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WordPress Governance Project Looks for New Leadership

The WordPress Governance project is looking for new leadership after its current leaders, Rachel Cherry and Morten Rand-Hendriksen, announced that they will be stepping down. Weekly meetings have been canceled until the organization selects new leadership.

After its introduction at WordCamp Europe 2018, the project went through what its leadership believed were the appropriate channels for launching it through the Community group but it was flagged as unsanctioned by WordPress leadership shortly before the first meeting and denied access to the Make blog and Slack workspace. Despite initial setbacks, the group has been meeting regularly throughout 2019 on its own website and Slack instance.

“I need to step down from my leadership role in this project,” Cherry said in a recent meeting. “I’m not stepping away for good, but this project is too important and I don’t have the bandwidth needed to keep it moving forward in the manner it deserves.”

She said the team is looking for two co-chairs who will help lead WordPress Governance going forward. Responsibilities include managing the overall vision and planning, as well as managing meetings and delegating assignments in support of the vision. Cherry said the duties list is intentionally “slim and vague,” as the leadership team doesn’t want the new leaders to feel they have to keep doing what has been done in the past.

“The Governance Project was always meant to be a community project meaning we want the community to take ownership of it,” Rand-Hendriksen said in his farewell announcement. “This is the first step: We’ve established the project and set some parameters. Now it’s time for the community to move beyond our intentionally vague vision and make it into what the community wants and needs. New internal governance in the form of co-chairs from the actual community is a key step in this direction.”

Governance Project Aims to Bring Clarity to WordPress’ Organizational Structure and Decision Making Process

In a recent post titled “What is governance and why does it matter,” Cherry said that the project “made a crucial error” in not clearly setting clear expectations at the beginning:

This lack of clarity, combined with a growing undercurrent of unrest in the WordPress community, led some to label the project a revolt, a revolution, even a coup.

That’s unfortunate and has done governance, and our project, a disservice. I feel it’s incumbent upon myself and Morten to set the record straight so we are able to move forward as a community.

Cherry identified two recent controversial issues within the WordPress project with debates that highlight a lack of established policy, including auto-updating old versions of WordPress and questions about conflicts of interest.

On both of these matters members of the governance project have chimed in on the Make/WordPress posts to urge decision makers to establish policies that will guide future decisions and to be more transparent about who is making the decisions.

Rand-Hendriksen asked questions about how and where the decision will be made regarding auto-updating old versions of WordPress, who holds responsibility for the final decision, and how people without decision-making power will be represented. His questions went unanswered.

“The WordPress project already has some governance, but much of it remains ad-hoc, opaque, and often inscrutable,” Cherry said. She identified three key areas where the WordPress Governance project seeks to introduce clarity and transparency: organizational structure, day-to-day processes, and how decisions are made.

The group is also actively working on researching and drafting policies around a variety of topics, including the following:

  • Community Code of Conduct
  • Diversity and Inclusion Policy
  • Code of Ethics
  • Privacy Policy
  • Conflict of Interest Policy
  • Accessibility Policy

It is not clear whether these policies would then be submitted to WordPress’ community team for consideration, as the group has not yet attempted to propose a finished document.

“Considering there’s no clear process for proposing and ratifying these types of policies, the goal of these efforts are to create a starting point for future official discussions within the WordPress project,” Cherry said.

The Challenge of Defining Governance in a BDFL-led Open Source Project

In the past, WordPress has navigated controversial issues in its own way. While the project has handbooks that offer guidelines, its leadership has never really been in the business of piling up policies to act on in anticipation of of future conflicts. The Governance project seems to have a good deal of both active and passive supporters. Regardless, when it was officially branded as unsanctioned, it was clear that WordPress’ leadership was not actively looking to amend its organizational structure or decision-making process through the Governance project’s particular approach.

Cherry’s post clearly states that the project is not aiming to overthrow Matt Mullenweg as WordPress’ Benevolent Dictator for Life (BDFL).

“Governance and Matt Mullenweg leading the WordPress project are not mutually exclusive,” Cherry said.

“The goal of the WordPress Governance Project isn’t to change how Matt is involved, but to more clearly define how the project is managed, and how he and others fit into the process.”

The BDFL governance model has traditionally operated with leaders acting more as a “community-approved arbitrator,” who often “let things work themselves out through discussion and experimentation whenever possible,” as Karl Fogel describes in Producing Open Source Software. Historically, WordPress’ particular expression of BDFL leadership has loosely followed this design.

