The OSTraining Podcast Season 2 Ep #2: Dan Maby of WPandUP and Blue 37

Miguel Balparda on Magento

In this episode, we will be talking to Dan Maby, Director at Blue 37, a WordPress design firm, and CEO of WPandUp, a non-profit designed to support & promote positive mental health within the WordPress community. Dan shares with us more about the origin story and services of WPandUP, as well as, the online event they are hosting on Giving Tuesday called DoSummitGood.

WPandUp: https://wpandup.org/

DoSummitGood: https://wpandup.org/go/dosummitgood/

For Support: https://wpandup.org/support/

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Listen to the episode with Dan


Transcript of Miguel’s Episode

  • Robbie: Welcome and thank you for joining us for episode two of the OSTraining podcast. Second season. I’m Robbie Adair and together with my cohost, Steve Burge, we speak with interesting people in and around the open source world. In this episode we will be talking to Dan Maby, director at blue 37, a WordPress design firm ,and CEO of WPandUP, a nonprofit designed to support and promote positive mental health within the WordPress community. Dan shares with us more about the origin story and services of WPandUp ,as well as, the online event that they are hosting on giving Tuesday called DoSummitGood.
  • Steve: Hey, welcome Dan.
  • Dan: Hey, you’re welcome. Thank you. I thank you for having me.
  • Steve: So Dan, you have a, a motto on your website that probably serves as a good introduction to what we’re going to talk about. Your motto is that you’re interested in people and tech in that particular order.
  • Dan: Absolutely, yes. Yeah, I mean it’s, it’s been a long term driver for me for both my business and ultimately what led into the nonprofit,focusing on the individual folks, focusing on the people,that behind us, the problems and, and whether that’s in the business, whether, whether we’re talking about building a website for them or whether we’re supporting them from a mental health perspective. I have two very different lifes, kind of business lines if you like. One is focused around my agency,and the second is focused around the nonprofit,WPandUp. So a lot of what I do is focused on the person,but of course the tech then follows to support that.
  • Steve: So if someone has never heard of WPandUp before, how would you describe it to them?
  • Dan: So, WPandUp is a registered charity or registered nonprofits. Our mission is to support and promote positive mental health within the WordPress community. It’s quite a far-reaching mission. Obviously the WordPress community is vast and we cover international barriers, international borders. So there’s quite a far reaching service that we’re delivering at the moment. And our mission really is around focusing on the individuals within the community and supporting them from a mental health perspective. It really was kind of born out of my own personal experiences and the challenges that I faced as a, as a business owner.
  • Steve: So is there an origin story of sorts behind WPandUp, is it a personal thing that you had experienced and felt the need for? Can you tell us what led to you creating this nonprofit?
  • Dan: Sure, absolutely. I’ve been involved in the web, I started using WordPress about 14 years ago, I think 2005, and initially started using WordPress. That led onto me getting involved in the WordPress community. I then went on to lead the work WordPress, London meetup. And through that experience of engaging and interacting with the community, it really, I started to see or hear kind of repeating conversations around some of the struggles that individuals were facing. For my own personal sake, I had, prior to even using WordPress, I dealt with my own personal mental health issues related to depression and anxiety. And I really started to see some recurring patterns in some of the conversations I was having predominantly related around isolation and individuals not having kind of a network or a community to be able to tap into to talk about these challenges openly. So through the events through the web press, London meetups really started to feel that there was this need for something more structured within our community that was focusing on, on mental health specifically. And it was off. It was a 2014 I originally registered the domains in the various social profiles for WPandUp because that was where my I was in a particular challenge, a particularly challenging time myself. But also seeing, as I said, these kind of repeating conversations within the community.
  • Robbie: Dan, what, what all type of services is WPN up offering now.
