[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, how WordPress education programs are growing.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox, and use the form there.

So on the podcast today, we are joined by three WordPress Education Initiative leaders, Destiny Kanno, Anand Upadhyay and Maciej Pilarski.

Together, they have spent years at the heart of WordPress training and outreach, working in roles spanning community education management, plugin development, and credit program administration. Their efforts have helped shape student engagement and university partnerships across the globe, introducing thousands of learners to WordPress.

The conversation focused on the current landscape of WordPress education with particular attention to three key initiatives, the WordPress Credits Program, Campus Connect, and Student Clubs.

Each initiative is designed to provide unique entry points for students of all ages and education levels. From high schoolers building their first site in a library to university students earning official credits for open source contributions.

We discussed the different approaches these programmes take. WP Credits ties student work directly to academic credit and mentorship. Campus Connect provides flexible, community driven, events in diverse locations and Student Clubs foster sustainable, peer led, learning within schools and other institutions. We explore how these models feed into each other, building a sustainable ecosystem for ongoing growth in the WordPress community.

We also get into the importance of repeat campus partnerships, the need for scalable facilitator training, and the role of recognition, certificates, badges, and public showcases in keeping students motivated and validated in their journey.

If you’re curious about the growing movement to bring WordPress knowledge to the next generation, or are looking to get involved with education in your local community, this episode is for you.

If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.

And so without further delay, I bring you Destiny Kanno, Anand Upadhyay and Maciej Pilarski.

I am joined on the podcast by Destiny Kanno, by Anand Upadhyay and Maciej Pilarski. Hello, one and all. Nice to have you with us.

[00:03:29] Destiny Kanno: Hello. Thank you.

[00:03:30] Anand Upadhyay: Hello.

[00:03:31] Maciej Pilarski: Hello.

[00:03:32] Nathan Wrigley: So a few months ago, back in, I think it was September 2025, I was joined by two of the three participants on the call today. I was joined by Destiny and I was joined by Anand. We were also joined at that point by Isotta, but she’s not on the call today. We’ve obviously got a wonderful replacement, Maciej who’s going to do a fabulous job explaining the bits and pieces here.

But the intention of that episode, which you can find on the WP Tavern website, it’s episode number 183, was to find out about all of the overlapping education initiatives in the WordPress space. And it was born, I think, largely out of a sense of curiosity on my part, but also a somewhat sense of confusion, because there were lots of things which were going on. Some of them seemed to be slightly overlapping. There was a conflict of names in some cases. So that episode was laying out the groundworks of what has been happening in the WordPress space.

When that conversation finished and we’d click the stop record button, I said, that was absolutely fascinating. This seems to be moving at such a rate, wouldn’t it be good to revisit this whole subject in about six months time?

Well, we missed that target, but here we are, maybe eight months later. I think my intuition at that point was correct, because being a close observer of what’s going on in the WordPress community, I think it’s fair to say that the educational space has been somewhat turbocharged during the last eight months.

And so today’s episode, with the help of the three people I’ve just mentioned, is to describe what’s going on, what’s changed, maybe some things that have been mothballed, but certainly a lot of things that are new and interesting and have gained a lot of momentum.

But I think, dear listener, the intention of this episode is to get you involved. Is to get to the end of this episode and for your curiosity to have been turned into action. To have gotten you out of your chair, written an email, turned up to an event, helped organise a thing.

So please have that in the back of your mind. If you’re sitting listening to this in a car, at your desktop, there is actual action that could be taken at the end of this. I think the intention of all four of us on this panel would be dearly for that to happen.

Okay, let’s establish the credentials of the people that we’re going to be talking to today. So we’ll just do a little potted bio of you one at a time. So we’ll begin with Destiny, if you could just tell us a little bit about you, your relationship with education in the WordPress space, I suppose would be apropos.

[00:06:01] Destiny Kanno: Yeah, absolutely. So again, Destiny Kanno. I’m currently working as an education program manager sponsored by Automattic. And I work directly with the Make WordPress Community Team. And I also work adjacently with the training team as well, because education training materials, they go pretty hand in hand. And I’ve been doing this now for about four years and, yeah, it’s just evolved since my original time working on Learn WordPress, and that relaunch that happened, to now, yeah, these wonderful programs that are spreading like wildfire as you said.

[00:06:37] Nathan Wrigley: Fantastic. Thank you so much. Okay, we’ll move over to Anand for the same sort of introductory moment.

[00:06:43] Anand Upadhyay: Yes. So my name is Anand Upadhyay, and I run the WordPress plugin development company, WPVibes. Apart from that, I’m very much involved in the WordPress community and I contribute in multiple ways. It can be documentation, it can be Core, Polyglots. But I’m also keenly involved in the community part, and specifically I can say with the education initiatives, I started with WP Campus Connect in WordPress Campus Connect in 2024. And since then, after that we started joining hands with Destiny and we started evolving this program in a much bigger shape. So that’s it.

[00:07:16] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Thank you so much. And last, but by no means least, Maciej.

[00:07:20] Maciej Pilarski: Yeah. Thanks for having me. My name is Maciej Pilarski. So I’ve been doing anything related to WordPress pretty much since 2007, so that’s been a while. But the biggest breakthrough for me was 2014 when I actually volunteered to WordCamp Europe in Sovia, Bulgaria. That opened my eyes to the whole community, everything that is happening around WordPress.

And since then, pretty much I’ve been working for multiple companies from the WordPress ecosystem. I joined Automattic in 2016. For many years I’ve been a Happiness Engineer, and since October last year, I’ve joined Isotta as one of the admins of the WordPress Credit program. And since that time, I will have been helping her out to grow that initiative.

And Destiny mentioned, it spreads like fire because at that time we had six universities onboarded, now we are at 21. The 21st, we got it after WordCamp Asia actually through a connection made there. And it’s our first institution from Africa, from Uganda. A huge shout out to Stephen Dumba, who I connected with during the event. And after that, pretty much a week after we signed our first partnership from Africa. So we’re actively growing and getting new institutions on board.

[00:08:42] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you so much. Gosh, there was an awful lot in there, wasn’t there? That was really interesting. We’ll try and unpack quite a lot of that.

Firstly, a sort of slightly personal message from me. I don’t usually reveal much about myself on this podcast. I take the position that I’m a, kind of like an interested party, but don’t really give much of my own thoughts. However, this is different because I cannot think of a more interesting, meaningful, moral, let’s go with that word as well, use of time than educating people. It simply is the most profoundly useful thing to do with your life.

Now, obviously people will have different opinions about that, but the juxtaposition of free open source software, in this case WordPress, and education is a real sweet spot for me. I just think that is such an amazing thing to be involved in, to have going on in the background.

If you think about it, an open source project, like how many open source projects have this level of stuff going on in the education space, this real international footprint. Things going on which we’ll find out about in a minute. It’s really fascinating.

And I am sure that the listenership to this podcast, the vast majority of people listening will never have encountered much of this before. Maybe they’ve seen stuff on Learn because they want to technically learn about WordPress in an online capacity, but we’re going to be delving into real world events affecting real adults, real youngsters.

And so anyway, that’s my little bit at the beginning, just how curious it is that the project is so big that we’ve got this international footprint of education. And so I suppose what we should do right at the beginning is lay out the different initiatives and just name them, and try to figure out how they differ from each other. Just so that we’ve got some kind of awareness.

So I don’t know which one of you wants to take that, but if maybe you take one each or something, I don’t know. If we just want to lay out the, just erect that tent basically so that we know what the initiatives are called, and how they differ from one another. So I’ll open that up. Whoever wants to step in.

[00:10:48] Maciej Pilarski: I can start with the Credits Program. So the Credits Program is based, it’s a contribution based program, internship, initiative by the WordPress Foundation that connects higher education students with the global open source community. So basically it’s an opportunity for the students as part of the educational curriculum to contribute to the WordPress community.

There are two types of courses that the students can do. One of them is 50 hours, the second one is 150 hours. Usually the students do that during a full academic semester. And as part of that, students are first onboarded into the WordPress ecosystem and the wider open source ecosystem where they learn not only about WordPress, but open source as a whole, and how crucial it is for the internet.

Then the second phase is picking the contribution area to which they would like to contribute. All the contributions areas basically are the ones that are listed at make.wordpress.org. So any team that is listed there, students can pick from that area. During that phase, they work on a particular area that they have selected.

And finally, during phase three, they wrap up the whole achievements, the contribution, what they did, they publish a final post. And what is also very important as part of the credit scores, students have also assigned a mentor from the WordPress community that guides them through the whole process. We don’t leave them alone. We connect them with actual mentors from the WordPress community that are vetted by us, that guide them through the whole journey into the contribution and the whole WordPress ecosystem.

So it works on multiple levels. For me, this connection is also special because it builds this bridge between the previous generation of WordPress contributors to the new one where they are introduced and can start working on any fields of contribution.

What is also important is that this is not limited to technical universities. Pretty much any type of university can participate in the program. The first university that we started with was University of Pisa, and it was the humanity studies. So the students from humanity field were the first group who started the Credits Program. There’s room for pretty much anyone from any field.

[00:13:18] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. There’s a lot there. Wow. I’ve just been taking notes and I’ve almost filled an entire A4 page. So WP Credits, the WordPress Credits Program, I guess the name sort of gives it away. The idea here is that you trade time for university or higher education credit. So credit being, I suppose if you were to atomise your three year degree, you might do, I don’t know, 12 modules or something like that. The idea is that one of those modules, perhaps it’s more, becomes something in the WordPress, but also curiously the free open source software space as well. I didn’t actually know that.

The idea is that you link up with real world institutions. So the first one was Pisa, and maybe we can get into which other ones have come along. And in exchange for 50 hours or 150 hours, you will be given that credit, which can then go to the overall awarding of a degree or whatever it is that you are hoping to get.

You’re then linked up with team members, WordPress community team members who will mentor you and shepherd you through this process. And the idea is that it culminates, I think you said in a final post, which I suppose in a sense is a bit like a dissertation or something like that, you sum up all the different bits and pieces. Yeah.

[00:14:29] Maciej Pilarski: Once that happens, the students also receives an official certificate from the WordPress Foundation, signed by Matt himself, that certifies that they completed the course. And what is also important to know, the whole progress through the course and what they did during the course, it’s also stored on the wordpress.org profile. So any contributions that they did, for example, photos that they’ve uploaded, this all will be visible on the wordpress.org profile. And they also receive a special badge dedicated to students who graduated from that program.

So it really gets them started into the WordPress ecosystem, and at the same time creates something like a small portfolio for any future company that would like to, for example, hire them. Because they have a proven history of contributing to the ecosystem.

[00:15:20] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so that’s an interesting quid pro quo, isn’t it? So the idea is you do all this work, which on the face of it, I suppose looks very philanthropic, you know, you’re giving up your time, but you get a real thing at the back end of it. You get a certificate. You can then presumably apply for jobs and indicate, okay, I’ve done this, I’ve contributed in this meaningful way.

What I think is really interesting there, and it kind of gets lost, I’ve worked in education in the past and I know the red tape that’s involved in doing anything in the education space. There is so much red tape. And I can only imagine what’s happened in the background to enable these kind of things. You know, the back and forth, the tennis of emails that go on and on and the proof that’s required to categorically show that this thing that we are doing is worth something. You know, it’s not just this Mickey Mouse. We use that expression, Mickey Mouse kind of qualification that really, it doesn’t actually require any hard work. It’s just there, nothing really in it, but you get an accreditation anyway.

I can only imagine the hard work that has gone in every single time you touch a new institution, trying to convince them that this is legitimate, that this is real. You’ve just kind of glossed over all of that by just describing what is in existence, not necessarily what has gone on to make it happen. I know that there’s probably more than the three of you involved in this, but my profound thanks for all of that hard work, which presumably is utterly and completely invisible. And I can only imagine what’s going on there. So yeah, thank you for all of that.

[00:16:54] Maciej Pilarski: Thank you for that.

[00:16:54] Nathan Wrigley: So that was WP Credits. So that was one wing of the things that we’re going to discuss today. Should we move on to another one and maybe somebody else wants to take the helm?

[00:17:03] Anand Upadhyay: I think Destiny can take Campus Connect and then I will take Student Clubs.

[00:17:06] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Destiny, let’s move over to you and see what you can tell us about something different.

[00:17:11] Destiny Kanno: Yeah, so I’d love to tell you more about WordPress Campus Connect. And the way we ended with WordPress Credits, I think is also very critical to the story of Campus Connect because, you know, it started with Campus Connect first, and that’s how organisers such as Anand and Pooja like were able to get those connections with the universities through being boots on the ground, you know, having those relationships. Proving through action that these activities that we’re doing with the students are having real impact and are showing real results.

Slowly building up these kind of case studies in a way has helped open a lot of doors, especially with Campus Connect now, we’ve done a lot of events, especially since we last talked. Like I think this year alone, we’ve already had 22 Campus Connect events. So, like it’s not even half the year and it’s quickly becoming one of the biggest run events, WordPress official series.

But these events are like a way of opening the door, right? Hey, here’s a free learning opportunity for your students. And as you said, like the red tape is there. A lot of institutions are like, wait, so what’s in it for you? Why is, there’s a little bit of dubiousness sometimes in the reaction, right? You’re going to give your time to educate our students, why? But once they see, it’s like, no, we really are just passionate about spreading WordPress, showing students what’s capable with their website, how it applies to different skillsets as well. Like it’s not just for coders, it is for marketers, it is for designers.

You know, there’s so many career opportunities that once we just get the foot in the door and we’re able to showcase that, a lot of institutions are like, okay, now I get it. I do want to highlight in Anand’s case, like they’re going to have their third WordPress Campus Connect in Ajmer this year. You’ve got repeat institutions. I’ve heard you also have institutions that are like, when are you going to come to our place and teach WordPress? You know, once the fire is lit and people see how bright and shiny it is, like people want to get involved.

