have a lot of that in WordPress sometimes. So that's what I'm gonna be bringing to the table today on top of the templates. And I'm hoping y'all, you guys will rock out with me a little bit. I'm also gonna walk around this stage, too. Cause I saw everybody be standing right here. So if I move from the, you know, Mike, does that affect you guys' recording? Yes. It does? Yeah. Do you want the scholarship? Yeah, let me get the hand here. I'm moving. Come on, baby, we moving. We ain't standing still. We gotta go. We on a mission today. Shoot. I told people this is gonna be the best workshop that anybody has been to in a very long time, if ever. And I was gonna make an historic landmark today. Thank you. Okay, can y'all hear me? Should I turn this off for an echo? Or do you turn it off? Okay. Hey, I wanna be honest. I don't, listen. I've been to a couple of work camps and I've trusted the sound and the video and I've been let down some time so I can't prepare my own stuff. So if y'all need some help, I'm AV2. Let's work together. Love is love. Come on. See, internet connection dropping right now. That's, look it, that's how they do it, y'all. Right now, that's what I'm trying to distract y'all and make sure this internet is going good. All right, okay. So, presentation is called Fresh Off the Block, Transform Word Press with Templates. Let me get some of my water, because it is hot. Okay. So just a little bit about me. I already gave you guys a little gist of my journey so far, I haven't given you a lot. It's been crazy. But a little bit about me. I'm a brand webmaster and founder of the iconic Expressions, it's a creative agency. Eight years ago, I have eight years of experience, excuse me, in marketing, strategy, development, project management, more things, more things, blah, blah, blah, who cares, right? I started Iconic Templates in 2022, and the reason why that's significant, because that's what gave me a lot of confidence to even have the presentation I have for you today. It's kind of like my sub-brand of my main company, where we provide free and premium templates for people based on WordPress. Outside of just Gutenberg or theme-based templates. I try, I want to hit a different angle because a lot of plug-ins have the export and import capability that most people don't take advantage of, and those are templates. I'll go deeper into that. I saw that face. That was a half-lil, what are you talking about, Willis? What you talking about, Willis? All right, look, I'm gonna say some American jokes and then some other jokes, some universal jokes. I'm gonna see which ones y'all get, because listen, we all got to learn today. I enjoy using technology and strategies to simplify life, cooking, reading, and traveling, and more and more. So without that handy phone right there, I would be, that's my best buddy. That has been my best buddy, this entire, my best friend, this entire trip, because without my phone and GPS, and I would be lost, y'all. I would not be here today. Y'all be like, where's Maestro? He's not here. That's because he's somewhere he should not be. And not because I wanted to be there either. All right, so here comes it out. I did prepare y'all. I gave y'all icebreaker before the icebreaker, right? The icebreaker was coming. Look, I see a couple of frowns, smiles, a little side, you know, I see some things. I'm looking at eyes. I'm looking at eyes. I'm looking at eyes. I'm looking at eyes. I'm looking at eyes. All right, so the icebreaker. I came up with a very, very, very simple anthem. Very simple. If you guys can't get this, I don't know if we can do the rest of the presentation. We're gonna, it's gonna be the test right here. Very simple, very simple anthem. But before we get to that, I'm doing twice. I prepared y'all twice, because I kind of feel the fear that some people are gonna try to escape go out of the anthem. There is a free giveaway that I want to do. All you have to do is submit a webpage since we're doing a presentation on templates. I just want us all to be able to say, hey, do you feel like you have a webpage that looks really, really good and really, really nice? At the end, we'll just vote and say who's, you know, who's got the best one and I'm going to give you just a giveaway. Now, here's the thing. I did not want to get it yet until I knew who won because what I was gonna do originally was get something from Greece. But what I didn't wanna do is get something from Greece that's very, you know, native and then the person from Greece gets it and they're just like, ah, you know, why'd you give me this thing? And I already have this. So it was like, let me wait and see because depending on where you're from is what I want to be able to give you. And it's just gonna be something simple. That's all. All right, y'all ready for this next part? I've gave y'all three ice breakers right now. Let's, okay, all right. All right, so I'm gonna say it a couple of times. Y'all are gonna get the gist. Y'all are gonna hear the cadence to it, the tone. I use cadence for a key word because we're gonna get into that later.   I didn't know that connected with like a movie. You know how the movie, like the movie where they connect the at the end of the movie to the beginning of the movie, that one thing they said and it comes back. All right, so it goes like this. I'm fresh, I'm fresh off the block, the block. And that's my word, my word, press. Now, I said it very bland and simple intentionally for you guys, but I'll put no up into it to show you how simple it can be. If you can't do it that simple, I don't know. I'm gonna do it again with a little more jazz, okay? I'm fresh, I'm fresh off the block, the block.  I'm fresh, I'm fresh off the block, the block.  Okay, I'm fresh, I'm fresh off the block, the block.  I'm fresh, I'm fresh off the block, the block. And ask my word, my word, my word, press, impress. One more time. I'm fresh. I'm fresh. Of the block, the block. And ask my word. You got it? My word, my word. Press. Impress. One more time.  I'm fresh. Of the block, the block. And ask my word. My word. My word. Press, impress. OK, I'm a little impressed. I'm a little impressed. You get the press work, y'all come on, man. Now the reason why I wrote it that way is because one, presentation is called Fresh Off the Block. That's very simple, right? Okay, why would I name it Fresh Off the Block? The reason why I named it Fresh Off the Block is because I'm from Cleveland, Ohio. I literally came from the hood. So I come from a very poverty stricken area and then in Cleveland we're trying to change that. And we consider that for my culture being on the block. I'm sure y'all have heard that term in some way. Movies, TV shows, something, right? Also, in WordPress, there's a thing called blocks. Double, double usage, block, block. Y'all ain't rocked lately, come on, come on, man. Geez. And then we also use the term word. So when people say like, hey, you're gonna do the word. Word means like you're holding your promise. Or it means what is is, it's done. I got it, word. So you going to the conference, the WordCamp Conference, the EU, yet word. That's how we, so word, oh my God, I'm moving on. I'm moving on. Let's go. Y'all just wanna get into the presentation and stuff. I'm trying to have some fun with y'all. Told you, I worked hard for this. It came a long way. Agenda, so let's talk about this agenda, okay? The agenda, we're gonna start off with templates. We're gonna go into a WordPress setup. We're gonna talk about page building with templates, forum building with templates, video publishing with templates, and we're gonna do a group fresher size. Not exercise, fresher size. Ah, I'm gonna clap for myself on that one. Come on, y'all. So one other thing y'all are gonna notice about this presentation, it's very thematic, right? Very thematic. I went hard with the theme. Like I went hard with the theme.  I'm a big fan of movies. I'm a big fan of stories. I'm a big fan of setting the scene. So it's not just all this stuff that we're gonna be talking about. When it comes to kids, you gotta give them the sugar with the medicine, right? Right? So the same thing when it comes to education, you know, this stuff is boring sometimes. So if you add color around it, no pun intended, but pun intended, add some color around it, it may be more palatable for people. So that's why I got real, real big on the theme and I had my designer for my company do all this jazz and stuff for you guys. Otherwise it would be all white screen black text and it would be plain Jane stuff because that's how I'd be sometimes. I keep it simple. So let's talk about templates. Templates and WordPress are considered things like patterns from Gutenberg, reusable blocks, video presets, reusable videos, hooked elements, child themes, design libraries and code snippets. So now you're understanding this word that we call templates and this is something that I am gonna have a conversation with some of the uppers. Oh yeah, I'm getting up, I'm getting there. I'm here now, so I'm gonna talk to some people, y'all. But this thing when it comes to templates has been very confusing. There's a lot of terminology in WordPress sometimes that gets confusing. And so I wanted to help kind of alleviate that confusion to say all these things are considered templates, even if they're named different things. They're still templates. Does that make sense? Okay, because one thing I got confused of was the patterns. Like why don't you all just call them templates? Why are they called patterns? I'm used to patterns being polka dots and triangles and things like that, right? Not necessarily templates. So the naming convention matters because one plugin calls one thing, another plugin will call another and it's the same thing. And then we get confused in conversation and communication when we're trying to make things happen. So that's why I said, hey, let me share what templates can be considered. There are also kits, blueprints, processes, SOPs, standard operating procedures and models. So templates could be a lot of things. No matter what the actual name of the template type, templates are a lot of things. So that's one thing I wanted everybody to understand is that we aren't just talking about templates in Gutenberg, but we're discussing the concept of what templates are and then diving deeper on how to use them within WordPress and Gutenberg. Does that make sense? All right. I'm gonna be asking y'all that throughout the presentation to make sure y'all are awake. So if y'all fall asleep on me, I will ring the bell. We gonna make it work. We gonna fly today. Shh, I told y'all, didn't I say the energy's gonna go as we go? All right. So let me give y'all a fresh tip real quick. Fresh tip, told y'all, the theme is coming. Here's the template advantage. The first thing is, is when it comes to templates, they basically give you a great starting point. If a template's not giving you a great starting point, it is purposeless. Like, there's no reason for you to have a template if you feel like you gotta start from scratch. So that's what templates are for. They also give you a great framework to work from. So you don't have to start from scratch. You also, you have something that you're able to model with. And then templates also help in the WordPress world create less development. You shouldn't be developing as much. And I know we have some developers in