Re: [RFC][Discussion] Social Media and Marketing Communications Policy

Larry, thanks the feedback, made changes based on all of it. Updated PR: https://github.com/php/policies/pull/32 On Mon, May 18, 2026 at 6:37 PM Larry Garfield <larry@garfieldtech.com> wrote: > > As I noted in a comment (before realizing I should likely post here instead): Saying "not > political" is a trap. In the current environment, not being political is simply not an > option, because so many things have become politicized. Simply whose name we mention can be > political, for reasons noted in the comment there. The neutrality wording now only applies to content and the policy explicitly says applying those rules is up to the social media team. > Similarly, the presented guidelines make no allowance for values-based selection of target > platforms. While it would be lovely to say that we're neutral, the platforms aren't. I > reiterate my previous question: Would you (general you) be OK with PHP having an account on Truth > Social? Or on the Daily Caller forums? Or 8chan? I didn't add values language but I think the result may be ok with you. There's now a "discretion" principle. Presence on any platform is never an obligation and the team can say no to a platform it thinks is a bad fit. > 1. The social media team is completely self-regulating. That means it operates without > accountability. At bare minimum there needs to be some way for the project as a whole to kick > someone out, whether by RFC or some other mechanism. (Eg, if catturd2 tried to join, I certainly > hope most of us would be opposed to that.) New members get announced on internals and the roster PR stays open a week so people can object. And the community can always remove someone (or the whole team) by RFC vote. > 2. The infrastructure team is completely undefined. Is the Infra team's membership > defined and regulated and documented elsewhere at present? If so, it should be linked. If not, > that's a prerequisite for this policy doc, because we are giving formal authority to a > committee that doesn't technically exist. That's not cool. Infra having a tighter > membership policy than Social Media makes total sense; it does not need to operate the same way. > But its operation needs to be defined somehow. It seems not defined anywhere explicitly, but there is https://wiki.php.net/systems and https://github.com/php/infrastructure. So policy now defines it by reference, the existing folks on systems@php.net / php/infrastructure repo, plus credential holders per account have to be listed publicly. Properly formalizing infra governance is a way bigger job than this RFC, I don't think it should block it. -Roman