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

First, I think the RFC is a great idea, thanks Roman.,

2nd, social media for the PHP project, IMHO, should focus on advocacy of
PHP and serve as a communication tool with the broader user base about
meaningful topics (ie. new releases). As such within reason broadest
relevant social media presence makes sense. Excluding platforms based on
personal views, rather than their practical utility for addressing the
former doesn't seem logical to me.

Lastly, rather than being a manual process, whatever social media (if any)
are decided upon probably should be managed via tooling (ie automated posts
when a new version is released) instead of relying on any single individual
or small group to ensure continuity.

On Mon, May 18, 2026 at 12:37 PM Larry Garfield larry@garfieldtech.com
wrote:

Hi internals,

I'd like to start a discussion on an RFC proposing a formal policy for
PHP's official social media presence and marketing communications.

RFC: https://wiki.php.net/rfc/social-media-policy
Policy PR: https://github.com/php/policies/pull/32

The proposal addresses three gaps in current practice:

1. Custodianship of credentials for official accounts is not formally
   defined, with no documented succession procedures.

2. There is no documented process for content decisions on official
   channels — what gets posted, by whom, and under what authority.

3. There is no framework for deciding which platforms PHP should
   maintain presence on, leading to platform-by-platform ad-hoc
   decisions.

The policy text itself lives in the php/policies repo (PR linked
above). The wiki RFC is a wrapper proposing its adoption. Inline
comments on specific policy text are welcome on the PR.

The proposal reflects feedback already received on the previous draft.
Further feedback is welcome.

-Roman

For the record, I do support greater clarity and process around this
topic, so I welcome this RFC. However, I do have concerns with it in its
present form:

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.

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?

To be blunt, if your answer to that is "yes" then I don't want you in my
project. Any claim of "neutrality" needs to be moderated to allow avoiding
platforms whose values directly contradict ours. The exact line for that
can be somewhat squishy and contextual, but that allowance MUST be in there.

Regarding membership, there's 2 issues:

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.)

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.

--Larry Garfield

--
Ilia Alshanetsky
Technologist, CTO, Entrepreneur
E: ilia@ilia.ws
T: @iliaa
B: http://ilia.ws

Larry, thanks the feedback, made changes based on all of it. Updated
PR: https://github.com/php/policies/pull/32

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