[00:00:20] Nathan Wrigley: Hello there and welcome once again to the WP Builds podcast. You've reached episode number 449 entitled. Making digital accessibility a reality, Anne-Mieke Bovelett’s CloudFest Hackathon Journey. It was published on Thursday the 11th of December, 2025.
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Okay. What have we got for you today? Well, today I am joined by Anne-Mieke Bovelett. She is the lucky winner of two CloudFest Hackathons. In the year 2025 and the year 2024, Anne-Mieke was able to scoop up the prize at the Hackathon.
Now it may be that you don't know what a hackathon is, and I didn't either, so I'm just gonna spend a moment explaining what it is. So the CloudFest Hackathon takes place in Germany. It's actually coming up in 2026. They're repeating the whole thing, and I will make sure to put some links into the show notes, so that you, if you are interested in this, can go and make yourself available and find out how you can participate. But it really is rather interesting.
A bunch of people gather in a room and they have some projects which they are going to work on, and they spend two or three days wrangling that problem and hopefully coming up with a solution. And the idea is that at the end, a panel of experts vote and a winner is announced.
Well, as I said, Anne-Mieke, the team that she was working with won it, and she was lucky enough to have that happen twice in a row.
But the curious thing about the CloudFest Hackathon is that when I went, I really didn't know what to expect. I thought it would be a bit like a WordCamp, but it really isn't. You have to be invited into the room for one thing, so you have to put in an application. That application has to be accepted. And then on the first day, the first thing that everybody does is decide which of the projects they're going to work on.
Obviously some people worked on the one that you are gonna hear about in the podcast today, but there were loads of others going on, and in various other places you may have found out about those.
But I kind of thought to myself, well, obviously everybody will just go and do the things that they're interested in, and some of the tables will be empty and some will be full. And it really didn't work out that way. It was amazing how everybody kind of fell into groups, and those groups were of equal size.
They then spend a few days hacking away trying to figure out a solution to the problem that their team is on. And then, like I said, they throw them all together and there is a vote at the end.
It really is an extremely interesting enterprise, and having been, I can honestly tell you that it's worth its weight in gold. You'll probably make lots of connections in terms of networking. No doubt you'll meet some people from different parts of the world who are really experts in their own area.
So can I encourage you to go and check out the CloudFest Hackathon? Go Google it in the year 2026, or just click on the link in the show notes.
Anyway, this podcast with Anna Mika is explaining all of the different bits and pieces that she was working on. What she thought about the CloudFest Hackathon, and how their project has been maintained since then. You'll get to hear that she would love for there to be more support after the hackathon is over.
But really interesting. Certainly worth a listen, and I hope that you enjoy it.
I am joined on the podcast by Anne-Mieke Bovelett. Hello.
[00:05:09] Anne-Mieke Bovelett: Hi Nathan.
[00:05:11] Nathan Wrigley: Nice to have you with us. We, we're gonna pretend like we haven't been talking for the last half an hour, about absolutely everything.
And we got, pretty deep, pretty quickly there.
[00:05:23] Anne-Mieke Bovelett: We should have recorded that.
[00:05:25] Nathan Wrigley: We should have recorded that maybe another day. But, Anne's gonna be talking to us today about an experience which happened earlier during the year. And actually for Anne, it happened, a year prior to that as well. I'm talking about, CloudFest and the CloudFest hackathon, but that's gonna happen in a few minutes time because before we do that, I think we should get you to know you, a little bit more, Anne, if that's all right.
So just give us your little bio. Tell us who you are, the bits that you're most proud of.
[00:05:53] Anne-Mieke Bovelett: Give us your little bio. Oh my gosh, that's a dangerous question. Okay, I, am Dutch half Danish, half Dutch. Actually, I grew up in the Netherlands. I currently reside in Germany, but I love to live all over the world. I've been in web design since 1998, so that probably tells folks I'm really old. I come from this very creative family of an Oscar winning animator, musicians, sculptors, painters. and I have this stray commercial gene that no one knows where it comes from. yeah, I always find it so hard. I should get this piece of, thing written and then have it on my screen and then rattle it down.
[00:06:51] Nathan Wrigley: your Read it out, but no, I think it's more human that you do it this
[00:06:54] Anne-Mieke Bovelett: yeah. okay, so let me give you the red, the, how do you say we call it the red line through our life.
[00:07:01] Nathan Wrigley: through line we would
[00:07:02] Anne-Mieke Bovelett: I'm the, the, thing is I learned in life after a long career in corporate. Stuff. I've been a recruiter, I've been a secretary at some point. I worked in legal stuff, but I've always been on this creative side, and there is one thing that has been most important to me forever, is when you do something for yourself and you make a living with that, or it's, it benefits yourself in whatever way it is, great.
But if you are able to do something. With or for a community that benefits thousands, possibly millions, that's bliss.