here. I'm looking to see who's gonna wink at me. Like, I'm a developer. I ain't gonna wink yet. Okay. So, helps you less develop for people who are or are not developers. I finally got a smile. You are a hard one, man. Dang. So people are less developed. And then it also gives you more free time, right? You should have more free time. If you're using a template and it's not giving you more time back, so you can go do whatever you wanna do, then the template is, I don't wanna say useless, but it's not efficient. I didn't wanna say useless, but I know these days we have to be careful with the words we say. We can't make it. But the template ain't right. So that's what templates, the template advantage is supposed to give you. And if it doesn't give you that advantage, then it ain't give you what you need. So let's talk about WordPress. I believe they gave everybody the ability or at least the heads up of getting the local installation of WordPress on your computer if you wanted to follow along. And so I'm just kind of reiterating that with the two platforms I use. I mainly use local WP and sometimes I use Kinsta. There's one more I use, but it's more of a sandbox site, but I use it as just WordPress, just temporary sites myself. So if you didn't have it, here you go. So I'm gonna go to the next one. All right, nobody's bringing out their phone. We're good. They're pretty easy to find anyway. All right, so these are the plugins. If you have not added these plugins yet to your site, I'm hoping everybody here has a sandbox site or a playground site or some type of fake site or just a practice site, whatever site you wanna call it. But these are the plugins that we're gonna talk about today that will give us some, we'll say experience, practice, or understanding with templates. This is not a term, exhaustive list. This is not a definite list. You can use whatever alternative tool or plugin, your favorite thing, as long as it has similar abilities that these have, but I just wanted to share that with you. So we have Cadence WP, and that's the reason why I said before, that Cadence, and that's the reason why I actually added the Anthem and I said, hey, follow my Cadence. And I said, I'll bring it back because that's actually one of the tools that we'll be using once again. I brought it back. Oh my God. Fluent form. So that's the next one right here. It's a form plugin. It's one of my favorite ones. I believe the owner here, his name is so hard to say. I just wanna call him SJ, but we took a picture last night at the social event and it was pretty great. Like just meeting one of my favorite developers and owners of a plugin on our company. So it was kinda cool. But we're gonna be using that as well. You can use whatever you wanna use as long as there's an export import feature, but I would advise just to try this out for today. And then Presto Player here is a video plugin and we're gonna be using this when it comes to templates as well, just to give you a demonstration. These two have more alternatives. Presto Player is a lot more unique than what you're gonna find alternatively in WordPress in the repo. Page building with templates. So when it comes to page building with templates, I did mention this before as far as the word patterns. I know I'm gonna get a stern talking to you after my presentation at some point in time. I'm gonna do something wrong. I know it, you know I'm gonna, it's just the WordPress gods are gonna get on me. But either way, patterns and reusable blocks. So patterns are templates and you will find that in Gutenberg editor. And then reusable blocks are also templates that you won't find in the Gutenberg editor, but you create in the Gutenberg editor. And I'm gonna show you that as well too. I have my sandbox site up.  I just wanted to keep this presentation on top.  They be messing with us, man. Because yeah, the picture is not supposed to be blurry like that. All right, I'm gonna go back one and we gonna go back to it. There we go. See how simple that was. All right, so when it comes to templates, there is most of them like elementor and stackable. What else is there? Somebody named another popular one as far as blocks. And anymore blocks, blocks, blocks wise, does anybody have any favorite block based plug-in types that they use to build websites with? Generate blocks. They generate blocks, that's a good one, thank you. So I'm just saying to say that they have design libraries and template libraries too. That's the point of my bringing it up. So you know what I'm saying? If you have a favorite one, just look for it there. And then with cadence's theme, they also have what's considered starter templates. Again, other themes have this. And that's something that I want people to really understand. There's templates that are based in Gutenberg based on blocks and there's templates that are based on themes. They're not the same thing. People get very confused on that. Now, when you bring up a template from any type of like elementor or cadence or divi or visual composer, things like that, yeah, it's gonna add the blocks with it to build but it's not the same thing. It's gonna add the blocks with the theme. It's gonna style it out for you and then add the certain areas, the blocks and the elements and stuff. But they are two different things because you can technically use cadence as blocks without using cadence theme. You can use generate press theme if you want to and then use cadence block. People typically use two to three block based plugins when they are building websites. So here's another fresh tip right here and then we're gonna go into the WordPress site. Duplicate pages and posts. So this is another great way for you to be able to create templates. Just make a page, use either a code snippet plugin or you can use a actual plugin to be able to duplicate the posts. There you go. You have a template. Just duplicate it. So let me bring up this one second. So I'm gonna go here so you can see the plugins and again, as I mentioned before, FluidForms, cadence blocks, presto player and then for this situation, I did add the plugin duplicate page instead of just adding a code snippet plugin and adding a code. But these are the ones that will help you create templates. So I should've definitely changed up the order of my screen, but that's all right, we're on the fly. So let's start, let's go to cadence. I wanna show you real quick. So if I go to pages and we're going to go to, we'll just add a new page. How about that? It's called fresh off the block. Let's start with a fresh page. That would just make sense, wouldn't it? Yeah. Talking to myself, but I'm talking to you at the same time. You gotta do that sometime. And we're gonna see how this internet acts. If not, I'm gonna go to data and hope it works. Okay, okay, let's try it. Refresh, refresh, refresh. Can you use, yeah, yeah, use local. Yeah, that's fine. No, I mean, even in a local environment, all the plugins that I'm demonstrating, you can find those in the repo, even in local. So nothing outside of the local is what we're gonna be focusing on. I try to do that just in case, to your point. So if you're using local, you don't have to use something that needs.  Oh, you're saying when we were on the slide, you didn't catch the, and did it go to the form? Yeah. Okay. The page URL. Yeah, yeah, just drop any page, the page URL that you wanna submit. Yeah, any page URL that you wanna submit that you've deemed worthy to, yeah, to be, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's it. Is that a trick question? I don't know, this is a test. Is this a plan here? Like, where's Ashley Kutcher? Am I getting punked right now? I mean, this is a, no, it's gotta be WordPress. Don't get me in trouble now. It's gonna get on me. You might show, I know, listen, I would normally, but we be a watch right now and record it, you know what I mean? It's like, you got me sweating just off of that question. All right, listen, I'm gonna try to redo this, turn off the Wi-Fi, reconnect the thing. Let's see, let's see. If not, I'll just have to use my, okay. Is there, I wasn't told this before. Okay, I see it now. Look, I'm lucky I got an ethernet adapter because some of these adapters don't come with ethernet chords. I'm just letting y'all know. I actually bought one just in case for this situation. So, whew, you gotta come triple prepared. It's great to be prepared, you don't ever know. All right, now let's try. We're in here now, all right, good. All right, so, let's just get this mouse going. And as I mentioned before, for instance, cadence, we have the design library. And so, okay, there we go. So, when it comes to the design library, you can pick, you know, choose and click it to import a template like that. And it's very simple. Same thing when it comes to patterns. I should say patterns. Let's click off of here and try this again. Interesting, interesting. Listen, the patterns was just showing up 20 minutes ago. Normally it's right here.  So, that's interesting. And this is why I love stuff like this. There we go. See how it wasn't there? Y'all would've thought I was crazy, like. I mean, y'all saw that, right? Okay, y'all are probably questioning me. Like, he didn't come prepared. I told y'all, I've been practicing this two months. But you always get tested. I need a witness, can I get a witness? Hallelujah, I need a witness, goodness. Okay, all right, so patterns are the same thing here. And so you can click anything, you know, any type of pattern, and it just gives you a template. So I just wanted to, you know, show you and demonstrate that it's the same thing. You can use WordPress's native templates with your patterns, or you can use your plugin-based template, your block plugin-based template to be specific as well when it comes to templates. So let's talk about forms, okay? Forms, form building with templates, excuse me, is very, very simple. Yeah, building forms with templates is very, very simple. And let me give you guys a quick story that made me actually appreciate more modern-based form plugins.  