DEV Community: Ruth Cheesley

Google Summer of Code 2024: Mautic Joins as Mentoring Organization

Ruth Cheesley — Tue, 27 Feb 2024 16:03:42 +0000

We are delighted to announce that Mautic has been selected as a mentoring organization for Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2024. This will be Mautic’s first year as a mentoring organization, joining the other 195 accepted open-source organizations!

GSoC is a unique opportunity for contributors worldwide to collaborate with Mautic and enhance our open-source marketing automation platform. For those unfamiliar with GSoC, it offers stipends to students and beginners in open-source software development who work on open-source projects over the summer, under the guidance of experienced mentors.

As part of our GSoC program, we are excited to open our doors to new contributors eager to join the Mautic community. This presents an exciting opportunity to enhance your technical skills and gain valuable experience in a collaborative, open-source environment.

You will have the chance to immerse yourself in the community, learning from passionate individuals dedicated to Mautic's project. This unique experience offers contributors the chance to make a real-world impact, contribute to meaningful projects, and receive mentorship from experienced members of the community.

Important Dates for GSoC 2024:

February 22 - March 18: Potential GSoC contributors discuss application ideas with mentoring organizations.
March 19 - April 2 18:00 UTC: Potential GSoC contributors will submit proposals through the program website.
April 2 - April 24: We review all submitted GSoC Contributor proposals and consider how many we want to select and how many we can handle (how many we have committed mentors for). We decide on the ranking of our GSoC Contributor slots.
May 1: Accepted GSoC contributor projects announced.
May 1 - 26: Community Bonding Period | GSoC contributors get to know mentors, read documentation, and get up to speed to begin working on their projects.
May 27: Coding officially begins!
July 8: Mentors and GSoC contributors can begin submitting midterm evaluations.
August 19 - 26: Final week: GSoC contributors submit their final work product and their final mentor evaluation (standard coding period).
August 26 - September 2: Mentors submit final GSoC contributor evaluations (standard coding period).
September 3: Initial results of Google Summer of Code 2024 Announced.
November 4: Final date for all GSoC contributors to submit their final work product and final evaluation

Refer to the GSoC Timeline for more info.

How You Can Get Involved:

If you're over 18 years old, interested in open source, and meet the eligibility criteria, you can apply to join us as a GSoC 2024 contributor. Reach out to the Mautic community early, exploring project ideas, and join our Slack community for updates and discussions.

Please read Mautic’s contribution guidelines for GSoC and the project ideas before engaging with the community.

The application period ends on March 18 (UTC), so prepare your project proposals and become familiar with Mautic beforehand.

We're excited to be part of Google Summer of Code 2024 and look forward to working with contributors and mentors to make Mautic even better!

Stay tuned for more updates and announcements, and let's make this summer memorable for Mautic and the open-source community!

Mautic recognized as a Digital Public Good by the Digital Public Goods Alliance

Ruth Cheesley — Tue, 27 Feb 2024 16:00:20 +0000

Mautic’s mission is to enable organizations to deliver world-class digital experiences to their customers by providing powerful open source marketing automation software which is supported by a thriving international community of passionate contributors. Mautic is empowering businesses, charities and organizations worldwide to create meaningful change in the world. To learn more, visit https://mautic.org.

What began as a passionate idea sparked by founder DB Hurley, has grown over the past ten years into the world’s largest open source marketing automation platform, powering the digital experiences of over 40,000 websites in 85 countries worldwide.

The Digital Public Goods Alliance is a multi-stakeholder initiative which is endorsed by the United Nations Secretary-General. The goal of the DPGA and its registry is to promote digital public goods in order to create a more equitable world, accelerating adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Today, we are delighted to announce that Mautic was added to the Digital Public Goods Alliance DPG Registry. Being recognised as a DPG increases the visibility, support for, and prominence of open projects that have the potential to tackle global challenges. To become a digital public good, all projects are required to meet the DPG Standard to ensure that projects truly encapsulate open source principles.

“Being recognised as a digital public good means a great deal. It’s a recognition of the importance of what we’re doing with Mautic - enabling equitable growth and empowering organizations worldwide to compete on a level playing field by making available powerful marketing automation software.”

said Project Lead, Ruth Cheesley.

“Mautic is truly changing the lives of those who use and contribute to it, and gives confidence to organizations that open source solutions are the way forward for building the digital experience platforms of the future.”

For more information on the Digital Public Goods Alliance please reach out to hello@digitalpublicgoods.net.

Dropsolid becomes a Diamond Tier member of Mautic with an annual commitment of $30,000

Ruth Cheesley — Tue, 27 Feb 2024 15:57:10 +0000

We are excited to announce that Dropsolid - a leading provider of open digital experience solutions - has made a significant commitment to Mautic - the world's largest open marketing automation platform. The company has pledged an exceptional contribution of $30,000 per year, solidifying its position as a Diamond member, the highest level of membership.

