Council

Welcome to the mid-quarter meeting of the Mautic Council, where the Council members convene to discuss strategic initiatives and make foundational decisions shaping the future of Mautic.

Council members have a unique platform at this meeting to bring forth and advocate for topics that matter most to our community, fostering innovation and growth. If you are a council member and there are specific topics that you wish to propose for consideration during the council meeting, we urge you to use the Proposals Component on our portal. Your ideas not only pave the way for meaningful dialogue but also form the bedrock of our collective decision-making process.

Meeting notes will be shared via the Etherpad and provided once the meeting is closed.

Agenda:

• Welcome, settling in, etc. (5 minutes) 1305
• Outstanding proposals (5 minutes) 1310
• Community Sprint recap - @Dominique (5 minutes) 1315
• MautiCon summary - @Prateek Jain @Ruth Cheesley (she/her) @Dominique (10-15 minutes) 1330
• Financial summary post MautiCon + new sponsorships - @Ruth Cheesley (she/her) (10 minutes) 1340
• Sponsor & partner outreach plan that came from the community sprint @Dominique (10 minutes) 1350
• UX/UI & Logos (10 minutes) 1400

(Note: Calendar invite was 1 hour instead of 2, it should have been 2. Sorry!)

Notes:

Honorary members

• DB Hurley, Dries Buytaert and Alan Hartless to be invited as honorary members (Ruth will send) 
• Ekke will create the badges for the honorary members and Marketing Team to write the comms to announce it. Prateek will work with the marketing team to communicate this whenever it's ready to publish.
  

Community sprint recap

• Open pull requests went from 300 to 263 = 12.4% reduction! :rocket: Over the two days we closed 7 PRs, merged 29 PRs , and 17 were created in that time as well
• Landing pages, emails and campaign created for FOSDEM and State of Open Con which were well received by stand visitors
• Multiple fixes to the Developer Docs meaning the builds are now passing and errors have been fixed, so references can be made to specific sections of the content
• Work is starting on the local landing pages initiative (funded by resources from Axelerant)
• It's not easy to get a good experience for people joining remotely with people also in-person.
• Team leads were not very forthcoming in helping to organise and to give tasks which people can work on.
• There weren't too many people on-premise (5-6) so it was a different feel.
• Andy asked if we can get the team leads to prepare a list to tasks - Ruth: we did but team leads weren't responsive despite repeated requests.
• Favour suggested that we should encourage and empower local communities/meetup groups to organise a sprint in their local area to coincide with the main sprint.
• Ekke: The hardest thing is finding tasks to hand over to new people to work on - especially if they haven't contributed before. Perhaps we should have the local communities working on things related to the local community as it's more tangible/easier for them to engage with.
• The sprints should be organised by the Community Team so we should take the discussions there to make a decision for the next community sprints.

Ownership of tasks

• Dominique: getting people together isn't always the challenge, the problem seems to be ownership at the level of the team leaders
• Ruth is picking up a lot of tasks which team leads should be taking on, because they aren't getting done - there seems to be a disconnect between the volunteers and the team leadership
• Dominique feels that the Council should be taking more of an executive responsibility role to support the team leads and make sure that things are getting done
• Norman: Feels there's too many goals/aims/ambitions in the teams, too many things we're trying to do or too big objectives, so nothing actually gets done. We should focus on one or two objectives per team and really focus on those.
• Perhaps we should poll the team members as to what they want to focus on and share with the team lead, then that's the things that they focus on for the quarter. Make it clear what they're focusing on.
• It's easier to help/contribute when you know those goals
• Dominique: It's good to have the small achievable tasks but thinking too small can mean you end up getting nowhere. Norman replied we've been thinking big for the last 8 years and haven't achieved those goals yet.
• Ekke: Our message and product hasn't really changed in the last 8 years, but the biggest point is that much of the work has been coming from a small number of companies and we need to diversify rather than expect the same companies to be stepping up more - not rely on the Council members to be doing more work themselves but supporting the team leads to lead more effectively.
• Norman: As the council we should be setting the vision/strategy for the teams and pass this down to the team leads, and they should then be the people who are responsible for delivering that.
• Andy: We have a published vision for Mautic: https://www.mautic.org/future-of-mautic - we need to review this, and then figure out how we are going to deliver on this and that then trickles down to the teams. We can do this in a virtual meeting / async meeting to prioritise what people can focus on in the teams.
• Ruth shared the marketing strategy: https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVMy63POo=/?share_link_id=95966136606 which was based on taking one thing from the vision.
• Prateek: Explained the Drupal agency partnership list being ranked by contribution where they've changed from monetary being the highest weighting to contribution being the most important. - https://www.drupal.org/association/blog/turning-takers-into-makers-the-enhanced-drupal-certified-partner-program
• Andy: Could we survey people who participated, about their experiences, to give more information/incentive to the team leaders to be more organised for the sprints?