That's something you can continue doing even if you're too old for all the other fun things. when I got into what I do, web design, being a creative agency. I've always been hanging around in, communities and I enjoy, sharing my knowledge and learning from others. And, then about five years ago, almost six now, I ran into something called digital accessibility.
And I have a DHD on steroids. It means I am bored by something within no time. But digital accessibility never bores me because it is about people. It is about design. It is about development. It is about thinking about your processes.
It is about speaking with people, and it is about motivation. And these are ingredients that make digital accessibility very, like, a great dish that never bores you. It's, The, there's not one day the same. The only thing that I find really hard to do, not because I can't, but because it gets boring, is testing.
But thank God there are so many people out there who are really good at testing too, who enjoy this and,
[00:09:12] Nathan Wrigley: know what's really curious about the, whole accessibility thing, which is not like any other, maybe there are some aspects of like web development, which have this, but I'm struggling to think of one. It's got a moral component. It's got, there's a, bit of morality in there, so making, I don't know, a, an e-commerce website, it, it might be fun, right?
And you might make a load of money out of it and you enjoy the marketing experience or what have you. But, there's, not much in the way of. Morals there, you don't have to apply your morals too much, but with the, accessibility side of things, I think there is that component.
you've identified that if you don't do that work, then you've built something which is at the exclusion of this cohort of people over there and this cohort of people over there. And going the extra mile has that. That feel to it, that flavor to it, that, that morality of making sure that you are, you're capturing everybody and you are scooping everybody up and you are making it so that all the people all the time can look at all the things, which is pretty cool.
[00:10:22] Anne-Mieke Bovelett: it is cool. But I've learned one thing. It's also in my headline on LinkedIn, that says, small changes happen through love and compassion. Big changes happen through capitalism.
[00:10:34] Nathan Wrigley: Interesting.
[00:10:34] Anne-Mieke Bovelett: And this is, I'm, I enjoy this way too much. This is a very dark corner of my character, but I love to use the commercial aspect as a bat baseball bat to put some sense into people.
and it's unfortunate, it's money makes the world go round. So, I'll keep using that argument to people to make things inclusive and I will always say it is a moral obligation. It's a human right, but people don't get it, or, their bosses don't get it. What's interesting though, is when you talk about this to children. even from the age of six, seven, and you explain to them like, Hey, look, grandma is having trouble ordering something in this shop because she cannot see the differences between the collar so well anymore, or, Hey, daddy had, has, trouble when someone, makes it like this because he will. Fall down or he will not be able to use it.
And then when you go up to 12, 13, 14 year olds where they're very malleable and still thinking about a future in tech maybe, and you start talking to these kids about that, you will see that they think this is really cool
because it gives. To them, it gives them a sense of power. if you are, we think as adults, we just want everything fast.
We want 'em to have a big margin on whatever we do, right? Profitability here, profit profitability there. But if you, teach a 12, 13, or 14-year-old, listen, if this is incorporated in the way you think. You are going to be much better at this than everybody else. The results will be better of your designs, of your coding.
You're going to open the doors to your parents and your grandparents and yourself when you are old at some age. And this always surprises me that I don't see that group approached so much. For digital accessibility because we're not gonna solve things in this day and age it, the thing is, adults can't solve anything. It's our children.
[00:12:53] Nathan Wrigley: for the next generation to come along and yeah. Fix it. that's interesting. Do you know what though? I is, there's never time to say what you just said. The, because of the, sort of the financial component, what have you, and the, need to ship things quickly and what have you, and I feel like time is, to some extent the enemy.
of widespread adoption of accessibility. If, we all had two x the amount of time to fulfill the same project. and maybe, there's a bit of finance thrown in there as well, but if, there was just more time available, you could, imbibe that information, but also you would have the time to do the different bits and pieces.
let, me ask you where you are, currently doing your work. 'cause I know. That you have had a variety of different fingers in different pies, working for a variety of different organizations and helping them with their products. Where has been most recently, some of the different things that you've been involved
[00:13:52] Anne-Mieke Bovelett: Most, most recently, I was in a fantastic project for, I'm not going to name the company, but it's a company in the online gambling industry, with online games and sports. And I've had a lot of discussions with people about that. People who are telling me that is Unmoral to do that, blah, blah, blah.
And I. Disagree with that. And I think it's incredibly discriminating when you say, oh, and don't, let anyone use your talent to make a game website with commercial intent more accessible. that is like so condescending because someone, has a disability. We have to protect them from themselves.
if someone cannot see well or cannot hear well, It's about being equal and having equal access
[00:14:50] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it's a, it's literally a bit like saying we shouldn't provide ramps in front of betting shops so that people who have wheelchairs can't get in and we need to protect themselves from themselves. Yeah, that's curious. That's a really bizarre argument, isn't it?