But as you said, like getting it to click for people, that is like the most difficult part. And I’ll give an example of, right now in Japan, we had our first WordPress Campus Connect event on the 9th of May. So I’m like, woo hoo. Like it finally happened. But we have this community in Japan that is like very passionate, very active. So when I first was like introducing the concept of Campus Connect, people were like, okay, but like how do we do this? What’s it about? It takes like a lot of presentations, a lot of going to people in person and talking. Helping them even shape the conversation that they’re going to have with the institution to sell this amazing gift of WordPress on their campus.

And after this one on the ninth, like now we have a case study in Japan that others can now use to be a starting point for those conversations going forward. So I think, once you have that one step, the gate just slowly opens until it’s just, the doors bang open in each way. But yeah, we’ve seen really great success with Campus Connect and it’s just like honestly, it just keeps growing.

[00:20:30] Nathan Wrigley: Can I just ask a quick question? So I just want to draw a very clear line for everybody that’s listening to this, what the difference may be between Campus Connect and WP Credits. Because from the description that we’ve had so far, it may be that you’ve fallen into the trap of thinking, well, they sound like they might be the same thing. So could you just, Destiny, just tease out where Campus Connect differs? Maybe in the nature of the event, the timing of the event, the availability, the age group, those kind of things that separate WP Credits from the Campus Connect initiative.

[00:21:02] Destiny Kanno: Yeah. Thank you, that’s like a really great distinction to make. So whereas WordPress Credits is geared toward higher education, Campus Connect is geared toward, honestly any level of students as long as they’re able to browse the web safely, and enjoy and participate.

So that means, Elementary school students now are pretty good at devices. High school students, college students, vocational students. We honestly kept the door pretty open in terms of what a campus means. We’ve even had a Campus Connect event in Uganda in a library, the Lira Public Library because students were able to go there right?

We were trying to make it as barrier free for students wherever their campus is. And so that’s, I think, the main difference. It’s more wide ranging in terms of who can participate as a student. And then also the fact that it could be a one-off event, so a one day event. A lot nowadays are multiple day events, they’ll maybe go two times out of a month, or a couple days consecutively. And then after that it’s up to really the organisers in the institution whether or not we have another addition on their campus the same year, or the next year.

[00:22:15] Nathan Wrigley: I’m going to tease out a few things. I just want to point out to, me as an English person, that is to say, not an English speaker, but somebody from England, campus has a really defined definition, and it’s usually bound to a university. Whereas it sounds like the description here, campus literally means the place where education happens, not it’s 18 years old and older, you know, people doing degrees, bachelors and PhDs and that kind of thing. Basically, if there’s an institution somewhere, that’s what the campus is in this case. Okay.

So the WP Credits program sounds like you forge your relationship with the university, and correct me if I’m wrong, it sounds like it takes place inside that institution, and it’s part of that program and what have you.

The Campus Connect initiative is much more ad hoc. It could be a one-off, it could be monthly, it could be inside a library, it could be inside the school, it could be an inside an institution. It feels a bit more like, I don’t know, a WordPress Meetup, but geared towards a younger audience or something like that.

And the minimum age requirement is really driven by your capacity to type on a keyboard and hold a mouse and those kind of things. And that’s kind of curious to me because I think my educational experience was always younger children. It’s really interesting how patterns are laid down at a very, very early age. Patterns that go on into much later life get laid down, typically at incredibly young ages. So this is fascinating for digging into that.

And it’s not just about, say, the code, it sounds like code is on the menu, but it could be about marketing, it could be about design. Basically the gamut of anything online, CMSy, those kind of things. Okay, is there anything you want to add? Did I misunderstand anything there, or misstate anything there?

[00:24:02] Destiny Kanno: No, I think you’re completely right. We’re trying to convey that WordPress isn’t just a blogging software that I think is still a lot of people have a mentality of. Like there are many ways to utilise it that goes beyond that.

And one thing I did want to add are a couple numbers. So since WordPress Campus Connect became official in May of 2025, an official WordPress event series, I should say, we’ve had 42 completed events, with 71 participating institutions, and over 5,500 students have been reached.

[00:24:37] Nathan Wrigley: That’s something else. 42 events, 71 institutions, and I think you said five and a half thousand individuals. Good grief. I don’t know what the measure of success is for this, but that feels like success to me.

I mean, imagine turning up to a WordCamp, like a flagship WordCamp and five and a half thousand people descending on you. You’d feel slightly overwhelmed. That’s a lot, isn’t it? Gosh, that’s pretty remarkable. Wow. Congratulations.

[00:25:05] Destiny Kanno: And the majority, the outcome, the students make a website. So we could almost count those students as also new WordPress websites that are live now on the web. So within a year, organisers around the world have been able to make that happen.

[00:25:19] Nathan Wrigley: Could I just perhaps draw another distinction as well, just very quickly, because it sounds like the WordPress Credit system, because it’s binding itself to institutions, it sounds like there might be more paperwork going on there, and maybe more high level meetings that need to take place. Whereas Campus Connect feels much more community driven. It’s the kind of thing that, quite literally, anybody listening to this podcast with a fair wind could have one of those going in a handful of months. If they’ve got the right initiative and they can find the audience for that.

Again, is that about right? There’s sort of more opportunity to become involved with the Campus Connect initiatives. You don’t need to have that academic background or have a point of contact at a university. You basically just need a building, some interest and a bunch of students.

[00:26:02] Destiny Kanno: Yeah, the key thing is, you know, having a real connection to the campus that you’re going to present at. But you’re exactly right. We tried really hard to lower the barrier to organise these events. Because I don’t know if you’ve organised a WordPress event before, there’s kind of a lot of hoops you have to jump through. And we’re like, okay, how can we think about this in a different way?

And I think that also has positive repercussions for how we organise other events too, that are, changes are being thought about too so that we can enable people and empower them to put these events, instead of bogging them down and process and a little bit of bureaucracy to say.

[00:26:38] Nathan Wrigley: So what’s really curious about that as well is we’re all in different parts of the world, aren’t we? People on the call today are in Japan and I’m in Europe and, Anand, are you in India? I think.

[00:26:47] Anand Upadhyay: Yeah.

[00:26:47] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Each of those events, I guess would look quite different. The kind of nature of the attendees, the nature of the kind of building it might be in, the institution. And it really is, you just grab what’s around you I suppose, and work with that. If you’ve got a connection to an institution, you can go for it. Maciej, I feel like I crosstalked you. I think you wanted to say quite a few times and I’ve just interrupted. I’m very sorry.

[00:27:08] Maciej Pilarski: No worries about that. So I wanted to add that those initiatives set backgrounds for each other. Because in some uni institutions, the interest sparks with a Campus Connect event, and that gets the institution interested in those initiatives, which sets background for WordCamp Credit.

And it happens also the other way around, where we start with an institution that starts credits and then we get the students interested in WordPress in general, the community, which leads to a Campus Connect event during the Credits Program. What is important is that those initiatives don’t compete with each other. They support each other.

[00:27:51] Nathan Wrigley: Right, so there’s a lovely virtuous cycle there, isn’t there? Where the two things can be going on in harmony, one promoting the other and they’re definitely not in competition. Okay. That’s really interesting.

One final question on Campus Connect, and I’ll direct this at Destiny, just because she’s been handling that. With the WP Credits thing, there is this moment where you hold the certificate in your hand and you go, yay, did it.

Is the same thing true of Campus Connect or is it more of a show up to the one event, you know that you did that, that was great, you can file that away in your own head as a thing? Or is there some sort of accreditation, or certificate giving, or badge giving, or profile updating that might go on on wordpress.org? Is there any sort of thing that the attendees receive, and I suppose that the people that are organising might receive as well?

[00:28:37] Destiny Kanno: Yes. So we do have a certificate of participation that students can receive signed by WordPress Foundation Executive Director, Mary Hubbard. And that just needs to be requested by the organisers ahead of time, because we need to get the signature and all that. So yes, they can come away with that. And we’ve heard really positive things about that, like it motivates them. They’re like, yeah, I did something, which they did.

[00:29:01] Nathan Wrigley: There we go. That was WP Credits and WP Campus Connect.

Can I just say at this point, dear listener, if at this point you’re thinking hang on a minute, there’s a lot going on here, don’t worry, there’ll be show notes. If you go to the WP Tavern website, there’ll be show notes. I’ll try to list out as many sensible links to get you to the root of each one of these initiatives, so that you can begin your journey and fan out from there.

I’m not sure what episode number this will be, but if you just go and search for, oh, I don’t know, Destiny or Anand or Maciej, you could probably find the episode that way. And all the show notes will contain all of the links.

Right, in which case, I think it might be Anand’s turn. What have you decided to take on Anand?

[00:29:39] Anand Upadhyay: So I will be sharing my thoughts on the third part of this whole education initiative ecosystem. So that is a Student Club. Just a few minutes before you were giving the analogue of meetup with this Campus Connect. So I would like to share the same analogue with us because we are more accustomed with like other terms of WordCamps and Meetups and contributer days.

WordPress Campus Connect is kind of like a WordCamp happening in the campus, because it’s like a big day event that holds everything happening, different kind of sessions, maybe workshops happening. So I would compare it with that thing.

And same way, credits thing, Credit Program is kind of like ongoing contribution series because more focused on the contribution part because the student devote 150 hours of their program. A lot of period goes to the contribution.

And now the same way we, if we talk about the Student club, it’s similar to like the Meetups that we have. But these are the in campus meetups for the students and by the students. How do things get started? Like the Campus Connect introduce the WordPress to those campuses and to those students, but since most of the campus, it’s a once in a year event. So once this event has sparked something about the WordPress in the students. So keeping that momentum going on, that’s where the Student Clubs come in.

So with the Student Club, it’s kind of like, as I mentioned, it’s like an in campus meet program. So a student can gather themselves, they can form a club and a couple of students can be nominated as club organisers, student club organiser from their campus. And then they organise the in-campus events, maybe like once in a month or twice a month, depending on academic calendar. There are a lot of hurdles in doing those things continuously.

But they usually do once or twice a month. They do a kind of a meetup in their campus. The students gathered together. They learn from variable resources available from WordPress. And from those resources, they share with the other students. It’s kind of a group learning, group study, that we use. Education live, we always do that. It’s kind of a group study. They’re learning from themselves. If someone has learned something, they are helping others to learn those things.

So I would just like to give some of the examples from my city. There are multiple Student Clubs are going on. When we went to the campus, we just taught like a small group of students about the WordPress, because we’d have some limitations of the resources, of the setting arrangement. We cannot call all the students of the campus and, okay, come together and I have a amazing workshop. So we have given the WordPress walk through to the limited number of students.

After that, they form a Student Club in their campus because they got very much interested. Then the first session they did was like, they started teaching to their juniors, like the students who have just entered the campus. They took a session for them. So they told, whatever we have told them, they have taught the same thing to the juniors.

After that, in the next few session, they experimented different things. Like in some session they’re just doing a fun quiz around WordPress. And in some sessions they are doing a kind of like a, I would say like a hackathon kind of thing. So they are just picking up a website. Or you can, just similar to the speed build challenge that Jamie do. So they have just one website open on the screen and everybody’s like cloning that website.

So there are different ways students are engaging through those student clubs. So it is helping to keep the momentum going on so that the student keep learning about WordPress and they are also connecting with the community members for the guidance about how they can learn more. What should they learn next if they are sharing their experience. Like we have covered these things and, what should we go next?

And in the recent WordCamp Asia, they’re also one of the Student Club lead from my city. She joined the event and there are conversation with the, like other community members who has offered them like, okay, we can come to your campus, or we can do, have a webinar for your campus where we can teach you particular subjects, particular topics. Maybe they can talk about SEO, maybe they can talk about plugin development.

So this is also opening the horizon for them, to learn from people across the world. So that is how the Student Clubs are happening. The examples I’ve gave, again, from my own city because I’m closely mentoring them, but there’s similar things are happening across the world.

So it is helping to create a kind of sustainable environment for the long-term sustainable environment in the campus. So the next time when we go to that campus, we are not going to teach like the basics of WordPress, because we want like, the ecosystem should be built within the campus, so every student know about the WordPress. Because last time when we went to the campus, we have to tell everything about WordPress because why you should learn WordPress.

So the Student Clubs, my ambition is that, wherever the Student Club is from, next time a Campus Connect event is happening, next time we should not tell them about what is WordPress and why they should learn this thing. There should be already a sustainable ecosystem.

And I feel that all these three programs are like very much interconnected. And the real impact of these programs, we will be able to see in the next two or three years. And there will be a regular ongoing activities around WordPress in the campus.

And these are also kind of a balance program as well. Like the Campus Connect is introducing WordPress to the students, Credits Program is motivating them more towards like the contribution part. And I would say that Student Clubs is more inclined towards getting new users to the WordPress. Because if we keep on focusing on the contribution, contribution, but if we discard the like increasing the number of new users, so we are not going to win. We need a balanced state.

The Student Club is trying to, learning how to build website, how to mastering the skills of the WordPress. And later on, many of them are going to join the contribution part as well.

So this whole ecosystem is built around bringing more people to the contribution, bringing more people to use WordPress, build websites, as in, for the individuals as a business as well. So that’s how all these three programrs are very much interconnected, and growing together fast.

[00:35:16] Nathan Wrigley: It feels like, of the three things that we’ve talked about, so WP Credits, Campus Connect, the Student Club, this final one that you’ve just covered, it feels like that’s got a very flat hierarchy to it. In other words, there’s like this peer learning. So it feels like more or less anybody can show up and demonstrate anything, which might then lead to somebody else thinking, okay, that was interesting, I’ll take on next month’s one because I’ve now seen that’s doable. Less hierarchy, if you know what I mean? So a much more flat structure.

[00:35:45] Anand Upadhyay: Because when we started Campus Connect, we also get a lot of attraction in the local community as well. And people join our Meetup groups. But then it becomes difficult for us, how to plan about the topics for our meetup. We have some experienced professionals coming in. We have some students coming in, and we plan the topics that suits the professionals. The student will feel like, okay, what’s they’re talking, we are not getting anything in our mind. If we bring the topics, very basic topics and the professionals who are joining the community meetups, they’ll feel like, okay, these are very basic stuff, why am I coming here?

