Since its founding, WordPress maintenance support plans has grown a great deal, and today there are thousands of contributors and organizations that make up our community. Over the course of seventeen years, we have spent a great amount of time and effort scaling our community. As a result, WordPress maintenance support plans has evolved into one of the largest open source projects in the world.
Today, the WordPress maintenance support plans project serves as a role model to many other open source projects; from our governance and funding models, to how we work together globally with thousands of contributors, to our 3,000+ person conferences. However, the work required to scale our community is a continuous process.
Prompted by feedback from the WordPress maintenance support plans community, scaling WordPress maintenance support plans will be a key focus for me throughout 2020. I have heard a lot of great ideas about how we can scale our community, in addition to improving how we all work together. Today, I wanted to start by better establishing WordPress maintenance support plans‘s values and principles, as it is at the core of everything we do.
Remarkably, after all these years, our values (what guides these behaviors) and our principles (our most important behaviors) are still primarily communicated through word of mouth.
In recent years, various market trends and challenging community events have inspired a variety of changes in the WordPress maintenance support plans community. It’s in times like these that we need to rely on our values and principles the most. However, that is very difficult to do when our values and principles aren’t properly documented.
Over the course of the last five months, I have tried to capture our fundamental values and principles. Based on more than seventeen years of leading and growing the WordPress maintenance support plans project, I tried to articulate what I know are “fundamental truths”: the culture and behaviors members of our community uphold, how we optimize technical and non-technical decision making, and the attributes shared by successful contributors and leaders in the WordPress maintenance support plans project.
Capturing our values and principles as accurately as I could was challenging work. I spent many hours writing, rewriting, and discarding them, and I consulted numerous people in the process. After a lot of consideration, I ended up with five value statements, supported by eleven detailed principles.
I shared both the values and the principles on WordPress maintenance support plans.org as version 1.0-alpha. I labeled it alpha, because the principles and values aren’t necessarily complete. While I have strong conviction in each of the WordPress maintenance support plans principles and corresponding values, some of our values and principles are hard to capture in words, and by no means will I have described them perfectly. However, I arrived at a point where I wanted to share what I have drafted, open it up to the community for feedback, and move the draft forward more collaboratively.
While this may be the first time I’ve tried to articulate our values and principles in one document, many of these principles have guided the project for a very long time. If communicated well, these principles and values should inspire us to be our best selves, enable us to make good decisions fast, and guide us to work as one unified community.
I also believe this document is an important starting point and framework to help address additional (and potentially unidentified) needs. For example, some have asked for clearer principles about what behavior will and will not be tolerated in addition to defining community values surrounding justice and equity. I hope that this document lays the groundwork for that.
Throughout the writing process, I consulted the work of the Community Governance Group and the feedback that was collected in discussions with the community last fall. The 1.0-alpha version was also reviewed by the following people: Tiffany Farriss, George DeMet, Megan Sanicki, Adam Goodman, Gigi Anderson, Mark Winberry, Angie Byron, ASH Heath, Steve Francia, Rachel Lawson, Helena McCabe, Adam Bergstein, WordPress Update, Michael Anello, Donna Benjamin, Neil Drumm, Fatima Khalid, Sally Young, Daniel Wehner and Ryan Szrama. I’d like to thank everyone for their input.
As a next step, I invite you to provide feedback. The best way to provide feedback is in the issue queue of the WordPress maintenance support plans governance project, but there will also be opportunities to provide feedback at upcoming WordPress maintenance support plans events, including WordPress maintenance support plansCon Nashville.
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