WordCamp US 2025 contributor day is coming to Portland, Oregon on Tuesday, August 26, starting at 9:00 am Pacific Time, and ending at 5:00 pm. There will be a table for Core AI during it and here is what to expect if you are curious about joining that table.
In order to join the team you don’t have to be a developer, although at this stage of the project knowing what you are going to do might help you navigate through the entire day.
Before you arrive
There is a focus right now on the AI Building Blocks, we recommend reading about them before the contribution day. Make sure you register for contributor day, have an account here on WordPress.org and have joined the Making WordPress Slack.
Pre Reads
Over the past few months, the Core AI team and contributors have been hard at work on several projects. We recommend reading and familiarizing yourself with some of the most relevant discussions, work and concepts for this.
- AI Building Blocks – A high-level overview on the strategy that Core AI has for the WordPress project.
- Project repos: PHP AI Client, Abilities API, MCP Adapter, AI Experiments
- Abilities API Overview (third party) – A great article by a Core AI contributor describing the Abilities API in great detail.
- MCP Documentation – Documentation for Model Context Protocol.
- MCP Adapter Github Discussions – The most relevant one is a discussion on how this will be packaged and distributed.
- PHP Client API Github Discussions – Several great discussions for the PHP client API building block.
You should also skim the #core-ai Slack channel. The WordPress Project Slack recently had AI features enabled, and using that for a overview is very helpful!
What to expect on the day
Contributor Day is a good opportunity to meet the core AI team and discuss any questions, ideas, or concepts you may have. We’d love as many questions as possible to take to our panel being presented on Thursday at 10:30 PT. While we expect to have some discussions, we’d like to stick to the specific goals outlined below during Contributor Day which are primarily oriented around furthering the AI building blocks, and use our panel time slot to publicly answer and discuss any persistent concepts that have surfaced since the formation of our team.
During the day you can get help from the table leads and Team Reps:
Felix Arntz – @flixos90
James LePage – @isotropic
Other leads and contributors will also be at the table. We are there to build, meet, and further Core AI, so please don’t hesitate to come up to us, even if we look focused!
The schedule for Contributor Day is kept up to date on the WordCamp US Website. As of 19 August it is as follows:
- 8:00 am – Registration opens
- 8:30 am – Doors Open – Mt Hood (Oregon Ballroom)
- 9:00 am – Start time / Opening Remarks
- 11:45 am – Group photo
- 12:00 pm – Lunch
- 1:30 pm – Teams resume
- 4:30 pm – Team summaries and wrap-up (within the team)
- 5:00 pm – Contributor Day ends
Our Goals for WCUS Contributor Day 2025
For Core AI, we have several specific goals that we’d like to achieve during the day:
- Contributing to the Building Blocks repos – each has its own goal for the day.
- Forming a concrete plan for the AI Experiments plugin. What we’re building, how we’re building it, and a roadmap for what’s next.
- Creating several proof of concepts, leveraging the building blocks to showcase how each comes together even in an early state.
- Improving contributor flows for the Core AI Team – Codifying a clear path towards contribution and implementing policies and systems to enable this. A big focus for this will be implementing and finalizing the early draft of the Handbook.
It’s important to note that this Contributor Day aims to operate like a hackathon. To those that have attended past contributor days this may feel slightly different than previous events. For Core AI, this is the perfect approach; using and experimenting with the building blocks in real time will help us better understand how they work in practice.
Async online
If you are not attending there will be opportunity to contribute online as well. Just join in when you can in Slack. Involved contributors like @justlevine will be online, and we’ll be checking Slack from Portland, Oregon as well.