Q1 2020 Mautic Community round-up

By Ruth Cheesley · PUBLISHED April 03, 2020 · UPDATED April 06, 2020

It has been a busy quarter in the Mautic community following the first Community Summit back in November.  What follows is a round-up on a team-by-team basis of their activity between January-March 2020.

Governance

Team formation

Perhaps the most notable development has been the community teams forming and starting to meet, with self-elected team leads and assistant team leads taking up the reins.

Teams have moved to asynchronous meetings (an idea we borrowed from the Drupal community!) with meeting notes being posted onto the forums afterward (note: most recent meetings are not yet shared due to a change in the Slack user interface which has broken our meeting parser!).

Trello workflows

We have adopted a Trello board-based workflow for each team, being publicly hosted - www.trello.com/mauticcommunity - with all boards being open and available to anybody. This has meant that we can always see what tasks are outstanding, and have a centralised point for conversations around tasks and projects.  Everyone who wants to get involved in Mautic and contribute is encouraged to check out the Trello boards.

By Team

Community Team

Team Lead: Ekke Guembel

Assistant Team Lead: Nico Grienauer

  • Community Health dashboard launched - https://dashboard.mautic.org - pulling in data from Github, Discourse, Slack and Meetup. This uses the open-source tool GrimoireLab from the Chaoss project.
  • Launched the Community Handbook - https://contribute.mautic.org - as a central point for all things community. 
  • Launched meetup.com/pro/mautic and in process of bringing in new groups/onboarding new organisers (three new groups so far and more being brought in).
  • Planning for first sprint and council meeting (happening virtually on 6-7 April 2020).
  • Planning MautiCon for September 2020 (planning to be a virtual event on 23-24 September 2020).
  • Several promotions have been run on the Mautic Community Swag Store (https://shop.spreadshirt.com/mautic-community-swag-shop/).

Education Team

Assistant Team Lead: Kevin Rundle

  • Team lead position remains vacant - we are currently looking for someone to step up and support the team in this role. Read more about the Education Team and the profiles of contributors we are looking for here, and expectations from leadership team members here.
  • The new documentation portal has been launched - docs.mautic.org.
  • The Knowledgebase is in progress and will be launched following the Community Sprint in April 2020.
  • Work is commencing on revising/improving the YouTube videos available on the Mautic Community YouTube channel. The team will also be integrating some of these videos into articles in the documentation and knowledgebase.
  • Further categories were added to the forum to facilitate international areas for collaboration, by country and by language.

Legal & Finance Team

This team is currently consisting of the Community Manager and the Legal team at Acquia.

  • The team is actively pursuing 18 trademark reports.
  • A budget for the community is in the process of being created, which will give an idea of the funds available from Acquia and enable teams to know what is available over the course of the year.

Marketing Team

Team Lead: Radu Zlatianu

Assistant Team Lead: Oluwatobi Owolabi

  • We were represented with a stand at FOSDEM on Saturday (this is the first time that Mautic has been represented and we had a great deal of interest!).
  • The new mautic.org website launched on Drupal (an MVP like-for-like migration carried out by Acquia’s Professional Services team).
  • The team has been supporting Mautic releases, writing announcement notifications and social media posts.
  • The team is developing personas and working on a marketing strategy for the community.
  • The team has commissioned a Mautic Cloud instance to re-engage the community with regular newsletters, release notifications etc (with templates being designed by community members).  During the April sprint, the team will be working on drip campaigns for people who download Mautic and other campaigns to raise awareness of Mautic.

Product

Team Lead: Norman Pracht

Assistant Team Lead: Dennis Ameling

  • The Product Team have shipped the 3.0 alpha and beta releases - much of the heavy lifting has been done by the Acquia engineers
    • The team held a 3.0 beta User Acceptance Testing with a small amount of community engagement
  • 2.16 release
    • 2.16 and 2.16.1 led by a new community contributor Dennis Ameling
  • A draft Community Product Roadmap has been created by Project Lead DB Hurley and has been in discussion by the Product Team. It is anticipated that this will be finalised during the April Community Sprint.
  • A new branching strategy has been proposed (included in the roadmap above) which will be adopted with the release of 3.0, facilitating better organisation for semantic versioning and easier management of Git Pull Requests.

