Hi! I’m Anne McCarthy and I have had the privilege of being a sponsored contributor to the WordPress project over the years. This led to my being on a range of release squads:
- WordPress 7.1 Release Lead
- WordPress 6.6 Test Lead
- WordPress 6.5 Editor Triage Lead
- WordPress 6.4 Editor Triage Lead
- WordPress 6.3 Editor Triage Lead
- WordPress 6.2 Editor Triage Co-Lead
- WordPress 6.1 Editor Triage Lead
- WordPress 6.0 Release Coordinator
- WordPress 5.9 Test Co-Lead
With each squad, I started receiving these wonderful WordPress albums as a thank you. Some of you might be asking why I am giving these albums away after a lot of work to receive them in the first place. If you know me, you know I’m a huge minimalist and I’m far more about preserving my memories/impact than I am about collecting physical items. These have been literally collecting dust ever since I started getting them and I have been trying to find a way to give them away in a way that helps the most number of people.
At first, I thought I’d do an auction to raise money to sponsor an LGBTQ+ person to work on the WordPress project. That requires a fair amount of overhead, based on my experience doing something similar with the WordPress mentorship program. The ideas kept rumbling around as the number of albums grew. Ultimately, I have huge amount of respect for those who walked the path I walk today in the WordPress world and that led me to learn more about the big impact Ryan Boren has had on WordPress. Due to both working with them at Automattic and staying in touch after, I’ve become a big fan of what they are doing with Stimpunks. While I donate what I can, I thought this would be an even better way to help an organization run by an incredible WordPress-er that centers disabled and neurodivergent people with mutual aid and access infrastructure. I am a big believer in how he is approaching supporting folks via mutual aid, micro-grants, and openly sharing information. It’s my preferred way of change making (people to people and open advocacy) over big corporate efforts.
All of this led to today where I am trying to auction these items away, slowly but surely, to raise as much money as possible for Stimpunks. Whether you win an album or bid at all, I encourage you to donate if you’ve benefited from WordPress in any way as Ryan Boren is one of the people who built WordPress from the ground up. They joined the project in 2003 and wrote the plugin system that nearly every WordPress site relies on today. They served as a lead developer for over a decade and, after retiring from tech in 2021, he co-founded Stimpunks to give back. This is my way to try to give back to someone who has given so much to the project.