How Open Source is WordPress?

And how much weight does the community carry?

This week we’ve seen a lot of discussion around the Active Install Growth Chart in the WordPress Repository. Mark Zahra has rallied the community to push back and find answers. He has an open meta Trac ticket you can follow and comment on to see where this goes, but it does beg the question: how open is our open-source community when decisions can be made unilaterally without warning and without community input?

This isn’t the first time the community has dealt with changes (remember when Gutenberg was introduced?), and it certainly won’t be the last time (history in any community bears witness to this), but when should the community be involved, how much involvement should there be, and how and when do you notify the community at large?

Decision-by-committee is difficult enough, and decision-by-community is called an election. Surely there must be a way that we can gather information, keep the community informed, and move forward in a mutually-beneficial way. I don’t claim to have solutions, but I, along with many of you, will be watching to see how this goes.