  • Dan: So WPandUP is offering a free to end users support. Our support is structured in three different ways. We have companionship which is focused on enabling the kind of the water cooler chats that we miss when we’re not in a kind of traditional work environment. So having somebody to pair to kind of, you know, digitally tap on the shoulder and say, do you want to have a quick chat or, you know, I’m thinking about doing this within my business. What do you reckon? It’s those kinds of conversations that when we’re, we’re not in a traditional work environment, we don’t have the ability to kind of process through those thoughts to kind of verbalize those thoughts that we would normally do on a daily basis when we got kinda coworkers around us. So that’s our, our companionship support.
  • Dan: We then have our mentorship, which is much more structured. We deliver mentorship in, in various different areas. Business mentorship, physical health, mentorship and a number of individuals are receiving much more structured support from that respect. And then we’ve also got our what we call cell call support, which is we are working with mental health professionals and we are able to deliver support for individuals that require access to mental health professionals. So some individuals that we deal with are find themselves in a situation where they’re unable to access mental health, mental health support or professional mental health support. So that’s a, that enables us to deliver that to those people.
  • Steve: So you had that motto about people in tech. I wonder if there’s a, a particular overlap there when it comes to mental health issues? I asked, cause I’ve got some friends and family and some fairly stressful jobs who have some issues to deal with. I get a brother-in-law works in London in one of the big hospitals there and him and his colleagues will often go out to some of the very worst things you’ll see. I think they went to the truck that had like 45 Vietnamese immigrants inside who had passed away recently in the Southern part of England and they’d had to open the truck and they see that kind of stuff all the time. They have an enormous amount of like stressful situations to process. And so there’s some kinds of jobs where you have like a lot of stressful imagery, a lot of stressful situations to deal with. I’m thinking of another friend who works in sales, a very high pressure sales environment and at the end of every month there’s an enormous amount of pressure on his back. When it comes to people in tech, do you see a, a certain kind of repeating pattern that that comes up with people that do the work? We do. Is it, is it isolation driven? Is it what kinds of things do you see regularly from people who come to visit WPandUp?
  • Dan: Mm, great question. A real regular or a repeating pattern that we see, it does relate to isolation within the community. We made up of quite heavily predominant, quite heavily made up of, of freelancers, solo business owners, even distributed team members that don’t have that kind of traditional work environment, so can spend a lot of time isolated, spend a lot of time on their own without the ability to have that kind of day to day interaction with other humans. I myself can spend, well, used to be able to spend days at a time in my own home office without actually seeing other, without even seeing other humans live and interacting with them. So isolation is definitely is a real reoccurring issue that we see. The WordPress community is generally very good in terms of the, on the events side and bringing people together.
  • Dan: We’ve got our WordCamps, we’ve got meetups. So we’re definitely very kind of proactive in that regard in terms of bringing people together. But we do, it is still definitely an issue that we see on a regular basis. And another major kind of reoccurring issue that we’re dealing with is individuals that are faced with financial pressures through starting their own businesses and the stresses and the mental health issues that can relate to to that. And from the stress that that could cause is a, is quite a repeating pattern for us as well. Unfortunately. We often see individuals that are are we, we regularly hear from individuals that are fantastic at their particular skill sets. So we may have an absolutely fantastic developer they can produce absolutely awesome piece of awesome product but then they don’t, may not maybe lacking in the marketing skills or they may be lacking in accountancy skills. Just having some level of understanding of how to run the business side of running a business and that can then lead onto pressures and stresses that can ultimately lead down, lead them down quite a dark path.
  • Steve: Yet it seems that a lot of the economy has moved towards a very isolated way of working. You’ve got people working as Uber drivers and people working as a delivery drivers, people being their own boss in inverted commons being often freelances in inverted commons. And that basically often means that you’re, you’re there when someone needs you and when they don’t need you, you’re dropped. And so being that individual entrepreneur often basically means there’s no support system. There’s no no colleagues, no, no HR, no day to day communication. You are the marketing person, you’re the business person. You’re the finance person, you’re actually doing the work. It’s a pretty stressful lifestyle, even for the people that make it work.
