PHP Foundation with new leadership: Elizabeth Barron is Executive Director

The PHP Foundation is getting new leadership: Elizabeth Barron is taking over the role of executive director. The decision was made after a selection process that was overseen by an internal committee including Nils Adermann, Sebastian Bergmann, Lorna Mitchell, and Ben Ramsey. Barron succeeds Roman Pronskiy, who wants to focus more on his work at JetBrains in the future but will remain with the Foundation as a board member and will oversee the transition.

Elizabeth Barron brings many years of experience from the PHP community and the open-source world. She was a co-founder of a non-profit organization for the promotion of women and non-binary individuals in the PHP industry and worked as a community manager at GitHub, where she was responsible for outreach programs such as “Patchwork,” among other things. These are initiatives that specifically target new contributors and support them in getting started with open-source projects. She was also involved in the CHAOSS project, which develops metrics and methods for evaluating the health of open-source communities. Her focus areas include community building and fundraising, as well as strategic development and operational management of open-source initiatives.

Mission: Secure PHP long-term

The PHP Foundation was founded in 2021 to ensure the long-term development of the programming language organizationally and financially – partly in response to personnel changes in the core team. The foundation collects sponsorship funds, provides financial support to core developers, and creates reliable structures around governance and promotion. With Barron at the helm, the organization aims to continue this course and strengthen the foundation for the PHP programming language to continue to power a large part of the web in the future.

More information can be found in the post on the official PHP Foundation blog.

(mdo)