Community or Clique?

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the Underrepresented In Tech podcast, hosted by Michelle Frechette and Allie Nimmons. Underrepresented in Tech is a free database built with the goal of helping people find new opportunities in WordPress and tech overall.

Michelle Frechette:

Hi, Allie.

Allie Simmons:

Hi, Michelle.

Michelle Frechette:

I had laryngitis the last couple weeks. I wouldn’t have been able to do that.

Allie Simmons:

Yeah. Oh gosh.

Michelle Frechette:

How are you?

Allie Simmons:

Pretty good. Pretty good. Tired, but I feel like by Thursday I’m always a little bit tired.

Michelle Frechette:

Yeah, same.

Allie Simmons:

But this is so exciting. This is episode 99 of the podcast.

Michelle Frechette:

99, I can’t believe it.

Allie Simmons:

We’ll be recording episode 100 next week. And I don’t even know… Well, we never know what we’re going to talk about, but I don’t know what we’re going to talk about for 100.

Michelle Frechette:

I don’t either, but we might have to think about a little bit more in advance than we usually do.

Allie Simmons:

Yeah, we’ll have to figure out something really nice to do or say or talk about. But it’s exciting, so we hope that y’all listen to… Listen to the rest of this episode, of course. But we also hope that you listen next week

Michelle Frechette:

Don’t stop now.

Allie Simmons:

Yeah, don’t stop.

Michelle Frechette:

Awesome.

Allie Simmons:

Well today, I was thinking about… Not to say it’s a struggle every week to come up with an idea, but we do put some thought into what we’re going to talk about if nothing just arrives out of the blue. And so today, I wanted to talk about community and how lots of times when we are a part of a community, if we’re not careful, and if we’re not intentional about maintaining that community and building that community and nurturing, it can turn into other things. It can turn into a click, or it can turn into… I think the word cult is thrown on loosely. We all know what real cults are like and what those effects are, but they can become cult-ish, right? And I think a lot of times when you are already inside of a community and you benefit from that community, you feel safe there, you know the people, you know how things work, to you, this is your community, and it’s fine. Nothing’s wrong with it. You want to keep it the way it is because you benefit from it.

Allie Simmons:

And I think that sometimes we can have blinders on to the limits that our communities are experiencing that turn them into cliques or turn them into cult-ish sort of environments. And I think about this because WordPress has been described by more than one person that I’ve met so far in my career with WordPress, as a cult. I’ve literally had people say, “WordPress is such a cult,” or “I stopped being a part of the community because it was so culty.” And to a degree, I can understand where people are coming from with that sort of a thought process. I would not literally define WordPress as a cult because, again, that’s a very strong word.

Michelle Frechette:

Yes.

Allie Simmons:

I think more so what we can be when we’re not careful is clique-ish, right? Which that is… I don’t know if that’s a word globally used. But whenever I think of a clique, I think of high school, where you have groups of people who this is this group of people and they only hang out with each other and they don’t want to spend time with anybody else, right?

Michelle Frechette:

Right. Yeah.

Allie Simmons:

And if you try to join that group, if you, as a new person, try to ingratiate yourself into that group of people, they’re like, “No, you don’t fit with us. You don’t meet X, Y, Z criteria.

Michelle Frechette:

The mean girls.

Allie Simmons:

Yeah, the mean girls, right? And cliques are not just a high school thing. I’ve experienced cliques in offices, workplaces. Even just pure friend groups can be cliques, and it’s very exclusionary. And I think that the word community, we think about this very kumbaya, everyone loves each other, very wholesome kind of idea when we think about community. But just because you call something a community doesn’t mean that it’s welcoming. It doesn’t mean that it’s inclusive. I’m not even going to go into the diversity part of things because that’s a whole other mindset. But just the idea of having your community be a place that people would like to be and that they find, I don’t want to say easy to join, but that there are not roadblocks, there aren’t blockers for them to join and become a part of that community, those are all things that you actually have to intentionally do. And I think that we, sometimes in the WordPress community, but I’m sure other communities all over the tech industry forget to be intentional about those things.

Allie Simmons:

So that’s kind of my two cents about it. And I think there are all kinds of ways that we can be more intentional. And whenever I think about community building and people who bring people into the WordPress community, I definitely think about you. I think about you. I think about people like Topher. There are these pillars of our community that almost effortlessly, it seems like, welcome people in and make people feel welcome that they want to be a part of this. I’ve seen you do it for years now. So I would love you to talk about the ways in which you intentionally, or even accidentally make this community more inclusive, because you do.