Student Clubs giving them their own platform, giving them a own opportunity. Okay, these are all the familiar faces. It is also giving the opportunity to come on the stage, come onto the stage and get out of your fear as well. It is also generating leadership qualities in them. Okay, we have to keep this momentum going on and we have to keep the activities going on. So there are a lot of ways, apart from learning WordPress, there are a lot of other ways it is helping the students as well.

[00:36:40] Nathan Wrigley: When you have to stand up in front of a bunch of people and deliver something, obviously there’s a whole bunch of us that are just really confident at doing that, quite happy to stand up and do that kind of thing off the bat. But equally, there’s people for whom that is just the most terrifying experience possible. You know, standing up in front of two or three people, oh boy, you know, anything above that is just off the books.

And I was just wondering about that, whether or not there’s, in this particular style of event, the Student Club, whether there is a growing corpus of, I don’t know, previously done topics or topic suggestions or slide decks or anything like that, which might enable people to feel that level of confidence? I don’t know if that’s something which is being put together. Just resources which enable somebody who doesn’t have the confidence, let’s go with that word, who then may gain that confidence. And I’m going to pass this to Destiny because she’s waving her hand.

[00:37:30] Destiny Kanno: I was really hoping I could shamelessly plug this project. This is like, you’ve said the most opportune thing. So I’m actually developing right now what I’m like tentatively calling the Meetup Activity Library. It comes with like kits on certain topics. So for example, WordPress Playground was the first one I built. But it comes with the facilitation guide, which is a doc. So the facilitator can read through, understand the steps they’re going to go through in the activity, how to pace it. And then a presentation deck which they would display, if that’s available to them, to the folks that they’re presenting to. And it’s a hands-on activity only. So it’s not only presentation. The facilitator of course guides and talks them through things, but then people are getting hands-on experience with that topic along the way.

[00:38:16] Nathan Wrigley: That is a beautiful remover of barriers, because I think just having that little document, that little crutch, you don’t have to feel that you, okay, I’ve got to come up with a topic. Not only have I got to come up with a topic, but then I’ve got to research the topic, deliver the topic. If you can have it all on a thing that you can crib from, I don’t know, it just arms you with that confidence as you walk in. I think that’s such a brilliant topic. And, Maciej.

[00:38:40] Maciej Pilarski: Both Destiny and Anand mentioned two keywords, sustainability and facilitator. The goal of also getting all those educational initiatives going is also create in a sustainable way. We’re not pushing for numbers, but growing them in a smart way where we don’t get too many students so we get overwhelmed. We need to have enough mentors to accommodate those students, and also enough facilitators to be able to scale the program, to grow it in the future.

And it’s exactly what Destiny is now doing, the Facilitator Training Program, which gets more people from the educational sectors, community organisers, everyone on board, to jump on those educational initiatives and help us to grow. Because the number of every, all those students involved in participating in those programs is increasing and we need to be able to accommodate them. And through the Facilitator Training Program, this allows us to do that.

[00:39:42] Nathan Wrigley: It’s so interesting in open source software spaces as opposed to corporate spaces. I suppose the metric of success for anything like this in the corporate universe would be how many people showed up and gave us money in exchange for this knowledge or, you know, something akin to that. Basically a metric of humans in a room and money gained. And of course, the measurement of this is so not that.

I did wonder, Destiny obviously very proudly rattled off the statistics for Campus Connect, you know, the five and a half thousand attendees and all of that. I wondered if there were success criteria of some kind in the background, which guide you. You know, it’s not like, okay, well we didn’t meet that we’re going to abandon it all. But more, things like you would like to see happen, so aspirational goals. It sounds from what Maciej was saying that maybe the attendance growing slowly over time is some kind of measure of success. Maybe there is none of that, but I’ll just open that one up to see if you want to take that.

[00:40:38] Destiny Kanno: I think one definite measure of success is repeat events on certain campuses. So if the campus is saying, we love that, please come back, or please come again soon. I think that is a really great indicator that, not only did the students get something great out of it, but the school believes in it. And that’s what we want to do. We want to create these systems that, not only bring people into WordPress, but also continue this cycle of, you know, growth within the community, but also ownership by the institution.

Another measurement of success is the institution is like, okay, great, how do we learn how to do that ourselves? So we have some folks now working in the institution that are organising WordPress Campus Connect events that are helping facilitate these Student Clubs. So the faculty and educators themselves, they’re directly getting involved. And that for us as community members too, whose volunteer time is quite limited, as Maciej was saying, like it is a great multiplier that makes everything much more sustainable.

[00:41:45] Maciej Pilarski: So from the WordPress Credits perspective, we don’t hope all the students to turn into contributors. That would be amazing but that might not happen. I can share with you some numbers. So currently we have 450 students globally enrolled. For the whole program so far, 75 graduates.

We hope that some or as many as possible of those graduates who completed the program will stay and become active contributors to the WordPress community, stay engaged.

That’s one of the goals we are aiming for the Credits Program, to not just get this done, but this is building the next generation of contributors. We know that like we are ageing, we’re getting older every year. We are not getting younger, unfortunately. Getting those students staying in the community allows us to build those next generations of WordPress contributors that will also have completely different perspectives to how the community functions, how it was built.

What brought us here might not move us forward. So these new students will bring us this new, fresh perspective of how they would like the community to function and move it to the future, to be current, to stay up to date with what’s happening globally.

[00:43:00] Anand Upadhyay: That’s why it’s very difficult to like measure the impact in numbers because how it is impacting in the longer term. But yeah, it’s going to impact. And I would say also, like Destiny mentioned, one of the metrics is like this campus is willing to have the Campus Connect again and again in the campus.

So I just want to share one more. Like I just recently got a call from one of the faculty coordinators from one of the campus where we have a Student Club. And now they have like two months of vacations. And he called me like, okay, now the vacations are going on, students will not be here, so what can we do for the students to keep their involvement with the WordPress in those two months? So can we do something online? Can we do something like this?

When we get these calls, these kind of communications, that these are interactions that we have, this gives us a sense of like accomplishment. Okay, yeah, we were able to create some kind of interest in the students. Because we cannot expect that if we are going to like any campus and 100 or 200 students are participating in our Campus Connect, they are all going to jump into the WordPress. They are getting a lot of different kind of opportunities as well.

There are other technologies as well, which are, some students are going into that, some students are going into that. But we are showcasing the WordPress as one of the career opportunities. And they have a choice of multiple options, so they will choose what they do. But yeah, the impact will be seen in the next few years. Just like Maciej said, mentioned that he went to the WordCamp as a volunteer and it’s bring him into the community.

And the same is with me. I attended the WordCamp and just after coming out of the WordCamp, I started the Meetup group in my city. So I got inspired from that. So that is a result of that WordCamp. And that cannot be measured in the numbers. That can only be sensed when we are doing this kind of conversation. Okay, that WordCamp helped me, that WordCamp helped me.

The same way in future, these students who will join the community or the WordPress industry, they will be talking about, okay, I got first introduced about WordPress through a WordPress Campus Connect event or I got introduced to the contribution through WP Credits Program. So when these conversation will be happening in the future, then we will say that those are the real metrics that we are looking for.

[00:45:00] Nathan Wrigley: That’s really interesting, and I like that. It sounds like there’s not so much a focus on statistics, you know, literal, brutal numbers, more kind of playing it forwards and measuring the impact over many years, not, you know, a handful of months into the future.

[00:45:15] Destiny Kanno: So yes, we’re not like, okay, here’s our KPIs, you know, and here’s our hard metrics. But one thing I really noticed that our community is, it could be better at doing, is just talking about what happened. Because then you hear all these success stories and there are numbers in that. So like for example, Ajmer again, Women’s Day event this year. 50% of tickets sold were to students. And that’s directly because of the involvement in going to these campuses and teaching WordPress. And I’m like, that’s amazing, that’s direct injection of 50% youth into the WordPress community.

[00:45:52] Anand Upadhyay: And they sold out so fast.

[00:45:53] Destiny Kanno: And they sold out really fast, yeah.

[00:45:55] Anand Upadhyay: The organisers were hoping like, now we have to pitch out to sale our tickets. And they have planned a social media campaign around that. Okay, we will be periodically pitch a student on the social media to encourage the ticket purchase. And within one day, we sold out. And the whole social media campaign was like their whole planning was gone. We don’t have tickets.

[00:46:14] Nathan Wrigley: It’s really interesting that there’s all this success going on, and yet, as Destiny said, it is hard to get that discovered. Maybe it’s a case of shouting louder about the previous success. Maybe things like this podcast will help in some small way for things like that.

But I know what you mean. There’s a lot of people talking about the code, and there’s a lot of people talking about the plugins and the themes and whether or not we’re going to get collaborative editing in version 7 or 7.1. All of that seems to suck up all of the oxygen in the room. And yet, without a throughput of, let’s go for young adults, coming into the WordPress space, there’s not really a great deal of hope for a project over decades unless we get people of a much younger age beginning now. And I’ll just hand the torch to Maciej because I think he’s got something to add.

[00:47:05] Maciej Pilarski: But this is also changing because at WordCamp Asia, we were able to introduce the educational table during the contributor day. And I’m also organiser of WordCamp Europe that’s going to happen really soon in two, three weeks, beginning of June. And during WordCamp Europe, we will also have a contributor table, dedicated to education, but for the first time also educational track.

During the second day, we will start the whole day with topics related to education. We will have a discussion panel rethinking learning in WordPress that Mary will be participating. And later in that afternoon, we will have actual students, who take part in the program. Sharing the experience, presenting the results. Not only students from universities, but I’m also leading a group of high school students who’ve been working for the whole past semester with a teacher on some projects related to WordPress building websites. So they are super eager and excited to show them.

We will also showcase some students, teachers stories, how both of those sites motivated each other, learn from each other, and basically help us keep growing the community.

So WordCamp Europe definitely will feature some of those things. And we’re slowly introducing more and more those things into those flagship events and into the broader community.

[00:48:28] Nathan Wrigley: Really nice. Yeah, that’s really nice to hear. I think it’s a difficult circle to square, the idea of making this stuff visible so that everybody’s aware of it. Even if they’re only interested in running their agency, or writing code or whatever it is. Maybe to realise that this is some version of the underpinnings of the WordPress community without which the software ultimately doesn’t exist.

And it is quite curious. I don’t know if I’m reading between the lines here, I think I’m not, but I get the impression that, I’m going to use the phrase like, I don’t know, from higher up, let’s put it that way. It feels like education is taking a more central place. It feels like for example, Mary Hubbard, it feels like you’ve got a real advocate there. Again, I could be reading between the lines, but it feels like the words coming out of her mouth, I hear the word education coming out of her mouth quite a lot when she’s on stage.

So it feels like you’ve got some big hitters, let’s go with that. I don’t know if you’ve got anything you want to add to that, but it feels like the importance of this is more profound this year than it was a few years ago.

[00:49:33] Maciej Pilarski: You are correct. Mary is a big supporter of that and she also created this space for us to grow those initiatives that like allows us to grow that. Isotta started the first Credits Program at the Pisa University as an experiment. And from there it was proven that this actually works. It gets us universities and new contributors.

And then on the other side, there was those Campus Connect events that also organically grew up on their own. So basically there was a need. It feels like there was this hive mind somehow that worked also for all of us. All of us felt this need to introduce those things. It looks like we’ve reached a certain growth level for the community that we organically felt that that’s the direction that we should start heading.

[00:50:24] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. What’s interesting there as well is that it very much overlaps with maybe a concern. So we’ve touched on this at various points without saying it out loud quite. If you go to, and I’m going to exclude WordCamp Asia 2026 from what I’m about to say, because that event was very different. If you go to a typical WordCamp, the age skews, and I’m doing air quotes, older. You don’t typically look around and see a bunch of teenagers.

So that’s a concern. There’s this, like a pyramid, like a reverse pyramid, and if we don’t get the younger people coming up, the edifice of this entire project kind of becomes a lot more shaky. And we’ve lived through 22 plus years of WordPress, and I think quite a lot of those people began, a lot of the people who’ve been involved in the community began their careers using WordPress and they’ve kind of moved through WordPress as it’s evolved over those 22 years.

And not to, I don’t know quite how to say this. At some point they’re going to stop contributing. Their age will become something, you know, they want to retire or they want to move on or do some other things. Unless we build the scaffolding and put things in place so that young people feel they’ve got a place here, feel that, I don’t know, some proprietary system is not the way they want to go, they want to support the ethic of open source.

Unless these building blocks, these educational building blocks are put in place, then that’s going to be a bit of a concern. So to your point, Maciej, it organically grew. And what a nice thing that it did kind of organically grow because it’s sorely needed at the same time. There isn’t really a question in there. But anyway, there’s my observation. Anand, did you have something to say? I think you did.

[00:52:04] Anand Upadhyay: Yeah. So just want to add that thing you have raised recently. So the way that we want to teach the students about the open source as well, because if you go to the WP Credit curriculum, so the initial lessons, they learn through the, given to them to learn from the learn.wordpress. So it’s all about like open source ethics, and how the WordPress community, WordPress project works.

So this opens up their mind about the open source. Because in the education system, it is something that is not clearly mentioned. There are simple, just simple definitions around the open source. But open source is much more than those definitions.

And especially the open source community like WordPress. It’s more about the people. So the students also learn about how the community is working, how the people are working from the different time zones, people are joining hands for running the bigger events like WordCamp Asia or these Credits Programs. The students will learn all those things as well, and I’m sure when they will join as a contributor in the future, they will have lot of experience before joining as well.

[00:53:02] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you. I love that expression, by the way. You just dropped it in in the middle of a sentence there. You said people are joining hands. What a perfect summation of the entire enterprise being discussed today. Maciej, you raised your hand.