This partnership reflects Dropsolid's ongoing commitment to enabling marketers to create world-class digital experiences which span the entire customer journey. Their annual contribution will help fuel Mautic's mission of democratizing marketing automation and enabling organizations of all sizes to create, manage, track and personalize their customer experiences seamlessly.

"After working with Mautic for the last 6 years integrating it into our product, we are very happy Mautic became an independent project so other companies like ourselves could step up and increase their sponsorship" said Dropsolid CEO, Dominique De Cooman

While the Diamond Tier sponsorship focuses on Dropsolid's financial contribution, they also continue their ongoing commitment as one of the top five companies contributing to the Mautic project including their Director of Engineering Mattias Michaux leading the Product Team and Marketing Expert Mike Van Hemelrijck supporting the UX/UI Tiger Team.

"We are delighted to welcome Dropsolid as our Diamond Tier sponsor. Their generous support will significantly contribute to Mautic’s ambitious plans for growth. We look forward to working along with Dropsolid and achieving our shared vision for Mautic to become the worldwide open marketing automation platform of choice." said Mautic Project Lead, Ruth Cheesley.

For more updates about this partnership and upcoming projects, follow Dropsolid and Mautic on their respective social channels.

About Dropsolid

Dropsolid is a world leading open digital experience provider with an open DXP and implementation services. The company, with offices in Belgium, Portugal and the United States, focuses on delivering scalable, secure, and user-friendly open source platforms which businesses can personalize to their needs, ensuring optimal interaction with their customers. Check out the the Dropsolid DXP.

About Mautic

Mautic is the world's largest open source marketing automation project. With 40,000+ organizations using Mautic and over 700 community volunteers, we empower businesses by making it easy to manage their marketing across a range of channels.

Mautic Open Startup Report #9 - December 2023

Ruth Cheesley — Tue, 27 Feb 2024 15:53:22 +0000

Key points

This month has seen a growth in memberships, however we have not met the target we set for our end-of-year financial goals, being just under $38,000 short. The year end saw us with a positive balance of just under $68,000 across our various projects on Open Collective. Greater focus will need to paid to bringing in more revenue streams going forward, to ensure Mautic's future financial stability.

We've seen substantial contributions towards the Mautic 5 release which will be made as General Availability in early January.

There continues to be strong growth in adoption, with a 120% increase compared with Q4 2022 in terms of deployed websites with Mautic tracking.

Finances

This month saw a strong growth in memberships, boosted by the Council elections which required membership to vote for nominated candidates. There has also been some movement in corporate memberships, but uptake has been slower than anticipated.

We end the year $37,756 short of the goal that I had set for the end of this financial year in respect of income from individual and corporate memberships, sponsorships, proceeds from MautiCon events and the trials project which will be launching next quarter.

With a year-end balance across all our accounts at Open Collective of $67,714.82 we can carry such a shortfall, but must continue to drive forward revenue-growth opportunities in the new year to ensure that we meet our goal of $205,370 income against a projected expenditure of $147,491.

The end of year balance of the relevant accounts is provided as follows for this year and the preceding two years for comparison - all amounts are in USD.

Account	Balance 31-12-2023	Balance 31-12-2022	Balance 31-12-2021
Main collective	55,454.68	11,084.85	13,336.85
Infrastructure working group	1,014.81	1,052.22	3,958.22
Marketplace initiative	391.23	293.31	260.67
MautiCon India	0.11
Mautic Meetup Valencia	217.01
Community Team	167.64	144	2088
Bounties	3,600
Next Generation	1,212.39	1212.03	1000
Education Team	0.61
Builders initiative	1,225	0	0
Developer Days event	16.27
Marketing team	1,224.01	2103	3235
LATAM community	382.84
Product Team	379.92	2689.92
Install/Upgrade initiative	428.3	428.3	428.3
Resource management initiative	1,000	1000	1000
Composer initiative	1,000	1000	1000
Season of Docs 22		7799.22
MautiCon Europe			1009.06
MautiCon Global 22			4875
Total cash at bank	67,714.82	28,806.85	26,307.04

Several of the accounts (for example team projects) have positive funds which were not spent from the previous year's budget. These will be factored into any future budget requests accordingly.

Income

This month is the last month for Acquia's monthly financial support, and we also signed a new Bronze sponsor this month. An invoice was also raised for a Diamond sponsor at the end of the year, which will be paid in the new year.

There was a strong growth in individual memberships, which was largely driven by the Council elections requiring membership to vote for the nominated candidates.

We continue to have some income from regular monthly sponsorships which is much appreciated, and this month Mautic Meetup Valencia signed their first sponsor of the monthly meetups.

