It hardly seems like three months have passed since the last roundup report on activity within the Mautic Community, but a lot has happened since then!  Read on for the latest updates.

Community partners

Last quarter we launched the Mautic Community Partners Program with five partners being eligible at the launch of the programme.

We are pleased to see new sponsors joining us during Q2, several of whom are also actively contributing to Mautic and working toward becoming partners.

Dropsolid will be the first such company who will be joining the Mautic Community Partners Programme at the beginning of Q3.

Q2 2021 sponsors shout out

A big thank you to the sponsors who have supported us this quarter on Github Sponsors or Open Collective:

$100 per month and over

Acquia

Webmecanik

Idea2

Leuchtfeuer Digital Marketing

Friendly

Nucamp

Waym

Up.mass

Akaunting

Droptica

New this quarter:

Dropsolid

Powertic

WebAnyOne

Under $100 per month

Weismann Web

Avinash Dalvi

Marcel van Nuil

Eli Logan

Tomas Poner

Joey Keller

Roundabout Media

Jan Linhart 

Khalid Zamer

Ruth Cheesley

We have also added an infrastructure supporters section on our sponsors page, to highlight the organisations who are providing us with tools for free or at a reduced price which help us to develop Mautic and our community.

Legal & Finance Team updates

This quarter saw some new features being rolled out by Open Collective which we have taken full advantage of.

Projects

We have established projects for each of the key initiatives and for our community teams who have budgeted line items. You will see these listed on ohttps://opencollective.com/mautic/projects.

This allows us to distribute our budget, and manage the budget independently for each project or team, from our central funds.

It also means that if you want to financially contribute toward a specific project or team, you are now able to do that. Simply visit the project, click on the menu on the right and go to ‘Contribute Money’.

We will be ensuring that all expenses relating to projects or teams are processed through the relevant project going forward, so that there is clear transparency over how the allocated funds are being used.

Going forward, we envisage that we could also use projects for meetup groups, community initiatives and local events to manage their own budget and receive funds from Mautic’s budget in a transparent manner.

Virtual credit cards

A feature we have been waiting for with some excitement has been the ability to request virtual credit cards. These are locked to a specific vendor and amount and can be used for one-off purchases or for regular monthly payments.

This enables us to pay directly for things like our forum hosting or tooling for our recent Mautic Conference Global event, without expecting someone to pay using their own money and claim it back.

We anticipate that this will also help us going forward if we need to expense things like travel or accommodation against a project, enabling us to create a virtual card for this purpose and have full transparency, while not relying on individual contributors being able to pay for things themselves and claim back at a later date.

Receipts are still mandatory and have to be uploaded to Open Collective after the expense has been incurred.

We have already been using this feature very heavily over the past few months, and it has really simplified our workflows.

Product Team update

Mautic releases

We have had a busy quarter, with the 3.3.3 release in April being the last planned release for the 3.x series. Once we release Mautic 4, the 3.x series will only receive security fixes for a period of six months, after which it will no longer be supported.

A lot of focus has also been on getting the Mautic 4 release ready for general use.

In May we made a Beta release available for testing and we have been addressing any bugs that have been reported by the small number of users who are helping us with testing.

A couple of these bugs have been quite a challenge, and we have also been working hard on some of the features that we wanted to include with the 4.0 release.

Some, like PHP8 support, will not make it into the release, but we have quite a few new features that will be coming, including a couple of our Strategic Initiatives delivering the first phases of their project plans.

There is currently an issue which is blocking the release process - the team are working on resolving this so that we can make the Mautic 4 Release Candidate release. After this is launched we will make the General Availability release following community testing. Follow this forum post for updates.

Changes to our release process

We have learned a lot over the last year with our monthly release cadence, and we are making a few changes to our processes.

These are outlined in the announcement here: https://www.mautic.org/blog/community/updates-mautic-community-release-process 

In short, we are going to be planning what will be included in releases on a quarterly basis. We will consider a maximum of 25 pull requests which must be ready to be tested and mergeable at the point of the meeting date, for each release. We will also identify five issues that the Product Team want to see getting addressed.

We will have a named release team for each release consisting of a release lead and assistant release lead. 

We will also be continuing the theme we started last quarter with having themes for releases. Please read the announcement for further details.

Make sure that you add the release planning meeting dates to your calendar if you want to have a say in what is included in the forthcoming releases!

Marketing Team update

New team lead

Q3 has also seen a change in leadership for the Marketing Team. Radu Zlatianu has stepped down as team lead after setting up and leading the team since we first created the governance structure. We thank him for his work and leadership over this time!