[00:15:08] Anne-Mieke Bovelett: I've, been, in, in, in dialogues offline. I've been, into a lot of rows about that. And, but it's also interesting, yeah, so I'm currently consulting a couple of companies on their process of making things more accessible. A few of them in the States, a few in Germany, one in Switzerland.
I'm growing more and more into this consulting role, and I, have this method of operations these days. If I can go buy car and anything under six hours is no problem, I will go there in person. I will give training and I will give people the, the tools, not tools, literally, but the, way of thinking so that a design.
department is going to give the right instructions to the developers or the developers think oh, the design gave us this, but not so sure if that's going to be accessible. So it's, changing more into it uniting, departments in companies about accessibility that normally didn't need any uniting that could be.
Islands, and that's, so that's more where I'm going. And there's another part where I'm going, but I'm mainly doing that for myself. I am running around in, WordPress in the community and I am totally going the developer road now, which is, that's hell froze over it, but it's. I had to learn so much about development beside HG M1 CSS to, be able to guide others in accessibility.
That now I'm like, why should I sit and wait until someone accidentally messes
[00:17:05] Nathan Wrigley: yeah,
[00:17:06] Anne-Mieke Bovelett: get in there and talk about
[00:17:07] Nathan Wrigley: Do it yourself. Yeah. That's
So the main thrust of this conversation, the reason why we got you on, is that, earlier this year in, Germany, in a little town called Roost, I think that's how you pronounce it, the, there's this event which take pla, which takes and it's called CloudFest.
And it's this giant, really huge, in-person event. It's not really. All about WordPress. In fact, it's a tiny proportion of it is about WordPress, anything really, which is to do with the cloud or in internet infrastructure or what have you. So hardware, software, all sorts of things. but there's this little bolt-on bit, which happens on the, sidelines.
And in this case it happens prior to the main event and kind of overlaps it a little bit. It is called the, hackathon. And the hackathon is something that I was not familiar with, but I attended this year. And the hackathon is, do you mind me summarizing it
[00:18:02] Anne-Mieke Bovelett: Yeah, sure. Go
[00:18:03] Nathan Wrigley: our listeners?
Yeah. So the hackathon is, you, apply to, to be a part of it. You apply to have a project and you apply to just be an attendee. And the idea is that they, find projects which during the three days of the hackathon, people will work on. So they select, I think it's. 10 projects. Those 10 projects are then assisted by the attendees and they, earmark the attendees nominally so that they've got a broad spread of people over lots of disciplines.
So it's not all just hardcore developers or just hardcore marketers or hardcore SEO people. The idea is there's a mix of people in the room. And on day one, the people who have been selected to run their projects stand up and say, this is what I hope to achieve during the next few days. And then people vote with their feet.
They listen to the people presenting, they vote with their feet, and they go and sit at a table. I thought that was just gonna be a total mess, not having been to one of these hackathons before. I thought there's gonna be two or three projects, which are really popular, and the others are just gonna be empty.
That's not how it pan out at all. It just worked beautifully. Everybody went and almost like they. they've been told, but they haven't, where to go and sit and, then the, then it begins, then out come the whiteboards, the projects get worked on. It's furious for several days. everybody goes, goes to bed at night, although a lot of people seems to stick around, work on it for three days.
And at the end of those three days, the summation happens and the projects where they got to the projects, it's announced, what they achieved and what have you. And then a panel of experts go away and decide who the winner is and, that's all, that's a thing. And you won. Twice,
[00:19:49] Anne-Mieke Bovelett: my team won.
[00:19:50] Nathan Wrigley: You are okay.
Sorry. Yeah, that's right. I should have said that your team won, but the project that you were shepherding, was the winner twice in a row. And so that's the thing that I want to talk about. So we could go to the previous year, but let's keep it to this one from this year. Tell us about your project because it's so interesting what you are trying to achieve.
[00:20:13] Anne-Mieke Bovelett: I had been pondering on the idea, so you know. Bringing an idea to, to, or a project to the hackathon doesn't start five minutes before it starts months and months before. And so I'd started to ponder upon what, can we do for accessibility for companies and people to make their life easier, that is being overlooked.
Now one of the things that it's been massively overlooked are infographics, and infographics are, medical data. You go into a medical website and it says, talks about percentages or it talks about ingredients or it talks about whatever in a graphic. but it's also Amazon. That, I dunno if you ever go shopping on Amazon, I find it a very frustrating experience when you go shop for clothing on Amazon, and it's gonna give you this chart with large, extra large, extra, large, and, then I, click on those and I'm like, this is not HTML.
This is an image.
[00:21:31] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. The data, the information is held inside just a f an image, like a
[00:21:35] Anne-Mieke Bovelett: It is inside an image and it. And they, I think one of the reasons it's like that is because of the possibilities that they offer or do not offer. Let me put it that way. apparently I've never seen the backend of Amazon. I admit that, but apparently you can't make it very sexy if you have to. All of the tools they have.
