This post is a transcription and the audio file (of course) of a short interview of Naomi Bush. Naomi is leading contributor’s day. This should answer all questions about what to expect. Enjoy!

Aaron: [00:00:01] Hey, I’m Aaron, one of the organizers at WordCamp Atlanta 2018 and I’m here with Naomi Bush and we’re going to talk a little about Contributor Day. How are you doing?

Naomi: [00:00:11] I’m doing great. Really excited.

Aaron: [00:00:15] Cool. Yeah. Tell me about yourself.

Naomi: [00:00:16] Alright. I’m Naomi C. Bush. I’ve been around WordPress for about, I don’t know, maybe twelve years now.

Aaron: [00:00:24] So, I’d say, a long time.

Naomi: [00:00:26] Yeah, and I’m excited to be one of the organizers for WordCamp Atlanta again this year, and basically what I do is I build Gravity Forms extensions over at gravityplus.pro. I’ve been doing that for, I guess it’ll be six years maybe, and I’m also the organizer for the WordPress Gwinnett developer meetup, so.

Aaron: [00:00:49] Yeah, which I have yet to make it all the way over there yet. Maybe someday, so.

Naomi: [00:00:54] I understand. I understand.

Aaron: [00:00:57] Yeah. So, tell me about Contributor Day.

Naomi: [00:00:59] Alright. So, Contributor Day is really cool, and the reason why I like it is because it is available to anyone of any skill level. People think that you need to be a developer, or you need to be a coder to contribute to WordPress and that is just not true. If you are brand new to WordPress, if you’ve only used WordPress a few times, you can still contribute. You say, well, how? Well, you know, we need people to, “Hey, walk through this flow, try to do these actions”, you know, and we’ll look, and we’ll see and say, “Okay, how easy is it? Do we need to change this? Do we need to adjust this?” We need people to test things. We need people who are good designers. We need people who are good at documentation. We need people who are, you know, who just love to help people, you know.

[00:01:50] I always say that if you know how to use WordPress, if you know how to do one thing you WordPress, you probably know one thing more than someone else and you can help. So, Contributor Day is going to be on Friday again this year. It’s going to be our second year doing it. It starts at 11 a.m. You can come for as long as you want. So, if you want to stay for fifteen minutes, that’s fine. If you want to stay for an hour, if you want to stay the whole day, that’s just fine. What we’re going to do is we’re going to walk through each of the areas that you can contribute in WordPress and then we’ll break off into groups and, you know, you’ll make your first contribution, which is pretty awesome. There will also be free lunch. So, if you come, just bring your laptop or your tablet and we’ll be ready to go.

Aaron: [00:02:39] I just want to say, laptops are important.

Naomi: [00:02:41] Yes.

Aaron: [00:02:41] You can try to help out without it but, yeah, bring it if you can. I know when I did Developer Day … I’m sorry, not Developer, Contributor Day – as you can tell, I’ve done that a lot – but Contributor Day in Orlando once, and I helped out. Because I know code, I was looking at some code and reviewing a theme, which is, you know, a little more technical than your average, but, I mean, you’re right. If you could do … answer questions on the forums, you know, any type of way to contribute, there’s plenty of them, so.

Naomi: [00:03:19] Yeah, so, last year we had people who liked marketing and they helped out with the marketing team. For documentation, we had people looking at the handbooks, seeing how to improve those. We also had people that were going through the comments that people leave on the handbooks, you know, either marking them as spam or saying, “Okay, this is good.” You know, so, it’s very easy to contribute to WordPress and that’s what we want to bring here to the Atlanta community.

Aaron: [00:03:48] That’s great. Well, thank you for your time. I’ll get this posted on the website in just a little bit. Thank you for your time.

Naomi: [00:03:54] Alright, thank you.

Aaron: [00:03:55] Thanks.