About the Mautic Campaign Library Project

Termed the ‘Mautic Campaigns Portability Project’ for the purposes of this funding grant, this first phase of the wider project implements the groundwork needed to bring to life a much-requested feature – a library of campaigns which allow users to get started quickly with Mautic by selecting from a searchable collection of premade campaign workflows and associated resources. Requested back in 2018, it’s one of the most voted for ideas in the Ideas Forum, and something we’ve been wanting to implement since 2021 when the strategic initiatives were announced.

This phase of the project addresses the need by establishing export and import functionality for campaigns and associated resources. This will not only save time but also promote best practice adoption among marketers.  We aim to enable seamless portability of campaigns between Mautic instances, enhancing the platform’s flexibility and usability. This feature will lay the groundwork for a more connected and efficient marketing environment, empowering users to maximize their strategic outreach efforts.

Next Steps and Participation

As we move forward, we will be working closely with NLnet to finalize the grant amount and our project plan. We encourage our supporters and the Mautic community to stay tuned via the Community Portal for more updates as we progress. We are eager to share our journey and milestones with you.

Moving Forward

We are in the process of refining our project plan, which will involve setting distinct tasks with specific outcomes. Each task will have a donation amount attached from the grant funding, unlocked by publishing the associated results. This structure ensures that our efforts are aligned with delivering measurable and impactful outcomes. 

We will be advertising opportunities related to this in the near future, however as the money is EU funded we are obliged in the first instance to recruit people who have EU citizenship. Watch out on our jobs channels for the announcements.

Once we finalize our consolidated plan and establish our team, we will proceed with the ‘Memorandum of Understanding’ to formally kick off the project. 

Thank you to everyone who has supported us thus far. We look forward to sharing more updates and celebrating milestones with you. Stay tuned for more exciting developments!

For further details, feel free to visit our dedicated project page on the NLnet website: Mautic Portability Project and join us in the public channel on Slack, #i-campaign-library. We will be tracking the project progress via the Roadmap project on the Community Portal.

For some that might mean helping a neighbour in need, or supporting a charity that matters to you. For others it might mean giving something back to the open source projects that you use on a daily basis, whether that’s by financially supporting the projects, or by giving your time and expertise to contribute in more practical ways.

Today the Mautic project is announcing our intention to financially support the top 10 projects – prioritised by the community – which we depend on to keep our community and product running. We have allocated $2,000 in our budget this year as a starting point for the ‘Back your Stack’ project.

As an open source project, we depend on many other open source projects, some large and some small. We want to play a small part in helping those projects to continue being sustainable. Together we all grow stronger.

For the next two weeks, we have a form which community members can use to prioritise the projects that they would like us to start funding. The top 10 voted projects will receive $200 over the next year from Mautic through GitHub Sponsors or Open Collective.

Share your priorities

We appreciate that $200 per project is not much in the grand scheme of things, but it is a start. Our budget allocation this year represents 4% of our annual budget, and we would love to raise this to closer to 10% in the future as we become more financially stable ourselves. We hope that as our project continues to grow and thrive, the amount we can make available – and therefore the number of projects we can support – will increase.

If you would like to support some or all of these projects on a personal basis or from your company (and we really encourage you to do this, if you are able!), please find the full list of projects we know to be seeking funding below:

Useful resources

How to find dependencies seeking funding

If you use Composer, you can use the command

composer fund

to get a list of your dependencies which are looking for funding.

If you have a public repository on GitHub or a dependency file (e.g. package.json, composer.json, *.csproj, packages.config, Gopkg.lock, Gemfile.lock or requirements.txt), you can use backyourstack.com to pull out a list of dependencies – this only shows links to Open Collective projects but the dependencies are all listed, so you can search for alternative ways to fund the projects (e.g. GitHub Sponsors).

How to add your funding links in your Composer files

You can use the funding markup in your composer.json file to provide links to places where you accept funding.

Democratic funding has already raised over $11M for over 7,000 projects!

What is Democratic Funding

There’s a disconnect between those who build upon and collaborate within Open Source and those in a position to provide significant financial support. FundOSS bridges that divide through a process called Democratic Funding. Watch this video to learn more.

A contribution and a vote

Every contribution, regardless of amount, is considered as a vote for a project under Democratic Funding. At the conclusion of the campaign, funds are distributed from a huge matching pool based on the frequency of donations, using a quadratic matching approach popularized by GitCoin Grants.

10x’ing individual contributions

For many FundOSS will be the most significant impact on the open-source they can have as an individual. Sounds exciting!

The matching money is distributed mostly based on votes, rather than the value of donations. As a result, the total matched can be 10x or even 100x the amount an individual donated which is more weight is given to a project with a high frequency of contributions rather than a single, large contributor that dominates the round.

Then the matching amount when you contribute is estimated, then let you know at the end of the round what impact your contribution had made and how much of the matching fund was allocated to the projects you supported.

How to Fund OSS (Mautic)

You can donate to Mautic as we are participating in the first FundOSS round between the 10th and 24th of June at fundoss.com. With the FundOSS’ cart system, you can contribute to Mautic open source project (and other projects that you may want to support) and checkout.