So people are often much inclined to put something in an image. It's the same thing with newsletters. It's horrible. People send beautiful newsletters and then you look at it and yeah, I can see why this is graphically so grown up because it's all images is and. What a lot of merchants don't realize, or any company or whatever is that they are excluding millions of people with that.
and With the team that I start to build beforehand. I had someone who was willing to be a project manager and someone who was going to do the design, because that's what I learned from the previous year. You have to become so well prepared. You have to divide your tasks even before you start, because if you have to start doing that at the beginning of your project, you're going to fail.
We'd been thinking about how can we do that? And then the idea was, let's write an iteration on how you could leverage AI to, to recognize an infographic for you, and then spit out either, a table with information or, general information about it. And. Especially in the medical world, this is incredibly important.
People's lives depend on it, and it was, it was amazing. The team was so great. So at the end, instead of just writing the iteration and writing this is how you're gonna do it. This is how you prompt the ai, this is how you, we ended up with a functional WordPress plugin. It's, I still get, get, how do you say, goosebumps
[00:23:49] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Goosebumps.
[00:23:50] Anne-Mieke Bovelett: plugin.
I actually have a link for you where people can try it out. I'm a bit of reluctant to share it because if people would start, throwing hundreds of images to that, I don't know what's gonna do to our bill. but this team proved that you could make a working product. And it's still there. The explanations are there.
It has a dedicated website and, it just works. And just this morning I tried again. there is this, fantastic research that SEMrush did in August about what does accessibility do for SEO lot, great things, obviously. And of course, RA makes the same mistake. They put their image in there with their beautiful graphic like.
29% more of this and, 60% more of that or whatever. I can't remember numbers for the life of me, but, and I whacked it through the generator. I uploaded it and it just worked. It just gave me the markdown. I could also get the HTML, whatever. So this can potentially save companies millions and millions because.
They have so many infographics. This could be commercialized, but the base needs to stay open source no matter what. Yeah. And yeah, that was, that was the project and, it was fascinating.
[00:25:26] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, it really was fascinating and I'm just gonna reprise a bit of that in case anybody listening missed it. So you've, we've all seen these infographics before. So a Medi medical is a really good example, but you, more or less go into any website where there's data being presented and it, is.
Obviously sighted people, they have this for creating a graphic to show it off. So they'll create, I don't know, a pie chart or they'll create a line graph, or they'll create a bar chart and then they'll put the information in the image about that pie chart rather than writing it as semantic HTML or something underneath the image.
So all the data is in a, is in an image. And obviously if you can't. If you can't see the image, you are, you, none of that is available to you because it's all as, text on an image or as charts on an image or what have you. And so that was the promise. And I, was a bit like you, I was pretty skeptical when you said at the beginning that, here's what we want to do.
We'd like to make it so that you basically chuck in an image into your WordPress, blog post or whatever it may be. The plugin that we intend to build will then, like in some magical way, send that image off to some API endpoint of, I don't know where, but some AI API endpoint that will then summarize what's in the image and it will then give us text back about what's in the image.
So yeah, like I said, fairly skeptical thinking. Yeah. Maybe, not. This will be fascinating. Oh. It just did it all and it, was able to get the finest detail
[00:27:05] Anne-Mieke Bovelett: Oh yeah. We uploaded some really crappy images to test that.
[00:27:09] Nathan Wrigley: but things where, even to me, so you uploaded images and you demonstrated images where even to me, it wasn't entirely obvious that slice of the pie, for example, was 29% or whatever it may have been.
And it figured it all out and then it summarizes it. And then, I guess you can put that information wherever you like, but presumably a good place to put it would be directly below, the image. But then it didn't just summarize it in a way that, you know, in a, in an. On clear way, it did it in human readable text.
So whole sentences encapsulating what this chart was not only about, but then it would bullet point. Okay. The, top item was this and this, with, with percentages and all. Essentially it passed that image. And presented the actual information as if you'd have been stood up on a lectern reading out, trying to explain what was in that image.
So firstly, that was the most astonishing thing. and the second most astonishing thing was that you managed to do it in th three days. that's just nuts.
[00:28:16] Anne-Mieke Bovelett: this nuts,
[00:28:18] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, it is nuts.
[00:28:19] Anne-Mieke Bovelett: but this is, essential about the hackathon in general. This is a. I dunno how you say it. A gathering of some of the most brilliant minds
[00:28:34] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:28:35] Anne-Mieke Bovelett: from all over the world. and they come together and some might feel like, oh, this is very much, Hey, everybody knows everybody here.
but last year I saw a lot of new faces and. Yeah. currently there are quite a lot of people that we know from the, WordPress space. I would actually, I love WordPress, there is no doubt about that, but I would love to see people from other spaces as well. Oh, we did have a lot of people from the Jula, team.
