I am so thrilled to be able to write up the follow-up from the first Mautic monthly core meeting. Before I give you the details about the meeting itself (which will eventually live on Mautic.org's working group meeting notes) let me share why this meeting is so important. Even if you're not super interested in the specific meeting notes I believe there's value in reading through the first part of this post.
What this meeting represents
I have shared in the past about the importance of the Mautic leadership being owned by the community. And recently this has come front-and-center as Mautic.org announced their call for leaders. There's several reasons why this leadership by the community and for the community is so critically important (and also why this is so difficult for any community to implement and maintain).
I shared an article recently which highlights this struggle very aptly. I'll let you read the post in its entirety on your own. As a brief summary Magento recognized a significant problem which plagues many open source communities - only a few developers from a single source contributed the majority of the code.
And the response by Magento was both insightful and important:
... Magento created the Community Engineering team with the basic goal that it would listen to and review pull requests. Today a significant majority of pull requests are accepted, but the initial rate of acceptance was lower. Over time, this initiative, which started as more of a "let the community be heard" exercise, evolved to "wow, much of the innovation in Magento is being driven by our community."
I've said it before and I'll continue to say it: the reason Mautic is able to achieve such clear success comes from the many who have shown the way in the past. In essence, we stand on the shoulders of giants. When we learn from other open source communities we implement tried and true successful strategies. We improve our community. Finally, the result is to give back our stories, learnings, and successes as well.
These other open source experiences taught us as a community the importance of putting more of an emphasis on the beliefs we held. Mautic from its inception has been committed to being community led. Unfortunately, as is typically the case when moving fast, plans and execution can have slightly different outcomes. One release led to another and Mautic fell into a pattern without even knowing it.
This core meeting represents a change to this oversight and a renewed commitment to our core values.
What this meeting contains
Now that we have a good understanding about what this meeting represents we need to get into a bit of the specifics about what this meeting contains. Remember, if you've read the various posts about Mautic working groups you'll recognize that each working group (like #core) will maintain their own meeting schedule and agenda. The topics and purpose of this working group will differ from others but there may be some elements which remain consistent throughout. But because this is the principle example for working groups the meeting contents are shared below:
- Quick recap of topics to be covered
- Review of current release progress
- Outstanding issues or concerns for the release
- Release timeline
- Next release and release leader planning
That's pretty much all there is to it! Of course items will pop up along the way as they always do, but one of the most important aspects of the meeting is to ensure you don't stray to far from the agenda. In #core we determined these meetings should not be used to discuss outstanding questions or "new feature requests" unless they are specifically related to the next release.
Important: Every meeting should have a moderator and a specific time limit. The moderator ensures the discussion stays on topic and remains within the time allotted.
Core Meeting Notes
And here we'll get into the specifics of this meeting and this group. Because this was the first one there's a certain amount of leniency and extra forgiveness offered for any lack of process or focus however in this case I don't believe that was necessary. The meeting began on-time and touched on each of the items mentioned above. Specifically here are some details:
- Alan Hartless is the release leader for 2.14.0, he discussed what remained before a beta could be announced. Specifically, the campaign "jump-to" feature was needing some finalization before it could be tested. (Side note: I'll take responsibility for the delay in 2.14 due to this feature, I requested we delay until this feature could be added).
- The 2.14 release has quite a few outstanding PR's still awaiting testing. Specifically 58 open pull requests are marked for 2.14 with most requiring a test confirmation still. Currently, the goal is to announce 2.14 beta on July 17 and release 2.14 on July 24.
- The 2.14 Beta period was determined to be held open for only the period of 1 week for this release given the amount of significant testing being done beforehand. But community members are definitely needed to see this beta tested successfully.
- Finally, the 2.14.1 release leader was discussed and announced...but I won't steal the Mautic.org thunder. You'll have to watch their blog to hear that news. (I can't tell you how excited I am about this announcement!)
As you can hopefully see this is an exciting opportunity for the community to come together and make a difference. Every voice is heard and everyone gets to participate. This is our community. This is our code.
This was the first of many #core meetings to come and if you're interested in joining this particular working group and getting involved in the release strategies from a technical perspective, I'd encourage you to put the next one on your calendar. Otherwise there are many other working groups you can become a part of to get involved. I'll be sharing some more super exciting news about that in the coming days!
