Who Legally Governs Classic Press? What are the legal entities comprising Classic Press, and who are the officers and board members of these entities? Form where does the funding come, and who makes funding decisions?
(These questions are being asked of the Wordpress community, so it only seems fair for the Classic Press community to present these answers as well. I could not easily find the answers on the Classic Press site, although maybe I missed them.)
You can find most, if not all answers, to your questions here:
As far as I’ve seen, ClassicPress relies to fundraising and donations:
@viktor, thank you, that does answer most of my questions.
I realise that expediency to set up Classic Press might have motivated an initial single director. However, one of my concerns regarding Wordpress.org is the lack of independent directors. When will Classic Press engage additional independent directors on its board?
@scott , you are lilely the best authority on this question. (Apologies if you have already answered it elsewhere.)
Additional directors will follow in due course, I don’t have the energy to be a dictator. Right now the focus is getting V1 out the door amongst other things.
@scott , I appreciate your initiative, effort and good will.
However, the main problem that many of us have with Wordpress.org chiefly concerns governance (as embodied by Matt’s one-person legal control) and its impact on technology/deployment choices and timeline, rather than the technology itself.
Complete legal control held by one person is too risky for many reasons. Polls and talk about democracy are great, but then Wordpress.org used to be a lot more inclusive as well. Yet all that is at the whim of the moment for whoever legally controls an organisation, whether it be Matt, yourself, or another person.
While it is important to take the time to find the best additional directors, I urge you to make this a high priority. Building up the community’s confidence in the governance of Classic Press will be a key in the decision of power and enterprise sites to convert.
Further, Wordpress.org is not the only competition out there. It is not that difficult for power users to knock something out in Ruby on Rails, etc., that meets their needs and that can even use the TinyMCE editor. Yes, they would be giving up the ecosystem of WP plugins and themes, but that whole ecosystem is getting really disrupted (and possibly diminished) due to the Four Phases of Gutenberg anyway. Please help make the decision to convert to Classic Press easier by reducing governance risk.
While I do agree that additional directors need to be chosen, for now I think the focus should be on getting v1 out of the door as soon as reliably possible. That is not to say Scott has full power. There is already a committee with very varied membership of varies nationality. This committee is also very varied in the companies (and kind of companies, from plugin developers to webdesigners) they belong too. I think we are safe enough, and I do trust that Mr. Bowler is serious about building a solid democracy and not a (benevolent) dictatorship, as Matt called WordPress.
I agree with this. I’m quite keen to get more involved in promotiong CP, but don’t feel like I can really start pushing things along while it is still in Beta. I’d suggest energy should be directed towards getting version 1 out there, then we can think about how to stop Scott becoming another Ozymandias.
Luckily, for now, Scott looks more like a Cincinnatus than an Augustus 
Just as long as he doesn’t want to put his horse onto the committee. 
Glitterhoof, Head of Animal Representation.
Well, Is Scott really a kind of dictator ? CP is not yet really out of the box and you all seem to be very worried about that ! Will he be worse than WP leaders ?
The new organisation of CP explain that the model is highly collaborative, even if of course the mainline had to be well driven. Ans so, Do we have a better solution to leave WP without rewrite entirely our sites ?
For the moment, I choose to be confident.
It is not just the “dictator” issue. It is what will the lawyers do with Classic if Scott gets kidnapped by aliens or eats the wrong sandwich at Pret A Manger.
When I have to pitch Classic to the powers that be for our enterprise WP application, they have these sorts of questions, since Classic is new. These folks are getting increasingly risk shy.
For reference, ClassicPress Initiative (a non-profit) manages and governs the ClassicPress project. More information about the Initiative can be found here: