224 WP-Tonic Show: We Interview GoDaddy Evangelist Mendel Kurland

Mendel Kurland joined us to talk about being an evangelist and building community for GoDaddy. Mendel defines an evangelist as someone who not only promotes the platform or company he represents but befriends and truly understands the community he supports. His work includes supporting the WordPress community and other open source communities, like Drupal. As a supporter of WordPress both as a business providing upgraded WordPress managed hosting, and as a sponsor of WordPress events, GoDaddy is working to develop products that the WordPress community is delighted with. According to Mendel, one of the highlights of participating in WordCamps is that he sees an overall cooperative community. Since people are making money on WordPress, you might expect that there would be aggressive posturing and competition. He mainly experienced more cooperation than he has seen in other communities.