Archived: Who Is on the WordPress Foundation Board?

With the recent drama surrounding Matt Mullenweg’s extortion attempt of WP Engine and potential legal action resulting from that, the WordPress Foundation has been getting more attention. There is fairly little information on the foundation and a lot of understandable confusion over it. On its homepage there is this explanation for its existence (emphasis in original):

The point of the foundation is to ensure free access, in perpetuity, to the software projects we support. People and businesses may come and go, so it is important to ensure that the source code for these projects will survive beyond the current contributor base, that we may create a stable platform for web publishing for generations to come.

The statement is odd as the foundation doesn’t, for example, control the WordPress website or other aspects of the WordPress project. It owns the WordPress trademark and provides funding for a scholarship and funds for WordCamps. It appears that Matt Mullenweg personally owns the website, which is concerning from a security perspective.

What is also rather odd is that the website doesn’t mention the board of directors. That is a pretty common thing, including in the WordPress space. Here is the page for WPCampus’ board of directors. Going further, there isn’t any mention on the foundation website of two the three members of the boards as the foundation’s last financial filing. The only one mentioned in Matt Mullenweg.

The foundation’s Form 990 tax form does list the directors of the board. The most recently available on is date September 20, 2023, so the information is nearly a year old at this point. Here is the information on the directors:

One of the other board members of the WordPress Foundation, Mark Ghosh, had a blog that covered WordPress, Weblog Tools Collection, that was sold to Matt Mullenweg. That last had new content published in 2013. As of 2016, they were apparently working for the Sherwin Williams paint company. They have a Twitter account, which was also last posted from in 2013.

The final member of the WordPress Foundation board, Chele Chiavacci Farley, who doesn’t appear to have any connection to WordPress. She has a background in finance, including working for UBS and Goldman Sachs. Her LinkedIn profile says she is Partner & Managing Director at Mistral Capital International. That has been described as a private equity firm (apparently private equity isn’t bad if it on Matt Mullenweg’s side).

She was the Republican candidate for the NY US Senate race in 2018 and the NY 18th District House race in 2020. She lost both races. She has social media accounts that last posted to in 2020.

According to the form, those two board members (neither did Matt Mullenweg) didn’t receive any compensation. Could that be because they are not doing almost anything in their role as a director? It does say they spent an average of one hour a week on related organizations. Could it be that they are compensated by Matt Mullenweg in some other way? Those would be great questions for a journalist to inquire about.