The WP Community Collective on feeding humans into the boiler

This is a first for Community + Code: a full board meeting (almost), on the podcast.

For this special Podcastathon episode, I sat down with three of my fellow WP Community Collective board members — Courtney Robertson, Sé Reed, and Jono Alderson — to talk about something I care about deeply and probably doesn’t get discussed honestly enough: how WordPress actually sustains its contributors, and why the current model is quietly falling apart.

Sé and Courtney take us back to the founding moment — a Q&A with Matt Mullenweg at WordCamp San Diego, where he made it crystal clear that the WordPress Foundation was never going to fund contribution. That conversation sent them down a path that became The WPCC. Jono, the newest member of the board (with me), brings a kind of brilliant, alarming clarity to why all of this matters: he describes the ecosystem as running on “feeding humans into the boiler” — burning through passion until people disappear — and explains why that’s a sustainability crisis, not just a community vibe issue.

We also get into some personal contributor stories (including one that will make a lot of Pantheon customers happy in retrospect), a genuinely surprising Waymo tangent, and why The WPCC’s membership model is more radical than it looks.

The CTA here is simple: if you believe in open source, and you want to put your five dollars where your mouth is, go join the WP Community Collective. Or just come listen. That works too.

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