Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley)

New site, new me?

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Well, I’ve been ‘on the web’ since the early 90’s when my school IT teacher had to remind me I had a home to go to (and my mother made me get a job to pay the dial-up internet bills!) but I never got around to creating a proper website for myself.

I have a personal blog where I mostly talk about Buddhist stuff, but after attending #kpiday I realised I really needed to create a site to tell people who I am, what I do, and what I’m interested in. So, here it is!

The meditation challenge!

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

As you may know, I’m Buddhist and am training for ordination in the Triratna Buddhist Order - quite a long process! I see my work as part of my practice and this is the main reason why my company Virya Technologies is run along ethical principles. Just recently my study group have started a module which involves learning and developing a particular meditation practice known as the Brahma Viharas.

The Brahma Viharas

The Brahma Vihara meditation practices includes four different meditations which focus on:

Loving kindness
Compassion
Sympathetic joy
Equanimity

I’ve struggled for years to establish a daily practice, and running a business doesn’t help things as I am constantly on the go and have to ‘hold’ a lot of balls in the air at the same time … and if you hadn’t noticed I’m also pretty good at making excuses for why I can’t commit to a regular meditation practice! ;)

Establishing a daily practice

When we started this module I was keen to make a determined effort to commit to developing a daily practice, and as a result I inadvertently inspired several friends along the way to create a six week meditation challenge! We’re all reporting in each day on how we’re getting on and supporting each other. Peer pressure huh!

So, how does this help me in business?

I’ve found that giving myself the space to meditate means that I am valuing how important it is that I can maintain a clear mind and not become consumed by all the things buzzing about all the time. Meditation is helping me to develop my awareness of and ability to put into practice not only on the subjects we’re studying (loving kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy and equanimity), but also general kindness, awareness of the people I work with, and kindness for myself.

I’m finding that I am becoming aware of when I am not really listening to somebody trying to communicate with me (because I’m trying to multi-task on steroids most of the time!) and am doing something about that - stopping the other things I’m doing and listening, or asking them if we can talk about it when I have finished what I am doing.

The sympathetic joy aspect has been most evident when hearing about some of my business contacts enjoying great successes - previously my responses would have been tinged with jealously, perhaps a bit of envy that they have achieved success and I’m still struggling on - whereas now I am turning that response much more towards a genuinely positive feeling of joy for them, and wow! What a difference it makes to the way I feel, and interact with them! I feel so much more open hearted and genuine!

How can you encourage me?!

Everyone needs a bit of encouragement sometimes, so please do poke me on Twitter, Ecademy or LinkedIn if you’ve not heard me talking about meditation recently … chances are I could do with a nudge! I often use the Insight Meditation programme on my phone, which auto-tweets when I complete a meditation as well! We’re just over half way through and so far I’ve done really well aside from a couple of trips out to Holland and London where it’s not been practical to meditate, during which I listened to talks or read material instead!

When things go wrong - tips for dealing with clients who have had a bad experience

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Sun, 22 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I don’t often work as a contractor on ODesk, mainly because when competing against thousands of other developers from other parts of the world who are charging $5 per hour or less, it is difficult to either be awarded a contract in the first place, and to work for an hourly rate which matches your skills and experience.

I came across a job posting recently which I felt compelled to apply for - someone who was at the point of dropping Joomla! due to the awful experiences they had with another contractor and was looking for a ‘last chance’ developer to rescue their site.

The job posting stated they wanted someone from Australia (as they are an Australian company) but I applied anyway explaining my background and how I thought I could help them. The job involved customising an extension which we have used quite a bit - Joombah Jobs - so I had a bit of a head-start as I’m already fairly familiar with the system. They hired me for the job, and I could immediately see why there had been problems - the site was being developed in an outdated version of Joomla!, the template was poorly coded, and the customisations they needed to meet their business needs had not even been attempted.

Right speech - a challenge at times!

It’s quite a tough role to play when someone has had such a traumatic experience, of course you want to make sure that you don’t repeat that experience but I also have to be reminded frequently of the precept I find hardest … right speech! This means not engaging in berating the previous developer which is quite challenging at times, especially when your employer initiates that kind of conversation! Ultimately, I’ve had jobs that have gone wrong, overrun significantly, haven’t met deadlines - it happens. I don’t know what was going on for that person or whether the story I hear from the client is the whole story, but it is terribly tempting to play that out to my own benefit (look how great I am, I’m not like that). This goes against the speech precept as you are (intentionally or not) inflicting harm on that person, speaking harshly about them, and probably not being particularly mindful of the situation.

Honesty is the way forward

I’ve found that in this situation the best way forward is complete honesty. Even if it means that the client is going to have to invest a significant amount to put right what was wrong or finish what hadn’t been started - it’s better to lay things out clearly so that they can make an informed decision whether to proceed. I try to remember that actually, I wasn’t the person who caused the problem but I have been asked to see if I can fix it, and I need to clearly explain what needs to be done to fix the problem.

Of course, this means letting go of the fact that you might as a result lose that job, if they decide to ditch it all together. On the flip side, you might also be respected for the honesty and for your knowledge, and be asked to carry out the work - which is what happened in this situation.

Clarify, clarify, clarify!

It’s important to remember that many clients are totally outside their comfort zone when hiring a website developer - most of them do not have an in-depth knowledge of website design and many are not particularly great at getting their vision for their site over to someone else - it is very easy to get the wrong end of the stick, especially if there is a language difference somewhere in the equation. Add to this someone who has already had a bad experience where something has gone wrong, whether it be their fault or the contractors, there is the potential for a repeat occurrence.

I can’t emphasis enough the importance of clarity in communication and having an open channel to clarify anything you are not sure of. I don’t mean that you can call them at 4am to ask what colour a heading should be, but you should both be able to question, clarify, and communicate freely. Personally I find that Skype is great for this, and if you need to screen share you can use TeamViewer which works cross-OS so shouldn’t be a problem on Mac/Linux/Windows/mobile/etc.

Don’t forget the time-zones

It is also important to bear in mind time-zones if you are working with clients on the other side of the world - you might need to adjust your working hours to accommodate for that. I use Kubuntu and I have several clocks on the right of my desktop which show the time-zones of the various clients I’m working with so that I know when I can expect a dialogue. Skype also helpfully tells you the local time for your contact when you open a chat dialogue. My Gmail also has a labs widget to tell me the local time of the person so that is also quite helpful! It’s all about awareness at the end of the day!

Ask for regular feedback

As the client has had a bad experience previously, I would always suggest asking for regular feedback - get them to check and sign off each major task you do for them, and ask if there is anything else that could improve it. Make sure that they are happy with the work you’re doing and provide a channel for any potential problems to be dealt with quickly. Also, have the courtesy to tell your client if you are not available for any extended period of time (generally I would advise if I am not going to be able to work for more than a day) - otherwise they are likely to go into a tailspin if they’re trying to contact you and you’re not responding because you’re at Great Aunt Mabel’s for her 90th birthday party in Spain and don’t have Internet connection. I made this mistake once by saying I was going to be away for a day, but due to time-zones it turned out to be a day and a half, which unfortunately ended up with a really frustrated client. It doesn’t take two minutes to fire them an email or drop a message on Skype just to let them know, and apologise if it’s unplanned or means you’re going to miss a deadline. Things come up, and if you’re honest about it, they will usually be accommodating.

I hope that this helps people who are in the unenviable situation of dealing with clients who have had bad experiences before they come to you - I’m afraid this seems to be happening on an increasingly frequent basis which is resulting in a lot of people losing faith in Joomla! when in fact the developer or designer was at fault - here’s to putting that situation right!

It's just like riding a bike apparently ... #bikeweek

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Sun, 17 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

They say that a good boss should lead by example, so for the next week I am making a real effort to cycle into work each day, as part of ‘Bike Week’. Bike week is a nationwide week of focused activity promoting cycling - and specifically for folk who don’t do it much!

I didn’t even have a bike until last night as my old bike (a hand me down from my partner, who had it since he did paper rounds) became a rusty heap after a winter of working nightshifts at Royal Mail when I first started the business and didn’t oil it as recommended - after all who wants to do that at 5am!

Yesterday a friend of mine gave me her bike (used twice!) to see if it would suit me with a view to buying it. This morning I learned some new skills:

How to remove wheels from a bike (ask your much stronger partner to jump on the spanner if particularly stuck!)
How to remove a tyre and inner tube from the wheel
How to replace an inner tube and tyre (as one of the tyres had splits, so needed to be replaced)
How to adjust the brakes and make sure they are ‘toed-in’ and not catching on the wheel

Not sure how useful these will be as ‘life skills’ but certainly will be useful for the whole biking to work thing! Now, apparently they use that saying of ‘it’s just like riding a bike’ to refer to always being able to remember how to ride a bike once you’ve learned … here’s hoping that holds true for me tomorrow! Watch out streets of Ipswich, here I come!

Google+, Authorship and Personal Brands - it's not all about the ego!

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000

NOTE: This is now very outdated, and remains here as an archive only.

Or is it?

Months ago, having listened to what several high profile people were saying about the importance of developing your own personal brand, and becoming a Key Person of Influence (KPI) in your industry.

I set up this website as my own ‘Personal Brand’. In setting the site up, I had to really ask myself the question - am I doing this out of an ego-massage, or am I doing this because it’s important in my industry to be recognised for who and what I am, what I know, and how I can help people?

Ego is a big thing in Buddhism, as it is a clear way of seeing yourself as separate to other people, and of course to be thinking of being better than others - when in fact, this is the root of many issues, from being unkind to other people to international wars - but that’s a whole other blog post in itself!

When I set up this site, I wasn’t entirely convinced, but it did give me a place to tell people a bit about how I got to where I am now (trust me, I didn’t just wake up one morning and decide I wanted to be a web designer and run a business - I originally wanted to be a marine engineering officer in the Royal Navy!).

Recently, some changes in the way that Google uses Google+ profiles and hooks this up with data from around the web has made me really take a step back and go ‘Wow, so it really is happening!’. Over the past year I’ve been making a half-hearted attempt to rank in Google for the highly competitive term ‘Joomla Specialist’ - this is what I do, it’s what our company does, therefore it makes sense to want to rank well for it. Initially I didn’t rank in the top ten pages of search results, now I’m coming up on page 1 for ‘Joomla Specialist’ and ‘Joomla Specialist UK’ when logged out of Google Services - even higher if you’re already in my Google+ Circles.

Over the next few weeks I’ll be writing a few blogs on how I achieved this, what tools are available to help you rank well in search engines, and some little nuggets of information I’ve picked up along the way. I won’t be giving everything away though, as I’ll be speaking at the Joomla! World Conference in San Jose this November on Google+, Authorship and Microdata - I’d recommend anyone involved with Joomla! comes along!

Joomla! World Conference, San Jose - Talk on Microdata, Authorship and Google+

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Fri, 30 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I am fortunate to have recently returned from a couple of weeks out in America, where I was invited to speak at the first Joomla! World Conference in San Jose, California.

I submitted a few proposals, but the one which was selected was on the topic of Microdata, Authorship and Google+ - something I’m developing a real interest in.

Travelling half way across the world to attend a three day conference may seem a bit excessive, but when you’re as passionate about something as I am about Joomla! (as anyone who has spoken to me about the subject will attest!) and it’s the first event of its kind, it’s an opportunity not to be missed!

Virya Technologies are currently working with UK Trade and Investment on their Passport to Export scheme, to develop our export profile (government speak for ‘sell more stuff abroad’!) so we were able to access some funding to assist me in making this trip, which has been most appreciated.

I haven’t quite managed to get over the jet lag yet so I’ll make a more detailed summary post later, but for now if you’re interested in my slides you can view them below - the video should hopefully be available soon which I’ll embed in the forthcoming post.

https://speaking.ruthcheesley.co.uk/vxiFBF/microdata-authorship-and-joomla

Microdata as an extension to Semantic HTML (aka adding cool stuff to search listings)

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Sun, 16 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

NOTE: This article is quite outdated and remains here for archive purposes.

You may have noticed recently that extra bits of information have started appearing in search results, perhaps photos of the author, reviews of a product, maps showing the location of a store or links which allow you to jump to a certain location within a page.

This article will give a brief overview of how you can make some small changes to your website which may increase the chances of your links containing these extra pieces of information.

Computers are as thick as two short planks when it comes down to it, and rely on correct interpretation of data to function. Much effort has been put into developing the structure of how a website is laid out in order to allow for better interpretation of its content and hence identification of key information.

Clearly, it is of great benefit to a search engine to be able to quickly and accurately ascertain key facts about a webpage – who wrote it, what topics it is about, if it is an offer or a review and so forth in order to provide that information to the person searching.

Understanding Semantic HTML

Semantic HTML is a term often thrown around in web design circles without its meaning being understood. Semantics means:

“Of or relating to meaning, often in relation to language; the meaning or relationship of meanings of a sign or set of signs” Source: Wikipedia

When web developers talk about using ‘Semantic HTML’ they are referring to the use of HTML markup to add structure to the page, or perhaps to reinforce the structural meaning of a part of the page. On a basic level this might mean using classes, IDs and tags to reinforce what is contained within those tags, but Microdata takes this one step further.

At a basic level, we should already be using H1, H2, H3 etc to signify the structure of our headings and sub-headings on a page. We use paragraphs and line breaks to signify the structure of our text. If we have an unordered list (bullet points to the un-initiated) then we us the UL tag, if we have an ordered list (numbered list to the un-initiated) we use the OL tag.

I often used to use incorrect HTML markup to make text look pretty before I knew any better – for example I would use the heading tags to make text appear larger or bolder, or I would use the font size/colour options to make a heading look nice rather than change the CSS stylesheet - neither of these approaches provide useful semantic information about the content.

The lesson to learn here is that HTML controls what something means and its structure, whereas CSS controls how it looks. C. S. S. = Can’t Structure Stuff!

Why bother with Semantic HTML?

Semantic HTML adds an extra layer of understanding for the machines we’re expecting to interpret our code. It points them directly at what we want them to know about our content. General Joe-Public couldn’t give two hoots about whether you’ve got your heading tags in the right order, but a search engine spider certainly does!

Semantic HTML is

Helpful for accessibility as screen readers interpret your page as spiders do!
Clean and easy to read/follow when returning to your code
Search engine friendly – logically ordered with clear signposts about what the content contains

What is Microdata, RDFa, Opengraph and all that jazz?

Microdata, microformats, RDFa and Opengraph are all an expansion of semantic HTML. It is another way of structuring your site to actively shove content under the nose of search engine spiders and say ‘here, this is what you’re looking for!’ – in other words, adding the cool stuff to search engine results (if you do it properly!).

For example, imagine somebody is searching for ‘handbag sale’ – they’re probably looking for offers which companies have available for handbags. It is possible to tag your content with the microdata to identify that it relates to an offer - which would indicate to the search engine that this is probably a highly relevant link for the search terms used. If they added in a brand name, you could attach microdata relating to the product which specifies the brand (as well as a load of other information!).

The web world still hasn’t quite made up its mind which type of ‘expansion’ it wants to adopt as the industry standard (although whispers indicate that it’s leaning towards a version of RDF in the near future), so many sites are using all, in an attempt to placate all search engines and remove those which are deprecated over time. An example of this would be Ecademy – if you check out my profile you will notice the heavy use of semantic markup. Just last week W3C released a working draft on the implementation of RDFa in HTML4 and HTML5 – some light bedtime reading for the insomniacs among us! It is worth noting that Google currently recommends using Microdata (however whispers indicate this might change to a version of RDF in development, but existing microdata will continue to be accepted).

What changes can I make to improve my search engine listings?

Firstly, have a look at what you’ve got at the moment – you can do this either by going to view source, or you can run your page through the nifty ‘Rich Snippets Tool’ from Google (now called the Structured Data Query Tool) - note you can also run chunks of HTML through this tool.

Linking up places you contribute content

For example, if I run my Ecademy profile through the Rich Snippets tool, (note this is now known as the Structured Data Query Tool) I find that it shows me a Google search preview complete with my photo (which is drawn from my Google+ Profile - essential if you want to develop your author profile on the web). It also shows a link to my Author page and shows it as verified - meaning there is a reciprocal link between my Google+ page and my Ecademy page. On my Ecademy page I link to my G+ profile, on my G+ profile I have my Ecademy profile listed in the ‘I contribute to’ section. It also shows you other places where I am considered an author, or I contribute, which are linked to from this page - my Twitter feed for example.

If we then run my Google+ profile through the Rich Snippets tool, it shows other places where I am an author according to my G+ profile page. Authorship is becoming a really important part of Google search engine ranking position and is closely tied to Google+. I recommend you take a look at my earlier article on why you can’t afford to ignore Google+ to explore this further.

Adding in the extra data

It’s interesting to check out the guidelines on schema.org, RDFa/RDFa Lite and Microformats and apply them to your site by editing your templates or tweaking your overrides to include the extra data, and seeing how this affects what is returned by the Rich Snippets tool. Certainly within a few days of linking up my G+ account with other accounts I use, I noticed my profile image appearing on many of the links I have authored.

Conclusion

The importance of semantic structure in HTML is growing, and despite the fact that there is no ‘hard and fast’ accepted way to incorporate microdata into your website, there are several ways you can start to dip your toe into the deep ocean that is microdata, microformats and RDFa. Please do respond in the comments if you have any experiences with any of these approaches, it’s definitely something to watch closely!

Identify and recover from Google Panda and Penguin updates causing sites to disappear from Google

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Sun, 16 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

NOTE: This is now very outdated, and remains here as an archive only.

Google has been tweaking its algorithms (the systems it uses to identify how relevant it’s links are to the search terms entered) over the years, with a view to improving the user experience, and promoting results which are more relevant and abide by their recommended guidelines relating to search engine optimisation.

Recently there have been two major updates which have hit some sites particularly hard causing them to drop significantly in major search engines. This article will cover the Google update first seen in February 2011 and later rolled out internationally in August 2011 known as ‘Panda’ or ‘Farmer’, and the more recent Penguin update.

Why the updates?

Positioning in Google has become critical to business success, therefore it is hardly surprising that some will try to cheat the system, by finding ways to trick Google’s algorithms into thinking that their website is relevant to the search terms using a wide range of tactics, known as ‘grey hat’ or ‘black hat’ Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

Google has always tried to make sure that the most relevant content is served in response to search queries, and when it becomes aware of these ‘grey hat’ and ‘black hat’ tactics which are trying to falsely promote links, it takes measures to address this. It is always strongly recommended not to use these tactics, as although it might give short term gains, if you get penalised in the future it can be extremely challenging to recover from. In short, if it seems wrong or to be cheating, don’t bother!

It is also worth considering that if you rely on your search engine position for financial income, you must prioritise staying up to date with the latest developments in the world of search engine optimisation in order to avoid potentially catatrophic de-indexing if you’re found to be breaking or bending any of the guidelines. If you aren’t willing to keep up to date or don’t have time, pay somebody else to do this for you. Especially if your business depends on it!

What is the Panda update?

Panda was first rolled out in February 23 2011 which hit many sites very hard. It was perhaps one of the first Google updates that made people sit up and pay attention to Google’s recommended Best Practice guidelines, and realise that some widely used practices were actually going against these guidelines. Up to 12% of search results were impacted by this update, which is a very significant amount. Subsequent updates are being made to the original Panda update, which further refine the original algorithm updates.

Panda cracked down heavily on thin content (pages which don’t have relevant content of their own, but simply exist to push users to another resource - think landing pages, cloned sites, parked pages filled with adsense link, etc).

Also targeted were content farms, sites with high advert to content ratios (therefore more focused on revenue generation than serving relevant and useful content), and a range of other quality issues including duplicated content.

Panda hit Europe around April 2011, which for many business owners was the first time they had heard about Google algorithms updates.

The issue with this update was that your entire domain was penalised not just the offending pages - so your ‘bad’ pages will drag down your ‘good’ pages if you do nothing about it.

Who lost out?

An analysis by Sistrix makes for interesting reading. Some of the sites hit particularly hard include wisegeek.com, ezinearticles.com, associatedcontent.com and many more.

Most of the sites either focus in revenue generation from heavy use of intrusive advertising or are simply sites where people can post content which is often posted elsewhere and isn’t unique or adding value - some even scrape content from other sources.

Who gained?

Sites which focus on useful content with lower levels of advertising such as wikihow.com, answers.yahoo.com, ehow.com and more were promoted in rankings as a result of the Panda update.

What to do about it?

Doing nothing is simply not an option. Proactive, positive action is required to recover from both Panda and the subsequent Penguin updates. It will take time, money and effort. Recovery will most likely require a dramatic ‘re-examination’ of your marketing approach.

Search and destroy

Seek out and fix duplicated content using webmaster tools, majesticseseo, seomoz tools etc. this requires time and effort. Use canonical URLs (sh404 does this well) if there is duplicated content in your site.

Deal with poor content

Sort the wheat from the chaff - ditch thin content pages or expand upon them , it is harming your strong content pages. If you have poor content pages, some recommend that you drop them from your site and when Google Webmasters shows them 404ing and they drop from the index, 301 redirect them to a good (relevant) part of your site so you still benefit from the incoming links

Stop writing poor content!

Make the effort to write good content or bring in resources to do it for you.

Look for other issues

Sort out any issues raised by Webmasters tools while you are doing the rest of the work!

What is Penguin about?

The Penguin update was rolled out as the next major algorithm update since Panda, on 24th April 2012. Rather than addressing links which contained poor quality content, this algorithm update addressed sites which were not adhering to Google’s Best Practice guidelines relating to ‘spamming’ - whether this be through keyword stuffing, paying for inbound links, or artificially increasing traffic to a website. Google suggested that around 3% of links were affected by this update - significantly less than the earlier Panda update.

What about the over-optimisation penalty?

Of concern to many web designers is the much touted ‘over-optimisation’ penalty - targeting the over-use of keywords in anchor text, URL’s, inbound link anchor text and so forth. Google confirmed that this was targeting web spam rather than white-hat optimisation, so don’t start panicking about your nice sexy SEF URL’s too much yet!

What are link profiles and why should I worry?

Penguin predominantly addressed issues regarding the ‘profile’ of links coming into your website. Google deals with a serious amount of web pages, and does an incredible amount of analysis on the links between pages and between sites. It has developed algorithms to identify what it deems to be an ‘un-natural’ link profile. Some examples of what may be deemed to be an unnatural link profile might be:

Sponsored templates displaying a link to the creator’s website on every page
Paid-for links into your site
Poor quality reciprocal links (for example to sites which are unrelated to yours)
Link networks such as buildmyrank.com
Link farms (for example having a site which exists purely to push users to another site)
The Penguin update set out to address this issue, and de-indexed links from sites it deemed to have an un-natural link profile.

Ultimately, sites which have been affected by the Penguin update will have done something to artificially increase the traffic landing on their site, and Google’s response to this is at best simply to drop all its links for that domain or if you’re lucky, to disregard all the link value which was coming from the ‘un-natural’ sources.

Identify if you have a problem

You may well have warning messages waiting for you in your Google Webmasters account - even if you haven’t activated it yet. Log in and check your site profile, make sure you check out any issues it raises.

There are a range of tools which can be used to check out your inbound link profile, personally I prefer Majestic SEO but you can also check out Open Site Explorer. There is a really useful step-by-step guide on Mashable which takes you through how to identify bad links.

Deal with bad links

Once you have identified that you have a problem, you need to set about cleaning up the links which are causing you problems. This can be time consuming as it often requires contacting other webmasters or finding out how to remove yourself from link networks, but perseverence will be rewarded.

Reconsider your marketing strategy

Call it a marketing strategy, link building campaign, brand awareness, whatever you like. Whatever you have done to fall foul of Penguin needs to go. Personally I recommend starting with a completely clean slate. If you’re not sure where to start, bring in the help of a specialist. By specialist, I mean somebody who can prove they have resolved problems like this before at a strategic level and have demonstrable experience and references to back them up - not the people who email you from free email accounts claiming to be able to get you to page 1 of Google for 20$.

Focus on diverse incoming links from a wide range of sources which are natural. This will require a wide-ranging strategic approach to how you engage on the internet as a whole, and for some it can be a real mind-shift in the way of thinking about how marketing works.

Social engagement

Social media engagement is a developing market strategy which can have a strong impact on link building and traffic generation if used correctly - again, if you don’t know where to start, seek the advice of a specialist, preferably with experience in your field of work. Listening to your potential and existing clients and responding can also help build reputation and broaden your sphere of influence.

Don’t hide things!

Try not to conceal things - don’t hide your links behind a shortener, cloak your URL’s, and try to avoid un-natural ‘spammy’ anchor text on incoming links - you should be aiming for natural links which are written in the way that people would normally write, rather than the way for you to get the best SEO benefits. It doesn’t hurt to optimise, but not to the point of it becoming un-natural.

Consider your off-site link building strategy

Once you ‘get your own house in order’ you can start to go out to other sites and develop your off-site link building. Syndicating your content on other sites, writing press releases which are distributed via reputable PR portals, write guest posts on blogs which are relevant to your industry, and explore other opportunities for contributing such as Quora, Pinterest, LinkedIn and EConsultancy.

Conclusion

Recovery from Panda and Penguin is possible, but it takes time and resources - and in some cases a different way of approaching the design, development and marketing of your website and/or your ideas/products.

Good quality, unique content is becoming far more important than duplicated content across lots of different sources, and creating natural traffic sources is absolutely critical. Keep the quality high, manage distribution and get rid of poor quality content which may be damaging the rest of your site in order to move forward.

How secure is your Joomla! website? Top tips for business owners to ensure your site is safe

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Sun, 16 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

NOTE: This article is quite outdated and remains here for archive purposes.

Joomla! is fast becoming one of the most popular content management systems in the world, powering almost 3% of the web and exceeding 30 million downloads - the chances are during your day you probably browse at least one website using Joomla!

Many businesses rely on Joomla! for their web presence, but often business owners are not empowered to ensure that their website is being managed properly, or is up to date with the latest security patches. This article gives Joomla! website owners some simple tips to ensure that your website is up to date, and some tools to make that process easier!

Is your website using the latest secure version of Joomla!

The most fundamental task any owner of a Joomla! website must carry out is to keep the base Joomla! installation up to date. Like any software, bugs and security vulnerabilities are identified and fixed regularly, and a ‘patch’ will be released periodically to resolve these issues.

The Joomla! project has a Security Strike Team who are tasked with investigating and fixing security vulnerabilities, with patches for critical and high severity being released immediately, and other lower severity patches are released within the regular release cycle. Joomla! updates are generally widely publicised, on the Joomla! website, Facebook page, Twitter, and the Google+ Community.

There are two ways to find out what version of Joomla! you are using, both require you to log into the ‘back end’ of your Joomla! website (by visiting www.yoursite.com/administrator). If you can’t log in here (you will get a message saying you don’t have access) you don’t have an administrator level account, so you’ll need to speak to your developers.

There are several versions of Joomla!:

Joomla! 1.0.x - this has been deprecated for a very long time and is no longer supported in any way, but there are still websites using it (shame on you!). Generally denoted by a red stripe across the top of the page, you will find the version number at the bottom of the page. The latest stable version is 1.0.15.
Joomla! 1.5.x - this version has recently been deprecated so there are still a lot of websites using this version, however official support is being withdrawn and many extension developers are not supporting this version any longer. Denoted by a green stripe across the top of the page, you will find the version number near the top right of the page. The latest stable version to date is 1.5.26.
Joomla! 1.6.x and 1.7.x - these were short term releases which are no longer supported. Denoted by a blue stripe across the top of the page, the version number will be displayed at the bottom of the page. Update urgently, as there were several security vulnerabilities which were patched in the 1.7->2.5 update.
Joomla! 2.5.x - this is the current stable version of Joomla! and is denoted by a blue stripe across the top of the page. The version number will be displayed at the bottom of the page.

If you can’t see the version number, it is possible to visit the System Information page, which displays the Joomla! version number in addition to other information about your Joomla! installation and hosting environment.

How do I update?

Updating your site need not be a cause for concern, however it is important to back up your site first (see below). You can either download the patch files manually from the Joomla! website (in versions prior to 1.7.x) and upload these to your site using FTP, or you can use Admin Tools to update with a single click!

Should I migrate?

If you’re running Joomla! 1.0.x, 1.5.x, 1.6.x or 1.7.x you should be seriously considering migrating to the latest stable version of 2.5.x. The reason for this is that the Joomla! Security Strike Force only support the latest version, and many extensions are now unavailable for older versions of Joomla! - meaning that vulnerabilities and bugs which are identified will not be fixed for your version.

It is important to remember that migrating from 1.0.x to 1.5.x, or 1.5.x to any higher version requires a migration, and generally will require reinstalling your extensions, and adjusting or replacing your template with one which supports Joomla! 2.5.x. Unless you are experienced with Joomla! I would recommend you asking a specialist to carry out this work.

Are your extensions up to date?

Second only to maintaining Joomla! is the importance of keeping your extensions up to date. Many site compromises I deal with are due to vulnerable extensions rather than Joomla! itself - and in almost all cases the site owner has not applied patched provided by the extension developers.

If a vulnerable extension is identified and reported, it is tested by security experts and added to the Vulnerable Extensions List with details of the type of vulnerability and versions affected, alongside updates from the developers of the extension. Those displayed in red have not yet been resolved.

How do I update Joomla! extensions?

Updating extensions should be a case of simply installing the new version - in Joomla! 2.5.x and later you can automatically update extensions (if the extensions support it) via the update facility. Check first with the extension developer, as they generally provide upgrade recommendations. Remember to take a backup before you update, just in case any customisation has been done which needs to be re-applied after the update.

The best way to find out about new extension updates is to sign up for their mailing lists - most developers will send out an email whenever a new version is available.

Is your administrator portal publicly accessible?

If you can browse to www.mysite.com/administrator so can anybody who knows (or suspects) that your website is using Joomla! - it’s one less barrier in the way of them being able to compromise your website.

How do I hide my administrators portal?

There are several ways in which you can hide this part of your website, the most popular being to use a ‘secret word’ which must be appended to the URL in order to access the administrators login screen. An example would be www.mysite.com/administrator/?mysecretword. This way, if the user doesn’t have the secret word, they can’t even get to the login page for your administrator portal.

Admin Tools has this facility built in, or you can use any number of other extensions which provide this facility in the Joomla! Extensions Directory.

Is your default administrator still enabled?

When you create a website using versions earlier than 2.5.x the default administrator was created using a set ID - in 1.5.x and earlier this was #62, and in 1.6.x and later #42. The username was also ‘admin’ - both of which are often not changed.

So what, you might say! If someone is trying to compromise your website and they know that an account exists with the user ID of #62 or #42 which has full access to your site, this is the first thing they will attempt with any vulnerabilities - to gain access to that account so that they can log into your site with administrator privileges (and effectively do whatever they want, including defacing your site or installing malicious code).

How to deal with default administrator accounts

The best thing to do is to disable this account, and use a separate account to do your administrator tasks.

The basic rule of thumb is to have the absolute minimum number of administrator accounts that you require, and ensure they have strong passwords. If you create an administrator account for somebody to work on a part of your site, remember to disable it afterwards.

Think of the administrator account as the keys to your house or expensive car, which you would most definitely not want to be in the wrong hands!

Are you backing up your site to a secure off-site location regularly?

If the worst happens and your site goes offline, you fall out with your hosting provider or (heaven forbid!) you make a mistake and need to quickly recover your website, could you do it?

As a business owner, this should feature highly in your continuity plans and considered a risk to the business, especially if a large proportion of your work comes via your website.

How do I back up my site?

The facility exists to back up your sites automatically, even to push those backups to a remote storage facility such as Dropbox or Amazon S3, and to notify you if there are any problems. The best extension for doing this is without a doubt Akeeba Backup, which is tried and tested by thousands of Joomla! users around the world. The professional version also allows you to back up other databases (for example if you’re running a separate Ecommerce store or learning environment).

Backing up your site is only one part of the risk management however - make sure you test your backups regularly rather than when you’re in the heat of the moment! You can do this quickly using Kickstart from Akeeba, which lets you recreate your site in minutes.

How do I keep on top of this?

Managing one site it’s fairly easy to add a reminder to your calendar or keep an eye on the Joomla! news to ensure you keep up to date, but when you are a busy person or you manage lots of sites it is easy to miss an update announcement or forget to update a site.

It is important to remember that as soon as a Joomla! update announcement is made, vulnerabilities which are fixed by that update are out ‘in the wild’ - and therefore the longer you leave your site unpatched, the higher risk you are at from being compromised.

Both Admin Tools and Akeeba Backup have built-in notification systems which will alert you regularly if your website is out of date or if your backup fails, but this can be quite inefficient when you’re managing multiple websites. Automating and remotely monitoring sites

When I was at the Joomla! World Conference I got chatting to Victor Drover - the face behind the popular Joomla! extension provider Anything Digital (JCal Pro, sh404, Josetta and more) - and we got chatting about their latest service, Watchful.li, which they were launching at the World Conference as a sponsor.

Watchful monitors any number of websites, and will proactively inform you if they are out of date. They can also monitor your backups, and check your homepage for a specific word - if it is absent it might be a sign that your site has been altered without your consent.

Backups can also be triggered directly from the Watchful.li dashboard, as can updates for sites which are running 2.5.x and greater.

We have recently started to move all our websites over to Watchful.li and continue to be impressed with the new features that are being introduced.

I would really recommend checking it out - Victor also kindly provided a code for readers of this article which will give you 3 months for $3, just use the code VIRYA3 - and there is also a 20% discount code on your dashboard for Akeeba if you sign up at Watchful!

Conclusion

In conclusion, I have presented just a handful of what I consider to be important considerations in making sure that your Joomla! website is secure, all of which are well within the capabilities of a regular website owner. There are also tools which allow a large proportion of this to be automated, which I really recommend if you’re a busy person!

Please note that while this provides you with the core security precautions to keep your site safe, there are many other factors which can be considered such as the security of your hosting provider and more, but these five tips should set you in good stead.

Google+, Microdata and Authorship - why you can't afford to ignore Google+

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Sun, 16 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

NOTE: This is now very outdated, and remains here as an archive only.

With the abundance of social networks that spring up on an almost daily basis, you would be forgiven for emitting a dramatic sigh to hear that you need to start paying attention to another social network. But this time, really, you do!

What’s the fuss about?

Google+, if you haven’t already heard, is the social network which is provided by the search engine giant Google.

On the surface it’s ‘Just another social network’ but when you start to look at the deep integration with other Google products which are gradually being rolled out, alongside the way that Google+ ‘Circles’ (the containers into which you group your contacts) are influencing the content served up through Google search, it is rapidly becoming a social network that you cannot afford to ignore if you take search engine rankings seriously.

Noise Control

Google+ takes on board many of the concepts which were presented by the crowd-funded Diaspora, such as adding people to Circles (collections of people and pages) based on whatever factors you want to group people by – how you know them, what they do, what they talk about and so forth – as well as having the ability to control the ‘noise’ that certain people throw at you without removing them entirely from your network (by adding them to a ‘Circle’ and turning down how much it outputs to your stream), and selectively allowing on a granular basis who can access your shared content.

You can therefore choose who you want to listen to – for example, create a Circle for all Joomla! People and you can just view that stream, rather than distracting photos of cute kitties and the latest baby photos from your friends’ sister.

Integration

Google+ also integrates with Google’s other systems – Gmail, Calendar, Docs (now known as Drive), and much more, providing tight integration for people who use those services.

A recent announcement for Google Apps Enterprise customers now allows domain administrators to control posts by their users and restrict to domain-only (thereby resolving issues relating to sharing of sensitive content), view all staff profiles and even allow users to create a hangout (very powerful video conferencing allowing collaborative working) automatically whenever a calendar entry is created, or manually with one click in the calendar entry.

Even more clever is that you can now read your Gmail filtered by your Google+ Circles – so if you add people to the Circle you can then quickly find their emails and screen out other content.

Authorship

Google is now using your Google+ profile as a centralised means of identifying the author of content across the internet. That’s not only for your content on Google+, but for all your content across the web. Blogs, forum posts, articles, reviews, videos, likes, shares, and so forth.

When you create a Google+ profile you are prompted to add all websites that you contribute to – for example, if you are an author on the Joomla! Community Magazine you could add this as a resource to which you contribute. Perhaps you write a personal blog – add that too! Maybe you also contribute to a corporate blog or have written books on Amazon, another source to add.

You also are able to add all your social profiles, which will be hooked up with your author profile – think Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and so forth.

Providing you have the correct microdata on your websites (this will be covered in a forthcoming article), you will quickly notice your Google+ profile being linked with your articles.

In search results they will begin to show as 'Written by Ruth Cheesley ’ which links to your Google+ profile. In time you’ll also see ‘More from Ruth Cheesley’ which links to a filtered Google search, for all content authored by Ruth Cheesley (this currently displays on google.com but not on regional (e.g. google.co.uk) searches).

So what?

Google is building a trust-based network, whereby your social habits and connections inform your search results. If you search for something in Google when you’re logged in, results which have been recommended (by ‘+1’ or sharing) by your network (people in your Circles) will begin to be served up above those which haven’t – the relevance algorithm won’t be ignored completely, but precedence is beginning to be given to resources which people in your network think are useful.

This makes logical sense, in a way. If you were looking for some information about a topic, would you be more likely to trust information which comes from somebody you are already connected with, or a complete stranger (or something a company is paying to put in front of your face)? I know which one I’d choose!

For companies …

Take a step back and consider this from a corporate perspective – if you have a corporate page on Google+ and your potential clients follow your Google+ page, your results are naturally going to start ranking higher for those people. If you have a lot of people following your page, then a lot more people are going to have your links ranking higher. It’s important to note, however, that you can’t directly ‘Circle’ people from a page unless they have already ‘Circled’ your page – so some strategy is called for in order to gain followers.

For individuals…

Consider the implications from the perspective of an author, technical writer, trainer, speaker, one-man-band or any other position whereby building a reputation is important. If you have lots of people in your Circles, they too will be served over time with content you recommend (by sharing or recommending using +1). They will also be able to see when they search for a term which you have a reputation for, how many Circles you are in (hence your general popularity), and at a click see all the content you have contributed. Everything.

