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PHP Ambassadors: Six Weeks In

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Sigs Update

When we launched the PHP Ambassador Program on June 19, 2026, we honestly didn’t know what to expect. We knew the need for something like this was definitely there, and it seemed like something the community would be interested in being a part of. But as they say, “you never know how a thing is going to go, until it goes.” I mentioned in my strategy document that I was hoping to enlist 10 people to attend a regular cadence of meetings. (Honestly, 10 people seemed like a reasonable number.)

Not only did you all surpass that number by leaps and bounds, you continue to show up and join the group. We now have 150 people who have expressed interest in the Program. I couldn’t be more excited about your enthusiasm!

What we learned

Some things we’ve learned about this group:

  • Maintain flexible infrastructure choices: When starting a new community, it's important to remember that it’s ok to try different options for infrastructure. Every community takes on a life of its own, and for this group, GitHub Discussions did not seem to take hold as a place where the community wanted to interact. As well, Google Meet did not provide us with the options for meeting management that we wanted. And third, inviting folks individually to meetings became unwieldy and got me flagged as a spammer. So instead of using GitHub, Google Meet, and Google invites, we are using Discord, Zoom, and a Google calendar to manage this community's interactions and these meetings.
  • Divide and conquer: We had enough interest to break the larger group into smaller, more focused groups:
    • Research: focused on locating and vetting sources of information and truth that the community can use in their articles and presentations
    • Marketing: focused on the messaging of PHP (including the php.net website)
    • Speakers: focused on providing structure and resources for people who want to give talks outside the PHP ecosystem
  • Give opportunities for overlap: As our topics of discussion became more focused, many people wanted to be in more than one group at a time. Also, a 30 minute breakout once a month is not enough to make real progress. For those reasons, we have afforded each group their own meeting space, while maintaining the monthly meeting that includes everyone. Allowing people to participate in more than one group at a time means there will be more opportunities for cross-pollination and coordination among the three subgroups.

Group Progress

Ideas are great, but what about actions? We have a goal in each group to build tangible assets and to keep momentum going. Launching is hard, but maintaining engagement and providing real outcomes is harder. So let's talk about what each of these groups is currently working on.

Research

As the smallest of the three groups, we tasked ourselves with identifying and listing the current available resources that are out there around PHP usage and other data points that might be of interest to our community. We felt that it was important to have a lay of the land as a starting point. We are still working on putting this into a format that we can share in the Research portion of the SIG-Ambassador Repo, but we have some notes started. If you know of a source of data that should be included, please share with us by opening an issue in the repo.

Group Info:

Marketing

There is an active draft PR that proposes some initial structural updates to the php.net website. The original PR was created largely from the work of Mark Randall, and it has gone through several collaborative iterations. The php.net website was one of the things most mentioned to me in the Listening Tour as a place that could use some help, so it’s great to see this next iteration being created by the community. I would venture to say this is the first in many iterations to come! Thanks to Matt Stauffer for shepherding this group and keeping progress moving forward.

Group Info:

Speakers

James Seconde from Vonage has done an amazing job shepherding this third and final group: the speakers. He has started a PR that offers guidelines for a more structured, Foundation-backed Speaker Program. The community has chimed in, but we are still open to receiving feedback on how a program like this might work. This group has also started compiling a spreadsheet of events outside our PHP bubble as a resource for PHP Ambassador speakers (or anyone else in the community). We would appreciate more eyes on this and the addition of more information. If you have thoughts on either of these things, we highly encourage you to join this group!

Group Info:

Join us!

If shaping the messaging around PHP and improving the perception of the language outside our bubbles is important to you, we would love to include you in this group!

Even if you aren’t sure where you fit in, you can participate in the larger effort:

To be added to the mailing list where you will be kept up-to-date on all the PHP Ambassador news, register your interest using this form. (Of course you can unsubscribe at any time, and we will still love you. We promise.)

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