Council

Welcome to the Mid-Q3 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.

Attendees

• Ruth Cheesley
• Prateek Jain
• Ekke Guembel
• John Linhart
• Andy Towne
• Favour Chibueze

Apologies

• Norman Pracht
• Dominique De Cooman

Actions from last meeting

• Ruth - make workload more transparent so that the Council can see what work is being done and what can be taken up by someone else.
• Ruth gave update about documenting her workload 
• Ruth and Andy to work on redefining the mission, vision and short/long term strategy/operational plan before MautiCon - continues from Q2.
• Andy shared an update about making the visions and goals along with short/long term strategy clear, The works are currently ongoing and need to have a meeting. (in progresss)
• Ruth: We should bring it up during MautiCon and get more community members to contribute and engage with the project
• Andy: Share docs to improve the key projects and prioritize them.

Notes from this meeting

Financial update end of Q2

• Ruth: Lack of income from the trials
• Ruth: MautiCon can bring in more income if we have over 50 people for tickets for the conference
• Andy: Focus on getting more income to the community and less on engagement. 
• Ekke: When do we run out of money? Ruth: 2 months
• Andy: We need to do well in MautiCon to get more ticket sales
• Ruth: We need to start making money through the trials which the website can help
• John: We need to adverstise, more like news feeds or push notifications - could we consider that in the application itself? Ruth to talk with Anderson.
• Prateek: Asked if there's anything we can cut down on the budget
• Ruth: Adding adsense or ads to the forum to generate revenue - maybe instead of generic ads we could run ads which are linked to affiliate accounts where we earn revenue, for services that our users need. Need to ensure we don't conflict with / cannibalise from potential partnerships. Perhaps one advertising position could be used for rotating affiliate ads?

Free trial update

• Ruth: We need to improve the experience for the trials because we have 2 distinct groups of users. The first group consists of new users seeking information and trials to understand the platform's capabilities. The second group comprises experienced users who are already familiar with Mautic and are seeking hosting providers to partner with.
• Ruth: To address the issues faced by these groups, there are two key solutions. Firstly, implementing a help tour to guide users through the dashboard and improve navigation. Secondly, providing clear hosting options, including self-hosting with resources, a hosted offering in partnership with Mautic, and a list of approved hosting providers.
• Andy: We had significant increase in hosting provider interest over the last year. Proposed prime banner placement for Dropsolid to encourage conversions until the end of the contract then we might consider also adding a paid add-on option for corporate members to be featured as a hosting provider/SaaS provider.

eLTS

• We need to refine Mautic's release cycle, and we're considering 24-months with regular security updates. This impacts Long-Term Support (LTS), offering potential revenue streams by offering an extended long term support program. 
• Steps we need to follow include:
• Be clear what we're offering with the extended long term support - do people really want those features? (check the debate here: https://community.mautic.org/assemblies/elts/f/92/debates/8) [Ruth/Ekke]
• Defining a clear release strategy and publishing this, so it's clear where LTS and ELTS fit in [Ruth]
• Defined LTS periods and what would be provided in the ELTS period 
• Public-facing plan for how we'd use the funds and how it would help Mautic and the customer
• Research what the demand is for ELTS and the likelihood of the income 
• Decide how we'd bundle it - e.g. corporate members getting a discount on the plans, bundling it with membership?
• Look at examples like the TYPO3 for inspiration building the landing page for the service: https://typo3.com/services/extended-support-elts
• Plan to announce it at Mautic Conference Europe, ready to launch ideally.

GSoC contributions

• Both projects are completed
• End to End Testing - now live in GitHub checking every PR
• Marketplace - now allows us to have both themes and projects, andn also to log in with your Mautic community account and leave a rating/review for the plugin or theme.
• Students have done really well, students have worked well within the community
• Can we keep them in the community?
• Offer them to stay as an assistant-mentor for the next year projects?
• Connect them with agencies in the community for student roles? Encourage/coach to share in the Jobs channel and/or we can share their work and invite folks to connect with them

Certification

• Prateek shared the docs he shared on Slack: https://mautic.slack.com/archives/C06AHPBERK3/p1725609144837249
• Do we need training and certification, or just certification?
• Official certification - to help Mautic users to find qualified service providers and for service providers to differentiate themselves from others. Also a minor source of income.
• Training - there are options out there, not all equally good. Ideally training would be oriented towards certification, with an official curriculum.
• Who would prepare the certification exam questions and training?
• Do the proposed tracks make sense?
• Marketer and Developer was proposed but Ekke suggested the Integrator track.
• Probably best to have the three, Ekke suggested what would be covered in the Integrator track on Slack
• How do we approach it - do we do an RFP? Accept the proposal that was given by Prateek?
• Probably best to keep certification and training as separate provisions
• Next step: Draft Proposal [Prateek] , Council to refine and make it public asap. Proposal should include Developer and Integrator (while not yet the Marketeer)

Next Meeting: "Q4" (Chair = Norman, Notetaker = Ekke)

[Norman to schedule this]