So, the question is, can you (and your clients) afford to ignore Google+ any more?

Ruth will be speaking at the Joomla! World Conference on the topic of Google+, Authorship and Microdata. Add her on Google+ here.

Update:

Link to video of talk on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGQLpLmuQ60

Link to slides on SlideShare: http://www.slideshare.net/RCheesley/microdata-authorship-google-and-joomla-ruth-cheesley-joomla-world-conference-2012

Getting deep and dirty with Google Analytics (Part 1)

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Sat, 12 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

NOTE: This is now very outdated, and remains here as an archive only.

Keeping up with changes from Google can be rather challenging at the best of times, and some of the more recent changes and advanced features added to their popular analytics platform have gone largely unnoticed by many people.

This series of articles will take you through some of the more recent additions, and also highlight some useful features that you may not have previously explored.

This article will cover custom dashboards and advanced segments.

Custom dashboards

When Google announced the availability of custom dashboards I danced with delight! Finally somewhere I can dump a collection of related widgets so I can see an overview of all the relevant data together in one place rather than have to to dip in and out of the different screens to find what I needed!

The great thing about custom dashboards is, in my opinion, the ability to share the dashboards you create both between your accounts and profiles and with others. Why reinvent the wheel if somebody has already created an awesome dashboard and they have been kind enough to share it!

Shared dashboards make your life easier, but remember that you still need to understand the metrics behind the graphs to be able to interpret them.

Here are some examples of shared dashboards which I find useful - just click on the links to add them to your Analytics profile:

Social media dashboard - https://www.google.com/analytics/web/permalink?uid=erNMqvwYQIWKDiA7dkHbJQ
AdWords dashboard - https://www.google.com/analytics/web/permalink?uid=mS-D6E-FSTaWBRhOavj0fQ
Site performance dashboard - https://www.google.com/analytics/web/permalink?uid=RZ8-NOorRSqtyaPi-lDCOQ
SEO dashboard - https://www.google.com/analytics/web/permalink?uid=DdK8j7mjQfqWjRRh27QHQQ

You can of course also make your own dashboards by starting with a blank template (or a starter template) and adding widgets using the interactive tool, which is great if you want to create a dashboard tailored to a specific client.

Don’t forget you can share your own dashboards with yourself, allowing you to copy them into other profiles.

Advanced segments

Did you ever want a way to show a graph of your search traffic and analyse it by different factors on the same graph, showing specific keywords, different sources, number of keywords used, or any other metric?

Advanced segments give you the ability to segment or ‘chop up’ your data into smaller chunks, and you guessed it, they can be shared too! To manage advanced segments, go into your Google Analytics profile, then click on ‘Admin’ on the top right and then click on ‘Advanced Segments’. All advanced segments can be saved for one specific profile (for example branded keyword segments) or for multiple - or they can be made available to all profiles under your account - just click on ‘more options’ when editing a segment.

Here is an example of advanced segments in use to identify the number of keywords that visitors are using to find a site, demonstrating that the majority of visits are from two word searches, followed by those of three words and greater.

Advanced segments can be as basic or as complex as you like, starting with basic text filters right up to matching regex statements. Here are some of the more helpful advanced segments I use on a regular basis - as with the Dashboards, just click on the links, and choose which profiles to apply these to (or you can apply to all in the case of generic segments):

Number of keywords (thanks to Avinash for these):
- 1 keyword: https://www.google.com/analytics/web/permalink?uid=trxgoXh4SOC1NvQHJgEUQQ
- 2 keywords: https://www.google.com/analytics/web/permalink?uid=-wG0binySrSyds5ndX3HOg
- 3 keywords: https://www.google.com/analytics/web/permalink?uid=c_VF_D0LQ2G7tiTkTazvFg
- 3+ keywords: https://www.google.com/analytics/web/permalink?uid=GwkrQjtPSIStpR7poowWIA
Exclude searches for the URL (www. and .com - you may need to add regional derivatives) [https://www.google.com/analytics/web/permalink?uid=DJ8mI-XcSqqyz6mSwO0UkQ

](https://www.google.com/analytics/web/permalink?uid=DJ8mI-XcSqqyz6mSwO0UkQ)
(Not included) searches
- exclude (not included) https://www.google.com/analytics/web/permalink?uid=ahzJ_H2GTRegsV8wB5YXLQ
- only show (not included) [https://www.google.com/analytics/web/permalink?uid=Ibpq2WaRTmyL6mDC27F4AQ
  
  ](https://www.google.com/analytics/web/permalink?uid=Ibpq2WaRTmyL6mDC27F4AQ)
Branded keywords (replace MyBrand with your brand!)
- Include brand keywords https://www.google.com/analytics/web/permalink?uid=HZgfIAn_RdqZEiH3KxHMdQ
- Exclude brand keywords [https://www.google.com/analytics/web/permalink?uid=Um16IBXkQrSxEWvqnS327w
  
  ](https://www.google.com/analytics/web/permalink?uid=Um16IBXkQrSxEWvqnS327w)
Region specific
- Traffic from the UK: https://www.google.com/analytics/web/permalink?uid=dWlZt_xlQ7qYXde0P4YZpQ
- Traffic from the USA: [https://www.google.com/analytics/web/permalink?uid=ZlVuCr0SRgSOnQ3RtcoGyg
  
  ](https://www.google.com/analytics/web/permalink?uid=ZlVuCr0SRgSOnQ3RtcoGyg)
Browser/device specific
- Chrome - https://www.google.com/analytics/web/permalink?uid=fUtettjCSqK2o-jqgC8pPw
- Firefox - https://www.google.com/analytics/web/permalink?uid=lmLiqjkrQFqTLmkBhBz9vA
- Internet Explorer - https://www.google.com/analytics/web/permalink?uid=-1XXk7HVT4CTy3wTfwdU_Q
- Mobile excluding tablets - [https://www.google.com/analytics/web/permalink?uid=M63vUrPTS-2wU3qv0nlgRw
  
  ](https://www.google.com/analytics/web/permalink?uid=M63vUrPTS-2wU3qv0nlgRw)
Social traffic - [https://www.google.com/analytics/web/permalink?uid=rydjrrMkQd-iy3eA0qixYQ

](https://www.google.com/analytics/web/permalink?uid=rydjrrMkQd-iy3eA0qixYQ)
Really engaged users - https://www.google.com/analytics/web/permalink?uid=zyyVFamFSgOWAL5IBhwe9g

Alerts

I don’t know about you but I like to know if something dramatic has changed on my site, and the alerts on Google Analytics are a great way of being notified if there is a developing problem or a sudden increase in traffic. There are automated and custom alerts in Google Analytics, both of which can be useful early warnings!

Coming next month

A whole new section appeared on Google Analytics recently which allows you to track with much more clarity what traffic is coming to your site as a result of social interaction, and what social sharing is going on within your site (for example social sharing plugins). Next month we will take a dive into how you can analyse socially informed data, and ways of measuring how social networks are impacting your traffic.

Did your Ecademy (now SunZu) profile suddenly drop from search listings?

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Sun, 07 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Did your Ecademy profile suddenly vanish from your prominent page 1 position in search listings a few months ago? Mine too! The bad news is that SunZu still haven’t fixed the problem despite having been advised what caused it - but the good news is I can help you to get back to that prominent position pretty quickly!

My Ecademy profile was a page I held up as a shining example of how to do semantic HTML - in fact, it’s one of the reasons why I got interested in semantic markup in the first place! After I connected up my Ecademy profile with my Google+ profile, magic started happening (as far as I was concerned!) and I suddenly started appearing on page 1 of Google listings internationally, for the much coveted search term ‘Joomla Specialist’.

So what?

This prominence alone has attracted many thousands of pounds in direct sales, with the obvious addition of developing my personal brand and reputation - so who knows what the true value of that profile was to my business. It’s something I nurtured and worked really hard on - actually my Ecademy profile was where many people found me first as a result.

Providing ‘feedback’

Like many, I was somewhat sceptical about the takeover when Ecademy became SunZu, however I wanted to check it out from the moment it was launched to make sure it was still going to bring as much traffic as Ecademy had done. I was bitterly disappointed. Now, give them their dues it was in beta at this point, and with a beta product you do expect there to be some features missing. I used the ‘Feedback’ feature to voice my concerns (politely) and check whether it was going to be implemented before the launch as there was a complete lack of semantic markup - and I’m not exaggerating here, there was literally nothing other than the basic heading and paragraph tags - not even authorship. What I got back in reply was, let’s say, not far off being rude and arrogant.

I actually forgot about it for quite some time, until I came to refresh my slides for JoomlaDagen where I am talking about microdata, authorship and semantic HTML - I needed to grab a fresh screenshot of my listing in the results page for ‘Joomla Specialist’ - and was staggered to find that my (now SunZu) profile had dropped to page 5! Not only this, many of my other links had dropped significantly in the rankings - to say I was surprised was an understatement.

What is the problem?

The problem is that the new SunZu website does not have any semantic markup at all, whereas Ecademy had semantic markup on steroids. I actually said in several of my talks on the subject that if anything, Ecademy over-did the semantic markup, in its effort to accommodate all the different types that could be used.

Critically, authorship is missing - which is a method by which you can associate content that you write with your Google+ profile in a two-way process, validating you as the author - which is the first thing I altered. This was a pretty simple thing to fix, and within a couple of days I had returned to page 1 for the term ‘Joomla Specialist’ without any other changes to my SunZu profile. This is only the tip of the iceberg though. Ecademy used to associate all kinds of other content in the ‘correct’ way, providing search engines with a context for the information on the page or the links to, for example, your company website. This is all missing still, and it’s a bit of a mission to re-add it.

What can I do?

Firstly, check out whether any microdata is being pulled through from your articles and more importantly your profile using the Rich Snippets Testing Tool: http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets - and read up on Authorship. Make sure you have a Google+ profile set up, so that you can benefit from it. Secondly, make sure you set up your SunZu profile and your ‘Contributes to’ section of your Google+ profile to make sure the reciprocal link is present and working - you’ll need to remove any references to Ecademy and alter them to be SunZu due to the URL change.

Additional microdata that can be added to your profile can be found at www.schema.org but due to the way in which SunZu editors function, it’s an incredibly convoluted process to manually add this information - not only to your profile but also to any articles that you may write which also contain no semantic markup (for the techies you can’t view source, so you can’t add the itemprop/itemscope manually without using developer tools to ‘hack’ it into the text) so it takes time. Ultimately if SunZu don’t do something about this the only option is to follow this process to get the information into your profile.

Can you help?

Absolutely, I can help you hook up your Google+ profile with your SunZu profile, and I can also help you set up any other microdata that you might want to include in your profile. Ultimately, I hope that the forces that be at SunZu (and their ‘industry expert’ staff) take note and include all of this markup on your profile and article pages. In the meantime if you find yourself in the same situation as I was, give me a shout. Tweet me @RCheesley or on Google+, or drop me an email to ruth@ruthcheesley.co.uk.

Social Media management for business owners

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Just recently I was reviewing the systems in place for managing our social media accounts, and looking at new technologies that had emerged since we decided to use Hootsuite - quite some time ago! I came across something which has really changed the way I’ve been using social media over the past few weeks - so much so I thought I’d write a blog about it!

As any business owner will tell you, time is money and often you don’t have much of either! My dilemma with social media is that I absolutely see the value and understand the need to use social media. I understand the need to approach it with a strategic mindset rather than as and when you feel like posting. I also have barely enough time to sleep as it is, let alone spending more hours on social media! When I do have time to manage my social profiles, it’s often in short bursts - an hour here or there, share an article as and when I come across it, see what is going on and respond, but I’ve never really managed to accomplish a regular, sustained presence on social media channels.

I tried out a few systems I had come across before to see what had changed (and I was quite surprised to see that in several, not an awful lot had changed!) but then I came across Sprout Social. I’d heard someone mention Sprout Social before, so when it popped up on my radar I had a vague recollection of someone saying I should try it out. There was a free trial too, so what did I have to lose!

Ease of use

My first impressions were of a fairly easy to use interface that guided me fairly quickly to add my various accounts. I was disappointed to see that there was not any support for posting to Google+ personal profiles (only pages), but that is largely due to the API availability rather than Sprout Social, from what I understand. The next feature which I found pretty neat was the integration with Google Reader (and yes, I know it’s being deprecated - and they are introducing support for Feedly which is pretty awesome!) - this allows me to see all posts of interest in one stream, but also to drill down into the individual feeds and my categories.

I’ve also had reason to contact the support team a few times, and I have to say it’s been a very positive experience. There’s always someone on LiveChat, and the ticketing system works seamlessly.

Finding content

Having the feed reader integrated means that I can read all kinds of content in one place, from which I can share out to my social media streams - I also use several AllTop RSS feeds to pick up new and interesting material. As I am interested in quite a lot of areas, the categorisation works really well - I can either just scroll through the feed, or if I am looking for something specifically relating to Joomla! I can filter down to my Joomla! feeds.

Sharing content is where Sprout Social comes into its own. Not only can you share and schedule posts with ease, but you can also use the integrated feed reader to find content and queue posts up to share throughout the day. You set in your account profile how many times during the day you want to send queued messages (and I was pleased to see it has a ceiling of 5 times per day) and then you can select the times at which the messages will be sent. I’m not a big fan of automation, due to the fact that some people only use automated messages which is both boring and unnatural, but in my case it allows me to spend an hour or so in the morning (usually still in my PJs!) reading through the latest news, and rather than share everything there and then, I can schedule posts throughout the day.

The first thing this has done is meant that I have some structure. Every morning, I go through this routine of looking for new stories, reading interesting updates, and considering what I might want to share. It also means that because I know how much I can get done in that time, I work very efficiently. I find useful information which I can flag to read in more depth later, share there and then, or queue for later. I might pop on during the day to see if there are any new stories (and how easy is it now that I just come to one central place!) and if I find something useful during the day, more often than not I’ll share it when I come across it, but the queue feature has definitely meant I am becoming more consistent with my social media activity.

Reports

One thing I’d never even considered before was the time I take to respond to messages on social media - if you were to ask me, I’d have no idea. I certainly couldn’t tell you whether we were quicker responding on one account or channel than another. With Sprout Social I now have some fantastic metrics which tell me exactly that - what is my average response time on each of my social accounts? Does this change on different days? How many messages did I have this week, and how many new followers? How many posts do we make on average for our different social media channels?

All of these metrics are presented on a beautiful dashboard which is both easy to understand and simple to use.

Result = Increased Engagement!

Even after using Sprout Social for a week, and without significant changes in the time I dedicate to managing my social media, I have definitely brought some structure to my social media activity. I’m still really grumpy that personal Google+ posting isn’t possible, and also that LinkedIn company updates aren’t possible. I’m also exploring the keyword facility which alerts me in a message stream any time words of interest are mentioned - this has directly led to sales as I’ve picked up on people asking for help with Joomla!, and it’s also helped with customer care as I’ve been able to respond to a range of customers across several social networks from one centralised stream.

It’s also meant that I’ve been able to quickly pick up on new posts of interest, with tweets mentioning keywords being flagged for my attention, which has helped me find new resources quickly which may not pop up on my radar otherwise.

So, thus far I’ve had a very positive experience with Sprout Social, and I foresee it being a very useful tool for small business owners who want to take a strategic approach to their social media management while still managing their networks in-house. I’ll let you know how I get on!

Social media in an emergency - Kenyan Interior Ministry maintains calm using Twitter to communicate

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Wed, 07 Aug 2013 00:00:00 +0000

As you may know I’ve been in Kenya this week, speaking at Joomla!Day Kenya and carrying out some market research. Today was my last day, so this morning when I went to check out of our apartment I was rather surprised when the reception team told me I wouldn’t be flying anywhere!

There had been a massive fire at the main airport in Nairobi which started at 5am - at first I thought they were pulling my leg, but then I saw the photos … it really is quite a miracle that nobody was hurt - but it looks like the majority of the airport has been destroyed.

One thing that I have been totally impressed by is the way in which the Kenyan Government has co-ordinated communicating about the incident.

The first message was broadcast on their Twitter account in the early hours of the morning alerting some of the main news agencies in the area:

A serious fire at JKIA kindly take caution @k24 @CapitalFM_kenya @StandardKenya @momanyibernard @CyrusOmbati @fmukinda @easy_fm

— Interior Ministry (@InteriorKE) August 7, 2013

Further updates have been using the hashtag #JKIAFire - providing people with a way of monitoring the situation and ensuring that people can find correct and up to date information. Updates are coming regularly, but not in a panicked way - the communication has been calm, measured, and appropriate. Many people are commenting on how professionally the Interior Ministry are using Twitter to keep people updated:

UPDATE: Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in Nairobi closed all flights diverted to Mombasa, Dar es Salaam, and Entebbe #JKIAFire

— Interior Ministry (@InteriorKE) August 7, 2013

An information center for departing passengers is being set up at the Domestic Terminals. #JKIAFire

— Interior Ministry (@InteriorKE) August 7, 2013

And ever since, there have been constant updates from the Interior Ministry, keeping people advised and giving people information about where to go if they have been stranded, responding to questions, helping people find out if their flights have been cancelled and more. They are also re-tweeting people who have posted useful information or praise for the teams who are fighting the fire.

News agencies are being updated via Twitter and people are being informed about the real situation on the ground. As one of those ‘stranded passengers’ potentially - I am reassured that things are being handled in a calm way, and service will be restored as soon as they possibly can - but most importantly, I don’t feel frightened, panicked or concerned about what is happening. Knowing that there is a source of information where I can go to find official updates is reassuring, and reassurance is most definitely what is needed at times like this.

It is great to see governments in developing countries reaching out via social media, and using it in a disaster to maintain calm and ensure communication of key information. It’s a shame that Emirates aren’t using social media to keep their customers informed … instead I had to go through a 10 minute hold period on their phone lines to get the information I needed about the status of my flight (the end result of which was I have to call them back at 4pm!)

So, apologies to people who I may have meetings with - I might be a little late!

It's been a busy few months and quite a few airmiles!

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Mon, 28 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Things have been a little busy in the past month, with lots of international speaking engagements and of course, being part of the team behind Joomla!Day UK which took place at the beginning of October.

After the experience in Kenya I was hoping that the travel would be a bit easier - and thankfully it was! First stop was Joomla!Day Switzerland where I gave a talk which busted some common SEO Myths, followed by speaking at Joomla!Day Spain the next weekend, and running (and speaking in three sessions!) at Joomla!Day UK the weekend after that.

Unfortunately I had to draw the line at three consecutive speaking events, so when I was invited to attend Joomla!Day South Africa rather than decline the invitation, we arranged to do a presentation via Skype, which worked really well!

It is always a pleasure to connect with people from around the world about the topics I’m passionate about, and these events were no different!

You can check out the slides & videos of the talks I’ve given on my Public Speaking page - if you’d like me to come to your event do get in touch sooner rather than later!

Why is community important in today's society?

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Mon, 18 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Today is an important day in the Buddhist calendar - it’s Sangha Day, where we celebrate one of the ‘Three Jewels’ of Buddhism.

The Three Jewels are at the heart of Buddhism, and include:

The Buddha (The person who gained enlightenment for the sake of all beings, and shared his experience with others) - Yellow
The Dharma (The teachings through which the Buddha shared his experiences of enlightenment, making it possible for others to achieve) - Blue
The Sangha (The spiritual community who have gained enlightenment, and the people with whom we share our lives) - Red

Community plays an important part in my life, both in my Buddhist practice but also my interest and roles within the Joomla! Community, so I thought it would be helpful to unpack what my thoughts were on why community is important in today’s society.

As a child I think I had a strong sense of community - I lived in a small village and had a pretty tight-knit family around me, so it was quite a shock when I moved to University and was transplanted into the middle of a large town, hundreds of miles away from everybody I knew. Something you do pick up on strongly at University is a sense of community - different to the community I had at home, but everyone was in the same boat being far away from family, despite coming from wide and varying backgrounds. This is something I think we sometimes lose touch with in adulthood - the importance of having a strong sense of community. I’ve found having a strong sangha around me to be a real priviledge - not only helping me along when things are tough, but also reminding me how far I have come, and gently bringing me back on track when I venture off on one of my many tangents!

Online versus offline community

I have just returned from the Joomla! World Conference which is a gathering of people from all over the world who are part of the Joomla! community - for those who don’t know, Joomla! is an Open Source Content Management System and web development framework, and it is the system I’ve used exclusively for the past six years or so for website development.

On a day-to-day basis the Joomla! community exists for me in a plethora of Skype chats, Facebook groups, Google+ communities, mailing lists, and more locally through my User Group. Twice a year a large proportion of the community comes together for two events - J and Beyond in Europe, and the Joomla! World Conference in the USA -the community is physically united. It’s quite an amazing experience, to meet the people you’ve interacted with for the past 12 months online and share a weekend together. Being an online community simply isn’t the same as meeting up, face to face, and being in each others’ presence.

The same is true for the spirtual community, I think. It’s great to keep in touch with people on Facebook, WhatsApp and Skype but it’s not the same as physically being in the same room and talking, practicing and sharing our lives. There’s something about having regular face to face contact with the people who matter in your life that just can’t be met by online replacements for real-world engagement. It’s something I’ve been neglecting somewhat over the past 18 months, as things have been tough with my business and pressures on my time have escalated, and I really notice the lack of this important community in my life.

Why does community matter?

Having a community around us is important for many reasons - first and foremost it means that we’re not in the world alone, we’re not fighting our battles by ourselves. Within a community, we have others we can turn to for help and support - perhaps just to seek advice or at times for more literal support. We have others to share our lives with, to care for and help in their time of need. Certainly for me, arriving at University was pretty scary, and having other people around to support me was invaluable.

It is also easier to manage large, unwieldy tasks in a group or community than it is as an individual, which is often why a community naturally forms around ideas and problems. It is important to involve the people who are affected by something - to allow them to have a say in the ongoing development and progress - without their input it is difficult for a project to proceed in a direction which supports those who are affected. A classic example is in town planning, where local residents are encouraged to be involved with ‘having a say’ on development plans for their local vicinity.

Why do we need community?

I think nowadays in a world which seems to favour the individualist, the importance of being surrounded by a strong community has, in some cultures, dropped in importance and needs to be revived. Being a part of something bigger than yourself is a humbling experience, and brings you up against challenges on a daily basis. Challenges that can help you, and others, to grow in a positive way.

Being alongside people from other walks of life, people who don’t see the world through your own eyes, can be a very challenging experience - but we have the opportunity to grow and learn from that challenge. We can expand our experience of the world, and learn how to communicate and interact in different ways. It also challenges our fundamental beliefs and concepts at times, which while a little unnerving can in fact be refreshing. It’s amazing to realise sometimes just how bound down we are by our preconceptions and judgements about others, and when those are broken down we realise just how many similarities there are - at the end of the day, we’re all people, and we all experience suffering and pain, happiness and sadness, good times and bad times. Being a part of a community means taking all of that on board, in all its beauty and ugliness, and approaching it with kindness and understanding. Walking in their shoes, seeing the world through their eyes, and trying to find a way to move forward together.

Thinking about the most recent times I have been truly happy, it has almost always been in the context of friendship, community, and sangha. Sometimes, strangely, this has been after very challenging situations that I’ve had to work my way through, seemingly never-ending and pushing all of those bright red buttons that set off every annoyance and niggle that irritates me.

Do you find the same? Why is community important to you?

When did you last stop to sharpen your blade?

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Mon, 06 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Today is my first day back from the winter break, probably the longest proper time off that hasn’t involved chasing kids around the mountains for DofE or being on retreat since I started running the business full time three years ago. It’s also the first time I have returned to work from a vacation and felt like I had truly had the chance to kick back and rest.

Yesterday a thread started in one of the local business networks I contribute to expressing surprise that business owners who had no necessity to close down until today (necessities were suggested as having children who didn’t start back at school until today, for example) had kept their businesses closed. It made me wonder just how hard we sometimes push ourselves when we are running - or indeed working in - small and medium sized businesses without thinking about the consequences of not taking the time to properly rest and recover.

Several people responded in the thread saying they were back to work on Boxing Day, or that they had a day or two off for the bank holidays but worked throughout the holiday season. Obviously some trades must remain open - the emergency services for example - 365 days a year, but that is not often the case in small business.

Taking the time to plan and prepare

There is a great story which my Buddhist teachers and my business partner remind me regularly, where two rather competitive woodsmen set about cutting down some large trees. The first one sets to work immediately, sawing away at the trunk of the tree, laughing and jeering at the second, who ponders the task ahead of him and decides to sharpen his saw blade before getting started with the job.

The woodsmen cut down trees almost every day, and as you probably know,with regular use a saw blade can become blunt and less efficient. It took the second woodsman a good while to sharpen the blade, but he finished the job far quicker than his friend who was still struggling deep into the night.

You are the most important tool in your business

It’s easy to forget just how hard we work and how much pressure we are under - indeed also how much we miss out on at home and in our local community - until we change our conditions and give ourselves permission to have a proper break. You are the most important tool in your business, and it is absolutely vital to your business that you take the time to stay sharpsharp rather than endlessly ploughing ahead with a blunt blade.

Never lose sight of the importance of resting, and bringing a balance to your life between what is really important and what can wait. This year my scales have necessarily been tipped toward turning around my business, at the detriment to a lot of other areas of my life including my health. I hadn’t realised quite what it could be like without that pressure until having a couple of weeks off over Christmas. My natural tendency is to work all hours of the day and night to get the job done, but like the woodsman in the story my blade has been blunt for some time because I would not allow myself the time to rest and recharge.

Plan your down-time

If you didn’t get a chance to have a good rest over the holidays, book in some time now, or start putting in place the conditions that will allow you to take some quality time off this year. It’s the best gift you can give your business to keep your blade sharpened throughout the coming year, and will deliver more return on investment than you might think.

It really doesn’t matter whether you spend a week curled up with some good books or playing with your children, whatever you find gives you the opportunity to rest, recharge and return full of energy and inspiration.

My journey with chronic pain

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Tue, 14 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I was largely motivated to write this blog post after reading this post - 6 things about chronic pain you didn’t know you knew - and just to be clear before I set off, I’m really not looking for ‘oh that’s so sad, you poor thing’ responses, or sympathy - I’m just writing this to express what it is like to be running a business and contending with chronic pain on a daily basis, and a bit of an exploration of the challenges faced by people with disabilities who run businesses.

When I read the article mentioned above, the first three words hit me like a truck. Pain is exhausting. Truly and utterly exhausting. I can’t remember the last time that I had a pain-free day, or when I last had a day that didn’t end with exhaustion - and actually this is just so normal for me that I hadn’t even realised! If you haven’t come across the Spoons Theory by the lovely Christine Miserandino as a way for explaining what it’s like living with a chronic health condition, I strongly recommend that you check it out.

Anybody who runs a business will tell you that it too can - at times - be absolutely exhausting. It’s also very empowering - you can set your own work schedule, make up your own rules, work within your limits, and this is ultimately how I came to run my own business. My (then undiagnosed) disability became unmanageable in an inflexible organisation like the National Health Service (yes, ironic, I know!). Looking back, it was the best decision I ever made to leave full time employment.

Being disabled in business

As I continued reading the article, I started to realise that I almost ‘wall off’ my disability from my business world - very few people in my business networks have any idea of the challenges I face on a daily basis, in fact I take a typically British view and ‘just get on with it’ - using splints and braces (and the most recent exciting development of corsets!) to allow me to stand for longer periods, and pain killers and TENS machines if it’s a particularly bad day, and attempting to master this ever-elusive thing that people keep talking about called ‘pacing’ (I’m really not so good at that one!). [For those who don’t know, I have Hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome]

Not only do I have the mammoth task of running a business, but also contending with the exhaustion of pain - knowing every day I wake up there will be a ‘snap crackle and pop’ as my partner puts it, while my joints put themselves back in place. Knowing pretty much every night some part of me will be really painful. The often frustrating inability to stand for longer than around 20 minutes before being in the kind of pain you might experience if you sprain an ankle or twist your knee - in just about every joint of my body - with wobbly joints making life just that little bit more interesting!

There comes a time, however, when you realise that actually that’s starting to do more harm than good. Just getting on with it and trying to keep smiling isn’t going to get me anywhere fast. In fact, it’s starting to have a detrimental effect on both my enjoyment of my life, and my ability to really engage with my business, clients and friends.

At some level, I haven’t been willing to accept that it’s actually OK to be an entrepreneur and a business owner, and not being able to be ‘normal’ and do ‘normal’ stuff - it’s something I’ve been fighting against quite ferociously over the past three years, being restricted by my disability. Not being able to stand up to talk to people, or walk around at an exhibition for me has so far been something of a frustration - an annoyance that was at some level also a sign of weakness. In business, we don’t like weaknesses - but perhaps I need to start turning towards those weaknesses instead of pushing them away, and see them as one of my strengths.

Just recently I’ve started realising how much I’ve been missing out on because subconsciously my mind just says “yeah, you can’t do that so don’t even try!” - things like going to a museum with friends, spending the day wandering around the shops, going to an exhibition and walking around meeting stand holders (you may not notice, but every conference I attend I spend 90% of the time sitting down, rarely get involved in late night socials, and if I am speaking longer than 30 minutes I always have a chair or seat). I’m really fed up, in fact, with being limited by my disability. So, I’m fighting back, by accepting that there are some things I can’t do, but that if I asked for a bit of help, I might actually be able to do!

So, you might well see me in the future with some help … maybe crutches or braces, maybe a wheelchair, maybe not. It depends whether I’m having a good day, whether I can cope, and how easy I can get around without assistance. Don’t be alarmed, it’s just me trying to get on with running my business and enjoying my life in whatever way I can :)

Meditations for women who do too much!

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Sat, 19 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000

A while ago, a good friend of mine gave me a lovely book of hers, slightly in jest but also out of compassion, at my busyness and tendency to do too much, called ‘Meditations for women who do too much’ by Anne Wilson Schaef.

Ironically, it’s mostly sat on my bookshelf (you guessed it, because I’ve been too busy!) however today I was reminded of this book in an evening on friendship and thought I would dig it out and revisit some of the reflections.

I retrieved it, dusted it down, and I’m going to make the effort to reflect on each day’s meditation, and post a blog each day with the reflection or meditation of the day. I may not manage every day, but I’ll see what I can do!

Have the courage to be fierce with reality

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Sun, 20 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Today’s quote from ‘Meditations for women who do too much’ is:

“You need to claim the events of your life to make yourself yours. When you truly possess all you have been and done, which may take some time, you are fierce with reality.” ~ Flonda Scott Maxwell

We often find at some point in our lives the need to take stock, look back on our life and review who we are and what we have done with our lives. The effect can be quite strong, and for me it has led to an ongoing reflective process, through which I’m working on really being in the moment and seeing that I am at this point in time as a result of the conditions that arose in the past, and that where I go in the future is dependant on conditions yet to arise.

Through this process, I’ve found it’s all too easy to get into the habit of beating myself up about all the bad decisions I made and the times when things didn’t go so well. I’ve definitely been in this place many times (it’s a recurring theme!), and I regularly get mini ‘flash-backs’ of memories where I did or said something really awful, which I often feel great regret (and often embarrasment!) about.

I do also sometimes slip toward the opposite end of the spectrum, patting myself on the back for all the great things I have done and the way I have lead my life - less so than the negative end but sometimes it can be more destructive.

The reality of integration

Living an integrated life is to bring everything to the game - the good, bad and ugly, and being ‘fierce with reality’ - it takes great courage to really look at your life, your conditions, your reactions. It takes courage to break through the stories we tell ourselves about what has happened, what could happen, what is happening, I’m a good person, I’m a bad person, he said this, she said that, and so forth - and simply reflect on the conditions that brought us to where we are, and what led us to act or behave in a particular way. It’s quite powerful to think that yes, I did do those things, I have acted in those ways, but I also have the potential to change, I will not always be like that, I can be creative in my responses to those situations.

Winding back (or forward!) the clock

I found it really helpful when I heard a teaching someone had received, that it’s often more helpful when reflecting on your past, to start from your earliest memories and move forward rather than starting where you are now and looking back. Working in reverse, so to speak, can help you to understand the conditions which led you to a particular situation and can often allow you to feel more compassion and kindness toward your past actions.

I have certainly found this helpful in unpicking times when perhaps I wasn’t as mindful or compassionate in a particular situation, and on reflection could then start to see the conditions which led to that - for example being really busy at work, not having had any time off or relaxation, perhaps having a headache or having missed lunch … sometimes something as simple as not having had enough sleep the night before. Realising this, I can start to understand that actually it wasn’t necessarily me being a horrible person, but a person under a lot of different conditions, struggling to cope, and reacting to a situation because I did not have the capacity to respond creatively.

“When we stop and truly possess all we have been, and done, we are on the path to becoming who we are”

Life is better with wheels!

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Tue, 06 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Being British has it’s advantages. Tea, for one thing, is something I really miss when I’m travelling the world … good old fashioned tea the way my mum makes it just can’t be found! And hobnob biscuits … mmmmm!

There are some tendencies which aren’t so great though, one of which is carrying on in the face of adversity, pushing through difficult times, and coming out the other side better for it. I say this isn’t so great, because what happens if the other side never comes?

I’m a stubborn person (much of which I attribute to the aforementioned mother!) and combine this with an ingrained “just get on with it” attitude, and I’ve managed to cope with some pretty challenging situations without making too much of a fuss. I’ve lived with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (also known as Hypermobility Syndrome) my whole life (despite only being diagnosed at 23, which is pretty common) and over the past five years or so, things have been getting gradually worse.

Dealing with pain and fatigue

I’m not able to walk as far as I used to because my joints are unstable and become painful pretty quickly - nowadays I can only manage around 20-30 minutes - or to stand for any length of time. I experience fatigue on a regular basis, and I’m not talking about feeling sleepy and needing to rest, I’m talking about muscles feeling as though they have run a marathon and physically will not allow me to sit upright, walk, even function as a normal person would expect their body to function. Frustratingly this often happens when I am mentally alert, have a lot to do and damn well want to get on and do it, but I just physically cannot do anything without what seems to be superhuman effort.

So far, I’ve made do with what I could, in the hope that things would get better … but there comes a point where you start to get fed up with not being able to do things, having to put up with pain and fatigue just to do what you need to do, and generally avoiding all the exciting stuff I used to do because I know it would cause me difficulties in being able to do my normal daily stuff like going to work!

It’s time for action!

So, the time has come for a pre-emptive strike! I’ve decided (at the recommendation of my GP and physio) that there are times where I simply have to admit that I can’t cope with what is asked of me, but I’m not going to let that hold me back. I’m going through the process of having a really awesome Trekinetic K2 Wheelchair made for me which will enable me to do a lot more than I’m able to do right now, and means that when I am at events, conferences and networking I’ll be able to focus on why I’m there, rather than trying to find the nearest chair or figuring out how I can stay standing for three hours without collapsing in a wibbling heap of jelly.

Unfortunately (for me!) the guys at Trekinetic are world leaders, innovators, and in high demand, so I have had to wait around three months for my chair to be ready. I am not ‘confined to a wheelchair’ - I use one when it enables me to do things that ‘normal’ people take for granted but which I find difficult. I’m ‘differently normal’, and that’s ok. I might in the future have less need to use a wheelchair, I might end up relying on it more - I just don’t know, and I can’t know, so I’m focusing on where I am right now. So yes, you will see me walking, and you will see me going up stairs (slowly) and other stuff like that … and you will also see me using a wheelchair. That’s where I’m at right now with my health. Shock realisation moment, not all wheelchair users are incapable of walking!

Wow, that’s a bit of a shock!

I do appreciate this will be a bit of a surprise for some people, as I’m pretty good at hiding the difficulties I do have (like the 25 tablets a day to control my pain and the oh-so-attractive NHS-issued braces I have to wear!) but I hope that, at the end of the day, you’ll understand that I’m just a business person trying to do a job, getting on with life in the best way that I can.

It’s going to be a challenge there’s no doubt about that, and I have no idea how I’ll fare when I have to travel abroad for events, but let’s take one thing at a time, and most importantly approach it with a bit of humour, after all, life is better with wheels!

Read more about living my life as a bendie

Read about the spoon theory - how we can communicate about my condition in a common language

Read about Hypermobility and Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome

Image used with kind permission from Hannah Ensor, www.stickmancommunications.co.uk

Setting icons for desktop shortcuts on KDE - a UI fail?

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Sun, 21 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Sometimes I find there are annoying little things that I don’t know how to fix on my Linux systems, but aren’t THAT bothersome that I can be bothered to dig a bit deeper and to find the answer … setting icons for custom desktop shortcuts is one of those.

Without an icon, all the shortcuts are created using a rather boring - and frustratingly identical -cog icon, or command line icon. Now, I’ve put up with this for months because I tried going through the settings to find how to change the icon and I simply couldn’t see it. Today, after the fourth time of launching PHPStorm when I meant to launch a time tracking app, I finally decided to track down the answer!

It can’t be that hard to change an icon, surely! There are file paths for everything else, so I was looking for somewhere to set the file path for an icon, or somewhere be able to upload an icon. Can you guess where to set an icon for the shortcut based on these screenshots?

Me either! I’d consider myself to be fairly prioficient in IT and getting there with Linux systems, but I couldn’t figure this one out. Thanks to a 2012 post on the Ubuntu forums, however, I found the answer!

Yep! Who knew! As soon as I realised this (thanks to the aforementioned forum post) I found what I was looking for - a way to either use system icons, or find an icon of my own, to associate with the shortcut! Hurrah!

So, this clearly has been an issue since 2012 at least, judging by the forum post, and it’s still a pretty poor user interface as it doesn’t clearly indicate that it’s possible to change the icon by clicking on it unless you already know that, or accidentally happen to click it. I spent a good 30 minutes actively trying to figure this out (because, let’s face it, who likes having to read the manual!) and I couldn’t find it.

Question to those skilled in UI/UX would be, how could/should this be improved? For example, I could see a small button under the icon saying ‘edit icon’ would be a simple-ish addition but make it a much easier process to edit the icon. Any thoughts? I’d like to figure out how to make this suggestion to KDE so if you’ve got any thoughts please post in the comments!

Now I have shiny new icons, hopefully less frustrating accidental clicks will be occurring!