  • Robbie: Yeah. And I see, you know, if you’ve look at social media too and there’s bullying that happens, we know with like high school kids, but there’s also bullying that happens in and among the tech communities I see. And I can imagine that that also kind of just contributes to the issues that you’re seeing when these people feel very isolated and when they do go out there on social media or on forums or things like that and could get attacked or it’s just not there, people aren’t receptive to them. I can see that this would also be an issue that you guys are seeing. So I’m glad to see you’re giving them a safe space to talk where they don’t feel that they could be attacked.
  • Dan: Absolutely. The the issue that we, I actually give a talk or I’ve given a talk several times at WordCamps that within it, I talk about the, just the sheer number of things that small business we need to have at least some level of understanding of and there’s, there’s about 20, 25 different elements that come into that. Whether it’s kind of accountancy marketing, the various different types of marketing. There’s quite a long list and every single time I give that talk, that particular slide in that particular part of the talk always seems to resonate really well with the, with the individuals in the room. This kind of this overwhelming feeling of things that I’ve got to be responsible for and things that I’ve at least got to have some level of understanding for to be able to run my business.
  • Robbie: Yeah, there’s a lot to starting a business, especially when you’re an individual starting on your own. Freelancing like that
  • Steve: I’ve found it helps to admit that often you’re not killing it. You’re not making a ton of money on the particular business angle that you’re taking at the moment. We started a WordPress plug in business a couple of years ago and with finally getting to the point after about a couple of years where it’s bout to turn profitable for the first time after really a pretty long slug probably, two, two and a half years of this point. And at WordCampUS I’ve managed to get in quite a few conversations with people who, when I mentioned that to them that it had been a long, hard slog and it really tired me out. A lot of people were very honest and very helpful in responsing, you know, what my business is struggling too. You see all these people on social media who are killing it. Well, three or four years ago we had 50 people in our company and now we’re down to five. We’ve just struggled to keep the business coming in the door. Other people had similar situations to me where they had a great idea, one that was making progress, but far more slowly than they thought it would do. There’s a certain help you can get from being honest with people. And the right people will be honest in return. And that’s, that’s been helpful to me.
  • Dan: Absolutely. It’s been really interesting. The conversations particularly in the the the London meetup we really try to encourage individuals to be open and honest about their situation. Cause it’s kinda counter-intuitive when you go to any of these kinds of events, these kind of networking events, you’re there to really kind of predominately kind of sell yourself cause you’re there to try and network trying to, to build the the build the relationships with individuals. So it’s kind of counterintuitive to walk in through and somebody says, Oh, how are you doing? And say, well, you know, I’m actually having a really bad month. I’ve, I’ve not been paid by my clients or, you know, I’m, I’m really struggling with staff and you know, that some of challenges that we face on a day to day basis. But having created a safe space, I haven’t created an environment where people can feel comfortable and feel it’s OK to, to be honest about the current situation of their business.
  • Dan: It really does change the conversation. It really does change the way people react because often we found that we’re individuals have come up and said, you know, I’m having a bit of a difficult time. It’s then led on to a conversation that’s enabled individuals to think of solutions and individuals to partner together and create bigger and better things on a more kind of collaborative focus as opposed to this kind of this individual focus. So it’s been really, really quite an interesting journey seeing that and encouraging that within the, within the events.
  • Steve: So if someone’s listening to this and they’re feeling like they need someone to talk to, if they’re in the London area, they can come along to one of your meetups or maybe they can go along to one in their area. But online, how can you guys help them? What kind of resources will someone find if they go to the WPandUP website?
  • Dan: Sure. So we, we actually run events across the UK at the moment. We are, we’re also launching a number of events across Europe. So there’s the the model that we’ve created is something that we’re replicating outside. We’ve, we started out in the UK just simply because that’s where we’re myself and a number of the other team members are based. But we are, so we’re moving on to moving beyond these borders. But in terms of online if, if an individual is interested and would like to connect with WPandUp , there’s a number of ways of doing that. If initially they visit WPandUp.org/support, there’s quite a long page there that will give them various bits of information about the styles of support that we deliver and the ways that they can then interact and, and access that support.