Description	Amount
Corporate membership	$11,200
Sponsors	$815
Individual membership	$760
Meetup sponsor	$100

Expenditure

This month we have incurred costs for the upcoming Mautic Conference India event which needed paying upfront and will be recouped via sponsorship and ticket sales. Other costs remain stable.

Description	Amount
Employment (November)	$8,685.28
MautiCon India venue	$2,332.82
Host fee	$1,287.50
Infrastructure	$343.15
Sessionize license (50% off)	$249.50
Postage	$4.08

Contributions

Kudos to these organizations that are taking Mautic to great heights and driving our growth! All set to delve into the numbers?

Let's take a look at the statistics from the last 90 days: Mautic | Last 90 Days

You can now view this month’s report here: Mautic | Monthly Report for December 2023

⬆️ = Increase from last month
⬇️ = Decrease from last month

Organizations

Most active companies

rectorphp 246 (⬆️ 602.86%)
Axelerant 145
Leuchtfeuer Digital Marketing 144 (⬆️ 89.47%)
Acquia 118 (⬆️ 57.33%)
PreviousNext 96
Webmecanik 83 (⬇️ 44.30%)
Dropsolid 48 (⬇️ 14.29%)
Friendly 37 (⬇️ 15.91%)
Codefive 23 (⬇️ 25.81%)
Sales Snap 20

Top contributing companies

Acquia 110 (⬆️ 243.75%)
rectorphp 96 (⬆️ 772.73%)
Leuchtfeuer Digital Marketing 22 (⬆️ 100%)
Webmecanik 18 (⬇️ 45.45%)
Dropsolid 8 (⬇️ 11.11%)
Comarch 7 (⬇️ 30%)
Friendly 3 (⬇️ 25%)
Bluespace 3
Axelerant 3
ip2location.com 2

Contributions are as defined here with the addition of Jira issues being closed as completed, GitHub Pull Request reviews and Knowledgebase articles being written or translated, which we track through Savannah’s API.

Want your organization to shine here? Start contributing now!

Individuals

A big thank you also to all the individuals who are helping us build this awesome community!

Most active contributors

Avinash Dalvi 286
Tomas Votruba 246
Surabhi Gokte 143
John Linhart 105
Rahul Shinde 97
Mohit Aghera 96
Anderson Eccel 82
Norman Pracht 47
Joey Keller 37
Zdeno Kuzmany 34

Top contributors

John Linhart 101
Tomas Votruba 96
Anderson Eccel 20
Zdeno Kuzmany 13
Artem Lopata 7
putzwasser 6
Patryk Gruszka 5
Patrick Jenkner 5
Rahul Shinde 5
Mike Van Hemelrijck 4

Welcome to our new contributors this month 💖

Anderson Eccel
Pablo Hörtner
Mike Van Hemelrijck
Prateek Jain
IP2Location

Top supporters

John Linhart 2
Joey Keller 1
Mike Van Hemelrijck 1
Ekke 1
Zdeno Kuzmany 1
Patrick Jenkner 1

Supporters are folks who have had conversations with people directly before they make a contribution, so most likely helping with that process.

This month we had 6 new contributors 🚀 (⬇️ 33%) and 57 new members joining the community !💖 (⬇️ 8%).

Usage of Mautic

We continue to see around 4,000 tracked downloads via mautic.org/download each quarter as detailed below. It's important to note that this does not represent all installs of Mautic - we have a good proportion of people who install Mautic via Composer, via a GitHub download, or simply re-use their base Mautic installer files.

We've had a slight drop in the number of installs of the API library this month via Composer, but a rising trend of Mautic installs which has almost doubled - as measured by the use of the mautic/core-lib package.

We continue to see strong growth in websites being deployed with Mautic tracking enabled, with over 5,200 being detected in Q4 2023. This represents over a 120% increase compared with Q4 2022.

Indeed, when we consider the number of domains with active Mautic tracking, we see just short of a 100% increase between Q4 2022 and Q4 2023 (from 19,531 to 38,801).

We're also seeing continued growth in GitHub star count tracking above the projected trendline, which is promising, especially when you consider Mautic's growth against other open source projects.

Community Health

December has been a quiet month in the Community, with many people celebrating the various festivals around the world, from Hanukkah to the Winter Solstice and Christmas.

As a result, we saw less new community members and contributors this month, which is a common occurrence each year.

We did, however, have a dramatic rise in the number of contributions in December, up from around 130 per month over the last quarter to a staggering 351 in December! A vast number of these contributions are from people who are helping us with testing new features and bug fixes in the Mautic 5.0 Release Candidate, and also a big thanks to Tomas Votruba from Rector who contributed a stunning 96 pull requests to help update and improve Mautic's codebase.