Michelle Frechette:

Yeah. It’s funny because you say that, I’m like, do I? But I guess I’m not seeing myself through your eyes. But I think some of the things that we do, some of the things we talk about, so there’s community in how we react to each other in person at events, whether it’s a made up or a word camp, whether it’s a small regional word camp, or a big word camp, excuse me, like US, Asia or Europe. But then there’s also how do we interact in Facebook groups? How do we interact on Slack? How do we interact with one another? Especially on Twitter where there’s… What’s the word I want. It can be a hostile, hostile environment, or it can be a really welcoming environment. It depends on who you’re talking to, and it depends on how they’re interacting. So one of the things that… I sound so disjointed right now [inaudible 00:06:30]. Let me take a step back.

Michelle Frechette:

First, before I was in what WordPress, I spent almost 25 years in higher education. And I spent 25 years in higher education as a registrar and a director of admissions. And in both of those roles, you are interacting with the entire diverse population of your student body. And I was a registrar first at a small Christian college where there was not a lot of diversity, but then at a university with a… And I was at one of the top 30 business schools in the United States. And so we had over 40% international students that I would have somebody walking into my office on a daily basis, all the different accents, all the different cultures. I have always wanted to make sure that my students felt embraced, involved, and respected for their cultures. And we did a really good job at that school. So at that school, we had cultural awareness type days.

Michelle Frechette:

So maybe we’re talking 20, 25 years ago, so forgive any labels that might today not be considered appropriate. But we would have different student groups. One I remember in particular was Brazil. And we had 10 students from Brazil. And so they did a presentation over lunch, and the school paid for them to order local food that was within their cultures and that we could legally have on campus because you know how campuses are with bringing in [inaudible 00:08:05]. And they would do PowerPoint presentation. It would include videos of dances, and it would talk about the GD… What is it? I can’t remember words now. The national products and the national cultures and things that had to do… We learned a lot about soccer that day, or as it’s called everywhere but besides the United States, football. I’ve said this before, I grew up in a very white community, in a very non-diverse community, in a very non-diverse family.

Michelle Frechette:

But I always had it instilled in me that people have value, and it’s not just your people that look like you. And so getting outside of my little white bubble into a cultural salad of people, not a melting pot, because we’re not trying everybody look the same, but this wonderful rich experience of being with all these people and meeting them and learning and teaching… I taught a class in idioms, US idioms that we say, so that when somebody who’s here for two years or a year from China hears like, “Oh, they were three sheets to the wind,” what does that even mean? Right? So I was teaching classes like that to international students to make them feel more welcome. I think I bring some of that forward with me into what I do here in WordPress.

Michelle Frechette:

The last position I held, I was the director of a massage school, and that’s where I really got an entrance into knowing and learning about the LGBTQ+ community because I hadn’t had that experience before, and knowing people that were openly gay, openly queer. At that point in time, there were not a lot of openly trans people because we’re talking still the early 2000s. WordPress has introduced me to a lot of my trans friends, which I think is wonderful. But bringing all of those experiences forward, understanding how to value people, I think is the first and foremost. I grew up… I think we’ve talked about this before. I grew up the United Colors of Benetton and being colorblind. I don’t see color. I’m colorblind, right? And in the eighties and nineties, that was like, that’s awesome. You don’t see color. Everybody’s the same. And we’ve moved past that now to I absolutely see color, and I appreciate you for who you are and the culture that comes with how you’re born and raised. And so I think a lot of those things come into just being able to be open and welcoming to people.

Michelle Frechette:

I was at Work Camp Montclair this past weekend. It was tour the end of the day, and I was just kind of me and my scooter toodling around, and there’s two black women who were having conversation. And one had an amazing head wrap, by the way. And I complimented her earlier in the day because she just looked like so awesome. So I pull up to these two women and… Pull up to [inaudible 00:11:02] on my scooter, and I was like, “Hey, can I join your conversation?” And they were like, “Yes, of course.” And the one said to me, “I don’t know if you remember me from last year, but I remember you and your talk on diversity and inclusion.” I was like, “Oh, good, I’m glad.” And so the three of us had a so wonderful conversation. Never once did they give me the side eye like, “Oh, that white girl just pulled up to talk to us.’

Michelle Frechette:

And never once did I say to them anything about anything. That was just like, “Hey, how’s the conference and all of this stuff going?” And as we drove away that night, I was thinking to myself, that was one of the best conversations there because we were just literally laughing and having fun together, even though I didn’t really know them, they didn’t really know me. But that’s not what it was about, right? But also the fact that the two of them were kind of off to the side, just the two of them, and not a lot of other people interacting and whatever. And I thought, well, I’m going to interact because that’s who I am. But also… And I feel like I’m rambling now, but just the idea of when I grew up, if there were two black women, you didn’t approach them because you didn’t have anything to share. You didn’t understand their experiences. You might even be a little bit afraid.