  • Dan: What we’ve tried to do is offer a number of different ways of communicating. So if an individual is happy to pick up a phone and, and speak to somebody, then we do have phone support. We also have a live chat. We also have of course email and a Slack team that is open to individuals to come and join and, and be part of that community as well. So there’s quite a few places in a few ways that individuals can access WPandUp. When somebody contacts us, if they are contacting us to look for support, then the process is very customized for the individual. There’s no kind of one size fits all solution. Within this. It’s about making sure that everything that we’re doing is right for that individual. So we’ll have an initial conversation to determine the, the routes that this individual is potentially looking for. And from there we can then take it down a slightly more structured route. So either look, we look at one of our health hubs to determine if one of those is the most appropriate solutions for them. And as, as we’ve, if, if need be, we can also access mental health professionals as well.
  • Robbie: And Dan, you guys are doing a summit, an online event coming up. The do good summit or the DoSummitGood. That’s it. Thank you. And so that’s going to be an online event, like an online conference, correct? It is, yes. Yeah. Okay. And so it’s, it’s to raise funds for WPandUP, It your fundraiser? Correct.
  • Dan: I actually know we’re actually raising funds for every nonprofit that’s involved in the event. We decided that essentially, so the event is running on giving Tuesday, so December the third from 1:00 PM UTC. And we’ve, what we’ve decided to do is bring together a number of four good entities within the WordPress space to not to raise the profile of each of each of those entities, but also to have some great talks from individuals that run these various funds and services. Now the talks aren’t specifically related to their funds. So for example, we’ve got Marie from Yoast CEO. She’s coming on. She’s going to be talking a little bit about the Yoast diversity fund and the Yoast care fund, but then she’s giving a talk, a 35 minute talk that’s focused around SEO. And so it’s, it’s a bit of a combination of a kind of a word campy style events online. But also there’ll be a bit of time just to talk about each of the four good entities that each individual represents.
  • Robbie: Oh, that’s cool. I didn’t realize it was not just a fundraiser for WPandUP. I like that you guys are combining with other nonprofit entities out there as well.
  • Dan: Yeah, thank you. Well, the thought, the thought there was that this is, it’s giving Tuesday you know, can we do something collaboratively, work as a, as a, as a greater community around this come together and raise some funds and distribute those funds across all the, all the nonprofits that are taking part.
  • Robbie: Fantastic. And we’ll put the link at the, in the description of this podcast. So if people are interested, they can register online, correct?
  • Dan: Yes, they can. Yes. Thank you. Yep.
  • Robbie: Great. And will it be recorded?
  • Dan: Yeah, each session is going to be recorded. The event, the event is entirely free for individuals to attend. There are limited places available for the live event and we do have a hallway track, so there’s a live chatting as well. So if individuals want to come on and just have a bit of a conversation about what’s going on if you had to WPandup.org/go, that’ll redirect you to the the registration page. And yeah, if individuals want to come and join us in the live event, that would be great. Obviously they can get questions asked as the, as the event is going on. But they are also being recorded so they will be available post event as well.
  • Steve: So probably some substantial overlap there. Between the mental health and the doing good summit that you’re holding. There’s a, a certain emptiness perhaps of just providing software for people have found over 15 years or so of being an open source now that the software itself is not enough. There’s, there needs to be a bigger reason to do what you do to direct your company in the, towards towards helping towards being a more constructive player than simply making money and providing software that unless you happen to be maybe someone like give WP who are very much in the nonprofit and in the contribution space that a lot of the software, we write a lot of the projects often that we do you know, fairly meaningless in the bigger picture that if you can get your staff, get your, your company involved in something that’s more meaningful and perhaps in it, perhaps not directly related to your company, you can inspire a bigger sense of meaning in what you do rather than just turning up and bashing away on the code editor every day. Is that fair to say? There’s an overlap there that one way to solve mental health issues is to get people thinking that is not just a question of turning up and bashing it code every day, but that the company or the work you do has a deeper meaning.