Something we are monitoring closely is the drop-off in numbers on our Google Analytics properties - this could be associated with the switch to Google Analytics v4. Prior to Q3 2023 we averaged around 120,000 visitors per quarter, but recently this has dropped to around 80,000, The marketing team will dig into this in more detail.

Conclusion

Overall, December has been a quiet month with many people taking time off over to celebrate festivities. Despite this there has been a tremendous amount of work getting ready for the Mautic 5.0 release next month, with many improvements and bug fixes being tested and merged super efficiently by the core team.

While we are financially not quite at the place where we wanted to be, we have made significant progress since becoming an independent project and I take heart from the growth in number of memberships being taken out, that we're on the right track.

Going forward this will continue to be a focus into the coming year, to ensure that we can stay afloat without the generous seed funding that Acquia provided us during this transitional phase.

RUNNING OUR FIRST IN-PERSON EVENT IN COVID TIMES

Ruth Cheesley — Fri, 19 Nov 2021 10:21:24 +0000

Today I am just heading home from a really wonderful few days full of energy, excitement, collaboration and enthusiasm like I haven’t seen in several years.

The Mautic Community came together this week in Hasselt, Belgium for our first ever in-person conference, Mautic Conference Europe.

We had one previous in person event back in 2019 directly after the acquisition of Mautic Inc. by Acquia where we were just setting up our governance models and starting work on Mautic 3, and then the pandemic hit.

Since then, everything we have organised has had to be virtual, and while it’s better than nothing it simply does not (in my opinion) replace the in-person event in open source communities.

In open source, most of the folks involved are volunteers who are contributing because they love the product, the community, but most importantly the relationships we build when we get to know each other. That simply does not happen in the same way as with virtual conferences and sprints.

We also found over the last few days that contributions are super-charged during in person events, because folks are all sitting in a room together and can get help quickly. Also most folk were able to step away from their ‘real’ work and other commitments for the majority of the two days, without being distracted - not always possible to do when you’re at home or in the office!

Planning the event

Of course given the situation in regards to the coronavirus pandemic, it was a big decision to go ahead with an in-person event. We purposely focus on inviting the local community for these events, but naturally because our community is worldwide, often we have folks coming from all over the world.

How do you balance needing to put in place precautions to keep people safe, with facilitating building those all important relationships and also acknowledging the free choice of the individual when it comes to things like vaccinations?

We decided to adopt the requirements to enter the country as our basic mandatory requirements to attend the event, which included:

Being fully vaccinated; OR
Having proof of a negative PCR test no more than 72 hours before arriving in the country

It would be sensible to make sure you know the requirements for any country you are planning an event in, and keep up to date with the changes on those requirements.

Top tip: I used changetower.com to track changes on the main pages from the Belgian government relating to covid-19 travel requirements. This allowed me to get a daily notification of any changes that had been made and communicate this out to the attendees and team.

We did also struggle with folk who needed to get a visa to attend - two were declined citing that there wasn't a good enough justification for travelling - so that's something to bear in mind if you have international speakers.

During the event

We decided to make it mandatory for every attendee to take a rapid antigen (lateral flow) test each morning of the event as further reassurance. We asked people to bring their own tests, but most did not - an additional cost we were not expecting but probably should have planned for!

During the event, masks were required when moving around the venue and in any public spaces, but not during the actual conference and sprints themselves when seated and working together.

We also had alcohol hand gel throughout the venues and people were encouraged to ensure they were using it regularly.

We offered attendees the opportunity to show with the colour of their lanyard how comfortable they were with physical contact:

Green: All good
Orange: Happy to shake hands but no closer please!
Red: Please keep 2m apart (but we can still chat!)

While the vast majority of attendees chose a green lanyard, with a few choosing orange, I feel that this was a very helpful way to give people the ability to share their own comfort level with physical closeness without the awkwardness of having to pull back from over-enthusiastic huggers!

We hypothesised that most folks attending are probably comfortable with close contact, whereas those who are not were probably not ready to attend in-person events at this point.

The conference centre we chose had a maximum capacity of 70, and we were planning for 50. We ended up having about 30 attendees, which meant that we were able to be quite spaced out in the auditorium and the plaza area (where lunch and breaks took place) without too much difficulty.

Community Sprint

Following the main conference we organised a Community Sprint and a Leadership Team Summit - both of which were hybrid, in that people could join us virtually via Slack and video call.

In retrospect we could have held the main event as a hybrid event, however it simply came down to the matter of resources. We did not have enough volunteers to help us with putting on a hybrid event, so we chose to focus just on the in-person experience.

The community sprint, however, was fully open to anyone. We had a great range of participation from people working on a pitch deck to help agencies and individuals with pitching Mautic, to developers working on reviewing, testing and adding automated tests to features and bug fixes which were in our backlog, through to the education team working on documentation resources and the community team putting together a blueprint for how to run contribution events in local communities.

