At a previous job, we had an engineering book club. Once a week we would meet and discuss a chapter of a book. It was a good opportunity to hear multiple perspectives on an author’s work, to see who agreed with the author and where people thought the author was off-base.
I would like to bring this concept to WordPress, especially to fellow Core Contributors. For the first book, we will be reading Producing Open Source Software by Karl Fogel. This is a book that has greatly influenced my perspective on open source and software development in general.
The club will meet on Google Meet on Tuesdays at 16:00 UTC (edit: This was originally 15:00 UTC. Moving to not conflict with recurring meetings of multiple WordPress teams) for one hour with the following schedule:
- 2 September 2025: Preface and Chapter 1. Introduction
- 9 September 2025: Chapter 2. Getting Started
- 16 September 2025: Chapter 3. Technical Infrastructure
- 23 September 2025: Chapter 4. Social and Political Infrastructure and Chapter 5. Organizations and Money: Businesses, Non-Profits, and Governments
- 30 September 2025: Chapter 6. Communications
- 7 October 2025: Chapter 7. Packaging, Releasing, and Daily Development
- 14 October 2025: Chapter 8. Managing Participants
- 21 October 2025: Chapter 9. Legal Matters: Licenses, Copyrights, Trademarks and Patents
While not an official WordPress event, the expectations from the WordPress Community Code of Conduct will apply and at my sole discretion, violations may result in individuals not being invited to continue. Additionally, participants are also encouraged to blog their thoughts on each chapter.
If you are interested, please leave a comment on this post. I will be getting in touch with respondents. If there is an overwhelming interest, I may need to restrict attendees or run a second meeting.
Props to Jonathan Desrosiers and Tammie Lister for discussing this idea with me, Pattie Reaves for starting the club at PMC and the PMC PEP team who ran the club I was a part of.
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