[00:53:14] Maciej Pilarski: Yeah, and besides the community goals and keeping it going, I have also a very personal goal that also is behind all of those things that I do. From my own experience, I had a pretty difficult and bumpy educational path, let’s call it. Unlocking those possibilities for those students, helping them out, making it easier for them, it’s one of my very personal goals, because I know it does not need to be very difficult or crazy when you study, especially when you are young. You’re not sure fully which direction you would like to go. So creating for them, one of those opportunities that might click for them is also something very personal and close to my heart. Because not everyone needs to struggle or have like difficulties, so.

[00:53:58] Nathan Wrigley: I am so glad you said that because that encapsulates all of it. That’s the entire point. It’s got to be that, right? So we’ve spent a long time talking about the minutiae of this, that, and the other thing. It all goes, like they’re spokes on a wheel. And the whole point is that little bit in the middle, which is the child, the adult, the human being somewhere who just wants to make use, wants to grow, wants to learn things, wants to figure things out.

With open source, with this kind of learning, there is potentially zero impediment, or at least very few impediments to actually get that learning underway. And so I think maybe we lost sight of that in this conversation a little bit. So I’m glad that you grounded it there, Maciej, right towards the end. That’s perfect. Destiny, was there anything you wanted to say? I don’t know if you were indicating that you did.

[00:54:48] Destiny Kanno: I know we’re like probably over time, but there’s still so much to share. Like even thinking about keeping WordPress relevant, right? For us and then also for youth. I think about the new AI Leaders Credential that was announced and is being worked on. And how tying WordPress to AI is like really helping students engage more, and see like the relevancy of it in a different way. Not even for the students, like for me, that’s challenging me and I think other organisers and learners of WordPress to be adaptable and think about WordPress differently in a new way of this year as AI keeps advancing.

And then you were also talking about wins, right? How do we celebrate that? I did want to surface, we have the Education Buzz Report, which goes out every month, which aims to try to surface all of these educational wins that are happening in the community. And I just have received some further collaboration from marketing to hopefully also broadcast that on our socials going forward so that we do get the word out.

And lastly, like celebrating the students too. There was a post that went out about the Student Clubs and the success. And we just want to make sure that in this, that they feel seen, right? And that this feels like a space for them. And I know WordPress Credits, we’re working on something to showcase, no, something went out recently. A post went out recently to showcase some of the successes of the students. And we just want to keep highlighting that as well. Because their work and the way they operate, especially because they’re coming in with different lenses, is really important to showcase and highlight and make sure that they feel like they deserve that.

[00:56:26] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, there was a post, I’ll try and link to it. I think it was like a week ago about the Student Clubs. There were three or four images, three or four photos and there were so many smiling faces in those pictures. It was absolutely lovely. Lots of people gathered in classrooms. I couldn’t exactly tell where, but it was just so nice seeing people kind of enjoying WordPress, having a nice time, bit of camaraderie, hanging out with each other, learning things. It was absolutely wonderful.

Unfortunately, I think time might have got the better of us. Hopefully, dear listener, what you’ve gained is an understanding that there’s so many layers to this educational initiative. It doesn’t appear to be in any way standing still. It’s growing. It’s interesting. There’s a lot going on, and you can be involved.

I will put links in the show notes to any of the places where I feel you would be best making a start with that. Maybe the contributors to this panel can drop some things, you know, if they’ve got a particular link. So again, wptavern.com. If you want to go over there, we will look for the links.

This giant edifice that you maybe know nothing about, and maybe at the end of this episode, some parts of you is tuned in and thinking, I would like to be involved in that. And the truth is, you can be. It’s all available to you to get involved and you could start today.

So there we go. With that said, I’m just going to say a great big thank you to Destiny, to Anand, and to Maciej. It kinds of feels like we need to come back. Let’s do it again in six months or so, and we’ll see where we’re at. Oh, I’ve got a lot of nodding faces. That’s nice. So maybe we’ll revisit this in a few months time.

But seriously, from the bottom of my heart, Destiny, Anand and Maciej, profound respect to you and all of the different things that you are doing. Thank you so much for chatting to me today.

[00:58:13] Anand Upadhyay: Thank you.

[00:58:13] Maciej Pilarski: Thank you.

[00:58:14] Destiny Kanno: Thank you.

Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress, the people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case using AI everywhere at rtCamp.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you or your idea featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox? And use the form there.

So on the podcast today we have Rahul Bansal. Rahul has a long and accomplished history in the WordPress ecosystem. As the founder and CEO of rtCamp, a company he started 17 years ago, he’s led his agency through the rapidly changing landscape of the web, helping enterprise clients such as Google, Fortune 500 companies, and major publishers solve complex problems with innovative WordPress based solutions.

rtCamp specialises in everything from large scale website builds, to more bespoke projects like Chrome extensions and SaaS connectors, and has grown to a team of hundreds over the years.

Today’s episode takes a deep dive into Raul’s recent talk at WordCamp Asia, which focused on what it will take to launch and scale an enterprise WordPress agency in the future.

The conversation focused on real, hard won, lessons from rtCamp’s journey, but also how rapidly the playbook is changing with advances in technology, particularly the explosion of AI tools and workflows.

We discuss Rahul’s philosophy around hiring, namely building a team of people whose strengths complement each other rather than just replicating your own skillset. This approach has allowed rtCamp to adapt to new challenges, fill gaps in expertise, and whether major industry changes.

We then explore how this idea of complimentary sets can also apply to choosing the right kinds of clients, those who value your expertise because they need what you offer, rather than simply hiring somebody who does what they already know.

A theme that emerged in the conversation was specialisation. Rahul outlines how, whereas rtCamp’s earliest differentiator was a simple focus on WordPress, when virtually nobody else in India was, today’s agencies must drill down much further to stand out choosing niches within niches, such as WooCommerce, or payment gateway integrations, and becoming recognised experts in those areas in order to thrive in a much more crowded field.

Towards the end of the episode, the discussion turns to what might be the most significant topic for agencies today, artificial intelligence. Rahul describes how recent advances in AI have not only altered his agency’s practises, but given them a firm mandate. If something in rtCamp can be done by AI it will be.

We talk about how AI is being leveraged inside rtCamp to automate and optimise everything from sales and proposal writing to project management, and even technical proof of concept builds. With a unified platform for all business processes, the agency is now able to significantly reduce costs, speed up delivery, and focus on higher value consulting and creativity, reshaping roles and team composition as a result.

If you’re interested in what it takes to stand out and succeed in the evolving world of enterprise WordPress agencies, how to confront uncertainty with both optimism and realism, and how AI can become not just a bolt-on feature, but the operational backbone of your business, this episode is for you.

If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.

And so without further delay, I bring you Rahul Bansal.

I am joined on the podcast by Rahul Bansal. Hello, Rahul.

Rahul Bansal: Hello Nathan. Thanks for having me here.

Nathan Wrigley: You are very welcome. Rahul and I were both at WordCamp Asia and that is going to be the main focus of the podcast today. We’re going to be talking about agencies, growth in agencies, and then probably delving into AI a little bit at the end because of a recent announcement that came out of rtCamp, which is the company that Rahul founded many years ago.

In order to, I suppose, lend credibility to a conversation about agency work, would you mind Rahul, just introducing yourself and tell us a little bit about who you are, what you do in WordPress, and maybe give us a few little interesting facts about rtCamp and what you do over there.

Rahul Bansal: So I’m, as you mentioned, founder and CEO of rtCamp. We started this 17 years ago. We primarily help large enterprise client, sometimes we build websites for their marketing team, which is the most common use case of WordPress. But at the same time, we help large tech companies like Google communicate better with the WordPress ecosystem for their offering. Like sometimes we build products that includes neither thing, neither plugin, but something like Chrome extension. For large companies sometimes we build like SaaS connectors for technology companies.

Yeah, so we work with, like a big companies really Fortune 500, and the idea is to deliver something related to WordPress in one form or another form.

Nathan Wrigley: If you go to the rtCamp website, you can probably Google it I would’ve imagined, then you’ll be able to get some impression of what the company is like.

I think last time we spoke you were into the sort of 200 employees level. I’m not sure if those numbers have gone up or down or what have you. But you get an impression of how large it is. And one of the interesting things that I spotted during my time at WordCamp Asia was just how vibrant the community, the WordPress community is. So maybe we’ll get into that a little bit as well.

I’m going to concentrate to begin with on the presentation that you gave at WordCamp Asia. If you would like to see that, wordpress.tv will have a video. And if the video is already available, I will link to it in the show notes. But the presentation that Rahul gave was entitled, how to Start an Enterprise WordPress Agency in 2026. And I’ll just read the blurb that goes with it because it was fairly short and easy to manage.

Building a WordPress agency business for large enterprises. In this talk, I’ll share the story of how rtCamp grew from a small WordPress shop into a globally recognised enterprise agency, trusted by Fortune 500 companies and major publishers. If you’re starting an agency today or looking to move up market in 2026, this session will give you a realistic roadmap building on real lessons from my personal experience.

So I suppose what I’m going to do at the beginning, Rahul, if it’s all right with you, is just ask you to tell us some of the bits and pieces that you mentioned during that. Some of the advice that you would give an agency owner beginning in 2026.

Rahul Bansal: Yeah. So first, like I deviated a little bit from the blurb because when I applied this talk I had a different frame of mind that, hey, I’m going to do this. And then as I was preparing the talk, and in during those months, especially like last few months, the AI has reshaped everything. And then I realised that a lot of what worked for rtCamp won’t work even for rtCamp if I start again today.

Rather than making it as a nice story about what worked for us, I lean more towards practical advice, and that’s where the essence remained. But I focus more on the 2026 part, because when we started, it was 2006. The first time when I used WordPress was 2006. rtCamp started in 2009. 20 years is a big time. And then at the end of this 20th year, like we are going through this AI led change.

So a lot of things that worked for me won’t work anymore. And that is how I restructured my talk to take enough from our history, enough from our learnings, what worked for us.

The way we hire is very different. And after the talk, if that one line that stick with the audience, that many people told me that the hire your complementary set was the most different idea. And it’s timeless idea. It’s relevant in AI world also.

So the idea was basically that we have this bias that when we try to scale, like basically when we go from freelancing to agency business, the idea of building a business, we try to find people like us. But my idea was that we should initially, especially, we should find people who are opposite of us. Like I was good at engineering, bad at sales, so my co-founder is sales heavy. My English was not good. His English was very polished.

So I literally listed down my weakness and found people who were opposite of me. Even interesting part was that, to the few initial hires I asked the questions, whose answer I had no idea whether they’re saying right or wrong.

So that was the most interesting idea and I think that’s still relevant today. I will do exactly same thing if I have to start building a new agency. I will build in WordPress, build in AI, any kind of business I will, my initial few hires will all together will cover each other’s weaknesses.

It’s at certain scale then you need to replicate, like, you need 50 engineers, you need 20 React engineers, you need five people who can write same proposal. That comes much later. But starting is all about finding your complementary set. And this was inspired by a set theory from math class that I attended in when I was like some 12-year-old. That stuck around before the life. And that is what I put in this talk as a biggest lesson we learned and that worked.

The second most specific thing that I would say, practical advice, like that was more about hiring advice, but that is not only hiring address, that is, I advise in many walks of life applicable.

When you’re looking for your client, you have to look for complimentary set there as well. Because you are trying to sell to agencies like yours, your margins gets hit a lot. You need to find people who do not understand WordPress at all because then, that is why your expertise become more important and premium for them, because they need to depend on you. They value you more. You are not commoditised for them.

So that hiring your complementary set works across the board. But then the most specific advice I gave that I didn’t follow myself, I would say. Actually there was nothing to follow that. When I started WordPress was just a blogging platform. There was custom post type were not yet part of WordPress Core. Everybody was just building blogs. We were playing around themes, and the race was to make our blog look unique. The metric usually was like traffic and how many email subscribers you got.

So there was no niche to pick. Like, that was the only thing WordPress was doing. And after post type, people started building a lot more than WordPress. Actually people started pushing WordPress earlier, and as a result of that, WordPress created those APIs to make it easy to extend WordPress beyond blogging platform.

But today, in 2026, there is so many things happening. And if you’re starting new and you do what rtCamp did on day one, like, hey, we are WordPress agency. That is not going to work.

It worked for us 20 years back because we were like, probably only one in India at that time who said at that time that we will be only taking WordPress project. Because India was a land of outsourcing. Like in supply chain, it was like a, it’s like a Chinese manufacturer saying that, hey, we are only going to assemble if you are building for iPhone. So it’s like, hey, we are only going to write PHP if it is going to end up as a WordPress theme or plugin. We are not going to do what was Cake PHP project at that time. We are not going to write custom PHP script.

So in a way we picked the whole WordPress as a niche among the largest set of choices available to us. But if your largest set of choices was building a iOS company, like mobile app company. Mobile app was big because with the introduction of iPhone, there was a sudden shift and huge demand for iOS apps, and we haven’t built one till 17 years. Like literally we built our first iOS app, public iOS app last month.

That time we were like, well, we are going to only do WordPress. So now that advice translate into, pick a niche within WordPress because WordPress itself is the web now. That time, WordPress was very small. Now you can choose e-commerce. Within e-commerce then you can probably pick WooCommerce. Within WooCommerce then probably you can pick like, depending on your market, payment gateway specialisation, ERPs, back office specialisation, subscription based businesses.

Start by picking a niche as small as possible and then go bottoms up, rather than starting with everything. So that was the key takeaway of my session, I would say that. Pick a niche, position yourself as a expert in the niche. Don’t just say that, hey, we build WooCommerce store, or we build WordPress site.

Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Yeah, I’ve got all of that. So firstly, hiring. That’s an interesting one. Hire people that are different from you. I was imagining when you were saying that, I wonder how long you can do that, because you can’t, eventually, you have a company of a hundred people and all of them are not the same as you. Eventually it must be nice to find somebody who’s a little bit like you.

But then also you mentioned picking clients who will trust your expertise, I think is a good way of describing that. Because they themselves are perhaps not expert within that WordPress platform.

And now of course, moving forwards, what worked for you in terms of being a WordPress agency 17 odd years ago, that was, as it turns out, really successful. But now you are going to be amongst tens of thousands in India alone, if all you say is that you are a WordPress agency. So you need to go a little bit more specialised and niche down.