It was great to see people really excited and inspired to contribute, and to see the phenomenal momentum that was generated as a result.

We organised this by creating a Miro board for each team. This enabled the team leads to identify key tasks that people could pick up and work on during the day, while allowing everyone to see in real time where the tasks were in the workflow and which ones needed working on.

It also served as a record of what had been accomplished by each team when we did our round-up at the end of the day.

Lunch was - of course - an epic pizza order!

Evening socials

We organised some informal social gatherings on the evenings where people were going to be in Hasselt, at various venues nearby the hotel where the team and speakers were staying. We found some really fantastic venues who were great at catering to an international audience with varying dietary requirements.

In Belgium there is a requirement for visiting restaurants or cafes to have a QR code which can be scanned (locally it is called the Covidsafe app) to show you’re fully vaccinated or have a negative PCR test result - this caused a problem for a few people who did not have a scannable vaccine record. Most people had no problems at all with their codes being scanned from all over the world - the app recognised them all without any problems.

Some places the folks who didn’t have a QR code to be scanned were allowed to enter, some they were not - there didn’t seem to be much in the way of rationale behind whether they were or were not allowed in. We were also required to provide some form of ID (e.g. a passport, drivers license) to accompany the vaccine or PCR test record to ensure you were the person who the vaccine/test record relates to.

Conclusion

All in all, we had a really awesome event and I feel that we took all the precautions that we could to ensure that our attendees' health and safety were front and centre. It was a bit of a novelty to do the covid tests each morning, but I am glad that we enforced that requirement as an additional safety check.

Everybody who attended really enjoyed the event and gained a lot from coming together in person. We certainly gained a lot as a community from the opportunity to sit around a table together and work through things.

We were fortunate in that we didn't have anybody experiencing covid-related symptoms during the event, or any confirmed positive tests. I would suggest that as an event organiser, you need to think about what you would do if someone were to test positive, and have plans to deal with that situation - especially if they were a speaker or a member of your team.

This was originally posted at https://www.ruthcheesley.co.uk/blog/mautic/running-our-first-in-person-event-in-covid-times

Organising digital events in the Mautic Community

Ruth Cheesley — Sun, 31 Oct 2021 16:28:19 +0000

Rewind just over two years and we were about to organise our first ever Mautic World Conference - MautiCon for short - at Acquia's head office in Boston. Then came the global pandemic, and two years of varying lockdown levels, forcing many communities to pivot unexpectedly from the in-person events which are the lifeblood of an Open Source community to finding a way to digitise these events.

In the Mautic Community, we had never organised an in-person event, let alone a digital event, so it was definitely breaking new ground!

Having now run two successful events, I have promised several folks to write up how we did it....so herewith the long overdue writeup!

Collaboration

From the start, we decided to keep everything we did - from recordings of calls to notes, research, contracts, marketing comms and design files - in a shared Google Drive folder. This meant that we could always find the information we needed, and made it simple to create the next event because all the information from the previous year was easily accessible. We met fortnightly until around two months before the event when we switched to weekly meetings.

We used a Jira project to work in two-weekly sprints, identifying tasks that needed to be done and assigning them to people in our working groups. This had varying success, as sometimes we would forget to update the board or would end up working on things which weren't on the Jira board....it takes discipline to keep things moving forward effectively!

Design

As a team of folks distributed around the world, we needed to find a way to work on the design elements for our events collaboratively, and using a tool which was simple to understand for non-designers. We settled on using Canva and sharing any elements which needed to be created outside of Canva in our Google Drive folder. This allowed us to quickly remix projects that someone else had used, and to create images using the appropriate sizes for the different social networks.

Call for speakers

We had several discussions about the call for speakers process and what tools to use, but ultimately we decided to go with a commercial tool because it provided so many features that would reduce our workload and improve the experience for speakers and attendees.

Sessionize is a well-known and respected platform for managing Call for Papers, and also allows you to manage the schedule, embed the schedule/speakers in your website, and provides a PWA mobile application. Free / low budget community events can also apply for a community license which gives a 50% discount.

The value this brought to our events far exceeded the cost of the tool!

For both events, we managed the CFP through Sessionize, and used their web embeds to display speakers, schedules and filtered lists of tracks.

The mobile application was also extremely helpful during the event - it allowed you to see what was happening in your own timezone, see where you were in the schedule at that point in time, and during the second event we were able to provide direct links into the specific room where a session was happening so that attendees could jump straight into the room.

Far and away the biggest plus side for me was that we didn't have to duplicate the work of creating the schedule and speakers on our website. Sessionize was the single source of truth, and we used that for any changes to the lineup or the schedule, which was immediately reproduced on our website.

Platform

Probably the most important thing to consider when organising a digital event is the platform that you're going to use for the event. Early on in the lockdown I also had to find a way to pivot East Anglia's largest B2B exhibition, the Anglia Business Exhibition, to a simple showcase event in a digital format with only a month's notice.

