A Safe Place for Conflict Needs Trust

High-level spats in the WordPress business ecosystem are a reality, but on Twitter, they can become low-level competitive exchanges. Maybe they could be moved into more private conversations without character limits if the goal is to resolve conflicts rather than intensify them.

The world is full of existential crises. Most of us rely on WordPress and its culture of cooperation for our livelihood, and we have pretty small-scale and simple lives. The animosity between leaders of the largest companies in this space lands heavily on us.

Many of us bill by the hour, finish a project, and look for the next. We don’t care — and can’t care — about market share, market cap and investments. We have jobs and families to worry about. Not who owns the hosting market.

The inevitable and necessary conflicts in our open source community have a place where they can and often do spill out — Post Status Slack. The value that comes out of that (and the restraint that is exercised there more than it’s enforced) builds trust and comes from a place of trust that exists only because we protect and nurture it.

Let’s go more kindly and carefully together.

—Lindsey Miller