We are grateful to Floris van Geel who organised Contribution Day, which allowed us to put together the Community Summit at very short notice, and Acquia, who funded the Summit as our sponsor. 

It was really great to be co-located with several other Open Source projects at Contribution Day, and to learn more about what they were working on. Ruth gave a lightning talk about Mautic which was well received, with several comments of “Wow, Mautic is way cooler than I thought it was”!

The Community Summit

We kicked off with an informal standup where we introduced ourselves and talked about how we would organise the day to get the most out of our time together. There were some discussions about what features would be able to be integrated in minor releases of 3.x and what would need to be pushed back to the next major release. We also discussed how to continue with bug fixes while the Symfony work proceeded, to ensure that there weren’t any issues with the code changes being made.

One team focused on the work involved with migrating the Symfony framework, and another team focused on the work needed to begin implementing the Community Governance framework. There were whiteboards, sticky notes and conversations a-plenty!

Mautic 3 

The task to migrate the Symfony framework had already been started by Alan Hartless, and a board prepared with the tasks that needed to be done – https://github.com/orgs/mautic/projects/6. The team set to work right away and we quickly started to see great progress being made! It is a really significant project, with extensive review, removal of deprecated code, re-writing, and then of course the all-important testing and code review!

The work is still ongoing, however the community sprint gave the team a significant jump-start and we are actively welcoming community involvement going forward.

To date, more than half of the tasks are already underway, with 5 completed and 17 pending testing and code review.

How can you get involved after the Summit? 

If you’re a developer familiar with Symfony and Mautic, jump into the project board and pick up an issue which takes your interest. Ensure you read the instructions and follow the steps in the workflow. Ping Alan Hartless on Slack if you need any help.

Not a developer?

All of the work being done needs to be tested thoroughly. Take a look at the ‘needs user tests’ column and find one that you’d like to work on. Read through the instructions and report your findings.

Need some help with getting started in testing? Check out this article on how to get set up with DDEV if you’re already using Docker, and this article on how to test Mautic. Drop Ruth Cheesley or Norman Pracht a line if you need further help.

Community Governance

Implementing the Community Governance Model was the key focus of the other team at the Community Summit. We started with a discussion on the model so that we were all clear on what had been proposed, and then we started to break out what working groups (WG) might be included in each team.

We came to the decision that the proposed structure needed a little tweaking, and landed upon the structure of five teams:

• Marketing Team
  • Newsletter WG
  • Website WG
  • Blog WG
• Community Team
  • Outreach WG
  • Events WG
  • MautiCamps WG
  • MautiCon WG
  • Growth (both local and global)
• Education Team [new]
  • Forums WG
  • Documentation WG
• Product Team
  • Release WG
  • Security WG
  • Roadmap & Features WG
• Legal & Finance Team
  • Finance WG
  • Trademark WG

We also talked about how to initially set up the teams – which will be by appointment rather than election – and how to work the first and ongoing terms so that we don’t lose all the leadership at the same time.

We defined active members of a team or working group as 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.

It was also determined that a leader may put themselves forward for re-election, or step down, at the end of their term. Standing for re-election would not prevent others from stepping forward to be considered for the role.

It was agreed that the information, once confirmed and adopted, would be added to the categories on the forum, to the website, and to the Github repository (probably contributing.md).

We then broke out into smaller groups and started to write up a description of each team, which would explain the function of the team, and the kind of skills that volunteers might be able to contribute.

How can you get involved after the Summit?

It was felt that we needed to finalise this in a follow up call where we invited other community members to give their insights, before adding them to the description of each category on the forums and putting out a call for volunteers.

The call is scheduled for Thursday, 7th November at 1600hrs CET and will use the Jitsi call link: https://meet.jit.si/MauticCommunityCall. Join #Community on Slack to follow the discussions!

You can find the working document here, it is saved in the Mautic Community drive folder.

Was it worth it?

The Community Summit has given us a critical head-start on some fundamental tasks that were facing the project. It also was a great opportunity for face-to-face meeting between contributors, which was hugely valuable!

Here’s some feedback from people who joined us in the summit:

“What a day: We got so much done, plus we now have the foundation for much more going forward – both in organization and in personal relations around the world. A true quantum leap!”

~ Ekkehard Gümbel

I felt inspired and gained a lot of insight working besides the Mautic community even though I was working on my own Drupal issues. I even joined the Mautic community online and felt immediately welcomed as I saw my username immediately listed as a ‘Mautician’.

