PHP Foundation: Alive and Kicking | Aug 20, 2022

"...Following Joe Watkins’ influential blog post about the state of PHP, long-time community members Roman Pronskiy, Nikita Popov, Sebastian Bergmann, Stefan Priebsch, joined Joe Watkins and envisioned the PHP Foundation, to help fund development and enable companies to contribute back. They drew inspiration and support from another Open Source Collective project, Open Web Docs. “We learned from Open Web Docs’ organization, materials, and updates, and had a few calls to share experiences.” Thanks to many PHP contributors and community members, along with support from major PHP companies, the community soon grew. “Our goal for 2022 was to hire software developers to work on PHP core, do maintenance, and implement new features. We were lucky to get six committed part-time developers on board right away. Our next goals are to establish scalable processes for handling requests, and to improve communications. To achieve this, we need more people and companies involved.” In general, they stay focused with a small team, a conscious choice of the PHP Foundation. “We decided to not make our communication public right away, instead starting small by inviting, one by one, people who were already helping us. Since all admins have full-time jobs and do this work as volunteers, we want to be practical and focus on things that matter. We have bi-weekly calls with an agenda I publish in our closed GitHub repository. At some point, we plan to make this repository open, and possibly do live streams of the meetings. Maybe next year”. The PHP Foundation supports its members to participate in events, like conferences, to give public talks. PHP Forum in Paris is coming up in October, where Sebastian Bergmann and Roman Pronskiy will explain where The PHP Foundation is right now and what we’re planning. At the same conference, developer George P. Banyard will go deeper into the technical side of the project. The next stop will be SymfonyCon in November, also in France...."