Contact Form 7, y'all. Yeah, oh, yeah, yeah. I learned the hard way. Contact Form 7 is, anybody here work for Contact Form 7? I told you, it's always one! It's always one! Well, anyway, I was working on a client site, working with another agency, working on a client site, and I recommended using this form plugin here to build out the site. We ended up building a site with this form plugin and then a month later, they had requirements that wanted us to switch back to Contact Form 7 for integration purpose or something like that. When I tell you, me and my developer went through so much headache because Contact Form 7 is a little different when it comes to building outer forms. It's not like block-based and we're used to the more modern block-based. So when it came to them asking us for help to edit the form and to change things on the form and stuff, it was totally different than how we're used to working. So we had to create a whole slew of SOPs for them in order so they can learn how to change things on the form. And I really wanted to tell them, I should have just used fluent form. And that was my lesson. And it literally just happened like 10 days ago, being honest with you guys. It literally just happened. So I'm like, it was very relevant to the situation and it made me appreciate a little bit more having more of a block-based versus having more of a code-based. I guess that's the best way I would say it. I'm a nerd, but I am a nerd, nerd, nerd. Like some of y'all are nerd, nerd, nerd. I'm like two nerds down. Some of y'all here are like five steps down when it comes to nerdism. And yes, nerdism is the real word. But with fluent forms, you're able to export import forms and that's one of my favorite, favorite features when it comes to being able to share and give others or have somebody give something to you or be able to just have templates for your own self for your own team and your own internal working. So don't sleep on the export import feature when it comes to templates. So here's another fresh tip right here. See, now I'm gonna help you out because I feel like I hurt your feelings a little bit because I'm gonna let you know I got a little bone to pick with this as well too. But here's another fresh tip. When it comes to fluent forms, you can just go to fluentforms.com backslash forms and you're able to see their demo forms. Now in the plugin of fluent forms and I'm gonna show you here in a second, you're able to see only certain so many forms but then you have to go here to see more of their demo forms and that's something that I'm going to generously make a small, I don't wanna call it complaint but just like, hey. See, when you flew out hundreds of miles, oh, there's a lot of things you've been waiting to say to a lot of people in person. I'm just letting y'all know that right now. You'd be holding it back. Just trying to get through the internet and submit the email and the request page and all that stuff. Yeah, that good, but when you see a person's eyes like I'm seeing y'all because y'all ain't gonna forget me after this presentation, I promise you that. It's a whole different ball game and feeling. Y'all do look good, by the way. I'm just letting y'all know that right now. Everybody looking nice and fresh. We have me a nice drink. The stiffest of all drinks. Okay, so we're adding a new form. As you can see, we see them right here. Like you see a little sneak peek of what it looks like but then as you scroll down, you don't see what it looks like until you click it. Again, to me, that's like a time, you know, waster not a saver for me because I want to see what it looks like before clicking. Yeah, I don't want to have to click it to see it. That's why I gave you all that other website because you can go there and see the forms. And that's something that, again, I think you know, it just could be improved upon but I'm not saying that what's being done is not great. The same thing with Contact Form 7. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. But sometimes there are things that you can do to update, upgrade and accommodate others. Does that make sense? Does that make sense? Okay, yeah, I see, all right, hold on, I asked that before and it was, yeah. And then this time I was like, yeah. I told you, y'all fall asleep on me. Oh, boy, do y'all not know. So let's talk about video publishing with templates. Oh, but let me show y'all real quick before we go there because I was kind of kind of compiling a lot of the stuff at the end but I'm not going to do that too much. Let me go to tools. I just wanted to show y'all guys where you would find it at. So what's in the tool section, export forms and port forms. That simple. That simple. And then you select your form here, whatever you make and then you export it and then that's something that you can give, you can sell, you can hold to yourself. I don't put it in a bottle and put it in the Mediterranean Sea. I can finally say that because I'm near it. But let's go to video publishing with templates. So with the tool, Presto Player, you have what they call video presets. So this is another thing where it's like, why don't you just call them templates? But they call them presets, just like we have patterns. They are templates. That's basically what it is. You click on one of these and it sets up your video in a certain way that you'll be able to kind of have certain features on your video player that you would have to set up in any other way. Who here uses Wistia, Vimeo, YouTube? No Wistias or Vimeos? Wow, that's shocking. If I took a poll right now, I would have never guessed that. Okay, and the reason why I say that is because Vimeo is typically it has a different type of, how can I say it? It's like, Android is too, now the Androiders don't, come on now, don't crucify me for this. I'm doing this off the fly too. I ain't make this part of the presentation though. But Android is to what I would say YouTube is what Apple is to Vimeo. Does that make sense? I hear William says it makes sense. I don't know if it makes sense to anybody else. Okay, so that's why I said I would have thought because word pressers are very particular. You see how my voice went, very particular about their stuff. You know, about how they want stuff to be presented and Vimeo, an accommodation world with YouTube. You don't have that same type of nuance and flexibility. You gotta kind of go with the flow of YouTube. And it's not necessarily as private. So that's why I assumed everybody here would be using more Vimeo or Wistia over YouTube. But then at the same time, I'm gonna just keep it real with y'all. Listen, I'm from Cleveland, Ohio and I know budgeting when it's necessary and YouTube is free. And that's why I'm assuming everybody here uses it because we know word presses are cheap. Yes, I said, camera get me right now. Sometimes we are cheap. We don't wanna pay for nothing. Geez, I be feeling bad for these developers or owners. I'm calling some people out. Contact Form 7 ain't need to pay for that. Shoo. All right, so reusable video. Like reusable blocks, you have reusable videos. And again, I'm gonna show you after I show you the picture. I took a long time, I'm just gonna snapshot, right? So, reusable videos, you have a media hub and in the media hub, you're able to add your videos and then when you add your videos to the media hub, anywhere on any page at any time, you can just bring in that video from your media hub. So you create a video, you have the presets and then you bring it in on any page at any time. Once again, it's a video template that if you know you're gonna repurpose a video and bring it back and you want the same settings, don't do it over again. Just create a template. And see, I have it right here. I didn't know as cheapers word pressers we're gonna be on this. I thought we'd be on this. Have y'all heard of Bunny.net? Nobody's heard of Bunny.net? Okay. Well, as Kevin Hart says, you gonna learn today. So Bunny.net is an alternative to YouTube and Vimeo. It came, it started as Bunny CDN and I'm sure we've heard of Cloudflare, right? Cloudflare, okay. We've heard of Cloudflare, Bunny.net is an alternative to Cloudflare and they ended up going into the video storage, video hosting, other nuances and two. And so this, I mean, I put like 50 bucks probably three years ago and I still have 40 bucks in my account. Like it barely uses anything. I'm gonna say that one more time, cheap word pressers. I put 50 bucks on the account three years ago and I still have about $40 left and my video gets played anywhere because it has a CDN attached to it as well too. And it's fast. And guess what? YouTube stuff doesn't pop up when somebody pauses. Okay, all right. I'm gonna pause right there for y'all. All right, so before we get into the group fresher size, y'all get fresher size now, right? Exercise, fresher size. Look, we gonna stretch it out today. Let me go and show you what it looks like. I'm looking at the time. Okay, I'm gonna start wrapping it up in about five, seven minutes and then any questions will go there. All right, so let me go back to pages. Oh, I am in pages. In this one, I'm hoping that I still have this video so I can show y'all on it because I didn't, did I save it?  Shouldn't be a draft. That's the only thing, I can't stand, sometimes where drafts come in and I thought that when you save it, let me see, otherwise I'm just gonna add a video. Okay. So what I'll do is I'll go back here, go to the bottom here, type a, and then we'll add Presto Player YouTube. And then let me get a YouTube video because I wanna show y'all what this looks like because I'm assuming most people here have never heard of Presto Player. Is that assumption correct that most people haven't heard of Presto Player? Okay, well this is about to be your first time. I'm gonna get a WordPress video right here. Just would be appropriate. I would say so. Okay. Okay, I'm about to just get a random video talking about WordPress, okay? Just so y'all can pretty much see. What's up guys? So if you're watching this. All right, so I'm gonna grab this URL and bring it right here. Et voila. Now we have a video here but the thing about this is just not any video. It has a nice skin over it, it's not YouTube. The YouTube's is terrible. And then anytime I click on any of these presets here, it changes a little bit of the different options. Now I'm not gonna get too far into how that's a great thing, but if you wanna go something simple, you don't want people to have control. There's sometimes where you do and don't want people to have certain control. Is the video a marketing video? Is it a sales video? Is it a learning video, right? The control of the video creates the experience. And a lot of times we just create videos and we all understand it's the experience that people have that really gives them more of the result that they're looking for. And it's not just the video itself. So that's PrestoPlayer right there. And then as far as the reusable block standpoint, let me show you all the reusable block while I'm here. For those who haven't learned how to use a reusable block, if I click create a reusable block, I'm just gonna say W-R-O-D. And then now it's a reusable block and you should be able to see it right here. You won't see this until you create a reusable block. Now you have a template right there. Same thing with PrestoPlayer, as far as the gallery, not gallery, excuse me, but the media hub is concerned. You go here, media hub, and then you would add the video here the same way that I just added it before. And then once you do, you can save this and then you can bring this up anywhere on any page at any time. So that is literally how you use templates when it comes to video. Now does that make sense? Okay, notice how it's getting quieter. Yeah, okay. So it looks like we don't need to go to the fresher size. In the group fresher size, it wasn't really anything major. I just wanted to kind of just get y'all's attention. But the main part is that I wanted anybody here to be able to, if you do want to test out templates, as I mentioned before, we have some free templates that you can use, or you can use the cadence library. I'll go back one more time if anybody did want to take a snapshot of it. Or you could use the cadence design library. How you would add it, I'm gonna show you here. Okay, so as I mentioned before, like stackable, obviously we're on here on cadence. Ultimate add-ons with Gutenberg is now Spectra. They all have a similar design library. So as far as building a page out, I would say for the most part, what you wanna do when you're using these templates, think of the different categories, and when it comes to a page, think of how you would lay out certain sections on the