In recent days I have been asked for my thoughts on the Matt-ers which have unfolded in the WordPress community, which was my home for nine years.

For those not au fait, as it says on the part of my CV where I desperately try to pretend that any prospective employer is interested in it, which I can assure you they’re not:
Open Source Community Contributor and Volunteer
2011-2020
I was an enthusiastic contributor to several OSS project communities, helping
community members to understand privacy, accessibility, and various regulatory
changes impacting the field. I delivered 32 conference talks across eight countries,
trained thousands of professionals, was a local meetup organiser in two cities, was a co-organiser for four multi-day conferences, and I helped build the WordPress 4.9.6 privacy suite to ship privacy tools to 40% of the sites on the open web.

As some of you may recall, all this counted for was being on the receiving end of some of the worst behavior in the WordPress project.

The reason I am still here though, strong and better and smiling despite all of that, is because I was also on the receiving end of some of the best people in the project.

Some of them were, and always will be, the best friends I have ever had in my life. They know who they are. They are, as Elbow once sang, the stars that I navigate home by. They gave me that light.

It’s thanks to the light that I can share my thoughts on what, in my view, really Matt-ers here, and that is this:

Their names are Asmahan Attayeb and Jennifer Westmoreland,
and we are responsible for what happened to them.

We are responsible.

We did this.

Say their names.

The abusive behaviour we all saw in the community, in public, and which we – collectively, as a community, kept our heads down about – turned out to be a hint of what was happening, privately, behind closed doors.

Say their names.

The use of contracts, and terms and conditions, and the four open source freedoms, as forms of control and manipulation which we all saw in public in the community, and which we – collectively, as a community – merely grunted about in Slack channels, turned out to be a hint of what was happening, privately, behind closed doors.

Say their names.

The singling out of people who were, through no fault of their own, at their lowest and vulnerable – like I was, for a time – as easy pickings to be exploited, which we all saw in public in the community, and which we – collectively, as a community – just wrote off as “Matt Bombs”, turned out to be a practice run for when, for him, it really Matt-ered.

Say their names.

The misogyny, the racism, and the transphobia which we all saw in the community, in public, and which we – collectively, as a community – rolled our eyes at because it was happening to someone else, turned out to be a hint of what was happening, privately, behind closed doors.

Say their names.

The smarmy American toxic positivity we all experienced from the Automattic “community team”, a brigade of contemptible corporate brand enforcers cosplaying as caring suburban mommies, and which we – collectively, as a community – rolled our eyes at, because it was just the hoops we had to jump through to host a bloody fucking conference, turned out to be the iterated code for domestic coercion and control.

Say their names.

The WordPress community – not the corporate entity, the local volunteers on the ground, the real people – was always about community. It was about realising that we had more in common than that which divides us. It was about national borders that ceased to exist, it was about language differences which ceased to matter, it was about class and status differences which evaporated.

It was about meeting someone at a conference whom, several years later, you’d somehow find yourself watching a sunrise with.

It was about us.

It’s why we stayed, and kept going, despite all the crap happening around us.

It’s why many of you even claimed that you weren’t just not interested in the drama, you were beyond it – that you were somehow above, beyond, and superior to what was happening to us at the grassroots, from the comfort of your warm suburban homes – firm in your conviction that none of “that” could ever, possibly, come near you or your families.

And yet.

All of us, all of us, somehow knew, that whole time, that corporate upstairs was laughing at us.

Sneering, even.

Our little volunteer communities? We knew that they served no use to corporate’s VCs.

The community groups, the nonprofits, the charity projects, the people just trying to have a voice, the salt of the earth that we built sites for? We knew that corporate and their VCs were rolling their eyes at us.

The conferences we staged, exhausted, unpaid, on our feet, with expenses funded out of our own pockets? We knew that corporate and their VCs didn’t give a shit: we weren’t going to make them any fucking money.

We knew.

We always knew.

We knew.

So we just kept our heads down and focused on what we could do, in the places where we were, and the people we could help, staying out of drama.

And we were fucking mugs.

We were fucking mugs, and we let ourselves be put into that position, which meant that we couldn’t be to our community what a community is supposed to be.

As best as I can tell, googling American courtroom filings as far as Eduroam will take me from a Scottish university campus, the trials for Asmahan and Jennifer go ahead on May 19 and June 16 2025, in the same courtroom in San Francisco, for the abusive, corrupt, and disgusting behavior which it was in our power to prevent.

Those court dates must be the next, and the final, WordPress community events.

Stop the clocks. Strike the set. Kill the meetups. Cancel the WordCamps.

End the charade.

These former things are passed away.

Those two dates are the only events which the community should look forward to attending, because they are the only dates which we are worth.

Those trials are going forward because we caused them.

Their names are Asmahan Attayeb and Jennifer Westmoreland, and we are responsible for what happened to them.

Say their names.

Their names are Asmahan Attayeb and Jennifer Westmoreland.

Asmahan and Jennifer, we failed you.

Tell us what we can do to to put it right.

Updated 15 October: follow-up thread.