The time has come. We have reached the 90-day milestone of the Acquia-Mautic merger. We are eager to discuss the roadmap items, plans, and proposals for the Mautic community as part of Acquia’s new role. We are excited to share how we plan to support the community and facilitate its growth into a vibrant, thriving place where people can really make a difference with their contributions.
To keep things simple, we’re focused on three major priorities within this initial phase.
We’ll go into details, when possible, and acknowledge that there are some questions that will still need to be answered as we continue moving forward.
This roadmap, items for discussion, and a plan for resolution is what we believe to be the first and most critical aspect in ensuring our community’s future growth.
Today, we’re sharing the high-level aspects of the first three priorities and some of the sections within each of them. We’ll share a deeper dive of each priority separately so that each gets the full attention it deserves.
A full-time community manager
Before we dive into the specifics of the first phase and the priorities within them, we’re announcing the first major contribution to the Mautic community from Acquia: Acquia hired Ruth Cheesley to be a full-time community manager for the Mautic community.
This is an exciting milestone and we will be sharing more about her many accolades and achievements soon. Ruth has been actively involved in the Mautic community since it was released, and will be an incredible asset to our community - we’re excited to see her contributions over the coming weeks.
Priority 1: Foundations
There are some aspects that we believe are important to establish solid foundations on which the community can build. We have termed the phase of addressing these high priority items as ‘Foundations’ which includes the following five sections
- Acquia’s Responsibilities
- Community Governance
- GDPR Compliance Requirements
- Mautic.org and other website assets
- Live Chat
Acquia’s responsibilities
Acquia will be contributing toward the Mautic community’s success by filling key roles where we are able to provide the reliability, dependency, and support that can be offered by an established company. These areas include: security fixes, marketing efforts, event coordination, resource assistance, trademark management, and funding.
In addition to Acquia recruiting a full-time Community Manager, there are four other Mautic-focused roles currently open and being actively recruited. We plan over the next year to further expand the Mautic engineering team, and long-term hope to establish a Mautic-equivalent of the Drupal Acceleration Team (DAT) - a team of Acquians who specifically work on developing Drupal and working with the community.
This represents a substantial investment in the ongoing technical development of Mautic, and demonstrates the commitment Acquia is making to ensure the future development roadmap for Mautic. If you are interested in getting into more technical details, join DB Hurley in a technical community call on Thursday, 15th August at 1100 EST / 1600 BST - a link to join the call will be shared in #community closer to the time.
We envision that, over time, Acquians will support the community in establishing teams around some of these key areas. This will enable contributors to identify where they can bring their skills and experience to the community, while having someone with overall responsibility for ‘getting things done’.
Community Governance
As the community grows, there needs to be clarity around governance, how decisions are made, and how we work together to gain a consensus.
We believe this is important to establish now, in collaboration with the community and external community governance experts, to lay sound foundations for the future.
Ruth will be kicking this project off soon and will be inviting involvement from the community on this crucial area.
GDPR Compliance
Along with the roles already mentioned, Acquia will also be assuming the liability and responsibility for GDPR compliance requirements. This means, with the community’s help, Acquia will help to lead the efforts to ensure we continually adhere to all GDPR requirements.
Mautic.org website
We will be focused on improving (re-launching) the Mautic.org website and other digital properties in collaboration with the community. Many of the digital properties need a refresh and some areas of the website are broken.
This is a major priority to be addressed immediately, which will help to facilitate ongoing communication and collaboration within the community, and present a professional web presence to new visitors.
Live chat
As many of you know, the community has been in discussions since October 2018 about moving the live chat community to Discord from Slack since several communities of comparable size to Mautic have had their instances restricted or found the feature set lacking as they scaled (React, Grav, Sia) (see discussion here on Mautic’s Slack instance - search for Discord to find other related discussions).
The Core and website project teams have used Discord effectively since December 2018 and we believe it will be a more stable live chat platform for the community going forward.
This transition requires some effort to fully move across to the new platform, which we believe needs to happen imminently as we are approaching the ‘danger zone’ where Slack may begin restricting new invitations.
Ruth will be leading this process, and will be sharing the proposed strategy shortly for consideration.
Priority 2: Evolutions
Once the items in the foundation phase are complete, we have identified the next phase as ‘Evolutions’. This priority focuses on those sections related to the evolution of our community as we enter our next chapter. There are four major sections to this priority.
- Ongoing management of web assets
- Marketing & Social Outreach
- Funding and financial support for the Mautic community
- Supporting MautiCamps and Events
Each of these priorities focus on ways for the Mautic community to be improved - and to grow - with the help of Acquia. Community involvement will be absolutely needed for every one of these sections (as well as the ones in the next priority as well).
Ongoing management of web assets
Once the new website is launched, there will be a need to ensure ongoing management of the site and its associated resources. This will involve multiple areas including content writing, SEO, design and development to name a few.
We will support and facilitate the development of teams around these functions, to enable the community to maintain a fresh and vibrant web presence which is representative of the activity within the community. We will also help to establish clear on-boarding processes for these teams.
Marketing and social outreach
Once the new website is in place, and the community channels are working effectively to empower new contributors in their journey to become part of the community, we will support the establishment of a team with the appropriate tools to market and promote the Mautic project.
Funding and financial support for the Mautic community
In acquiring Mautic, Acquia appreciates the importance of the community and understands that there will be a need for financial support in order for it to grow and thrive.
Some areas where Acquia’s funding can help the community might include (but are not limited to) managing the trademark and web assets, legal expenses, organising and hosting events, supporting MautiCamps, hosting web infrastructures and tools required for the day-to-day functioning of the project, and having Acquians giving their time to work on community projects.
We will establish clear processes through which this can happen, so that there is appropriate financial support for community-led initiatives.
Supporting MautiCamps and events
MautiCamps will receive additional support from Acquia in terms of resources and assets to help the many localized and regional Mautic groups grow faster.
We will be looking for volunteers to form a team which will organise the very first MautiCon, which we are aiming to hold in 2020 - keep an eye out in the community for more details on this!
Priority 3: Futures
The final phase we have termed ‘Futures’ as we begin to cast our gaze forward and focus on the various near-term futures. This priority, as with the others, has not been fully elaborated on, but identifies important next steps we think need to be considered.
The Futures priority focuses on creating plans for a variety of the earlier priorities mentioned above.
The most important plans include:
- Developing a plan for establishing community working groups in the identified crucial areas of the community;
- Sharing the plans for future investments from Acquia (e.g. a Mautic Acceleration Team similar to the Drupal Acceleration Team); and
- Developing plans for future events and co-hosted events with Acquia.
Each of these plans requires thought and collaboration between the Mautic community and Acquia.
Finally, it is important for us to mention the purposeful lack of explicit timelines due to the nature of community volunteer work. With that caveat, the intention is to see these three priorities and this initial phase of the roadmap to be completed by the end of 2019.
This is an exciting time for the Mautic community to demonstrate to other communities in Open Source how a transition like this can enable growth of the community and long term stability of the project.
This is also an opportunity for those outside of Open Source to begin to understand the value and passion found in Open Source communities.
Mautic has, in our opinion, one of the best, most positive and encouraging Open Source communities in the world, and we firmly believe that working together, will continue to grow and become even stronger.
This alliance with Acquia strengthens the Mautic community in innumerable ways both seen and unseen, and we look forward to watching the growth explode as a result!