page. So if we were building a landing page, and this is now where I'm gonna get a little bit of participation. I'm gonna give away the first one, hero. I would think a hero would make a lot of sense for a landing page. Now when it comes to the second session, if we were building a landing page for just a simple site, what would the next, or could the next section be anybody here based on just looking at the categories here? And anybody can just throw anything out and I'll just add it any time. And you could just say a category, you don't have to say a specific one, but what would the next section, like what would you say, that's a good one. Yeah, I would say features too. And I'm glad you said that and it's not there because this is another thing where it could be there, just could be another name. You know what I'm saying? So everybody doesn't use the term features when it comes to, so that's something that, I'm glad you said that because we have to peep that. We don't, like it's not there, but yet we can still create a features by, let's see, the features. Could this be a feature section? Media and text? Nope, I'll go back to list. So for example, boom. So we go from a hero to the features section we just wanna talk about, this could be anything, this could be the features of our product, this could be the features of our service. That would be the next thing. Okay, bam, we have a hero. Obviously there needs to be some type of a footer but we don't go into a footer. We'll do two more sections. Anybody else have two more sections before we say there's a fake footer there? Services? Is that a word that we see? Nope, nope, no services. Well we can use, we can create a services. It can be a pricing section and then we turn it to services. And so this is why I call it the exercise. You see how either you're not, y'all are getting tired and stuff and you're, or y'all are really trying to think, okay, how would I lay this out using the terms within somebody else's library? You see why we're doing this right now? Because some names aren't gonna be there. That's something that most people don't know and don't learn and it confuses them and it hasn't stuck. So you gotta talk it out and you gotta walk it out and go through it. And just say okay, it's not, there are features, no services, but I can delete this, delete this and delete that and I can create the services part. That's what templates are supposed to be for. If they're not all the way there and ready for you, then you just manipulate them just a little bit. It's just like resources, I agree. So I just wanted to go through that with you all because once again it's just something that when there's different naming conventions, it confuses a lot of people, especially when you're playing in somebody else's sandbox. But if you have a mentality of, okay, that may not be called that there, but it looks like that, I can use that and then change it to my, bend it to my will. Anybody got any questions? I was joking. So let's do a refresher here. We talked about templates. We went over how you can add a local environment to your WordPress website and add the plugins to create the templates. Then we went into page building with templates and then form building with templates and then last we mentioned the video publishing using templates. So those are the main three and the list goes on, but page building, form building and video publishing are three ways that you can use templates very efficiently and it will save you hundreds of hours if you do it without trying to be all, get into that developer mode where you're just like, okay, I'm using the template, but now I'm gonna start doing it from scratch. That defeats the whole purpose of the template and oftentimes we do that. So I encourage you to start fresh on WordPress. You know, if you're building a new site, if you're doing something, I encourage you to try out using templates. If you're not using templates, if you typically build it from scratch, I feel like that it's a great way to get your mind into that direction and then you can continue to build from scratch as you want to, but if you start to train yourself to use templates more, you can train others to use templates as well too because we like to practice what we preach around here, right? And then that way, the people who are helping you or working with you, they can really adopt using templates and then you can continue to do what you do and how you do it. So does anybody have any questions? The question is in templates, are there plugins built in templates sometimes that you have to be careful of? Are there plugins built in the templates that you gotta be careful of? If, for example, you download a theme or a starter kit or something like that, they do typically give you the option to add the plugins with it. So I would say you should always be careful because you never know. But if it's a plugin that is popular and has nice ratings, again, I don't wanna go too deep, but I have a system of type of plugins that I use based on criterias, just for safety reasons, I would use your own method and just be very cautious. But to your point, yeah, you gotta be careful all the time. But did I answer your question? Okay, thank you, by the way. Listen, y'all don't ask me questions, I'm gonna just start asking y'all questions. I promise y'all, I'm gonna just start looking y'all. Didn't I ask you a question? If y'all, yeah, let's you, hello. They want to mic you up. Okay, all right. I don't know if we don't need the official to do it again. We don't need to officially do it again. Ask the question again. It was good? Okay, okay. Do I need to ask the question again? Yes. I guess so. Okay. Yeah. Can we do the same thing without using any plugins or to do the templates without using any plugins at all only with the fresh WordPress? You can use different code snippets. You know, there's PHP. I mean, with Gutenberg and the tools, WordPress gives you from a fresh install. From a fresh, yeah.  I mean, let's just be honest. I mean, who's not adding plugins to WordPress? I don't know if that's a trick question again, but I'm like, is anybody in here use WordPress with no plugins? Be honest.   You're just very limited. You got to play within the sandbox of Gutenberg and then use the patterns and the reusable blocks to create the templates, but you don't get to use plugin-based templates. Thank you very much. Did that answer your question, though? I just want to make sure, yes, okay. People use the plugin. Who here doesn't use plugins? What's up? Hi, well, this is not a real question. It's just about your opinion about it. In our agency, we have a great deal of concern regarding the consistency of pages, right? How they will behave, and we have to, at least we try to stick to some templates along the site, and we usually avoid to create a large amount of templates or patterns. So the writers are a bit limited in this situation. It's just, I was wondering if, in your opinion, this is a good approach to stick to some models only, or some templates, or should they have these ability to add more features to the general templates, you know? Should they add more? So you all do use templates. You're trying to avoid creating a whole bunch of them. Exactly, because if you give them the liberty to add some blocks, they will add, and we will lose the consistency of the website, you know? The strategy along the website, and everything. So in your perspective, these guys have good practice, or you think that they should be able to add the features themselves? Added so the people could add the features themselves to the templates themselves. Well, I would say when I think about templates, I definitely want to have the word consistency involved. I mean, that would be the purpose of having a template. So once it makes things inconsistent, and we're talking about templates, now we're kind of conflict, there's a big conflict in my opinion. Before we even get to the whole capacity or overload of too many templates. And then as far as your situation, which I'm just still trying to process your process, I would say that giving these people the flexibility to adjust and change or add with limited ability, I think it helps. But at the same time, you don't know what you don't know. And maybe they don't know anything that they don't know. So it could, you know, your process could be working. And maybe you want to make a slight adjustment. I wouldn't say move too far away from it, because it seems like it's working for you, right? So I don't even want you to move far away from it. But I definitely would say that I don't think you can go wrong with having too many templates as long as they're categorized. That's the key. You don't have a categorization system in a way where a person can easily get to this and the naming convention is so clear, you don't have to explain what it is, then you're good to go. Once you add too much of anything and things aren't clear because the naming convention, that's when it becomes a bad thing. Does that make sense for you? So yeah, categorization is key. Yeah, I definitely think, yeah. Organization, naming, structure, even maybe a quick hint on when you categorize it, this is typically used for this or that. That way, I'm a big fan of eliminating excuses. If I can eliminate as many excuses by saying, okay, you said you weren't here at 10 o'clock, but I gave you five hour ahead, what is excuse? Like, I want to eliminate all the excuses. So if you can eliminate excuses, you'll have less resistance. You're welcome. The last one before we wrap it up, I want to thank everybody for coming here as well too. She's looking around for the mic, she's looking around for the mic, she's looking around who needs the mic. Look, she ain't about to miss a beat.  So don't be shy. All right, all right. Okay, well, I definitely thank every single person for being here today. I'm hoping that the presentation gave you guys a little bit of edutainment, combination of education and entertainment, and that somebody here has a different perspective, a fresh perspective of WordPress. Yes, I went fresh all the way till I couldn't breathe no more. And then I breathed, and I went back into the fresh. Hopefully it gives you a fresh perspective of WordPress. I am Maestro Stevens, the fresh prince of WordPress. Y'all finally get it now, dang! Had to bring it back! Shoot, look for me on LinkedIn. You'll see it, Maestro Stevens, the fresh prince of WordPress. Not the king, the king gets, everybody's going for the king's throat. I said, I'm gonna be the prince. Just to give a fresh perspective of WordPress because WordPress has been so in areas outdated from when it comes to the knowledge. Most people don't understand the modern capabilities of it, and it frustrates a lot of people. And I talked with people, average everyday people that are not developers and they want to use WordPress and they're so scared because they think it's 1992. And they're using the old version of WordPress. I'm dead serious with you guys. WordPress, the whole point of it is supposed to be accessible, right? It's free. But there are a lot of people who don't have a lot of money and they need the free-ness, but they're confused and they're scared because they're so used to what they think WordPress was. So that's why I'm trying to bring a fresh perspective and say, now it's something new. So thank you all today.


