Hello awesome Mautic supporters!

I hope that you've all kicked 2024 off with a flying start and things are going well! Apologies for the lack of an update over the last two months, I've tried to encapsulate all the exciting news and updates in this update to compensate so it's a bit longer than usual! 😁

It's been quite a busy few months in the Mautic project with important events like the new Council being elected, our first General Assembly meeting being held to formally adopt the new Governance Model, and of course the release of the long-awaited Mautic 5.0 General Availability release.

Financially we came in about $40k under target at the end of the financial year, with just over $67k reserves across our Open Collective. We have shifted a lot of my focus towards growing our membership base and building relations with potential corporate members, as it's essential that Mautic is able to become financially self-sufficient in the coming year. This means we really do need contributors to step up and support all the teams in the community so that I can step back from the day-to-day doing, and instead focus more on the strategy. If you or your team can help, we especially need people to support the Marketing, Education and Community team who are quite under-resourced, and as always, testers and bug fixes for the Product team. Feel free to ping me if you need help getting started.

At Mautic Conference India (more on that later) I announced a few things which you might be interested in.

We are on track with the Mautic Trials project and we're expecting to launch the trials towards the end of Q1 2024. This will not only bring a revenue stream into Mautic but also importantly will allow newcomers to Mautic to quickly spin up an instance of the open source product so that they can quickly understand its capabilities.

Firstly, Mautic has been recognised as a Digital Public Good(DPG) by the Digital Public Goods Alliance.

The Digital Public Goods Alliance is a multi-stakeholder initiative which is endorsed by the United Nations Secretary-General. The goal of the DPGA and its registry is to promote digital public goods in order to create a more equitable world, accelerating adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Being recognised as a DPG increases the visibility, support for, and prominence of open projects that have the potential to tackle global challenges. To become a digital public good, all projects are required to meet the DPG Standard to ensure that projects truly encapsulate open source principles.

Being recognised as a digital public good means a great deal. It’s a recognition of the importance of what we’re doing with Mautic - enabling equitable growth and empowering organizations worldwide to compete on a level playing field by making available powerful marketing automation software.

News hot of the press (announcement coming out soon), Mautic has been accepted for the first time into the Google Summer of Code program. We've applied three times in the past but not been successful at getting a place, so we were delighted to hear that we've been selected this year!

Summer of Code gives students the opportunity to work full-time during their summer holidays contributing to open source project, paid by a stipend from Google.

We have several project ideas which we've proposed and we're already seeing a lot of interest from students, so we're really looking forward to reviewing the proposals that are submitted and hopefully working with some great students on improving Mautic! Please do welcome them into the community and make them feel at home!

We have work starting on two initiatives this year which is exciting!

It's long been commented that it's difficult to organise resources in Mautic by marketing project - categories, tags and naming conventions have been hacked together by marketers for many years as a workaround, but we want to make this a much more effective process. Webmecanik stepped up to tackle this project which you can read more about in the blog post: Exciting Changes Ahead: Rethinking Resource Management in Mautic. We expect to see the first iterations mid to late 2024.

Some great work has been getting underway with the UX/UI Tiger Team who are focused on improving the user experience for marketers who are using Mautic. Smaller changes are being contributed to patch releases, but there is work underway to completely update the user interface and bring a much more modern feel to Mautic at the same time as improving accessibility across the application. Dropsolid has agreed to fund the work of the UX/UI Tiger Team Lead to drive forward the work on this and complete the project. Read more about the Tiger Team in the blog post: Announcing the New User Experience and User Interface Tiger Team at Mautic

We're delighted to share that Dropsolid have made a significant commitment to Mautic, becoming a Diamond-tier sponsor with a financial commitment of $30,000 per year. This is in addition to their already substantial practical contributions in the Product Team and the User Experience/User Interface Tiger Team.

Over the last two months we've had some awesome opportunities to showcase Mautic!

Firstly we had a stand and I gave a talk in the Community Devroom at FOSDEM, which is the largest gathering of open source developers in Europe. We estimate having spoken to in excess of 200 people across the two-day event about Mautic, many of whom had never come across us before. Definitely a lot of work to do in raising awareness of Mautic in the open source community!

Next we headed to London for the largest FOSDEM fringe event, State of Open Con. We had a stand in the delegate experience and again spoke to well over 100 people across the two days and at social events about Mautic.

Both events have led to several leads on funding and opportunities for grants that could support Mautic's growth, and of course the all-important awareness raising of the power of Mautic.

Prior to FOSDEM we also held our first Community Sprint of the year at Dropsolid's offices, making a huge amount of progress in several teams. There were around 6 people in the office over the two days, and around the same number joining us online.

If you can't get to the in-person event, sprints are a great way for you to come together with your local community and contribute to Mautic! Perhaps consider if you'd like to get involved next time - all you need is a location and perhaps some food and drink to keep people going - it's a great way to get to know others using Mautic while also doing something awesome to support Mautic!

Finally I'm just about to return back to the UK after our first Mautic event in India - Mautic Conference India. Our in-person conferences rotate continents each year and are an opportunity for the local communities to attend an event without international travel, and also given them the opportunity to host the event in their own country.

The team did an amazing job of organising Mautic Conference India and it went off without a hitch - there were two tracks running simultaneously for Marketers and Developers respectively and I heard great things from attendees at both! It was wonderful to meet with the vibrant and engaged community here in India and we got an awful lot done in the contribution day, where over 30 people came together to contribute to Mautic.

The team will be sharing a full write-up and financial report of the event soon on the Mautic blog.

Next week I'm going to be speaking at FOSS Backstage about our process of changing the governance model of Mautic, and also chatting with lots of other open source maintainers. It's a great opportunity to learn from others and gain inspiration for Mautic.

We're planning to launch the new trials project towards the end of Q1 which I'm very excited about - it's going to make a big difference to new users who come across Mautic and want to find out what it's all about without having to set it up themselves.

I'm excited to see the Google Summer of Code get underway with some interesting projects that will make a big impact on Mautic. We are already welcoming several students who are interested to learn more about Mautic, and we're excited to see the project proposals that they put forward.

Thank you as always for your support of Mautic, past and present - it's very much appreciated. If you're not yet a member please do consider it. Membership is $100 a year for individuals (or a pro-rated amount using the Big Mac Index based on where you are registered for tax - https://mau.tc/big-mac) and from $1,200 per year for companies and organizations.

Every membership makes a difference, be a part of building a strong future growth for Mautic!

Ruth Cheesley
Mautic Project Lead
[email protected]