Die Original-Veröffentlichung "Do you love Mautic? Act now! - Let’s unleash the full power of Open Source Martech" und Diskussion dazu finden Sie hier: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/do-you-love-mautic-act-now-ekkehard-gümbel/

“Almost 2 months ago after the announcement of the acquisition of Mautic by Acquia, the Mautic community is still waiting for extra announcements the corp. started to prepare for “the 90 next days” offering further details.”

...well put by Norman Pracht in his recent post on LinkedIn. These ideas spawned some further thoughts and discussions, and eventually lead to a community-side vision which I would like to share here.

Context

We do love Mautic. It is a fantastic and truly unique product.

Mautic founder DB Hurley deserves a ton of respect for the vision, the skills and the persistence to create not only Mautic as a piece of software, but also everything around it.

Now that Mautic – the brand, the community project, the company – has become the part of something bigger, a lot of additional potential has been created, and a lot of additional momentum has been induced.

This is the perfect time to redefine the Mautic community as an entity, as well as its relationship to its commercial branch. And thus to leverage the currently existing momentum by providing it with the most fertile environment – in order to boost the pace, quality and success of Mautic as a whole, which serves the interest of all parties involved best. And which is the secret sauce of any successful Open Source project.

Product

As of today, Mautic is already a strong Open Source software product, with a unique position in a hot and growing market. To make the product even better and to further increase its reach and success, these are the cornerstones that we consider most important:

• “Snappy” user interface, with evolving UX concepts for industry-leading ease of use
• Modern, powerful, yet lean core
• Wealth of features through rich ecosystem
• Enhancement-friendly core
• Marketplace of plugins, templates and other offerings
• Encouragement for good plugin maintenance (security fixes and version compatibility), including rules for the hand-over of orphaned plugins
• Identification of “supervised” plugins of strategic importance, i.e. those that need to be free and especially well-maintained
• Perfectly suitable for small businesses as well as for large enterprises
• Helpful and well-organized documentation and other learning ressources (“official” and third-party)
• “Fastlanes” for beginners and for everyone
• Complete sample setups to choose from during installation
• Campaign library
• GDPR templates
• Live try-out
• Great server-side performance and scalability through smart architecture and optimization on all levels
• Proper support for on-premise / self hosting (including means for housekeeping etc.)
• Good quality of all released code; quick reaction and good communication in case of relevant issues
• Explicit focus on security and privacy
• Clear release strategy including Long Term Support (LTS) versions

Market

Given the qualities and the uniqueness of the product, the rising relevance of data privacy, and the fresh project momentum, we envision an incredible potential for Mautic’s future, reflected in only a few (conservative!) goals:

• 10x number of active installations within 2 years
• Users from entrepreneurs and small businesses to large enterprises
• High visibility, with graspable distinction from the commercial branch

Community

Acquia has taken of ownership and responsibility for the Mautic community as part of the deal. It is of course in their own best interest to set it up in a fashion that enables a maximum of valuable contribution – which implies a good degree of liberty and self-control for the community, while respecting and growing the value which, after all, has been paid for.

So these are the intended elements of the future community setup:

• We live an open, transparent, respectful and welcoming community culture. This also includes a modern, written code of conduit.
• We acknowledge and welcome all sorts of contributors, and encourage everyone to build their own successful business around this Open Source project. We explicitly support this through structures (e.g. Marketplace) and of course through the use of GPLv3.
• We strive to maintain a community and environment that is accessible even to beginners, and that encourages & enables contribution an all levels.
• We consider it crucial to start by creating structures and processes (e.g. for defining technical and feature roadmaps) and by identifying responsibilities and teams (core, education, marketing & website, security, infrastructure, events, …), and even more importantly: We need to bring those to life quickly. (Note that while DB Hurley’s call for working group leads comes from a slightly different angle, it has similar intentions and can surely help as a reference point.)
• Of course, the community has to have full control over their working instruments (e.g. community website, …)
• Learning from the Drupal community setup is an obvious idea and surely very helpful, may or may not involve closer cooperation and even sharing of technical infrastructure. (However, Mautic shall not be mistaken as a subset of Drupal. We value all integration partners equally!)
• Before long, an association should come to life that embodies the community, that everyone can join as a member, and that is governed by the will of its members. The role and authority of Acquia within this Association needs to be limited and well-defined.
• The responsibilities of the Association not only needs to be described, but also financially backed. It should be financially independent from day one – with a clear vision of elements for the funding, and with clear benefits to the members (probably including different “Member” / “Partner” levels).

Action

Acquia: Please communicate your own ideas on the community branch, help us understand your intentions, and let’s work on aligning all approaches!

Acquia: Please do take the lead in boosting the community, namely by naming an experienced and truly Open-Source-minded community manager, and by giving her or him the time and freedom required by the job. (Of course, staffing of community teams and other contribution are welcome, too :)

Community (that’s you, dear valued reader): Let’s further refine our shared vision, and then let’s get going! Proposed course of action:

• Discuss! https://mautic.slack.com/messages/C8B89CLSF is the place to be (in addition comments on articles here and there, of course). I would specifically love to hear opinions on the "next steps" as outlined below, and of course alternative approaches.
• Make sure to catch (not necessarily resolve!) all thoughts, ideas and issues that people have.
• Agree on a date and easy-to-reach place (NYC?) for a global kickoff meetup – in person, for all who can make it. I strongly believe in the immense value of this being real-life.
• At that meetup, work hard on the outlines (including coming to an agreement with Acquia on their role), but also on the details and the persons in charge. The goal here should be a good deal of decisions and next steps. And for everyone to come home from that meeting happy and motivated.
• Presentation of results and call for participation at DrupalCon Amsterdam (Oct 28-31, 2019)