I do think it's slightly amusing that the project has all of a sudden been shut down in a sense because of it's so-called 'unsanctioned' approach. I must admit, I was skeptical when I first heard about it and I don't see how it'll change anything within the WordPress project itself.

The project belongs to Matt as far as I can tell, so I doubt he'll just give up the reins so easily. Furthermore, the quote from the Post Status podcast mentions leads from a release point of view which this governance project isn't talking about. The governance project is talking about actual leadership of the whole project.

Whilst Matt may have been silent and to the side for many releases, ultimately it's his project and he's never given up the ownership and power he has over the project. I don't blame him. It was his idea to fork WordPress in the beginning after all.

I think Morten and Rachel need to rethink their approach to this project as well anyway. I'm getting emails from them recently with no way to unsubscribe about a project I don't even know much about. They need to set out a clear vision and prove to the unknown leaders of the WordPress project the worth of the idea. Which is hard enough as it is.

I tried to get a new team started to help on-boarding people to various 'Make Teams' and that got shut down too. Think about how hard it'll be for them to try and convince the powers that be that they want to take some of that power away. It's probably not going to happen.