  • Dan: Yes, absolutely. I think there’s, there’s a it’s important to realize that the, the important to realize the impact that we can have. I mean a lot of a lot of businesses out there producing websites for other businesses are enabling those, those businesses to continue to grow, to continue to become more, to deliver more to their owners, their family, their owner’s families. You really can have a very far reaching impact. And it can sometimes get a bit lost I think. Certainly I have the ability to, just to sit and, just as you said, kind of get yourself lost in the code editor and just, just be tapping away all day long and, and think, well, actually, what, what’s the purpose? What am I actually achieving here? So sometimes it’s, it’s good to kind of sit back and reflect and, and realize that actually, you know what, there is a a kind of a greater good.
  • Dan: It’s not just about producing a product, it’s not just about making some money. There’s, there’s much more to this. There’s a much deeper kind of need to, to satisfy ourselves as business owners. I think it, it’s for, for a lot of people it’s not just about the money and not just about their kind of for success, it w how do you determine success? What does success look like for you? I think that’s something that we, we certainly do discuss with individuals. When we’re talking with them. Cause it’s, it, sometimes people can come to us and, and, and they’ll say, Dan, I feel like a failure when I feel like I’m not achieving them. I’m not going anywhere. Well, okay, let’s take a step back. What does success look like for you and, and for some that may be, you know, producing something that enables another business to continue to grow.
  • Robbie: Dan, do you find that the people that come to WPandUp for help or assistance or support, whatever they’re looking for, do you find that they then continue on and actually then help and assist other people that are coming into WPandUp looking for help?
  • Dan: We certainly do see a lot of people there in have an interest in WPandUp come through and going on to want to support in some way whether that be volunteering their time, whether it be financially donating. It’s very much a really nice community focus. That’s, that’s growing and developing within WPandUP. It’s very much a maturing thing. We as, I mean, I registered the domain back in 2014, but it wasn’t actually until beginning of 2018 that I brought together what is now the board of trustees a group of friends who said, look what does this look like? Where should this go? And so, WPandUp is a very young entity. We actually only got registered charitable status at the back end of 2018 so as a registered charity, we’ve only just hit our first, our first year. So there’s, there’s a lot of growth and a lot of maturity to, to still happen within WPandUP. But certainly the individuals that we’ve, we’ve they’ve come through and are taking part in and I’ve been part of it’s have really kind of grown into the community and grown into the to deliver, to help deliver the, the support and services within it.
  • Robbie: Awesome. I love seeing the pay it forward kind of model
  • Dan: Yes. Yeah. It’s been such an incredible journey. This is the, the kind of the, from the start to, to where we are now and, and what, we are really very much in the start still. But there’s, there’s so much, there’s so much more to come. We’ve, we’ve actually found ourselves ahead of where we’d expect it to be. In terms of the support that we’re delivering, we’ve delivered. We’ve delivered a little over seven and a half thousand hours of support to date within WPandUp. We’ve had a little over six and a half thousand attendees register for one of our in-person events. So it’s been really quite a whirlwind since since originally meeting with that. What is the say now? The board of trustees.
  • Robbie: Wow.
  • Steve: Are you, you slightly shocked by that level of demand that
  • Dan: Extremely, yes, yes. Yeah. We hadn’t expected to be anywhere near that. The level of support that we’re now delivering was what we had expected to be doing this time in 2020. So we were kind of a year ahead of ourselves in terms of the support that’s being delivered and the services, et cetera. We’ve just got to catch up in terms of the finances cause we’re not quite there in terms of the 2020 finances at the moment.
  • Robbie: Wow. That is an extreme demand. I’ve… those numbers surprised me as well.
  • Dan: It has been, it’s definitely taken us by surprise, the focus in terms of what’s needed to be delivered around the support and around the, the companionship has been way more than we’d expected. So things have had to evolve fairly rapidly for us for to enable us to do that.
  • Robbie: Can people donate directly on the website to your organization?
  • Dan: Yes, they can. Absolutely. Yeah. WPandUp.org/donate is an online donation form there, we’re actually using the GiveWP plugin on that one.
  • Robbie: Fantastic.
