The “State of the Word” address from the WordPress CMS project will be both live and in person, as well as streamed for viewing from home.
State of the Word, the annual keynote address from Matt Mullenweg, WordPress’s co-founder, is scheduled to take place this year on December 14, 2021, between 5 and 7 pm. Although it’s too late to attend the event in person (the deadline for requesting an in-person seat was November 28), the event will be livestreamed as Mullenweg pontificates from a podium in New York City — meaning everybody can participate.
Like practically all other in-person events, last year the the event was moved entirely online (“for the first ever” says WordPress). Also like practically all other events, this year the folks at WordPress are hedging their bet, and are offering the event both livestreamed and in-person.
“Every year, the event allows us to reflect on the project’s progress and the future of open source,” WordPress said in a statement. “This year will include that and more.”
“Join Matt as he provides a retrospective of 2021, discusses the latest trends he’s seeing, celebrates the community’s amazing wins, and explores the future. Expect to hear about a range of topics, from WordPress 5.9 and Openverse to Web3 and non-fungible tokens (NFTs).”
Mullenweg will offer a unique perspective from his vantage point. Although WordPress doesn’t produce a lot of news, it’s one of the largest open source projects on the planet. The open source content management platform is widely believed to be used by 455 million websites, and the web technology research company W3Techs says the software runs 43.0% of all the world’s websites.
For those who want to watch the event at home, the livestream will be embedded on wordpress.org/news.
“State of the Word will be followed by a Question & Answer session,” the organization said. “If you want to participate, you can either send your question ahead of time to ask-matt@wordcamp.org, or ask during the event in the livestream chat on YouTube.”
