Marco Calicchia

Marco Calicchia

Half Italian, half American, Marco is a Community Manager at SiteGround. In his role, he attends numerous events around the world and actively networks and builds relationships with the WordPress community members. In his free time, apart from playing football and cooking, Marco travels frequently to visit his family in the US and Italy. He loves to spend his summers sailing and winters snowboarding.

Session

About Gary Jones

I'm a Customer Experience AI Engineer in the enterprise WordPress space, currently figuring out how AI fits into the way our support and engineering teams actually do their jobs at WordPress VIP. Most of my recent work sits at the intersection of three things: AI inside engineering and support operations, the open-source plugins our customers rely on, and the community that holds the WordPress ecosystem together. On the AI side, I've been exploring how AI agents and MCP servers can connect to the operational tools support teams use day-to-day, from scheduling and coverage through to triage. There's still a lot to learn here. On the plugin side, I review and merge contributions to VIP-owned WordPress plugins used by tens of thousands of sites. Earlier this year I helped launch customerhub.wpvip.com, a community hub for our enterprise customers. On the community side, as of WP 7.0 I've contributed to 29 of the last 39 WordPress core releases, I'm a General Translation Editor for British English on translate.wordpress.org, and I'm an organiser for WordCamp Europe (Basel 2025, Krakow 2026). I'm also a named contributor on PSR-5, the PHPDoc standard. Before VIP, I ran my own agency for ten years, was a long-standing contributor to the Genesis Framework, and co-hosted the UK Genesis Podcast. Earlier than that, I taught maths and IT, including a stint as a team leader for prison education. The teaching instinct still drives a lot of what I do.