Channing: Cool. Thank you everyone for coming.

[podcast music begins]

Josepha Haden Chomphosy, Executive Director of the WordPress Project: Hello everyone, and welcome to the WordPress Briefing. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy. Here we go.

Channing: I’m a design director at Automattic, and I’m a co-lead of the WordPress.org design team.

Josepha: Channing is a product and visual designer based in Brooklyn, New York.

Channing: We are a group of full-time designers who are sponsored by Automattic.

Lee Moreau, Host of The Futures Archive podcast: Channing’s work is all about contributing to the open source WordPress project.

Channing: It’s kind of similar to Wikipedia, in the sense that it’s maintained by volunteers.

Channing: A typical day involves spending a lot of time on GitHub, where much of the development for the WordPress project takes place.

Channing: You know what, why don’t I just share this.

Channing: This is a block locking feature, that merged just the other day.

Channing: Working in open source can be complicated, it’s not always a linear process.

Channing: That’s the scary and exciting thing about working in open source, is like getting comfortable with sharing work that is very much in progress.

Channing: Having the solid foundation of a community is what makes that collaboration possible.

Josepha: If I recall correctly, this is the first time that you are like leading part of a release. So what would you say was the most challenging part of that?

Channing: There might be some features that need to stay in the Gutenberg plugin for a while and get more testing before they get released to a much wider audience in a major WordPress release.

Channing: Ok, what would the implications of those decisions be within the UI?

Channing: Design has started to play such a more important role in the WordPress project over the past few years.

Channing: It’s definitely an exciting turn for the brand.

Channing: It can be hard to wrap your head around how many people are really interacting with what you’re working on.

Channing: The ideas could come from anywhere.

Channing: Thank you. Bye.