Michelle Frechette:

And so the idea that we can grow past whatever was ingrained in us from our childhood into who we can be today and embrace one another for who we are, including our backgrounds, our cultures, our sexualities, our skin color, all of those things, whether we’re on a scooter or standing, all of those things come into play with being able to talk to each other. And at those in-person events, we talk about that Pacman concept and making our groups be open so other people can join us. I talk often about sitting at a table by myself where anybody can come up and join me and I want to meet them, or sitting at a table where there’s one seat left and saying, “Can I join you?” and meeting new people, as opposed to just sitting with my friends that I’ve known and WordPress forever, because I talk to y’all all the time.

Michelle Frechette:

And yes, I’ll sit with you sometimes. Let’s grab breakfast, whatever. But I want to meet and know as many people in WordPress as I can. And I think that that’s part of what makes it a pretty amazing community, is that you can, if you are willing to… And I understand there are introverts who the thought of doing some of those things is beyond their ability to engage, and they’re hoping that somebody like me rolls up to them and says, “Hey, how are you doing?” So I’m not saying that everybody can do what I do at that level, but being open to it is something that’s super important. And we can actually extrapolate that into the online community as well.

Allie Simmons:

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Allie Simmons:

I think that’s so impactful and that’s so important, particularly bringing it back to communities, because we’ve only recently started seeing the comeback to in-person events, right? And I remember so many instances at in-person events where, yeah, I’d be sitting at a table with people that I knew, people that I had seen at many other conferences, other work camps before, which can be described as clique-ish, right? We’re sitting together because we know each other. But so frequently, and I started learning how to do this by watching other people, yeah, like you said, you’d see somebody sitting alone or you’d see somebody pass the table and you’d say, “Oh, hey, I liked your talk,” or you bridge some kind of gap and you invite them to sit with you. That, to me, is one of the most powerful things that I’ve seen at pretty much every word camp I’ve been to, and I’ve been to and a little over a dozen by now.

Allie Simmons:

And it happens at lunch or in between sessions, right? We don’t do a lot of our community building during the sessions. That’s why we’re sitting quietly and we’re listening and we’re learning and all that. But the ability for us to socialize with each other in a not necessarily networky kind of way is… It is so important because you sit down and you talk to these people. And instead of having this feeling of like, well, I don’t really belong here, I don’t know as much as they do, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, we’re just all kind of equalizing ourselves, and we’re all just people, which I went to… The only other in-person conference, tech conference that I’ve been to that was not WordPress, I’m not going to say what it is because I think I’ve talked about it on the podcast before, and I don’t want to badmouth any other organizations or communities, but I went to a very large, I’ll say, women focused tech conference.

Allie Simmons:

And it was not a community. That was not what was important. There were lots of talks to go to. There were some socializing things, but not really, the big thing was to walk around the big sponsor area and basically literally network, get someone’s card so that you can send them a resume. That the point, was to try and find a job. And there was no community anything. And the whole time, I was there for three days, I basically spent the entire time by myself. I saw some people standing together and talking, but it was usually like they came from the same company or they came from the same town or something, and there was no opportunity for people to really mix together. And the times that I did try to talk to people, they were just very, very, very job focused and we’re not interested if I was not helpful toward that end.

Michelle Frechette:

Right.

Allie Simmons:

And I stayed in contact with nobody that I spoke to. I got a lot of business cards, but I didn’t stay in contact with any of those people because there was no human connection there. And I’m sure lots of people got jobs and found it very useful and wonderful in that way and learned things at the sessions. I did. But the number one thing to me that was missing, that made me feel like I’m never coming back was the cliqueishness of the people who did sit together and how there was no emphasis on let’s bring other people in and meet new people.

Michelle Frechette:

Yeah.

Allie Simmons:

And I think that’s what makes WordPress very special, is that we tend to emphasize that. We tend to think a lot about how we are going to provide socialization at these events, virtual or physical.

Michelle Frechette:

Right.

Allie Simmons:

That’s really good community building that we do. And I do think a lot about how we can do that outside of events. And I feel like we haven’t really nailed that yet. And so from the outside looking in of somebody who maybe hasn’t been to an event, we can come across as clique-ish because we have these pods of people that know each other from these events. I even remember at some point realizing, in terms of the people pre pandemic who were kind of career word campers, who were going to basically every single one, there is an east coast and a West coast group of people that know each other and go to all those camps on their side of the country. And I don’t know, I find those things really interesting because they can be helpful, but they can also be… Discriminatory is a strong word, but they can be in inclusive, I suppose.

Allie Simmons:

So yeah, I feel like it’s, I important for us all the time, when we’re doing things in the community and we were, whether it’s from an event to hiring people, to think about what’s the decision that I can make right now that is going to push the community side of things forward and not push the side of things forward, right? So another good example is when I met you. We met over Twitter because you needed a podcast guest. And I said, “Okay, I’ll be a podcast guest.” And I don’t know if a lot of people know this, but through meeting me and speaking with me and learning about the things that I do, you helped me to, or you encouraged me to apply for a job at GiveWP. I don’t think you went to anyone and said, “You should hire her,” but I learned about that opportunity because you told me about it.