Marketing Automation - the missing piece in your small business marketing toolbox

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Wed, 08 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Small businesses are often heavily reliant on their marketing - particularly in the early stages - for generating interest, reaching out to potential leads, and keeping your message in front of their eyes.

As many small businesses do not have their own marketing team, or necessarily the time to follow through with every potential lead, having some of the key tasks automated can make a huge difference not only to the time spent, but also on conversion rate and ultimately, sales.

Until recently, Marketing Automation (the process of setting up systems which automate many of the processes within your marketing workflow and nurture leads with ‘drip flow’ marketing techniques) has been the domain of those with deep pockets - mainly owing to the high prices charged by the key suppliers in the market. In November 2014, Mautic changed that. The tables are turning, and now Marketing Automation is within reach of all businesses, large or small. The missing tool from your toolbox has arrived, and now you need to learn how it could help you grow your business!

What is Marketing Automation?

Quite simply, Marketing Automation refers to software which is designed to help organisations to market to multiple channels in a coherant, strategic way, while automating many of the repeatable aspects of a campaign - such as sending emails, providing resources, and keeping in touch with a new lead.

The aim of Marketing Automation is obviously to reduce workload and improve efficiency, but also to reduce the chance for human error and increase the chance of new prospects converting into sales.

There are usually three elements to a successful Marketing Automation platform:

Marketing Intelligence

Knowing what your potential prospects have been doing on your website, how they are using social media, what’s going on in their lives, can be a huge benefit when trying to move the prospect through the sales funnel to conversion. The more that is known about their behaviour on your website, the more you can gauge if they are really interested, or just visited one page and left. Understanding which links in email campaigns have been clicked on by a prospect can also inform how likely they are to convert, what they are interested in, and whether they engage with your content.

Understanding a prospect outside of your ‘bubble’ and getting into their world can provide valuable insights, and allow them to be approached as a warm contact rather than a cold call.

All of this is possible by gathering ‘Marketing Intelligence’ with a range of methods including tracking pixels, analytics, and so forth.

Marketing Automation

Once a prospect has shown interest, the next steps in the marketing process focus on moving the prospect from the ‘top of the funnel’ as a cold lead to the ‘bottom of the funnel’ as a sale-ready potential customer. This can be done through regular communication in the form of email marketing, social media engagement - even in-person meetings. Marketing Automation brings together many technical tools to streamline this process, sending out automated emails at predefined times in the sales process, and informing the intelligence aspect what happens to the emails - were they opened? Did they click the links?

Workflow Automation

Automating the workflow in a marketing campaign involves making the internal processes flow automatically, with minimal input from the marketer who sets up the system. This can include a whole range of things from managing a calendar which shows which leads need nurturing when, through to planning for asset creation and budgets. Often this involves linking with a Customer Relationship Manager or other system to set up tasks which require manual processing - such as designing assets, creating landing pages and setting up advertising campaigns on social channels.

What does a Marketing Automation System include?

Marketing Automation systems will often include all the tools necessary to achieve the tasks above. For example, the ability to:

Create landing pages
Insert lead generation forms
Track visitors across a range of web properties
Build a lead profile by drawing on CRM and social media data
Set up predefined workflows
Create assets which can be shared and tracked in campaigns
Integrate with email platforms for the sending of campaigns
Integrate with analytics systems to track and monitor traffic to web properties

What does a Marketing Automation system offer the small business?

It’s my opinion that small businesses stand to reap the most benefit from a well-crafted Marketing Automation campaign - with an input of time and energy at the start to set up the system, create assets and workflows and integrate sign-up forms within a website, the system can then be left to work its magic, with new workflows being added as and when required.

This can often mean that the user can have a marketing professional set up the system on their behalf and, with some basic training, be able to manage the system independently going forward.

Automating the marketing process also frees up time to enable the business owner to follow up on their newfound leads, and get on with running their business.

How do I get started with Marketing Automation?

If you’d like to know more about getting started with Marketing Automation and how it could help your business, why not find a Mautic Meetup near you? Check out http://mautic.meetup.com/ and get signed up! I’ll shortly be publishing a series of articles on how to use Mautic, which will take you step by step through the process - keep up to date by following my social media feeds!

Gamification reaches new heights with Majestic's Awards

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Fri, 24 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Picture the scene … just about to leave work, quickly checking something on a client’s Majestic report, when suddenly I discovered Majestic had launched a whole new element of fun on what is usually, let’s face it, a pretty nerdy platform where SEO folk crunch some serious numbers about how well a website is performing or what problems there might be with links coming into or going out from a website.

In exchange for me ferreting around on the Majestic site, unearthing tools I had probably known about but long ago shelved in the “don’t need it right now but that’s kinda cool” part of my brain, I started to work my way through the new Awards system and work my way up the ‘Leaderboard’. Surprising the things I learned … like the fact that you can assess the quality of a social media profile using Majestic!

Discovering new features

As you progressively explore the different areas you tick off the different tasks, working toward finishing all the tasks needed to complete that section. It’s a pretty simple idea really, you gain points for exploring features of the site, reading their blog, and even planning a telephone “walk through” - and let’s face it, what data geek would allow one simple task like having a walk through of a system hold them back from completing that award?!

Majestic’s free walk-through

Normally I detest these sales-focused walkthroughs which generally try to force you into upgrading your subscription to a higher level, but I was pleasantly surprised when I spent an hour with a representative from Majestic exploring their platform in great detail. The walkthrough focused almost entirely on exploring how the system can be used to its maximum benefit, and how I can better find the data I needed to analyse for specific projects. Definitely not a waste of an hour wishing I didn’t have to listen to sales people!

Limsan and her colleague who ran my walk through were patient with my questions and keen to show me new features, explain to me what specific numbers actually meant and how they were calculated, and put forward feedback I offered on user interface niggles that had been annoying me for a long time, in addition to passing on things which I really appreciated like the visual changes to the UI which make it easier to quickly see the correlation between Trust and Citation flow.

Majestic Business Profiles

Sure, the gamification is really quite a superficial thing, and points don’t really mean prizes here, but wait, it gets better - there’s a leaderboard of business profiles! Who doesn’t like a bit of friendly competition! Members with a subscription can create their business profile, and any awards you gain are listed on your profile. If you have higher than Silver level subscription you can also list your contact details and link to your website on your profile - well worth the investment going forward if you are a heavy user of Majestic.

I really benefited from working through the different tasks and exploring the areas of Majestic that I hadn’t touched on for some time - and really think this is a great example of gamification done right, for the right reasons, and with the right amount of learning, fun and encouragement to get people to have a go! Well done, Majestic!

Top tips for surviving your first exhibition or conference

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Tue, 05 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Exhibiting at an exhibition or conference for the first time can be quite a daunting prospect - especially if you’re a new start-up business or presenting a concept for the first time. You’ll probably be bouncing between exhilaration and exhaustion for most of the day, but hopefully these top tips will ensure you make it through to the end of the event!

Don’t go it alone

If at all possible, try to have somebody else come with you - especially if you have a stand or booth at the event. If you’re the only person, there probably won’t be any opportunity to leave your stand without potentially missing out on customers. If you do manage to persuade somebody to help you, make sure you spend time with them explaining what you want to achieve at the event, and briefing them on what it is that you do, what message you are trying to portray.

Be realistic

Have an idea of the visitor numbers expected (this is often called ‘footfall’) and make sure you are realistic with your flier, freebie and business card stocks - ask in advance if there are storage areas that can be used, and if not make sure you have a floor-length tablecloth which allows you to store boxes under your table, if you have one.

Also be realistic about how many people you hope to interact with. If you are at an exhibition with an expected footfall of 5,000 people and you only have one person on the stand, it’s very unlikely you will even manage to speak to half of the visitors.

Comfort first, fashion second

In my opinion this should be #1 - it’s absolutely essential that you can be comfortable for the duration of the event, and this means that you don’t wear a brand new pair of heels or shoes which pinch your toes. Make sure your footwear are comfortable - perhaps consider using cushioned insoles - and also make sure your clothing is comfortable - be prepared for both hot and cold, as air conditioned halls can sometimes be quite cold.

Make sure that if you need to be able to carry things in a pocket, that you have pockets in whatever you’re planning to wear. If pockets aren’t possible consider a hip bag or similar to ensure your hands are free.

Perch if you can!

Standing all day is exhausting, and sooner or later even with the comfortable, cushioned soles your feet are going to start to hurt. Wherever possible, try to perch - tall bistro chairs are great for this or perching stools - which allows you to talk with people while giving the impression that you are standing.

Eat and drink when you can

It’s often really difficult to get time to go and eat or drink while you are at an event, especially if you are responsible for a stand or booth. Try to have a stash of cereal bars and similar (preferably those which don’t have strong flavours!) so that you can have a quick bite to eat in between visitors. I usually take a whole tray of small water bottles, or one larger bottle, which I stash near my stand - it’s ideal for quickly grabbing a drink in between talking to people - don’t underestimate how much you’ll be talking and how quickly you’ll become dehydrated!

It’s a great idea to schedule up your social media in advance, and many tools such as Hootsuite and Sprout Social allow you to do that without much difficulty. Keep an eye on social media while you are at the event - set up streams which follow the main event hashtags and reach out to people proactively! Ideally, have some way of marking individuals for follow up after the event, so that you can identify people of interest from your social streams.

Be prepared

It sounds silly, but make sure you have everything that you are likely to need with you at the exhibition - lay it all out the night before, check it off on a list, whatever works best for you. Things which I always forget but tend to need include:

Scissors
Sellotape
Pens and paper
Phone battery pack/USB cables
Throat sweets
Tissues
Food/drink
Promotional material (business cards, fliers, etc)
Post-it notes

Tell people you’ll be there

Exhibitions and conferences are a great place to meet new customers, but they are also a good way to reconnect with existing clients. Why not invite your clients past and present to the event, and let them know your stand number? It’s also nice to see a familiar face in a sea of strangers!

Plan time for setting up and packing down

Exhibiting can be tiring enough, it really doesn’t help if you arrive late and stressed! Make sure you plan plenty of time to set up before the exhibition, and likewise that you prepare time afterward to pack down your stand, tidy away your equipment and get packed up in your vehicle (or shipped out with a courier!).

Clear your schedule for following up

Exhibiting at a conference is pointless if you don’t actively follow up your leads. Make sure you clear your schedule for a sensible amount of time, or have your sales team primed, to ensure you can capitalise on the leads you might pick up as a result of the event. If you don’t have a Customer Relationship Management system then get one! Make sure you have a way of tracking interactions with your customers, and are able to show what interactions led to sales - if you track the value you can show the true return on investment of the event.

I hope these tips are useful, and look forward to hearing how your exhibitions have gone!

How venues could learn from Brighton Dome about supporting people with disabilities

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Fri, 22 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This weekend I had the great pleasure of attending my first BrightonSEO event - a twice-yearly gathering of the great and the good (and definitely the geeky) from the SEO and digital marketing world.

I attend quite a lot of conferences within the Joomla community, but it’s not often that I head to a conference in a venue I’ve never visited, with a community I’ve not really engaged with before. Needless to say, being a wheelchair user going into unfamiliar territory by myself can be a little daunting!

This weekend I have been thoroughly impressed by the team at the Brighton Dome - so much so that I thought I would write a blog about my experiences. I really hope that other venues take on board some of the ways in which the Brighton Dome have approached making life that little bit easier for people with disabilities, and use this to improve their own practices.

My experience with conferences and venues varies widely - some provide no information whatsoever about accessibility (they do however tell me a lot about how accessible they are trying to make their website!) and others provide chapter and verse, complete with full video walkthrough of the routes to/from/around the venue (hat tip to the Eastern Enterprise Hub for their fantastic video).

Here are some of my thoughts on what Brighton Dome do well, and how other venues can follow their lead to help people with disabilities have a better experience.

Provide adequate information on your website

Without any exceptions, if I am visiting a new location the first place I will go to find information is your website. Make it easy for people to find information about venue accessibility. So many times I get sent to a website accessibility policy when I’m expecting to find information about how disabled-friendly your venue is!

I love the fact that Brighton Dome put this front-and-centre on their main menu - Access - next to About. As a user, I tend to expect to find this information under ‘About’, ‘Venue’, ‘Access’, or at a last ditch attempt, I sometimes find it lurking, hidden away under ‘Finding us’ or ‘Contact Us’. Placing it on the main site navigation demonstrates to me that Brighton Dome take venue accessibility seriously, and make it easy for people to find the information. If it’s buried five items deep on an obscure menu, you’re giving me the impression that it’s not something you’re proud of.

I don’t know if this was a good call by their web developers or a proactive decision by the venue, but either way you made my life much easier!

Also, we do understand that venues may not be perfect - if there are certain areas of the venue which people with certain types of disabilities will struggle with, it’s OK to tell us that, in fact I would go so far as to say I would rather know what I’m likely to find difficult than to be confronted with it when I’m at the event, unexpected. What’s even better is doing your best to ensure that this doesn’t result in a lesser experience for us:

Whilst the Studio and Corn Exchange do not have designated viewing platforms, we can arrange for you to have a sectioned off area near the front of the auditorium so that you have the best chance of seeing the stage. Please contact our Visitor Services Team to arrange this.

The other thing I love about Brighton Dome’s information is that they do their best to cover such a wide range of disabiltiies - not only providing physical access information but also details about auditory and visual facilities, temporary disabilities (how many people have had to go to a conference with a broken limb before!?!), information for people who may make involuntary noise, how personal care needs can be met, even where you can park with a blue badge nearby the venue. In fact, one of their access docs includes photographs of every relevant part of the venue. The only thing I would have really appreciated is some nearby food outlets that offer accessible seating, as I found this something of a challenge!

Have a designated point of contact if more information is required about accessibility

People with disabilities have a lot of questions, often more than you can answer on your one-page statement about accessibility. Our needs depend on our disabilities, the event we’re going to be attending, what specific things we need to know in order to feel less anxious … you get the picture!

It is inevitable that we will need to ask something specific to somebody who knows about the venue, performances, and the local area.

Please, provide a way for us to contact somebody who knows the answers, or who at least can find the right direction in which to point us. Please provide that contact in as many ways as you can - some of us might be better able to communicate our question by email, others might need to speak to someone on the phone. Quick questions could even be answered in a live-chat facility perhaps!

PLEASE make sure that your conference and event organisers know who to ask at your venue - sometimes we might be asking the questions to them, rather than you directly, so make sure they have the right contact details! Better still, provide them with the text to populate their website which explains all that visitors will need to know (or have them point at your own page).

Recently I went to Mamma Mia in London, their accessibility team were absolutely fantastic, even being able to tell me the dimensions of their chair lifts and widths of doors without needing to go away and look it up. While I didn’t need to use the service offered by Brighton Dome, I was pleased to see that they provide clear routes to get in touch with their team.

Have enough staff on hand to ensure that any problems are picked up quickly, and you don’t get lost!

Events are busy - especially when there are lots of people! It’s very overwhelming being in these conditions when you have a disability, especially if you are on your own and don’t know anybody. It can be disorienting trying to work out where you are meant to be, how to get there, where the step-free routes are, even to clear a path wide enough to get your wheelchair from A to B in my case!

This weekend, I was really impressed that there was a member of staff at or very close to every door. Situated at strategic locations in the big halls. At the entrance and exits of each room. The staff members were attentive to people passing them, open to helping where it was needed or just being there to hold the door. Several times I struggled to work out which room I needed to be in, or how to get from A to B - I didn’t have to go far to find a lovely, smiling face who pointed me in the right direction and, often-times, took me where I needed to be.

People often don’t realise how much of a difference this can make to the experience of someone with disabilities, and I was extremely grateful to all the lovely men and women who helped me at some point this weekend. Thanks to you I was able to enjoy the event, relax, and even laugh about my total brain-fog moments of not remembering how to get to a room I had been in only an hour beforehand!

Let’s not forget here, that having enough staff to support an event doesn’t only help people with disabilities. The staff on duty picked up on developing problems quickly, and stepped in courteously and politely to keep things moving - whether it was people not moving along seat rows or drinks being spilled in a heavy footfall area causing a potential hazard. People on the ground pick these things up. If you have enough people available to support the event, you’ll naturally be offering the attendees a better service.

Ensure all staff are fully briefed on locations of sessions and the quickest routes between facilities

As I alluded earlier, sometimes people with disabilities (and even those who are still hungover from the night before … which is not, by the way, mutually exclusive of people with disabilities!) have mental blanks. Brain-fog can be totally debilitating. For me, I lose all semblance of thought processes, and I simply can’t get words out or even remember what I need to ask. I forget which room I was heading to, and I certainly can’t remember how to get to that room in the back corner of the sprawling venue.

Several times over the weekend I was in room A and I needed to get to room B fairly quickly for the start of a session. Each and every time, I simply asked the nearest member of staff how to get to a specific session, and they skilfully directed me in the quickest route between facilities.

On a recent visit to the London Science Museum I had a similar experience, with the lovely staff sneaking us between floors via staff lifts where there were large queues for families with pushchairs using the lifts. Trust me, when you’re having to push yourself around all day long, any saving on wheel-time is a bonus. Having your staff familiar with, or able to find quickly, the session titles and locations makes a big difference.

Think about where people with disabilities will be seated, and whether this is appropriate to their needs

The number of times I’ve been to conferences and there has been absolutely no thought about where people with disabilities would be seated does not bear thinking about.

More often than not, I end up being plonked right at the front (often facing the crowd!), or right at the back of the hall and not able to see the speaker. I’ve had times where I’ve not been able to get into the rooms because they only entry point is at the back of the hall and the aisles aren’t wide enough to fit a wheelchair down the middle or sides.

At Brighton Dome they have specific areas which are designated for wheelchair users, allowing you to discretely slot into the regular seating plan and still see the speaker. Entrance to the rooms is via several doors, so you can get to the one closest to the disabled seating pretty easily. Again, the staff know how to get you into and out of the various rooms in the least disruptive way, which is a huge help.

Some conferences also reserve areas for people who need to be able to see the speaker, such as those who lipread or have a hearing impairment.

If in doubt, simply ask people what would best suit their needs, and do your best to be as accommodating as you are able. It doesn’t take much to ask someone what would work best for them, but it means a lot.

Introducing Ehlers Danlos Syndrome (EDS) Awareness Month

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Sun, 30 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

The month of May is a special month to me - it’s a month where the condition which I live my life with is showcased through Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome Awareness Month.

This year has been quite a year - I’ve been working hard on building up my strength, pacing, and a whole lot of acceptance and kindness to myself - and the result is that I am probably the most well I have been in about a decade. I’m going to use this month to share some insights into living a full, joyful and active life with EDS.

I’ll be writing some of the articles, but I’m also inviting some of the people who have helped me along the way to share their insights as well.

I’m hoping to be able to post something each day, but we’ll see how we go! Feel free to ask questions and if there’s anything specific you’d like to know just drop a message in the comments!

If you’d like to support the Ehlers-Danlos Society, I’ve set up a fundraiser page here - feel free to donate any amount you can afford :)

Being believed and getting a diagnosis of EDS

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Sun, 30 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Sadly, many people experience a lot of suffering before they are actually diagnosed with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome.

Some of the classifications are picked up from a very young age because the symptoms cause life-threatening complications which are present in babies and young children. As hypermobility is relatively common in children - with many never going on to develop problems - children and their families can often be told that it’s normal, and that their child will ‘grow out of it’. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. Sometimes it’s just a case of a bendy joint, but sometimes it can be much more than that.

In my own experience, I was told I had growing pains even into my late-teens and early 20’s. I never really thought to question it at the time, and nor did my parents. Herein lies an unanswerable question - if I had an earlier diagnosis, would it have affected how active I was and therefore how strong my muscles were? I don’t know.

Hypermobility can affect so much of the human body that inevitably it can cause difficulties for children.

What is Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome? (and how it affects me)

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Mon, 01 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000

The title should really be ‘what are the Ehlers-Danlos Syndomes’ as since 2017 there have been thirteen sub-types of Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome.

Basically, the Ehlers-Danlos syndromes are a group of disorders which affect connective tissue (tissue that connects, supports, binds, or separates other tissues or organs) which can be inherited (with several genetic causes) and have different impacts on the body depending on the classification.

Generally, they are characterised by joint hypermobility (joints stretching more than they usually should), skin hyperextensibility (skin that can be stretched further than normal), and fragile tissues which may not heal well, and damage easily.

In the UK it is not often that genetic testing is offered, so mostly the classification is based on an assessment against the minor and major criteria and matching these to the most likely diagnosis - this is often called a ‘provisional clinical diagnosis’. You can read more about the different sub-types of Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome here. It is thought that I have Classical-like EDS (clEDS), however I have not had genetic testing to confirm this.

Symptoms of Ehlers-Danlos Syndromes

The main symptoms associated with EDS are related to the joints and the skin.

Joints

Hypermobility

Hypermobility of joints, often leading to them being loose and unstable leading to injury is the most common symptom. I experienced this from a young age and frequently sprained my ankles, as well as having extremely loose shoulders (sorry for all those times I used to demonstrate this on the hockey pitch turning people a rather unattractive shade of green!). Sometimes joints can partially move out of their normal position (sub-luxation) or completely (dislocation) which may spontaneously resolve, or need medical help to relocate.

For me, my shoulders do this on an almost daily basis, and rarely need medical attention to fix. I’ve found ways of supporting my shoulders so that they are not ‘at risk’ of being stretched or popping out - which is why you’ll often see me sitting with a cushion on my lap, with my arms on the desk or table in front of me, or with my arms above my head (because this stops my shoulders dropping out of the joint!). It’s also why I chose the wheelchair I have, which does not require me to push at angles which cause strain on my shoulders.

I also frequently get problems where my joints have moved too far and get stuck - particularly with my spine. In this case, my facet joints get ‘stuck’ and locked in position. Generally I have to go and see my osteopath for help resolving this, as I can’t fix it myself. I also have ongoing stiffness in certain facet joints due to the hypermobility in my spine which means they can get sore and inflammed - for these I have exercises which help to keep them moving, and un-stick them if they are getting a bit stiff.

Related to this, there can sometimes be chronic musculo-skeletal pain which starts from a young age. For most of my childhood I had pain in my joints at varying levels. This was almost entirely put down to having ‘growing pains’ and nobody really thought to look any further - plus I was very much a ‘just get on with it’ rough and tumble child and just pushed on!

I was very active from a young age. Most of the clinicians and trainers I have worked with think this is why I was largely able to function normally for most of my childhood and teens (despite the pain) because I had pretty strong muscles which were supporting my joints and preventing the more severe complications such as traumatic dislocations. I only started to have my life significantly impacted by my EDS when - due to a health crash - I lost the ability to be physically active, lost muscle tone, and gained weight.

Hyperextensibility

I have hyper-extension in several of my joints - my knees, elbows and neck mostly - which means that I stand with my knees extended beyond the ‘normal’ range of movement because the ligaments which should block that movement are too loose. It also means that it can be very tiring for me to sit without neck support, because my neck and back muscles have to try to compensate for the ligaments being too stretchy.

Early-onset osteo-arthritis

One of the common side-effects to all of this is early-onset osteo-arthritis, because the joints are moving more than they should and wearing down quicker. This also happens because the normal anatomical structures are not functioning in the way they should to distribute the load, and hence pressure points develop.

As an example, I have almost completely collapsed arches in my feet which causes very bad over-pronation (where my feet roll inwards). If I walk without arch support, the load which should be distributed through the efficient ‘arch’ of the foot but instead is forced directly from my ankle through my big toe joint. This was confirmed both by a podiatrist and by running on a force plate which graphically showed a big red ‘hotspot’ under my big toe.

I was advised by both that if this wasn’t corrected, I would end up with extremely severe arthritis in my feet by my 30’s (which my paternal grandmother suffered with all her life). Adding arch supports also suddenly stopped the pains i was experiencing in my shins, as the rest of my lower leg biomechanics returned to how they were ‘meant’ to function.

Skin

Texture and stretchy-ness

EDS can cause the skin to be very soft and velvety, as well as being extremely stretchy. My skin is like this - I easy get very deep striae distensae (stretch marks) just by drying myself with a towel or streching the skin, and have done since I was about 12 years old. I also bruise very easily which is another common symptom of EDS, usually spectacularly worse than the actual injury would usually cause unless I’m very quick with ice and pressure! We have ice packs on standby at all times in our house!

Wound healing

It often takes a long time for wounds to heal in people with EDS, and they can sometimes heal with strange-looing scars, which is called ‘atrophic scarring’. Scars can often become thin and stretched, once they do heal over. Of course, this has pretty important implications any time surgery is needed - thankfully this hasn’t happened to me yet!

Other symptoms

There are a lot of other symptoms that can be related to EDS, which are largely due to the types and location of collagen which are affected.

Collagen is what the body uses to provide strength and elasticity to tissue; normal collagen is a strong protein that allows tissue to be stretched but not beyond its limit, and then safely returns that tissue to normal. Collagen is found throughout the body, and Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome is a structural problem. As an analogy: If one builds a house with bad materials, with cheap nails or only half the wood required, problems will arise. Some problems are more likely to show up than others, but because the bad or missing materials are everywhere and not necessarily visible, one can be surprised where some problems occur.

It is much the same thing with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome and collagen. The collagen with which a person with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome is built is not structured the way it should be, or only part of it is produced. With a badly built or processed collagen, the tissue that relies on it can be pulled beyond normal limits and thus be damaged. Collagen is the most abundant protein in the body and types of collagen can be found almost anywhere: in skin, muscles, tendons and ligaments, blood vessels, organs, gums, eyes, and so on. The problems resulting from one’s body being built out of a protein that behaves unreliably can be widespread and in a wide range of severity. It shows up in places that seem unrelated until the underlying connection to Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome is recognized. ~ Ehlers-Danlos Society

For example, the heart valves can be affected causing mitral valve prolapse, and internal organs can sometimes be fragile and rupture or prolapse. Blood circulation can be affected if the blood vessels are too ‘floppy’. I have real difficulties with dental anaesthesia, which wears off very quickly. I also find it extremely difficult to exercise in hot or cold environments because my body is not very good at regulating its temperature.

I hope that’s given you an overview of what the Ehlers-Danlos Syndromes are, and a bit of an insight into how they affect me!

If you would like to support an organisation who are actively working to promote awareness of and research into these conditions, you can make a donation here - large or small, everything helps!

Useful resources:

What is EDS - Ehlers-Danlos Society

EDS Types - Ehlers-Danlos Society

Skin involvement in EDS - The Hypermobility Syndrome Association

Update for clinicians on Hypermobility Syndromes - The Hypermobility Syndrome Association

What lies behind being so well at the moment

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Wed, 10 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000

In the last few months I’ve had several people comment on how well I look, and how different that is to where I was even a year ago.

I’m probably physically and mentally the most well I’ve been in about a decade, but it’s really easy to forget just how much work has gone into getting to this point, and how much work goes in to maintaining it.

This time a few years ago I ‘came out’ about the struggles I was facing, and started to take my health seriously. ‘Project Ruthie’ as I’ve affectionately called it, got underway!

I started using a wheelchair to help with pacing. I started to say no to things. I started to say yes to people offering to help me in big ways and small ways. I started exploring what exercises I could do safely and what was still beyond my reach. Learning what caused or contributed to a crash, and how to recover from and prevent them happening so often.

It doesn’t end here though folks. Just because I’m well, doesn’t mean that I’m fixed. I have a genetic condition for which there isn’t any cure, so it’s a lifetime of applying all that I’ve learned.

Today, I’m off to the Anglia Business Exhibition with my company Virya Group - it’s been interesting reading my old Facebook statuses … How badly I coped in the past, how far I crashed and burned afterward.

This year, I hope will be different. I’m fitter, happier and better at managing my fatigue, pain and dislocations. I’m also on a much more even keel when it comes to pain control. Especially when I’m pushing the boat out (pic is today’s meds!) and know that it’s going to be painful and exhausting … A potent combination!

So yes, at the moment I am really well, and thank you to everybody who has mentioned it - I really appreciate your kind and encouraging words!

I am also incredibly grateful to everybody who has helped me on this journey… It would have been considerably harder and probably much more bumpy without you all helping!

Who cares about marketing strategies anyway?

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Sat, 28 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Something I come across time and again with businesses I encounter is a real lack of strategy when it comes to their marketing efforts. I myself am just as guilty - I wrote a simple strategy and had everything laid out in a rough sketch, but never bothered to refer back to it!

So, why is it important to have a marketing strategy, and how do you build a business case for carving out the time each week to review and implement your strategy?

I’m sure you’ve all seen those annoying memes that do the rounds regularly on social media about failing to plan is planning to fail … but how seriously do we take these words of wisdom?

We’re already planning our lives strategically

When you think about your personal life - whether it be organising the chaos of a multi-child household, a busy social life, or even what episodes are released on what days on Amazon Prime or Netflix (I’m a huge Outlander fan, so don’t you dare disturb me on a Tuesday night, OK?!) - I’m sure you take time each week to check what is coming up, make sure you’re prepared and have the time in your diary, maybe a reminder set.

You see, we are already planning our lives, and making time for the things that matter. If we’ve got a night on the town with our friends coming up, you can bet we’ve already got the outfit, decided on the shoes and handbag, and probably have sorted out childcare, organised the taxi and have set up a WhatsApp group to plan and chat with our friends.

Why don’t we do the same for the important task of marketing our business, whether you’re a freelancer/sole trader or a large company?

I’d suggest, it doesn’t take more skills or more knowledge than we already have to start thinking strategically about how we market. It just needs us to focus on intentionally doing this, regularly and consistently, and the results will start to show. We already have the tools in our toolbox, let’s use them!

It all starts with a plan

Whatever in life we are organising, we start with a plan. A long term vision that in six months’ time, we will be going to Greece for a girlie holiday with our friends. Six months seems like a long time away, but we have a lot of things to do in that time. Save money, book flights, find somewhere to stay, research the local area, figure out if our friends have any dietary needs and what their interests are.

The same is true of a marketing strategy. Our plan might be to bring in a certain number of new projects over the course of a year, or to achieve a specific sales target. Maybe your job is to ensure customer satisfaction, so your plan might be to raise your customer satisfaction rating by a certain percentage. Whatever it is, there needs to be a ‘vision’.

Chunk the plan down into simple steps

Organising a holiday seems like a daunting task for most, that is, until you break it down into smaller chunks. The same is true of hitting your sales goals or whatever your vision might be - breaking it down into small chunks that you can attack and achieve makes it much easier to move toward your target.

I don’t know about you, but I’m much more inspired and encourage when I can look at my tasks list at the end of a busy week and know that I’ve ticked off the things I needed to do - likewise when I am ‘miss procrastination’ the same list of things I need to do keeps me focused and driven, rather than a big unwieldy task like ‘do the marketing’ or ‘follow up leads’.

Set up a system for checking in regularly

I’ve tried all kinds of systems from Trello boards to Wunderlist and everything in between. What I’ve found to work best for me is a blend between digital and analogue - yes that’s right, the geeky nerd that I am, and my life is organised with PAPER AND PENS!

I live by my Google Calendar when it comes to appointments, meetings and events. I share my calendar with my partner and my team, so I will always continue to use it for that purpose. When it comes to tasks, I have a blended approach. First and foremost, I am a Bullet Journal user. I have an old-fashioned, paper-and-pen notebook which I use with a particular method inspired by the original Bullet Journal method and some inspiration from Kara over at Boho Berry. I also apply the GTD methodology with everything - journal, email inbox, etc.

I’ll write up more about the system I use at a later date, but the important elements are:

Reviewing each month what tasks need doing, events need attending, calls need making and so forth
Reviewing at the end of each week what I have managed to get done, what needs to be brough forward, what I need to delegate, what is coming up that week, and what’s on the horizon
Reviewing at the end of each day whether I achieved all the tasks I needed to do, what needs to be brought forward to tomorrow, what might be urgent and what needs to be delegated

For a strategy to be successful, regular action and review is essential. When the smaller chunks are drawn up, simply decide when you are going to focus on them, slot the tasks into your workload for that week, and get it done. Check back in with yourself at the end of each month and see how you’re progressing against your strategy. What is working? What isn’t working? How can we improve on this area to help us meet our goals?

In the coming weeks I’ll be preparing some tools to help you with building a marketing strategy, planning what you want to achieve, chunking down into actionable tasks, and setting up the methods for checking in regularly to keep yourself on track.

Let me know in the comments below how you keep yourself focused on your strategy - what works for you? What are you finding difficult?

Have a great week folks!

I ran a mile every day for 40 days .. and so can you! #rwrunstreak

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Sat, 06 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I remember quite clearly, that moment when I saw a post on Facebook about the Runner’s World Run Streak while I was contemplating the icy cold morning I was about to launch myself into in order to get to the gym for my 6am personal training session. ‘That looks interesting’, I thought, as I yanked on my leggings, mumbled something about early morning training sessions, and joined the Facebook group thinking I’d check it out later that day.

Little did I know, that decision I made on an icy cold morning in November 2017 was about to challenge me in more ways than I was ever expecting in the coming 40 days!

What’s this Run Streak all about?

The Runner’s World Run Streak happens twice a year - I picked up on the Thanksgiving to New Year’s Day one - which involves committing to running at least 1 mile, every day, for 40 days. Anybody who decides to join simply adds themselves to the Facebook community, and gets running. Each day, runners from all over the world report in with photos, commentaries and anecdotes from their daily run.

Thanks to over two years of basic strength and conditioning training and some wonderful trainers, I am in a position where I can actually contemplate running a mile. Well, I say run, it’s more of a ‘joghobble’ (my new favourite word) as my joints won’t cope with any kind of high impact exercise. But still, one foot goes in front of the other, and eventually I manage a mile, and sometimes more.

Make a commitment and find a supportive community if you want to change or start a new habit

The most important thing I learned from this experience is that making a commitment, even to a group of people from all over the world many of whom I will never meet, meant that it became my primary focus and I had others to inspire me and keep me on track.

Whatever I was doing, wherever I was in the world, I made it a practice to allow myself 15 minutes for running my mile.

People were getting their mile done with their baby strollers, running around hospital car parks in their scrubs during their lunch break, trudging through thick snow up and down the road outside their house … the least I could do was go for a joghobble around the block or blast out a mile on the treadmill before a workout!

Keep your inspirations alive

Keeping my inspirations alive is one of my core mantras. If I allow my flames of inspiration to go out, you can be sure that I won’t follow through on the new habits or behaviours I am trying to adopt!

Each day I would see the often mundane stuff on my Facebook feed replaced with inspirational photos from all over the world, people sharing their challenges, spurring each other on when there was a down day, and that in turn spurred me on.

I felt as much a part of other people’s conditions as they were a part of mine. If they were making the effort, I would too! If they weren’t giving up, nor would I! If they asked for help when they were struggling, so could I … and I did, several times, only to be bowled over with positivity, encouragement, ideas and friendship.

A mile is actually not that far!

Initially the thought of running a mile every day was a bit overwhelming … could I actually do it? Would my body hold up? You won’t know unless you try!

When it comes down to it, actually it’s around 15-20 minutes of activity (for me - others may be faster or slower) and although the first week or two were pretty hard going, I quickly became used to it and found that actually it wasn’t as far as I had kept telling myself. I just needed to put on a good audiobook, get my head down, and get it done. 1 and done. That was all I needed to do! And, I did! I am shocked to say, I actually started to look forward to my daily plod and the necessary stretching that followed afterwards.

Of course, if you have not done any kind of training before, you will probably want to start out with a programme such as Couch to 5K or similar (and the usual caveat of always seeking your doctor’s advice, etc).

I knew that I had to be very strict with myself - I was doing 1 mile per day and no more. Not a single day of longer runs until the streak ended. While I was pretty sure I could cope with a mile a day, much more without rest days and active recovery days would, I feared, be taking me into the danger zone for injury and flare ups (see, I did actually pay attention during my Sport Science & Physiotherapy degree courses!).

I am physically quite well at the moment, but it is all too easy to quickly slide back down into the realms of pushing my body too far, and landing right back where I was a few years ago (mostly needing a wheelchair due to fatigue and recurrent dislocations).

This was something I had to monitor extremely carefully every day of the streak, and thankfully I managed to make it through, mostly unscathed!

Make your commitment part of your daily productivity process

When it came down to it, this was a challenge I felt I could take on. I made it an important part of my day, and it even got a spread in my Bullet Journal so that it formed a part of my daily/weekly/monthly GTD review process.

Below is a photo of the spread I used for any BuJo fans - adapted from one shared in the Runner’s World Run Streak Facebook group!

The satisfaction of filling out each line, adding the number in the mileage log, and knowing that I was that little bit closer to completing my goal is what kept me going some days!

You have to listen to your body

Part way through the streak, I suddenly had pretty sharp pain under my foot (see day 20!) when I was coming to the end of one of my runs.

Due to my Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, I have completely collapsed arches and have custom orthotics from the hospital as well as bilateral ankle braces (Aircast A60’s if anybody is interested, which allow full range of normal movement but block the movements that my ligaments don’t restrict due to faulty collagen!), so problems with my feet are always something I have to take very seriously.

By the next morning I had what I knew was the early warning sign of plantar fasciitis … every runner’s worst nightmare. My orthotist had replaced my year-old insoles around a month prior, and the combination of the increased arch support height and my increase in running volume was too much for my feet to cope with and they were sending out the smoke signals. I had to listen.

Be prepared to come to terms

What to do? Stop the streak? I was half way done at this point, and I really didn’t want to duck out early. Then again, I also didn’t want to cause a potentially serious injury either!

I had to come to terms with my ever-evolving body in a way that any person living with a disability will no doubt be familiar … The never-ending dance between pushing your boundaries and respecting your body when it pushes back.

We would see if I could run in some way that would not cause the repetitive trauma to my foot while it recovered, and I meanwhile sought physio advice on how to proceed. Big thumbs up to AHP Suffolk and their self-referral MSK Physiotherapy service on this point, I was triaged and saw a very helpful, encouraging senior physio within a few days who set me on the right track to a rapid recovery!