Community Health Metrics

As we have launched the new dashboard we can refer to these metrics as a way of monitoring community health.

Code-related metrics

Contributions

When considering the Mautic product repository (github.com/mautic/mautic) we can see a significant jump in contributions in November during the Community Sprint in Amsterdam. There have been further contributions over the past quarter which are still higher than the average monthly contributions between December 2018 and October 2019.  

 

If we exclude the work done by Mautic Inc. and Acquia employees (which we can therefore assume to be carried out by community members), we can see that in some months over the last twelve months there has been a decrease in community contributions, however averaged out over the year, the contributions have been relatively stable.

Attraction and retention of developers

When considering the Mautic product repository (github.com/mautic/mautic) we can see that there has been a steady rate of new developers contributing to Mautic this quarter.  New developers are defined here as having made their first commit which was merged in the given period of time. 

This quarter has seen an increase in casual contributors but a significant reduction in core contributors and a stabilisation from the significant drop in regular contributors seen in Q4 2019.

For the purposes of this analysis:

  • Core: those contributing 80% of the activity.
  • Regular: those contributing the next 15% of the activity.
  • Casual: those contributing the last 5% of the activity

This is something to monitor, as a continued drop in core and regular contributors could have a negative impact on the project overall.

Issue management efficiency

The efficiency at which we process and close issues has been improving this quarter, due to a concerted effort to close outdated issues, merge PR’s and triage more effectively. For reference, Backlog Management Index (BMI), is defined as the number of closed issues divided by the number of open ones in a given period of time. This metric measures our efficiency at closing issues.

Pull request merging efficiency

There has been a significant amount of PR’s which have come from Acquia as a result of the Mautic 3 work, but there is also a substantial volume coming from other sources.

While there remains a problem of technical debt with PR’s remaining open for a long time, the Product Team has a strategy for dealing with this going forward and are actively working on addressing the problem.

We are also becoming more efficient at merging PR’s - largely due to the recent releases for Mautic 2.16.x and Mautic 3.  We should monitor this trend and ensure that it continues to improve over time once Mautic 3 is released. For context, Review Efficiency Index (REI) is defined as the number of closed pull requests divided by the number of open ones in a given period of time. This metric measures the efficiency of closing pull requests.

Growth in overall contributors

This quarter has seen a growth in overall contributors (across all community resources - Github, Slack, Forums and Meetup) which has been a significant improvement on the last two years.

Growth in overall contributions

We also see a significant uptick in the overall contributions across all community resources, exceeding activity from back in 2018 and in some months, being not far from the highest values we have seen. This is a promising picture for the community at the zoomed-out level as it shows general engagement across a wide range of areas.

 

Web traffic

We have seen an increase in web traffic (across the website, forums and documentation portal) in Q1 2020 compared with Q1 2019 as below.

Chart showing comparison of traffic between 2019 and 2020
Image caption

Source: Google Analytics

 

We have seen a drop in impressions for mautic.org on Google Search console, however it is important to realise that the forums and documentation are now separate subdomains, and hence no longer captured within the main mautic.org data.

 

Chart showing impressions for mautic.org
Image caption

Source: Google Search Console


When we factor in the Documentation site:

 

Chart showing impressions for docs.mautic.org
Image caption

Source: Google Search Console

 

And the forums:

Chart showing impressions for forum.mautic.org
Image caption

Source: Google Search Console

 

We have a value of 2,431,000 impressions against 1,700,000 last year.  This is a substantial improvement!

Clicks for this quarter result in 975,260 which is slightly down compared with last year, however it is significant to notice the much better click-through rates and position for the forums and documentation portal, which means people are finding these more relevant in response to their queries and clicking through to the site.

Going forward, the Marketing Team plans to make more use of our web analytics data to determine what proportion go on to register, make enquiries, and become active community members which will allow us to more accurately track the return on investment from the various sources.

Conclusion

Q1 2020 has been a busy one in the Mautic Community.  A lot of positive steps have been taken to establish a solid foundation for growth.

Teams are becoming more proactive and processes are being established which helps the community to function more effectively.

We have seen, as a result, a significant increase in engagement and have welcomed new contributors to the project as a result.

The next quarter will focus on shipping the Mautic 3 release, and building on these foundations by developing and sharing a formalised roadmap, organising more effectively and further engaging the community.

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