Hi, so I changed the title because I think it's fitting more about what I will speak today. And I hope that you will enjoy my French accent all along this presentation. So I will first present what is trail formation. And then I will explain, I will present some experimental results and show you what I mean by marginality. So trail formation occurs when you have a non-explore area, and you have a first individual going through and leaving some attractive trail behind it. And then when the second individual come, it has a higher chance to follow the same trails and leaving his own attractive trails and so on and so on. And you have path formation. The master in path formation ends. They are using pheromones, which is attractive substances, attractive for the nest mates. And they use it to deploy it to transport network and run their nests, which help them to efficiently explore their environment and to optimally exploit it. For instance, here, they are finding the shortest path between the nest entry and the thought source. To understand this phenomenon, we need to really understand what are the individual rules here. And there are a lot of studies carrying on here. But there are two problems in that phenomenon, which make it hard to study. The first one is that pheromones are really hard to detect, especially if you have a large group in a large arena. And what we usually do is that we use the previous passages as a proxy to estimate the pheromone concentration. The second problem is that when you study such animals in large groups, you have tracking issue.  And also, you have a high frequency of direct interaction. So when you observe a behavior, you don't know if it gets influenced by direct contact information or by pheromones. So to overcome these two problems, I have done several experiments based on Tingen end. So you have only one end in the experiment. And I focus on today, I will speak mostly about characterization of the trajectory of an isolated end. And also, I will answer to a very simple question, but which has been never addressed, is a single end influenced by its own pheromones. So here is my experimental setup. You take an end. You put it in an Argentine end. You put it in a triangle-shaped maze. And you just record its trajectory for two hours without food. This experiment is easy to replicate and to track. So I have about 500 of precisely tracked trajectory. So it's a behavior of an isolated end, like I said. And what is interesting is that the trajectory is confined. So the end is visiting repeatedly the same areas. And also is facing frequently binary choice when it is leaving the chamber. So all of that will help to address the question I have asked previously. And so I represent two experimental results. And these results provide marginality. The first one is on the end activity. So the hand has active period when it's walking and unactive period when it's stopping. Just to let you know, I have found that while walking, the end have a constant probability to stop. So nothing new. What is interesting is the stopping time distribution. It's a parallel of parameter 1. So just for the intuition, a parallel means that the more the end stops, the less likely it will walk again. So there is a self-implification in the stop process. There are a lot of really interesting features in the parallel for the end. But today, I will stress on the marginality of the value 1. Because if the stopping time we're following a parallel of parameter greater than 1, the stopping time will have a finite mean. So it means that you can predict in average how long the end will stop. And if you had a look to the evolution of the proportion of active time of your end, it will stay constant. But if the parameter is less than 1, stopping time will have a non-finite mean. So it's not really easy to get it intuitively. For the end, that means that you cannot predict how long the end will stop. And you can observe very long, long, long stopping time. And also, if you had a look to the evolution of the proportion of active time, it will decrease over time. So activity will decrease. So that is my first experimental results. The second one is marginality, again, in the binary choice. Like I told you, when the end is exiting the room, it's facing a binary choice, right or left. And we have a look to that to see if there is a reinforcement in the barrier of the end. And so we will see if we can observe path selection. This means that after a while, the end when it's exiting the chamber will only use exiting by the same corridor or observe the uniform traffic. It will use both the same way. Or do we have something in between? So before to show my experimental results, I will present to you the model I have choose to model with binary choices. So you consider that the end is leaving a quantity b at its choice between the connection of the chamber and the chosen corridor. And then the probability for the end to choose, let's say, the right branch, the right corridor, will depend, of course, of the weight. And this weight is expressed with the total ferroman quantity left here. So it's b times the number of passages. And also I add a coefficient alpha, which is fair to model the end sensitivity to the ferroman. So the role of the parameter alpha b in the model. So to understand that, we just follow the evolution of the proportion of passages of the end through one of the branches. So here it's right. One of the corridors here is right. And here are sketches of this distribution. The two parameters can have two effects on the model. The first one is path selection. When they are high, if you have a high quantity of ferroman left or a high sensitivity, so you will observe path selection. They will contribute to a path selection. And the contrary, if they are low, you will observe a uniform traffic. But they don't affect at the same time in the convergence of the proportion. B will have a short-term influence. It will influence only the first choices, which is totally opposite to alpha, which has an asymptotic effect.  If alpha is greater than 1, we will observe a probability. One path selection. And if alpha is less than 1, we will observe uniform traffic. So here it's important to retain that choosing the value of alpha different than 1 fix what you will observe at the end. So it's deterministic. What is interesting here is the marginality. So when alpha is equal to 1, it's B equal to 1. Here, alpha kind of disappears. And B is the only one to decide what will happen eventually. And it's no more deterministic. You will have a certain probability to observe path selection and a certain probability to observe uniform traffic. And tricking the value of B will change this probability. If B is less than 1, you will have a higher probability to observe uniform traffic. And if B is bigger than 1, you will observe the contrary. And when B is equal to 1, the marginal value, you will have the same probability to observe path selection or uniform traffic. OK, now let's go back to my experiments. And of course, the question is what are the good value alpha B to reproduce what we observe. And I claim that we should take alpha and B close to 1, 1. Why? I will present two arguments based on the data and some modeling. The first one is that the binary choice probability is following the verbals law. So I will not explain what you see here, because we already spent time yesterday about that. So what it means here is just that the probability to choose the right branch depend linearly to the binary choice probability. So here it's not enough to decide that alpha and B is close to 1, because we could maybe find over parameter value who provide such a linear relation. So to explore the parameter space, I had a look to the diffusion. So what I mean by diffusion? You take the triangle divided in six zones. And you don't take into consideration what is happening in each of the zones. You don't just consider that the end is jumping from one zone to another one after some waiting time. And then you unfold the space so that if the end is always jumping in the same direction, you consider that it's converging to infinity. And whereas if it's jumping between two zones, you consider that it is staying close to 0. So what is the experimental diffusion? It's that. So here you have the distribution of the end on the unfold space for several times. And here you have the variance over time. So it's a diffusion because the variance depends linearly on the time, so that is not new. But what is really interesting is that if you put a log on the y-axis, you see that the distributions are exponential. So that means that the diffusion is not Gaussian. So that it's a clear evidence that we have a reinforcement. Because if the process was memorialized, it would be a Gaussian. And it's not what you observe. We observe exponential diffusion. So now the question is, which value of alpha B I have to choose to reproduce this specific diffusion? And so for that, I have done simulation by fixing different value of alpha and B. Most of the time for value of alpha B, I observe diffusion. So the variance depends linearly over time. So good. And here is a diagram of B and alpha. And I plot here the result of the simulation for a different value of alpha and B. Here you have alpha and B equal 1. Here alpha and B less than 1, and et cetera. So you can observe that we have a diffusion which are not exponential. This one on here also, which is Gaussian. But we also observe exponential diffusion on that for several values of alpha and B. So to efficiently explore the parameter space, what I have do is that I have, for several values of parameter value, I have simulated two hours of experiments. And then I have fitted the resulting distribution of the ends with an exponential function. And I have reported the quality of this fit on this heat map. The darker it is, the better the fit is. And you can see that we have a whole region of good parameter value, which will produce an exponential diffusion. What does that mean for the end? So this region relies when the parameter alpha and B have an antagonist effect. For instance, this extreme case is when the sensitivity is high, alpha is bigger than 1, and the quantity of element is low, B less than 1. And the same here is the contrary here in that region. So if you think about the end, it's a waste of energy to take alpha and B in that region. Because it means that if you have ferriments, which if you lay a lot of ferriments at each passage, this means that you have to be really poorly sensitive to this ferriments. And the contrary, if you leave a very weak quantity of ferriments, you have to be really sensitive to this ferriments. So that is not smart for the end. And like scale down the flexibility of the Bayer view. And of course, the marginal value 1, 1 is inside this region. And I think of this marginal value, it's a suicidal compromise between the two effects. And so that is that argument to take alpha and B close to 1, 1. So to conclude, the answer is yes, ends are influenced by their own ferriments, but by a marginal way. And we have found marginality, like I told you, in the end activity between path selection and uniform traffic, we have, oh, there is a problem. And I have also found some marginality between constant activity and decreasing activity. And I didn't have time today to explain another sign of marginality I have found in the still magic Bayer view between nonlinear reinforcement and no reinforcement at all. And yeah, so thank you to have listening. And I want to thanks my PIs and collaborators who have helped me in this project, and notably Gitterolas and Yuxiate. And also I want to thank Offer Feynman, who welcomed me in his team since one year. And I hope that the next time that we meet, I will present to you my work with Offer. Thank you.