In her February 2019 newsletter, Nadia Eghbal, a researcher who specializes in open source infrastructure, shared some informal thoughts about governance, particularly in relationship to BDFL-led projects:

A friend of mine has very good taste in music, but I couldn’t tell you what he listens to. I couldn’t name a single artist he plays, or where one song begins or ends. His view is that “the best kind of music is where nobody notices it’s playing”. In his ideal world, music shapes ambiance as a background process.

Similarly, despite all our talk about governance design, I keep coming back to the idea that the best kind of governance is where nobody can tell it’s there.

Eghbal describes the relationship between the “government” and “the governed” as fragile and symbiotic and that “having power can be just as vulnerable [as disenfranchisement], an act of cupping water in your hands, rather than closing your fist over it.” Maintaining a BDFL leadership role requires diplomacy and a broad awareness of the project’s needs. Eghbal surmises that contributors support a leader in this position because of the character the leader has demonstrated:

In open source, there’s this concept of a “benevolent dictator for life”: a developer, usually the author, who runs the project and whose authority is not challenged. This phrase is often interpreted as “You’re the dictator, but at least you’re nice about it”. But I think there’s a hidden causal relationship that gets missed. It’s not that you’re a dictator who’s decided to be benevolent. Rather: because you are benevolent, you get to be dictator for life.

This idea echoes Fogel’s summary of the qualities of a good BDF. The forkability of any open source project serves to keep BDFL powers in check:

It is common for the benevolent dictator to be a founder of the project, but this is more a correlation than a cause. The sorts of qualities that make one able to successfully start a project — technical competence, ability to persuade other people to join, and so on — are exactly the qualities any BD would need.

In reviewing the 16-year history of WordPress’ leadership structure on a Post Status podcast episode earlier this year, Matt Mullenweg described different experiments the project has explored, including a “lead developers consensus” approach and having the release lead as the final decision maker for the software. In recent years he has returned to a more overt BDFL model but said, “I don’t see that as the forever structure.”

In attempting to clarify WordPress’ organizational structure and decision making model, the independent Governance project will need to be sensitive to the possibility that this ability to improvise and evolve the project’s leadership structures may have been one of the key factors in its continued growth and long-term ability to thrive.

The new leaders who replace Cherry and Rand-Hendriksen will have a formidable challenge ahead of them in carving out a path for the organization to have a meaningful impact on WordPress, despite not being designated as an official project. As it stands, the leaders face an uphill climb in moving the project from an unofficial working group to one that can effectively draft policies that WordPress will readily adopt.

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WordPress Governance Project Flagged as Unsanctioned, First Meeting Set for January 15

The WordPress Governance Project is a new community initiative, led by Rachel Cherry and Morten Rand-Hendriksen, that will host its first meeting Tuesday, January 15 2019.

The purpose of the project is to address two objectives:

  1. The governance of the WordPress open source project and its various community components, and
  2. WordPress’ role in the governance of the open web including representation in forums where decisions about the web platform and the Internet are made.

Hendriksen advocated for open governance when he introduced the project at WordCamp US in his presentation, Moving the Web forward with WordPress. He discussed how the decisions made for WordPress’ future affect a large portion the web. The project will first look at WordPress’ internal governance structure and then move into the second aspect of getting WordPress a seat at the table in important discussions affecting the broader web.

Contributors on the project are aiming to propose a governance model for WordPress at or before WordCamp Europe 2019 or the Community Summit, if one is planned for 2019. The group plans to research existing governance models from corporations, government, and the open web community and submit their proposal to WordPress’ current leadership for consideration.

WordPress Governance Project Seeks to Change Leadership Structure, Rand-Hendriksen Says Status Quo is “Not Tenable”

The governance project has piqued the public’s interest but some have found its objectives confusing. It is not clear what actions will be within the realm of possibility with the current benevolent dictator model WordPress has used. Part of the scope of the project is to “propose a leadership and governance model for the WordPress open source project and its communities.”

The idea of governance means different things to audiences across cultures. The second aspect of the project that aims to get WordPress a seat at the table seems more feasible and more likely to be well-received by the project’s leadership. It might make more sense to split up the two objectives into different projects. WordPress’ internal governance and its role in the greater web are very different topics, but the project’s creators seem to view them as inseparable.

Matt Mullenweg hasn’t joined in the Twitter conversation about governance but he did address the topic on a recent Post Status podcast episode.

“When he was talking about open governance, my take was that he was talking about getting WordPress a seat at the table, and discussing these regulation changes and et cetera happening,” Mullenweg said. “I think the example last year was that there was this meeting at 10 Downing Street. Who was there? Was WordPress represented?