For that event, the primary requirement was providing pre-recorded and live sessions which people could watch, but there wasn't really a need for much more than that. For this purpose, HeySummit was perfect (in the years since they have added a whole load more features, and it's still a pretty awesome platform to use!)

For Mautic, however, we wanted to offer a much more community-based event with the opportunity for 121 and group networking, and we also needed to be able to give our sponsors a way to engage with attendees. Another plus was if there was an open source angle - for example an open source version of the software and/or a company which supported open source.

Our research led us to discovering Veertly, which provided an open source and hosted event platform. It ticked pretty much all of our boxes, except for being able to sell event tickets through the platform and a lack of room-specific chat. We also considered Remo and Airmeet, but aside from the lack of open source roots, they also weren't quite at the level we needed when it came to features - both have evolved over the last couple of years so are well worth checking out. We also checked out the popular Hopin platform but the pricing was far too high for what we could afford at the time for the events we were organising.

Ticketing

At this point, we had no financial autonomy as a community at all - everything was funded through Acquia. In order for us to run an event like Mautic Conference Global, we really needed to have our own financial systems which were transparent to the community and enabled us to manage our own budget.

Open Collective

At this point we discovered Open Collective, which also had the facility for collectives to host events as fundraisers. I won't go into Open Collective in this post - more on that in another post - but suffice it to say this worked really well for us.

Another great bonus for us was being able to offer the tickets on a 'give what you can' basis. As a Buddhist, dana (generosity) is one of my central principles and I also am well aware that for many, high event fees prevent people from attending events - we wanted our global events to be accessible to the widest possible audience. For this reason we decided to set the minimum ticket price at $5 (with an option for people to contact us for a free ticket if the cost was a problem) and allow people to make their own decision about how much they paid, with a recommended ticket price of $20. Open Collective allowed us to do this, which was a great bonus and much appreciated by our attendees.

We also offered various sponsorship tiers which were managed through the same interface, so the money came straight into our Open Collective account (minus the fees charged to use the platform).

Pros of using Open Collective

The plus side of using Open Collective is that all of the transactions are shown publicly for all to see. Personal information (for example individual invoices or bank account information) is redacted from public view and only accessible by administrators, but the bulk of the information can be accessed by anybody.

This greatly improves trust, and also holds the event team accountable for the spending of their budget. No more having to produce laborious reports at the end of the event - everything is there for all to see.

The balance is also transferrable back to the main Collective once the event is finished, with the funds being instantly available after transfer.

Cons of using Open Collective

The big down side of using Open Collective was the lack of customisation of the ticketing form.

Individuals and organisations can purchase one ticket for $100, or 10 tickets for $10, but only one contact point is provided. Also, with organisations, the contact point was often not the person/s who were going to be using the ticket. It also wasn't possible to get the email address of organisations purchasing tickets via the API at all.

This was problematic for several reasons:

With a digital event we needed to create an individual access link for each person to attend
We needed to push these users into our email communication processes
We needed to send each person a swag coupon as part of their event swag
With people buying multiple tickets in one transaction we didn't know how many tickets were being purchased

In the first year of running the event, this resulted in a somewhat comical process of having to manually export from the transactions list any new registrations and cross-reference them with a Metabase table which the team at Open Collective made available to us in order to determine the point of contact. We then had to manually email any multiple ticket or organisation purchases and ask for the details of the people attending, and manually send them the relevant information. We also had to manually upload the list of attendees to Veertly, manually copy the attendee link, and manually email the attendees with their access link.

You can imagine the overhead this resulted in with 300+ attendees - for this reason we had to close ticket sales when the event started because we simply could not maintain this process while the event was underway. At this point, Veertly did not have a Zapier integration, and there was little else we could do to automate any of this workflow as a result.

In our second iteration there was a small improvement - the 'private instructions' field which shows after a ticket is purchased and on the email the user received. This allowed us to push the user over to a 'ticket claim form' hosted on our new Mautic instance. Also Veertly developed a Zapier integration. This meant that the second time, we were able to automate much of the process using Zapier.

Live chat

During the first event, one of the main things that attendees complained about was the lack of a room-specific live chat where they could ask questions. By the time of our second event, there still wasn't a live chat functionality, so we needed to find a way to provide this.

Dead Simple Chat is exactly what it says on the tin. A super lightweight and simple live chat system which can be embedded within other tools. It also allows you to pay for an upgraded service for a month without any long term commitment, perfect for running events. Veertly has the ability to display web applications within the rooms using a simple URL-based embed system and Dead Simple Chat allowed you to embed the chat rooms with a URL. Sounds like a perfect match!