I want to introduce just the general concept of an income tax. The natural type of deduction for an income tax is generally going to be those things that you needed to consume in order to generate the income. Now, that's the general rule we kind of want to keep in mind. And when we think about a business transaction, there's always going to be two sides of any business transaction. One's going to be the one getting income, the recipient of the income, the other one's going to have an expense who's paying for the goods and services. So keeping those in mind then, the IRS actually has to leverage within the transaction on the one that's paying for the goods and services on the deduction side of things, because if they want to get a tax benefit of having a deduction or expense that they can record, which will lower the taxable income, then the IRS has some pressure on them and saying, well, you need to then give us information such as W-2s, 1099s and so on and possibly have withholdings and what not paying us directly for the people that you are doing business with. So that's generally how things are set up and how we're often driven when we're doing our taxes by the income tax forms. That's where they're coming from, the W-2 forms, the 1099 forms and so on. Remembering that the government doesn't just want those forms so that they can provide that to you so that you can self-report, those forms are also going to the government. So we've got to remember that the government is holding on to these forms as well. That's basically their goal, they want to get to the point in essence, or it seems like, where they can basically create the tax return by themselves by having the documentation that they're getting from the payer side of the business transactions. Now that becomes a little bit more difficult to see when you look at non-business kind of deductions, because when we look at like itemized deductions, charitable contributions and things like that, home mortgage interest and that kind of stuff, those are not natural kind of business deductions or tax deductions that you would expect in an income tax system. You would expect deductions in a business kind of setting where anything that you had to expend in order to generate revenue would be a natural income tax deduction. Many of the other deductions like charitable deductions, for example, the government is trying to incentivize us to behave in a certain way and they're using the tax code to do that. Deductions for like saving for retirement, IRA deductions, 401k plans, again, those are weird kind of deductions where the government is trying to manipulate our behavior through incentives, through the tax code. So it's good to have this general understanding of how things are going to basically be working as we start going through these line items and thinking about where these forms are coming from like the W-2s and the 1099s.


So the campaign office hours for us all to learn, connect, share campaigns are a really important part of the little comedian movement and they offer a really especially as movement strategy grows and we'll talk about this a little bit more. We need to find tactics and ways to support the movement for folks to come in. I'm Alex Stinson. I'm a senior program strategist at the Media Foundation and I am based in Uruguay and it's so good to see people from all over the world in the conversation. Next slide please. You'll see some names in the room. We now have two teams at the foundation focused on campaigns. We have a programs team which includes Felix, Narti and myself. We are focused on the kind of social dynamics and systems, the kind of training and capacity building required for people to organize campaigns. We have a product team. You will hear from Alana and Gregory, but I also believe Lauren and possibly Irene are focused on the software side of the house and I'll let Alana explain exactly why and what we're focused on in a few minutes. But if you want to learn more we have a central page on Meta that is focused on campaigns and again it's on the slide deck and if you want to follow along in the notes or ask questions while we're talking feel free to queue them up in the etherpad. Today's topic is software and product development for campaigns and I'm going to do a brief introduction and then we're going to hand it off to the product team to explain what they're thinking about our first feature. Next slide please. So why do we need software for campaigns? Next slide please. So this is a graphic I've been working on recently that's very early drafting in the process but campaigns are complex. We interact at multiple different layers at the international level, at the local level, at the participant level and like other movements and social communities it's really important that we have tools that both connect these different levels but also make it easier to coordinate. There are so many people involved in campaigns Wikipedia pages wanting photos had over a thousand people involved this last round and it's like that kind of coordination right now is really it's running on a very complex mix of kind of on and off wiki tools, social systems and coordination and so again this really drafty map shows just how many different activities there are involved at every level on the campaign and they're really complex. Next slide and so as we think about this we're really excited to have like a technical opportunity of software opportunity right now because the tools we have now are not adequate for that scale of campaign. They're good, we've made do for a long time with kind of volunteer or community built tools that really help us but it's not the like level sophistication needed especially as movement strategy asks us to work on topics for impact at scale. We're going to see more organizers more campaigns more topics which means we need better and more consistent tools that set new organizers especially up for success because we're going to have more and more parts of the movement involved in organizing and so we're going to kind of introduce you to what where that where our current thinking at the foundation is about this and so I'm going to hand it over to Alana who is going to show you what we're up to. Hey everyone, nice to see all of you in the chat. So hi my name is Alana I'm the product manager for the new campaigns team at the wikimedia foundation. So campaigns like Alex said is a new team. We were formed in 2021 where a software and product development team and we're focused on building and improving tools for campaign organizers and participants. Our big goal is that we want to provide software solutions that empower and support campaign organizers. For experienced editors what this really means is we want to simplify workflows and provide more powerful tools and for newer organizers we want to make it easier for them to be effective long-term organizers. Next slide please. So as a team we want to be building solutions that are really useful to organizers so we thought the best way to figure out how to do that was to talk to organizers themselves. So as a first step we set up calls with about 50 campaign organizers in the movement. They worked in different kind of campaigns and wikis and regions and we really wanted to know what was working for them and what wasn't so we could identify the biggest challenges and from those conversations as well as research and information we already had we identified these top 10 sort of like problem or focused areas that were really key for a lot of organizers. So I'll briefly run through some of them and then we'll talk about some of our plans for them later. So first there's the concept of the organizer and action center. So in other words we've heard from organizers that they want a central place where they can find all the tools and resources available to them. So this is what we would call the organizer center. Then there's the participant side of this and that would be a central place where people can learn about campaign events and how to join them. That's the action center. With list building we've heard that people want easier ways to create worklists and more powerful tools to do that. We also know organizers want easier ways to create campaign event pages and register participants.  There's also problem area that we're just calling now participants support tools but really it's providing more structured help and guidance to participants during the event. Then there's what we're calling better tracking tool. So this would be improvements to existing tracking tools like the program's events dashboard and event metrics and potentially new ways of also thinking of how we can track impact. And finally there's what we're calling next steps. So this is really how people close out campaigns, how they recognize participants efforts and how after the campaign organizers can take steps to ensure that editors that whether they're new experience feel excited and want to continue as editors in their journey. So next slide please. So there's a lot of different problem areas I just explained tend to you. So rather than just picking one or two and saying okay we're going to focus on these we really want to approach it in a more systematic and integrated way. So one way we're thinking of doing that is by creating what we are calling organizer platform. So this is really where we're thinking of how we can over time work at a lot of these problem areas. So it will be focused on improving and simplifying workflows related to the pain points that I just mentioned the previous slide. We want it to be modular so that means fetch features can be separated and recombined and we want it to be extensible. So that means features can be developed over time and they can be developed by a lot of different groups or people it can be features our team develops it can be features that different communities or volunteers develop but over time the platform will grow and become bigger and more robust. But of course we need a first focus area as our first project and we've chosen registration. Next slide please. So in the previous slide I talked about how we really want to build up a platform over time. So we see that registration is a great first building block to do that. So if you look here you can see this one potential kind of plan or idea of how this could be possible. So what we see here is take for example registration you see that that can with list building lead up to that creation. From there we can have an action or activation center. So we build up over time more and more support so we can have more robust features. One thing to notice too about this kind of layout that we have here is that some problem areas have more arrows attached to them like next steps that has more arrows. So in other words the more arrows there are the more complexity there is because there's more dependencies and more things we may potentially want to build up for. So next steps for example is pretty complex and again next steps is how after the event editors can continue to feel motivated so they stay on as editors and really grow and that's because there's a lot of different things to go to next steps. With the action or activation center you may want to learn what campaigns they can join next. With list building they may want to get a list of other articles that are in their interest area for things they could improve or create new articles for. For tracking it's helpful for them to know what they've already done so they can set meaningful goals about what to do next and then for communication tools would be great if organizers or other people can communicate with them or they can communicate with others about what is good for them to do next and what kind of help they need. So as you can see there's a lot of different like parts that lead up to next steps but we're hoping that we can build up the support over time so we can really have this larger vision of a system of empowerment. Okay so next slide please. So now let's talk about our first project which is registration. Next slide. So our objective is to build an on wiki registration configuration and management system. So in other words that means a way that organizers can create a registration form and manage the registered registration process. Our goal is we want to empower organizers by making it easy to see who is coming to campaign events and how to effectively support them. This way organizers can identify opportunities for growth and re-engagement within their communities and contexts. Next slide. So what are the current registration solutions? There is on wiki and there's off wiki solutions so these top problems