Clarity on the council's mission and remit

• Ekke: we need to be clear what our remit is as the Council and not get involved in micro-managing of teams. We also need to ensure there's folks to actually do the work, otherwise there's no point setting objectives if there's nobody to do the work.
• Ruth: Council is not intended to be the busy-bees. Council members may participate in projects that they are particularly interested in, but are more expected to be advisors and mentors to the team leads. Create accountability for team leads to achieve projects and recruit new members.
• Dominique: We should consider that if the money runs out, we won't have a full time resource working on the community so we would have to pick up the work anyway.
• Norman: The project would continue but it wouldn't be as efficient and things wouldn't move so fast. We want to keep a full time resource because it enables a lot to happen but the community would continue.
• John: we did this as an experiment when the forums were broken for 3 years, slack was the only place to communicate and it was generally a bad experience for the community.
• Ekke: The important thing here is that we need someone to be doing the important tasks and leading the community, we need the financial stability. Let's be clear what our priorities are and the actions to those
• Favour: Perhaps we need to be direct with the team leads and check in as to whether they still want to lead the teams, because if they don't we can support them to find a replacement.
• Ruth: We can't just continue how we are because there's a very real risk of burnout. Ruth needs to focus on the strategy, finances etc and to do that has to stop doing the day to day tasks - team leads have been made aware.
• Ruth: We perhaps need to focus on developing a much stronger contribution mentoring workflow to make sure we really help people to get started and stay active as contributors. This would unlock and help with many of the challenges.
• MautiCon India
• Dominique: Impressed by the vibe, good turnout (100+ tickets, 70+ attendees and 50+ at contribution day). Interest from the developers and marketers which was great. 
• Prateek: Insightful sessions, good conversations and interesting case studies how people were using Mautic which we'd not heard about. Volunteer team did a great job before, during and after the event. During contribution day, some struggled to get started on the Product side due to a DDEV bug.
• Financial plan / 12 month forecast
• Sheet is here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1-TdZI3HtxbSCIpqQwDGOSqnZgewSUZZuhZwO4Z3Ah3Q/edit?usp=sharing
• Dominique talked through the current situation, known commitments from renewing memberships and the pipeline / plans for growth. Some sponsorships came out of MautiCon.
• There was a lot of work done at MautiCon India on outreach: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1MNe7PMkhvx9UZlCYsjSK8gpnVLxRjjbjoVcxARJ4IWE/edit?usp=sharing including messaging we can use around the 10 year anniversary and the free trials (scroll to Marketing Team) - Dominique talked through this and explained how they came up with the talking points for the different kinds of users.
• Norman: Perhaps we should be making it very clear that we need people's support to be financially stable
• Andy: Clients often want to have some impact on the roadmap and that would motivate people to contribute financially
• Norman: Right now we can't look at taking promises for features because we can't deliver them. Ruth mentioned in the second year the plan was to actually fund a full time developer who we could task on things like product roadmap delivery.
• Ekke: Who are the best audience? Agencies over users of Mautic as they earn actual money, have impact from Mautic and would gain from prominence. Larger companies should be a focus, but there it's more of an administrative challenge finding out who has access to the budget. Could we offer a 'product' which an agency purchases which includes membership. Existing v new - new users (e.g trials) probably not the best focus for becoming a member. Probably the existing users are best.
• Prateek: We have to be careful with our messaging as it could put people off if we are seeming too desperate. It's important to be mindful of that.
• Dominique: Paint a positive story, and iterate on this as we need to. We're in a unique situation where we're becoming independent, we're growing and we're doing well. We should focus on that. Actually we're needing to pitch to our investors - the community - as if we were a startup sharing the opportunities.

Next meeting:

Q2 meeting on 8 April: 

Chair - Dominique, Note taker - Prateek Jain

Actions:

Honorary members

• Send email to honorary members: Ruth
• Prepare badges for honorary members: Ekke
• Work with Marketing Team on comms to announce honorary members: Prateek

Community sprint

• Provide feedback on the sprint to the Community Team so that they can take it on-board for future events: Ekke
• Explore how to organise in-person sprints to run alongside the main event in local communities: Favour / Ekke

Ownership of tasks

• Review the vision and mission for Mautic, consider its appropriateness and how we can go about developing a strategy to deliver it: Andy to coordinate, all to provide input.
• Survey those who participated in the community sprint and get their feedback to share with the team leads / community team: Ekke via MautiCon Working Group

Vision and remit of the Council

• 1-2-1 discussions with team leads to provide clarity on expectations and commitments from the team leads / discuss plan for electing replacements if they aren't able to commit: Ruth
• Propose ways to improve the mentoring onboarding process across all teams so that we are making the most out of interested contributors and preventing losing them through the cracks: All to support this.

Financial plan

• Review the plans for communicating about the financial situation and ensure that it's consistent and clear: Ruth & Dominique
• Research how we can make it easier for companies to 'buy' a 'product' that is membership (e.g. making it easier to buy, rather than sell, membership): Ekke
• Determine segments to be targeted for membership v trials and ensure messaging is appropriate: Ruth, Dominique and Prateek