WordPress community still struggles with diversity & inclusion

News Matt Mullenweg, founder and CEO of Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, made the news again (this time with the Wall Street Journal). He talks about ‘asynchronous work’ and why he thinks hybrid models will die out.  Automattic employees are already living the work from anywhere model and are able to adjust their work schedules as needed. Anne McCarthy is back with another round of testing this time for the WordPress Photo directory. By adding your photos here, they will automatically appear in Openverse, a search engine for openly licensed media. Volunteers are needed to test and provide feedback on media-related features in WordPress. Anyone is welcome to contribute, and feedback is open until February 23. Eric Karkovac wrote a post on the WordPress photo directory. If you would like an understanding of how licensing images came about and to see an early review of WordPress media go check out his article. From Our Contributors and Producers Many in the WordPress community have been feeling the weight of growth and change and frankly everything over the last couple of years. Cory Miller shared an update on his “crash and burn”. Many of us are not alone in this area and support Cory along with his team over at PostStatus. The organizers of WordCamp Europe 2022, were called out recently for a lack of diversity on the Organizing Team. They are addressing that now citing the team cares deeply about diversity, equity, and inclusion. Click the link to read their updated communication. Angela Jin has started an open discussion on diversity as well over on make.wordpress.org. Make sure to participate in this very important discussion and provide feedback. Eric Mann wrote a post on his first month using WordPress 5.9 from an experienced WordPress contributor perspective. If you would like to see the good, the bad and the future of WordPress this post is worth a few minutes of your time. Sarah Gooding over at the WPTavern covered the latest with the German court fining a website owner for violating the GDPR by using Google-Hosted Fonts. If you are using Google fonts and are subject to European regulations, you may want to review how you are using them to be in compliance. Sarah’s colleague Justin Tadlock wrote an article stating that Block Editor Sidebar Panels are the new Admin Notices. Product marketers will be interwoven with the editing experience for the foreseeable future. Or until an official mechanism for products to notify users of upgrades is offered in core, as WP Minute correspondent Spencer Forman comments. Business news! Convesio Raises $5M in funding to further develop its scalable WordPress Hosting Platform. This funding will help to deliver a consistently fast experience with their customers.  MasterWP.co, a newsletter for WordPress professionals,