you've identified some apply to on wiki, some apply to off wiki and some are kind of a problem for both on and off wiki. So just to quickly go through some of these some problems that apply to a range of solutions whether on or off are they can just be time consuming and tedious for organizers to configure and manage. They're really usually not integrated with tracking tools like the dashboard so a lot of time organizers need to manually add the usernames of registered participants to the dashboard themselves. Now when we're thinking about on wiki solutions they can be sort of technically challenging or not very welcoming to newcomers. They can kind of look and feel outdated. It's not very easy to contact participants especially in a targeted way. For off wiki they're not integrated with wikis. They're not really aligned often with wikimedia values. Participants can't see who else joined. It's difficult for participants to edit their information and they tend to not really be very supportive for a multi-lingual diverse online communities. Next slide please. So the way we want to approach building the new registration solution is trying to find what are the best things for on wiki, what are the best things for off wiki and how can we sort of blend them to get the best of both worlds. So for on wiki some of the benefits are the registration solutions are integrated with wikimedia workflows and privacy standards and you can see everyone who registered. For off wiki organizers can collect rich participant information and it's very easy for participants to register. It's also easy for organizers to configure the form often. So our vision is really to blend the communalism from on wiki solutions. So in other words the fact that everyone can see who joined you're integrated into wikimedia workflows with the ease of use from off wiki solutions. And on top of that we have an added bonus which is integration with tracking tools. So we want usernames that are we want usernames for registered participants to be automatically pushed to the tracking tool choice. So in other words if you're an organizer that's using programs and events dashboard you can specify that when you're configuring your registration form and then participants who register for your events can be automatically have their username pushed to the tracking tool instead of you having to add them yourself. Okay so next slide. I hear a little background noise from someone. Okay cool. So what are the benefits of this new system? So from the organizer side organizers can get an easier configuration experience, more information on participants and their needs, better support for languages, integration with wikis and integration with tracking tools. Participants can get easier event registration experience and easier account creation experience and I mentioned this year because we're hoping to try to find a way in which if users don't have accounts yet we can have ways potentially they're integrated within the form for them to create accounts. We'll have to look into that technically to see what isn't isn't possible. We want to try to simplify that process. A view of other campaign participants and better onboarding onto wikis. Next slide please. So there's a few last things that I will talk about. So the first thing I want to address is a question that we received and this is on the talk page feedback so far which is why we aren't looking at existing open source solutions for registration. So first thing I will say is that we haven't hired our engineers yet we're currently hiring so certain I guess decisions around what back end solutions we will use for creating registration system will need to be determined by the engineers who aren't on yet so still may there may be more that comes about they can assess but from the kind of user experience side we want it to be a platform that's really integrated into the wikis rather than like an external platform off wiki because one of the pain points that we've identified that we really want to address is the fact that now there's this sort of system that isn't really supported on wiki. So that's why we're thinking of an on wiki experience. So now I'll tell a little bit more but we imagine for this kind of future of registration and how it can provide a lot more support on wiki. So overall the way we're building our work is we want it to be agile and iterative that really means that instead of like you know working on a project for a year and then releasing one version that has all the features at once we want to release more often so we can collect feedback and so we can see what's working for people what's not and then we can come out with later versions. So we tend we plan to release earlier and to collect feedback that also means though that our earlier release won't have everything at once we'll have a smaller version that will have the essentials and then over time we'll build it up to have more and more features. But some things that we envision that might not necessarily be in the first release but are still really important to us so we imagine on later releases they'll be available or what I'm going to share right now. So the ability for organizers to ask for optional information such as the editing level gender of the participants why they're joining the campaign organizers can specify which information in the registration form or information collected about participants is public versus private. Organizers can apply search filters in the participant list and send targeted messages based on those filters. Organizers can contact participants based on their method of choice for contacting them. Newcomers can be directed to onboarding tools and resources potentially before the event so they can have some training as newcomers and there'll be a little more prepared and ready when the campaign event starts on the ability to create a sort of standardized like kind of UX redesigned event pages and then other expansions of the organizer platform. So now that is all for me I'll pass it on to Gregory to give you a bit of a taste of the experience that we're imagining. So thank you. Hello everyone. My name is Gregory. I'm the designer on the campaign's team. I'm based in Lagos, Nigeria. I recently joined the team about eight weeks ago and it's been fun learning about Wikimedia and campaigns and it's been interesting working on solutions to help our campaign organizers achieve their goals. So I'll be sharing some of the early ideas we have. I'll be sharing some of the early designs we have for this registration platform. So this design only shows the flow of how campaign organizers get to add registration to their events and it doesn't show the participant side. So these are the final designs. These are just rough early designs and nothing here is fixed and can be changed and so I would love your feedback on how the design or the workflow, how well you think it's going to help you achieve your goals regarding organizing campaigns and registration. So I'll be sharing my screen in a moment. So can you hear my screen? So this is the first page that we can organize as C when the visits come to the registration sites. The idea we have for the first page is C and so it's going to be integrated with Wikimedia. So you can access it from Wikimedia and so if you are signing to Wikimedia, it's your automatically signed into this. You don't have to create a separate login for this. So if you want to be a campaign organizer who, assuming that the campaign organizer has already created an event page and so if they have done that, they can come to this page, click on create events registration. When they do that, they are, sorry, when they do that, they are taken to this page. So this is a page where they enter the general info about their events. The first thing they enter is the event page URL. So when they enter the event page the platform automatically populates the remaining feuds with the information that is on the event page. So if there's information in this form that's going to be put on the event page by the campaign organizer, this system automatically gets that information and the campaign organizer is also free to edit whatever information was automatically added in case it may not be correct or any of that. So once you enter the URL, you can proceed to enter other feuds, the name of events, the time and dates of the campaign events and it also automatically takes the time zone that is set into your Wikimedia account or your campaign organizer is also free to make the assessment changes. So the campaign organizer chooses what type of events it will be, a location, what is going to be an online event and if it is a physical event, the campaign organizer can enter the address of the event. So the campaign organizer can move on to select what tracking tool they will be using and enter the URL. Like I mentioned earlier, the user names of the participants are automatically taken from here to the registration platform to the tracking tool. So the campaign organizer does not need to manually enter that information or pass it on to manually enter that information. So you select the dashboard you are using, the tracking tool you are using and enter the URL and below you can also add user names of additional organizers for the campaign event. So once the campaign organizer is done with this, click on next and it goes to the next page. So if you can see from at the top, you can see these two steps here. So it's taken to the next page which is this page here. So for the future versions, this is the page where the campaign organizer gets to configure the form, the registration form and sets the questions that they would like participants to, or the information that they would like to get from participants. But for this MVP, for this version, the only information that's being collected from the participants will be their user names. So currently for this version, campaign organizers won't be able to modify the form, or I mean modify it or modify it, or the confirmation message. So campaign organizers can go ahead to preview, click on this button to preview how the event page will look like once the form has been created. And then from there, they can move ahead to click on publish form. So when they publish the form they click on publish form, the form is published and they are taken to this page. So when you create the form, immediately you create the form. You wouldn't see this item below because nobody has registered. So you basically see this. So you can copy the link and you can share it on whatever platform or wherever you want to share the URL to. But after people have registered, participants have registered for the events, you can see the user names, details of the registered participants. And if you want to send messages to participants, to remind them about the event or to send them resources or training materials, you can select all the participants by clicking on at the top here, or you can select individual participants, then click on message. So when you do that, when you do that, this sidebar comes up. So you can enter the message you want to send and you can select what means you would like the message to be sent. Either you have user.pages or email or both. You can decide to send whatever method you would like the participant to receive the message. Also, you can also edit the form as you can see at the top. You can also, these details here shows that the form is online and people can register. So if you click on the grab button, it's not shown in this design, but you can be able to close, you see the option to close the form. That is to stop people from registering when it is done. So I'm going to go to the next. So this is the page that, the first time you visit this page is what the user sees. So once you have added your event, you have created your form and you have multiple forms or events. This is how the page will look like. So you can now see the list of all the events you have created. And you can also see the stats. So you can see number of the app registered for your ongoing, for your events. So you can copy, click on this, copy the link to the event and share. And if you click on these three dots here, it's open a menu. So you can click on, you can edit, you can view. You can go to the tracking tool of your choice, the dashboard event metrics or any other tracking tool you might have selected. So you can duplicate the form in case you want to create a new form for an event and the form is similar. So instead of having to recreate everything from scratch, you can just duplicate and make necessary edits. So you can also close the form. In case you