They're fantastic. they, know a lot about accessibility and, yeah. It's, of course people with a lot of hosting knowledge, for example. but we also had some, people there with knowledge about AI in a practical sense that was mind boggling. It's just, and. I think because these people are all coming for the same thing.
hackathon starts months before it starts. When, the people who run the project, start putting these projects online because you then you can see, hey, I wanna be in that project, I wanna attend, I want to apply, I want to. so people are coming informed and usually already have an idea of where they want to go.
[00:30:05] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, and I think the bit that you touched on there was that the dis, there's so many people from different disciplines and so I, I don't know the exact numbers on your, team, but it maybe it was like 10 or something like that.
[00:30:17] Anne-Mieke Bovelett: No, our team started off so big. we actually had to, I. Make it a bit, smaller. I, on top of my head, I think it was 16, wait, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 40. Yeah. 16 people. We
[00:30:35] Nathan Wrigley: 16 people and those 16 people are from a wide variety of backgrounds. So obviously, you wouldn't be able to pull this off if every single person was, I don't know. if their area of expertise was solely accessibility,
[00:30:49] Anne-Mieke Bovelett: Oh no. Yeah, true.
[00:30:51] Nathan Wrigley: able to pull this off if everybody's area of expertise was marketing or if everybody's area of ex, right?
So it's gotta be this sort of there's a few developers here sprinkled around and there's some accessibility focused people over here. And you, got this little team together. For, that's quite interesting to start with the dynamics of that, the fact that, collection of random people put together could actually get along and understand the project and realize what was needed.
[00:31:17] Anne-Mieke Bovelett: I,
[00:31:18] Nathan Wrigley: I was gonna say, I guess that's where you step in the project leader. making sure that everybody's got the, got the, memo, if you like, before it all begins.
[00:31:27] Anne-Mieke Bovelett: I think, that's an essential thing because, I think I'm good at project leading and motivating, but I suck as a project manager.
[00:31:38] Nathan Wrigley: Did somebody step in and take that role of away from you or what
[00:31:42] Anne-Mieke Bovelett: So this is why I literally asked someone with strong knowledge of development. Processes to be the project manager and then went for the design as well. And, that was an essential difference, compared to what we did the year before. Yeah. Yeah. It has to be. It has to be that, and what I love about it is that I was asking people like, don't you wanna apply for the hackathon?
You would be great in projects for, I don't know, social market. Social media, or for marketing or writing copy. Because I think if you have a hackathon project, and I'm gonna get to that point again later, one of the things that makes me sad about the hackathon currently is that project. Are dead in the water
[00:32:35] Nathan Wrigley: Sort of run out when the hackathon itself comes to an end.
[00:32:39] Anne-Mieke Bovelett: Yes. that's my impression. my projects both are dead in the water. where they both have incredible commercial potential and it's not like people weren't interested with, this project from, this year, from 2025. I had several people approaching me like, Hey, we would like to, join this.
We would like to, invest in this. We would like to, and I was like, a lame duck. I was like, what am I gonna do now? Where am I gonna go? Now I need to talk to the team. What are the consequences? We don't know. I still don't know that up to today because you are working with people who are there for the hackathon who are employed.
Some of them are self-employed. a project is eligible for funding. People might want to fund it, and then how are you going to get those people to work on the project continuously? How do
[00:33:39] Nathan Wrigley: Oh
[00:33:39] Anne-Mieke Bovelett: prevent an atmosphere when someone says, oh, hold on a minute. I've worked on this for three days and nights, literally, and now you, our guys are all gonna get paid to proceed.
What am I gonna do? The other hand, the other. Side of it is where people say, I, wish I could continue to work on this project, but I am employed. I can't afford, I'm not allowed to do something on the side.
[00:34:05] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:34:07] Anne-Mieke Bovelett: It's, that, is just, I don't know. I, wish. That there was something like, I just, there's this thing called an accelerator program.
I, I just recently learned about the German accelerator program because grade was in it. I'm, involved a lot with, the guys from Grade Suite,
[00:34:28] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:34:31] Anne-Mieke Bovelett: And, this is where, the, brilliant minds of who do business, who can bring funding, who can make this thing grow and thrive, come in and guide you and teach you how to do that.
And I think that is a part that is missing. So they started promoting that last year. I really loved it. Jerry Miller, for example, is he was in the jury and the organization, he's very experienced in investing and all that, and we had a lot of great talks about it. But we are not that, we are designers, developers, content creators.
We are, we're not. We are not the CEO of a project that wants to make enough money, so everybody gets funded and the project comes to fruit to fruition. What do you call it?
