The events in the WordPress community since September have shown how fragile the ecosystem can be.
In A Stronger Foundation for the Ecosystem, I laid out my core ideas of how we could move forward with the WordPress Foundation to build a better community together. The key ideas were:
- Pay for infrastructure through a diverse foundation backed by the community, not one person’s generosity, and back it with transparent leadership.
- Have clear policies, and clear ways to evolve them.
- Back it with an empowered foundation that can defend the project.
Despite best efforts to engage on these topics, it became clear that none of us in the community could wait for the project to change – we needed to start building the future ourselves. Without this, we’d continue to have the same dangers to the ecosystem, to ourselves as contributors, and to the open web – with no guarantees that the situation won’t change again next week.
This is not just my opinion, it’s the opinion of over 20 senior contributors to the WordPress project. And I would know: I was one of the signatories to that letter.
Until we fix this problem, WordPress remains vulnerable. Accordingly, we’re taking action.
Today, we’re launching the FAIR Project under the Linux Foundation.
The FAIR Project is designed to replace the centralised point-of-failure of WP sites with a fully decentralised system. It simultaneously fixes the problem with a single repository, and stitches together the fractured universe of the plugin ecosystem that exists today.
As part of the Linux Foundation, we have transparent leadership, with a charter for the project that lays out the governance structure clearly. We have enforced maximums on the number of members from any one company, a clear code of conduct that applies to all members, and a commitment to open contribution from all. Any changes to policies go through votes by the TSC, and require a majority vote to change.
We also have elected co-chairs for the steering committee (TSC), and I’m delighted to say that I was elected as one of the initial co-chairs by the group of over 50 contributors who worked on forming this project.
The Linux Foundation owns all trademarks associated with the project, as well as other properties like the domain, and has clear policies regarding its usage. They also have a clear history of acting neutrally but in the project’s interest, allowing flexibility for each project to set its usage requirements.
The project also separates “the business side” from “the technical side” – technical being basically everything within the project.1 The technical project has clear independence in its decisions, but remains accountable to the board, who drives financial funding for the project. By building these structures, it creates clear trust in the project, promoting an actual reason to contribute monetarily to the project.
On the technical side, the FAIR Project stitches together the scattered sources of plugins and themes out there today. And, on the organisational side, we’re doing the same – bringing together the contributors who built WordPress, projects like AspirePress, organisations like the WP Community Collective, and companies in the commercial ecosystem.
In other words, the FAIR Project implements everything I set out in my post, and truly creates a way to ensure the project’s existence into the future. It’s the first step to truly uniting the community to build the next 20 years of WordPress.
If you run a company in the ecosystem, we encourage you to support the project through the Linux Foundation. We’ve got a lot to do to push the project forward, and the more support we can get, the better. If you’re an individual, we encourage supporting the WP Community Collective, who we’re working closely with – or, just roll your sleeves up and start contributing!
Learn more about what we’re building at fair.pm →
WordPress has been a very successful project, but in the words of Matt, what got us here won’t get us there. It’s time for change, and we’re making it happen.
- We deviated from the standard LF project charter to make it even clearer that non-code contributions count towards the TSC. [↩]