don't want people to continue registering and you can also delete it. You can also click here to create a new one. You can search for whatever events you might have created registration form for. And you can also filter based on the currently there's how for the three filter options are. You can filter forms that are online, that is people can actively register forms that are closed. And also forms that drafts that you haven't published yet. So once you're done with publishing the form that was in this page, once you're done clicking on publish, this is how the event page will look like your event page. So currently currently this is how the normal event page looks like. But for this, the current idea for the the only change we have now is this bottom sheet below. So that's the only change that is made to the current design of the event page. So this is added to the bottom of the event page to the bottom of the screen, not the bottom of the event page. So you can scroll on that. So this bottom sheet is always at the over the text. So it's not at the bottom. So whether participants or whether this page can click on this button to join or register for the event. And if the person wants to see more details, can click on the bottom panel or can click on this more details. And it opens up to reveal a side panel like this. So you can see more information about the events, you can see the dates and time, you can see the organizers and you can see the participants who have registered. I can also proceed to, the person can also proceed to register. So we haven't worked on the flow for how participants will get to register. But the current idea is that since currently since we are only collecting the username currently. So the idea is that if the person is already signed into Wikipedia, once the person clicks on this button, the person automatically joins the event. If the person is not signed in, the person is asked to sign in. If the person doesn't have an account, the person is asked to create a Wikipedia account. So that's all for the flow. Just wanted to mention this briefly. So like I mentioned earlier, this whole workflow exists within Wikipedia. So our current idea for how to access this on the Wikipedia pages, the current idea we have. On one of the latest skins, the idea we have is that if you click on this button drop down here, the button to access that page will be somewhere on this list or on the negative vector, I think that was this code. You can click on contributions on the button to access the organizer center campaigns, events, distribution will be somewhere on this list. So this is the current ideas ideas we have for how the workflow will be. Like I mentioned earlier, this is a wireframe and so everything here is liable to change, nothing is finalized. So a lot of the feedback on how this workflow helps you as a campaign organizer. Achieve your goals regarding registration. What do you think works well for you and what do you think could be better improved or added? Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Gregory. Thank you, Ilana. Thank you, Alex, for your presentations. I think at this point we would invite questions from participants on the call. I'd just like to say that nothing is fixed, like Gregory has mentioned and repeated over again. We would invite your feedback and we would be glad to take any comments that you have about these. So I just wanted to share a few more logistical things with you before we leave. So what's next? We are expecting you to go on our project page, read staff on our project page. We'll be giving updates very soon on what we're doing on the project. I think it's also very important to rehash that engineers are not yet here. So feel free to go on our page and add any comments or questions that you may have. I want to also re-emphasize that we are giving you the opportunity to add your comments and feedback to the mirror board about the initial designs of the project and I would invite all of you to visit the mirror board to do that. Please feel free to send us messages on our top page if you have any concerns or comments or suggestions to the team. Thank you very much once again for joining us today and I hope this was what you want.


Dear students, now we will discuss about the distinctive characteristics and qualities that must be acquired by the social workers while performing their professional roles in providing the welfare services to the deserving segments of the society in the field. So, a very important quality which should be present in the personality of a social worker is love of people. As we know, their social workers have to work for the welfare of the humanity, for the welfare of the people.  Love of people is usually the greatest motivation for social work students and social work practitioners to become involved in interventions. A prerequisite is therefore that a social worker must like and be entrusted in people. Another important quality which should be present on the part of the professional social worker is of emotional maturity. Emotional maturity suggests a complete developmental state but is something that each social worker can strive towards. It implies amongst others that a worker must have a super image of reality and be able to work independently, cope with frustration, control impulsive behavior, recognize related factors and take definite actions to solve the problems. An emotionally mature person is able to realize and acknowledge his or her human feelings and the feelings of the client. Such a worker can work through hurt feelings, through disturbed circumstances and imbalanced conditions and can identify, examine, acknowledge and crack their own faults as well. Another important quality which should be present in the role of a professional social worker is the quality of self-awareness. Self-awareness implies that the social worker is striving towards self-acknowledge by being in touch with his or her own needs, motives and values of his or her profession. The worker attempts to be in control of his or her feelings and behavior and is not easily threatened by others and is not easily to be hopeless and helpless by the unfavorable social circumstances. And the worker is comfortable with him or herself in every kind of circumstances. The worker is also aware of personal unresolved conflicts and makes every attempt not to allow this or harm others because of having the quality of self-awareness on his or her part. Then the social worker practitioner must have a strong interpersonal communication abilities and this communication must constantly be maintained at all levels. This implies there for that communication must be both tactful and acceptable. The ability to listen should be equally good as the ability to talk and the social worker must be aware of the effect that his or her conversation is going to make on the part of the client. And simultaneously the worker's verbal and nonverbal communication, the impact of verbal and nonverbal communication should also be known by the workers that the impact that conversation is going to make on the part of others. Then the workers, the social workers must have a strong empathetic understanding and why because not all people can enter into another person's world of experiences with the same ease. Empathetic understanding involves being able to think with someone by separating yourself from your own frame of reference. This must however be an objective action so that you do not take on others' problems. The social workers should have the quality to learn in an eager manner and the social workers must be eager to learn. No social worker can ever be truly competent if he or she is not eager to learn. This involves an ambition to know more so as to deliver a better service with a comprehensive understanding of all the social phenomena he or she is going to tackle. This is achieved through self development and this can be attained through having the eagerness to learn. Although basic intelligence is necessary, no doubt it is influenced by the workers openness towards learning. The social workers must be open and must be ready to worse learning in all the circumstances and social workers, social practitioners must avoid these kind of statements such as I am very experienced, I work from experience, I have an intuitive touch and my intuition is telling me what is going to happen in the next moment and what will happen in the future and I do not like studying because I know enough. This usually indicates a learning block that can seriously hamper the competency level of a social worker. Then another important quality is assertiveness. It is becoming all the more important for the social worker to act assertively with systems. This involves the manner in which the worker handles, expresses and asserts himself or herself in the face of others. This involves the capacity of the worker to convey for example knowledge, values and skills in such a manner that the rights of all participants are respected. All the rights of other are respected by the worker including the rights of the worker as well. And this doesn't imply a passivity or aggressiveness from the worker's side. Another significant quality which is necessity to be attained by the professional social worker is preservance. Preservants, there is the tendency both nationally, internationally to expect social workers to provide more assistance with less resources. Fortunately or unfortunately this kind of expectation exists in every corner of the society. For this reason the social worker must be tenacious because progress, development and change is sometimes laborious and slow. So the social workers must be realistic and challenges must be accepted no doubt without any hesitation and should have a motivating effect upon the worker. Social worker must be a responsible person and as a social worker, as a professional social worker, work to a large extent autonomously and as a member of the team in any social welfare setting. And there's a great responsibility is owed to the clients and the community. In order to comply with these said responsibilities, the worker must be self-disciplined and primarily responsible towards his or her profession, towards his or her client, even towards himself or herself as well. The responsibility of the social worker is comprised specifically of professional responsibilities such as maintaining confidentiality and general ethics. If the worker doesn't take basic responsibilities seriously, his or her professional position will be seriously compromised and can be regarded as equal to that of the client system, the part of the problem.


Why are we standing here? Why in 2023 do we need to flow the streets globally across Europe, in Berlin, of all places, to demand an end to a genocide which our governments knowingly support? Not only that, why did we have to fear that we may be silenced, prevented from standing here and speaking out? Why does this government criminalize our solidarity and stands in solidarity with war criminals? This is only the latest horrific chapter in a nightmare that our countries unleashed upon the Palestinian people 75 years ago. The killing intensifies at times, but let's be clear, it never truly stops. How many innocent lives have those 75 years claimed? How many Israeli missiles have delivered death and destruction since we woke up this morning? How many children have been killed or maimed since we gathered here? And they speak of humanitarian pauses, a pause in the massacring of innocents, a pause in the erasure of entire families, a pause in the ethnic cleansing of over 2 million people. You don't ask for a genocide to pause, you demand a genocide to stop. But remember this, let not only the brutality of the Israeli government enrages, let also the resilience of the Palestinian people inspire us. One side has every tool of mass destruction at its disposal, the other has nothing except a determination to live in peace and freedom. This determination will outlast oppression, it will outlive injustice, it will deliver peace and freedom, not only for them, because this will mean peace and freedom for people of all creeds and ethnicities in Palestine. It will renew inspiration for the oppressed around the world, because if the Palestinian people can persevere and win, so can they, and so can we. So today we link arms around the world to demand an end to genocide, occupation and apartheid. Together we will bring freedom to the land of Palestine. Palestinians will be free, Israelis will be free, people of all creeds and ethnicities will be free, Palestine will be free, long live Palestine. Long live Palestine! Thank you.