It turned out, running on an elliptical trainer without using the arms was a fairly similar movement to running and caused me no pain at all. This was my ‘peace offering’ to my foot, and it seemed to accept it. While the letter of the rules for the streak state that you must physically run each day, this was an acceptable workaround for my purposes to ensure I avoided injury (I would have been physically running if it weren’t for the injury), and I faithfully slogged out my mile each day on the elliptical trainers!

A week and a half of icing, stretching and cursing at the elliptical trainer machines (who knew how hard work it was without using the arms!) and my foot was starting to recover enough to get back to running outside with my old insoles. Just in time for the Christmas break!

Your friends and family may not quite understand!

This is one I did expect, but all the same a word of warning. Getting up early over Christmas so you can ‘go run my mile before the day starts’ caused many of my family to raise the odd eyebrow and ask me if I was feeling OK! Since reading and following the Miracle Morning book/process, I’ve found that mornings are by far and away the most effective time of the day for me to exercise - get it done and out of the way and there’s no chance of missing it!

I did find quite a relief at having the opportunity to exercise each day when usually I would just lay about over-enjoying the festivities. As a result, I maintained my weight over Christmas AND New Year!

Forward planning is key!

Every New Year I head up to the Trossachs to attend the Women’s Winter retreat at Dhanakosa, a beautiful Buddhist retreat centre on the banks of Loch Voil near Balquhidder. The forecast was the typical Scottish winter … snow, more snow, rain, more snow, sleet, snow … and at this point I still had just under a week of the streak left to go!

The Facebook group was a great way to pick the collective brains of several thousand people, many of whom run regularly in snow and icy conditions. A quick search and I found an overwhelming number of recommendations for YaxTrax Run - I can honestly say if I hadn’t thought to plan ahead and pick up a pair of these with my Christmas money, my streak would have been scuppered!

The first day we arrived, I literally drove up a tiny track which had around 10cm of snow freshly laid and it was still falling. For five out of the seven days, I had to use these to complete my run without bambi-style skating on ice impressions!

Am I well enough to run?

One of the delights that comes from spending time with friends and family at Christmas is the inevitable lurgies that follow.

Sadly I came down with the lurgies while I was away in Scotland, and with 5 days remaining I had to ask myself that question … am I well enough to run today?

I had a running nose and a sore throat, but otherwise was fine. A runner friend advised me, if the cold is in your neck and up you’ll be fine, just take it easy and use a mask over your face to keep the air warm and drink lots of fluids. If it’s in your chest, think seriously before you run.

Let’s give it a go and see how we find it, I thought … and that’s how I managed to complete the streak, complete with tissues, a lot of throat sweets, gallons of ice-cold Scottish mountain water (which is, I have to say, no substitute for dairy free ice cream!) and a lot of patience.

Plus a lot of cheering each day from my fellow retreatants (many sipping hot cups of tea waving at me cheerfully from inside!) as I plodded out for my 20 minute adventure into the icy realms each day!

No matter how slow, you’re still getting out there and doing it!

My last few runs were MUCH slower than I would expect even without taking into account the icy surfaces, but I was still getting out there and doing it.

I was keeping up my commitment to see the streak through, to run every day as best I could under the circumstances.

Knowing when you need to stop

I have absolutely LOVED doing the running streak, I have enjoyed the consistency and the community, and I’ve loved watching myself get fitter, more confident, and generally enjoying being active every single day. Learning that yes, I am indeed a ‘RUNNER’!

I also know that I am a very driven person, and sometimes I have to take a reality check. Today, on day 40+4 I’ve had to bow out of my daily running to allow myself to recover from the persistent cold that has apparently done the rounds of the entire family, as I learned on returning from the Highlands to find everybody on antibiotics!

It’s a question you’ll have to ask at some point of a daily running practice and only you can know the answer. Saying no, I’m not well enough to run today, is not a weakness, or a failure. It’s honouring your body, giving yourself an opportunity to start afresh the very next day you head out running with a day 1 of … who knows how many?

So, what are you waiting for? If I can do it, so can you!

I’d like to say a huge thanks to a few people: Sam from Dilly’s PT and Tyler from Tyler Thornhill Fitness for getting me to this point physically and mentally, believing in me, and giving me the confidence that I can, indeed, run. If you’re Suffolk-based and need a helping hand with your health, fitness and nutrition, get in touch with them.

England Peakers, Laura and the Peaker Red Shirts, and My Peak Challenge generally for being my daily cheerleaders in my ongoing challenge of working with a body that doesn’t usually like to co-operate! MPC2018 is about to launch #soon - watch this space!

My partner John for not giving in to my whimpering and making sure I got my backside out of the door on the evenings where I didn’t get up early enough, and was tempted to give up.

How businesses can support people with #EhlersDanlosSyndrome to be well at work

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Thu, 05 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

A question I am asked regularly by visitors to my blog is how I am able to be well while I am working full time, often long hours, and mostly at a computer screen throughout the day.

Living and working with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome can seem like an uphill struggle at times, but there are some simple ways in which I think employers can support staff with EDS to be well at work. I’ll explore a few of my thoughts on this in this article.

Understand how Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome affects your team member

I have yet to find two people with EDS who have exactly the same problems at work or the same symptoms. In my experience, having an open dialogue with your team member about their condition, what they struggle with (remembering here to discuss both emotional and mental well-being, as well as physical well-being), and any ways in which work can make things better or worse is a great place to start.

Make sure that you are open to really listening to what your team members says without any ulterior motive rather than thinking about your response, what it means for your team or how you can help solve things. Active Listening is a very important skill to practice here.

Allow them the space to feel comfortable with being entirely honest with you here, and always try to assume the best intentions - that they want to be working, they want to find a way to bring things into balance, and they are not trying to be difficult, shirk work, or cause problems!

When they have shared their experience and thoughts, demonstrate what you have heard by reflecting back to them the key points - without any judgements or trying to suggest anything - at this point you’re just echoing that you’ve heard and understood their key challenges.

Get creative about how you can support their well-being

One thing I can tell you for sure is that if you have a team member who is struggling with EDS and you don’t try to find ways to support them, they will eventually crash and burn resulting in a possible extended period of sick leave and a long recovery.

In my personal experience I am still recovering 10+ years later, largely because I didn’t take things seriously enough early on. Supporting their well-being is about more than the here and now, it is about their future life many years in the future.

Finding ways to support physical and mental well-being early on can be the difference between someone being able to live a full and active life, and someone being physically incapacitated for many years.

Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome is not something that is going to go away or get better.

The only treatment that exists currently is based on managing symptoms and ensuring that conditions are the most conducive to the patient being able to maintain physical strength and stability. This doesn’t mean that when the symptoms are well managed, the person is ‘better’. It just means that they are effectively managing their condition at that point in time. Flare ups can and do happen - how you respond to them determines whether they last a day or two, or a month or two.

Based on what your team member has shared with you regarding how their condition impacts their life, you may need to get creative with how best to support their needs.

For me personally there have been a few significant steps I have taken along the way to being as well as I am now.

Physical support

I have had a range of physical interventions including physiotherapy, occupational health, rheumatology consultants, hand therapy, and rehabilitation classes. Some were helpful, others less so! Probably the most significant learning point for me has been finding ways to break the ‘Boom and Bust’ cycle as it relates to pain, energy, and emotion.

I did this in a few ways:

Request support from Access to Work to get assessed for a proper desk and chair, keyboard and mouse which allows me to sit and work comfortably, without pain. They also gave me an immense about of support and ideas for ways that I could improve my working habits to
Using a wheelchair whenever I needed to be on my feet for any length of time or was struggling with fatigue
Using braces and taping to support joints that were painful or particularly hypermobile
Taking time to rest after busy days or following events which involved travel
Using an app on my computer to force rest periods - read more about the other tools I use in my LinkedIn article here

Practical support

It might be that your team member struggles to sit for long periods, or needs to rest regularly. There are all kinds of ways to work around this, from getting support from Access to Work to help with identifying furniture, technology or training that could help through to varying their working schedule to allow for different postures and break up long periods at the computer or on their feet.

Perhaps they might benefit from adjusting working patterns to permit a mid-week shorter day or day off to recharge?

For me personally, the most fundamental shift in my wellbeing coincided with adjusting my working pattern so that I do four long days, and have Wednesday as a non-working day. I still work full time hours, just distributed slightly differently.

While I still have to watch my energy levels during the longer days (generally I do something approximating to 8-6), having the day mid-week to rest and recharge means that I am immensely more productive and focused on the days I am working. My team knew that Wednesdays were the day I wasn’t working, so we simply made sure everybody had what they needed before I finished on a Tuesday evening.

It goes without saying that it might be necessary to involve the wider team to ensure that changing work patterns will be feasible, but it’s well worth considering.

A fully focused, engaged member of staff working four days a week is FAR more efficient than an exhausted member of staff doing the standard 5 day working week.

Emotional support

Receiving a diagnosis that is going to affect the rest of your life and have far-reaching implications, with no treatment available except symptom management, can be completely crushing. Often people will have been through years of misdiagnosis, being told they were making up their symptoms, even being called a liar, before they finally get an explanation for their symptoms. Imagine for a moment the impact it would have if you lost the ability to do almost everything you enjoy. That you were in pain most of the time, and had been told there was pretty much nothing that could be done about it.

From my own personal experience, I went from being a hockey player, a mountain leader, a fit and healthy 20-something with their whole life ahead of them to being barely able to walk up two flights of steps, having to stop playing hockey, being unable to volunteer as a Duke of Edinburgh’s Expedition Assessor/Supervisor, and eventually being signed off on bed rest for almost a month.

Emotionally, it felt like I had stood in front of a mirror looking at my reflection and smashed it into pieces. Everything that I was, everything that defined me, everything that meant something to me, no longer was. I had to try to pick up all the pieces, and find a way to put them all back together.

Sometimes, work might be the only thing that is providing some kind of continuity in their lives, some kind of self-worth that they can actually do something. To face losing that as well can be a terrifying prospect.

Any time your team member talks about their condition or how they might be struggling, bear this in mind. Reassurance that you will try to work together to find a way that will help support them with managing their condition and opening the channel of communication where they feel able to share when they are struggling or ask for help if they need it, could well be a much needed lifeline.

Be aware that they are probably dealing with a lot of emotional turmoil, and this can easily bubble over in the workplace, particularly in roles which involve dealing with conflict or challenging situations. This could be an opportunity to discuss with them whether they feel they need support in talking about what is happening if you have the option to help them access talking therapies through your workplace well-being programmes.

Consider early referral to professional services

There are several professional services which exist specifically to support people with long-term health conditions in the workplace.

One in particular which has come to my attention recently is Working Toward Wellbeing.

They have a service which is specifically aimed at supporting people with chronic illness in the workplace.

If you don’t have the resources within your organisation to support your team member, it is well worth seeking early intervention from experts.

Not only will your team member benefit from direct access to their services, but they will also likely value your effort to support their well-being.

I hope that this has given you a few ideas for how to support a member of your team who is living with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome. If you have any other ideas or examples of ways that you have been helped in the workplace, do leave a comment below!

Building a community? Check out these great resources!

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Thu, 05 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

You’ve got a great idea and you’re thinking that building a community around your idea would be a great fit … but where do you start?

Often communities are launched without much background preparation, and many fail to thrive as a result. There are many useful resources out there to help you with starting, growing and managing a community - a few of which I’ll outline below.

Why community?

The first port of call is to make sure you’re clear on why you’re going to start a community in the first place.

What is the purpose of the community?

What will the values be?

Who is the community for?

Introducing the Community Canvas tool

A fantastic tool called the Community Canvas has a range of worksheets and diagrams to help you take these concepts from your head onto paper, and in the process formulate a clear overview to help you developing your community.

Start off by downloading the Summary & Guidebook which walk you through their approach.

If you’re pressed for time, or you have a good idea of the whys and wherefores, jump right in and fill out the ‘Minimum Viable Community’ template.

If you’ve got a bit more time then you can work through the long-form worksheet (this is great for working through with a client if you’re a contracted CM) and populate the visual summary template.

This tool gives you a really great overview and asks some pertinent questions that should get the conversation moving before you jump in and start building.

Getting strategic

Sooner or later, somebody will utter the word ‘strategy’ … but don’t let your heart sink! It doesn’t have to be boring!

The lovely folk over at Feverbee have put together an awesome course on building community strategy … and what’s more, it’s free!

It covers areas including:

Why create a strategy
Setting goals and objectives
Tactics
Developing an action plan
Data and metrics
Managing change

You can also download a handy template which you can work through step by step.

I found this dovetailed well with the Community Canvas - several of the points will have been explored in the CC work, so the strategy work will naturally follow from this early work.

Calculating ROI for communities

Another great tool from Feverbee is a short course and handy spreadsheet on calculating the Return on Investment (ROI) from communities.

This covers areas including:

Understanding value in communities
What is return on investment
How to measure communities
What are the benefits of a community
Determining costs and returns
Working with acquisition, retention and cost reduction
Communicating value to others

Want to read more about building a community? Check out this ultimate list of resources - jam packed with articles and resources on a range of topics!

Breaking the Boom and Bust cycle of pain and activity

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Tue, 17 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

One of the most fundamental tips I learned over the years was how to break the ‘Boom and Bust’ cycle of pain and activity. It has taken many years of constantly trying to find a balance, but I’m closer now than I have ever been at finding the middle way. Read on for some of my tips on how this has helped me to live a ful and active life with Ehlers-Danlos Syndome.

The Boom and Bust cycle is probably the most powerful way that people with chronic conditions stay trapped in the downward spiral of inactivity, deconditioning and pain.

It had me in its jaws for probably well over a decade before I even started to realise what was happening.

Associating our self-worth with what we do

To understand how deeply we can be stuck in these patterns of Boom and Bust it takes a little understanding of where our habits around doing ‘stuff’ comes from.

Let’s go back to when we were young and we did some small task - maybe we put our toy away after using it. It’s likely that someone important to us noticed this and praised us in some way.

Instead of linking this praise to the action of putting our toy away, often what can happen is we link the action (putting the toy away) with being a good person, with getting praise, with being loved.

In other words, we develop a habit of tying our self-esteem and self-worth to how well we perform tasks.

Writ large, our entire identity can be build around constructs of the things we do, the tasks we perform, the roles we hold and the achievements we make. To feel better about ourselves, more worthy - particularly in the eyes of those we care about - we feel the need to do more, and to do those things better.

Boy, was this a painful realisation for me when it all came crashing down around me when I had my health crash back in 2010.

Driving ourselves to exhaustion

I’m a very driven person. I do stuff. I get things done. I’m competent. I can do it by myself! I don’t need other people’s help, I’m a capable, independent woman.

Pretty strong views, right!

Imagine what happened when suddenly I was barely able to get myself out of bed to the bathroom …

In some ways, I am grateful for my health crash.

It made me face up to the bonkers reality I was forcing upon myself.

Boom

I was literally driving myself to my absolute limits both physically (I walked the Coast to Coast - 200 miles - in atrocious weather!) and emotionally (having a tough time at work and with my relationship), and I was constantly pushing, pushing pushing regardless of the physical and mental exhaustion that was creeping up on me. New projects, joining a hockey team, supervising and assessing DofE expeditions, starting a business … you name it, I said yes to it!

What I later learned is that this kind of stress can completely screw up your endocrine system and ultimately switch on chronic pain processes. I had weeks and months where I was wired like the dynamo bunny (BOOM!) and yet more weeks where I was barely able to drag myself out of bed to get to work (BUST!) (but yes, you guessed it, I was still forcing myself to play hockey, and doing all the other stuff as well as working!).

Being in this constant state of exertion means your body simply has no resources to rest, recover and repair. Eventually, I had an epic BUST.

Bust

The Boom phase definitely had early warnings of the forthcoming Bust phase. I caught colds that lasted for weeks, after expeditions I would be totally wiped out for days, and there were increasingly often days where I could barely function effectively, with atrocious attention spans and difficulties with memory.

Top tips for maximising your exhibition experience with digital marketing and social media

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Fri, 28 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000

When you are attending a business exhibition, it is important to consider digital marketing and social media as part of your wider strategy for promoting your involvement and bringing people to your stand.

Digital marketing offers many opportunities for engaging with people and brands both before and after your event which can sow the seeds for great business relationships in the future.

Set objectives

The decision to exhibit at an event should always be made with the wider picture of your corporate goals and strategy. You should have clear, measurable expectations for the event, such as:

Increasing brand awareness
Growing your following on social media
Growing your mailing list
Direct or indirect sales of goods, products or services
Lead generation
Networking opportunities

Whatever your objectives might be, make sure you set them before the event. For example, you might want to come away with at least three warm leads to follow up and to grow your mailing list by 25%. Another company might want to have sold a certain number of products or set up a number of product demonstrations.

It really depends on your business - whatever you do, be clear and specific about your expectations.

Who else is going?

Most events will have an exhibitors list which you can use to find out who is exhibiting at the event. For the Anglia Business Exhibition 2019 you can access it here.

On social media, you can often find curated lists of exhibitors - for example you can find lists for last year’s ABE18 Exhibitors and Sponsors on their Twitter account.

You can follow all these exhibitors and use the list on the day to keep track of what is happening. You may also want to follow them on other networks such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram. A ‘see you there’ tweet is a nice way to engage with other exhibitors and gives you some content to share throughout the run-up to the event.

It’s well worth following the event hashtag and any other relevant hashtags - for example for the Anglia Business Exhibition this year we’re using #ABE19 - also #SuffolkHour is a great one to follow for live tweeting with other businesses between 8.30-9.30 on Wednesday evenings.

Add the event to your Facebook page

Most events will create a Facebook event - you can add this to your company Facebook page when on a desktop computer by clicking on the three dots to the right of ‘Share’, and select ‘Add to page’. We’ve written a more detailed ‘how do’ on the ABE blog here.

Tell your clients you’re attending

Whether you send a direct email, add it to your newsletter or push something out on social media, let your clients and contacts know that you’re going to be exhibiting at the event.

Invite them to come along - you could even offer to have some 1-2-1 appointments if you have the staff and facilities to permit this during the event.

Do something to invite engagement

You could run a competition or launch a product at the event, whatever you choose make sure you have something to encourage engagement and give people a reason to open up a conversation with you - free sweets and pens will only get you so far!

In the run-up to the event you can use this as an opportunity to post teasers - videos or images which hint at what you’re preparing so that you can build excitement and buzz around the event.

During the event you can often ask the organisers to make an announcement on your behalf if you are announcing the winner of a competition or launching a new product.

Prepare your materials

All your visual materials, whether it be business cards, exhibition stands, giveaways or fliers need to be on-brand and relevant for the event you are attending.

Ideally a professional designer should be involved in helping you define the brand message and creating these materials. If you’re a smaller business and want to ‘do it yourself’ then check out canva.com.

Ensure you get your materials delivered in good time, and use this as an opportunity to offer ‘sneak peeks’ behind the scenes of your event preparation. You can take pictures of the design process, snaps of the exhibition material when it has arrived, even setting up at the event.

Preparing for the day

Train your staff

Make sure that everybody who is involved with digital media knows your overall strategy and what they are expected to do before, during and after the event.

Ensure that your digital marketing tools are set up and ready to receive the incoming contact details - for example I use the FullContact app on my mobile, connected via Zapier to my CRM, so that each time I scan a business card it automatically adds the person to my CRM and sets me a task to follow up with them.

This takes time to set up and think through - particularly if you are doing any kind of automation associated with people you meet.

If you have sales and marketing teams, make sure that they are aligned on the strategy for the event, follow up and your expected outcomes.

On the day, it is likely that you will be busy. Plan for not having time to check your phone or social media and ensure that somebody is taking care of that - whether you schedule up social posts in advance or have somebody back at the office looking after it.

If you need to do some social media updates while you are at the event, do not do this while on your stand. Go and grab a coffee and sit somewhere away from your pitch - having somebody staring at their phone instead of engaging with visitors when you walk past an exhibition stand does not give a very good impression!

Make use of ephemeral content

All the social media channels have short-term content, as-it-happens news collections and similar. Facebook and Instagram have ‘stories’ (which can be page-related and event-related on Facebook!), and Twitter has ‘moments’.

This is a great way to interact with your audience without flooding your main timeline with lots of updates in a short time period.

Tools like Wordswag allow you to quickly put together collages on your phone which can then be uploaded to the various networks.

When you get a chance to visit other stands this is a great time to be sharing on social media - selfies, pictures of their stands, and other interesting snaps of the event are a great way to share the experience with your audience.

You could even consider doing a Live Stream, on Facebook Live or Periscope!

Post-event follow up

The work for the event doesn’t just stop when you pack up your stand and head home - in fact this is where the real work starts! First and foremost, make sure you thank the event hosts, venue, catering etc!

Make sure that you follow up with everybody you met at the event, and follow them on social media where you can find them - both company and individual profiles.

Drop them a message to connect with them after the show and try to include something memorable - it might be something you remember about meeting them or that you wanted to discuss with them.

Check out the event hashtags, and follow anybody of interest who you didn’t encounter on the day - you can also drop them a message saying you didn’t get a chance to chat, perhaps set up a date to meet up over a coffee?

Follow up marketing

With the new GDPR rules coming into play you’ll need to ensure that any list-building you do as a result of the event is compliant.

As an example, you may wish to set up a list with double-opt-in, and then personally contact the people you meet inviting them to subscribe (perhaps with some kind of enticement - for example to find out the winner of the competition or the latest news about your new product or service).

Use the first email they receive as an opportunity to remind them how you met, and to follow up on any specific themes you were featuring at the event, so that it is familiar to them. If you were running a competition at the event you might use a title like: ‘And the winner of the ABE19 iPad giveaway is …… (it could be you!)’ which encourages them to open the mail.

Remember that you should be segmenting your lists to make sure you send appropriate information - so add a tag or a segment in your marketing tool of choice so you can identify these subscribers in the future as coming from this event.

Write up your experience on a blog - making sure you feature links to your social media updates within the article to encourage people to follow you if they didn’t already do so (you can embed most messages from social media platforms).

Amphibious SEOs, cracking content and optimisation of Javascript sites .. another Brighton SEO round-up

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Fri, 28 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000

A standing event in the calendar of any marketing and SEO professional has to be BrightonSEO.

Twice a year, 4,000 people descend on Brighton from 40+ countries to learn, share and generally get their geek on.

I’ve been attending for the past three years. Without fail I have come away from every conference with ideas, enthusiasm and often with the need to decompress my brain!

The latest installment was no different!

#RunBrightonSEO

Arriving the night before, I was able to join the intrepid band of amphibious folk for #RunBrightonSEO … a 5k run starting at 7am sharp. Claire prepared a great route along the Brighton sea front, complete with photo reference points!

We all set off at our own pace (I’m most definitely a tortoise rather than a hare!) and we met on the shoreline back at the start where several people went for a swim. Big thanks to Claire for organising it, a great way to get to know a few people in a rather different way!

After a quick shower and checking out of the hotel, it was over to The Brighton Centre to register and chat with sponsors. It’s great to talk to the people who build the industry gold standard tools.

Discussing with representatives (and picking up some free trials and swag!) is a huge time-saver when you are researching tools and services. Often you don’t know what you don’t know - things change so fast in this industry, so it’s important to keep an eye on new developments.

Content strategy sessions

As much of my focus involves communication and content strategy, I headed to the main auditorium for the content stream. Ross Tavendale kicked us off with a great talk on Data Journalism, which included some really handy top tips for winning big links with techniques including data mining of public data sources (useful link: https://toolbox.google.com/datasetsearch). He walked us through an example of a client who had a £50k budget per month, and how his team went about developing their content strategy. Some useful tips I took away were the use of a RAP sheet (Research, Angles, Pitches) to quickly develop multiple potential ways to approach a piece of content.

Keynote time!

After a short break where I caught up with a colleague who had been in Brighton for the training course the day before, I headed to the keynote by Meg Fenn - Using stunning design to leverage your SEO.

It echoed a lot of what I have learned over the years from experts like Chiara Aliotta at Until Sunday - the importance and cross-over of design when it comes to the user experience, and how this impacts on your SEO. Meg covered a range of topics and shared some great tips, so make sure you check out the talk!

BrightonSEO - Using stunning design to leverage your SEO from Shake It Up Creative

Getting geeky with Javascript SEO!

Having inherited a React front-end / WordPress back-end (yes, you read that right!) website at work, and knowing the buzz on the ‘wires’ about the importance of Javascript SEO now there are many more sites being deployed using JS, I headed over to the sessions on this topic. Hands down, the most informative sessions of the day (in my humble opinion!).

Martin Splitt gave a great overview into how Javascript sites actually work ‘under the hood’ and the different problems that can be encountered. He walked us through the different options - client-side rendering (CSR); Server-side rendering (SSR); and Hybrid rendering. We learned the challenges Google is trying to overcome when it indexed Javascript sites and why things sometimes go wrong, resulting in indexing problems. Martin declared publicly that developers documentation on dynamic rendering would be going live the following week - and he was true to his word! Martin fielded a lot of questions, some of which were relevant to the issues I’ve been working with, so it was super helpful to hear how he recommended addressing them. I was fortunate to catch up with Martin after the session to dig into some of our issues with the React site and really appreciated his input!

Next up, Jamie Alberico gave a great session on Angular SEO, and addressed some of the challenges faced. A couple of the tips mentioned will be really interesting to explore going forward, including the use of puppeteer/rendertron.

SEO for Angular - BrightonSEO 2018 from Jamie Alberico

Back to content again!

The next session from Björn Beth & Svetlana Stankovic - Making Data Dreams come true: Bridging the Gap between Ranking Factors and SEO Strategy - had some great insights into the importance of considering content as an agile structure, comprising of five stages: analyse, develop, create, update, and monitor. This mirrors what I am developing in my content strategy so it was helpful to hear how this works at a larger scale. The talk also covered the importance of balancing fresh news with archives of previous news - category and tag filtered pages, for example - which can sometimes rank much higher than fresh content.

Next up, a fascinating insight into the changes in the latest Quality Raters’ Guidelines from Google by Marie Haynes. Having previously worked as a quality rater many years ago, I was interested to hear how the guidelines had been developed over the years. Certainly it pays to keep an eye on this document, as it gives us an insight into what the search algorithms are trying to use as indicators of good (and bad) quality content. A key takeaway for me was the increasing importance of being able to clearly see information about the author of content, enabling the reviewer to determine their authority on a subject. This sounds very much like how the old Authorship system used to work with Google+, but in a much more subjective way. Another important takeaway was that sites which bombard the user with pushy sales tactics - particularly in a ‘Your Money Or Your Life’ (YMYL) context - will be penalised. Marie shared some examples of this in action which were rather sobering! Closing statement: Make a website that people trust and recognise as an authority.

Super Practical Nuggets from Google’s Quality Raters’ Guidelines - Brighton SEO September 2018 from Marie Haynes

The penultimate session was an intense walk-through of ranking factors in YouTube and how to optimie as part of your marketing strategy. Luke Sherran gave us some great tips on what the ‘real stats’ were, and what they actually meant. Some important takeaway points included making sure you launch at the right time - the aim being to get the most views in the immediate minutes and hours after release - and ensuring you optimise vital elements such as the title and thumbnail.

Video Ranking Factors in YouTube from Luke Sherran

Rand Fishkin keynote

Finally, a great ending to a full day was the keynote by Rand Fishkin. Technical issues aside, Rand gave some great insights into where he sees the future of search and most importantly, what this means for us as search marketers. My key takeaways included the importance of building your own websites and email lists on your own real estate and not relying on external sources such a social networks or search engines which can change the ‘rules’ without notice. Also, the importance of leveraging every scrap of organic traffic that arrives on our site. Make it convert, don’t waste it! Rand also emphasised the importance of building up demand for your content and tools, and controlling closely how your brand appears in search results. SEO will be a crucial skillset for at least another decade, probably longer says Rand. Phew, that’s a relief then! :)

SEO on the SERPs - Brighton SEO Closing Talk from Rand Fishkin

All in all, another awesome BrightonSEO, I hope to return again in the spring!

How my wheelchair gave me back my life, my health, and my dignity

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Fri, 01 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Today is #InternationalWheelchairDay which has me reflecting just how much my life has changed since I decided to start using a wheelchair back in 2014.

Wait, what? Wheelchair?

For some, this might come as a surprise — particularly those of you who have only come to meet me recently — as at the moment I don’t use my wheelchair hardly at all. In fact, the last 12 months have been something I never expected to experience again, a time where I have been more well than unwell. A time when I was able to exercise, even to run, without crippling exhaustion or injuries.

I’ve included a bit of background for those who might not know the back-history so feel free to scoot through if you already know!

Being bendy

I have been hypermobile all my life, ever since I can remember I had joint pain, clumsiness, sprained joints and injuries but this was all thought to be ‘growing pains’ and just not paying attention to what I was doing! Despite that, I was extremely active throughout my childhood and teens — something I am very thankful for, as it built strong muscles that made up for the weaknesses that I had.

It wasn’t until my mid-20’s when studying to be a Physiotherapist that I was diagnosed (by one of our lecturers, a consultant spinal physio) with widespread hypermobility.

Hypermobility Syndrome as it was known, or Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (EDS for short) as it is now classified in the 2017 nosology, is a heritable condition (meaning it’s something that is passed between generations — my paternal grandmother was likely a sufferer as well) which affects connective tissue — specifically collagen. The downside is that a lot of important things in our bodies rely on connective tissue to function. Tendons and ligaments which join muscle to bone, and hold joints together. Our internal organs. Skin.

I literally knew nothing about Hypermobility before I was diagnosed, but I ended up doing my Masters thesis on it because as soon as I started learning from resources at the HMSA and scientific papers, lots of pieces of a fragmented jigsaw puzzle started to come together.

How EDS brought me to my lowest, physically and mentally

Just under nine years ago, a whole series of events came together which I believe led to a significant — and very rapid — decline in my health.

I pushed myself physically to my absolute limits doing a 200 mile walk across the UK in atrocious weather; I was under immense pressure at work in less than ideal circumstances; and I was emotionally distraught at being unable to secure my junior rotation as a Physiotherapist, and facing the likelihood of that career never materialising after two years of hard work and with a large loan to pay off.

It all starts somewhere …

It started as pain in my thumb which was diagnosed as excess hypermobility and braced in a splint. This (unhelpfully, in hindsight!) allowed me to continue to work as a data analyst but led to elbow and shoulder pain, followed by spinal pain.

As was my default, I just kept on ploughing through, working full time while building websites in my spare time and playing my beloved hockey two or three times a week, supporting a Duke of Edinburgh’s Gold Award group with their expeditions, and assessing for various organisations.

Unsurprisingly, the relentless pressure I piled on myself led to something of a meltdown.

I started to experience crippling exhaustion which made it almost impossible to function, hand-in-hand with an epic decline in my mental health.

Why couldn’t I fix this?

Why can’t I just get off my arse and get myself to work?

This is completely stupid!

You’re better than this!

Don’t be so weak and feeble!

Pull yourself together!

Owch. It’s painful to even write those thoughts down, let alone own the fact that they were so viciously directed toward myself for many, many years.

It was my partner who, in the end, gently suggested I needed to go and see the doctor. I could tell he was really concerned — the way I was behaving was so unlike ‘me’, and he was really worried.

The doctor signed me off for what would become over a month, and told me very directly that if I wanted to stand any chance of reversing the situation I needed to stop.

Stop everything.

Stop pushing myself.

Stop over-working.

Simply stop. Rest.

How do you even do that, I asked myself?

Both my parents were one generation away from abject poverty, and as a result, the work ethic instilled in me was such a strong driver in my life that I simply didn’t know how to do anything other than push.

The endless cycle

Anybody who has lived with a chronic condition will be familiar with the endless cycle of boom and bust.

You can’t do what you want/need to do due to your condition — stuff mounts up because you need to take time out to rest
You start to feel better having rested/got over the worst part … hurrah!
All the stuff you need to do suddenly gets done in short order, because you’re feeling a bit better and it has piled up, and you need to get it done
You’ve used up all your energy and you’re now completely exhausted, in pain, can’t cope and can’t function any more … go back to #1, but a bit worse off than when you were last there

A visual representation for the boom and bust cycle from https://www.abi-rehab.co.nz/fatigue/

The other kind is pain-related

You’re in pain, so you have to scale back what you are doing and rest
The pain is under control through meds/rest, so you can do stuff. Quick, let’s do all the stuff we haven’t been able to do before!
Urgh, I overdid it again. I’m in more pain than I was before, or maybe picked up an injury or am crashing with fatigue
Go back to #1 but worse off than you were last there

A great example of doing all the stuff at the weekend only to crash and burn during the week and desperately trying to recover — super common for people who work alongside managing chronic conditions! Image from https://www.abi-rehab.co.nz/fatigue/

Over the intervening 5 years or so, I tried so many times to break out of these cycles. I’d been through physiotherapy multiple times, discharged by consultants because they felt there was nothing else they could do for me.

The turning point

Without a doubt, the turning point for me was realising a central teaching of Buddhism in a literal, felt-sense:

“All things are by nature conditioned. With the arising of this; that arises. With the ceasing of this; that ceases.”

It’s an ancient teaching called Pratītyasamutpāda, if you want to look it up.

What this taught me, in a profound way, is that everything is governed by conditions. I realised that I could change the way I approached my life.

I could make changes — big and small — to the conditions of my life, which affected the way I lived my life. Those conditions were both external, but also — and perhaps most significantly — internal. The way I talked to myself about myself, and the way I approached life’s challenges.

Another more recent learning came later which further validated this, from Hal Elrod of Miracle Morning fame:

“The moment you accept responsibility for EVERYTHING in your life is the moment you gain the power to change ANYTHING in your life.”

This was the biggest shift I think I have ever experienced in my life, from being a passive bystander in my life; in which everything was being ‘done unto me’ and I was powerless to do anything about it, to being the steering force in my life; taking proactive steps to live my best life, despite the challenges it threw up at me.

Breaking the cycle

The biggest cause of fatigue and exhaustion in my life was related to the physicality of what I did. I was building a business, working long hours, speaking at conferences and events which were often several days in duration and all over the world. I’d manage for a few weeks, maybe even a month at a time, before imploding and crashing into fatigue, pain and exhaustion.

Both my physio and my doctor told me that I needed to either change what I was doing and cut back on my work, or do it differently so that it didn’t result in so much pain and exhaustion which was undoing all the hard work I had done in therapy/pain management almost overnight.

Doing things differently

In 2014, after about a year of coming to terms with the idea, I had pretty much decided that enough was enough. I needed to find a way to enable my body to rest, to put less demand on it while still being able to do most of what I loved doing.

I can remember breaking down in tears in my study group for the first time ever, when I shared this with my closest friends. I shared that it felt like I had given in to not being good enough, that it was the start of a downward spiral. I couldn’t quite bring myself to see it as a positive move yet.

What was obvious was that I needed to be clear to everybody around me that I was not superwoman. Most people at this stage had no idea of how much I was suffering in silence — both physically and mentally.

I had tried using a wheelchair when I’d been struggling — at the Boston Science Museum after half an hour my feet were on fire and my back was killing me, so I asked to borrow a self-propelling wheelchair and spent the rest of the day wheeling about the place and realising that while it was physically hard work (hire chairs tend to be extremely heavy!) I was actually able to do stuff, rather than having to go home in pain and spend the rest of the day in bed!

It was a chance discovery on a trip to London with my partner, where the Science Museum had some incredibly futuristic-looking Trekinetic K2 wheelchairs, that I discovered my wheelchair-to-be.

In past visits I had been cranky, in pain and exhausted within an hour (and I LOVE science museums and would spend an entire day there if I could) … but this time, I spent the entire day whizzing around the whole building, poking buttons and spinning dials and generally having an awesome time.

I didn’t crash at the end of it, in fact we went on to have a lovely meal together.

We both saw, so clearly, this was what I needed in my future, to really start to live my life. I shared my experiences on Google+ (which was my platform of choice at the time!) and started the process to figure out how I could get one of these amazing chairs.

Early positive experiences are SO important

Having had such an overwhelmingly positive experience at the Science Museum, I knew that I needed to set up the conditions so that the first few times I used a wheelchair ‘out in the world’ on my own, they would be positive experiences which would help me to make the transition to accepting this as part of my life more easily.

So many people see a wheelchair negatively. Oh, poor you, you’re in a wheelchair. Oh my gosh, what happened?! It’s super hard to have to go through your medical history or address difficult topics — sometimes with complete strangers — multiple times a day! Stickman Communications cards were super helpful with this — especially in foreign countries!

For me, my chair was giving me my life back. It was a positive step, giving me back the ability to do all the stuff I wanted to do and not have all the negative side effects. To break the vicious cycles that were controlling my life.

On my worst days it meant I could still work, still function, still be a productive member of society, without worsening my conditions.

On my best days, it helped me to really start to care for myself. To learn that I needed to take my own health seriously, and that my wheelchair was a huge step in a positive direction.

The first conference I attended with my wheelchair in Europe had a leadership team summit attached to it before the conference, so I nervously wrote an email to the whole team, telling them that I would be using a wheelchair, explaining the back-story, and asking for their support. I explained that I was still learning, still figuring stuff out, and importantly still learning to accept help from others. I asked them to feel free to offer me help, but be willing for me to reject the offer if I wanted to try to do something myself.

I couldn’t have had a more positive experience at that first outing as I think this picture sums up!

My friends were simply fantastic. We had so much fun, I learned so much, and importantly I gained so much confidence.

Almost all of the Community Leadership Team at the Leadership Team Summit, 2014 (side note: check out the wheelchair heels! :D )

‘Coming out’ as needing a wheelchair takes a LOT of courage

When my Trekinetic chair was ordered and on the way, I knew it was time to ‘come out’ to the wider world — especially as I was about to be manning a stand at a large exhibition and seeing many of my business networking friends who largely had no idea about my health.

I shared through a blog post on my website and across my social media channels, an open and vulnerable post about what was going on for me and why I was going to be using a wheelchair more often.

You can read the post here: Life is better with wheels.

Life really did get better with wheels!

My wheelchair took me all over the world, from India to Cancun, Germany to the USA.

It gave me the freedom to do what I wanted to do, without the fear of constant pain and exhaustion.

I spoke at conferences from my chair, presented to board meetings, visited clients, represented Joomla! at events, and generally got on with my life.

