Anne McCarthy of Automattic Joins PHP Foundation Board

The PHP Foundation's Governing Board has unanimously approved Anne McCarthy, Architect and Open Source Director for Automattic, as a platinum sponsor representative. Elizabeth Barron, the Foundation's Executive Director, announced the appointment on August 4, 2026.

McCarthy brings 15 years of technical and open source background, 12 of them at Automattic working with the WordPress community.

What She Said#

Here's McCarthy on joining:

Open source comes down to people trying, caring, and showing up to benefit the collective. This feels like an especially powerful act in today's world so it's a real honor to join the PHP Foundation Board to support those who have given so much to PHP and all the other projects built with it.

Why It Matters#

Platinum sponsors get a seat at the table, and Automattic sits at that tier alongside JetBrains and the Sovereign Tech Agency. That sponsorship money pays for work on php-src itself, including the security triage behind releases like PHP 8.5.9.

WordPress is one of the largest bodies of PHP running in production anywhere, so Automattic has a direct stake in where the language goes, and the Foundation gets someone who has spent over a decade on the community side of a very large open source project.

She's based in Seattle, and the Foundation's post notes she finds joy in mountains and dogs.

Read the full announcement on The PHP Foundation blog.