# Better Way — Anne McCarthy ## 🗂️ Triage — annotated highlights surfaced > [!note]- Cross Reference > - **Release leadership as emotional labor** — 4am anxiety and lost sleep as a first-time Release Lead, held alongside awe at contributor care. #xref > - **Hedged advocacy** — "not perfectly good nor perfectly bad but it does feel like a better way" is a reusable phrasing for open-source advocacy that doesn't overclaim. #xref > - **Companion to the 7.1 release** — the personal counterpart to the official WordPress 7.1 Beta 1 announcement; the feeling behind the changelog. #xref ## 🧭 Bib capsule Anne McCarthy, "better way," nomad.blog, 2026-07-17, https://nomad.blog/2026/07/17/better-way/ — ~510-word personal reflection tied to WordPress 7.1 Beta 1 shipping. ## 🧠 Author's thesis (Adler Q1+Q2) McCarthy, serving as WordPress Release Lead for the first time, reflects on the emotional weight of the release process and shares a short documentary about open source she was interviewed for. In detail, she braids two threads — a release-lead diary (lost sleep, 4am stress, "learning something new every single day") and a values statement that the open web exists because humans choose engagement and care over disengagement and despair — landing on a deliberately hedged claim that open source "does feel like a better way," while noting she's "only scratching the surface." ## 🧩 Key arguments - Release leadership carries a real emotional cost that the changelog never shows — anxiety concentrated in the beta window, amplified for a first-time lead. - The open web is created by fellow humans choosing to engage rather than disengage, visible in merge proposals, design debates, and API refinement in PRs. - Open source is worth advocating for precisely because the claim stays comparative and honest ("a better way"), not absolutist. ## 🗒️ Notes — Literature atoms ### Open source feels like a better way, not perfection > [!quote] > Like everything, it's not perfectly good nor perfectly bad but it does feel like a better way. - **Where**: Second main paragraph, framing the shared documentary - **Why**: The deliberately hedged comparative claim is the post's thesis — useful phrasing for advocacy that doesn't overclaim. ### Open web exists because humans choose engagement over disengagement > [!quote] > the open web is created by fellow humans choosing to engage rather than disengage, care rather than despair - **Where**: First paragraph, amid the release-anxiety account - **Why**: Grounds an abstract value (the open web) in observable contributor behavior — merge proposals, design debates, PR refinement. ## 🔖 Permanent candidates - Release leadership is emotional labor, not just coordination — Leading an open source release is emotional labor that deserves the same resourcing as the technical work (holds for volunteer-heavy, deadline-driven projects with visible leadership roles; weaker where releases are automated or staffed by paid full-time teams). ## Links - [[Open Source Governance MOC]] — home MOC; a first-hand account of what release leadership in an open governance model actually costs. - [[Commons & Community Governance MOC]] — evidence for resourcing the human coordination layer of a commons, not just its code. - [[The Maintainer's Burden - Open Source Beyond the Bazaar - Literature Note]] — the same sustainability tension (invisible emotional labor of maintainers/leads) from a broader vantage. ## ✅ Processing checklist - [x] Claim atoms carried from deep-read analysis - [ ] Permanent candidates reviewed for promotion - [ ] Version History Diff check