Our Vision and Values

AspirePress is a community-led project. Our focus is on developing tools for the community, and what we build is as diverse as the community that builds it. This outlines our vision and values, as well as our philosophy on developing software and components for the WordPress ecosystem.

Our Vision

AspirePress exists to develop free resources for the WordPress community that diversifies, decentralizes and democratizes WordPress.

Diversity

We empower the community through a diverse set of viewpoints, and the inclusion of as many groups of people as possible. We believe in the power of diversity to produce better outcomes, and we firmly believe that diversity of opinion is a strength.

Decentralize

When the community is centralized in one place, it creates the potential for one train of thought, one way of doing things, and one point of failure. Decentralizing the community in different but equal systems and flavors is a core part of our vision: we want everyone to have access, but we don’t want that access concentrated in any one place.

Democratize

While some people think of “democracy” as a dirty word or even an “American” one, we think of democracy as freedom of choice, freedom to contribute, and freedom to do what you want with the system. WordPress offers the greatest ability for any person to publish: if your website is hosted by someone, somewhere, you can write what you please and the marketplace of ideas decides the validity of your perspective. To us, democratizing WordPress means increasing the freedom to use the platform, and expanding, not restricting, access.

Our Values

We aspire to uphold five core values as part of our implementation of our vision.

We value collaboration.

We want people to work together and share ideas. This is important because if people work alone, they often don’t produce at their best. Challenging ideas and holding them up for examination by others is the best way to clarify and contextualize those ideas.

We value connection.

We want people to connect with each other. After all, that is the point of WordPress itself: to share ideas and connect with those who believe what you believe. We foster a culture of connection and belonging so that everyone feels like they’re part of the whole.

We value communication.

Speaking and listening are different skills, and they’re both required as part of effective communication. We acknowledge that understanding what someone is saying is the key to understanding their perspective, and we listen carefully and work hard at communicating with each other to achieve the best outcomes. When communication breaks down, we work together to restore it, and we pride ourselves on being quick to say “I didn’t understand that, can you explain?”

We value consensus.

It’s not enough to communicate positions: we must develop a community consensus around our solutions. Consensus doesn’t mean everyone holds the same perspective or even believes in the direction; what it means is that everyone has been heard and we are moving in the same direction. We believe that the greater the consensus, even with reservations, the more we can do as a team.

We value circulation.

Circulation refers to the distribution of our tools and components in the broader community. If we build something, and nobody adopts or finds it valuable, then we have wasted our time and failed the community. If we build something and the community readily adopts it, we can be proud of the fact that we built it, and it was worthwhile. This doesn’t mean we don’t experiment or develop for the sake of exploring; what it does mean is that when we focus our efforts, we value the community’s input and experience with the things we develop.