How do other open source projects pay the people who build them? On This Week in WordPress 309, recorded during a tense week for WordPress, the panel talked about contribution, and I compared WordPress with open source foundations like OpenJS. I was then an open source developer advocate at GoDaddy, working on contributor dashboards.
🎙️ Episode details
- Show: This Week in WordPress 309, “The week where there was actual news,” from WP Builds
- Host: Nathan Wrigleycolleague
- Panel: Taco Verdonschotcolleague, Michelle Frechettecolleague, Cameron Jones, James Giroux and me, Courtney Robertson
- Live: Monday, September 30, 2024. The podcast followed on October 1.
- Topics: how open source foundations fund contributors, contributor dashboards, and hosting criteria
- Show notes: This Week in WordPress 309 on WP Builds, with news links and a transcript
The captions are YouTube’s automatic captions, cleaned for repeated lines and names but not checked against the audio. WP Builds also publishes a full transcript on the show notes page.
🏛️ How other open source foundations fund contributors
For example, in some open source projects, the foundation employs staff who work on the project full time. WordPress doesn’t work that way. I wasn’t calling for a revolution, but I suggested looking at how projects like OpenJS operate. GoDaddy funded OpenJS and other projects, including PHP_CodeSniffer, which underpins the WordPress Coding Standards.
I said I’d like to see the organizations most dependent on WordPress, such as hosts, plugin and theme companies, and larger agencies, do more for the official Make teams. I wasn’t judging any company’s past contributions.
📊 What contributor dashboards can and can’t see
Andrea Middletoncolleague and I first discussed contributor dashboards around 2020. Taco raised a concern I shared: the tooling measured only activity. In addition, many locales run their own Slack instances, and our dashboards couldn’t yet pull in Trac, which I’d discussed with Otto at WordCamp US. Hari Shankercolleague and I planned a deeper conversation with Nathan about the data.
I also mentioned an idea shared in the hosting team’s Slack the day before: listing hosts that meet Five for the Future criteria alongside the wordpress.org/hosting page.
🧪 What can you take from this talk on open source foundations?
- Companies: look at how other open source foundations structure funding before you decide how to give.
- Contributors: know that activity metrics miss a lot; record the work they can’t see.
Also, more conversations like this one live in my podcast and speaking archive.
🗓️ Archival note
WP Builds released this episode on October 1, 2024. Its show notes say it was recorded on “Monday 30th October 2024,” which is after the release and wasn’t a Monday. The Monday live slot before release was September 30, 2024, so I used that date. I added this post on November 9, 2026, from the automated transcript, which garbles some words. I reviewed the transcript, not the recording.