Oluwatobi Owolabi has been the Assistant Team Lead alongside Radu, and has stepped up to the Team Lead role. We are looking forward to appointing an Assistant Team Lead - if you have experience in Marketing and would like to support the community by sharing your expertise please do consider stepping up to support the team!

Mautic instance established

We established our own Mautic instance in Q2 hosted on Acquia’s Campaign Studio - if you received emails from us about Mautic Conference Global you will already have benefited from this!

We are in the process of re-consenting all existing contacts from our old instance, but if you would rather not wait please do join our mailing lists here: https://www.mautic.org/community/get-involved/mailing-lists 

Mautic Community Newsletter

We are going to be starting a monthly Mautic Community Newsletter on the first of each month, which Oluwatobi is leading. If you would like to join the working group, please join #wg-mautic-newsletter on Slack.

Community Team update

Mautic Conference Global

Q2 has been a busy one for the Community Team, with our second ever World Conference being held on 16-17 June. What a huge success! Nearly 300 Mauticians gathered together to learn, share and network.

Videos will be made available on YouTube shortly once we have finished rendering them.

We are tentatively planning an in-person event in November 2021 and will be sharing more information on that in due course.

FundOSS

Mautic was selected to be one of the 56 open source organisations taking part in the first round of the FundOSS pilot - an innovative approach to raising funds for open source projects.

A huge thank you to everybody who supported us during the two-week funding round - we raised $1,411 from 52 donors which was matched with $3,621 from the $75,000 fund. This money (minus transaction fees) has already been transferred to our Open Collective.

New Mautic Meetup group

We are excited to share that we have a new Mautic Meetup starting in València, Spain. Organised by Julio Roldos and Joan Serra, we’re really looking forward to their first meetup being a great success!

If you think you’d like to start a Mautic Meetup group in your local area, please take a look at the guidance in our Community Handbook and drop us a message in #t-community on Slack.

Community Survey

During Mautic Conference Global, I launched the first Mautic Community Survey which we are planning to repeat on an annual basis to learn more about how people are using Mautic, what they think about Mautic, and where the community feels we should be focusing our attention.

Please do take a moment to complete the survey, read more about it in the announcement here: https://www.mautic.org/blog/community/announcing-first-mautic-user-survey. 
 

Let’s see the numbers!

We are continuing to see a steady growth throughout the year in members joining our community, defined as folk engaging on Slack, forums, GitHub, Stack Overflow and Reddit.

Over the last 90 days, our most active contributors (based on the number of conversations) have been:

Ruth Cheesley (she/her) 1649

Nick Veenhof 354

Joey Keller 307

Ekke Guembel (he/him) 174

Zdeno Kuzmany 142

Norman Pracht (he/him) 135

Bob Clough 106

Michael 104

Adrian 89

Dennis Ameling (he/him) 86

Our most engaged contributors (based on the number of connections they have made with others in the community) have been:

Ruth Cheesley (she/her) 573

Norman Pracht (he/him) 255

Joey Keller 240

Zdeno Kuzmany 126

John Linhart 105

Mohammad Abu Musa 101

Michael 100

Dennis Ameling (he/him) 91

Eli Logan 89

imihandstand 80

The majority of active members (621 over the last 90 days) were existing members, but we are also seeing a steady volume of new members engaging for the first time across the community.

We are continuing to see a fairly steady flow of contributions coming into Mautic across all of our channels. Our top contributors this quarter are:

Zdeno Kuzmany 46

Ruth Cheesley (she/her) 36

Dennis Ameling (he/him) 19

Saurabh Gupta 12

Nick Veenhof 11

Ekke Guembel (he/him) 11

Rahul Shinde 10

Miroslav Fedeleš 10

Joey Keller 9

Adrian 7

The companies who are most active in the Mautic Community (based on the number of conversations) are:

Acquia 1835

Dropsolid 354

Friendly 313

Webmecanik 290

Leuchtfeuer Digital Marketing 179

Aivie (Idea2) 99

QED42 75

Favcy 74

Harmut.io 25

Merkur 22

The companies who are contributing the most to the Mautic Community (based on the number of contributions) are:

Acquia 77

Webmecanik 48

Dropsolid 11

Leuchtfeuer Digital Marketing 11

Friendly 9

Aivie (Idea2) 7

Steer Campaign 2

Marketing Heap 2

Facet Interactive 1

Harmut.io 1

 

Conclusion

Some great collaboration happening across the community this quarter resulting in several projects coming to completion and a wonderful two days at Mautic Conference Global. There is much to do in the coming quarter, so please do think about getting involved! Join us on Slack at https://mautic.org/slack and head over to #Community where we can help you find where to get started with contributing!