With Underscores’ growing popularity and continuing maturation as an open source project, we decided to take the next step and open up commit access to contributors outside of Automattic. Please join me in congratulating Philip Arthur Moore on becoming the first external committer to an Automattic project on GitHub.
Philip has been a fairly easy choice as we obviously know him well here at Automattic. He was with us for over three years and a driving factor in everything theme related during his time with us. But more importantly, he continues to care about Underscores and contribute in discussions and patches, and we know about his theme development skills and passion for world class themes.
We’re much more conservative with our Underscores goals and dreams than most people wanting to contribute, so it is important to us that committers share these values and understand where we see the project headed. We have no doubt that that is the case with Philip, who helped shaping Underscores from the day it started. Andrew Nacin recently published a post about how the WordPress project chooses committers, and while WordPress and Underscores are vastly different open source projects, there is still a lot to take away from it—especially around the qualities of a great contributor—that also applies to this project.
Underscores just recently celebrated its second birthday. It has become an integral part of many projects, not only at Automattic, but for theme developers all over the world. So we’re exited to have Philip back in a leading role and continue this journey with us!
ThemeShaper 
Contrats! ^^
This is another sign that _s has staying power. Congrats Philip!