Allie Simmons:

And that to me is very community, right? It’s like you could have just said, well, I don’t really know her. I’m going to go recommend my friends, the people that I already am close to. But we found that we had, that I had skills that were relevant to that job, and you cleared that, opened that door for me. And that, to me, is community building, is you help other people for the sake of helping other people, not because they’re going to benefit you.

Michelle Frechette:

I think it comes down to a couple things that we hear our whole lives long, but so many of us have yet to internalize, which is kindness is free. And it comes down to kindness. And part of being kind is being observant and looking for ways to be kind. You can be a kind person when you are asked to do things. But to be a proactively kind means you’re looking for opportunities to be kind to others. So I think that that practicing kindness and looking for opportunities to help one another is really something that a lot of people haven’t got that last step yet because they don’t think about… We as human beings are so concerned about ourselves all the time, that sometimes we forget to look outside of ourselves in our bubble. And then the other idea was… Oh shoot, I forgot already. I’ll come back to it.

Michelle Frechette:

But practicing kindness I think is one of the biggest things. And that’s what people tell me all the time. People don’t tell me I’m the smartest person in WordPress. People don’t tell me I’m… Yes, they tell me I’m the busiest person sometimes, but I have people… One-on-one, people will tell me that I’m one of the kindest people that they know in WordPress, and that’s because I’m looking for opportunities to be helpful, little things like… And it seems like a little thing to a lot of people probably. It takes over an hour to do my weekly Wednesday jobs thread tweet. I’m not getting paid to do that. I have a sponsor, but it’s an in kind sponsor. I’ve made no money doing that because it’s not about the money. It’s looking for opportunities to help people in the community.

Michelle Frechette:

WP speakers, same thing. W career pages, some of the projects that I’ve done. And I’m not suggesting that everybody has to drop everything and do projects, but look for opportunities, look for gaps, whether that’s with one person or the entire community, and find a way to use your kindness to fill those gaps. I think that those are things that kind of go a long way.

Allie Simmons:

And I definitely, I’ve seen you and a lot of other people… I put a lot of emphasis on people who are kind when nobody is looking, right? People who are kind not to get the reception back of that feeling, not to impress anybody, not to promote it or anything like that. But if it’s just you and another person in a room, being kind for the sake of it, I think is pretty incredible. And to strangers, not always the easiest thing to do, to be like, I’m going to put myself out there and I’m going to make myself a little vulnerable to help this person that I don’t know. I don’t if they even do deserve it, right? Because that’s the other thing, is you can’t just blanket say, well, I’m going to be equally as kind to everyone all the time, no matter what, right?

Michelle Frechette:

Life does not work that way.

Allie Simmons:

Life does not work that way, right?

Michelle Frechette:

Right.

Allie Simmons:

But we find people… I think it’s always, as a community member, giving folks who are new, the benefit of the doubt and saying, “I want you to be a part of this community. I’m going to be kind. I’m going to help you. I’m going to,” whatever you can. And we’ve talked before about… What am I trying to say? We’ve talked before about managing community in such a way that when people are detrimental to that community, you’re not just going to look the other way and say, “Well, I’m going to just be kind and keep doing things for you no matter what.”

Michelle Frechette:

Right.

Allie Simmons:

But I think especially for a community like ours, that depends so much on this lifeblood of people coming in with new ideas and new experiences and new skills. Welcoming in new people is such a strong community building and maintenance practice that I think a lot of our projects help with, and I’m really proud about that. So yeah, that’s all I want to talk about.

Michelle Frechette:

That’s great. The only other thing I’m going to add to it is one of the things that I have said over, and again, I love random acts of kindness, but I really love intentional acts of kindness, and it’s possible to do both. So random acts of kindness is great. Who hasn’t returned somebody’s shopping cart once in a while or offered that extra dollar at the register that somebody was short, those kinds of things. Those random acts of kindness, I think are wonderful, and they define humanity in a wonderful way. Intentional acts of kindness, looking for opportunities is even better. So if you can this week at some point in time, find ways to be kind to others and help others find the bright spots in the community and feel that sense of belonging in the community because of something you’re able to do.

Allie Simmons:

Yeah. Good note to end on.

Michelle Frechette:

Absolutely.

Allie Simmons:

Wonderful.

Michelle Frechette:

We’ll see you next week when we have our 100th episode celebration.

Allie Simmons:

100th episode celebration. Yay. All right. Thank you so much for listening. Go out and be kind. And we’ll see you next week.

Michelle Frechette:

Bye.

Speaker 1:

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