I wonder, Rahul, with the benefit of hindsight, it’s always easy to look back and sort of see for example, from my perspective, I see rtCamp as an entirely successful enterprise. You know, you began all those years ago, and decisions were made and you grew and you grew and you grew and you grew, and now we are where you are now. Committing a lot to WordPress with incredible growth and a really amazing agency on your hands.

But I’m just wondering, looking back, with the benefit of hindsight, were there any moments where you made some decisions where you were very nervous about how it was going to be?

So for example, one of those could be WordPress. There was no writing on the wall that said WordPress will be the successful CMS. That really could have gone either way. It could have been Drupal, it could have been something that some kid in a basement created. So I’m just wondering, are there moments when you look back and you think to yourself, gosh, I am so glad that we did that random choice than all the others that we could have made?

Rahul Bansal: Yep. So it’s a reality that, one of the co-founders we lost, within the first year of company formation was because, I refused to add Joomla to our offering. And Joomla I think was market leader at that time when we started. So we were like more like engineers, like some were good at sales, some were good at communication, but we were all from the same kind of school, like we didn’t know if there was any survey existed.

So we didn’t back by any data. The only reason we chose to stay with WordPress or build this agency with WordPress because we were using WordPress. So rtCamp for the most part, people missed that. So rtCamp was not started as an agency. rtCamp was basically a media company, a blog network. And that blog network was running on WordPress. As a technology blogger. It’s like just imagine WP Beginners, like that is more relevant example.

So by the way, we, and WP Beginner were operating at the same time, that’s the power of niche. Like say I chose to focus on WordPress and say very very well. And my technical blog was everything like from iPhone to Windows operating system to Mac OS update to web APIs, to HTTP2. Whatever, like it was a larger technology blog So we were more like a stripped down version of TechCrunch rather than picking a niche. And Syed picked this WordPress as a niche.

Both were contemporaries in that same era. Now just imagine Syed in those days I started an agency. So we were using WordPress, we needed to stand out because, social network or blogging or web was still a fancy place. Like minimalism wasn’t the trend. It was how much you can push, like how you can make your website look different without using Flash. That was the coolest thing. Like how much you can push jQuery, how advanced CSS you can write. So all those things led to we customising our WordPress a lot.

Another thing that worked in our part was, our blog was one of the biggest in India. Globally also, it had good traffic. In fact, it had so much traffic that one of the most Googled keyword in my name was Rahul Bansal, how much money this guy make. Like that was the first question I used to get asked because traffic was insane. We used to get a lot of traffic.

That led us to writing nice WordPress code. In early days, like especially when I was freelancer, I had to write amazing WordPress code that will scale and host it in a way that it will also scale. So not only WordPress, we choose Nginx before it become a norm. Like before there was. anybody started any WordPress managed hosting company. We managed to scale WordPress at a very high level.

And so now we, are this famous blog running on WordPress handling so much traffic, on Linode’s $10 something plan. Customising it. So we got this natural market. We got initial customers were technically our competitors, like other tech bloggers. It’s like TechCrunch hiring Mashable to customise their blog So something like, because Mashable has a tech team. So that was at early story of rtCamp.

And then we realised that we are making more money and faster money via customising WordPress. So we started cutting down on our editorials. And then, slowly, slowly like the business has shifted from, being a blogging agency, to WordPress custom development agency. That’s why we chose WordPress.

And that has been the principle since then, like we only sell what we use. That was the reason we didn’t, so it wasn’t any ideological decision. So the ideology is at open source level. So rtCamp is committed to providing open source solution to its client from day one.

Joomla tick that box. But Joomla didn’t tick the box that we use Joomla. We don’t use Joomla. There was no reason for us to have our blog running on WordPress and website running on Joomla, and that’s why we stick around WordPress when there was no data, no trend. And I think in hindsight it was just luck. I would say like it could have backfired.

Nathan Wrigley: Well, okay, I really like this story. Firstly, I like the fact that you are identifying luck as a component, because I think too often when you listen to people who have had success, they sort of chart this narrative of how brilliant the decisions were along the journey and how impeccable, you know, we did this and then we did this, and then we did this, and then we did this. But never a nod to luck.

And of course, with the benefit of hindsight, we did this, we did this, we did this does lead to where you are now. But I really enjoy it when founders and people have that confession in them. Yeah, there was a bit of luck.

But also, and we’ll get onto this in a minute, because a big part of what you are about to do, or have recently done with your business kind of leans into what you’ve just been saying.

It sounds like you were led by what was in front of you, if you know what I mean? It doesn’t sound like there was a great big, okay, by 2016 or 2026, we want to be here. It was more like, okay, this is where we’re at now. These are the things that are coming to us. Okay, looks like WordPress, not only are we using it, but it looks like people want us to help them to use it. Well, let’s go there then. Let’s put the blogging to one side and let’s become more of a, I don’t know, a technical helper for you and your website.

So there’s this sort of lucky piece, but also the willingness to steer into favourable winds, if you know what I mean? I love that story. Thank you very much for that. I also admire your humility in all of that. That’s lovely.

So the next thing then, I suppose that I want to get into is some change in the landscape at the moment. And again, this maps to what you were just saying about move where the wind takes you. We all know that AI is a thing. You cannot have missed that. But I think a lot of people are taking nervous steps into their business and how they’re doing things with AI and maybe biting off a little bit here with AI and leaving the rest as it is, and biting off another chunk here, and leaving the rest as it is and slowly moving into AI.

You have a very different approach. And I will link in the show notes to a blog post on the rtCamp website, which I read several weeks ago. I’ve got to say, I was a little bit, not surprised, that’s the wrong word, but it was written in such a way that I thought, gosh, now that’s interesting.

Because in it you painted the case that rtCamp in the future is going to do AI everywhere. And I know we hear that all the time. You know, we’re going to use AI here, and we’re going to use AI there. You have painted your colours on the mast, and literally, I think you said, if it can be done with AI, it will be done with AI. There will be no stone left unturned.

Okay. Firstly, why? Why have you got that approach? What’s the reason? Now, I’m sure it’s fairly obvious, but lay it out for us anyway.

Rahul Bansal: Yeah. So I don’t know from where it comes, anytime I see things going south across industry like COVID or, like AI, like everybody was gloomy, my brain kind of think of opposite. So in my brain, I’m not building, I’m actually imagining an AI only agency with humans required to probably feel capture. That’s how my brain works. So it’s like AI first.

Then again, like WordPress, so I have been lucky more than once in my life. So before this AI came, this famous saying by Steve Jobs like you can only connect the dots looking backward. Three to four years ago, riding on the digital boom, we survived the COVID, like all agencies grew. rtCamp grew a lot more, and a lot faster in very short span of time. And to manage this humongous workforce, we needed to refactor a lot internal tooling, softwares, processes, to the point that we have internally codified our mission that we want to build McDonald’s of consulting business, inspired by that movie Founder. That was also part of my talk at WorkCamp Asia.

And in fact, I had somebody to literally a complimentary set example. I know we want to build this, but I don’t have that kind of mental model. So that’s the brief I give to our chief delivery officer that you have to give me this. McDonald’s of agency business.

We start thinking of every process that we can repeat, and we realised that we need to take control of our software stack. And we ended up finding something, in open source. That’s, I would say truly a spiritually aligned to the WordPress ecosystem called Frappe ERPNext, which handle our accounting, payroll, project management, CRM. So many business processes in one single source of truth, like single source of truth for so many things. Earlier it was all siloed data.

So this was started with a different intent, to scale rtCamp, 2000 people, 5,000 people, 10,000 people, because that was a business model then. Agencies growth with capacity. You want to sell more, you need to hire more. Basically agencies growth was limited by on one dimension, the inventory, human inventory you can have. So we started implementing this open source back office software automation with the idea that we will own, central piece of our operating system of connecting, getting thousands of people working together.

Then AI happened, and then we realised we don’t need to hire those many people anymore. Year on year, we moved from 200 to 250, but I think next 50 will be very slow. Because, now we are no longer aiming to sell, or hire people. But as luck would’ve been, we ended up creating this system of record, which is unified and cleaned. When we think of a client or a project or a human. All aspect of their metadata is available in a single system.

So that is why we can leverage AI more than a company, agency to agency. For agencies using say, Jira for project management. QuickBook for accounting, some other software. If their operations is scattered across 6, 7 software, we have leverage over them. Not only we are paying very less because all our software is open source. The data is first party. Like sitting duck there to query in any way we can. We are not limited by SaaS providers, enterprise plan or this AI capability.

So that is where we realised that we can take this huge bet on AI where we can now build a lot more, in a lot less time using AI across the board. And if you look at a business like not just WordPress business, when you buy something, like you buy a car from a car company. You are actually paying for everything that company does, advertising, researching on the EV technologies, hiring a brand ambassador to put billboard, sponsoring F1. Anything that company does. every penny they spend on their business, the customer ends up paying it.

So we thought like now we have a single stack, which technically takes care of 70 to 80% critical nature of our business operations. From when the lead enters the CRM, the project management, time entry, people’s new management, everything is linked. Everything is beautifully linked in a single unified interface and database. So why don’t we just use AI to cut down the cost.

Because now we cannot charge by hours, we can try, but, it’s not making sense anymore for clients. They want us to commit to fix output bid. Now when we say, hey, we can migrate this thing for 100k, or we can build this website for half million dollars. So those numbers, traditionally, and actually all the time will include all the operation cost. Like my salary. I’m not doing any coding work, but my salary will be eventually paid by all the clients. Electricity bill that is also going to be paid by all the client.

So we thought like rather than just thinking AI to build a website, let’s use AI to bring our operational costs dramatically down. Because we have single source of truth for maximum data we have, and that is where we went all AI in. Now it’s like we can submit a proposal in one third of the time.

In old days we used to build PPTs. Now we vibe code a WordPress demo site and attach it to the proposal. Hey is this something that you want? Not just the screenshot, not just the Figma, like we are actually building Playground, like websites, and launching them and sharing those links to the client. Go play with it. We are even trying to copy the design systems if they’re migrating. So migration is a big category of work we do.

So that is what we mean by going AI ready. So we are leveraging AI to reduce the cost of sale, increase probability of winning the project by pitching them something. And then while estimating the effort, like let’s say we would traditionally say, oh, this might cost us a thousand hours. Now we blindly said Make it 30% less, as if it will be done in 700 hours and it will be, sometimes it backfires.

But then on some project it’ll be 500 hours. In some project it’ll be 900 hours, but average will come back to 700 hours. Then again, the idea is we have a central operating system, which gives us, like bird’s eye view of how healthy our projects education are. Are we getting returns on our AI engagement? And all this is possible because few years back we took a bet in different direction.

Like we choose WordPress because we wanted to be a better media agencies, and that was what media agencies were doing in the early days. But we ended up building an agency business with the WordPress. Likewise we choose this Frappe ERPNext software. To operationalise our back office. But now it is starting out to be our advantage point in this areas like we are able to do AI a lot more. In the end, it’s all about bringing the cost down at certain quality. You have to keep the quality up, and just make it more affordable. If that is not. as a business you cannot do that with AI, then something is wrong.

So AI is not about building something new. I have another approach. So if you’re an agency people are hiring you to move things from A to B, like you are the movers and packers of internet. I put crudely, what rtCamp does. We move things, like a shipping company who moves your house, remove you from Sitecore to WordSpace.

And that’s still big part of our business. We don’t have to reinvent or reimagine different experiences all the time. Sometimes we have to just do what everybody’s doing, the boring part. Put AI there to make it efficient, more cost effective. And if you do that, that means more people wanting to shift to new house. Again, a different approach. People think that they need to build something out of the world to benefit from this AI way.

My idea is that pick a boring thing and make it so affordable that people who were sitting on the fence, just imagine travel, Middle East travel. Like this is a very actually a bad example, might sound inhuman, but, say like X number of people wanted to experience Dubai as a destination, but let’s say, it was beyond their budget. For some even unfortunately now suddenly that comes within their budget, they will be able to do that.

People wanted to move to WordPress Initially, agencies were quoting a hundred thousand dollars for that big shift. Now if you can, suddenly you can do it in 50k a lot more people will shift. So, you don’t have to do things like out of the world thing. You don’t have to invent new. You have to sometimes just make existing problem more efficient to solve.

And it was not always about money, especially in large client. It was not always about 100k versus 50k versus half million versus 1 million. It was about timeline. It’s like you are refurbishing your home and it is going to take three month, then it’s a different mental model, like to put up yourself in a hotel or a second home for three months. If a magically a new company appears and hey, we can refurbish your home overnight. You don’t mind checking into hotel for one night. And that is where I feel like this WordPress will be net gain because of AI. Agencies has to be optimistic, and think differently to gain from AI.

Like, what people are doing is everybody’s trying to act like a ChatGPT, OpenAI, it’s their job to invent AI algorithm. We are agency. Our job is to apply AI, not invent AI. We don’t have to think of what is Opus 4.8 will do. Let cloud engineers think of that.

So we need to understand we are AI’s consumers or consultant, and that is where some people are getting it wrong by vibe coding things that they’re not able to sell to anyone. Then they will cry that, hey, six months later they will realise they built stuff nobody bought. Now they don’t have money to pay AI bills, or their developer salaries and then they will try that, hey, AI took over job, AI killed our business. No, think what existing problems we can solve with AI cheaply, efficiently, with better quality. And a lot of work is there to be done.

Nathan Wrigley: There’s a lot in there, but one of the things that I’m taking out is. So prior to AI coming along and demonstrating to us all what it could do, which by the way didn’t kind of happen overnight, although it feels like it did, there was a sort of, a year in which we could suddenly see, oh boy, it’s getting much more performant and much more interesting. But prior to that, it sounds like post COVID, you kind of inspected your business and were thinking, okay, how can we refine everything that we’ve got in the business and how can we put it all into this one system?

And again, with the benefit of hindsight, and I’m maybe going to use the word luck, maybe that’s not the right word. You, having done that work, then meant that when AI did come along, you weren’t trying to link up four or five or six or ten different things. You had this one source of truth. Which meant that you could cut waste, for want of a better word. You know, waste could be measured in terms of dollars or it could be measured in terms of time or it, whatever it may be.

