Business Roundup Week Ending December 27

The Call for Change is Getting Louder

Following the holiday shutdown of WordPress.org, some interesting conversations have been happening among leaders in the WordPress world.
As I summarized last week, an open letter from 20 anonymous signatories called for an end to Matt Mullenweg’s excessive control over critical project infrastructure, including websites, repositories, communication channels, and security tools.
Last Friday, the conversation broadened when both Joost de Valk and Karim Marucchi published thoughtful posts on what that change might look like.
- Joost called for (among other things) a move toward Federated and Independent Repositories (FAIR) as supplemental update sources as a way to take back the commons.
- Karim emphasized the need to secure the supply chain and modernize the tech stack so that WordPress can become the Open Web’s operating system.
Joost and Karim plan to convene a group in mid-January to work on the initiatives that they described.

A new report reveals that no U.S. state website fully meets upcoming Department of Justice accessibility requirements.
The study, published by the Web Almanac as part of the State of the Web 2024, shows the results of a Google Lighthouse scan on the home page and a secondary page.
The assumption of the study was that if accessibility problems exist on a state’s home page, they likely exist throughout the website.
Colorado lead the results at 96% compliance, with Vermont, Nevada, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia achieving scores above 90%.
It’s important to note that automated scans like Google Lighthouse typically do not find all accessibility problems on a web page. Human testing is more thorough.
How does your agency think about accessibility? Are you positioned to capitalize on what is sure to be a growing demand for accessibility in the coming years?

GitHub announced a free version of its Copilot AI programming tool, available in Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code (VS Code) editor.
Free users get access to 2,000 code autocompletions per month, and 50 chat messages with Claude 3.5 Sonnet or GPT-4o.
Copilot Pro is still just $10 per month (still free for verified students, teachers, and open source project maintainers).
GitHub Copilot is compatible with several editors, including VS Code, Visual Studio, JetBrains, and the GitHub.com website.
This new free offering aligns with GitHub’s aspiration to reach one billion developers worldwide.
Get all the info from the GitHub announcement and get started with Copilot.