Mautic Community Manifesto

Mautic is an Open Source Project created and driven by DB Hurley, who also founded Mautic Inc. (which was recently acquired by Acquia).

To further sharpen the vision for Mautic’s future, there has been a public process to determine the community’s position and express its expectations. 

A lot of good thinking and passion from many people went into this general Mautic Community Manifesto. It has been developed and approved by the community.

Also, to fix what currently feels like an impasse, the Mautic Community would love to see specific and explicit statements on the following topics, ideally by August 27, for our next community call.
Those topics have been extracted from the Manifesto and are kindly directed to Acquia:

  • Commitment to keep Mautic Open Source and GPL, including all future versions
  • Immediate action for opening up all communication channels and websites a.s.a.p. This has been breaking growth for too long now.
  • Timeline for an independent NGO as the embodiment of the community (including hand-over of control over community assets like website etc.)

P.S. Dear reader: If you are interested in the future of the Mautic Community, if you share our desire to let it grow and prosper, please join the discussion under #community in Mautic’s Slack space, and join our bi-weekly calls.

~ Floris van Geel & Ekkehard Gümbel on behalf of the Mautic Community


The Mautic Community Manifesto

Pledge for a Free Open Source Marketing Tool

Mautic is currently the only Free and Open Source Marketing Automation software on the planet. It has an extensive set of features and enables Marketing Professionals to do their work with ease, solving the pressing problems for engaging new clients.

Over the last decade we have seen this promise fulfilled in many ways. With current developments and acquisition there seems to be a risk involved. We have learned that we should more explicitly set out our aspirations in order to keep a Free and Open Source Software for Marketing.

The Mautic Community: That’s you!

The Mautic community is not an abstract animal. It is everyone who

  • Contributed code or content to Mautic. 
  • Visited a website to ask for Mautic support.
  • Is interested in Mautic, without ever contributing.

Thus: You are welcome to be part of “we”!

We are committed to making Mautic the best and easiest solution for Marketeers.

We are committed to providing the best possible framework for Mautic as an Open Source project. We believe that self-governance and ownership of resources are a basic and indispensable requirement to guarantee a healthy community that is able to grow and foster innovation.

We love community collaboration and would never want to give up.

We look forward to a mutually beneficial collaboration with Acquia. We respect their history of commitment to FOSS, and expect to come to a joint understanding based on the principles described here.

Our principles 

People over code

The needs of the users and contributors are the reason why we create code. We strive to continuously gather (and react to) feedback from users with understandable fluid communication.

Mutual respect

As a community, we value respectful communication among each other as well as to the outside - regardless of who you are and what you believe in, what your background is, what you like as a person or what your professional focus is. Growing a diverse community that is closely united for the purpose is a top priority.

Open for everyone

We welcome everyone to our community. We make it easy to understand and easy to get started with. Real-life meetings of all sorts and sizes are encouraged and supported for growing and maintaining our active community, since personal relationships are considered a valuable complement to online sharing of knowledge, code and ideas.

Every contribution is valuable

All contributions are important for the success of the project, since contributions by newcomers might lead to happy and dedicated core contributors.

This includes mentions like "It doesn't work on my server" which too is a valuable contribution - the underlying message being e.g. “improve documentation”. Even failed contributions are essential, because of how much we can learn when we fail. Contribution from newcomers is especially valuable, because they see the project with fresh eyes.

Transparency

Transparent community-based processes promote participation, accountability and trust. This includes open channels of communication as well as clear rules for decision making.

Responsibility and Accountability

All areas of community activities need volunteers to take care of it (maybe you?), including someone to coordinate and also to be responsible. In order to give this a democratic and sustainable framework, it is very desirable to have an NGO that takes accountability and is able to redistribute responsibilities. 

Commercial ecosystem

A commercial ecosystem is essential to the success of this project. We encourage individuals, companies and agencies to sell services of all sorts based on Mautic.

The original working Google Doc can be found here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tGKqzxshXO8_QzH6EjGtXaWQ1vD_h9-LAKjxb0pTUy4/edit?usp=sharing