I got used to the questions — both kind and the not-so-kind — and learned all the tricks of the trade that nobody ever tells you about using a wheelchair!

The great thing about the Trekinetic is that, unlike other wheelchairs, the action to self-propel does not put your shoulders in a compromised position — it’s more like doing a bench press movement.

So, I got pretty strong arms … especially going up the hills to the blue badge parking in Brighton!

I had some shocking experiences, like BA breaking my chair at Gatwick and not telling me while pushing me through the terminal with a wheel almost hanging off the axle!

I also had some fantastic experiences, like the team at Brighton Dome being nothing short of awesome.

I also had a lot of positive experiences within my work — along with the opportunity to raise awareness of just how poor the accessibility was in some venues across East Anglia!

Honestly, any business owner should spend a day using a wheelchair to really get an idea for the difficulties that wheelies can face, it would be an eye-opening experience, I’m sure!

Empowered to grow

Reducing the amount of physical crashes I experienced and injuries I picked up meant that I had increasing amounts of energy. Energy I could direct in positive directions, to help me to grow and improve my life further.

A close friend — Frank Delventhal — who practices strength training approached me and offered that, when I felt ready, he would be more than willing to help me learn some strength exercises to help my body cope with using my chair and to improve my body strength.

It took nearly a year before I was in a place to take him up on it, but that’s another point where I started to take positive steps to improving my health. We started with super simple exercises — mostly bodyweight training — with me sending a video to show my technique and him giving me feedback in a video.

Later, I found a local trainer who worked with people who had disabilities and had experience with training clients who had EDS. Samantha Muncaster from Dilly’s PT was simply amazing.

The torture chamber. Otherwise known as a random room at Adastral Park where we trained twice a week! Everything from basic bodyweight training to boxing.

Sam met me where I was at, pushed me within my limits, respected my boundaries when things weren’t doing so good, and most importantly, had unwavering confidence in my capability to get stronger both physically and mentally through consistent exercise.

It’s hard to believe that when we started, I was only really able to walk short distances, do sit-to-stands from a chair and I could only do lunges with something to hold on to!

After nearly a year, we graduated to mini-circuits, and what I now know to be ‘jeffing’ — walking, with intervals of jogging.

Consistency is key

For the next three years, although I was training at varying intensities twice a week and starting to get much stronger, even being able to jog for around 10 minutes, I was still cycling between boom and bust — at times wiping me out for several days at a time.

I hadn’t fully cracked the game that is known as ‘pacing’.

I would still push myself flat out, work crazy long hours, train really hard on those two days, and then wonder why after a couple of weeks my body would fail me.

Pacing effectively takes a LOT of patience, and a LOT of courage.

Patience with yourself, with the fact that you are still learning the ropes.

Courage to accept when you’ve screwed it up. To get back on the wagon — often starting way further back than when you fell off — and to keep a positive mindset, to learn from the experience.

For me, consistency has been absolutely key. Whatever is happening with my body, still committing to do something — even if that is just half an hour of stretching — that has a positive impact on my body. Getting rid of the negative habits that kept me in the downward spirals, one choice at a time.

Consistency isn’t only necessary from the physical training aspect though. It has been really important for me to consistently come back to my mental states, the way that I talk to myself about myself, compare myself to others, to how life used to be ‘before the crash’. To really reflect on them, and share with others what’s going on — and to share the celebrations, the moments when things have changed, when positivity reigns.

One of the most valuable things I learned from one of my Buddhist teachers was to ask myself:

If your closest friend was suffering, in this moment — as you are — would you speak to them in the way that you speak to yourself in your own mind?

Without a doubt, I would not be where I am now — being able to train most days, running regularly and even joining races, and being physically and mentally well — without my wheelchair.

While I currently don’t need to use my wheelchair much at the moment, it doesn’t by any means suggest that I won’t need to use it again in the future if things change and my health deteriorates.

This time, however, I would have absolutely no hesitation whatsoever at using a wheelchair if I needed to.

It empowered me in ways I didn’t know possible, gave me strength and courage at times where both were at an all time low, and enabled me to heal, to recover, and to come back stronger than ever.

To those who are new to wheels or at the point where wheels might be coming into your life, I say that you can choose how to to face this challenge. My experience has been that facing it proactively, with a positive mindset, is a much better experience than treating it as something negative that is holding you back.

Follow inspiring wheelies and connect with them on social media. Learn from them. See the world through their eyes and explore in yourself what you can change to live your best life.

Whether you are going to be using a wheelchair for the long-term or not, the way you deal with it and approach your life with wheels can have such a strong impact. Choose positivity, courage and compassion. Choose that for yourself.

“The moment you accept responsibility for EVERYTHING in your life is the moment you gain the power to change ANYTHING in your life.”

This article was originally posted on Medium.com

Working with internal and external thinkers in communities

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Fri, 12 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Have you ever watched discussions happening in your community where someone shares a thought or opinion, or responds with a message which does not appear to be thought through or doesn’t seem to have any substance?

Often, we frown on this kind of discussion and the person can even be ridiculed for their lack of understanding or clarity - posts get closed down or threads deleted for lack of substance.

How, then, do we cater for those in our communities - like myself - who are external thinkers?

How internal and external thinkers differ

External thinkers may have a tendency to say (or post) whatever comes into their head, even if they aren’t sure whether they agree with it, how it fits together, or even if it’s correct.

I call this my “thinking out loud” stage, where I have thoughts and ideas buzzing around in my head and sharing them with someone else - whether verbally or typing - helps me to process them into some kind of order.

“We speak not only to tell other people what we think, but to tell ourselves what we think. Speech is a part of thought.” ― Oliver Sacks, Seeing Voices

Share thisX Bluesky LinkedIn

Internal thinkers, on the other hand, may process almost everything in their own head, having their own private conversations with themselves and fleshing out all the details before they even utter a word. They often don’t feel the need to discuss with others to process information.

Is one better than the other?

Both come with advantages and disadvantages, and people may behave differently in social situations than when taking decisions.

Internal thinkers may need more time to make decisions

Internal thinkers might be chatty in social situations, but when decisions need making, they may be less engaged, still thinking things through and bringing their ideas together in their own mind before committing to any actions. They often need quiet time to make decisions - needing to ‘sleep on it’ or take time to process the information before committing to actions.

Internal thinkers risk being left out of the discussion or talked over if they are not given the space they need to reflect on and process information. They can sometimes frustrate their external-thinking colleagues by back-tracking to previously discussed items when they come to a conclusion.

Sometimes, ideas arise, but an internal thinker might disregard it before even mentioning it to others. While they may not see any value in the idea, discarding it means that nobody else even hears about it - perhaps that idea is the key to unlocking your next big thing or a solution to a particularly thorny problem!

Internal thinkers need to feel they have a safe space to share their thinking without it being fully thought through

Share thisX Bluesky LinkedIn

External thinkers are literally “thinking out loud”

External thinkers are often highly engaged in discussions, putting out ideas and playing a key role in the interactions. You will often hear them literally say the words “I’m just thinking out loud here…” - which may seem completely alien to an internal thinker!

This can mean that ideas shared by an external thinker may not be thought through, they may not choose words with as much care, and their thoughts are just that - thoughts - rather than actual beliefs or views about a situation.

Sometimes external thinkers can be difficult to follow and easily misunderstood, because their views appear to chop and change with the wind. This is simply a reflection of how they process information. Sometimes, for example, I start to see relationships between things (or a lack of) as I’m speaking, or I figure out something is a daft idea in the speaking of it and disregard it.

If external thinkers don’t make it clear this is what they are doing, and bring themselves to a clear conclusion - for example with a statement such as “OK, here’s where I’m at with this” or “So, this is the conclusion I am coming to” - it can be difficult for others to follow their meandering!

How can you ensure that your community is supportive to all?

The first, most important thing is to recognise and respect that not everybody processes information and comes to decisions in the same way that you do. The central tenet of always assuming the best in others helps here - if an external thinker is dominating a discussion, there are tactful ways of encouraging them to develop an awareness of this without completely shutting them down.

Likewise, a good community leader will find ways to draw out internal thinkers, and ensure they feel safe in sharing their thought processes before they have everything set out in their mind and ‘making sense’ - perhaps noting they have been quiet and asking them directly if they would be willing to share their thoughts on the discussion - giving reassurance that it doesn’t matter if they are all fully formed and that all input is welcomed.

Listening for clues

You can encourage people to listen out for the key clues to build an understanding of how different people in the community process information.

Often they will literally say “I need some time to think this through” or “I’m just thinking this through out loud” which can be clear indications. Sometimes it’s more subtle - taking longer to respond, or choosing every word purposefully and carefully.

Giving space for processing

If you know that you have a team with a high proportion of internal thinkers, it’s often a good idea, if possible, to split important meetings where decisions need to be made.

The break doesn’t have to be long in duration - for example having a meeting to run through everything followed by a break, and then a follow up meeting later in the day where decisions are made and actions are assigned.

This approach not only gives internal thinkers some space to bring their thoughts together, but it also allows external thinkers time to thrash their ideas around and come to some conclusions by a specific time.

Have you found creative ways to engage people with different ways of processing information in your communities? How do you think this impacts the practical day-to-day functioning within your teams? Leave your thoughts in the comments below!

Image credit: Juan Rumimpunu

My first two weeks at Acquia

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Mon, 19 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

It really doesn’t seem like it was only two weeks ago that I walked through the doors of the cleverly named ‘White Building’ in Reading (yes, you guessed it, it’s white!) to start my first day working for Acquia as Mautic Community Manager!

I knew that this was going to be very much a ‘hit the ground running’ kind of job … it couldn’t be anything else given the challenges facing the community and the exciting opportunity that comes with Acquia’s commitment to support the growth of the Open Source project after it acquired Mautic Inc. three months ago. I wasn’t quite expecting to hit the ground at a sprint though ;)

Here’s a quick review of my first two weeks at Acquia, and some insights into what’s on the horizon over the next few months.

Getting on-boarded

Like any new job, the first few days are almost always consumed with getting on-boarded within the organisation.

The basic stuff like being issued a laptop (my first ever Mac, which has had its own challenges being a Linux user exclusively for the past 8 years or so!), set up on all the different systems that are used within the organisation, going through the HR on-boarding and learning about all the great benefits Acquia offers its employees. There are a few mandatory training units that I had to complete in the first week, plus a 100 day training plan exploring all the Acquia products and services which I’ll be chipping away at over the next month or two!

Next, the IT onboarding and running through all the do’s and don’t, security policies and so forth. I was glad to see Acquia issuing all staff with a Yubikey which I’ve been using for years and mandating two-factor authentication on all resources.

Then, learning more about the organisation as a whole, its structure, and where my role fits. In an organisation of over 900 staff, it can be a bit challenging figuring out who does what!

I learned a lot - someone gave a great example of it being like drinking from a firehose, and it certainly felt like that at times!

It was also great to have the day in the office in Reading - I will be working remotely so it’s helpful to meet people face to face and put a real face - rather than just an avatar - to a name!

Getting stuff done

The rest of the week focused specifically on Mautic and the Mautic community - we were approaching 90 days post-acquisition, when Acquia had committed to making an announcement to the community - quite something to be writing four days into your new job! I worked with the team at Acquia to prepare the release and to get going with some of the priorities we knew needed to be addressed, such as figuring out what needed doing to fix the community forums.

As many of you will know, I’m very much a ‘get stuff done’ person, so that has been my focus. Getting stuff done to fix some of the fundamental things that are blocking progress in the Mautic Community.

The first of these was getting the community forums back up and running - they had been offline for a long time. Grappling with local installs of Discourse, setting up my MAMP stack (thanks to John Linhart for the super useful tutorial he shared!), migrations of users and posts, setting up single sign-on authentication were all part of my second week.

It was fun, if something of a technical wrangle, to get everything working as it should. Releasing the forums at the end of my second week felt like a great achievement and it was fantastic to see the community starting to engage and use the forums again!

What my work will involve

I’ve had a lot of questions about what my job actually involves, and how the relationship between Acquia and the Mautic Community will function.

I see my role as being a two-way bridge between Acquia and the Mautic Community. In acquiring Mautic Inc., Acquia also acquired the brand assets which were previously owned by Mautic Inc.

The Mautic community is still relatively young, but I believe it has huge potential to grow and thrive. It needs to establish structures, governance, and to empower people to contribute to, rather than just use, the Open Source software. These structures need to give sufficient confidence that the Community is ready to take stewardship of the assets relating to the Open Source project from Acquia, and manage them effectively - a process that I hope my role helps to facilitate over time.

I figured the easiest way to explain this would be to share my objectives through to the end of the year, which form part of the OKR system at Acquia. These are as follows:

Enable the Mautic community and remove current roadblocks to collaboration/contribution
Support the Mautic community with implementing clear governance structures and policies
Launch a new Drupal-based website in collaboration with the community for mautic.org
Establish metrics to measure community health
Establish sustainable practices for moderation of community channels
Increase my technical knowledge to better enable supporting the Mautic community
Organise an in-person event for the Mautic community

You’ll notice that there aren’t any points around the technical roadmap or development - currently those remain with DB, although of course we will be working very closely together and as part of #6 above, I hope to gain a greater understanding in this area!

One of the key things I have committed to doing on a regular basis (as part of #6) is to test five PR’s per week and to contribute to 5 updates on the documentation each week. I’d invite you all to consider adopting this in whatever systems you use for your own accountability, as this small commitment would make a huge difference if lots of us undertook it!

Schedule

I’ve set up a community-facing Trello board where you can see the projects I am working on and get involved with the tasks that need attention.

Over the coming weeks I’ll be helping set up various projects and working with the community on a range of areas, from governance to communications tools to encouraging more contributors to test pull requests!

Generally, my office hours (UK timezone) look something like:

Monday & Friday - 9am-6.30pm

Tuesday & Thursday - 11am-8.30pm

Wednesday - 9am-12.30pm

Note: you might see me here and there outside these hours, if so please assume that’s me contributing, as a contributor, in my spare time :)

I’ll be in the Reading office for a week or so in early September, and then I’ll be away for two weeks mid-September on annual leave.

I’m probably heading out to Boston for a week w/c 30th September to do some work with DB, Dries and Angie Byron (Community Manager for Drupal).

I’ll likely be headed to Amsterdam at the end of October for DrupalCon where we are hoping to hold our first Mautic community event.

I hope to keep the community involved with what I’m doing and plan to give regular updates through my personal blog on what I’m up to, so you get a bit of an insight into what’s happening (my blog might actually get more than one post per quarter finally!).

That’s it for now, exciting times ahead! Feel free to ping me with any questions on the forums or Slack, or leave a comment below.

Updated to amend the Trello link to point at the public Mautic Community team (13/01/2020)

Q1 2020 Mautic Community round-up

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Fri, 03 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

It has been a busy quarter in the Mautic community following the first Community Summit back in November. What follows is a round-up on a team-by-team basis of their activity between January-March 2020.

Governance

Team formation

Perhaps the most notable development has been the community teams forming and starting to meet, with self-elected team leads and assistant team leads taking up the reins.

Teams have moved to asynchronous meetings (an idea we borrowed from the Drupal community!) with meeting notes being posted onto the forums afterward (note: most recent meetings are not yet shared due to a change in the Slack user interface which has broken our meeting parser!).

Trello workflows

We have adopted a Trello board-based workflow for each team, being publicly hosted - www.trello.com/mauticcommunity - with all boards being open and available to anybody. This has meant that we can always see what tasks are outstanding, and have a centralised point for conversations around tasks and projects. Everyone who wants to get involved in Mautic and contribute is encouraged to check out the Trello boards.

By Team

Community Team

Team Lead: Ekke Guembel

Assistant Team Lead: Nico Grienauer

Community Health dashboard launched - https://dashboard.mautic.org - pulling in data from Github, Discourse, Slack and Meetup. This uses the open-source tool GrimoireLab from the Chaoss project.
Launched the Community Handbook - https://contribute.mautic.org - as a central point for all things community.
Launched meetup.com/pro/mautic and in process of bringing in new groups/onboarding new organisers (three new groups so far and more being brought in).
Planning for first sprint and council meeting (happening virtually on 6-7 April 2020).
Planning MautiCon for September 2020 (planning to be a virtual event on 23-24 September 2020).
Several promotions have been run on the Mautic Community Swag Store (https://shop.spreadshirt.com/mautic-community-swag-shop/).

Education Team

Assistant Team Lead: Kevin Rundle

Team lead position remains vacant - we are currently looking for someone to step up and support the team in this role. Read more about the Education Team and the profiles of contributors we are looking for here, and expectations from leadership team members here.
The new documentation portal has been launched - docs.mautic.org.
The Knowledgebase is in progress and will be launched following the Community Sprint in April 2020.
Work is commencing on revising/improving the YouTube videos available on the Mautic Community YouTube channel. The team will also be integrating some of these videos into articles in the documentation and knowledgebase.
Further categories were added to the forum to facilitate international areas for collaboration, by country and by language.

Legal & Finance Team

This team is currently consisting of the Community Manager and the Legal team at Acquia.

The team is actively pursuing 18 trademark reports.
A budget for the community is in the process of being created, which will give an idea of the funds available from Acquia and enable teams to know what is available over the course of the year.

Marketing Team

Team Lead: Radu Zlatianu

Assistant Team Lead: Oluwatobi Owolabi

We were represented with a stand at FOSDEM on Saturday (this is the first time that Mautic has been represented and we had a great deal of interest!).
The new mautic.org website launched on Drupal (an MVP like-for-like migration carried out by Acquia’s Professional Services team).
The team has been supporting Mautic releases, writing announcement notifications and social media posts.
The team is developing personas and working on a marketing strategy for the community.
The team has commissioned a Mautic Cloud instance to re-engage the community with regular newsletters, release notifications etc (with templates being designed by community members). During the April sprint, the team will be working on drip campaigns for people who download Mautic and other campaigns to raise awareness of Mautic.

Product

Team Lead: Norman Pracht

Assistant Team Lead: Dennis Ameling

The Product Team have shipped the 3.0 alpha and beta releases - much of the heavy lifting has been done by the Acquia engineers
- The team held a 3.0 beta User Acceptance Testing with a small amount of community engagement
2.16 release
- 2.16 and 2.16.1 led by a new community contributor Dennis Ameling
A draft Community Product Roadmap has been created by Project Lead DB Hurley and has been in discussion by the Product Team. It is anticipated that this will be finalised during the April Community Sprint.
A new branching strategy has been proposed (included in the roadmap above) which will be adopted with the release of 3.0, facilitating better organisation for semantic versioning and easier management of Git Pull Requests.

Community Health Metrics

As we have launched the new dashboard we can refer to these metrics as a way of monitoring community health.

Contributions

When considering the Mautic product repository (github.com/mautic/mautic) we can see a significant jump in contributions in November during the Community Sprint in Amsterdam. There have been further contributions over the past quarter which are still higher than the average monthly contributions between December 2018 and October 2019.

Image

Image caption

Source: https://dashboard.mautic.org/goto/166b69cd6db63a5b7f48c91ef5276fbe Contributions

If we exclude the work done by Mautic Inc. and Acquia employees (which we can therefore assume to be carried out by community members), we can see that in some months over the last twelve months there has been a decrease in community contributions, however averaged out over the year, the contributions have been relatively stable.

Image

Image caption

Source: https://dashboard.mautic.org/goto/88316dfca696899d0e1ad87d63456fb0 Contributions excluding authors with organisations of Acquia or Mautic Inc.

Attraction and retention of developers

When considering the Mautic product repository (github.com/mautic/mautic) we can see that there has been a steady rate of new developers contributing to Mautic this quarter. New developers are defined here as having made their first commit which was merged in the given period of time.

Image

Image caption

Source: https://dashboard.mautic.org/goto/166b69cd6db63a5b7f48c91ef5276fbe Attracted Developers

This quarter has seen an increase in casual contributors but a significant reduction in core contributors and a stabilisation from the significant drop in regular contributors seen in Q4 2019.

For the purposes of this analysis:

Core: those contributing 80% of the activity.
Regular: those contributing the next 15% of the activity.
Casual: those contributing the last 5% of the activity

Image

Image caption

Source: https://dashboard.mautic.org/goto/108c4770ede44dfb90964a010c7e9bbd Community Structure

This is something to monitor, as a continued drop in core and regular contributors could have a negative impact on the project overall.

Issue management efficiency

Image

Image caption

Source: https://dashboard.mautic.org/goto/705e9a7a43597591569e8d72ec4d3843 BMI

The efficiency at which we process and close issues has been improving this quarter, due to a concerted effort to close outdated issues, merge PR’s and triage more effectively. For reference, Backlog Management Index (BMI), is defined as the number of closed issues divided by the number of open ones in a given period of time. This metric measures our efficiency at closing issues.

Pull request merging efficiency

There has been a significant amount of PR’s which have come from Acquia as a result of the Mautic 3 work, but there is also a substantial volume coming from other sources.

Image

Image caption

Source: https://dashboard.mautic.org/goto/88fc203ae991762e518234a9b124ab87 Pull Requests by Organisation

While there remains a problem of technical debt with PR’s remaining open for a long time, the Product Team has a strategy for dealing with this going forward and are actively working on addressing the problem.

Image

Image caption

Source: https://dashboard.mautic.org/goto/ca7e77e4bdbec62d402ff1cc4848a648 Pull Requests (filtered by Mautic project)

We are also becoming more efficient at merging PR’s - largely due to the recent releases for Mautic 2.16.x and Mautic 3. We should monitor this trend and ensure that it continues to improve over time once Mautic 3 is released. For context, Review Efficiency Index (REI) is defined as the number of closed pull requests divided by the number of open ones in a given period of time. This metric measures the efficiency of closing pull requests.

Image

Image caption

Source: https://dashboard.mautic.org/goto/5e56d7a345ad40594695d19677518c92 REI

Growth in overall contributors

This quarter has seen a growth in overall contributors (across all community resources - Github, Slack, Forums and Meetup) which has been a significant improvement on the last two years.

Image

Image caption

Source: https://dashboard.mautic.org/goto/1a6a9117ad02084a324b72a52a2d6677 Active contributors over time and growth analysis

Growth in overall contributions

We also see a significant uptick in the overall contributions across all community resources, exceeding activity from back in 2018 and in some months, being not far from the highest values we have seen. This is a promising picture for the community at the zoomed-out level as it shows general engagement across a wide range of areas.

Image

Image caption

Source: https://dashboard.mautic.org/goto/6a56a010ab52b5abc86e66d551ab58c1 Contributions

Web traffic

We have seen an increase in web traffic (across the website, forums and documentation portal) in Q1 2020 compared with Q1 2019 as below.

Image

Image caption

Source: Google Analytics

We have seen a drop in impressions for mautic.org on Google Search console, however it is important to realise that the forums and documentation are now separate subdomains, and hence no longer captured within the main mautic.org data.

Image

Image caption

Source: Google Search Console

When we factor in the Documentation site:

Image

Image caption

Source: Google Search Console

And the forums:

Image

Image caption

Source: Google Search Console

We have a value of 2,431,000 impressions against 1,700,000 last year. This is a substantial improvement!

Clicks for this quarter result in 975,260 which is slightly down compared with last year, however it is significant to notice the much better click-through rates and position for the forums and documentation portal, which means people are finding these more relevant in response to their queries and clicking through to the site.

Going forward, the Marketing Team plans to make more use of our web analytics data to determine what proportion go on to register, make enquiries, and become active community members which will allow us to more accurately track the return on investment from the various sources.

Conclusion

Q1 2020 has been a busy one in the Mautic Community. A lot of positive steps have been taken to establish a solid foundation for growth.

Teams are becoming more proactive and processes are being established which helps the community to function more effectively.

We have seen, as a result, a significant increase in engagement and have welcomed new contributors to the project as a result.

The next quarter will focus on shipping the Mautic 3 release, and building on these foundations by developing and sharing a formalised roadmap, organising more effectively and further engaging the community.

This was originally posted at https://www.mautic.org/blog/community/q1-2020-mautic-community-round

Learning to write acceptance tests with Codeception

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Mon, 13 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Having run the last two manual User Acceptance Test processes for Mautic 3, it was clear that relying on users to manually test every aspect of Mautic was both error prone and time consuming.

While we did surface some critical bugs, it took almost a full weekend to write up all the tests that needed to be done, and then another weekend (at least!) to run through the testing for Mautic 3 alpha.

We need to find a better solution to ensure that we’re doing robust testing when we are shipping new releases of Mautic. I’d heard Codeception and acceptance tests mumbled about and seen it in our documentation that we had acceptance tests, so I started digging!

It turned out, we had two – can you log in, and do you see the dashboard when you’re logged in …. a starting point at least!

Here follows my journey over the last week or so learning Codeception and starting to write my first acceptance tests for Mautic. I’m sharing in the hope that it helps guide others in getting set up to join this project, as it’s very much needed!

Installing Selenium Standalone Server and Chrome WebDriver

Depending on your computer, you’ll need to install the Selenium Standalone Server and the Chrome WebDriver. We have some basic documentation on how to set up Selenium Standalone Server (the homebrew instructions were super simple to follow if you’re on a Mac), I also found this article on how to get started with Selenium and WebDriver on Ubuntu helpful getting set up on Linux with the caveat that I had to select Java 8, not 11, to run Selenium Server using the following command:

sudo update-alternatives --config java

Enter the number which relates to Java 8 – in my case, 2, and press enter. This will set your default Java version to use 8 rather than 11.

Downloading, installing and configuring Mautic for testing

Once you’re set up, create a testing environment which is specifically for automated tests. You will need to clone Mautic from the Git repository, as the test folders we need to use are not available in the packaged releases.

Here’s a step-by-step of how to do that! I have included how to clone down Mautic from Github and install Composer, because as a newbie I found these steps were often missing in tutorials and assumed as something that I already knew!

1. Create a fork of the main Mautic repository

This is standard best practice when you’re going to be making a pull request – and I am presuming at some point you might want to write tests for Mautic.

Making a fork of the main repository gives you a copy which has been split off from the main repo at that specific point of time. You can then work on this, and in the future, request that your changes be brought back into the main repository using a Pull Request.

Start by going to github.com/mautic/mautic and clicking on ‘fork’ at the top right. This will warn you if you’ve already got a fork set up – if you’re not using it any more (for example it might have been created a long time ago for testing) you can delete it by opening the fork, going to settings, and scrolling to the bottom of the page.

Once you have your fork set up, you can access it at github.com/yourusername/mautic. Now you need to bring the fork down to your local computer, so that you can run and create tests.

I’m assuming you have a localhost environment set up – if you don’t you might consider setting up with DDEV which is quite popular in our community.

2. Clone the repository to your local machine

To clone the repo, you need to have Git installed on your machine.

If you have an SSH key set up with Github, you should be able to clone using the SSH link, if you don’t you’ll need to enter your username and password (or access token if you have 2FA set up).

SSH is a much easier way to work with Github and saves a whole lot of time. I really recommend taking the time to set this up – see this article from Github on using SSH keys for a walk through of how to add an SSH key to your Github account.

It’s also worth noting that as you use SSH more, you might want to set up an SSH config file which makes it easy to specify particular keys for particular purposes, and to create short names to connect to servers (e.g. ssh my-server) rather than having to remember the IP address, user, port and SSH key to use.

To get the link you need to clone the repository, click ‘clone or download’ on your fork.

This shows the SSH link – if you need to use HTTPS then click the ‘use HTTPS’ link to get the appropriate link.

In a terminal window on your computer, navigate to the directory on your localhost where you want to install Mautic.

Remember that cloning will install to a directory called mautic, so when you set up your vhost, ensure you include this in the document root path.

Type the command to clone down from Github:

git clone <your link>

Replacing <your link> with the link you copied from Github.

3. Run composer to install dependencies

Once downloaded, you’ll need to run Composer to install the dependencies that Mautic relies on. Do this with the following command:

composer install

if you don’t have Composer installed yet, head over to getcomposer.org - also worth noting if you use a tool such as XAMPP for your localhost setup, you may need to do some additional work to ensure that it works with the command line version of PHP – there are lots of results in search engines for how to do this depending on your operating system.

Now you have Mautic installed, browse to the URL on your localhost and go through the Mautic installation process as you would for any install. Don’t worry too much about the admin user as this will be overwritten in the next step.

4. Install sample data

Finally, install the sample data by running the following command in the Mautic root:

php app/console mautic:install:data

Note that this will erase any data existing in your Mautic instance, and will create an admin user with the username admin, password mautic.

This step is important, because we require the dummy data and the admin user in order to run the automated tests.

Configuring Codeception

Now we have a working Mautic instance ready to go, we need to configure Codeception to tell it how to access our Mautic instance for running the tests, and what parameters to use when it is running tests.

Edit the following file:

/tests/acceptance.suite.yml

Note, if you do not have a /tests/ folder in your Mautic instance, you probably did not clone it from Github. Please jump back a few steps and follow the instructions above!

This file allows us to tell Codeception how we want it to carry out the tests in our acceptance test suite.

There are a couple of crucial settings you will need to configure including the URL of your Mautic instance, and the window size for testing (I found that Codeception defaulted to testing in a mobile-sized environment which isn’t representative of the Mautic userbase, so had to specify the window size).

I also found on some environments I needed to set w3c:false under chromeOptions per this StackOverflow article.

actor: AcceptanceTester

modules:

enabled:

- WebDriver:

url: http://local.mauticautomatedtests

browser: chrome

window_size: 1920x1080

- \Helper\Acceptance

Running existing tests

To begin running your tests, you will need to ensure that the Selenium Web Server is up and running, and you’ll also need to ensure that the WebDriver is running. You should find the documentation for both in the documentation mentioned earlier. If you experience any errors, do a search for them and you’ll likely find the solution.

Once Codeception is configured and the Selenium Server/WebDriver are running, change to the Mautic root directory in your terminal, and run the following command:

bin/codecept run acceptance

This will run the acceptance tests that are currently found in the tests/acceptance folder. You can decide to run specific tests using the following arguments:

bin/codecept run acceptance ContactCest.php

This will run only the tests in the ContactCest.php file

bin/codecept run acceptance ContactCest.php:^createContactFromForm$

This will run only the createContactFromForm test from the ContactCest.php file.

If you want to see a more verbose step-by-step output or see details on any errors occurring, use the debug flag

--debug

I found this super helpful when I was actually writing the tests, as it helped me to track down exactly where the problem was or what the error was being caused by.

Resources for learning Codeception

Here are some resources I found useful and tips I came across when learning about Codeception and how to write automated tests.

Learn about XPath – it’s awesome!

I had not really come across XPath before I discovered Codeception, but now I absolutely love it and will most definitely be learning more about it and using it more often!

I had seen it in tests but had no idea how it was generated – until I realised that right clicking on any element in the Chrome console and going to Copy gave me an option of ‘copy XPath’ …… so that’s where I’d seen it before!

Take a look at this article for a clear explanation of how it works.

The power of XPath and the ease with which you can identify the appropriate elements using Chrome Developer Tools makes it my #1 recommendation. You don’t have to fully understand how it all works, but getting familiar with using it in your tests is highly recommended!

Codeception documentation

The most helpful resource has been the Codeception documentation. It is well laid out, contains useful examples and while it makes some assumptions about your technical knowledge, I mostly found it easy to follow as a non-developer.

Start with the Introduction and then jump on to Acceptance Tests. I also found the section about Reusing Test Code helpful! All the possible actions you might need to use are listed in the WebDriver module documentation.

Just get started!

Once you’ve been through the documentation, my best advice is to just jump in and start writing. Take a look at the existing tests as a steer for the basics and re-use where you can.

I picked a bundle to start with which I knew would be relatively simple to test – I suggest doing the same!

Getting help when you’re stuck

You’ll inevitably come across some challenges along the way, and my experience has been that there isn’t an awful lot out there in the realms of tutorials, blogs or guides (at least I wasn’t finding them in my searches) so I almost always reverted back to StackOverflow. Feel free to ping me if you’re stuck on something, I might have come across it myself!

Use Codeception (or Selenium if nothing comes up!) <what you’re trying to do/error you’ve got> and you’ll most often find some pointers. Don’t forget to up-vote if you found them helpful, and drop those URL’s into your notes for future reference!

Writing new tests

At the moment the test suite is pretty limited. I have started writing a batch of tests for the Contact bundle, but we have many more that need automated tests to be written!

If you’d like to write some tests, I’d recommend first dropping a message in #t-product on Slack, and making sure nobody else is already working on that area.

Creating a branch on your fork

Make a branch from your fork, using the command:

git branch acceptance-tests-<bundle you’re working on>

Then check out your branch using the command

git checkout acceptance-tests-<bundle you’re working on>

As you are working on your tests, ensure you add any new files using the command:

git add <filename>

And then commit them periodically using

git commit <filename> -m “what you’re committing”>

At the end of each day, or when you want to save your work (e.g. if you’re finishing working on it for a time) ensure you push your changes up to your branch using the command:

git push origin acceptance-tests-<bundle you’re working on>

Creating a new test

To start working on a new batch of tests, you will need to create a new Cest file. Use the following command:

bin/codecept generate:cest acceptance <name of bundle>

This will create a new, simple Cest file in tests/acceptance from which you can commence writing your tests. I went with Cest files as they have more functionality than Cept files, particularly as your tests get more complex. They are a bit more complex for non-developers, but apparently it’s worth it in the long run!

Reusing code

You may wish to use the StepObject in the _before function to check for existing sessions or log in, using the following:

public function _before(\Step\Acceptance\Login $I)

{

$I->loginAsUser(); // Check for existing session or log in

$I->amOnPage(‘/s/dashboard’); // Go to dashboard

}

Making a pull request (PR) with your completed tests

When you’re at the point where you have written all the tests for the bundle you’re working on (or perhaps you’ve written all the essential tests, and want to push those up to the main Mautic repository for inclusion in the next release) go to your fork, and you’ll see a button to commence a Pull Request.

Click the green button, follow the steps, explain in the description and title of the PR what the tests are covering, and then submit your PR for consideration.

I’m looking forward to seeing your contributions!

Q2 2020 Mautic Community Roundup

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Wed, 15 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This quarter has seen huge progress being made in many areas of the Mautic Community and some big changes being announced.

All of this has happened against a backdrop of a worldwide lockdown due to Coronavirus and systemic abuses of power and racism being witnessed in communities around the world. We stand united in condemning racism, racist behaviour and all abuses of power. As a relatively new community we have a long way to go, and we are dedicated to setting up the conditions for our community being welcoming and supportive to all.

The lockdown has had different impacts across our community. Some have found they had more time for contributing due to being furloughed, where others found themselves trying to juggle a full-time job with caring responsibilities and as a result were not able to contribute as much, or in some cases at all. Ultimately, your wellbeing and that of your family has to come first. There will always be tasks to do, code to write, pull requests to test. During these difficult times, take the time to care for those you love, and when you are ready to return, we will be here.

Despite all the challenges we have faced over the last three months, we have made some huge steps forward.

Running our first virtual sprint

As the world suddenly found itself in lockdown last April, the Mautic Community kicked off our first virtual sprint, which was originally planned to be held in Ghent at Drupal Dev Days.

A huge amount of work went on ‘behind the scenes’ by the Community Leadership Team who helped to organise the two-day event, which saw more than 60 people sign up and 42 contributors joining us during the event.

I was particularly pleased to see several faces from the Drupal and TYPO3 community bringing their knowledge and expertise to work on issues or projects in the Mautic community.

Getting accepted as a Google Season of Docs organisation

In April we applied for the Google Season of Docs, and later heard that we had been accepted! We will be working with two Technical Writers who will be helping us to improve our documentation - watch out for the announcement when we will share which projects have been successful!

Making some important changes

Appointing a full-time Project Lead

In May, we shared the news that - with the full support of the Community Leadership Team and DB Hurley - Acquia appointed myself as a full-time project lead.

After leaving Acquia, DB Hurley scaled back his participation in the Mautic community and felt it was in Mautic’s best interest to have a full-time Project Lead. He will continue to act as an ambassador for the Mautic project. We are grateful for DB’s leadership and having guided us this far.

Setting the direction for Mautic

We defined our mission:

“To help people succeed with Mautic”

and our six areas of focus:

Develop the features and functionality so that Mautic becomes the tool of choice for Marketing Automation, and the market leader in this space
Improve the ease of use for marketers
Improve the stability and reliability of Mautic
Improve the way we support people to succeed with Mautic
Enable organisations to scale Mautic as they achieve success
Build a community that is self-reliant, welcoming, diverse and engaged

We also defined our release strategy and shared the cadence that the community can expect to see in the coming months along with some changes that we are making to approvals of pull requests which will help us meet our goals - read more here.

I enjoyed hosting webinars where we unpacked these changes and answered questions with many of our international communities which you can watch back on our YouTube channel.

Project Lead Office Hours

If you have any questions or would like to chat about anything to do with Mautic, I have also started holding office hours weekly.

Ask product questions, suggest feature requests, lodge complaints, offer praise, share ideas, discuss recent blog posts, or talk about good or bad experiences using Mautic.

Anything that’s on your mind is fair game. I’m here to listen, share, and be available to help in any way I can.

Office Hours with Ruth Cheesley EMEA/Americas - Fortnightly from 28th May at 1500hrs UK time Link to join: https://acquia.zoom.us/j/98583607751 (Password: 815478)

Office Hours with Ruth Cheesley APJ - Fortnightly from 3rd June at 0700hrs UK time Link to join: https://acquia.zoom.us/j/91119231380 (Password: 502111)

Both are on the Mautic Community Calendar.

Launching Mautic 3

Last but by no means least, after over five months of hard work, Mautic 3 was released and we also provided a smooth migration path for Mautic 2 with the upgrade script that ships with Mautic 2.16.3.

We also shipped the first patch release for Mautic 3, 3.0.1.

Read more about the Mautic 3 release here.

Contributions

When considering the Mautic product repository (github.com/mautic/mautic) and filtering commits to the core Mautic repository, we can see a blip in May with only 63 commits, which has bounced back to 143 in June. We know that the spike from Q4 2019-Q1 2020 was largely due to the work on Mautic 3, so we are expecting to see things settle into the coming quarter.