[00:35:29] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, fruition. That's
[00:35:30] Anne-Mieke Bovelett: Fruition,
[00:35:31] Nathan Wrigley: yeah.
[00:35:32] Anne-Mieke Bovelett: English language.
[00:35:33] Nathan Wrigley: So it, it seems So first of all, the process itself is really interesting. You love all of that bit of it. The getting together, spending three days, organizing the team, wrangling that, spitting the project out, all of that, the, all of that side of it is really interesting.
But there's this sort of slightly unusual portion where once the winner has been announced and all of the different teams go back to their own lives, the projects kind of stall. So your suggestion. Potentially there is that, I don't know, maybe the winner wouldn't necessarily have to be the winner, of course.
But let's imagine the, winner in this case, would drop in like a prize, if you like. The, result of winning would be that you drop into some sort of, I don't know, incubator program. Another thought that I have around that is what if, for example, by winning. a bunch of industry experts were to n not just be part of the, decision process about who won, because if you, think about that environment in roost at that time, there's probably I don't know, 10,000, 12,000 more, people from all over the world in all sorts of industries.
It'd be interesting if some of them could be parachuted in for the final demonstrations to see. The output, a handful, maybe, 20, 30, 50, put on a balcony, right? Watch this. This is what these people did over this period of time. And then they o of their own volition could say, you know what?
That project is interesting for my company. We could spin that out
[00:37:16] Anne-Mieke Bovelett: But, also, and again, this is also touching on, on, on one of those, hidden problems, I'd say, because of course these pro, this hackathon is being sponsored. Okay. Sponsors are super generous. They are. Investing so much money that this can happen. All these people that need to come, that need to stay, that need to eat, that need to drink, that need to hang.
and, it's, like I would think as an, as a sponsor, you would like to see more ROI. On that. So maybe there could be more involvement from the sponsors through the organization on making that what you just suggested happen. Maybe they're working on it already.
[00:38:03] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, yeah,
[00:38:04] Anne-Mieke Bovelett: don't bite my head off right now about this.
[00:38:07] Nathan Wrigley: I think it's interesting 'cause you've got a perspective on it, haven't you? And, you're not, criticizing the process.
[00:38:13] Anne-Mieke Bovelett: No, not at all. Not at all. Yeah.
[00:38:16] Nathan Wrigley: process. It'd be interesting.
[00:38:18] Anne-Mieke Bovelett: What is, what was interesting as well and frustrating at the same what, there were two things where I'm like, let's try to see if that can be done differently the next time. And that is that from the participants, a lot of their companies are also aren't CloudFest, right?
So the hackathon is starting, is two or three days before and then. In the morning when, the whole thing goes through, like the winners are being announced and whatever clown Fest itself actually starts, and then large numbers of people are suddenly not present in the room because they have to be present in their booth.
[00:39:02] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:39:03] Anne-Mieke Bovelett: And I really, I wish that they could organize this differently. I don't know if it's possible, but, it would be, or make this, hackathon, the results, a highlight in the CloudFest itself
[00:39:23] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. Yeah, that's interesting. I know that they, they do announce them in one on one of the sort of stages, don't they? I seem to remember this year that there was the, it almost looked like a boxing ring if
[00:39:33] Anne-Mieke Bovelett: Yeah, the boxing ring was super cool, the boxing ring is very small. whereas some of the projects were so impactful, it was absolutely crazy. The quality of all of these projects was extremely high. Honestly, the fact that my team one and accessibility one for the second time in a row was super unexpected for me.
We've, had some hurdles, and, When I look at all the other projects that were there, I'm like, there were so many other projects so deserving of this. And then there is this thing like, okay, say they managed to do that, to organize that and say let's, go and present these projects on stage.
The time pressure is insane. Okay. Which is understandable.
[00:40:29] Nathan Wrigley: I.
[00:40:30] Anne-Mieke Bovelett: but not everybody feels. Comfortable presenting their project. There are some people who are really good at it and there are some people who are just shy or find it difficult to, show off or whatever. And maybe in that direction, we can think of something to help them.
we do that in work camps as well. We have MCs on stage for a reason. Imagine someone starts to announce
[00:41:00] Nathan Wrigley: asking questions, so it's more question and answer rather than you've got 10 minute or three minutes or whatever to sum up your project. It could be a sort of more of a q and A format where somebody Yeah. Guides those people through it. Yeah. That's interesting. So the, I guess one of the questions that I was gonna ask is, what has the long-term impact been then?
And it sounds to me as if it, the brakes went on. After the event itself and the project while still there hasn't moved forward. So I, I wonder if, if one of the things that might possibly be a good idea is that, let's say for example, you have a winner and a second place and a third place or whatever it may be, I wonder if those projects could be picked up automatically next year.
