Ever since we first created the FAIR Project, it was designed to be a project following the best practices for open source projects. We’ve had the privilege of working with the Linux Foundation to help set it up.
One of the core principles of how we designed the project was to separate the “business” side from the “technical” side. We structured the project intentionally with a board separated from the implementation, providing a way for commercial organisations to be involved with and contribute to the project.
This follows the best practices for large open source projects, but in a way, was us “speedrunning” starting up a large project from scratch. We intentionally created some of these structures ahead of needing them.
As Joost and Karim have posted about today, the commercial participation necessary for the full board didn’t materialise. While we had a lot of interest and even commitment, companies were unwilling to be first movers – this isn’t surprising, given that many of us as individuals have been targeted and suffered, and those same pressures can be brought to bear on companies. This culture of fear is something that won’t be surprising to anyone in the WordPress community.
We planned and designed for this. The structure of our project means the technical project is separated from the commercial side, and the nature of FAIR being decentralised means we don’t actually need a huge amount of investment to run.
So, it’s time for us to slow down, stop speedrunning the process, and focus on what’s working well for us.
We’ve delivered the core of the FAIR technical solution already, with a robust decentralised design made of FAIR Connect, FAIR Forge, and AspireCloud.1 We have a clear path forward to expanding out this system, sustainably and openly.
We designed this system to be independent of WordPress too – and with plans in the Typo3 ecosystem already, we’ll be continuing to push forward on building out the future of package distribution. That doesn’t mean abandoning WordPress, it means approaching it from a different angle.
As we move forward, we’ll focus on building this technical solution out – and, when we’re ready, we’ve got a clear path to re-expanding the project’s structure to incorporate the commercial side again.
Onwards, then, to the next era of the FAIR project!
- Plus, we’ve got excellent add-on projects like FAIR Explorer and FAIR Pulse, proving out the system design. [↩]