You happened to be in that place because you’d done that preparatory work, not necessarily knowing that AI was going to come along and make all of this fun stuff possible. But with the benefit of hindsight, that’s exactly what it did.

And it’s curious, you said 70 or 80% of the business could be streamlined in that way. And I’m so staggered by that number. I thought you’d be in the kind of, I don’t know, 20, 30% or something like that. But a full 70 to 80%. So does that mean 70 to 80% of the things available, or do you mean that you were able to cut 70 to 80% of the cost or the time? Because I wasn’t sure which 70 or 80% you were meaning.

Rahul Bansal: It meant different things. First like, as I mentioned that we are not thinking AI adds just something to sell, but something to consume first. Because, again, dog fooding principle. We managed to sell WordPress better because we were a blog network. That’s why we could understood publishers better. We got into this Frappe ERPNext consulting because we built our backend with it. Now before we make any promise with AI, we have to be net gainer with the AI. And we believe that our internally, we will be.

So there are two parts, actual cost of building something and the meta cost. Like cost of sale, like the writing proposal. marketing costs, like case studies, going to even preparing for articles. Non build cost is definitely, we are able to bring, I would say it’s already half, but it’ll be, further down. I will give you a very simple example.

Like in early days is when somebody used to submit rtCamps form, inquiry form, a human, would manually check like, Hey, what is the domain name of this email id? Are they on LinkedIn? Some 30 minutes and then they will write a note hey, this looks like a good quality lead. We are fortunate that we get a lot of inbound inquiries, so we had to have prioritise, like which leads we are going to respond first.

Now, as soon as somebody submits a form an AI integration does that, within minutes. And the notes are much more details, it creates action items. Across like WordPress our Frappe CRM, our Slack, everything runs like a clockwork, and we don’t need a human. So that, junior human job is definitely gone. So in sales team, we used to have like this entry level job. That is no longer there. Some jobs are actually going to get vanished. So now going on a call, meeting notes, a lot of those things are getting automated. So the cost of sale has dramatically came down.

What is the effect? Like, say we can now assume flat 10% discount compared to earlier pricing when we are thinking of a migration project. Like, let’s say, in early days, we used to think like hey, anybody wanting to migrate from Adobe Experience Manager? We must assume that they need to pay us 100k. On the initial call, we can say, hey, that would probably cost something like minimum 50,000 dollars.

The minimums, the starting numbers has came down because we need less energy to have those pre-sales conversations. Less number of minutes of ours spent building those demos. Very fast discovery. Data mapping sometimes happens in minutes. In fact we did one 10 days to prepare this migration literally in five days, that was unthinkable. And that included data migration, QA testing, like automation testing where somebody built a bought in panel, which would randomly open a Zendesk ticket and verify that all metadata and deploys are migrated into new health desk system, all within five days.

This is where I have been saying that the cost of building custom solutions will fail. For like so low, like it’s 60, 70, 58. Like definitely more than half. It’ll be reduced by half more. People will buy custom solutions. So agencies are going to grow from here in just these one or two years. Because agencies, to price something upfront, we need consistencies. Like I’m running an airline and if my jet fuel is my biggest cost, and that is out of my control. Then how do I price my tickets? That’s AI hallucination, which is, I would say the jet fuel version of aviation industry.

Something happens in Middle East and fuel prices goes up. A war starts. So now when AI hallucinates so it’s like what we are internally tracking, or what we call as a KPI or internal metric is that, worst case, AI gains, that’s already 20%. Best case is more than 90%. In some cases it’s literally 90%. This range will keep compressing and that’s what I think 70% is my expectation in two years. We will have that maturity that, the build time will fall by 70%. That means. the client companies will hire more agencies to do more work.

WordPress will emerge as a winner, not only for its ecosystem, but its ability to expose structured data without any proprietary walls. AI was so fast that only an open source can keep up with it. In fact, we are seeing more migration inquiries with with the AI boom.

Nathan Wrigley: Oh, interesting. I was going to ask a sort of follow up question. Do you think that you, so you were mentioning, how to describe it, a rising tide carries all boats, or you certainly implied that the pie is getting bigger, if you know what I mean? So you are getting more phone calls, more migrations, more work, and you can obviously do that more affordably. And because you can pass on some of those savings to the clients, the price point lowers and so you get more inquiries because there’s this virtuous cycle of price going down, but quality staying the same or getting better.

I wonder if you, given your success in the past, I wonder if that transition will be easier for you, because the phone is already ringing, than it would be for somebody who was beginning in 2026? Because we all know when you begin, getting the phone to ring is probably the hardest thing. You know, getting those first 5, 10, 15 reliable clients, whatever it is that makes you work.

I wonder if you are in a uniquely good position, having a history of clients, a roster of clients that will come back to you. And also just being famous, for want of a better word, in the WordPress space, for doing the kind of things that you do. I wonder just what your thoughts are on that.

Rahul Bansal: They’re both pros and cons. The only con for rtCamp is that our business model, a big part of what’s traditional like setting our flagship revenue stream for last 8 to 10 years was staffing solutions. We used to provide engineers, sometimes to other agencies, sometimes to publishers. So usually they used to have the leadership layer with them. We were more of executors, and if AI within the IT industry, the first casualty of AI revolution was that people who code, or people who can only code but cannot think. But luckily our hiring was very different.

While it is taking time, so as I said, net headcount addition has been slowed down. I think this is probably first time rtCamp’s career site doesn’t have any engineering opening. If we would’ve been like a publicly listed or like a shareholder owned company, we might have got mandate to fire a hundred people right now, because we have already gained by, so much that, our one third of our WordPress engineers are currently out of work when the work is rising.

Because traditionally, when we needed eight people, now we were able to do in four people. But now we are using this. We have our own challenges, going from one kind of business to another kind of business model. The switch is causing some friction, but we are communicating it openly. We are giving people like more freedom. You give us ideas like which part of the entire business equation you can optimise. Is it editorial experience, is it migration cost? Is it data mapping, visual testing? So people are constantly building.

So change is there. Change is scary. It is scary for us also because we don’t want to fire people. We don’t want to lay off people. We want to return this team. From here onwards, we don’t see we are hiring more engineers for at least a year, because we have enough of them. But, we are so optimistic about this WordPress growth and the pie getting bigger.

We are hiring more sales and marketing team. Two days back I was telling like traditionally, we had this 90 to 10% ratio, like in 200 people, our headcount team, we would have 20 people. That would be, we can call as a sales and marketing department, I think next 50 hires will be only sales and marketing.

Nathan Wrigley: Oh, that’s a big skew, isn’t it? So you’ll go to more like 30% marketing as opposed to 10% marketing.

Rahul Bansal: Yeah sales and marketing. By the way, when we say sales, sales in rtCamp means slightly different. It’s more of a initial consulting, basically making those solid promise, which can be backed by engineering, not over promising. So our sales team needs are more like a WordPress consultant, but we have a category within rtCamp which we call Growth Engineers, who are some of our best coders. But rather than writing code, they go on the first client call and make promises on behalf of WordPress which are practical, feasible, and real.

That is what our internship look like, because coding is race to bottom. Eventually the cost of building will shrink to the point that you don’t need many, you won’t need many traditional developers in any agency. You will need people who can imagine what needs to be built. There might be 20 different ways and which way this project should be executed. That prompt engineering, context in engineering.

So the value is shifting and it’s definitely shifting away from people who can only code. That is why, probably from two years now, we might be at 300 people. Hundred of them will not be coding at all. But they will be prompting AI. They will be building vibe coded prototype in pre-sale stage to gain that customer confidence like early on that day. What you want is possible with the WordPress. It won’t cost that much. It’ll be given you fast enough that your life won’t be disrupted for many months, like your business operations won’t be disrupted for many months, so this is a thing

Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, nobody could deny that we’re in interesting times. I think a lot of people are very confused by what’s going on at the moment. You know, they’re trying to figure out a path. They’re trying to figure out how it affects their business. They’re probably in, I would imagine, quite a lot of cases, quite keen to stick to the ways that they’ve done it in the past. But certainly the picture that you’ve painted over at rtCamp is that you are aligning yourself with a very different future, kind of embracing AI, seeing where it can take you, trying to adapt your business. Being optimistic about it rather than pessimistic. Because I think there is quite a lot of pessimism around there at the moment. But seeing the opportunity and seizing it.

Absolutely fascinating. There was so much to unpack there. I feel like we could talk probably for another nine hours about this because it genuinely is never ending. I would love to prize back the curtain a little bit more. However, time allows only this much. So what an interesting conversation. Thank you very much, Rahul.

Just before we end, could you just tell us where we can find you online, should somebody want to, you know, maybe they’re experiencing a bit of anxiety of their own. Their agency is in a rudderless ship at the moment and they’re trying to figure it out. Where can people get in touch with you best?

Rahul Bansal: I am actually available on all social networks. I use LinkedIn least and email is most level way, I’m a bit old school there. But, yeah, Twitter. I check daily.

Nathan Wrigley: I will link to your bio in the show notes, but also, I will link to the presentation that you gave and any other bits and pieces that we discussed that I can find links for. I will mention those well. So head to wptaven.com, search for the episode with Rahul in it.

Thank you so much for chatting to me, and all I can say is all the best. I hope that all of the intuitions that you have turn out to bear fruit and be fruitful for you.

Thank so much for chatting to me today.

Rahul Bansal: Thank you Nathan.

[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress, the people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, why WordPress events and community matter.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox, and use the form there.

So on the podcast today, we have Cathy Mitchell. Cathy has been working with WordPress since 2007. What began as a fun personal project during her maternity leave soon evolved into a fully fledged business with the launch of WPBarista in 2008. Over the years, Cathy has garnered extensive experience in the WordPress space, and is now working towards the 2026 WordCamp Canada.

The conversation focuses on the powerful role of community within the WordPress ecosystem, something that Cathy is deeply passionate about. We discuss how open, welcoming, and international the WordPress community feels, compared to more traditional corporate or volunteer environments. A theme that emerged was how involvement in WordPress has provided Cathy, and many others, with a sense of belonging and fulfilment, especially after life changes like becoming an empty nester.

The discussion explores the motivations for volunteering and organising within the WordPress community, both from the perspective of newcomers looking for purpose and connection, and business owners assessing the return on investment from contributing or sponsoring events. This includes how easy it is to get involved, the unique lack of barriers and red tape, and the value of altruism and camaraderie.

Other topics we explored with a broader impact of technology and loneliness, the importance of service and community for wellbeing, challenges in sponsorship amid changes economic times, and the vital need to engage the next generation in open source.

If you’re interested in the human side of WordPress, how volunteering shapes both individual and the broader community, and what the future might hold for WordPress events and contributors, this episode is for you.

If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.

And so without further delay, I bring you Cathy Mitchell.

I am joined on the podcast by Cathy Mitchell. Hello, Cathy.

[00:03:25] Cathy Mitchell: Hello. Thanks for having me.

[00:03:27] Nathan Wrigley: You are very welcome. Cathy and I have been having, well, 15 minutes or so of chit chat just before we started the podcast. I’ve been learning a little bit about Cathy and we’re going to share all sorts of information.

I think probably broadly we could talk about it as being the WordPress community, which is a subject which is dear to my heart.

However, before we get into that, Cathy, I’ve had an introduction from you over the last few minutes, but would you mind sort of giving us your potted version of that, your shorter version, your bio if you like. Tell us who you are and how come you’re featuring on a WordPress podcast.

[00:03:58] Cathy Mitchell: Well that’s a whole lot of imposter syndrome. Why I am featuring, because you’re kind enough to have me. I’ve been working with WordPress since 2007 and it was just something fun that I did to begin, much like you with podcasting.

And then a couple years in, I told my friends that they’d have to start paying me, or I was going to go back to work, find a real job. This was during my mat leave, and so it kind of just took off from there in 2008, started WPBarista.

And now I’m very interested in the community because I was looking for something to do in the WordPress community last year. Dan in the Canada Slack got a hold of me and said, hey, do you want to help with the WordCamp? And I said, sure. You know, I had time.

And he got me in and brought me right up to like being on the organising team. And it was so fun but so shocking. Like, there is a lot of red tape in the corporate world before they let you do anything meaningful. Like you have to sweep the floors for a whole long time before they let you actually do something you’re good at. So this was remarkable. And this year I find to my surprise, I’m leading the 2026 WordCamp Canada.

So that’s what I’m doing now. And we’re going to focus on community too. So I’m very excited about this topic, both from a corporate, like what do we get out of this? Or are we supposed to get something out of this? And from a personal standpoint, it’s been amazing to meet these people, and to be given a chance. And I found out I’m not the only one. This is like normal, which is bizarre and wonderful.

[00:05:37] Nathan Wrigley: My experience of the WordPress community, so I started in WordPress actually quite a long time after you did. Maybe sort of six or seven years after you began using WordPress. I really didn’t know that there was a community at all. I just downloaded the software and used the software. And then I can’t even remember really how it happened. It might have been through things like Facebook Groups or something like that, where I was trying to learn a particular thing? Or perhaps there was something in the dashboard which indicated that there was an event nearby.

But I found myself, to my own surprise actually, I found myself at a WordPress event in London, WordCamp London, which at the time was going really strong. You know, hundreds and hundreds of people would show up every year.

And I remember purchasing a ticket and getting the train ticket and thinking, what am I doing? What am I possibly hoping to get out of this? And showing up and kind of being a bit like a timid rabbit sitting in the corner a little bit, and then it kind of worked out fairly quickly. Okay, this is all fairly benign. Nobody seems to be all that boastful. Nobody seems to be sort of shoving corporate speech down my throat, or trying to sell me anything unnecessarily.

And during the course of a day or maybe a couple of days, opened up a little bit and got chatting to people. And lo and behold, within a couple of years, a significant proportion of my free time, let’s call it that, outside of the commitments of daily life and family and all of that kind of thing, was taken up with doing WordPressy things in my spare time.

