Mautic and the Open Source community was very much built as a bootstrapped startup, and as a result there are some areas where things were put together quickly and are starting to hold us back as we grow and scale. Other areas simply weren’t addressed as they were not needed at the time.

Earlier in the year we addressed some of the urgent concerns by migrating the mautic.org website over to Drupal and deploying a new documentation portal.

Today I am excited to share two areas that we have been working on behind the scenes and are now ready to share with the wider community.

Getting stuff done!

In any Open Source project there will always be tasks that need to be completed and projects that range in duration from a few months to several years.

When I started as Community Manager back in August 2019, as a short term fix we set up a Trello team, with each team having its own public board. This enabled us to get started quickly, work together transparently, and certainly served us well over the past year.

More recently we started to struggle with missing features and having to work creatively around the maximum number of boards available. We also wanted a way to link up meeting notes, sprint reviews and documentation with the project tools.

The community carried out some research into the tools that were available and after an extended trial by the Community and Product teams we have now migrated to Jira/Confluence at mautic.atlassian.net.

Most of our boards have public read access by default, and any existing members are able to invite new members. If you had previously participated on Trello you should already have received an invitation to join Jira – if you need an invite please drop a message in #community on Slack (get an invite at mautic.org/slack).

All teams will now be using their Jira projects to manage workflows and tasks, so take a look and see if any open tasks take your interest.

Managing community finances

To date, Acquia has been managing any financial obligations on behalf of the Mautic Community and covering the cost for many expenses that we incur.

As part of the work we are doing to organise Mauticon in November it quickly became apparent that we need a way to manage the finances of the community that is transparent, and makes it easy for us to accept contributions and to spend the money that we have available according to a budget.

We need to have a process that is transparent to all, and that is very difficult to do within Acquia’s financial management processes.

I am happy to share that – with the agreement of Acquia’s CFO Chris Andersen and the Community Leadership Team – we have created a collective on Open Collective through which we plan to manage all the finances of the community. If you are not aware of Open Collective, it is specifically aimed at Open Source projects who need a way of managing the tax and financial side of running a project.

Acquia will now become a contributor to that Open Collective, so that the funds they have allocated in the budget will ultimately be demonstrated through their contributions and the expenses that they pay on our behalf (for example using a corporate credit card) will be more transparent. Other companies and individuals may also decide to become contributors to the project either on a regular basis, as a fixed donation for each Mautic project they deploy, or to support specific initiatives.

We are currently finalising the governance required around this, including policies about what can and can’t be covered, who can sign off expenses and how team leads will manage budgets (if you would like to help with this, do join the Legal & Finance team on Slack!).  In the interim I will manage this directly until we have those processes in place.

In the meantime you can take a look here: https://opencollective.com/mautic – note that we are currently showing some default options for donations and we will be expanding this over time.  It will take us time to transition all the expenses over to Open Collective and transfer the currently budgeted funds, so please bear with us!

I am really excited about this step, as I feel like this gives the Mautic Community an opportunity to grow and take control of our own finances, raise revenue for projects that we may want to work on, and of course allows us to easily manage the funds from sponsors and ticket sales related to the upcoming Mauticon event.

Establishing Working Groups

As we continue to grow there are areas where we need community contributors to help manage specific projects. Here are three Working Groups who are looking for members:

Infrastructure Working Group

As a community we have multiple servers that power our web-based resources.

We are currently recruiting interested community contributors who would like to help as part of the newly forming Infrastructure Working Group.

You must have a solid understanding and demonstrable experience of working with Linux servers and be able to commit at least 1-2 hours a week.

If you are interested please drop me an email at ruth.cheesley@mautic.org.

Website Working Group

We are looking for folk with experience working with Drupal to help us manage the mautic.org website on a day-to-day basis.

We also need content writers and editors to help us with reviewing, updating and creating more content for the community blog.

You should have a good background in Drupal and/or content writing depending on how you want to be involved, and 1-2 hours a week that you can commit to working on these tasks.

If you are interested please drop a message in #website on Slack (get an invite at mautic.org/slack).

Mauticon Working Group

If you are interested in helping us to plan, organise, host and manage Mauticon on 17th November, now is the time to raise your hand!

We have a wide range of ways that you can contribute with differing time commitments – if you’re interested please drop us a message in #mauticon on Slack (get an invite at mautic.org/slack).

After several discussions between the Mautic Community Manager (Ruth), Acquia, and Mautic Community members on the forum, we now are able to deploy the new structure and make our community an even bigger success.

Time to work, we need volunteers, we need you!

Now that the way to work is clearly defined, it is time to build Teams and Working Groups (find a reminder of each of them at the end of this article). And for that, the Mautic Community needs volunteers.

As I mentioned some time ago in a blog post, this is an excellent way for you to give back to the community, what the Open Source community brought to you!

Ways to contribute

If you are not already involved in Open Source communities, you might not be aware that there are many ways to help and support the community, depending on your skills and experience.

In fact, the community has different missions to achieve and we have many opportunities for a diverse range of people to be involved in helping us meet our objectives and grow the project.

Encourage people to join the community and facilitate contributing to Mautic

This is the first mission of the community, to keep it growing and involving more and more people. That mission refers to the Community Team.

If you are enthusiastic about Mautic (that’s probably the most important skill here), you could help improving global community infrastructure, optimizing the forums, etc. by understanding community personas. You could also help to organize global and local events.

Promote Mautic, developing awareness and growing the audience of the Open Source project

If you are a Digital Marketing Strategist, a Designer, a Copywriter, an SEO specialist or Social Media Manager, then the Marketing Team is the right place for you!

You could be helping by joining the following working groups: Website, Social Media Management or Newsletter.

Improve the resources available for people to learn how to use Mautic

If you like to transmit your knowledge, if you’re renowned for being a trainer, then the Education Team is waiting for you!

You can help on various tasks around the Forum, taking care of the quality of contributions, adding documentation, moderating, giving support to Mautic users or keeping all the documentation and application languages up to date!

Manage the product release cycle and roadmap

Probably the most obvious mission, making sure that the product is evolving in the right direction and following the expectations of our users and market trends. This is handled by the Product Team.

Here we are mainly looking for Project Managers, Product Managers, Marketeers and DEVELOPERS! You will find in this team a lot of work about security, releases management, coding (of course) and roadmap design which includes feature definition, benchmarking, etc.

Manage the legal and financial aspects of the Mautic community

Perhaps the least popular (but still very important!) option, this team will be tasked with managing the legal and financial aspects of the Mautic community and project.

How to join the teams

The first step is to go to the forums and find the thread for the team you are interested in joining. Add your comment on the thread, and give your availability for the first meeting which will be in the next few weeks.

Once the team has met, we are going to appoint for each team, a Team Leader and an Assistant Team Lead.

Reminder of what has been decided

How will all those Teams and Working Groups function? As a first step in this new organisation, we will set up team leaders by appointment rather than election. But don’t be afraid, this is the first step.

We defined different statuses – active members are defined by having attended or participated in at least one of the previous three meetings (some might meet fortnightly, others monthly, depending on need) which would enable them to have a vote in the context of that team or working group.

Working Groups will set their own cadence for meetings, but teams will meet a minimum of monthly, and the leaders and assistant team leaders of teams will also have a meeting at least monthly.

Elections will be held after an initial term of six months, with each team being staggered by two months. So, as an example, the first team will have elections at 6 months, the next at 8 months, and so forth. Note that a leader may put themselves forward for re-election if they like.

What are you waiting for?

The Mautic Community needs your skills right now!  Head over to the forums and let us know which team you would like to be involved with, and help us build a strong and vibrant community!