WordPress Governance Charter

Introduction

Governance is the action or manner of control, influence, or regulation. In a complex organization, a mature governance process requires trust, transparency, goodwill, process, and protocol.

Guiding Statement

The Wake Forest University WordPress web environment (WFU WordPress) exists to create a consistent, clear, unified public web experience for Wake Foresters. WFU WordPress should be easy to use, reliable, and unobtrusive, empowering diverse and distributed University staff to communicate effectively with their constituents and support their strategic objectives.

Charter

The WFU WordPress Governance Group (Governance Group) convenes Wake Forest stakeholders who develop and maintain University websites within WFU WordPress. The goal of the Governance Group is to evaluate, direct, and monitor WFU WordPress.

The Governance Group discusses issues related to web publishing, including prioritizing requested work against available resources and communicating with stakeholders. The Governance Group also helps form a long-term strategic vision for WFU WordPress that is shared with University Marketing & Communications (UMC) leadership.

The WordPress team, under UMC, facilitates the Governance Group: it maintains this charter, prepares the monthly update, surfaces items for the group’s input, and reports outcomes. The Governance Group shares goals, reports progress, outlines emerging risks and opportunities, and receives guidance on future priorities from UMC leadership on an ongoing basis.

Specific charge of the Governance Group:

• Risk Management: Ensure that the University’s risk appetite as it pertains to WFU WordPress is understood, articulated, and used for prioritization when remediation is required. Identify issues and opportunities for improvement. Example: if the Wake Alert banner and the Instagram Feed plugin are both broken, the Wake Alert banner repair becomes the top priority since that outage creates more institutional risk.
• Prioritization: Ensure resources are used as efficiently and effectively as possible to deliver quality WFU WordPress services that meet the most critical needs of the user group. Evaluate and prioritize suggested work, including new features and plugins, against the guiding principles and available resources. Discuss and propose standards and guidelines.
• Communication: Ensure that performance and conformance are transparent, with group members witnessing the goals, means, and necessary remedial actions. Communicate key items to WordPress stakeholders, including the guiding principles, the request and evaluation processes, current priorities, and realistic timelines for work. Help build and communicate the long-term strategic vision of WordPress.
• Strategy: Survey and evaluate usage of, and develop a strategic plan for the evolution of, the WFU WordPress instance.
• Housekeeping: Ensure maintenance and improvement of governance components with clarity of authority and responsibilities to achieve the University’s mission, goals, and objectives. Build and maintain guiding principles for evaluating the future of WFU WordPress.

Decision Rights

The Governance Group operates primarily through asynchronous review. Decisions are made asynchronously by default; a meeting is called only when an issue divides the group (see Decision Process). In practice the group’s role is to witness and weigh in on the WordPress team’s ongoing work rather than to gate routine changes.

• Risk Management: Weighing in on issues and opportunities for improvement that surface outside the web request portal. Example: a group member identifies an accessibility issue and brings it to the group for discussion and prioritization.
• Prioritization: Advising on new third-party plugin requests and on new features proposed by University stakeholders, prioritized against the guiding principles and available resources.
• Communication: Covered by the monthly update to the group.
• Strategy: Guiding the long-term direction of the WFU WordPress platform.
• Housekeeping: Altering governance workflows as necessary to optimize effectiveness as the group learns and evolves.

Communication & Cadence

The Governance Group operates on an asynchronous, ongoing basis:

• Monthly email update summarizing updates to the group, new and pending requests, and future plans, delivered via the WordPress Governance Google Group (). Members review it carefully and respond to any prompts for input.
• Ongoing asynchronous discussion through the same Google Group, so issues can be raised, reviewed, and discussed as needed. Members may request a meeting through this address.
• Ad hoc meetings, called when a new project significantly changes current planning, a new risk is identified, or a significant development threatens the stability of the WordPress landscape. Meetings are held by videoconference at a time convenient to the largest possible number of members, with minutes recorded to capture discussion, decisions, and action items.

Membership

Criteria:

• Passionate about improving the web infrastructure
• Highly invested in using WFU WordPress
• Diversity of voices (different campus units, multiple websites, member diversity)

Group members are responsible for:

• Carrying out duties as outlined in the group’s charge.
• Reviewing the monthly email update carefully.
• Responding thoughtfully to prompts in the monthly update or other asynchronous communication.
• Preparing for any ad hoc meeting, including reviewing current requests from stakeholders.
• Routinely reviewing new-feature web requests to help prioritize.

Processes

Request Process

WordPress stakeholders make requests through the Web Request form: https://cer.ua.wfu.edu/request/web/

Decision Process

Decision-making is divided according to whether debate is required to reach consensus. If members generally support a decision, that decision is made asynchronously; initial voting on issues is also held asynchronously. When an issue is shown to divide the group, a meeting is called for discussion.

Communication of Decisions

Decisions that affect the broader WordPress community are shared through the WordPress blog and the monthly email update, along with any related documentation updates.

User Responsibility

Campus partners are responsible for:

• Using in-person and virtual training resources.
• Following standards and practices outlined in style and training guides.
• Following all University policies.
• Submitting plugin and feature requests via the web portal. If further clarification is needed, the campus partner may be asked to share their request with the Governance Group and make a case for it.
• Submitting broken functionality via the web portal.

Reviewed and revised June 2026 (effective July 2026), in conjunction with the annual WordPress SLA review.