You know what I'm saying? Is that the result of being the winner? Is that your project automatically gets put into the next hackathon so that it would be continued. I know it's a long time, you've got another 12 months to wait or what have you, but at least you'd have that certainty that okay, we, captured that, was our three days and we're gonna put it down for a little bit.
And then in a year's time, if nothing else happens in that year, we know that we're gonna come back and have another crack at the whip and see if we can extend it and make it more interesting. That's maybe another possibility
[00:42:12] Anne-Mieke Bovelett: That. Yeah, I think it depends much on the project. So some, projects need to hit the ground running and get going. and some, could really use that. And, yeah, and it's exactly as you say, if nothing else happens in the meantime,
[00:42:32] Nathan Wrigley: Do you on, balance though, even though the, project may have stalled, obviously you got where you got, do you, still like the sort of hackathon format? Is it something that you'll be taking part in next year? applying to take part in
[00:42:45] Anne-Mieke Bovelett: Yes, I'm already working on, a project idea with a group of people.
[00:42:53] Nathan Wrigley: You love it?
[00:42:54] Anne-Mieke Bovelett: iterating on what we could do, see if we can find another, topic, because there are so many topics, and again, it needs to benefit really. I'm, gonna say the
[00:43:06] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:43:07] Anne-Mieke Bovelett: of people. Otherwise to me it's not, it's just boring.
[00:43:10] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:43:13] Anne-Mieke Bovelett: yeah, we're working on it. and obviously, of course, if we could iterate. Not on the project from last year because that thing has a website. That thing is there, the documentation is there. Anyone could go with that and go on a role and of course would need funding to, to develop it further. But my first project is still super, potential and I think there are other projects like that.
yeah. I don't know. For some, projects that would be good to proceed after a year.
[00:43:55] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, but not for everything. Some things you tie it off after three days and that's it. You are genuinely done with it. Or you realize that, that didn't work. that
[00:44:05] Anne-Mieke Bovelett: were meant to be
[00:44:06] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. Some things, might work, some things might not. because it's not the ca Actually what was amazing is in that room, pretty much all the projects, not every project, but pretty much all the projects really did astonishing work.
from the ground, from ground zero, no minutes, no seconds, and then Basically three days later when they presented what they'd done in every case, a, lot of progress had been made. And it was interesting what some of the expectations of those projects were. So in your case, it turned out that you could ship a, an actual thing.
But some of the other projects, the idea was more about let's scaffold what the. Thing might be in the near future. if we can take this after the hackathon, we're just gonna scaffold what that would look like and figure out what the questions are that we need to ask, and yada, So it's having a finished thing is not necessarily the point of the hackathon.
[00:45:06] Anne-Mieke Bovelett: Yeah, that's, I think, something that they did great this year was getting the coaches, the coaches, the juries, the experts too. Visit every project to, to give guidance to, to, they were asking, what are you running into? And I think that if you, if, it were something that would go on the year after, maybe that's something that they could do and appoint people to, keep coaching these projects, to go somewhere to, and, get people to think about these.
these things and, the other thing is we're talking about human beings and people like new stuff,
[00:46:02] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. that's true. Yeah.
[00:46:04] Anne-Mieke Bovelett: don't know if you would bring in a project, after a year again to continue with it. I'm not sure that would get you
[00:46:15] Nathan Wrigley: what's interesting about, your one though is that there really is a commercial angle to it. It does feel, that, if somebody was to pick that up and e, even if they just took. Onboard what you've done already and went with that. It feels like with a very short, within a very short space of time, you could turn that into a commercial thing.
something where you're charging a, subscription or an
[00:46:39] Anne-Mieke Bovelett: Yeah, that's, that's what I was really hoping for, that was going to happen. Maybe that is going to happen. I don't know, maybe someone is listening now and is oh gosh, I gotta get in touch with that person, to talk about this. of course, the first and foremost, this is for open source, so this has to stay open source at all
[00:46:59] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:47:00] Anne-Mieke Bovelett: Now, where the, where you would think about subscription models and stuff is, of course this is running using ai. and the AI costs money. And we've done it in such a way now that people could hook up AI through their API voodoo, and, use it. But I can imagine if a big company, I don't know, Nike wants to do this for their web shop or maybe even Amazon or whatever, then you're going to talk about AI uses usage that is going to save them millions because we calculated that.
We calculated how long does it take you to make these description manually? How much more ROI is going to give you this on your shop? again, I hate them with the money stick. and this is a part where we could probably commercialize it. And what I would love to see from big open source projects like this that are being sponsored and co-funded either by talent or money, is that profits from these projects flow back into open source.
[00:48:15] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:48:16] Anne-Mieke Bovelett: It is like everybody gets paid for their time and the rest of the money goes into funding whatever is important at that time. And, I, might be segueing a little bit, but there is, a project, a PHP project, that Juliet Rams Fulmer, took over, the project.
[00:48:42] Nathan Wrigley: things Yeah. Yeah. Yep.
