Mid Q1/26 Mautic Council meeting

Attendees:

    - Ruth

    - Ekke

    - Simran

    - Adrian

    - John

    - Dominique

    - Sven

Agenda:

1. Last meeting actions:

1. Enact financial recovery steps - done

2. Present budget at General Assembly - prepared, Ruth will present

3. Ruth to draft roles for council, and determine in next meeting who will do the roles - prepared, will go through it

4. Ekke to write council report for the General Assembly - done, Ekke will present

5. All to review list of tasks to take on in Ruth's absence and decide which they will take on -> agenda item below - prepared, will discuss

6. Ioana to send Doodle for meetings at start and mid quarter - done

7. Update website to reflect ELTS license cost being based on country of the end user, not provider - done

2. Financial status

2.1 Status update from Ruth and walk through of recovery plan

- planning 40k fundraiser

- discussing that 9k in host fees for OpenCollective is a big amount, it's paying for the convenience of not having our own entity and accounting.

2.2 Financial status: Decision on whether to implement further cuts

- Ruth 4 days/week

- Barsha: No new employee but rather still a contractor

- Acquia's ELTS didn't happen

- More cuts from sponsors

- We are between level 1 and 2 plan

- We shouldn't let our contractors go before Ruth's planned absence

- We should consider to go to level 3.

- Invoices are delayed. We are 2 invoices behind

- OpenCollective is ok for now, but cannot do this for long

- 21k is planned for the Mauticon income

- 15k should be allocated to costs for the event

- additional 15k income may be possible

- Mauticon tickets will be available in the next couple of months

- certifications are delayed, planned for the end of Feb for devs

- $250 

- Barsha optimizing email flows for trials

- The Fundraiser is planned

  - We decided to do a Fundraiser to generate funds/donatioons reach our finacial goals

  - consists of a new website with a payment link

  - serious marketing is planned around that

  - partners will be matching donations up to 2.6k 

  - Ruth to reach out to members and partners to provide them the opportunity to join also the matching donations option

- Outreach to partners, members

   - Ruth's using Hubspot and can record the process of how to use hubspot effciently

  -  Ruth was able to hand over about 7 or 8 potential members to assign them to other council members. 

  - We need to get behind those calls/contacts to bring in some partners (Ruth assigned some contacts to people in the council. Every one assigned will act in the next few days to contact the company and reach out if they would be interested in becoming members of the project to support its future viability). 

- Options to cut costs

- plan: 70-60% of Ruth's time allocation (3days/week)

- or moving from an employee to a contractor

- Ruth is now on 4 days/week but works the same hours as on 100%

- Ruth suggests 60% rather than switching to contracting

- Vote: All agrees

3. Council role allocations

Results:

Chair: Ekke Gümbel

Treasurer: Adrian Schimpf

Secretary: Norman Pracht

4. Adopt policy on contributor references

Ruth suggests to write a policy that only contributors active for 12 months are eligible for references (for visa for example)

- Vote: All agree

5. Tasks to take on in Ruth's absence -> who will take on what? Draft as tables(External link)

- https://github.com/mautic/community-management/blob/EG-20260210/Project%20Lead/Project%20Lead%20tasks.md

- Ruth's out starting April 6 and will be back July 13

- We need to assign all tasks in Feb

- Shadowing from March 1

- Sven can take care of the infrastructure

- We are parking the chatbot and ambassadors roject due to time constraints due Ruth's hours reduction 

6. Fundraiser + marketing it

- Discussion about the tone of the message. Urgent (need to fund a missing gap) vs positive (make Mautic better)

- Discussion about whether 40k is big enough. Perhaps we could add greater goals on top of it.

- We need recurring revenue to avoid the same situation next year

- Ekke: Each of us should find more sponsors. Shall we write down talking points/script?

   - Simran to assemble the talking points

- Dominique: we should upsell potential new features while in it to raise more.

- Adrian: careful with the messaging so people won't think Mautic is going out of business and stop funding/using it completely.

- Sven: we should be transparent and show urgency about the current situation

- Ruth: communicate that the lack of funds is slowing Mautic down

- New license? Not technically possible due to all contributors would have to agree

- Adrian: Can we add a fund link to Composer?

- Ruth: a message to Mautic UI is also planned, no contributor. Ruth shared Martin is working on this, but we need someone to lead it. Adrian volunteered.

- Jan: We should take the word out about release sponsors.

7. AI Initiative status

8. Certification status

* launch around Feb 20th?

9. John/Ruth: Update on Campaign Library phase 2

- pivoting into building a public marketplace due to auth constraints

10. Release Cycle & ELTS Review 

11. Next sprint?

- will be handled in Slack

12. Google summer of code

- Sven applied, focussed on AI. Waiting if we get in. 

Reducing the versions that are getting security updates:

    - Lack of active security engineers

    - We'll drop ELTS for M6

    - M5 has a potential to get some funds from ELTS