The one thing we struggled with was finding a way to identify the attendees without them needing to create an account with Dead Simple Chat - ideally they should be authenticated by their existing Veertly session. To accomplish this, the team at Veertly introduced a neat feature which allows you to push user information from the logged in session into the URL of the embedded item - in our case, first and last name. Dead Simple Chat allows us to to use the information to assume that as the identity of the user. Perfect!

We embedded a separate chat room in each Veertly room, including the sponsor booths.

The next challenge was how to moderate these rooms as they were effectively distinct rooms, and it wasn't practical for our moderators to be hopping in and out of rooms all the time. Veertly prevents you from having the application open in more than one location, so that wasn't really an option.

To allow our moderator team to have an overview of chat across the whole platform, we created a Mautic landing page and embedded each of the chat rooms in a separate column, side by side.

This allowed the moderators to see what was happening in each of the rooms, hop in and deal with any incidents, and still be following a track within the event platform. Sure, it was a little bit clunky, but a great improvement on the previous year's experience and on the whole, worked really well.

Zapier

Zapier (and other open source alternatives like n8n) are such an awesome resource if you're using tools which aren't natively connected with each other. For the second iteration of Mautic Conference Global we made extensive use of Zapier to:

Push contacts from the ticket claim form (Mautic) into Veertly as a new attendee
Pull the access link from Veertly and push it into a custom field in Mautic so that we could send the event access email
Pull a Spreadshirt code from a Google Sheet into Mautic when the attendee filled in a swag claim form to specify their region for delivery
Push an update to the Google Sheet when the code had been emailed out to the attendee and was therefore considered redeemed
Push Streamyard access codes from an email inbox into Slack when our track moderators were logging in (so they didn't all need access to the inbox)

This immensely improved our workflows and resulted in a dramatic reduction in the overheads associated with the ticket sales process.

Mautic

Of course, we had to make use of Mautic once we got our new instance set up and migrated over to Acquia's Campaign Studio (a hosted instance of Mautic).

There were several ways we made use of Mautic during the second iteration of our event:

General event marketing
Providing a landing page for attendees to 'claim' the ticket (to address the shortcomings of the Open Collective ticket signup)
Send the email to the attendee with their access link (pulled from Veertly by Zapier and stored in a custom field)
Consent the attendee to receive (or not) other information from the Mautic Community
Send mailshots from our sponsors
Manage speaker communications including proactively contacting speakers who had not submitted their pre-recorded videos after the specified date
Provide a landing page for attendees to claim a free swag coupon (we needed to know which region they were located in to supply the correct gift card)
Automate the sending of gift card codes
Popups/info bars and modals to make the community aware of the event and encourage them to sign up for the events

Streamyard

Veertly has a built-in Streamyard integration, but only for the main stage. In our event, we were running several tracks in parallel and didn't actually use the main stage at all. We didn't want there to be one stage which was more important than others. This meant we had to use their 'rooms' facility to create our stages.

While you can have a Jitsi video call for the room, this would mean that all attendees would be able to join the call, which isn't really what you want with presentations.

We decided to use Veertly's RTMP streaming capability, and have the sessions managed from Streamyard.

As we were running up to six tracks in parallel during the event, this meant having six different RTMP streams, and six different Streamyard accounts. We accomplished this using unique email addresses on the same mailbox - mauticon+1@mautic.org for track 1, and so forth, and pushing the access codes into our Slack instance in a threaded message via Zapier. This enabled our track leads to access the code so that they could log into the appropriate account at the appropriate time. We did need to upgrade our Zapier account to ensure these came through in a timely manner, as the lower tier would only fire every 15 minutes which was too long when the event was in session.

Challenges with Streamyard

The downside of Streamyard was that the total recording time available was less than the total session time for the track. This meant we had to create different broadcasts for the morning, afternoon and evening sessions, and the broadcast had to start at the beginning and finish at the end of that time slot. If someone inadvertently ended a broadcast prematurely (easily done due to the position of the end broadcast button!) we had to re-issue invitation links to all subsequent speakers in that time slot.

Another issue that we faced was using pre-recorded videos. At the time of our first event, it wasn't possible to upload these to Streamyard, so we had to post them to an unlisted YouTube channel and have the track lead play the video in the browser. A couple of challenges were faced - firstly remembering to check the button for sharing audio on the screenshare, and secondly that the hosts needed to have pretty fast internet connections to ensure smooth playing of the videos.

The second year we used this system, the videos could be uploaded to Streamyard in advance, so this reduced the errors and made it much easier for the track leads to play the videos. We did still experience some problems with the track lead or speaker's internet connections being unstable despite them being on a wired connection.

Streaming to YouTube

To get around the recording limitations, and to have a backup source of recordings, we streamed to private streams on YouTube. This meant that we had a backup for the full session recording outside of StreamYard which had no time limitations - if a broadcast happened to go over the limit for Streamyard recording, it would still be captured on the YouTube recording. All of our published recordings ended up coming from the YouTube recordings.