  • Steve: The summit itself is on the Tuesday, which comes right after Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
  • Dan: That’s right, yes. Yeah. So Giving Tuesday has grown over the last couple of years, the last few years, into a more focus around, you know, we’ve had all the major expense of Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and let’s, let’s focus on some of the nonprofits and, and supporting the communities that that are out there.
  • Steve: Yeah. I’ve seen a couple of WordPress companies entirely abandoned their Black Friday offer and focus instead on Giving Tuesday giving a portion of every purchase to something constructive rather than just trying to have the biggest cash grab they can on black Friday.
  • Dan: Absolutely, yes. Yeah. I think as a, I think to be a, my, my personal take on the, on the Black Friday thing is, is it’s become a bit more diluted. It’s a bit more it’s a, it’s a bit of a shame the way that’s, that’s going if I’m honest. But it’s, it’s wonderful that this giving Tuesday focus has come out of it and we’ve got, we’ve got this opportunity here to support nonprofits globally.
  • Robbie: And how else does WPandUp do fundraising? I know you have the online donation, but do you guys do other fundraisers out there that people could contribute to?
  • Dan: Yeah, sure. So we, we’d run, we run a number of campaigns throughout the year. We’ve just run out and never give up campaign throughout October, which was really had a, a message around kind of that, that idea of, of not giving up. For some individuals giving up can have really kind of kind of far reaching and quite disastrous consequences. We weren’t saying that it’s right to always never give up, but there are situations where it is, it’s right to continue and keep, keep trying to press forward and push forward through it. And these, these kinds of events were very focused around the messaging and the, and the, the support that we’re being, that we’re able to deliver within that message. But it’s also an opportunity for us to put the message out there that we as a charity do need some form of funding.
  • Dan: We’ve as I’ve mentioned, we’ve, we’ve found ourselves in a situation where we’re delivering far more support than we’d ever expected. So we’ve had to work quite hard to look at alternative income streams and ways of sustaining the charity. Going forward. So a big focus for us has been around corporate sponsorship and, and getting companies involved and getting their brand exposed across all that we’re doing enabling them to, to be associated with the kind of the for good entities, the for good focus that we have. So we’ve got the likes of Green Geeks that have come on board, which has been fantastic. They’ve supported us from day one and WPMUdev and a number of other companies that are coming on board to enable us to do this. But we’re also looking at alternative income streams. We’re currently developing our support and counseling services as a, as a paid for service to be delivered into agencies. So agencies can then deliver support to their staff in a more structured way.
  • Robbie: Fantastic. Now we have concentrated all on WPandUp, your nonprofit, but do tell us a bit about your agency that you own there in London. It’s in London, correct?
  • Dan: Yeah, Blue 37. Yeah, I’d say, I mean that was my I just said I’ve been running for, I don’t know how many years now, actually too many years to remember. It’s, it’s been an incredible journey. I’ve, I’ve really enjoyed that experience. So it was born out of initially as a, as a freelancer moving on to, to taking our staff, moving on into more kind of an agency level. The, the, the progress within it has been fantastic. It’s, it’s been a really enjoyable journey for me. The very early days that where, I’m not going to lie were difficult. There were lots of challenges, lots of things that I faced that I didn’t expect to face. And then looking back now they’ve enabled me to deliver a WPandUp. So I’m actually really grateful for, for the challenges that I did face in those early days.
  • Robbie: And you are involved in the WorkCamp, you said earlier and in London and the meetups and like that you’re very involved in the community it sounds like.
  • Dan: Yes. Yeah. I wrote. So at the moment I run four meetups across the UK. So London, Essex, Suffolk and Liverpool. But we’ve also got a number of, as mentioned, other Word meetups coming on board. And I’m also the co-lead with Barbara, for WordCamp London. So that’s another kind of major thing that happens once a year, which keeps us, keeps us out of, keeps me out of trouble.
  • Robbie: And when is WordCamp London?
  • Dan: That’s a really good question. We don’t have a fixed date at the moment. There’s some work going on looking at potential alternative venue for London this year for 2020. So we’re looking at alternative dates as well.
  • Robbie: Alright, well we’ll watch for those days.
