Another quarter of exciting developments in Mautic!
Read the previous reports here for Q3 2023, Q2 2023, Q1 2023, Q4 2022, Q3 2022, Q2 2022 and Q1 2022.
Project governance updates
This was a busy quarter when it comes to governance, as many projects came to completion and we have made great progress.
Back in October our new Community Portal - the central place to go for all things community, governance, decision making and more - came out of beta testing and was launched at https://community.mautic.org. The portal uses an open source tool called Decidim, and you can log in using your existing forum user account or create a new account directly.
We've had over 140 people join the portal to date and it's already providing much-needed visibility into what's happening around the community.
Read more about the new portal in our blog post: Introducing Mautic's New Community Portal: Your Hub for Collaboration and Engagement.
Once the portal was launched the next step was organising the nominations for our core governance body, the Mautic Council. Mauticians needed to be an individual member of Mautic in order to nominate themselves, and we had a great response to the call for nominations, with 10 people stepping up to represent Mautic as a Council member.
Members of Mautic then had a round of voting for their preferred candidates, with 7 votes per person (as there are 7 places on the Council). At the end of the voting period, the seven highest voted candidates became Council members, with terms being staggered according to our Governance Model.
Learn more about the elected candidates in our blog post: Mautic announces its first community-elected Council and get to know the members on our Council page: Meet the Mautic Council.
The Council was formally inaugurated and the new Governance Model adopted in our Extraordinary General Meeting of the Mautic General Assembly on the 18th December 2023.
A huge thank you to everybody who stood for election, voted, and supported this process. I am proud to see Mautic moving forward as an independent open source project and look forward to working with the Council to continue driving Mautic's growth.
News from the community
As well as the governance work, there's been a lot going on the community and the wider marketing industry.
In February, some changes are being introduced by Gmail and Yahoo which mean that bulk senders must now also provide a header with their emails which allows the user to unsubscribe with one click, and is less prone to being clicked by bots than the current methods. We talked about this some months back in our blog post, but in the 5.0 and 4.4.11 releases we implemented the necessary headers for Mautic to take care of this for you.
More changes came when our security reporting and bounty system, huntr.dev, stopped supporting open source projects that were not involved with Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence. This meant that we both needed to implement a new system for bounties, and also that we needed to change our confidential reporting system for security issues.
Happily this coincided with GitHub releasing new features for maintainers to receive security reports directly through the GitHub repository in a private and secure manner, so we have implemented this workflow. Read more about that in the blog post: Mautic Adopts GitHub's Private Security Reporting System for Vulnerability Reporting.
On Giving Tuesday we announced our annual 'Back your Stack' initiative where we use a percentage of our annual budget to support the open source projects we depend on.
This year we decided to support five projects with a larger sum - these projects are:
- Rector
- PHPStan
- Guzzle
- Composer
- Doctrine
Finally this quarter we concluded the RFP process we started last quarter to find a provider for our Trials project. After a thorough process we selected the proposal from Dropsolid for a three year term. It is expected that this will launch towards the end of Q1 2024 and will bring a revenue stream to the community from those who decide to continue with the hosted service after the trial completes.
Product updates
Of course we can't wrap up this quarter without reporting on the phenomenal work that has been done to get Mautic 5 ready for release.
We made the Beta and Release Candidate this quarter, and after 200+ contributions from the founder of Rector to help remove older code and modernise many areas of our codebase, we made the Release Candidate 2 for final testing. The General Availability release was made just into the new year, on 9th January - so more on that in the next quarterly report!
We also announced the formation of the User Experience and User Interface (UX/UI) Tiger Team, headed up by Anderson Eccel and Mike van Hemelrijck and sponsored by Dropsolid. Their first project is to be working on a redesign of Mautic's user interface, much needed to bring us up to date with modern standards and improve our accessibility.
Financial updates
This quarter has seen strong growth in membership since we launched the Community Portal, with several corporate members joining and many new individual members supporting Mautic.
Regular monthly sponsorships are also relatively stable, with some reductions as organisations become members and therefore commit to an annual payment rather than monthly.
This quarter we had an income of $61,909.20 and our expenditures were $33,570.76. While we ended the year with a positive balance of $67,714.82 we did not reach the fundraising targets that we had set for the year, so we have work to do in 2024 to ensure we reach financial stability.
Read the Open Startup reports for more detail:
Mautic Open Startup Report #7 - October 2023 - Mautic Community
Mautic Open Startup Report #8 - November 2023 - Mautic Community
Mautic Open Startup Report #9 - December 2023 - Mautic Community
Let's look at the numbers
This quarter we had 383 active members in our community, slightly down from the previous quarter but aligned with the usual drop over the festive season.
There were 707 contributions during the quarter from 74 contributors, which represents a strong growth against the previous quarter. Over 100 of these came from one contributor, Tomas Votruba from Rector, who single-handedly worked tirelessly over several weeks on removing outdated code and improving Mautic's codebase. It's great to see this continued growth in contributions as more and more people step up to give back to Mautic in whatever way they can. Thank you to everybody who has contributed to Mautic this quarter!
Most active members
Avinash Dalvi 353
John Linhart 332
Tomas Votruba 281
Mattias Michaux 251
Joey Keller 168
Surabhi Gokte 155
Zdeno Kuzmany 149
Rahul Shinde 130
Norman Pracht 129
Anderson José Eccel 113
Most engaged members
Joey Keller 86
Norman Pracht 74
John Linhart 72
Matic Zagmeister 54
Dirk Spannaus 50
Robin Tindall 50
Stefan Franz 38
Ekke Guembel 32
Zdeno Kuzmany 30
Bill F 30
Top contributors
John Linhart 168
Tomas Votruba 107
Zdeno Kuzmany 47
Mattias Michaux 36
Anderson José Eccel 26
Joey Keller 14
Oluwatobi Owolabi 13
Patryk Gruszka 12
Patrick Jenkner 12
Anna Munk 10
Most active companies
Dropsolid 467
Acquia 371
Webmecanik 333
RectorPHP 281
Friendly 168
Axelerant 159
Leuchtfeuer Digital Marketing 136
Codefive 130
Devsadda 130
PreviousNext 108
Top contributing companies
Acquia 187
RectorPHP 107
Dropsolid 73
Webmecanik 67
Leuchtfeuer Digital Marketing 30
Comarch 25
Friendly 14
Bluespace 13
Devsadda 9
Codefive 5
Looking forward
- Mautic is being represented at several major events next quarter, including having a stand at FOSDEM - the largest event in Europe for open source developers - and State of Open Con in London along with sessions at FOSS Backstage.
- Our next in-person conference is coming up in February in India with over 100 attendees expected to join us to learn more about Mautic and get involved in contributing during the community contribution day
- The Mautic Trials project is due to launch in Q1 which will bring another revenue stream to the community while also allowing people to quickly get started with Mautic
- We are making good progress on attracting new members but we need more individual and corporate members to enable our future growth. This will be a major focus of the coming months.