Note: At present you need to log in with Github but they are working to implement Google, Facebook and Twitter logins which we hope will be available shortly.

At the end of the round, a matching fund of $75,000 will be allocated depending on the frequency and volume of donations across the round.

The key feature of Democratic Funding is that small contributions can have a large impact.

Do help us to grow our reach by contributing, and sharing your personalised carts and your previous donations with your friends, relatives and pets

Sometimes there’s a lot of community interest to work on something and a willingness to pay someone/a group of people to focus on it so that it is addressed in a timely manner.

Also, more generally, we know that many people are contributing to Mautic in their spare time, and we believe that more people (particularly those who do not have the privilege of free time) may be able to contribute if there was a way that some tasks or initiatives were able to provide them with financial compensation.

Often features, initiatives and bug fixes are important for the community – and deliver significant value to both the project and organisations who are dependent on Mautic – so we want to find a way forward which creates a sustainable ecosystem around Mautic.

At the same time, we don’t want to create a culture of people only working on things if they are paid to do so, therefore it’s important that we have some boundaries and set expectations.

Now that we have our Open Collective, which brings the practical toolset to facilitate financially supporting the Mautic project, we also need to set out some basic guidelines on how we intend to use our funds.

We should also have clarity on how people can get paid to work on projects or reimbursed for expenses incurred on behalf of Mautic, and establish some processes around all of this.

A proposed solution: Funding in the Mautic Community

There are two core areas where we will be initially providing opportunities for contributors to be financially compensated – a bounty programme for contributions to Mautic core, and the funding of initiatives.

Mautic Community Bounty Programme

A bounty programme in Open Source projects is when a monetary reward is offered for completing a task.

What follows is an initial proposal to implement a bounty scheme which we will be trialling for six months (January to June 2021) for contributions to Mautic Core via the Github repository.

We fully appreciate that this community has many more forms of contribution than writing code, however this is where we have the most activity and the most practical place to start such a scheme.

If you have feedback on this, please join the next team meeting on Slack in #t-product (get an invite at mautic.org/slack).

Get paid to contribute to Open Source!

The Mautic Community Product Team is small, and we’re always looking for new contributors to our Open Source codebases. Our Bounty programme will enable community members to financially reward developers who work on the issues they care about through our partnership with Bountysource.

With Bountysource, issues in the Github issue queue can have a bounty associated with them by one or more people or organisations. This means that one person could add a single bounty of $500 or 10 people could add a bounty of $50, with the person resolving the issue receiving the funds from Bountysource when the fix or feature is merged.

No compromise on quality

As is already the case, we will not accept pull requests unless they are:

• Completed to a high standard
• Fully covered by automated tests
• Prepared in a reasonable timeframe
• Resolving the linked issue in its entirety

We want to attract quality contributions only. For general guidelines about what’s expected in pull requests to Mautic core, see more info here.

The issue will only be considered complete and approved by BountySource for payment if the pull request is merged by a member of the Mautic Community Core Team. Read more in the BountySource FAQs.

Developers may only be assigned tasks and projects that they are confident can be completed in their entirety, seen through to completion, and which they are capable of working on at their current knowledge and skill level.

Our Product Team is happy to answer questions and provide some limited support, but don’t have the capacity to mentor junior developers working on bounty issues – developers are expected to work on the task without requiring direct support from the team.

This bounty programme will be running as a trial for the next six months and will be closely monitored by the Product Team.

We invite feedback from contributors and bounty posters – please provide in the meetings of the Product Team on Slack as mentioned earlier.

Funding Strategic and Community Initiatives

The Project Lead has an annual budget allocation for supporting Strategic Initiatives with community funds where required.

This coming year (January-December 2021), the budget is $6,000.

Strategic and Community Initiatives can also be funded in part or wholly by companies or individuals via a fundraising tier on our Open Collective.

Initiatives that require funding of any kind (whether this is to hold an in-person sprint, pay for development time, or any other expenses) must have a clear project plan with a roadmap on their Confluence page which includes dated milestones and a full financial requirements breakdown.

Payments will be made based on the delivery of agreed objectives within the project plan, rather than on a time and materials basis for hours worked.

Strategic or Community Initiatives that require funding will have their project plan accepted by the Project Lead prior to any funds being committed.

Once approved, if community funding is required a tier will be created on the Mautic Open Collective. This will allow organisations or individuals to contribute which will be used specifically for that initiative.

Funds will be paid on invoice from the Open Collective or if the individual prefers, a gift coupon for the Swag Store can be issued in place of financial reward in multiples of $25.

Conclusion

We appreciate that there are a lot of opinions around paying for contributions in Open Source, and whatever approach we take we know that there will be some in favour, and others not.

This is our first pilot into funding in two different ways, and is a trial to test the waters and see what works for us. We hope that it will be the first step towards building a sustainable ecosystem, and attract contributions from folk who may not otherwise be in a position to give their time to Mautic.

We welcome and value respectful discussion on any aspect of the trial and will have a standing topic in the Product Team meetings once a fortnight should you wish to share your thoughts.