  • Dan: Yes.
  • Steve: I just got to thinking how much I could have used WPandUp at certain points, and also perhaps some of our team members who would be could have used it to it. I had a moment to think back to quite a few times when either my team members have had to help me or, or vice versa. I can probably think of at least half a dozen people that have worked with us who in particular have had issues like insomnia quite often. They often started bad sleeping patterns. Having your brain racing about a coding problem late at night and suddenly you find it’s four or five o’clock in the morning. And as a company we’ve often dealt with it just by talking as a team and trying to trying to understand each other’s issues. But it’s probably never the easiest to talk to your boss about these things. And so I really appreciate you taking the time to start a project like this. I can think of a good number of people off the top of my head who this could or would be helpful for.
  • Robbie: Absolutely. And you know, Steve talking about the isolation of team members, remote team members. I have several team members and you can feel it in our team dynamic, whenever people that are remote, when they start, you can kind of feel when they’re a little more isolated feeling. And so then we tend to then do a, you know, let’s do some video conferencing to go, you know, not just meet, but then we’ll even just stay on the conference while we’re working. We’re probably all working on the same project, but we may actually be working on separate projects, but we just kind of keep that video room open so it kind of feels like you’re in the same room even though you’re not. And, and we, you know, a lot of the team members then come back and there’s like, I really enjoyed our work session, you know, and, and so you can, there are some things that you can do even with remote workers. I feel like to try and help with that. And I don’t know, Dan, I’m sure you guys have some even better suggestions than what we’ve come up with internally. But
  • Dan: Now that they’re great at it, just having those, those kinds of zoom calls or some, some form of call we’ve seen with community members just, just sitting a working is a fantastic way of creating some sort of connection for us as, as kind of remote workers. Cause it’s that we’re often missing that in our kind of day to day life when we were sitting in our own home offices or own small our own spaces. We were the NWP now we run a number of what we call life groups that are small groups that are kind of very focused on, on the individual supporting one another cause to kind of peer support. And, and those kinds of calls happen really regularly. So it’s a really good opportunity for people just to, you know, when we’re, we’re in a more kind of a traditional work environments where we got coworkers sitting in a desk. Opposites, even if we don’t realize it, we’ll be verbalizing our thoughts, we’ll be verbalizing the way what we need to deal with. And we’re often missing that when we’re in these kinds of these isolated environments. So having somebody sitting on a zoom call or a Skype call or Hangouts just sitting in the background and in now and again, you kind of pipe up and say something, it’s a really good way to to, to reduce that feeling of isolation.
  • Steve: Yes, absolutely. Cool. Well all the best for Tuesday. If, if people listening to the podcast after Tuesday, they can head over to the WPandUp website and then see the videos afterwards and make a donation.
  • Dan: Absolutely. Yes. Yeah. All the videos will be available on the web, on the WPandUp site. Post the event. So if anybody’s interested or has the option WPandUp.org/go and that will take you to the registration form and post event, there’ll be some links on the site there for all the videos.
  • Steve: Cool. And what can people keep in touch with you personally? And I’m sure we’ll be showing a lot of links related to this topic, do you have a social account you’re on?
  • Dan: Yes. So yeah, pretty much anything forward slash Dan Maby.
  • Steve: Cool. Wonderful. Thank you so much Dan and all the best with your conference and then the ongoing fundraising and success for WPandUp.
  • Dan: Excellent. Thank you. Really. I really thank you. I really grateful for the opportunity to come on and talk about this, so thank you very much.
  • Robbie: Thank you, Dan.
  • Dan: Take care.

Author

  • Robbie Adair

    Robbie started her career in corporate training until starting her own custom training and media company almost seventeen years ago. In 2010, she began doing classroom training for OSTraining while running Media A-Team. She is often presenting about various tech topics such as Joomla, Fabrik, Web Development, Social Media, and Augmented Reality. She loves seeing that "ah-ha" moment in peoples eyes in her sessions and workshops. She lives in Houston, Texas, but enjoys all the travel for client work and speaking gigs.

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