Swag

Any event is incomplete without some kind of goodies for the attendees, and we wanted to be able to offer something for our events - especially because getting the Mautic brand out into the world is quite a high priority for us at this time. Being a worldwide distributed community with a relatively low budget, shipping physical swag out to attendees was cost prohibitive, so we had to get a bit creative.

For some time we have had a Spreadshirt swag shop, where people could purchase their own Mautic swag with commissions coming back to the Mautic Community from each purchase. Our solution for our digital events was to provide an event-branded design on our swag shops, so that people could choose what they wanted to buy. We purchased in-bulk gift cards to give away to attendees, but Spreadshirt like many companies locks the gift cards to a specific region.

To get around this challenge, as we didn't ask for region in the ticket claim forms, we sent an email to confirmed attendees asking them to claim their swag codes. They filled out a simple form telling us which geographic region they wished to have the swag delivered to, and we sent them a coupon for the appropriate region.

This was automated using a Google Sheet which had one column for region, and one for the code. When the code was claimed, Zapier searched for the next row which contained the region name, and then pulled out the relevant code. It then pushed this code into a custom field in Mautic and triggered an email to be sent when that field was no longer empty, containing their unique code.

After the code had been emailed to the attendee, the spreadsheet was updated to prefix 'USED-' in front of the region and the code so that they couldn't be issued twice. We also entered the email address of the person claiming the code next to the code, so that people couldn't use the same email address to claim more than once.

Aside from a couple of folks picking the wrong region, and a rather slow process of Spreadshirt issuing the codes meaning that we had run out of codes at one point, the process worked well.

Multilingual tracks

Speaking in front of your peers in a language which is not your native language is a huge thing - I am constantly in awe of the many folks who do this. Many events assume that everybody in their community will be able to follow sessions in English without translation, which in my opinion is excluding a lot of people who could otherwise benefit from the event and/or share their amazing knowledge.

As a worldwide community, I really wanted us to enable our community members to give sessions in their native language if they preferred to do so - in some cases in addition to delivering it in English at a different time in the schedule. During our first conference, we tried to chunk these together in sections of regular tracks which didn't work all that well for the users. The track had been in English in the morning, and when they returned in the afternoon, it was in German. Confusing, eh!

For our second event we decided to make one track fully international throughout the event, and empower our community to work together and come up with at least three sessions and someone who was willing to be the track lead if they wanted to have sessions in their language. This worked much better, because it was clear to attendees that all tracks in the international track would be non-English. It also meant that we could chunk the sessions in a time that worked best for the timezone of the speakers. For example, we had a full morning of sessions in Japanese, along with sessions in Hungarian, German, Spanish and Portuguese.

I feel this was one of the higlights of the event and was really appreciated by the folks from those communities. We'll definitely continue to offer this in our global conferences going forward, and I hope that we might even have entire tracks for specific languages. A key learning, however, was that you need to have someone in the session review panel who speaks the language for the sessions you're accepting - otherwise it can be difficult to review the sessions and select the appropriate ones for the event.

Timezones, timezones, timezones!

Running an event for an international community can create timezone chaos! Organising the schedule was probably the most challenging, trying to make sure that we were putting sessions in the schedule at a time that was going to work for the speaker. Our first event was one very long day, which the organising team found pretty exhausting.

For the second event, to better facilitate timezones, we decided to start the first day earlier in the morning and finish early afternoon, and have a second day which started late morning and ran into the evening. While this did extend the event over two days, we feel it made things a little easier for the team - who had time to rest! - and for speakers to be accommodated at an appropriate time.

It did mean we had some gaps in the schedule as a couple of speakers pulled out at short notice and some times were more difficult to fill than others, but generally speaking it worked pretty well. The event app from Sessionize also allowed people to view the timings in their own timezone, along with the embedded schedules. This caused some confusion to start with until we made it clear on the website that the timings would show at the time of the browser, rather than the event, but we would always communicate timings using UTC.

I also strongly recommend using something like everytimezone.com when you are communicating with speakers about timings, and providing them with calendar holds (which Sessionize now does automatically).

Conclusion

It certainly hasn't been an easy process running these events digitally, and has taken quite some work to bring together all the moving parts that we needed in order to create the experiences we needed for our community. I hope that some of the above will be helpful for people who are also faced with organising digital events - although some of the workarounds were somewhat hacky they did work pretty well in the second year! Going forward, we're considering our options as several event platforms have now made significant improvements. For sure one area that was very sub-par in our previous events has been the sponsors booths, so I am hopeful we will be able to provide a more impactful experience for our sponsors in our next digital events!

If you want to come along to our events, keep an eye on https://mauticon.mautic.org