In a post yesterday, we covered that those in charge of WordPress didn’t know how people could appeal being banned from WordPress. That came during a question and answer stream with the new Executive Director of WordPress.org, who wasn’t selected by the community, but is instead was hired by Matt Mullenweg’s company Automattic to have that role. Similarly, the previous person in that role (under the title Executive Director of WordPress) was an Automattic employee in charge of their team that was involved in WordPress. The new Executive Director had so little involvement with WordPress before being named to the role that her account on the website was created the same day she was announced for the role.  Matt Mullenweg didn’t acknowledge their employment with Automattic when announcing them in that role. WordPress is far from a meritocracy.

In a recent article on the “culture of fear” inside WordPress, the banning of community members was mentioned several times, including in this paragraph:

Contributors said they felt stuck, as publicly disagreeing with Mullenweg could result in a ban from WordPress.org, potentially ending their involvement with the project, but not speaking out was stifling meaningful discussion about how to move the open-source project forward.

All of that runs directly counter to a comment that Matt Mullenweg made at the end of the Q&A:

WordPress is made by the people who show up. And I love that we can come together, we can talk about things, debate, disagree. And you know that sort of idea of meritocracy. Where we can debate over ideas, but shake hands afterwards.

He isn’t the first to say that WordPress is made by the people who show up. And it is true. But what goes unsaid is that who can be involved is restricted. It isn’t just Matt Mullenweg who shuts down attempts by others to raise concerns, other people he has empowered have been doing it for years. That hasn’t produce good results, as can be seen with fixable security issues that haven’t been addressed for years and years.