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I've been reading up on the Wikimedia Foundation, the 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that manages Wikpedia and various other projects, such as the Media Wiki open-source software. They have a very sophisticated governance structure with many interesting features that I feel could be beneficial to the WordPress community as well.
The most notable thing is that the organization isn't controlled by any individual or founder, but is instead governed by a Board of Trustees through which the entire community gets a voice in the process:
- Community members can either stand for election (8 seats) or get appointed based on skills/qualification (7 seats), providing a clear path to leadership for those who want to get more involved in higher-level decision-making.
- The criteria for voter eligibility is based on contributions as Editors, Translators, and Developers. Everyone who edits pages, translates content, or writes code can become eligible to vote, ensuring that passionate community members are empowered to participate. In the 2021 election for example, 6873 voters participated.
- There is 1 trustee position set aside for the founder (Jimmy Wales).
By contrast, it doesn't feel like there is any democracy or transparency with the WordPress community. How can the world of WordPress become more like the Wikimedia Foundation?
Urge Matt to pursue other interests?
Behave like an open-source organization.
Don’t allow one person the ability to single-handedly wield the power of the open-source organization alongside/in sync with his own commercial interests without any checks and balances.
For instance, if Jimmy Wales gets pissed at one of the numerous commercial entities using MediaWiki, he can’t just up and bring the weight of Wikipedia/MediaWiki/Wikimedia Foundation, etc. down upon those companies.
The foundation doesn’t own the org website. That’s probably the first step, because Matt owns the website.
The foundation is also farce with just Matt as the active member, he bought out the other director’s business who is nowhere to be found since and the other director’s business seems to be a politician and have nothing to do with open source and not active too. So essentially it’s just Matt and two dummy directors.
Giving .org to the foundation by itself won’t change anything, we need more non Matt affiliated directors.
There is a lot to be said for this, but the Wikimedia Foundation may not need to support different end goals.
We on the other have that in the WordPress community. We have professional developers, agencies, DIYers and so on with different ideas on the “best” way to solve something. Classic Editor vs Gutenberg, FSE vs php themes and so on.
Voting is all good, but it tends to go the way of too-many-cooks-in-the-kitchen quite easily. And I don’t think this is just due to preference. Often this is based on what you can build a workflow around.
People who build small page websites with it will not need the same feature set as an agency with a redundant CI pipeline, but you might have more people voting for that since that is a lower barrier of entry and users in that group.
Sometimes its better for the software to ensure that a general direction is its main goal and within those borders the voting takes place.
I know this isn’t ideal either and haven’t had to concern self with this too much, but I do see software that becomes popular is “ruined” by “everyone-gets-to-vote” feature implementation that really hurts the original goal. That of course depends on HOW voting is done. The tricky part.
I’m no fan of software for everyone and I do feel that this was kinda the way WordPress has been going. In this case the goal was to build something for everyone to compete with SQSP /Wix.
By no means do I think that Matt leadership here has helped this in any way since that IMHO is a big area of conflict (.org vs .com vs Automattic at large).
Maybe something more in the middle with a “position” that looks out for their user base? Or maybe more like distros?
Personally I feel the developers that provide services (aka built custom sites) are the ones that have gotten the shaft here most of the time. When the last time WP changed anything to customize the backend experience we ‘sell’ our clients? Or actually made metafields usable?
The changes with GB for example gave way to another large swath of plugins to augment whatever was missing from WP. Yes, developers but ones that support the same end user – the DIYer.
How many developer/programmers chose those? I’d think not that many simply due to ability to provide alternative solutions and profit margin.
Again I think this comes down to user-base and in my dream GB and FSE would be plugins…
Edit: spelling and clarification
Trial by combat.
Dries Buytaert, the founder and project lead of the WP adjacent open source project Drupal, wrote a blog titled [Solving the Maker-Taker problem](https://dri.es/solving-the-maker-taker-problem) where he offers heartfelt advice to Matt and the WordPress community and gives example how Drupal built a community around “makers” without a heavy handed “five for the future” program. Really showcases their different open-source philosophies and how they encourage people to contribute to core in democratic and egalitarian way.