Image

Source: https://dashboard.mautic.org/goto/90debdf01e8718284f55874ac1a26dbf

If we exclude the work done by Acquia staff we can see a strong increase in community contributions to Mautic core this quarter, particularly as we geared up for the Mautic 3 release in June.

Image

Source: https://dashboard.mautic.org/goto/298990c1b1e176d46060cdabc04fc77c All commits excluding Mautic Inc. and Acquia

Attraction and retention of developers

When considering the core Mautic repository, we can see that there have not been as many new developers during Q2 making their first commits.

Image

https://dashboard.mautic.org/goto/166b69cd6db63a5b7f48c91ef5276fbe Attracted Developers

We have, however, seen an increase in casual contributors this quarter, defined by:

Core: those contributing 80% of the activity.
Regular: those contributing the next 15% of the activity.
Casual: those contributing the last 5% of the activity.

This indicates less reliance on the core team and more engagement from the wider community.

Image

Source: https://dashboard.mautic.org/goto/108c4770ede44dfb90964a010c7e9bbd Community Structure

Issue management efficiency

The efficiency at which we process and close issues has been improving this quarter, due to a continued effort to close outdated issues, merge PR’s and triage more effectively. For reference, Backlog Management Index (BMI), is defined as the number of closed issues divided by the number of open ones in a given period of time. This metric measures our efficiency at closing issues.

Image

Source: https://dashboard.mautic.org/goto/705e9a7a43597591569e8d72ec4d3843 BMI

The median time to close issues in Q2 is 11.439 days, with the trend continuing to rise (see the trend below) as we are working through closing old issues. This is being addressed by the Product Team with the establishment of a triage team.

Image

Source: https://dashboard.mautic.org/goto/892cb1b931118a64b729a0a3f70784db

Pull request merging efficiency

We have seen several organisations contributing to Mautic over the past quarter, with an expected reduction in volume contributed by Acquia since the Mautic 3 work was completed.

Image

Source: https://dashboard.mautic.org/goto/88fc203ae991762e518234a9b124ab87 Pull Requests by Organisation

The Product Team is steadily working through the backlog of open pull requests and aims to have all open PR’s tagged to a future release by the end of Q3.

Image

Source: https://dashboard.mautic.org/goto/ca7e77e4bdbec62d402ff1cc4848a648 Pull Requests (filtered by Mautic project)

Progress in this area is largely limited by the need for community testing of pull requests which is an ongoing challenge, and the need for older PR’s to be rebased and updated for Mautic 3.

We are also continuing to work on being more efficient at merging PR’s as demonstrated by a rising REI. For context, Review Efficiency Index (REI) is defined as the number of closed pull requests divided by the number of open ones in a given period of time. This metric measures the efficiency of closing pull requests.

Image

Source: https://dashboard.mautic.org/goto/5e56d7a345ad40594695d19677518c92 REI

Growth in overall community engagement

Active community members

We are continuing to see a growth in active community members over time across all our channels (Github, Slack, Forums and Meetup), which is beginning to regularly trend above the average. This is great to see after several years of decline.

Image

Source: https://dashboard.mautic.org/goto/1a6a9117ad02084a324b72a52a2d6677 Active Contributors over time and Difference with the Average

Contributions

Following the work on Mautic 3, we have seen a decline in the total number of contributions across the whole community, returning back to the levels of late 2019.

Compared with last quarter, the trend is increasing upwards and we are remaining above the average line. This is something to monitor over time to ensure that it does not continue to fall.

Image

Source: https://dashboard.mautic.org/goto/6a56a010ab52b5abc86e66d551ab58c1 Contributions

Web traffic

We are continuing to see an increase in traffic compared with the previous year (across the website, forums and documentation portal).

Image

Source: Google Analytics

June 2020 also saw the highest volume of search interest in Mautic since it was launched according to Google Search Trends:

Image

Source: Google Trends

We are continuing to see a gradual rise in position and click-through rate in Google for mautic.org despite the reduced traffic since separating the forums and documentation in August 2019 and March 2020 respectively.

Image

Source: Google Search Console

The documentation portal has seen a substantial increase in impressions since May 2020:

Image

Source: Google Search Console

As has the forums:

Image

Source: Google Search Console

Want to help us improve our web presence?

The Marketing Team is actively recruiting members and would love to hear from you - just join the Slack channel (get an invite at mautic.org/slack).

Conclusion

There has been a lot happening over the past quarter and a lot of good progress has been made.

The Mautic 3 release was a huge project and a big milestone for us, but we have many more challenges ahead of us!

We are starting to address the backlog of technical debt and to grow the community, but we need your help to make that happen.

The easiest way to get involved is to jump into our Slack community and join the team channels - they all start with #t-<teamname>. Teams meet fortnightly on Slack, but just hop in and say hello at any time!

I am looking forward to seeing the project continue to go from strength to strength with the support of this amazing community!

This was originally posted at https://www.mautic.org/blog/community/q2-2020-mautic-community-roundup

Q3 2020 Mautic Community Roundup

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Fri, 09 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Another quarter has flown by, so it’s time for our round-up report of what’s been happening in the Mautic Community over the past three months!

Read the previous reports here for Q2 2020 and Q1 2020.

This quarter has seen steady progress being made in several areas of the community, and work beginning on some big projects that will be happening over the next few months.

We have been following through on our commitment to setting up the conditions for a community that is supportive and welcoming to all, with a review of our Code of Conduct being published and the creation of a new space on Slack for LGBTQIA+ members (or allies) in the Mautic community who want to connect and/or talk about inclusion in the community.

Now for some updates from our teams.

Community Team

The Community Team have been working behind the scenes to put together MautiCon 2020 - our first World Conference - which will be held virtually on the 17th November 2020. Sponsorship packages are selling out quickly and tickets are available on a ‘give what you can’ basis starting from $5.

We have received almost 60 session submissions from around the world, and I’m excited to see a lineup of diverse speakers sharing everything from how to run Mautic at scale to how they created a thriving meetup group and best practices for using Marketing Automation. We even have a track for Community and Open Source where we’re welcoming speakers from other sectors and projects who will be giving some fantastic talks.

Product Team

The Product Team have hit all the release dates for the quarter, with sprints being held on the Friday and Saturday prior to the release freeze and Release Candidates being made available for a week prior to each stable release being issued.

We have released 3.0.2, 3.1 and 3.1.1 over the past three months, and welcomed a new Release Leader, Mohammed Abu Musa, who led the 3.1.1 release in September supported by Dennis Ameling.

We had some great new features ship with 3.1 - make sure you check them out!

Considerable effort has been made to clean up our issue queue and ensure that all pull requests have been assigned to a milestone, properly triaged, and the authors know what the next steps are to get their contributions merged.

This is reflected in the great progress being made with regards to reducing the open issues and pull requests, making it much easier for the team - and potential contributors - to see what needs work and when their contributions could expect to be merged.

Image

The team also updated the governance process that is used when reviewing issues and pull requests, which you can read more about in this blog post.

Education Team

The Education Team has been working closely with our Season of Docs candidates and just launched the new Knowledgebase on 1st October which is already growing in popularity - if you want to contribute something, take a look at the detailed contribution page and the team backlog which has a list of articles they would like to include.

Legal & Finance Team

The Legal and Finance team recently published an update to the Trademark Policy and implemented a process for people to request a license to use the Mautic Trademark, as well as reporting infringements and asking questions.

We also launched Open Collective and Github Sponsors as a way of managing the finances of the Mautic project. It has been a great success with several organisations and individuals becoming contributors already.

Open Collective is also being used to manage the finances for the MautiCon event, which allows for full transparency over incoming funds and outgoing expenses.

A financial policy has also been created which explains what the Mautic Project will cover in regards to expenses, and the associated financial processes.

Marketing Team

Work is underway to re-initiate the Mautic Community newsletter and mailing lists which we expect to be completed by the end of the year. There is also a ‘meet the contributor’ series which is about to be launched for the Community Blog.

The Marketing Team are particularly short of contributors, so if you would like to help please do get in touch with them via the #t-marketing Slack channel.

Things are continuing to move forward with each new release of Mautic, and we are getting into the rhythm of our monthly releases.

The contributions we are seeing to Mautic’s core Github project have largely stabilised after the work to release 3.0 saw a large spike in commits.

Image

Source: https://dashboard.mautic.org/goto/90debdf01e8718284f55874ac1a26dbf

What is good to see is the rise in contributions from the community. The chart below shows all contributions excluding those from Mautic Inc/Acquia and we can see a strong increase over the past months. We hope that this will continue to grow as we move forward!

Image

Source: https://dashboard.mautic.org/goto/298990c1b1e176d46060cdabc04fc77c All commits excluding Mautic Inc. and Acquia

We continue to attract new developers who are submitting pull requests to the Mautic repository, with the chart below showing where a contributor has made their first contribution during that month.

Image

Source: https://dashboard.mautic.org/goto/166b69cd6db63a5b7f48c91ef5276fbe Attracted Developers

We are also seeing a rise in the proportion of contributors who are considered ‘regular’ and a drop in casual contributors, which suggests that this quarter we saw more contributions from core and regular contributors than casual contributors.

Core: those contributing 80% of the activity.
Regular: those contributing the next 15% of the activity.
Casual: those contributing the last 5% of the activity.

Image

Source: https://dashboard.mautic.org/goto/108c4770ede44dfb90964a010c7e9bbd Community Structure

With a continued effort by the Triage Team to close down old issues, respond and deal with new issues and make sure that there is a speedy response, we have seen one of the highest rates of efficiency at managing issues - BMI.

This suggests that we are getting better at dealing with open issues, and becoming more consistent with our triage process.

For reference, Backlog Management Index (BMI), is defined as the number of closed issues divided by the number of open ones in a given period of time. This metric measures our efficiency at closing issues.

We expect this to drop somewhat over the next quarters having dealt with the majority of the 900+ open issues, as we settle into a rhythm when it comes to managing our issue queue.

Image

Source: https://dashboard.mautic.org/goto/705e9a7a43597591569e8d72ec4d3843 BMI

We have seen a significant improvement in the median Time to Close this quarter, going from 11.439 days last quarter to 2.913 days this quarter, which means that issues are getting dealt with much more promptly.

As we are closing down old issues we are still seeing spikes in the lead time - the time it takes for an issue to be closed - but we expect this to stabilise soon with the establishment of our Triage Team.

Image

Source: https://dashboard.mautic.org/goto/892cb1b931118a64b729a0a3f70784db

Moving on to pull requests, we are continuing to see a growth in pull requests from the community over time, which is great! The Product Team are working on the resources we have available to help people contributing to Mautic for the first time - take a look at the onboarding resources here.

Image

Source: https://dashboard.mautic.org/goto/88fc203ae991762e518234a9b124ab87 Pull Requests by Organisation

We are continuing to work through the backlog of pull requests (over 300 at the start of the year!) and with the 3.1.2 release we finally dipped under 200 open PR’s!

Our aim is to get that under 100 by the end of this quarter, so we have a lot of work to do!

The chart below shows open and closed pull requests based on when they were originally submitted - the red areas show that we do still have some very old pull requests that need to be merged, many of which need to be updated for Mautic 3 or have automated test coverage improved before they can be merged.

If you’d like to help us with that, please do join #t-product on Slack (get an invite at https://mautic.org/slack if you’re not already on Slack!) as we would welcome help on this task!

Image

Source: https://dashboard.mautic.org/goto/ca7e77e4bdbec62d402ff1cc4848a648 Pull Requests (filtered by Mautic project)

Accordingly, we are gradually improving our efficiency at processing pull requests with each release we make as you can see below. For context, Review Efficiency Index (REI) is defined as the number of closed pull requests divided by the number of open ones in a given period of time. This metric measures the efficiency of closing pull requests.

We expect the 3.2 release to merge a lot of new features, but to do that we need people to help us testing them.

Please do join the Product Team as above if you’d like to help with this. You don’t need to be a developer to help with testing new features - we even have a test instance of Mautic for you to use! Plus, you get to play with the new features before they are released!

Image

Source: https://dashboard.mautic.org/goto/5e56d7a345ad40594695d19677518c92 REI

In terms of the wider community, when we take into account Github, Slack, the Forums and Meetup we are continuing to see a somewhat stable number of active contributors - not as many as in the early days of Mautic, but definitely higher than we have had over the past few years.

Image

Source: https://dashboard.mautic.org/goto/1a6a9117ad02084a324b72a52a2d6677 Active Contributors over time and Difference with the Average

If we look at the rolling average we can also see a big jump at the beginning of the new year (when we did some maintenance in the forums to close old threads) but on the whole, the community is seeing a fairly consistent number of contributors with a slight upward trend.

Image

Source: https://dashboard.mautic.org/goto/6a56a010ab52b5abc86e66d551ab58c1 Contributions

Conclusion

A huge amount of work has been going on over the last quarter, across all teams in the community. We are continuing to move forward with clearing up our technical debt and welcoming new contributors to all teams. It is great to see the project starting to manage its own finances and I believe this will be a solid foundation for future growth.

We are looking forward to some exciting projects coming to fruition by the end of the year, including our next minor release which has several great features being introduced. We will also be holding the first World Conference - MautiCon - which is already shaping up to be a great event!

There are many ways to help be a part of making Mautic great, and many people on hand to get you started. If you’d like to be involved, feel free to drop me an email at ruth.cheesley@acquia.com or drop a message in #community in Slack, and we’ll help you get going!

This was originally posted at https://www.mautic.org/blog/community/q3-2020-mautic-community-roundup

Q4 2020 Mautic Community Roundup

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Fri, 15 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Another quarter passes and we mark a year of progress in the Mautic Community since we held our first in-person community sprint in November 2019 at Contribution Day in Amsterdam.

Let’s kick off a roundup of all the awesome things that have happened this quarter!

Read the previous reports here for Q3 2020, Q2 2020 and Q1 2020.

Our first Mautic World Conference

November 2020 saw us run the first ever World Conference for the Mautic Community, MautiCon 2020. We were determined to hold an event that was welcoming to our worldwide community and as inclusive as possible.

With six tracks running simultaneously throughout the day, 17 sponsors, 51 speakers and 65 sessions across seven languages with 333 attendees, by all accounts it was a huge success!

Furthermore, the event generated just over $13,000 for the Mautic Community which has been transferred over to our Open Collective, in addition to the $595 that was received from Spreadshirt commissions on purchases from our Official Mautic Swag Shop.

This absolutely would not have been possible without the support of our amazing sponsors and the MautiCon 2020 Working Group, who put in endless hours of work behind the scenes to make the event happen. We would also like to extend a big thank you to the team from Veertly who expertly hosted the event on their platform.

If you missed some of the talks from MautiCon, don’t worry - they are all available on our YouTube channel here - make sure that you subscribe to get notified when we release new videos!

Initiatives, Tiger Teams and Working Groups

During my keynote at MautiCon I outlined my vision for the coming years and announced six strategic initiatives which we will be focusing on this year. These include:

You can read more about each and get updates on progress from their Confluence page.

Watch the keynote on YouTube:

Product updates

We fixed 93 bugs this quarter in our patch and minor releases, all of which were released on time in accordance with our release schedule.

We also merged 30 features and enhancements this quarter including releasing Mautic 3.2 , bringing improvements both to the product itself and to our behind-the-scenes tooling which has massively simplified the process of making a new release.

With Mautic 2 coming to the end of security support in December 2020 , we are expecting to see a significant reduction in the 2,000+ active Mautic instances running the 2.x version in the coming months.

Despite a lot of hard work we were not able to hit our target of getting the open Pull Requests and Issues under 100 by the end of the year - but we are still chasing the goal!

We continue to see relative stability when it comes to commits being merged over time, which we would expect at this stage of the project. As we start to work on new initiatives, we are expecting to see increases in activity.

Image

Source: https://dashboard.mautic.org/goto/577f196baf4437f907d972aeb5dc4ee4

We are also continuing to see a growth in commits from the community - this chart excludes commits from Mautic Inc./Acquia.

Image

Source: https://dashboard.mautic.org/goto/249a5b3faadcf5fa3b10b2c9888b46b9

When we break this down by organisation we can see who are supporting Mautic, with the top organisations this quarter being Webmecanik, Fits 4 All (Dennis Ameling) and Acquia.

Image

Source: https://dashboard.mautic.org/goto/4c3496d8f0626d80d825331a220c8217

We continue to attract new developers to Mautic as demonstrated below, which shows the number of developers that made their first commit by month.

Image

Source: https://dashboard.mautic.org/goto/90debdf01e8718284f55874ac1a26dbf

When considering those contributing to Mautic Core, we can see that there has been a fluctuating number of contributors active across the quarters this year. We anticipate that this will smooth out and grow over the coming year, with more regular and core contributors who are consistently contributing to Mautic throughout the year.

Image

Source: https://dashboard.mautic.org/goto/6211872dd052d10afc791c364e6fedab

The Product Team are continuing in their efforts to work through the backlog of issues which is reflected in the Backlog Management Index (BMI) below - defined as the number of closed issues divided by the number of open ones in a given period of time, and the lead time - the time expressed in days between the initiation and completion of a production process, in this case, an issue.

Image

Source: https://dashboard.mautic.org/goto/3833275717fa00e9b9c0dc8de7eabc47

As we are closing some very old issues in this process we expect to see fluctuations for some time in the lead time.

The Product Team have recently implemented a Stalebot which will automatically tag stale issues with no recent updates and after a specified time has elapsed with no further activity, the issue will be closed.

As Mautic 2 is now formally outside of support, any issues which relate to Mautic 2 will be closed unless they are reproduced in Mautic 3.

Image

Source: https://dashboard.mautic.org/goto/f4989b1802d9561f3e5d54958a4f4615

We are continuing to see a fairly consistent number of pull requests coming in from across the community, with the top organisations contributing this quarter being Webmecanik, Acquia and Fits 4 All (Dennis Ameling).

Image

Source: https://dashboard.mautic.org/goto/cac6d9216e4d95f6712fe27712226dac

Our regular release cadence means that we are just about able to keep pace with the incoming pull requests while working through the older ones, which have often required extensive work to bring them up to date and ensure good automated test coverage. The chart below shows that we do have a small number of older pull requests outstanding but the majority are from 2019 and later, which have a plan for getting them merged.

Image

Source: https://dashboard.mautic.org/goto/cac6d9216e4d95f6712fe27712226dac

Accordingly, our efficiency at merging pull requests is continuing to remain relatively stable, as can be seen from the chart below. This demonstrates the Review Efficiency Index (REI), defined as the number of closed pull requests divided by the number of open ones in a given period of time.

Image

Source: https://dashboard.mautic.org/goto/5e56d7a345ad40594695d19677518c92

With an average of only 17 active contributors over the past quarter we are slightly below the 5-year average demonstrated by the red line, with the average over the past 12 months being 18 contributors.

We would love to see this grow in the coming years as we welcome more contributors with the development of our community and the start of our Strategic Initiatives.

Image

Source: https://dashboard.mautic.org/goto/1a6a9117ad02084a324b72a52a2d6677

When considering the community as a whole across all Github repositories, Slack, Forums and Meetup, we are continuing to see above average engagement and a very slight positive trend line against the five-year average.

This year has seen a very positive change in community engagement and is a solid base for us to continue to grow over the coming months and years.

Image

Source: https://dashboard.mautic.org/goto/6a56a010ab52b5abc86e66d551ab58c1

Conclusion

This has been a very full quarter with a huge amount of energy being put into our first ever Mautic World Conference and launching our plans for the future of Mautic.

Alongside that we have kept pace with our release schedule and continue to see growth across the community - all of this at the height of the global pandemic - quite an achievement!

I am excited for what the future holds and look forward to an exciting year ahead!

Becoming a bilingual typist - switching from QWERTY to Maltron

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Thu, 18 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Just over a year ago, I strained a muscle in my wrist while caring for a family member following an operation - little did I imagine the journey this would take me on over the course of the next year!

I thought nothing of it at the time, but a few weeks later it was getting progressively worse. As someone who lives with hypermobile joints due to Ehlers Danlos Syndrome, I am used to dealing with strains and sprains, so I just did the usual tape, rest and ice and hoped that it would settle down.

Of course, by this point we were in the grips of a national lockdown and it was not possible to get treatment for several weeks. Eventually, after several months of things not getting better (and it starting to affect being able to lift weights …. thus getting escalated to a major problem!) I was able to access a virtual GP appointment and get a referral to a physiotherapist.

Here came the bad news that anyone who uses their hands for their work dreads hearing … my strain had developed into repetitive strain injury, the position of my ergonomic keyboard was exacerbating the problem, and I had to completely rest my left hand other than the physio exercises for at least 6-8 weeks!

I spend on average about 10 hours a day on a computer. I have been a touch typist for over 30 years, and now, I was only going to be able to use one hand for at least two months …… Eeek!

How do you type with one hand and not get injured?

Of course the first thing that any geek does when faced with a challenge is to search the interwebs … and that’s when I came across Maltron for the first time. A little known business based here in the UK, Maltron makes specialist keyboards, including a one handed keyboard. Who even knew that such a thing existed?!

They have a great facility where they are able to loan out their specialist keyboards for a period of time, which allowed me to get to grips with learning to type with one hand while I was having to rest the other one. The challenge, of course, is that the keyboard uses a totally different layout to anything I had ever used before.

Any time you try to change something that you have done for hours, every single day for the last 30 years, it’s going to take time. Learning to type with one hand was seriously hard work. I could literally feel the brain cogs turning and the neurons rewiring when I was learning to type.

I spent much of the first month using voice dictation any time I needed to write more than a sentence or two, or needed to respond quickly. I also found the huge value of the facility on a Mac to use shortcuts to expand or correct specific words - for example I was regularly having to write certain responses like ‘please post this on the forums at forum.mautic.org as we use Github for bugs rather than support’ so I just set this as a shortcut on the letters ‘pofmo’. Same with URLs that I often had to type like mautic.org/slack which became ‘sorg’ and Mautic 3 became M3.

I also started making short video logs as I needed to learn how to use the video recording and editing software for my day job, and I couldn’t find anywhere videos from people who were learning to use these keyboards, and sharing their tips and tricks.

You can watch some of my progress in this playlist!

It was really interesting as I got more confident with the keyboard to see just how sensibly the keys were laid out. All the commonly used keys were close to the home keys, so you really minimised the amount you had to move your hands and fingers when typing.

Getting back to two hands

Thankfully after about three months I was able to start using my other hand, initially for an hour a day but then building up over time. This was when I started looking into the two-handed Maltron keyboards and more specifically at alternatives to the traditional Qwerty layout.

Many will be familiar with the history behind this layout which was originally designed to slow down typists to prevent the mechanisms from getting jammed. They did this by positioning the letters frequently occurring together as far apart on the keyboard, reducing the tendency to jam, and thus allowing faster typing - at the expense of having to move and reach much further, and being much less efficient for the typist.

Several alternative layouts have been created over the years, including the most popular ones like Dvorak and Colemak, and more recently the Maltron layout. Created based on scientific studies into the frequency of use of each letter, the layout is designed to be the most efficient and least strenuous layout for the typist.

The more I looked into it, the more fascinating it was at how we have had the Qwerty layout forced on us by the world of computers when it’s actually not the most efficient layout - and nobody has ever really questioned it!

As I started to shift back to two-handed typing I had to find a keyboard that would allow my wrist to be in a completely neutral position, and the Maltron keyboard fit that bill perfectly. I figured that I had already learned a new layout with the one-handed keyboard so learning a new two-handed layout wouldn’t be too hard, right?

Wrong!

Switching to the Maltron layout

Learning a new layout with both hands was much harder than learning the one-handed layout, probably due to the 30+ years of practice using Qwerty! It was frustratingly slow going at first, and I spent hours doing typing drills in the evenings to get the muscle memory of where the common keys were located.

I wonder sometimes if there are some parallels between this and learning a new language. It feels very much like I am having to type in a different language when I am using the Maltron layout, my brain has to think differently and it’s very much something I have to bring a lot of conscious awareness to, because the muscle memory is still not quite there. Increasingly I am finding that when I have to switch back to my ‘native’ qwerty layout, I have to work really hard to remember where the keys are and frequently get muddled with the Maltron layout!

After nearly 6 months of being back at two-handed typing with the Maltron layout (now using a Kinesis Advantage 2 keyboard remapped to Maltron as I couldn’t get on with the actual Maltron keyboard itself and this allowed me to slightly customise the layout for my own needs) I have to say I am really impressed by the efficiency of typing with this layout.

Although I am still learning and becoming more confident with typing in a ‘new language’, I’m definitely noticing that I am moving my hands much less when I am typing with Maltron, and now that I know where the majority of the keys are located my WPM speed is definitely increasing. I still have pain in my hands, which is probably not going to go away, but I am definitely finding that I am less tired and less achy nowadays.

It has been quite a journey and at times has been incredibly frustrating, but I hope that this switch to a more optimised layout will mean that in the longer run my hands will be less painful and I’ll be protecting them from the extra wear and tear of using an inefficient layout like Qwerty!

Have you tried other layouts? Are you a fan of one or the other? I’d love to hear in the comments!

Q1 2021 Mautic Community Roundup

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Fri, 30 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Another quarter has seemingly flown by and here we are again with a quarterly round up of everything that has happened in the community over the last three months. Apologies for the delay in getting this published!

This also marks a year since I started doing these posts, and I would like to take a moment to recognise the huge amount of progress that has been made - especially given the challenging situation we all find ourselves in during the global pandemic.

Some highlights for you:

Establishing a governance structure and teams (Q1 2020)
Running our first virtual sprint (Q2 2020)
Appointing a full time Project Lead (Q2 2020)
Launching Mautic 3.0 (Q2 2020)
Holding the first ever worldwide conference, MautiCon 2020 (Q4 2020)
Established ways to financially support Mautic and provide transparency over the budget with Open Collective and GitHub Sponsors (Q4 2020)
Kicked off the first of our Strategic Initiatives (Q4 2020)

If you would like to read the previous posts in full here are the links:

Q1 2020 - Q2 2020 - Q3 2020 - Q4 2020

Q1 2021 sponsors shout out

A big thank you to the sponsors who have supported us this quarter on Github Sponsors or Open Collective:

$100 per month and over

Under $100 per month

Weismann Web
Avinash Dalvi
Marcel van Nuil
Eli Logan
Tomas Poner
Joey Keller
Luis Rodriguez
Roundabout Media
Jan Linhart
Khalid Zamer
Ruth Cheesley

Security release

In January 2021 we made the first major security release to fix two vulnerabilities that were responsibly reported to the team. We have also put together some formal documentation on how we manage security reports in the community, how we work on issues and make security releases which you can find here.

As a result of this, we also applied to become a CVE Numbering Authority and we were granted that status on 26th February. This means that anybody finding a vulnerability will have to report them to the Mautic Security Team in order to obtain a CVE number.

Mautic 3.3

Our third feature release for Mautic came out on schedule on the 22nd February - a huge thank you to everyone who contributed in any way to this release!

There were several new features in the release which you can read about here - probably the most notable being the beta release (meaning we are still working on some outstanding bugs and invite your feedback) of the new and modernised email and landing page builder. If you would like to try it, read the documentation here and then enable it in your plugins.

Season of Docs Project Completions

A huge congratulations to Favour Kelvin and Swati Thacker who successfully completed their Season of Docs projects! Read more about the projects and how they have impacted on the Mautic Project here.

Favour has since stepped up to lead the Education Team and we are looking forward to her leadership of the team helping us to improve the documentation we have available.

We would also like to extend our appreciation to Google Open Source for the $1,000 contribution that was received as the stipend for mentoring our technical writers.

Announcing Mautic Conference Global 2021

After the huge success of MautiCon 2020, the team have kicked off preparations for Mautic Conference Global 2021 which will take place over two days on the 16-17 June, with a training day on the 15th June.

At the time of writing all Gold sponsorships have sold out and there are only three Silver sponsorships available, which is great news! Tickets will be on sale shortly and the agenda will be announced A big thank you to everyone who is supporting this great event!

We are also tentatively planning our first ever in-person conference (subject to the COVID-19 situation) for November 2021.

Spreading the word about Mautic

We have had a presence at two major events this quarter - FOSDEM in February and Inbox Expo in March.

Both were a great way to raise awareness of Mautic and get to chat with people about Marketing Automation. We are always on the lookout for events and opportunities to showcase Mautic - if you have some ideas or would like to help with this, please join #t-marketing on Slack (get an invite at https://mautic.org/slack).

Funding in the Mautic Community

I shared our thoughts on how we are taking some steps toward funding in the Mautic Community, including implementing Bountysource on GitHub and allocating budget to support strategic initiatives.

You can read more in the blog post here.

Code metrics

During Q1 2020 in the core mautic/mautic repository we saw:

379 commits (383 last quarter, 1881 in 2020)
179 new pull requests (170 last quarter, 644 in 2020)
136 new issues created (116 last quarter, 621 in 2020)
148 issues closed (184 last quarter, 1181 in 2020)

We have seen gradual improvements to the metrics relating to how we deal with issues and pull requests:

Median review duration (pull requests) 1.04 days (9.02 days last quarter, 7.11 days in 2020)
Median time to close (issues) 78.77 days (87.92 days last quarter, 309.95 days in 2020)

As you can appreciate, having over 170 new pull requests and over 100 new issues per quarter, it is quite a challenge to keep on top of them and get issues fixed / pull requests merged into the releases! This is why we really need your help to test pull requests - this can be done by anybody with a computer available who knows how to use Mautic.

In mautic/mautic we have had:

39 authors according to Git commits (35 last quarter, 28 in Q1 2020, 82 in 2020)
83 issue authors (92 last quarter, 76 in Q1 2020, 332 in 2020)
42 pull request submitters (39 last quarter, 33 in Q1 2020, 94 in 2020)

Of these, we welcomed:

19 new authors according to Git commits (16 last quarter, 12 in Q1 2020, 53 in 2020)
51 new issue creators (49 last quarter, 43 in Q1 2020, 248 in 2020)
19 new pull request submitters (17 last quarter, 16 in Q1 2020, 62 in 2020)

You can learn more on the Community Dashboard at https://dashboard.mautic.org or on our public cauldron.io dashboard.

Conclusion

It has been a really exciting start to the year with lots of work on initiatives getting underway! We are looking forward to the Mautic 4 release and also the return of our world conference - there is always a need for folks to help out in the community, do join us on Slack if you are interested at https://mautic.org/slack.

This article was originally published on mautic.org.

Q2 2021 Mautic Community Roundup

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Thu, 01 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

It hardly seems like three months have passed since the last roundup report on activity within the Mautic Community, but a lot has happened since then! Read on for the latest updates.

Community partners

Last quarter we launched the Mautic Community Partners Program with five partners being eligible at the launch of the programme.

We are pleased to see new sponsors joining us during Q2, several of whom are also actively contributing to Mautic and working toward becoming partners.

Dropsolid will be the first such company who will be joining the Mautic Community Partners Programme at the beginning of Q3.

Q2 2021 sponsors shout out

A big thank you to the sponsors who have supported us this quarter on Github Sponsors or Open Collective:

$100 per month and over

Acquia

Webmecanik

Idea2

Leuchtfeuer Digital Marketing

Friendly

Nucamp

Waym

Up.mass

Akaunting

Droptica

New this quarter:

Dropsolid

Powertic

WebAnyOne

Under $100 per month

Weismann Web

Avinash Dalvi

Marcel van Nuil

Eli Logan

Tomas Poner

Joey Keller

Roundabout Media

Jan Linhart

Khalid Zamer

Ruth Cheesley

We have also added an infrastructure supporters section on our sponsors page, to highlight the organisations who are providing us with tools for free or at a reduced price which help us to develop Mautic and our community.

Legal & Finance Team updates

This quarter saw some new features being rolled out by Open Collective which we have taken full advantage of.

Projects

We have established projects for each of the key initiatives and for our community teams who have budgeted line items. You will see these listed on ohttps://opencollective.com/mautic/projects.

This allows us to distribute our budget, and manage the budget independently for each project or team, from our central funds.

It also means that if you want to financially contribute toward a specific project or team, you are now able to do that. Simply visit the project, click on the menu on the right and go to ‘Contribute Money’.

We will be ensuring that all expenses relating to projects or teams are processed through the relevant project going forward, so that there is clear transparency over how the allocated funds are being used.

Going forward, we envisage that we could also use projects for meetup groups, community initiatives and local events to manage their own budget and receive funds from Mautic’s budget in a transparent manner.

Virtual credit cards

A feature we have been waiting for with some excitement has been the ability to request virtual credit cards. These are locked to a specific vendor and amount and can be used for one-off purchases or for regular monthly payments.

This enables us to pay directly for things like our forum hosting or tooling for our recent Mautic Conference Global event, without expecting someone to pay using their own money and claim it back.

We anticipate that this will also help us going forward if we need to expense things like travel or accommodation against a project, enabling us to create a virtual card for this purpose and have full transparency, while not relying on individual contributors being able to pay for things themselves and claim back at a later date.

Receipts are still mandatory and have to be uploaded to Open Collective after the expense has been incurred.

We have already been using this feature very heavily over the past few months, and it has really simplified our workflows.

Product Team update

Mautic releases

We have had a busy quarter, with the 3.3.3 release in April being the last planned release for the 3.x series. Once we release Mautic 4, the 3.x series will only receive security fixes for a period of six months, after which it will no longer be supported.

A lot of focus has also been on getting the Mautic 4 release ready for general use.

In May we made a Beta release available for testing and we have been addressing any bugs that have been reported by the small number of users who are helping us with testing.

A couple of these bugs have been quite a challenge, and we have also been working hard on some of the features that we wanted to include with the 4.0 release.

Some, like PHP8 support, will not make it into the release, but we have quite a few new features that will be coming, including a couple of our Strategic Initiatives delivering the first phases of their project plans.

There is currently an issue which is blocking the release process - the team are working on resolving this so that we can make the Mautic 4 Release Candidate release. After this is launched we will make the General Availability release following community testing. Follow this forum post for updates.

Changes to our release process

We have learned a lot over the last year with our monthly release cadence, and we are making a few changes to our processes.

These are outlined in the announcement here: https://www.mautic.org/blog/community/updates-mautic-community-release-process

In short, we are going to be planning what will be included in releases on a quarterly basis. We will consider a maximum of 25 pull requests which must be ready to be tested and mergeable at the point of the meeting date, for each release. We will also identify five issues that the Product Team want to see getting addressed.

We will have a named release team for each release consisting of a release lead and assistant release lead.

We will also be continuing the theme we started last quarter with having themes for releases. Please read the announcement for further details.

Make sure that you add the release planning meeting dates to your calendar if you want to have a say in what is included in the forthcoming releases!

Marketing Team update

New team lead

Q3 has also seen a change in leadership for the Marketing Team. Radu Zlatianu has stepped down as team lead after setting up and leading the team since we first created the governance structure. We thank him for his work and leadership over this time!

Oluwatobi Owolabi has been the Assistant Team Lead alongside Radu, and has stepped up to the Team Lead role. We are looking forward to appointing an Assistant Team Lead - if you have experience in Marketing and would like to support the community by sharing your expertise please do consider stepping up to support the team!

Mautic instance established

We established our own Mautic instance in Q2 hosted on Acquia’s Campaign Studio - if you received emails from us about Mautic Conference Global you will already have benefited from this!

We are in the process of re-consenting all existing contacts from our old instance, but if you would rather not wait please do join our mailing lists here: https://www.mautic.org/community/get-involved/mailing-lists

We are going to be starting a monthly Mautic Community Newsletter on the first of each month, which Oluwatobi is leading. If you would like to join the working group, please join #wg-mautic-newsletter on Slack.

Community Team update

Mautic Conference Global

Q2 has been a busy one for the Community Team, with our second ever World Conference being held on 16-17 June. What a huge success! Nearly 300 Mauticians gathered together to learn, share and network.

Videos will be made available on YouTube shortly once we have finished rendering them.

We are tentatively planning an in-person event in November 2021 and will be sharing more information on that in due course.

FundOSS

Mautic was selected to be one of the 56 open source organisations taking part in the first round of the FundOSS pilot - an innovative approach to raising funds for open source projects.

A huge thank you to everybody who supported us during the two-week funding round - we raised $1,411 from 52 donors which was matched with $3,621 from the $75,000 fund. This money (minus transaction fees) has already been transferred to our Open Collective.

New Mautic Meetup group

We are excited to share that we have a new Mautic Meetup starting in València, Spain. Organised by Julio Roldos and Joan Serra, we’re really looking forward to their first meetup being a great success!

If you think you’d like to start a Mautic Meetup group in your local area, please take a look at the guidance in our Community Handbook and drop us a message in #t-community on Slack.

Community Survey

During Mautic Conference Global, I launched the first Mautic Community Survey which we are planning to repeat on an annual basis to learn more about how people are using Mautic, what they think about Mautic, and where the community feels we should be focusing our attention.

Please do take a moment to complete the survey, read more about it in the announcement here: https://www.mautic.org/blog/community/announcing-first-mautic-user-survey.

Let’s see the numbers!

We are continuing to see a steady growth throughout the year in members joining our community, defined as folk engaging on Slack, forums, GitHub, Stack Overflow and Reddit.

Over the last 90 days, our most active contributors (based on the number of conversations) have been:

Ruth Cheesley (she/her) 1649

Nick Veenhof 354

Joey Keller 307

Ekke Guembel (he/him) 174

Zdeno Kuzmany 142

Norman Pracht (he/him) 135

Bob Clough 106

Michael 104

Adrian 89

Dennis Ameling (he/him) 86

Our most engaged contributors (based on the number of connections they have made with others in the community) have been:

Ruth Cheesley (she/her) 573

Norman Pracht (he/him) 255

Joey Keller 240

Zdeno Kuzmany 126

John Linhart 105

Mohammad Abu Musa 101

Michael 100

Dennis Ameling (he/him) 91

Eli Logan 89

imihandstand 80

The majority of active members (621 over the last 90 days) were existing members, but we are also seeing a steady volume of new members engaging for the first time across the community.