[00:48:45] Anne-Mieke Bovelett: And that's the project.
If someone is asking me like, Anne, where would you put your money in first? Because it benefits the world. It's that,
because I know in that project, people depend on one person, and that is very uncomfortable. If anything ever happens, then nobody knows. And this is dangerous. This is like AI going down or a AWS going down like we had yesterday. And the thing is, people are gonna stand there and say,
[00:49:23] Nathan Wrigley: world out, didn't it?
[00:49:24] Anne-Mieke Bovelett: they're gonna huh? What happened?
[00:49:27] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, It was interesting. It was really an interesting day. And, CloudFlare got a lot of bad PR out of all of that. And, luckily they were, I think, able to get it back up and running, and they were fairly apologetic
[00:49:38] Anne-Mieke Bovelett: do
[00:49:39] Nathan Wrigley: what you mean.
[00:49:39] Anne-Mieke Bovelett: people do not. Realize that the internet is, fueled by Linux. They're hosting companies need it. The same thing with PHP, all these developers saying, eh, the PHP is, is the language of the Stone Age or whatever. yeah.
[00:50:01] Nathan Wrigley: No, It's interest. Yeah. The, whole project that Juliet, is shepherding. we, we actually, we did do a podcast with her a little while ago, and it was interesting listening to her take on it. I, didn't realize that things hadn't changed,
[00:50:15] Anne-Mieke Bovelett: And she's not exaggerating. I'm sorry that I'm, just hijacking the opportunity to talk about this, but this is what I feel like, there's, the hackathon is also, and CloudFest itself is, especially CloudFest is also now. Making this corner for WordPress, and to me that's like we're making a corner for open source.
But this is the thing that I really want to give as, my, peace of mind to the hackathon in any project like that. there are more hackathons in the world, many more.
That if, there were accelerators joining these projects and helping these people to turn that into something viable, and more than the MVP, you know that a certain percentage, and I hope it's a large one, flows back into these things because people up until today think open source should be free.
[00:51:20] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, that's, what people think.
[00:51:24] Anne-Mieke Bovelett: it is freely available. It's not free. There's a, that's a language thing. yeah, I think, that would be really great. And that would also make it, again, very sexy for many companies to sponsor because they can plaster their name all over it.
[00:51:42] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it's interesting. 'cause we've, we've done the whole gamut of this thing really. So we've talked about the hackathon and how much you enjoyed it and how it worked. And we've talked about maybe some constraints where it just dries up a little bit. Maybe there's opportunities for an incubator or a, an, some sort of accelerator program to step in after the fact.
people to come from the wider. cloud first to come and see what the end result is and maybe there'd be some interest there. yeah, that's really interesting. I'm curious to, to end this on, on, on pot, potentially getting that project a little bit more attention, the one with the infographic.
I will link to it in the show notes before we hang up the call. I'll make sure that I get the URL for that and I'll pop it into the show notes. If somebody having listened to this who thinks that's a fascinating project, I want to take that on, or I wanna at least talk to, you about it, where would we, what's the best place to be in touch with you?
[00:52:45] Anne-Mieke Bovelett: send me a DM on LinkedIn
[00:52:47] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.
[00:52:48] Anne-Mieke Bovelett: or find me on Twitter, or, send me an email. My contact data are on my, website. Yes. And if you, put my name spelled correctly in the show notes and someone adds that to Google, they're gonna get
[00:53:08] Nathan Wrigley: There's only one of you Yeah. With that name. Okay. In which case I, the bits that I can do, I will put into the show notes. So go and search for the episode, on WP Builds, but if that fails, go to Google and have a search around there as
[00:53:23] Anne-Mieke Bovelett: I'm really grateful for that. Thank you so
[00:53:26] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, you're very, welcome.
Thank you for joining me today. That was a very pleasant chat. And, best of luck if you do get into the hackathon next time around. Best of luck and, I hope that you win it
[00:53:38] Anne-Mieke Bovelett: that would be accessibility
[00:53:39] Nathan Wrigley: in a row.
[00:53:40] Anne-Mieke Bovelett: in a row, but accessibility's boring, right?
[00:53:44] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. That's all we've got for you today. I hope that you enjoyed that. If you've got any intuitions, or anything you want to say, head to wpbuilds.com, search for episode number 449, and leave us a comment there. We'd really appreciate it.
And don't forget the hackathon is taking place in the year 2026. Google it or look for the link in the show notes if you've got any curiosity about that. And you could find yourself in that room with all of those marketers, developers, SEO experts, a whole range of different people, all in one room trying to solve a variety of problems. The energy's pretty remarkable. And like I said, links in the show notes. Go check it out.
Okay, that's all I've got for you today. I am going to fade in a little bit of cheesy music and say, stay safe. Have a good week. Bye-bye for now.