And so I, I don’t know if the story maps the same as you, I’ve shared mine, maybe you’ll share something similar in a moment. The community to me is much more than just, oh, there’s a community there. It genuinely is a seriously important part of my life. To the point where if that was to be sort of whipped away, or somebody like a Thanos type character suddenly clicked their fingers and that disappeared, I don’t know what I would do with myself. I would really have to go out there and find an awful lot of other things to do. Was it a bit like that for you?

[00:07:41] Cathy Mitchell: Not at all. I went to the forums first. And in 2008, 2009, there were some big names nowadays that were just answering us in the support forums. And so I learned from the best of the best, I think. And they would answer my ridiculous questions. I had no idea about PHP. I didn’t even know HTML. I didn’t even know what the internet was, like as broad concept. I asked my husband at the time like, okay, I don’t understand how my computer is talking to someone else’s computer, like you need to draw me a picture.

So anyway, I’ve only recently, I went to a couple of events, but I’ve always had the business mind. If I can’t see an ROI financially, I’ll say, from what I’m doing, then I don’t have time for it. But that was also during a time when I had a young family and then I became a single mum and then I had to work this business. And so it’s only really recently that I’m looking around and seeing people like you and going, this is unique.

I’ve been in volunteer communities, and now that my kids are all grown up, I’m kind of looking for those opportunities. What meaningful thing can I do with my time? And this just seems so unique. Like I volunteered at other places and there’s so much red tape and there’s so much, I don’t know, different feelings than this one. This one’s very open.

[00:09:09] Nathan Wrigley: I think the bit that is so curious to me is you can sort of dip in and dip out of it. Because, I don’t know, let’s say for example, you do something much more local, involved with your hometown or something like that. And you get involved in it and there’s a certain kind of, pressure is the wrong word, I suppose you can dip in and dip out of that as well, but do you know what I mean? You get involved in those philanthropic things locally and you get to know things and it becomes more of a habit, and you do the same thing over and over again. At least that’s my experience.

What I quite like about this is the international flavour of it. The fact that I’m being introduced people from really different parts of the world and cultures. And it’s very, very open, and it’s a real contrast to the bit that you just mentioned, where the corporate bit, and obviously there’s a side of our community which is very much devoted to turning a profit and what have you. But there’s a significant proportion of the people who don’t have that metric in their head when they’re introducing themselves to people.

They are just trying to be helpful and trying to deliver on the promise that the internet gave us back in the 1990s of, here’s the infrastructure to pass information around freely. Wouldn’t it be nice if everybody had the capacity to publish things, or to share things online without some sort of corporate overlord or paywall or algorithm? Which we’ve now probably regret deeply allowing that to happen to the internet.

All of those kind of things come into play. I have constantly, for the last decade, tried to sum up and capture what this is. And I always fail. It simply feels nice, is all that I’ve got, really. This community, the people in it that I hang out with, it just feels like a nice thing to do. That’s all I’ve got. No wisdom beyond that. It’s bizarre, isn’t it?

[00:10:53] Cathy Mitchell: I’ve been trying to quantify it too, and especially planning this next conference. I feel much like a student because there’s a large group, probably most people are not like me. Like they’re like you, at least the ones, in Slack that I’m talking to on a daily basis. And they’re the original nerds who are so happy, like were inspired and spent their free time, like this wasn’t their job. Promoting this and like answering my questions in forum as an absolute noob. So in that way I feel like I would really like to give back now.

But the community, yeah, I can’t quite put my finger on. I just talked to a sponsor yesterday and she is of course wanting to get in front of her audience, which is agency owners. But there’s a real sense of promoting the community because the healthier the community, the healthier all of us are. Not just financially, but it creates the forward momentum, I think as far as open source as a whole too. Like there’s a bunch of us, me included, even though I kind of am taking a corporate angle that really believe that open source could change the world. I still do, maybe even more so because AI is, can actually talk to things that are open source. Less so if everything’s behind a paywall.

[00:12:09] Nathan Wrigley: I think one of the things that you mentioned there, which suddenly sort of struck me is whilst there are a handful of people out there, and I say a handful, there’s obviously many millions of people. I think it’s fair to say that many people prefer to be in proximity to other people, to do things, to be in conversation with people, to have a shared experience. You know, we go to the cinema or the movie theatre to watch a movie. I mean I know the screen’s bigger and everything, but part of it is to be with other people and to go ooh and ah, at the same time and go to firework displays and concerts and things like that.

Now all of that stuff can be done in an isolated environment in your house. You know, you can watch Netflix and you can watch the TV and get a similar kind of experience. But I think there’s some sort of core part of me at least, and the people that I hang out with at these kind of events and online who just enjoy that shared experience, that willingness to be involved in a similar task. Just to be pointing in the same direction as a bunch of other people, pulling together on the same team. And it’s unquantifiable. I literally can’t encapsulate it, but I think you and I are talking about the same thing.

What’s interesting is I accidentally found it fairly early on in my WordPress journey. Serendipity played a really blinding hand for me there. But I think had I not had, bit like that film Sliding Doors, I could easily have missed the cues which sent me to that WordCamp or whatever it was that got me started. And I probably could have gone for a decade or more and not even noticed it was a community and maybe discovered it much more recently.

And it sounds like that’s kind of happening to you. You mentioned that you are, I think in the show notes you described it as, it’s a lovely phrase, empty nesting. Does that mean when your children grow up and go away? Is that what that means?

[00:13:53] Cathy Mitchell: Yeah. That’s a pretty common phrase over here.

[00:13:55] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay.

[00:13:56] Cathy Mitchell: This side of the pond. You know, you kick the little birdies out, and they’re spreading their wings. All of a sudden we’re left with, it’s a different life stage. I think we were talking a little bit about it. You’re getting there.

[00:14:08] Nathan Wrigley: I’m going to there very, yeah, awh, it’s kind of filled with melancholy. On the hand, obviously I would love for my children to grow up, but on the other hand it’s, pulls all the heartstrings, doesn’t it?

So you are finding space in your life to do this kind of stuff. I’m going to ask a question, which is maybe a little bit personal, I don’t know. Hope you don’t read it in the wrong way. Do you find this stuff like meaningful and significant? Do you get a sense of fulfilment and satisfaction from the work that you are doing? For example, with WordCamp Canada.

Because there must be moments when it’s a real chore and, you know, you’ve got far too many tasks which are spilling over, and you think, gosh, I’m just a volunteer. There’s no quid pro quo here. I’m just doing it out of the goodness of my heart. But on balance, do you get that warm and fuzzy feeling from doing all of this?

[00:14:54] Cathy Mitchell: That’s a good question. I had time, so I started volunteering at a bunch of things. I started volunteering teaching kids, and then to go the complete other end of the spectrum, I did a seniors class at my local college last month. I just started volunteering because in my opinion, as a little amateur psychologist, I think service, serving our community is kind of the best way to, like you said, pull alongside someone. And then when you have like a focused goal, there’s a togetherness and I really need to grow my community.

Me, and I think quite a few other people, there’s this whole epidemic of loneliness to be frank. Having raised the kids and then having done the job, now all of a sudden it’s like, I have time to invest in a real community. And I really want it to be worthwhile. I don’t want to sweep the floors for, maybe it’s an age thing, I don’t know. I’m so, so grateful that they let me do something that I’m good at, as far as organising, because they didn’t have to. That’s a big responsibility to put on somebody. And I am praying it all works out in the fall.

But it comes because of the huge number of volunteers that all work together. So my job’s just basically pulling all these people together, and making sure that we’re talking to each other. Because one person can’t possibly do all of the work that comes with putting on a conference. At least not part-time. But yeah, I’m finding it immensely rewarding because I also feel like I’m good at it. Everybody loves to do something they’re good at.

[00:16:28] Nathan Wrigley: You mentioned something earlier where you sort of implied that you were very surprised that in the WordPress world, you were given a bunch of responsibility for an event. I mean, basically, I think a lot of that, isn’t there? There’s a lot of, whoever can show up does get the job really, because there’s a paucity of volunteers. And for an event of the magnitude of WordCamp Canada, if you’ve ever been to events like that, you sort of walk in and on every level it feels like a corporate event. You know, it’s very polished, highly polished. There’s catering, the venue’s all been booked, you’ve got name badges and there’s probably some translation going on, and there slides and every, there’s timetables and everything. And it’s all done by volunteers.

And I remember the same sort of thing, being asked to do a variety of different things and thinking, wait, really? You don’t know the inside of my head. I will mess this up so badly. But that is such a nice characteristic of our community. And you’ll fail together, if you know what I mean? You know, it is not like anybody’s going to let you deeply fail. People will step in and help you, should you need to.

[00:17:31] Cathy Mitchell: Yeah, we have to say yes, like it’s part of the culture is, if people volunteer, we have to find a way to say yes. Like our default is yes, not, well, have you done this first?

[00:17:43] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. It’s interesting because you obviously have done a lot of this kind of corporate stuff, and so have the impression that you ought to be qualified, I don’t know, a decade or two decades of this particular thing in order to be trusted to do it. And this is just, yeah, this is so different. Anybody? Bueller. Okay, you’ll do it. Great. Fine. That’s great, yeah.

[00:18:03] Cathy Mitchell: Yeah. You’re hired.

[00:18:04] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s it. That’s I’ve never done it before. It doesn’t matter. You’ll be brilliant.

[00:18:07] Cathy Mitchell: We’ll help you.

[00:18:08] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And that camaraderie of binding together on a particular thing, in your case WordCamp, but the broader project, you know, the WordPress project as a whole, I feel it’s full of these kind of people. And we will get into in a minute I’m sure, how that maybe has changed for some people in the more recent past, and about the fact that the community does feel like it’s in a bit of a challenging place at the moment.

But I just want to go back a little bit because you mentioned, and neither of us I suspect will have the answer to this, but I’m interested in your intuitions anyway. You mentioned that people nowadays, maybe this has always been the case, but it feels like there’s been a change. Loneliness seems to be a very common thing now. And my sort of back of the napkin calculus points me in the direction of wondering if it is actually oddly technology. The very thing that we’re celebrating. If technology might be responsible for it.

For example, I look around and I see a lot of people who give an awful lot of what would’ve otherwise been free time, time that they could have gone out and socialised and what have you. And, you know, you sort of end up sitting on the couch and scrolling through social media and things like that.

Television has become so absolutely fascinating. You know, there’s like a billion different channels, and essentially there’s a thousand ways to keep yourself entertained all by yourself, and never speak to another human being, or be in proximity to another human being. There’s no question there, I just wondered if you had an observation or a similar thought process.

[00:19:39] Cathy Mitchell: I looked up, because I knew we were going to talk about this, the stat on it. Because I know I’ve had the same feeling. And I’ve heard people talk about it, but I didn’t really know if that was like true or not, because whenever I am thinking or researching something, of course that’s what the algorithm shows me. So I’m always kind of hesitant, like is this actually real or am I just seeing this?

But it did say in a 2021 report, the US Surgeon General, and this is in the States, no 2023, that the health impact of a loneliness epidemic. Okay, General Vivek Murthy declared a loneliness epidemic in 2023. And he said that the health impact is the same as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. It’s not good for us. And that the biggest effect, 79% reported feeling lonely of the 18 to 24-year-old group, which is more like 40 some percent. What was it? 41% of 66 plus.

[00:20:35] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so the younger you skew, the more lonely you are likely to be.

[00:20:40] Cathy Mitchell: Yeah. And we also see, now I don’t know if this is correlative or causative, but technology has also skyrocketed in that period of time.

[00:20:48] Nathan Wrigley: Yes. Yeah, and also probably, again, I’m drawing conclusions which are not based in fact or research or anything like that. You and I were both born in an era where that technology wasn’t available. So I imagine patterns were set down in our infant brains, which are perhaps different to the patterns that are set down now.

It’d be curious to see if there is a there, there. If the broad adoption, certainly in the UK, I can’t speak to Canada, but the broad adoption of technology to ever and ever younger children, to a really alarmingly early age. You know, you see children who are not even at school age who seem to have access to every technology under the sun, and who don’t seem to get that interaction from another human being. I wonder. And I’m going to sound all curmudgeonly and there’s probably going to be people shouting at me.

[00:21:34] Cathy Mitchell: I have seen it change with the Gen Z that they’re talking about. And my kids fall in that category. Whereas I wanted to be, okay, it’s personal responsibility, so we’re going to raise them. It was new to me, so I raised my kids thinking, okay, tablets, I’m going to teach you how to use it, not restrict it. I was all open-minded about all.

Now they’ve told me that if they have kids, they will restrict it far greater than I ever did. They were like, they won’t have nearly the freedom that I gave them in my open-mindedness.

[00:22:06] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, well, but you are forgiven for your open-mindedness because I guess humanity perhaps needed more evidence to draw conclusions around that. And perhaps those conclusions are now landing.

[00:22:16] Cathy Mitchell: I think so.

[00:22:16] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, well, certainly as an example, I know that in Australia more recently, there’s now a widespread ban, I think under the age of 16, and I’m going to use the word illegal, maybe that’s the wrong word. Maybe there’s a technical definition, but social media is not permitted for children under the age of 16. And I think that there’s legislation being talked about in the UK of a similar nature, and some other European countries.

I don’t know how much traction that will have because I feel that there’s a persuasive argument, much like you described of, it’ll all work itself out. You know, we don’t need the government to tell us what to do, and all of that, and that all makes sense.

But my, I can well understand, I think in the UK also, there is a growing, a groundswell of this alternative way of looking at it. Like a rejection of the phones and the technology.

Anyway, there we go. That was an aside. Do you want to contribute into that a little bit more before I push us back in the WordPress space?

[00:23:11] Cathy Mitchell: Yeah, I don’t want to be all, it’s bad, it’s bad, but I think that we’re seeing an effect. I really do believe that volunteerism, whether it’s with WordPress or anything else, in my faith background, being a person, a Christian person, I grew up seeing the service as an answer, as just part of our lifestyle. You just serve others. But now I’m seeing it come in a secular sort of way as well, where service is an antidote to loneliness.