All members by new and returning status, Q2 2021

We are continuing to see a fairly steady flow of contributions coming into Mautic across all of our channels. Our top contributors this quarter are:

Zdeno Kuzmany 46

Ruth Cheesley (she/her) 36

Dennis Ameling (he/him) 19

Saurabh Gupta 12

Nick Veenhof 11

Ekke Guembel (he/him) 11

Rahul Shinde 10

Miroslav Fedeleš 10

Joey Keller 9

Adrian 7

The companies who are most active in the Mautic Community (based on the number of conversations) are:

Acquia 1835

Dropsolid 354

Friendly 313

Webmecanik 290

Leuchtfeuer Digital Marketing 179

Aivie (Idea2) 99

QED42 75

Favcy 74

Harmut.io 25

Merkur 22

The companies who are contributing the most to the Mautic Community (based on the number of contributions) are:

Acquia 77

Webmecanik 48

Dropsolid 11

Leuchtfeuer Digital Marketing 11

Friendly 9

Aivie (Idea2) 7

Steer Campaign 2

Marketing Heap 2

Facet Interactive 1

Harmut.io 1

Conclusion

Some great collaboration happening across the community this quarter resulting in several projects coming to completion and a wonderful two days at Mautic Conference Global. There is much to do in the coming quarter, so please do think about getting involved! Join us on Slack at https://mautic.org/slack and head over to #Community where we can help you find where to get started with contributing!

Q3 2021 Mautic Community Roundup

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Fri, 01 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

It hardly seems that it was a year ago we were releasing the biggest major update to Mautic with our Mautic 3.0 release, but here we are just over a year later, and Mautic 4 has been released! There have also been some other important announcements, so read on for a roundup of activity across the community.

Q3 2021 sponsors shout out

A big thank you to the sponsors who have supported us this quarter on GitHub Sponsors or Open Collective:

$100 per month and over

Acquia

Webmecanik

Aivie

Leuchtfeuer Digital Marketing

Friendly

Nucamp

Waym

Up.mass

Akaunting

Droptica

Web Any One

Powertic

New this quarter:

SMC

QED42

Marketing Heap

Under $100 per month

Weismann Web

Avinash Dalvi

Eli Logan

Tomas Poner

Joey Keller

Roundabout Media

Jan Linhart

Khalid Zamer

Ruth Cheesley

New this quarter:

Dirk Spannaus

Product Team update

Mautic releases

It has been another busy quarter as the Product Team worked hard to get Mautic 4.0 released. It was delayed beyond our target release date due to some bugs that were identified during the testing of the Release Candidate, and a lack of community testers.

The first bug fix release was made on Monday, 4.0.1, with nine bugs fixed focusing on forms, in accordance with our new release process.

We also back-ported some security fixes to Mautic 3, which will receive security fixes for six months after the 4.0 release is made. Please update to 3.3.4 if you are not yet ready to update to 4.0.

If you use Mautic and would like to help us to test bug fixes and new features, please do let us know in the #t-product channel on Slack. We can help you get set up to test which will make a big difference! Get an invite to join Slack at mautic.org/slack.

RFP process

We are implementing a new process for feature development, initiatives and larger bug fixes which allows the Product Team to create a brief for a task and developers to share how they would plan to address the brief. Some of these projects will have a budget associated, some may require funds to be raised, others may not be funded.

Read more about the RFP process here, and check out the opportunities accepting proposals here.

Marketing Team update

The Marketing Team launched the monthly newsletter last quarter and we are seeing a steady growth in subscribers - we hope this will be a helpful way for you to keep in touch with what’s happening in the community!

If you would like to help with the newsletter, we would love to hear from you. Just drop us a line in #t-marketing on Slack.

In addition to the newsletter, we have been sharing videos from Mautic Conference Global across our social media channels, highlighting some great sessions and sharing other useful resources. Watching the videos on YouTube will also help us to qualify for monetization of our channel, another useful revenue stream to support the growth of the community, so please do watch them!

Community spotlight

The team supported the Mautic 4 release and have also reinvigorated the Community Spotlight feature, where we highlight contributors from the Mautic Community. This quarter we have featured:

Nick Veenhof, who led the Composer Initiative
Nikola Nedić, who developed the user interface for the Tag Management feature
Adrian Schimpf, who led the Builders Initiative

Community Team update

Mautic Conference North America Europe 2021

We shared at Mautic Conference Global that we were planning to hold our first in-person event in Boston, USA, however due to the uncertainty surrounding covid-19 we had to take the decision to move the event to Europe. We will be holding the event in Hasselt, Belgium on 8th November 2021, with a community contribution day on the 9th November and a leadership team summit on 10th November.

The call for speakers is currently open - please submit your sessions before the 10th October. Speakers will have their travel and accommodation covered by the event budget.

There are also several opportunities to promote your organization and support the community as a sponsor, from our tiered sponsorships to bag drops and lanyard sponsors.

Tickets will be going on sale imminently - keep an eye out on social media and email!

New meetup group

We are excited to share that we have a new Mautic Meetup starting in Ghent, Belgium. Organised by Nick Veenhof and team from Dropsolid, we’re really looking forward to their first meetup being a great success!

If you think you’d like to start a Mautic Meetup group in your local area, please take a look at the guidance in our Community Handbook and drop us a message in #t-community on Slack.

Community Survey

We have now closed the community survey - a huge thanks to the 82 people who took the time to fill it out! We will be announcing the results in the keynote during Mautic Conference Europe, and on the blog shortly afterward.

Education team update

Updating the developer documentation

The Education Team has kicked off several projects this quarter, including the task of transitioning our developer documentation from Slate over to Read the Docs, and updating it during the process. This will allow us not only to localise the documentation, but also to version it - thus when we have major releases we can maintain multiple versions of the developer documentation.

The team are open to volunteers helping with this task, so if you’d like to get involved please join #t-education and let us know how you’d like to help!

Improving documentation for installing and upgrading Mautic

Work is also underway as part of the Install/Upgrade initiative to improve the documentation and resources around installing and upgrading Mautic. We hope to greatly improve the onboarding process for people who are completely new to Mautic, so that the whole workflow from downloading and installing through to configuring and starting to use Mautic is as smooth and user-friendly as possible.

We always need people to help with writing and reviewing the documentation, creating visual resources and video, and more. Please reach out to us on Slack if you’d like to contribute in this way!

Legal and Finance Team update

Trademark infringement cases

There are several trademark infringement cases which are being actively pursued, several have now been escalated to enforcement action. This is an important aspect of maintaining our trademark and ensuring that anybody using the Mautic name and brand are doing so in line with the Trademark Policy.

Let’s look at the numbers!

Across all our channels we are continuing to see a steady growth in new members joining our community, defined as folk engaging on Slack, forums, GitHub, Stack Overflow and Reddit.

Image

Over the last 90 days, our most active contributors (based on the number of conversations) have been:

Ruth Cheesley (she/her) 1257

Joey Keller 355

Adrian 201

Matic Zagmajster 163

Dennis Ameling (he/him) 135

Ekke Guembel (he/him) 123

Zdeno Kuzmany 115

Nick Veenhof 87

Michael 83

Don Bowman 77

Read more about what is defined as a contribution here.

Our most engaged contributors (based on the number of connections they have made with others in the community) have been:

Ruth Cheesley (she/her) 488

Joey Keller 244

Norman Pracht (he/him) 220

Zdeno Kuzmany 140

Dennis Ameling (he/him) 113

John Linhart 103

Michael 102

Alan Hartless 97

Adrian 91

Mohammed Abu Musa 88

The majority of active members (539 over the last 90 days) were existing members, but we are continuing to see a steady volume of new members engaging for the first time across the community.

Image

We are continuing to see a fairly steady flow of contributions coming into Mautic across all of our channels. Our top contributors this quarter are:

Ruth Cheesley (she/her) 34

Zdeno Kuzmany 30

Dennis Ameling (he/him) 13

Adrian 12

Joey Keller 8

Nick Veenhof 6

Mohit Aghera 4

Patryk Gruszka 4

Lukassykora 4

Lukas Günther 4

The companies who are most active in the Mautic Community (based on the number of conversations) are:

Acquia 1323

Friendly 355

Aivie 204

Webmecanik 182

Leuchtfeuer Digital Marketing 173

Smart Octopus Solutions 163

fits4all 135

Dropsolid 87

Agilicus Incorporated 77

QED42 70

The companies who are contributing the most to the Mautic Community (based on the number of contributions) are:

Acquia 50

Webmecanik 36

Leuchtfeuer Digital Marketing 15

fits4all 13

Aivie 12

Friendly 8

Dropsolid 6

Agilicus Incorporated 4

QED42 4

Smart Octopus Solutions 4

Conclusion

It has been another great quarter in the Mautic Community, and really exciting to see new contributors coming through and making their first contribution.

I’m also really looking forward to our first ever in-person Mautic Conference next month. It will be so great to be in the same room as all the awesome folks from around the world who are using and contributing to Mautic. Please come if you can, and if you can’t, please share the event among your network - let’s make it a sell-out event!

There are so many opportunities to get involved with helping Mautic grow and improve, regardless of your skills or experience level - please do consider setting aside a few hours a week to give something back, and/or contributing to the community through our GitHub Sponsors and Open Collective. Every contribution really does help us to move forward together as a project and a community. Thank you!

Organising digital events in the Mautic Community

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Sat, 30 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +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

Running our first in-person event in covid times

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Fri, 12 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +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.

6 ideas for building an equitable partners program for your open source project

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Tue, 14 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

The organisations that partner with you to contribute to your open source project deserve recognition. But there is more to showcasing these organisations than simply adding a logo to your website.

I work at Acquia where I am the Project Lead for the open source marketing automation project, Mautic. In the Mautic project, we wanted to have a way to showcase these contributors in order to say, “These are the folks who are the makers. They support this project—work with them so they can do more!”

As we started to plan, we immediately bumped into some pretty major challenges. We needed to develop an equitable program with entry requirements that reflect both the complexities of worldwide financial systems and the nuances of what we considered a contribution to our community.

Here’s how we set about it.

Financial management

First, we needed a way to manage our finances. I have always encouraged the community to default to transparency, and this is extremely important when it comes to money.

The Mautic team looked into different options, but, based on experiences in other open source communities, getting a bank account with a physical bank can be extremely challenging when you’re geographically dispersed. The same challenges apply when navigating tax systems and accounting.

Enter the Open Collective, a fantastic organisation that exists to support organisations with their financial management in an open, transparent way. We applied for a Fiscal Host with Open Source Collective, which focuses on providing financial infrastructure for open source projects, in November 2020. Within a day or two, we were up and running.

Developing a partners program

Once we had the sponsorship opportunities up and running, we focused on building a program for both the organisations that financially support the project and those practically contributing to the community.

Many projects have similar programs, often with complex tiering systems and requirements to join the program. As we were starting this in a bootstrapped fashion, we decided to have only one partner tier to start the program.

Setting the entry requirements

Financial contributions

The next tricky question was, how much do we deem enough to qualify an organisation to become a partner? How can we set an amount fair to everyone, wherever they are around the world, taking into account its value in their local economy?

We started with a method used in the Joomla! community to determine the cost of taking the official examinations: the Big Mac Index. Essentially, this method allows you to work out the relationship between currencies based on the price of a McDonald’s Big Mac in each country (check out the latest data here). This method isn’t perfect—for example, if a country is experiencing hyperinflation, the index does not work—so we have to exercise some discretion.

We decided to set the baseline price at US$ 100 per month and work out prices for other countries according to the Big Mac Index. This method gave us a minimum monthly amount to use as the entry point for potential partners in most countries. We decided on a term of three months over which the organisation must have contributed at the minimum amount. We chose this to align with our quarterly reporting and for ease of management.

Practical contributions

We also needed to decide how to define a contribution and how to consistently measure contributions across our community in the most automated, streamlined way possible.

Defining contributions in open source is a bit of a thorny subject. Historically, code has been considered the first and best way to contribute to open source projects by default. In Mautic, however, most of our users are not developers—in fact, very few are. We have a lot of non-code things that need to be done, ranging from writing articles to creating videos, moderating on the forum, and running meetup groups.

We needed first to clarify how we could identify and measure these contributions automatically. Second, we needed to find tools to bring this all together into a community overview.

Enter Savannah CRM, an open source community relationship management (CoRM) system with a hosted platform available if you prefer not to self-host. The tool was a huge bonus to both building our community, by helping us identify the key people who were well connected and talking about specific things, and gathering the metrics from across all of our community channels.

We use the Savannah definition of contributions, which closely matches what we were already planning to track and enables us to track across all the various channels in which our community interacts.

When an organisation requests to become a partner, we review their activity over the previous three months and determine whether there is a consistent contribution and activity history. The leadership team discusses what we’ve found and, if all are in agreement, the partner is accepted.

We also monitor the activity of our partners each quarter. If a partner has dropped their contribution or activity in the previous quarter, we reach out to them and let them know they need to maintain their activity to retain their partner status.

Creating policies

It’s essential to have clear policy documentation to explain how an organisation might join the program and the processes to retain that status. We’ve tried to keep this simple and straightforward on our website.

We decided to feature the top three most active/contributing partners on our homepage each month, basing the ranking on the previous month’s activity. Doing this necessitated a monthly cadence to reporting. We accomplish this recognition through a shout-out in our Announcements channel on our community chat, then include a quarterly roundup in the report we share on our blog.

Building the partners portal

Because we were bootstrapping this project, we didn’t have much capacity for development work. As a result, our partners portal had to be built quickly using static pages. Drupal has a great layout builder that enables us to create modular pages rapidly, and we used this to create the portal.

The main landing page lists the partners in order of activity the previous month; these can be updated easily with the drag-and-drop interface. Each partner has a landing page that we create with them, using a standardised template, including their activity and contribution history for the previous 90 days and their contributors who have been active in that time. Currently, we use a screenshot, but in the future, we would like to embed it.

Partners have the option of including a Mautic form that sends an inquiry if people want to work with them. They can also include links to Mautic case studies about projects they were involved in. These case studies are featured on the general Mautic Case Studies page as well.

Perks for partners

We decided to offer some perks for partners that are not available to sponsors, such as getting a mention in the keynotes during our main conferences. They can also propose up to three features each year for inclusion in the product roadmap. These proposals go directly to the Project Lead and Product Team for consideration, without going through the community voting process.

Next steps

While the partners portal is purposely pretty simple, it definitely won’t be scalable as the number of partners grows, so we will be looking to build something a bit fancier in the future. For example, we want filters and the ability to search by geographic region or language. We also want to automate ranking the organizations each month and then automatically feature the top three on our website.

We would like to build on the sense of belonging, for example, by having a badge that our partners can share on their websites to show that they are a partner. We might also explore the possibility of an NGO which they are a member of, which we don’t currently have.

We plan to look into a tiered system in the future, especially as we have some partners who contribute significantly more than others. If we go this route, we will need to ensure that the thresholds remain fair and consistent in both the financial and practical aspects.

Outcomes

To date, the partner program has been very well received. Organisations in the community value the opportunity to be listed on the partners portal. While it doesn’t generate huge volumes of sales, it does raise their profile in the community and enables people to find reputable companies helping build and support the future of the project.

Most importantly, organisations have agreed that our implementation of the program is a fair approach to ensuring that both financial and practical support are considered for inclusion in the program.

This article was originally posted at opensource.com.

Q4 2021 Mautic Community Roundup

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Wed, 12 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Let’s kick off a roundup of all the awesome things that have happened this quarter!

Read the previous reports here for Q3 2021, Q2 2021 and Q1 2021.

Q4 2021 Sponsors Shoutout

A big thank you to the sponsors who have supported us this quarter on GitHub Sponsors or Open Collective:

$100 per month and over

Acquia

Webmecanik

Aivie

Leuchtfeuer Digital Marketing

Friendly

Waym

Up.mass

Akaunting

Droptica

Web Any One

Powertic

SMC

QED42

Under $100 per month

Weismann Web

Avinash Dalvi

Eli Logan

Joey Keller

Roundabout Media

Jan Linhart

Khalid Zamer

Ruth Cheesley

Giving Tuesday / Back your Stack

On Giving Tuesday, we announced that in our 2022 budget we have allocated funds to support the top 10 open source projects which are dependencies we rely on. The top ten were voted by the community, and have received $200 in donations from Mautic via our Open Collective.

The projects we will be supporting in 2022 in ranked order are:

Twig
Guzzlehttp
Monolog
Sebastian Bergman
Symfony
Predis
League
FriendsofPHP Proxy Manager
Matomo Analytics
ESLint

While we appreciate that $200 is not a huge amount of money, we want to start somewhere by doing our bit to support a sustainable Open Source ecosystem.

Read more about the Back your Stack project in our blog post.

Product Team Update

Mautic Releases

During Q4 we have released two bug fix releases - 4.0.2 and 4.1.1 - and our first minor release in the Mautic 4 series, 4.1.

4.1 release

After an immensely productive sprint at Mautic Conference Europe, we managed to get a large number of features and enhancements released in the 4.1 release, including Gitpod support which enables anyone to spin up a Mautic instance on Gitpod with a new feature or bug fix applied - a massive help for testers!

Read more about the release in the announcement post.

We’re looking forward to the next in-person sprint in the spring!

Coming up we have another bug fix release - 4.1.2 - at the end of January, and then our next minor release, 4.2, at the end of February. We are hoping to have some great new features in this release but we do need help from testers. Please do consider putting some time in your calendar each week to test a couple of bug fixes or features, it would be a huge help! Join us on Slack in #t-product if you need any help getting started.

Marketing Team Update

Welcome Déborah Salves, who has stepped up to take on the Assistant Team Lead role in the Marketing Team!

Mautic Pitch Deck

We have made a great start on the Pitch Deck project, thanks to the many people at Mautic Conference Europe who contributed!

The vision for this project is to empower people to pitch Mautic more effectively, by providing a set of slides which can be used as a whole or within existing presentations.

Take a look at the planning document and the slide deck, and if you would like to get involved with this project please join #t-marketing on Slack.

Community Team Update

Our first ever in-person conference

What an amazing event, our first ever in-person Mautic Conference. We heard from some fantastic speakers on the first day, had some great conversations in the networking sessions and socials, and got an immense amount of work done in the community sprint!

Read more about the event in our blog post here. Videos are being processed and will be available on YouTube soon, be sure to subscribe and click on the bell to be notified the moment they are released.

Community Survey

At Mautic Conference Europe I shared some interesting information from our first Community Survey. It is the first time that we have surveyed users of Mautic to find out things like how and where they are hosting, how many contacts they are working with, and what they think about the product and the community.

Thank you to everyone who responded - you can download the raw data and the charts from the blog post.

New meetup group

We are excited to share that a new meetup group has been formed for French-speaking Mauticians. Based in Libreville, Gabon the first meeting will be scheduled during January.

Join the meetup group to get updates here.

Education Team Update

Updating and re-platforming the developer documentation

Work is well underway to update the Developer Documentation and move it to Read the Docs, which will allow us to both version the documentation (e.g. have a version for Mautic 4, while working on a separate version for Mautic 5 as we’re developing it) and to translate it with Transifex.

If you’d like to get involved in this project, please join us in #t-education on Slack. The repository can be found here.

Updating and re-platforming the end-user documentation

The Education Team is just kicking off a project to update and re-platform the end-user documentation to Read the Docs.

This is in the very early stages, if you’d like to get involved, the repository can be found here - please get in touch on Slack as above.

Integrating the documentation into the main Mautic repository

Once the work in the two projects above is complete, the Education Team is planning to relocate both documentation resources within the main GitHub repository. This will mean that when a new feature is being added, the documentation can be added at the same time. It also means there will be a single place where all of our code and our documentation resides, instead of in multiple separate repositories.

If you’d like to know more about these projects, please reach out to Education Team Lead, Favour Kelvin.

Let’s look at the numbers!

This quarter we exceeded 5,000 members in the Mautic Community, with the majority of the growth coming since 2019.

Over the last 90 days, our most active contributors (based on the number of conversations) have been:

Ruth Cheesley 45

Zdeno Kuzmany 38

Dennis Ameling 26

Norman Pracht 15

John Linhart 14

Joey Keller13

Oluwatobi Owolabi 9

Alan Hartless 8

Matic Zagmajster 7

Adrian Schimpf 7

Read more about what is defined as a contribution here.

Our most engaged contributors (based on the number of connections they have made with others in the community) have been:

Ruth Cheesley 386

Joey Keller 233

Norman Pracht 224

Michael 125

Zdeno Kuzmany 104

Dennis Ameling 88

John Linhart 86

Eli Logan 74

Alan Hartless 70

Mohammed Abu Musa 56

Our top contributors this quarter (based on the number of contributions they have made) have been:

Ruth Cheesley 45

Zdeno Kuzmany 38

Dennis Ameling 26

Norman Pracht 15

John Linhart 14

Joey Keller 13

Oluwatobi Owolabi 9

Alan Hartless 8

Matic Zagmajster 7

Adrian Schimpf 7

The companies who were most active in the Mautic Community (based on the number of conversations) are:

Acquia 1176

Friendly 407

Webmecanik 317

Leuchtfeuer Digital Marketing 206

Dropsolid 175

Smart Octopus Solutions 165

Bluespace 65

Aivie 61

Torontoheadshot 45

QED42 43

The companies who are contributing the most to the Mautic Community (based on the number of contributions) are:

Acquia 78

Webmecanik 53

Friendly 15

Leuchtfeuer Digital Marketing 10

Bluespace 9

Aivie 9

Dropsolid 8

Smart Octopus Solutions 7

It2servu.be 4

Digiriders 3

Conclusion

It was really inspiring to see the community coming together for our first ever in-person conference and community sprint last month, and the immense amount of progress that was made as a result of the community sprint. I’m really looking forward to many more in-person and online collaboration events in the coming year.

Planning to support event attendees who test positive for covid-19: top tips

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Wed, 19 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

With the way things are going it is more likely than not that event organisers are going to have to deal with at least one attendee testing positive for covid during their event at some point.

Here are some helpful tips to make sure you are ready to deal with that eventuality based on my own experience of testing positive when attending an event abroad in December 2021.

Plan for the worst

They say failure to plan is planning to fail, and never was this more true than when it comes to dealing with a positive test from a delegate during your event.

It’s really important that you have everything planned out ahead of time, so that when it does happen you simply put in place existing procedures, and you know exactly what you need to tell the delegate to do.

I should raise at this point that you could very easily create some resources on your website, and set up an email which will automatically send to any people in a specific segment, if you’re using Mautic. If you’re not, have this created somewhere (email client, mailchimp, etc) in draft form so that you can copy/paste or clone it and send it really quickly. I’ve included some templates below which you can modify as needed.

It should go without saying that first and foremost, the health and wellbeing of the delegate, yourself and your team must take priority, closely followed by the health and wellbeing of your other attendees / venue staff. If you have to prioritise, make it humans first, institutions and formal processes second.

Some of the things you might need to consider having documented are:

Formalities with the local authorities

How do they get a formal confirmation (e.g. a PCR test administered by a healthcare professional) if they have tested positive on the lateral flow (antigen) test?
- Where do they go?
- What is the cost?
- How do they book?
  - In some countries, the local authority has to book
  - Sometimes the individual (or you) have to book
  - Sometimes the insurance company will book it for them directly
- Who pays for the cost?
- How do they get there and back
  - Consider that they might be feeling quite unwell and unable to walk long distances
  - In some regions you cannot use public transport or taxis - check this!
- Pre-advise the attendees that they must have the capacity to pay for at least one private covid-19 test, maybe two in some countries, in the event that they attend and test positive - one for confirming the diagnosis (not generally covered by insurance) and one for the safe to return home test (sometimes covered by insurance but not always required - some will accept an antigen test and some countries don’t need this test) - as they may need to be done promptly, before the insurance case is opened (which will most likely require a positive covid-19 result obtained from a private clinic).
Who do they need to notify (e.g. local health authorities, track and trace)
- Have the telephone numbers / website addresses that they need to use to report their positive test results
- If the country of your event has a track and trace system (notifying possible close contacts) ensure you know how to access it, and how it works. Help the delegate to note down interactions outside of the event that they may have had.
- If you are hosting an event in a country where attendees do not speak the native language, ensure you have a way to support the delegate with this process, or you know exactly which numbers they have to press in what order on the call operator stages.
- Sometimes a local number is required for communication. Consider having a pay as you go mobile phone with sufficient credit which can be used for this purpose - the delegate will not have a local number and you don’t want to keep having your phone busy with calls if you are busy running the event.

Logistics

Identifying potential close contacts
- Have a way to determine who the delegate has been in close contact with and the places they have visited during their time since leaving home - close contact is defined as more than 15 minutes and less than 2 metres distance.
- You, the delegate or track and trace (if it exists in your locality) should inform those places visited of the positive test and when they were in the venue so that the venue can take any actions necessary to safeguard their team and customers
- The people identified as close contacts should be privately informed of the positive case, and take an antigen test - they may want to take a PCR test (which is more sensitive). Ideally they should take a lateral flow (antigen) test daily before attending your event/leaving their accommodation for at least four days if the first test is negative.
- Strongly encourage (or mandate as you see appropriate) those who have been identified as close contacts, to take stronger precautions. Full FFP2/N95 mask wearing at all times, regular hand antibacterial application, and avoiding contact with others as much as is possible.
- If it is possible for those people to engage with the event virtually e.g. via a live stream, you may wish to encourage them to do so.
- You may wish to announce (AFTER you have privately informed all the close contacts) to the attendees that there has been a positive case (without sharing who, unless they give you consent to do so), and share what actions you are taking to make sure people are safe, explaining that all known close contacts have already been advised. Word spreads fast, it’s better if it comes from you as the event organiser, in a clear and positive way, than through the rumour mill.
What will you do to ensure that they can quarantine for the full duration required?
- Ensure you can extend the room booking for their accommodation (if a speaker or sponsor) or have some rooms on standby in case it’s attendees staying elsewhere who need to extend their stay - their accommodation might not be available after their check-out date
- Ensure attendees are aware of any mandatory quarantine periods before they attend, and ensure that they (if you’re not paying for the accommodation) can cover the cost of that extension in case their insurance requires them to pay upfront
- If the country where you’re hosting the event has quarantine hotels, familiarise yourself with the process of
  - How it works moving into one,
  - What the cost will be (usually covered by insurance, but make sure that attendees are aware that they might have to pay it upfront and claim it back in some countries/insurance policies)
  - What food / drink / clothes washing / etc provisions are made
  - Whether it is possible to send deliveries (e.g. a care package) to people staying there, if so, how
- Ensure that attendees are aware of the limitations of travel insurance - for example they will most likely need to pay for their food and drink, any costs associated with travel to/from tests, and in some cases for the tests themselves. This can quickly accumulate. Ensure they have a means of paying for this, whether through a company picking up the bill, or using their own money.

Show that you care

Testing positive in a (possibly) foreign country necessitating a quarantine period is a daunting prospect, even without the fact that your attendee is most likely going to get some degree of sick over the coming days.

The absolute worst thing you can do is just tell them to stay in their accomodation and get on with running your event, never to speak to them again and effectively abandoning them. This would really suck. Don’t do it.

A named ‘covid carer’ (or team of them)

Make sure you have someone, anyone, who has the specific task of keeping in touch and being a responsive point of contact for folks who might test positive during the event. They may not need to be called on, but if they are, they can take that burden off your shoulders as you’ll be super busy with keeping the rest of the event afloat.

Make sure that person has a dedicated event phone or are willing to use their own phone for this purpose, with a whatsapp/signal/etc account associated with it and enough credit to make all the calls that might be needed/means to top up (consider auto topup).

At a minimum, have them reach out to anyone who has tested positive once a day, just to check in and see how they are doing. Maybe even schedule a video call with the delegate. Just seeing another human face, and one who cares about your wellbeing, makes a huge difference when you’re in quarantine and all you’ve seen all day are the four walls and the TV.

A care package

This is not essential, but it is a nice touch. You could even ask your sponsors to consider providing some items you can include in it - as the attendee may not get the swag they would usually receive.

Some ideas for what you might consider including:

Antibacterial gel
Hand cream / lip balm
Masks / plastic gloves
Throat lozenges (some honey/lemon ones to soothe the throat and some with menthol to clear the nose!)
Tissues (one big box of good quality tissues rather than cheap ones, their nose will thank you for it!)
Paracetamol
Vitamin C / Zinc high strength effervescent tablets
Tea/Coffee/Herbal tea
Biscuits
Slipper socks
Event swag they might have missed out on
Something to read
Something to do - puzzle book, colouring book/sketch pad with pencils … anything to pass the time!

Templates

Here are some ideas for the kinds of things that might be helpful to send to delegates who have tested positive at your event. These are just some ideas, feel free to run with it and do your own thing, but whatever you do, please make sure you do prepare something!

When someone has just tested positive

Hi <firstname>,

Firstly let me say I’m so sorry to hear you’ve tested positive for covid-19 while you were attending <eventname>. We are here for you, and we’re going to do everything we can to make sure that you are taken care of during this time. Please do not feel guilty

We have put together lots of useful information so that we can navigate through this process together.

What you need to do

You should have already been advised to stay in your accommodation until we are able to organise a confirmatory test (if it hasn’t already been done) at a clinic, and to advise you of the next steps <check the rules on this - some places may not require a PCR but you probably need a formal clinic-diagnosis even if it’s an antigen test, for the insurance providers>. Please do not leave your accommodation for any reason, you should only leave on the advice of the local health authorities and generally this will only be for the purposes of getting a test.

The first thing we need to do at the event is to try to limit the spread to anyone else.

If you could please reply to this email with

A list of people who you have had close contact with since leaving home (close contact being 15 minutes or more, within 2 metres of distance)
Any places you have visited during your time here - for example coffee shops, meals out, etc - this will help us to make sure that they are notified in case they need to take additional measures to keep their team and customers safe

This will help us to make sure that those people can take extra precautions and get more regular testing.

Next steps

We will be dropping you off a care package shortly (today or tomorrow) with a few essentials.

You should make contact with your travel insurance company and let them know that you’ve tested positive for covid-19, and advise that you need to extend your stay until <likely date of leaving quarantine>. If you need anything from us, please don’t hesitate to be in touch.

<name of covid carer> will be your point of contact in case you need anything. You can reach them on <phone number> by call, SMS or <whatsapp/signal/etc> or by email at <email address>.

With best wishes,

Follow up email

Hi <first name>,

I hope you’re feeling OK today, <if you dropped off the care package, check everything was OK / ask if there’s anything they need>.

As far as the rules go relating to quarantining after testing positive, here’s the lowdown:

You have to test negative on a lateral flow test for two consecutive days before you’re allowed to leave quarantine <check this, rules vary!>
Once that happens you’ll be able to return home - you’ll need to make sure you get the test done in a clinic <check if this is true, rules vary!>

Here’s the nearest clinic where you can get a test done:

If you haven’t already done so, you might want to order some essentials. <insert information about any home-delivery services, apps that they can use, etc, to get whatever they might need e.g. Glovo app, supermarket delivery, etc>.

If there’s anything you need from us, or just want to have a chat, please get in touch with <name of the person who’s going to be the covid carer person> on <phone number> - you can call/text or use <whatsapp/signal/etc> to keep in touch.

With best wishes,

Before they are due to end their quarantine

Hello <name>,

I believe you’re coming to the end of your quarantine period soon, and I bet you can’t wait to get home!

If you require any assistance with booking transportation to the airport, please don’t hesitate to let us know. It is recommended where possible not to use public transportation <check this, guidance varies>. You can use <recommended taxi booking services> to book a taxi if you need one.

If you need to get a negative test before returning home, you can get this done at <list local clinics>. We’d recommend getting the test done the day before going to the airport if that’s possible, so you don’t have the additional stress of wondering if you’re going to be negative before your flight!

If there’s anything else that we can do to help, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us.

Best wishes for a safe journey home!

Conclusion

I hope that some of this is helpful and it gives event organisers a head start on planning for how to support people who might test positive for covid-19 at their event and need to quarantine.

How to back your open source project's stack

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Thu, 20 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

On GivingTuesday, the Mautic project—an open source marketing automation platform—shared its intention to allocate part of its budget each year to financially support the other open source projects on which it depends, as part of the Back Your Stack initiative.

What is Back Your Stack?

What is Back Your Stack, and why should open source projects follow Mautic’s lead?

Sustainability is a huge challenge in open source.

We’ve seen several cases in recent years where critical tools which are literally keeping the internet and the world of technology running are being maintained by a very small number of people, at times as a hobby rather than their full-time occupation. Sometimes this only comes to light when those people decide that enough is enough and either stop maintaining it or sell/transfer it to another organisation to support.

Tidelift recently reported that 46% of open source maintainers are not paid. Only 26% earn more than $1,000 from their maintenance work. The same survey also reported that around half felt demotivated, stressed, and undervalued because there was no recognition for the “thankless work” involved in maintaining these projects.

While some projects and maintainers may genuinely not want to receive any funds for their work, the vast majority have various channels through which they can be compensated, whether it be the cost of a coffee or a more substantial donation, once or on a regular basis.

The finger is often pointed at the end-users of software and there is pressure on them to fund open source projects directly. However, once an open source project has any significant budget, I believe it is the project’s responsibility to support those on whom it relies—its dependencies.

Without dependencies, open source projects would not be able to do all the awesome things that they do. Even if every open source project with an annual budget of over $50,000 per year decided to support their top ten dependencies at a relatively low amount of $200, I am sure that the maintainers would find a massive benefit in the support, if only in terms of a morale boost for being appreciated!

Identify dependencies with open source tools

There are some great tools out there to help you identify the projects on which you depend.

First, if you’re a composer-based project, you can use the command below to get a list of all the dependencies actively seeking funding (this uses the funding markup in the composer.json, so if you’re a project seeking funding, make sure you add it!).

$ composer fund

You can also use backyourstack.com to identify dependencies through your GitHub organisation or upload a dependency file—they support package.json, composer.json, *.csproj, packages.config, Gopkg.lock, Gemfile.lock, and requirements.txt files.

This gives you a list of projects on Open Collective and a useful list of all your dependencies that you can then use to research funding opportunities.

How much should I contribute?

How much you contribute depends on your budget and how much money you have available outside of your “must cover” expenses.

Personally, I would like Mautic to be at 10% so that we could support all of our dependencies at a basic level, but we haven’t got the financial stability just yet to reach that. For now, we’re allocating 4% of our budget to support the top 10 projects as prioritized by our community—it’s not much, but it’s a starting point.

But I don’t have the money!

I hear you. It’s tough to get to a point where you have enough funds available to support your dependencies, so what about getting creative about how you support them?

Organise a documentation swarm, where you bring some of your contributors to improve the documentation for one of your dependencies in a giving back initiative.
Give a project feedback, and help them improve the contributor experience by sharing what’s worked well for your project or where you find things difficult with their project.
Allow a developer on your team to work on a dependency project for some portion of each week.
Find a project on github.com/opensourcedesign and assign a designer on your team to help out.

In the survey from Tidelift, 90% of maintainers suggested that the primary non-financial ways they are looking for help are improving documentation and improving the experience for new users and contributors.

What about donating a percentage of the ticket sales from your next conference or event towards supporting your dependencies, or adding it as a power-up for your community members to pay more in order to support your dependencies?

There are many creative ways to collectively help open source projects become more sustainable, through which we all grow stronger.

Are you backing your stack currently? What ideas do you have for backing your stack? If you’re a maintainer, what are your thoughts on the most helpful way for people to support your projects if they depend on you for their own products or services?

Feel free to share in a comment below.

This article was originally shared on opensource.com.

Q1 2022 Mautic Community Roundup

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Mon, 04 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

It’s that time again! Let’s recap what has happened in the first quarter of 2022 - it’s been a busy one!

Read the previous reports here for Q4 2021, Q3 2021, Q2 2021 and Q1 2021.

Q4 2021 Sponsors Shoutout

A big thank you to the sponsors who have supported us this quarter on GitHub Sponsors or Open Collective:

Over $100/mth

Acquia

Webmecanik

Aivie

Leuchtfeuer Digital Marketing

Friendly

Waym

Up.mass

Akaunting

Droptica

Dropsolid

Web Any One

Powertic

SMC

QED42

Marketing Heap

AudienceWare

Media Giant Design

Under $100/mth

Avinash Dalvi

Dirk Spannaus

Shamaeva Natalia

Joey Keller

Roundabout Media

Jan Linhart

Ruth Cheesley

Eli Logan

Jon Stephenson

First Mautic Roadmap

It’s an exciting time for everyone involved with Mautic as we grow our community and develop our product to meet the evolving needs of the Marketer.

I have often been asked about our roadmap and before today there has never really been anything that I can point at and say ‘this is where Mautic is going’ other than vague blog posts and forum threads.

Earlier this year I shared the first iterations of our plans for the future which I debuted at Mautic Conference Europe 2021 in my keynote. It includes some great features that we have coming over the next year.

This process is new for us, and we do anticipate that there will be some tweaks made over the coming year, so please take this as our first rough outline of what we are hoping to achieve.

Some of these features will be community contributed, others may be contributed by an organization who has built or worked on it as a project for clients and are providing it back to the community.

If you prefer to view this in visual form, please head over to https://mau.tc/roadmap where you’ll be able to view an interactive graphic, and if you have a Jira account for our community instance, see the progress at the task level.

Community Team update

Mautic Conferences

There has been a hive of activity in the Community Team this quarter as we kick off the work to prepare the next Mautic Conferences.

The team have put out an open call for help with organizing these events so that they are run and managed by our community rather than a couple of people - if you would like to get involved please join #mauticon on Slack and let us know how you would like to help. All the roles are documented in the Community Handbook.

Call for in-person event location proposals

The Community Team is inviting proposals for locations to host the next in-person conference after Mautic Conference Europe last year saw our first ever in-person conference in Hasselt, Belgium. Nominations are open until the end of April, so be sure to submit your preferred location!

In person Community Sprint

The Community Team is also organizing an in-person Mautic Community Sprint in Budapest from 2-4 May 2022 - I am looking forward to meeting some of you there and working together on several exciting projects across all the teams in the community.

Education Team update

Replatform of documentation

A lot of work is going on behind the scenes to update and migrate both our Developer Documentation and End-User Documentation to Read the Docs.