~ Matthew Radcliffe

It was great to bring together the team from Acquia and the community to get started on what are some huge tasks for the Mautic project! Seeing everybody working together, getting things done and literally creating the foundations for future growth was really inspiring! It was even better to be located with other Open Source projects and hearing what they were working on, sharing our challenges and learning from each other at the same time.

~ Ruth Cheesley

See also write ups from Norman and Ekke on LinkedIn.

Maybe you don’t know anybody in the community, or you haven’t had any involvement with contributing to Mautic yet.

You are not alone! More importantly, you are most welcome!

Hear from some of our community members about why they think you should join us for a day of helping to improve Mautic:

“This is the right moment for any person to jump in the Mautic Community. The recent events related to Acquia gives to the Mautic Community a renewed energy to face our new challenge, Mautic 3 and its future. This is also a great opportunity to meet people and contributors in person!”

Norman Pracht, Webmecanik

“Mautic is the perfect place if you want to start a career as a freelancer, and be at the centre of a shooting-star Open Source project! Come join us to get started with technical insides, business advice, and of course how to easily become a part of any Mautic team”

Ekkehard Gümbel, Agency Owner – Leuchtfeuer Digital Marketing

The Contribution Day will lay down basics for Mautic 3. The plan is to upgrade outdated libraries at least. But I encourage anyone to come in with their ideas for necessary breaking changes, discuss them together and implement if possible. The last major version (Mautic 2) was over 3 years ago. This meeting will shape the future of Mautic.

John Linhart, Senior Engineer, Team Lead at Acquia

But I’m not a developer!

Mautic doesn’t only need developers to help with building and improving our product – we also need marketers and people with other skills such as translators, event organisers, even in legal and finance! Bring your skills, and we’ll find ways for you to get involved!

“If you are a marketer and you use Mautic, this is also a great opportunity to help to define the user needs and draw up Mautic’s roadmap. We will also be kicking off a Marketing Team to boost the Mautic Community’s marketing activities around new releases, outreach and generally improving our communications process, so we definitely need your skills!”

Norman Pracht, Webmecanik

“There are so many ways to contribute to Open Source projects if you’re not a developer – for example, writing good quality documentation so that new users can understand how to get set up and troubleshoot the most common problems. Often, it’s better having non-technical people writing these, as they are more likely to understand the experiences of our users and write in a jargon-free way!”

Ruth Cheesley, Mautic Community Manager

What about businesses using Mautic?

If your business is considering Mautic as a platform for your own use or for clients, it’s also a great way to meet the people who actually build the platform, and explore how you might be able to support its ongoing development. You will also get a sneak peek into the future roadmap for the product!

“Are you considering adding Mautic to your agency’s portfolio? This is the perfect place to learn about business strategies, technical integrations, future direction –  and to get your questions answered by people from the core of Mautic.”

Ekkehard Gümbel, Agency Owner – Leuchtfeuer Digital Marketing

The event is completely free to attend thanks to our sponsors, Acquia, who have funded the summit.  We will also be going out for lunch and having a dinner somewhere nearby, so there’s plenty of opportunity for socialising alongside the practical side of ‘getting stuff done’!

But I can’t get to Amsterdam

No problem! You can join us remotely!

We will be using the #community channel on Slack (you can get an invite at mautic.org/slack) throughout the day to involve community members from around the world. We also make use of Jitsi virtual conferencing tools so you can come into the room with us and see what we’re working on!

We hope to see you there – either in-person or remotely – don’t forget to sign up on the website https://www.contributionday.org.

The event is happening on Friday, 1st November immediately after DrupalCon Amsterdam, and will be hosted at B.Amsterdam. This will be our first Community Summit!  Many thanks to Acquia for sponsoring the event.

We would like to extend an invitation to all Mauticians to join us – whether in person at Contribution Day, or virtually.  Here is an overview featuring some of the projects we are going to be working on during the Mautic Community Summit:

1. Migrating the Symfony framework to a newer version
2. Testing pull requests and triaging issues (support available for new contributors)
3. Reviewing and improving the Mautic Documentation

We will be joined by several of the Mautic team from Acquia, including Project Lead DB Hurley.

There are only 120 spaces available at Contribution Day, so if you intend on joining us in Amsterdam make sure you book your space on the website!  

If you’re joining virtually, please make sure you sign up via the website at www.contributionday.org as well, so we can get an idea of numbers, and join #community on Slack!