And I think no matter where you’re serving, not the church or any, like just pick a service. Being that cameraderie with people, having a similar goal, going in the same direction, like I really do think there’s hope. There’s hope out there for all of us. And it’s a great way to do something meaningful. Like you get to do all those things. You get to practise a skill, you get to do something meaningful, you get direction, you get cameraderie all by serving.

[00:24:03] Nathan Wrigley: I’m going to, say something now, and I’m going to caveat it heavily before I say it because A, it relies on my prodigiously bad memory, and B, it could just be fabricated anyway because the source could be utterly wrong. But it feels like there’s a kernel of truth in it.

I was doing some research recently about happiness, that broad subject. You know, we would all like to be happy I’m sure. There’s a lot of people who spend a lot of time thinking about what this actually means, and trying to drill it down to some fairly basic maxims, if you like, for what leads to happiness.

Two of the biggest indicators of happiness are really interesting. One of the two is how often you spend with other people basically. How much time you interact with other human beings. Now I know that that’s not for everybody, but broadly speaking, that seems to be a huge indicator. If you actually get yourself out and you do things with other human beings, there is a definite benefit.

And the other one, which is very curious because I think it’s fair to say, you know, Canada and the UK, we’ve been brought up to worry about our own finances and amassing as much stuff as we can, and lining your nest for the future and everything. Well, this other one, controversially, the second one that I’m going to mention is the amount of stuff that you basically give away. And that could be time, or it could be finance, it could be any of those things. The more that you give away with no expectation of a return, that also apparently is a real indicator of happiness.

And I think we can all identify that. That moment where you give somebody a gift and you’ve really thought about it, and you hand it over and you watch the face change as they unwrap it. And you think, they’ve loved that, haven’t they? And you’re not thinking to yourself, well, I did that. I made them happy there. You’re just thinking, oh look, they’re really happy. Isn’t that wonderful? So anyway, there’s my 2 cents of utterly unproven thoughts.

[00:25:59] Cathy Mitchell: Okay. Learned something. Those are two, so the two things were being around people and altruism basically, with nothing expected in return.

[00:26:08] Nathan Wrigley: And funnily enough, they map very closely to what we’re talking about, right? We’re talking about events and socialising with other people, but also that, in this case, it’s not a financial thing that you are giving away, but you are definitely giving away an awful lot of your time for doing these kind of things. And maybe, given that little bit of information, it kind of becomes a little bit easier to justify because if you can say to yourself, this makes me happy, it might not seem it in those stressful moments.

[00:26:36] Cathy Mitchell: Yeah, today.

[00:26:37] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s right. But ultimately that might be causing your happiness.

Okay, so there we go. That was our little segue. Let’s sort of bring it back to WordCamps. You were very kind to write me a bunch of show notes, and they really drew me in as I was reading them. And I want to sort of dwell on a few of them because you.

[00:26:53] Cathy Mitchell: Had to convince you to get me on the podcast.

[00:26:54] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, no, there not a lot of convincing needed. I loved it. You’ve got some sort of bullet points if you like, not really bullet points. You’ve touched on different areas where you feel that you’ve got something to say about, I dont know, why people might contribute and why they might volunteer and what have you.

So it’s things like, why might new people, newbies, as you’ve described them, volunteer and why might business folk volunteer?

So the first one was, let me go back. So I’ll read into the record what you wrote because it makes a lot of sense. You said, in 2025 I helped the organisers for WordCamp Canada and this year found myself the lead organiser. And this has been consistently one of the nicest, most open groups, that I’ve ever been part of. And then you strayed into why other people, for example, new people and business people might like to contribute.

So on the business side, you said, volunteers, boundaries when not getting paid, giving back, sponsoring folks, not necessarily a financial return on investment. And then for the newbies, you said, there’s other ways to contribute, for example, contributing in code or non-coding ways, and also just being a recipient of the open, friendly community that you encounter. So that was really it. Maybe I’ve said everything that you wanted to say.

[00:28:07] Cathy Mitchell: Well, those are kind of questions that I had coming from a corporate, and I keep talking to different people trying to figure out, I guess I’m looking for something other than altruism when comes to the corporate people at least. Like why are they sponsoring? And I can see, the pessimistic, or maybe the pragmatic, side of me to be positive wants to know why. Why are they putting the dollars in?

But then on the other side, I think, well, if WordPress doesn’t do well, then they don’t do well. Like, if their businesses are based on WordPress. But then I also saw something that, if you sponsor open source projects, it makes hiring people that much easier, and also vetting people that much easier. Because it gets you into the community and so it goes both ways. People will be more likely to apply for your jobs and you will be more likely to have a way to vet them. That’s one thing I saw.

[00:29:04] Nathan Wrigley: I think there’s a lot of truth in that, or at least I’d like to believe there’s a lot of truth in that. That makes me feel happy about the whole situation. But what’s curious about what you’ve just said, and I don’t know how much of an intuition you’ve got on this, but if you were to go back to, let’s say the year, oh, I don’t know, 2018 or something like that, WordPress was experiencing this really stratospheric growth. You know, in terms of market share of the internet broadly, you know, the number of websites as a percentage, WordPress was going from sort of the low twenties to the mid twenties, high twenties, and then through the thirties, and then finally landing at this sort of 40%.

And during that time, saying this phrase sounds ridiculous because it is ridiculous, WordPress could kind of do no wrong, I think. There was just growth upon growth upon growth and a lot of companies, I don’t think needed to explain themselves to their directors quite so much. The return on the investment didn’t need to be made. It was just, look, we’re part of this thing, and there’s this rising tide, and we are one of the boats. And look, we’re going up as it all goes up. So it just happened.

However, during COVID, and then especially over the last few years, and then now especially the last couple of years, inject AI into the mix, I feel that that calculus has changed a little bit. And there’s this inkling when you speak to the same corporate people who a few years ago were willing to open their wallets to sponsor events, the wallets are much, much harder to open.

Again, in much the same way that I don’t really know why the community is so fabulous. I don’t really know why the wallets are harder to open. But I think the landscape for sponsorship, and the requirement of a return on investment, as opposed to, well let’s just join in because WordPress is growing. I think that calculation is going to be harder and harder to make. And maybe you’ve got experience of this over at WordCamp Canada trying to gather sponsors. Perhaps you found it straightforward. Perhaps it’s been difficult. I don’t really know.

[00:31:08] Cathy Mitchell: There’s almost like a perfect storm right now because wallets are tighter because over the last few years, at least in the States where my clients are, it’s become, economically there’s uncertainty. And so that trickles down and trickles up, right? And so more wallets are going to be a little bit more restrictive on what they’re going to buy, and they’re going to want to see more bang for their buck.

Corporately, also there’s been this huge rise in competition in the corporate world. There’s just way more competition over the last five or six years for just about anything when it comes to agencies or plugins or themes or whatever, there’s a lot more great competition, like good products out there. But then there’s also a lot more competition to get the clients, like clients have a lot more options.

And so I think it’s a perfect storm. Like, do you want to put your money into WordPress because is that the future? Is there money for sponsorship? Plus WordPress has become stricter on what they require to sponsor, as far as trademark use and different things that have been put higher on the priority list.

And I kind of see it like a levelling off. Like not as a bad thing because every industry can’t just, go, go, go, go. Like there’s going to be a levelling, right? Can’t be that easy. When I started, I didn’t even advertise. And I’ve had this business for 19 years. I’ve never advertised. That is going to go away. Like it was just, you know, I lucked out starting somewhere, but that’s not realistic.

[00:32:44] Nathan Wrigley: So what’s interesting in that is I think I am the same. The only period in which I’ve been in the WordPress community was during this stratospheric growth period really. Everything has been, you know, people have argued on the inside about this, that, and the other thing, and whether a feature should ship in Core, or whether or not we should do this thing at an event or what have you. So there’s been some minor disagreements.

But broadly speaking, the whole project has just swelled and swelled and swelled. There’s this overarching sense of optimism and growth, and now the brakes are on. And so for me, it feels like unfamiliar territory. And because it’s unfamiliar, it feels a little bit scary because I don’t know what that means. I don’t know whether that means that things are going to just level out as you just described, or whether it means things are going to decline, or whether it means some of my friends are going to go away because the community, it’s no longer going to be something that they wish to frequent because their profitability is under question and they need to seek revenue from other different options. Maybe AI, maybe, whatever it might be. And so I think my concern just, it’s probably self-interest really. I’m just concerned because I don’t know what’s coming and that fear is, well, it’s fear.

[00:33:57] Cathy Mitchell: I think this brings me perfectly into the WordCamp Canada thing that I wanted to mention. Just because I see this event, and even the community team, as a whole in WordPress. There are teams in WordPress, by the way, for people that don’t know, that help you get involved. It’s not just coders, like there’s all kinds of teams. And one of them is the community team, and all we have to know how to do is plan an event or host an event or serve coffee. It’s amazing. But anyway.

I am excited about WordCamp Canada, and the reason I’m putting so much time and effort into this conference is because I really see it as a light at the end of this tunnel. Not at the end. Maybe midway. I have no idea what’s going to happen to my own business, to WordPress, I don’t know. But I think there’s one thing that I’m fairly certain of, even now, even in the midst of AI, and that’s open source. I really still believe that open source is the way of the future. I still think it is, open source and AI are probably the way of the future. Yeah, I don’t know how else to say it.

And I think the exciting thing, and the thing that we need to do as people who got to take advantage of that uprise and that uptick, is you and I need to get young people involved. Like we need to get those young people involved in open source. I don’t even care if it’s WordPress or not, but they need to become part of a community that is exciting, that is beyond themselves. They need to see that we’re nice. We don’t bite. We’ll hire them. There’s just so much good that can come out of being together. And these are the nicest people. They’ll talk to people that are just standing around in the hallways with nobody to talk to, which is me. I’m an introvert, ironically.

[00:35:38] Nathan Wrigley: You definitely don’t come across like that, just so that you know.

[00:35:40] Cathy Mitchell: Well, we’re I’m pretending nobody else is listening.

[00:35:43] Nathan Wrigley: The other thing that I would add, as you were saying all of those things, it occurred to me that, I would imagine that people in more senior positions, I don’t really know how to describe it in the WordPress world, have got a similar intuition to the one that you just described. In that they can definitely see that the future needs to be thought about in terms of the youth coming in. Because there’s an awful lot of work being done at the moment and an awful lot of hours being put into educational initiatives.

And also, not just where you and I are living, but all over the world. And it was kind of interesting at WordCamp Asia recently, that was a big focus. A lot of people talking about exactly this thing and these kind of overlapping initiatives that are beginning to bear fruit. So people coming out of universities who’ve had experience of open source and WordPress in particular. And children at schools having experience of open source and WordPress.

And I think, as much as we would like open source and WordPress to win, just from a moral point of view, wouldn’t that be a great thing if everybody just noticed it and got on and used it? I think we need to do a bit of work to make sure that it’s being put under their noses so that they can make those judgements for themselves. And that is definitely a part of the future.

[00:36:57] Cathy Mitchell: Yeah, the Campus Connect and the Credits where they can university credits, like it is getting popular in other places we haven’t heard so much. But I really want to introduce it and bring it to the conference in Vancouver this fall. Because we can have universities in Canada and the US, on this side of the pond get involved in this and actually give kids credits that they can use to graduate.

[00:37:21] Nathan Wrigley: It’s so interesting as well because it’s very hard to, how to describe this, that’s a difficult one to sell, let’s put it that way. The people that are really into those initiatives really love it, but it’s hard to get people to notice that that’s going on, and hard for people perhaps to notice how important that is. But without those little foundational bricks being put in place for the future, this rising tide carries all boats metaphor, that’s not going to happen. You know, I think maybe another good metaphor there is they’re kind of building the harbour wall to make sure that the boats have got something to rise against. And I think that’s really important.

And your part of the world is definitely open to that, I’m sure. Seems to be that some European institutions, colleges, universities and South American institutions and parts in India and Southeast Asia and places like that are also beginning to bite on those ideas as well. So it’d be really interesting to see how that all goes.

You’re painting a picture, Cathy, which makes me feel optimistic. Feels like there’s a lot of positivity coming out of where you are, yeah.

[00:38:24] Cathy Mitchell: I’m probably going to get in trouble for saying this, but for all of the faults that Matt might be accused of, somehow he put something in place that became very, very popular. And the culture that I have been a part of, I haven’t worked for Automattic, but the culture at the WordCamp level and volunteering and the community team has been unbelievably positive, and foreign to me. Like I’ve had to learn this culture. What do you mean there’s no application process? How do I say yes? What are you talking about? So somehow this has grown. And he has had a lot to do with it. People don’t like that he’s had a lot to do with it, but there’s some truth there.

[00:39:07] Nathan Wrigley: It’s really interesting and it doesn’t matter how many times I have conversations like this, I’m always confused by it. I can never get my hands around it and work out what the secret sauce is so that I could copy and paste it into a different locale or a different jurisdiction or different era. But there’s a there, there. There’s something very satisfying about this community. And from everything that you’ve said, it sounds like you are very positive about it. And I share your positivity, even though sometimes it seems quite hard to grasp in the more recent times.

Oh, Cathy, that’s been absolutely wonderful. I’ve enjoyed chatting to you today. We’ve hit the sort of sweet spot of the amount of time that we’ve got, so if it’s okay with you, we’ll wrap it up there. Just before we go, if anybody wants to get in touch with you, or just sort of wants to pat you on the back for your wisdom there, where would we find you?

[00:39:55] Cathy Mitchell: Well they can find me at WPBarista. And right now they can also find me at canada.wordcamp.org.

[00:40:02] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Well I will make sure that that goes into the show notes. So if you’re listening to this, head to wptavern.com, search for the episode with Cathy Mitchell, that’s Cathy with a C, and you’ll be able to find the details in the show notes there. So Cathy Mitchell, thank you very much for chatting to me today. That was lovely. Thank you.

[00:40:19] Cathy Mitchell: Thank you. I enjoyed it.