“And he started talking about the Web Foundation, and I began thinking, “Wow, WordPress only represents a third of websites, and not even, really. It’s a third of the top 10 million. Another foundation like the Web Foundation actually might be a better vehicle to try to advocate on the open Web as a whole, versus just the people who happen to be using a single CMS.”

When asked more about WordPress’ leadership structure, Mullenweg reviewed the different approaches he has taken with the project. In 2018, the expression of his BDFL-style leadership was manifestly more overt than previous years, which may have influenced or even inspired the creation of the WordPress Governance Project.

“There’s been a lot more leaders, but I would actually argue the point that WordPress has always been sort of my vision being set, or even my direct leadership,” Mullenweg said. “There was a good four or five years there where the leadership structure, because we’ve experimented with lots of different – we don’t call it governance – but essentially leadership structures in WordPress. For a while, we had kind of the … It wasn’t a committee approach, but essentially like the lead developers consensus approach. We did that for a few years.

“Even from the beginning it wasn’t just me. It was me and Mike Little, so it’s never been solo. Then we went to where the release lead was the final decider, including over me, so that was probably, I don’t know, 3.9 to 4.7 maybe, that included overruling me as project lead for what was in the release or not, and that was to try to give a little more autonomy and flexibility to release leads. But the big change was a few years ago I said, ‘Okay, I’m going to take back over core WordPress development,’ and that was to try to make some of these big changes happen. So right now it is much more of a benevolent dictator model, although both of those words are questionable. But, I don’t see that as the permanent forever structure.”

Mullenweg may not be able to sustain this level of involvement in core leadership indefinitely, with all of his other responsibilities at Automattic. He said he is open to WordPress empowering other leaders in the future.

“I’m not saying it always has to be me, but what I want is a strong, opinionated, thoughtful leader setting a bold direction, taking experiments and being willing to fail, comfortable with failure, is I think what you need to create great software,” he said.

Brian DeConinck, a WordPress developer who has recently been a vocal critic of the project’s leadership, called for more transparency around the decision-making process in his initial thoughts on the governance project.

“Matt is the central figure of the WordPress project,” DeConinck said. “He’s been a guiding force since the beginning. Without a doubt, he’s an important and valued member of our community. I don’t imagine governance as a means of usurping him.

“But should there be a single human face at the head of a project and a community at this scale? When people are critical of decision-making, having Matt at the center makes it easy to make criticism needlessly personal. This dynamic is hard on Matt and others in the project leadership, and ultimately toxic for the community.”

DeConinck said in order for the governance project to be successful he thinks it needs to be international, multicultural, and multilingual, with diverse voices, as well as clear mechanisms for WordPress users to provide feedback. He outlined a detailed list of success criteria that hasn’t officially been embraced by governance project as it has yet to hold its first meeting.

DeConinck’s suggestions are incompatible with the current BDFL-style leadership, as he claims that “feedback from a community of millions of users can’t adequately be processed and acted upon by a single individual listening and making decisions for the project.” WordPress has risen to become a dominant force on the web during the past 15 years under this style of leadership. Any meaningful proposal of change to the leadership structure will need to demonstrate how the new model can continue to enable WordPress to make rapid progress and maintain its relevance on the web.

WordPress Governance Project Flagged as Unofficial and Removed from WordPress.org

Earlier this morning, WordPress Community Team representative Francesca Marano posted a notice on behalf of the governance project’s leadership to announce that the project has been removed from WordPress.org.

“Concerns have been raised about the posting of news about the WordPress Governance Project on make.wordpress.org and use of the #community-team Slack channel giving the impression the project is sanctioned as an official WordPress project,” Marano said. “It has not received such sanctions from WordPress leadership.”

“We went through what we believed were the appropriate channels for launching the project through the Community group (ie speaking to group members, asking for access to the Make blog, coordinating with the team and others to find a meeting time which didn’t collide with others, etc),” Morten Rand-Hendriksen said. “We were later informed the project was not sanctioned by WordPress leadership and therefore cannot use the Make blog or Slack.” He would not comment further on what transpired or the communication his team received.

For the time being, it looks like the governance project will need to prove its worth independently before being officially adopted by WordPress. Many other community-led efforts and tools have followed this same process before coming under the umbrella of core.

The project now has its own dedicated website at wpgovernance.com and a Slack instance at twgp.slack.com. The first meeting was set for January 8 but has been postponed to January, 15, 1600 UTC to allow participants to sign up at the new Slack workspace.