This will bring several benefits including:

Being able to have multiple versions of our documentation so that we can maintain information for several major versions of Mautic alongside each other
Allowing us to translate the documentation with Transifex and host multiple languages to better serve our international community
Enabling us in the longer term to locate our documentation within our core mautic/mautic GitHub repository, so that there is one centralized repository for making features and bug fixes as well as contributing to the documentation which will improve the contributor experience.

We have also applied to the Google Season of Docs for a grant to help with the huge task with the End-User Documentation.

If you would like to get involved in these projects please join #t-education on Slack, or if you are comfortable with GitHub you’ll find the repositories at mautic/new-developer-documentation and mautic/user-documentation.

Marketing Team update

Would you like to write for the Mautic Community blog? Review and proof-read articles? Create imagery for our campaigns? Write the Mautic Community newsletter and onboarding campaigns?

The Marketing Team would love to hear from you!

We’ve had some great articles this quarter which you can find on our blog at mautic.org/blog.

Product Team update

Open source Friday Community Sprints

This quarter the Product Team has started to trial a new concept of encouraging businesses who rely on Mautic to contribute some of their time every Friday to help make Mautic even better. They are calling this ‘Open Source Friday Community Sprints’ which is joining an existing initiative to encourage open source contributions on a Friday.

There are already 7 Mautic businesses who have signed up to enable their teams to contribute to Mautic on Fridays - will you join in?

To start with this is a pilot in the Product Team but it is planned to roll it out more widely later in the year.

To get involved, join us in #t-product each Friday!

4.2 release

Last month the Product Team released Mautic 4.2 - the latest feature release in the 4.x series, which also included a security fix to the .htaccess file. Read more about the new features in the announcement post.

The Product Team has also announced with the 4.2 release some planned changes to the Mautic installation and upgrade processes which will be introduced over the coming releases, to remove the ability to update Mautic in the browser and eventually move to Composer being the supported method for installing and managing your Mautic instance.

Let’s look at the numbers!

This quarter we exceeded 5,500 members in the Mautic Community, with 634 active members who have an average of 10 conversations per member.

The majority of our members are from the forums, but a good percentage are also coming from GitHub and Slack.

Over the last 90 days, our most active members (based on the number of conversations) have been:

Ruth Cheesley 1135

Joey Keller 479

Zdeno Kuzmany 306

John Linhart 301

Bill 291

Ekke Guembel 191

Matic Zagmajster 176

Renato Santos 136

Oluwatobi Owolabi 115

Mattias Michaux 92

Read more about what is defined as a conversation here.

The most engaged members (based on the number of other community members they have conversations with) have been:

Ruth Cheesley 363

Joey Keller 263

Norman Pracht 179

John Linhart 139

Zdeno Kuzmany 119

Matic Zagmajster 85

Adrian 76

Michael 74

Mohammed Abu Musa 71

Eli Logan 65

When we look at contributions made, this quarter we have had 70 new contributors across all our community channels. In total we have had 307 tracked contributions.

We are continuing to see a growth in contribution over time across all channels, especially when compared with historical contributions.

Image

Likewise we are seeing ongoing growth in contributions across our GitHub repositories:

Image

This quarter, our top contributors (based on the number of contributions they have made) are:

Ruth Cheesley 70

Zdeno Kuzmany 37

John Linhart 33

Mattias Michaux 15

Volha Pivavarchyk 11

Dennis Ameling 11

Renato Santos 9

Joey Keller 8

Adrian 8

Matic Zagmajster 7

Read more about what is defined as a contribution here.

The companies who were most active in the Mautic Community (based on the number of conversations) are:

Acquia 642

Webmecanik 247

Aivie 76

Dropsolid 49

CTMobi 31

Tu Wien 24

Steer Campaign 24

Friendly 23

TwentyZen 22

Leuchtfeuer Digital Marketing 22

The companies who are contributing the most to the Mautic Community (based on the number of contributions) are:

Acquia 81

Webmecanik 37

Aivie 19

Dropsolid 15

TU Wien 5

Steer Campaign 4

CTMobi 3

Smart Octopus Solutions 2

App Civicio 2

Leuchtfeuer Digital Marketing 2

Conclusion

It has been great to see the energy and enthusiasm coming about through our recent in-person events, Open Source Friday sprints and a real growth in engagement across the community, but as always we are always on the lookout for folk who can help us by contributing some of your valuable time with whatever skills you can offer.

I’m looking forward to seeing the realization of some big projects next quarter, including Acquia’s Custom Objects plugin being released, our next minor release which will have some nice new features and hopefully also support for PHP8, and our first alpha and beta releases of Mautic 5 which will be compatible with the next version of Symfony. I’m hoping to see some of you in Budapest in May!

The last two years have really felt like we have been catching up with ourselves, but we are starting to see a lot of progress, innovation and exciting ideas for Mautic coming through. Sharing a roadmap for the first time feels like we are moving out of the reactive mode and more towards a creative way of planning Mautic’s future. It’s great to have you along with us on this journey!

Acquia volunteering day at Camp Mohawk

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Mon, 23 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

As a fully remote worker at Acquia, I always jump at the chance to meet up with fellow Acquians, especially when we get to spend the day working together to create something to benefit others.

Give Back More is one of Acquia’s core values - what we call our Core DNA. Every year, we get volunteering days to support good causes, and being Reading-based for the UK head office, a long standing relationship has been forged with Camp Mohawk, which provides:

A ‘safe haven’ with both indoor and outdoor facilities where children and young people with special needs and their families can come to relax, play, develop social skills and build their self-confidence in a positive and uplifting environment that accepts and welcomes them all.

We had two days organised by Acquia, where team members would spend the day working on whatever the team at Camp Mohawk needed doing.

On the day we rocked up, this involved stripping back some old safety matting around their accessible roundabout, digging out the surrounds and preparing it for gravel and some permanent matting to be laid.

Sounds like an easy job, right … trust me, we were absolutely exhausted by the end of the day!

It was a really great way to get to know other Acquians, some of whom I know in passing from Slack and others who I would never have otherwise encountered. Bonding over pickaxes and wheelbarrows full of heavy, clay-filled soil was certainly an experience we won’t forget in a hurry, and it was a delight to see the families enjoying using the roundabout a few weeks after we finished!

Photos from the day

When did you learn how to run properly?

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Thu, 16 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

During my training for Endure24 I started to pick up small but frustrating problems with my body - painful hip flexors and quads, a Mortons Neuroma, and struggling to progress further than about 8 miles. I had a gait and running analysis done to find out what I was doing wrong, and running re-education sessions to learn how to run properly!

Local to me, we have a great running analysis service provided by Physiofixx which I started in October 2021 to learn more about my gait and running style so that I could improve my form and hopefully get rid of these problems I was encountering!

The analysis took two parts - one focused on gait, and then focused on analysing my running form. I thought I’d share a bit of what I learned from these sessions, and how it’s helping me to be a better runner.

Gait analysis

I’ve had gait analysis done before because I have completely collapsed arches (thanks to my Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome), and I wear insoles to recreate the arch that my ligaments can’t, so it wasn’t something new!

This part of the analysis involved standing, walking and running over a force plate both barefoot and in my trail running shoes with braces and insoles.

Static balance

The first thing we did was look at my static balance and where my weight was distributed through my feet in standing. Unsurprisingly, it was mostly distributed through my heels!

My weight distribution in standing, with no braces or shoes/insoles.

Walking and running barefoot

Next, we looked at walking and running in barefoot without braces, which felt very strange and a little uncomfortable!

Barefoot walking

When I was walking, there was very little lateral roll - you would expect to see the line move to the left of the midline, then roll across the midline to the outer edge of the foot, and then curving back over the midline to end with a toe-off from the big toe. My right foot was marginally better than the left, but still a lot of room for improvement!

Barefoot running

In barefoot running things were a little different in that there was little weight bearing through my heels, however the movement through my forefoot was pretty poor with very little roll at all, and as with walking, not really pushing off from my big toe.

Walking and running with insoles, shoes and braces

Next up was with my braces (Aircast A60s), insoles (custom made from the hospital orthotics team about 2 years ago) and my trail running shoes (Brooks Cascadias) which I wear most often.

In walking, there was a bit more of a roll across the midline, but still not anywhere near what you would expect to see.

Walking with my insoles, braces and trail shoes.

Running showed a much more pronounced roll, but still with the insoles and braces, the roll isn’t what we would be expecting to see - suggesting that my insoles are probably not giving me enough support in the midfoot/arch to have my foot roll outwards at the start of the stance, back into the midline for mid-stance, and then roll inwards to end with a toe-off from the big toe. Time to find some new insoles! Also notice how my right foot was off at an angle rather than central - possibly indicating some muscular weakness.

Running analysis

With the gait analysis done, we moved on to the running analysis.

mCell EMG muscle recruitment analysis

Unfortunately the EMG shorts only come in one (relatively small!) size, so it was a rather tight fit, but I managed to squeeze into them! These shorts have sensors throughout the material that feed into a pack which sits on the waistband, with a button you can press to create ‘laps’. We did a walking, jogging and fast running lap to see how my muscle recruitment varied with the different speeds. Fascinating stuff!

Below you can see the muscle load in each phase, and at the bottom right, an overview of muscle recruitment. L = Left, R = Right, Q = Quad, H = Hamstring.

Report from the mCell EMG assessment

You can see from the distribution that my quads were dominant over the hamstrings and glutes - probably what was contributing to the hip flexor and quad pain on my longer runs - and that my right posterior chain (glutes and hamstrings) is significantly under-performing when compared with the left.

I have had problems with my right side before with IT Band syndrome and having torn my quad in a hockey injury, so it did not come as a surprise to me, but the contrast was quite significant.

Treadmill gait analysis

Next, we got onto the treadmill and I was asked to just run normally at a comfortable running pace that I could maintain for a while, so that we could gather a good amount of data.

The tech kit here consists of laser beams on either side of the treadmill which detect when your foot is moving through the different stages of the run, and video recording from both sides and from behind which could be paused and nudged forward/backwards and annotated.

The image below shows the different phases that we were looking for, and the durations for each phase.

The phases of running

Fascinating stuff!

Unfortunately one of the form issues that was found is not lifting my leg high enough in the flat foot phase, so some phases were not detected by the sensor because my great big canoes of feet never actually fully cleared the sensor, so some of the data was impacted by that.

Overall the data showed that my left to right is not far off being balanced when it comes to the phases, with just a small percentage each way.

It got really interesting when we started to look at the video analysis.

Video gait analysis

During the treadmill running, Bob was taking footage of me from different angles which he could then review and analyse afterwards. It does feel a little weird having someone walking around with a video camera pointed at you, but you get used to it after a while!

CaptionaMid-stance still on the treadmill

Here is a photo from when I am in the mid-stance phase, you can see that my arm drive is quite low, and it’s coming somewhat across my body rather than forward and back, which reduces running efficiency. You can also see here the low height on the recovery cycle where the knee is coming backwards and the heel should be coming up towards the back of your hamstring, but I barely lifted my foot from the ground, reaching about 60 degrees when a minimum of 90 is what you’d be aiming for.

Here’s where a lot of my problems stem from - although I have a good elbow bend in the upper body, when I land I have a very strong heel strike with my toes pointing skywards, which is effectively slamming on the brakes when it comes to the momentum you’ve gained through the previous cycle. Not only that, I’m also striding way too far forwards. The aim is to be landing underneath your hips but you can see the distance from the midline is quite significant.

Here you can see me mid-stance on the left side, again the low arm drive and the fact that it’s coming across the midline means less efficient running. You can see the two white dots on my pelvis show that there is a drop mid-stance, so my hip and glute muscles are not properly stabilising my pelvis through this phase. Also, my left foot is landing over the midline - a bit like if you try to walk purposely putting your foot over to the right, it means your body has to compensate to correct the drift.

On the right side mid-stance, the pelvic drop is much more pronounced and there was a slightly less pronounced midline drift from my right leg.

I found all of this really fascinating and very helpful to be able to scroll back and forth through the recordings and actually see the muscular weakness playing out in my running form, and learn how this impacts you on longer runs.

What to do about it?

Well, unfortunately there is not really any quick fix for this kind of problem. It takes work to correct and re-learn how to use your body!

Some things were quite obvious, like needing to invest in new insoles for example, but which take a long time to introduce without causing problems for your body (I went for SOLE insoles, it took nearly 4 months to fully break them in to the point where my feet were not painful during runs!).

Movement re-patterning

Next, we started on what I affectionately term ‘Run School’ - learning how to run, and doing drills which help to fire up your neuro-muscular system to start making the right connections.

This started with some fun but incredibly challenging at times drills on the torture mat!

The dynamic skills movement re-patterning mat

The goal with this mat is re-programming your mind and body into different habits. There are various drills and exercises that we did, mostly involving moving your feet quickly in specified directions - forward, backward, sideways. Also some exercises which involved lunging and leaning to work on balance.

I actually quite enjoyed this, and Bob suggested you can use these drills to get you fired up before a race if you’re standing around waiting to get started, to get the muscles and the brain ‘ready for action’ which was a great tip. I use the drills we learned as a warm up most times I run now!

Learning to run with better form

After a few sessions on this we started to work on breaking down the actual running form into things we could focus on and try to change. We started with the arms, which at first felt very strange but as soon as I started getting back on the treadmill in the speed sessions on my training plan, made a whole lot of sense.

The idea with the arms is keeping them moving forwards and backwards, not chopping across your body, and up to your chin height and back behind you, rather than around the height of your hips.

Later, we moved on to look at the contact phase - planting the foot into the ground and scraping back, to activate the hamstrings and glutes, rather than - as I was doing - lazily activate the quads to do all the work! It took a while for me to ‘get’ the feel of this, but once I did it was like suddenly I ‘knew’ how to run like I had never done before (and my backside and hamstrings ached like it had never done before as a result!).

Putting the two together can be a bit comical, but I started out slowly by just doing the first 100m of each mile and then building up from there.

As I run quite slowly at this point, it’s a bit difficult to fully apply everything I am learning, but it’s already making a big difference and as a result I am managing much longer miles, hitting my first half-marathon distance just recently.

It’s really interesting that whenever we take up a new sport, we often take lessons to learn from an expert how to do it properly, how to make sure we’re using good form, but with running we just tend to throw on a pair of trainers and run how we think we should run.

I’m still working through the running re-education stuff and applying the learnings to my running, but without a doubt it has hugely improved my running form and really made me start to think much more critically about how I can be a better - and more efficient - runner! I’d highly recommend if you can attend such classes, it has been such a huge benefit!

Q2 2022 Mautic Community Roundup

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Fri, 01 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Where did that quarter go?! A lot of exciting things happening in the Mautic Community at the moment, check out the roundup report to learn more.

Read the previous reports here for Q1 2022, Q4 2021, Q3 2021, Q2 2021 and Q1 2021.

Q2 2022 Sponsors Shoutout

A big thank you to the sponsors who have supported us this quarter on GitHub Sponsors or Open Collective:

Over $100/mth

Acquia

Webmecanik

Aivie

Leuchtfeuer Digital Marketing

Friendly

Up.mass

Akaunting

Droptica

Dropsolid

Web Any One

Powertic

SMC

QED42

AudienceWare

Media Giant Design

Sales Snap

Under $100/mth

Avinash Dalvi

Dirk Spannaus

Joey Keller

Roundabout Media

Jan Linhart

Ruth Cheesley

Eli Logan

John R White

Acquia Japan

DT Network

Spiderdev9

One-time sponsors

Manoj Kumar ($20)

Comarch SA ($5)

Ruth Cheesley ($60)

Beau Enslow ($5)

Magenteiro ($65)

Community Team update

Mautic Community Sprint - Budapest

It has certainly been a busy quarter for the Community Team, organising the Community Sprint in Budapest and more recently, our world conference, Mautic Conference Global 2022.

The community sprint was a great success, with a lot of progress being made in all teams and perhaps more importantly, welcoming new contributors who had never before made a contribution to Mautic, and getting them onboarded.

We also had some great evening socials organized by our local host, Joey Keller, exploring the local restaurants, entertainment and the world-famous thermal baths.

Community sprints are a great way for the community to come together and really ‘get things done’ - everyone who attended left inspired, excited, and with a lot of great memories to treasure.

We are looking forward to the next time we come together!

Mautic Conference Global

We took the decision to change platforms for this year’s Mautic Conference Global, and although it had some quirks, we feel that Airmeet was a far superior experience for attendees, speakers, track leads and sponsors.

With two days jam-packed full of fantastic talks from speakers both within our community and from the wider email marketing world, there truly was something for everyone.

We are planning to release the videos next week - thanks to the great work from our community contributors who have worked tirelessly to get the videos rendered.

Mautic Conference South America

At the end of Mautic Conference Global, we announced that the venue for the next Mautic in-person conference will be in São Paulo, Brazil.

We are really looking forward to supporting our Brazilian community with holding a great conference in November!

Education Team update

Season of Docs project started

We were delighted to be awarded a grant from the Season of Docs programme this year, and we have hired Technical Writer Favour Chibueze to work for a period of five months on updating, migrating and improving the end-user documentation.

Favour is already working through the content and we value any resources or materials that you feel would be a benefit to be included in the documentation. Please reach out to Favour directly or through the Education Team channel, #t-education.

Knowledge base project kickoff

The Knowledge base has been one of the more neglected areas of our documentation resources, and something that is sorely needed by users of Mautic.

We are in the process of kicking off a new project led by RobM to implement a new, improved and fully multilingual knowledge base. If you would like to be involved in this project, please let us know in #t-education on Slack.

You might be wondering why we have documentation and a knowledge base, and what information should live where. We are adopting the Diataxis framework which will help to guide which resources belong in which locations based on user needs.

Marketing Team update

Substantial progress was made in the Mautic Community Sprint held in Budapest at the beginning of the quarter, with Ivana Rosic from Sales Snap joining the team as a new contributor and several of her team members providing additional support in promoting Mautic Conference Global.

We have moved to a new platform for managing our social media - HeyOrca - which allows for unlimited users and has a robust approval process including working with external stakeholders. This should greatly empower our contributors and remove the existing bottleneck of only two people being able to access the platform.

We are also working on a range of useful, informative articles for the blog, contributor spotlights, and updating the imagery that we use in the community to have a more modern feel.

Product Team update

The quarter got off to a great start with our first ever Mautic Developer Days in Ghent. Held alongside the already well established Drupal Developer Days, we had three full days of collaboration and troubleshooting some of the challenges faced with bringing both PHP 8 and Symfony 5 support to Mautic.

Although we were a small team, a great amount of progress was made, with over 50% of the must-do tasks being completed during the event.

Of course it’s not all hard work - we also got to see the sights and join some of the great social events organized by Drupal Developer Days, including a silent disco in a castle and a board games night!

While we have made a great start on the Symfony 5 update, we do have a lot of work left to do. If you would like to help with this, as a developer or a tester, please do reach out in #mautic-5 on Slack (get an invite at mautic.org/slack).

We have also had two minor releases this quarter, with 4.3 bringing many new features and bug fixes, two security fixes, and support for Acquia’s recently released Custom Objects plugin.

The 4.4 release this week included support for PHP 8.0, and many bug fixes - including some regressions from the previous release.

Focus will now shift toward preparing an alpha release for Mautic 5.0, which is already overdue. We do need more help with this, so if you are able to support a developer to work with our team for a period of time each week, it would be greatly appreciated.

Finally the Product Team are going to be re-launching their regular meetings, check out the updates in #t-product on Slack for more information.

Let’s look at the numbers

This quarter we exceeded 6,000 members in the Mautic Community, with 795 active members who have an average of 11 conversations per member.

Active members

Over the last 90 days, our most active members (based on the number of conversations) have been:

Bill F (748)

Joey Keller (587)

John Linhart (499)

Oluwatobi Owolabi (161)

Norman Pracht (150)

Ekke Guembel (149)

Pierre Ammeloot (139)

Michael Wolman (122)

Matic Zagmajster (119)

Favour Chibueze (117)

Read more about what is defined as a conversation here.

Engaged members

The most engaged members (based on the number of other community members they have conversations with) have been:

Joey Keller (307)

John Linhart (164)

Norman Pracht (141)

Michael Wolman (124)

Pierre Ammeloot (114)

Zdeno Kuzmany (110)

Bill F (99)

Matic Zagmajster (90)

Clark Reeves (63)

Mattias Michaux (62)

Contributions

When we look at contributions made, this quarter we have nearly doubled the new contributors across all our community channels compared with last quarter - up to 126 from 70 in Q1 2022. In total we have had 718 contributions tracked against 307 last quarter.

Some of this increase may be attributed to the recent addition of GitHub Pull Requests and completed Jira issues assigned to a user being automatically logged as contributions, and also the speakers and team members at Mautic Conference Global, helping to shine a light on the contributors who are often missed in the statistics but without whose contributions the community could not function.

We are seeing a substantial growth in contribution over time across all channels, especially when compared with historical contributions.

Source: Savannah CRM

We are continuing to see growth in contributions to our GitHub repositories over time.

Source: Savannah CRM

Individual contributors

This quarter has seen some new contributors entering the top ten list (based on the number of contributions they have made):

John Linhart (53)

Zdeno Kuzmany (26)

Mattias Michaux (17)

Tejas Navghane (17)

Favour Chibueze (16)

Volha Pivavarchyk (13)

Rohit Pavaskar (8)

Miroslav Fedeleš (6)

Dennis Ameling (6)

Mohammed Abu Musa (5)

Read more about what is defined as a contribution here.

Organizations contributing

The companies who were most active in the Mautic Community (based on the number of conversations) are:

Acquia (2231)

Friendly (591)

Webmecanik (273)

Leuchtfeuer Digital Marketing (240)

Bluespace (161)

Web Any One (139)

Dropsolid (137)

Aivie (133)

Sales Snap (128)

Surge Media (122)

The companies who are contributing the most to the Mautic Community (based on the number of contributions) are:

Acquia (240)

Webmecanik (50)

Leuchtfeuer Digital Marketing (34)

Dropsolid (27)

Aivie (27)

Bluespace (24)

Sales Snap (14)

Friendly (13)

Steer Campaign (12)

Smart Octopus Solutions (8)

Conclusion

It has been really fantastic to meet up - both in person and virtually - with Mauticians from around the world over the last few months. I am struck by the excitement and enthusiasm across the community and the dedication you all have to making Mautic and our wider community even more awesome than it already is.

We do have a lot of work to do this quarter to get the Mautic 5 release ready, and I will be reaching out to organizations in the community for help with getting this important project over the line. We are also working on starting some interesting initiatives, including improving the reporting and analytics features in Mautic, so do keep an eye out for more opportunities to provide input and support Mautic’s growth!

My first long distance race - Endure24 Reading

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Fri, 15 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This weekend after a culmination of nearly a year’s training, I completed my first ever marathon - and indeed ultramarathon - race at Endure24 Reading. A 24 hour running race which consists of running as many 5 mile, hilly trail loops as you can, Endure24 was my first ever long distance race, and I think I’ve got the bug!

40km in my 40th year

Back in 2019 I had a place in a team with my running club - Vegan Runners UK - to run as part of a relay at Endure24. It’s a great event held over a weekend where individuals (solo runners) and teams from 2-12 people take on running for 24 hours, against their own targets, to run as far as they can.

It was cancelled due to all things Covid, and then last year I was not able to race due to another commitment on the rescheduled event, so when it came around I was looking for something to train for, and figured I would see how far I could go.

My aim was to try to do 30 miles - just over 40km - to mark my 40th year, with a stretch goal of 40 miles. I managed to smash my goal and hit my stretch goal, running 25 miles in the first 12 hours, and 15 miles in the second half.

Bear in mind, before I started my training, the furthest I had run was 10km, or 6.2 miles! Here’s a bit of insight into how I got there.

Training for long distance

Obviously with such short distances up to the point where I signed up, I had a lot of work to do!

For about 6 months, I trained by increasing the distance that I was hitting with my longer runs, and working hard in my PT sessions on the muscle groups that you need to run - posterior chain, core, and legs! I based the training on the 50k ‘just finish’ ultramarathon plan from marathonhandbook.com which I adapted slightly to take into account the other gym-based classes I did. You can take a look at my outline here. I also highlighted when, based on the mileage, I would need to be looking at replacing my shoes.

This worked OK for me until I started to hit 8 mile runs, when my body really started to struggle. I kept getting intense pain in my hip flexors and quads, so bad that I was barely able to walk my way back to the start.

I reached out to a local physio - Bob Grainger at Physiofixx - who offered running-specific gait analysis and running-rehab classes to teach you how to ‘run properly’, which demonstrated that I was a very quad-dominant athlete, with a very lazy posterior chain! More on that in another post!

It also became apparent in these sessions that I needed a different approach to training, with more focus on how I was running, rather than just the distance.

80/20 training

At this point I came across the training plans from MyProCoach, which are delivered through the TrainingPeaks app, synchronising directly to your Garmin device telling you precisely what to do, what heart rate and pace zones you should be in, and more importantly, completely tailored to your own fitness with regular fitness tests.

This was definitely the turning point for me.

The training plans from Phil focus on the 80/20 methodology (thanks Angie for the book you got me in the Secret Santa the other year) which involves 80% of your training being in zone 1-2 heart rate zones, and 20% of it being in higher intensities.

It helped me understand that to run endurance, the focus has to be on a slow, steady pace and staying out of the zones where you’re building up more lactic acid than your body is able to clear. Those sport science lectures actually taught me something after all!

With the 24 week hilly trail ultra plan, I set to work building my endurance base in what seemed to be endless hours plodding around every park I could find in the local areas, and a few adventures a bit further afield when I had to start taking in more miles.

My longest run in training was just over 20 miles, with 6.5 hours of running over very challenging terrain into a 25 mph headwind, and although it was 10 miles short of what I had set as my goal, I figured nothing could be as bad as the conditions on that day!

Support crew

Some folks do long distance races truly flying solo, but I really found having a support crew kept me going.

My amazing friend Viryamati gave up his whole weekend to come and camp on-site, and make sure I had everything I needed, when I needed it. From preparing my soft bottles with Tailwind to boiling water for me to clean and soak my feet to making sure I had the right kit at the right time (torches were mandatory from 8pm-6am), he was absolutely invaluable. My mum also came and cheered me on all day on Saturday which was wonderfully supportive!

The dream team sorting me out on the penultimate lap!

Getting mentally strong

You’ll probably have heard folks saying that long distance running is more about mental toughness and grit than it is physical fitness, and I definitely found this to be true.

Absolutely you need to have a solid aerobic base, good proactive foot care (read the Fixing your Feet* book, if you haven’t already - it’s the distance runners bible!), and take care of your body so that you don’t get injured, but without a doubt the mental toughness is what will keep you going when everything hurts, there’s another hill in front of you and you are feeling miserable in the middle of the night!

Physical fitness gets you to the start line, mental toughness gets you to the finish line.

Share thisX Bluesky LinkedIn

I had moments during the race when I hit all-time lows. Ironically, the immense amount of positivity that I encountered out on the course had me in tears frequently as it was quite overwhelming - so many lovely supportive comments from people as they passed me (which happened every few minutes!) as I had a sign on my pack:

My sign, updated by my awesome support team each lap!

I had several ways to keep myself going - listening to the incredibly inspiring High Performance Podcast, an audiobook, a Spotify playlist (although, make sure you download things, as we had almost no signal most of the route!). The event also provided a huge amount of motivation with energetic, cheerful marshals complete with fancy dress and music playing, a DJ blasting out the tunes at the half-way point, and OMG the watermelon at 4am was HEAVEN!

My secret weapon was my outfit that I wore for my 40th birthday parkrun - a luminous rainbow unicorn - which I left until the very last lap, to make sure that I did hit my goal and didn’t give up early! It was a lot of fun doing the last lap in fancy dress, complete with tutu, tail and headband, and really kept me going forward through the tough times.

Crossing the finish line for the last time!

Would I do it again?

Absolutely! Training starts on Monday for the London Ultra 55km race which will be my first A-to-B non-stop ultramarathon, in October 2022 as my B race, and my A race will be Endure24 next year where I’m aiming for 60 miles!

Photos from Endure24

* Affiliate link

Using DDEV with Joomla for local development

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

In Mautic, we make use of the open source tool DDEV heavily as a tool to help you get a local development environment spun up quickly. It’s an incredible tool, based on Docker (and can also be used with Colima if you prefer). While I was working on migrating this website to Joomla! 4, I decided to see how it stacked up when working with Joomla.

I love working with DDEV because it is quick and easy to set up, but also to change things like the PHP or MySQL version. With a couple of commands, everything is rebuilt with the new environment and you’re ready to go.

Mautic ships with a DDEV config file, however Joomla doesn’t currently provide one, so I decided to see what would happen just using the default DDEV PHP project configuration.

If you haven’t installed DDEV before, you’ll find some pretty concise instructions in the DDEV Documentation. For me, it was a case of:

Install Docker (or Colima if preferred)
Install DDEV

Once installed, you navigate to your Joomla directory at the command line, and run the command:

ddev config

This will run through some questions which you answer, and it creates a configuration file for you. If you’re using a project where there is already a configuration file shipped with the project, you can skip this step.

Once the configuration has completed, you can then start DDEV using the command:

ddev start

This will spin up for you:

NGINX server with FPM
MariaDB server with a database called ‘db’, user of ‘db’ and password of ‘db’ (or root/root)
PHPMyAdmin for interrogating the database
Mailhog for capturing outbound emails (you can configure Joomla to use Mailhog while testing)

If you need to know the port numbers or addresses to access the site, you can use the command:

ddev describe

This will output all the services in a nicely tabulated format!

Once DDEV is up and running, you can then either set up your Joomla site using an Akeeba Kickstart, start completely fresh with the regular installation process, or simply update your database credentials to look at the DDEV database (all use ‘db’) and then import the Joomla database in PHPMyAdmin.

First Breathworks in-person board meeting

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Thu, 21 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I certainly wasn’t expecting to be playing with toy unicorns, ribbon, jewels and pine cones during our first in-person meeting of the Breathworks board since I joined back in 2021, but a few weeks ago that’s precisely where I found myself!

Breathworks is a fantastic organisation which exists to help people live their lives with pain, illness and suffering through teaching mindfulness and compassion through their worldwide network of trainers.

It was an honour to be invited to join the board, as these teachings are what fundamentally allowed me to break free of the suffering I had been experiencing for many years following my health crash relating to Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, and continue to help me work with my physical and mental wellbeing.

Many of the Board members had to travel quite a distance, so we were accommodated in an Airbnb near to the location we were using the next day. Sona and Stanter made a wonderful curry, and we had a fun evening of getting to know each other. The Breathworks team had already been involved with some team retreat days in the previous days, so we were excited to hear how that had gone.

Some of the Breathworks board members and team enjoying an evening meal together

The next morning we had short presentations from members of the Breathworks team on the progress that had been made in their areas of responsibility, which was great to hear. Although we receive reports in each board meeting, it’s just not the same as hearing it from the people who have done the work and led the teams. Some really great progress made in the most challenging of circumstances!

Then the fun began - we were working with a great trainer, Kerry from Brilliant Thing, who used the Design Thinking methodology to help us explore the goals that Breathworks had set three years previous, and to review what the challenges were to achieving them. I had heard of Design Thinking before but never actually had an opportunity to put it into practice.

I won’t spoil the fun in case you have the opportunity to explore this methodology yourself but suffice it to say there were breakout groups and plenary sessions, opportunities to really explore what we felt about the different goals and opportunities going forward, and even some storytelling!

Possibly the most fun part of the whole day!

We had a great opportunity to really dig into some of the exciting potential at Breathworks as well, and I came away with sense of energy and excitement for what lies ahead.

At the end, I really appreciated the closing activity where we all shared three things:

I like, I wish, I wonder.

It was a really great way to end an engaging and inspiring time together, and to hear everyone else’s input also gave us a lot of food for thought.

A huge thanks to Kerry for such an inspiring and engaging day, and to the Breathworks team for all the wonderful work you’re doing every single day that makes a real difference to the lives of many folk suffering with pain, illness and disability.

Photos from the day

3 years working in Open Source at Acquia: a review

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Fri, 05 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

It’s hard to believe that three years ago today I was nervously preparing for my drive to Reading to pick up my laptop and have my induction training on the first day of my new job as Mautic Community Manager.

At that point, the Mautic community was in a state of disarray. Acquia announced the acquisition of Mautic Inc. in May 2019, and the resulting uncertainty around the future of the open source project meant that contributions came to a standstill and there were conversations about a potential fork of the project.

Quite the situation to be stepping into and taking direct responsibility for!

I look back at those times from where we are today and it hardly seems like the same project.

So much has changed for the better, and we have made so much progress despite all the challenges that the universe has thrown our way during that time.

Let’s have a look back in time at just how much progress has been made.

Wow, it’s so awesome to see just how much we have achieved in the last three years, right! I didn’t even include everything - read the Mautic Blog for all the in-between things that I haven’t covered.

Working at Acquia hasn’t been without its challenges, balancing the needs of the company with that of the open source community, and getting the community up and running as an autonomous open source project.

I also had some great opportunities to set up and co-lead the Women of Acquia ERG where we organised lots of fun and educational events and partnered with the organisation on several DE&I initiatives, and got to join colleagues recently for a volunteering day in Reading which was great fun and really rewarding.

It has been something of a steep learning curve, but I’m really proud of everything that we have achieved together in the Mautic community over the last three years, and cannot wait for all the exciting things that lay ahead!

Switching from Kubuntu to Ubuntu Studio

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Wed, 17 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Having started to learn the flute three years ago and taking up piano during lockdown to help me with learning how to compose, I’ve increasingly been tinkering with open source digital audio tooling to record and tweak various musical endeavours.

Some time ago after complaining about the challenges of getting audio (and specifically MIDI) working under Kubuntu, someone happened to suggest taking a look at Ubuntu Studio - a distribution of Ubuntu specifically aimed towards creative folks.

When the time came to rebuild my desktop machine with a new SSD (byebye my last spinny drive!) I decided to take a chance and go for Ubuntu Studio. Having been a 10+ year Kubuntu user I was somewhat apprehensive!

What’s special about Ubuntu Studio?

Well, first and foremost it is based on Ubuntu, so some of it should be relatively familiar based on what I am used to. That was definitely a deciding factor, having to learn an entirely new OS is not something I really have time for at the moment!

The main thing for me is that the entire OS is focused around the needs of the creative, so all the tooling and resources you have available are specifically curated with their needs at the forefront.

According to the website, Ubuntu Studio is:

… the most widely used multimedia-orientated operating system in the world. It comes preinstalled with a selection of the most common free multimedia applications available, and is configured for best performance for various purposes: Audio, Graphics, Video, Photography and Publishing. ~ ubuntustudio.org

In addition to my music, I do also get involved with a fair amount of work with videos and graphics for the voluntary organisations I am involved with, so it seemed like a great match.

Also, I had previously spent far too many hours trying to get JACK to play nicely with my system and to have my MIDI devices coming in correctly, so my main hopes were that with a system which is purposely designed for this, I might stand more of a chance of actually getting it working!

Installing Ubuntu Studio

The installation process was no different to regular Ubuntu - boot from the DVD/USB drive and follow the steps on the screen. Super easy.

After installing on my desktop I subsequently installed on my Dell XPS 15 laptop which had the same issues I’ve had with every single Linux installation on that hardware - a lack of Broadcom drivers. See this thread for the solution (now firmly favourited after spending way too much time trying to track it down again!).

First thoughts

The first thing that really excited me was seeing all of the apps that are included by default with Ubuntu Studio - many of which I had never come across before. Plenty of rainy-day exploring ahead!

It also ships with the open source Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) that I use, Ardour. I tried several open source DAWs with different licensing models and features, and Ardour is the one that I have settled on. Although I actually use the installers provided by Ardour, it’s great to see it bundled with the OS. Hopefully that brings more people into using these tools!

Getting set up

As Ubuntu Studio is based on Ubuntu it was really easy for me to find, install and configure the other tools that I needed. I had literally everything set up and working within about an hour or so (most of which was spent scratching my head trying to think what had before - now have this written down in a note for future reference!)

Everything was easy to find, and I even discovered some new open source tools that I had not used before, always fun!

The interface is really smooth, nicely designed and just feels more up to date and modern.

So, about the audio!

By default, JACK is installed and can be managed with the Studio Tools application for audio - trying to get it set up under Kubuntu was a hellish experience so this was definitely a plus.

I figured what’s the worst that could happen … let’s fire up Ardour and see what is broken!

I was totally shocked to discover that my digital piano was picked up and working in Ardour, in addition to my audio interface and my Akai MPK Mini. Holy moly! Definitely a huge step forward already.

On the surface, everything seemed to be working a hundred times better than I had it working in Kubuntu. Later I found an issue with headphone switching which led me to change from JACK to Pipewire, which you can read in my blog, but other than that, everything is running absolutely perfectly!

I’m about a month into using Ubuntu Studio now and it has been awesome so far - long may it continue!

Swapping out JACK for Pipewire in Ubuntu Studio 22.04

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Wed, 17 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Pretty soon after setting up Ubuntu Studio on my laptop (which I plan to use for my music recording and composition) it became obvious that all was not well in JACK land. My excitement at everything ‘working out of the box’ was somewhat premature on this machine!

To headphone or not to headphone

The primary issue I was experiencing was with my audio - it seems to be my nemesis as this was what prompted me to switch to Ubuntu Studio in the first place!

The issue seemed to be with JACK, the default audio server, and surrounded the use of headphones … pretty vital if you don’t want to thoroughly annoy your partner and neighbours with constant click tracks and your amazing musical creations!

Every time I switched to headphones, any apps that were using Pulseaudio (Spotify, Chrome etc) would switch perfectly to and from the headset, both wired and Bluetooth. Ardour, however, absolutely REFUSED to play through my headphones, no matter what settings I changed.

Troubleshooting with Carla

Carla, a really awesome open source audio plugin host has a great feature called the Patchbay which allows you to see and modify all of the audio magic going on under the hood.

In my case, there was no differentiation between the audio that was coming from the likes of Spotify, Chrome etc at all - and nothing I did seemed to make the audio from Ardour route correctly from the laptop speakers to my headphones, either wired or Bluetooth.

After hours of troubleshooting (thanks to the awesome folks in Unfa’s community) I was still no closer to getting this working.

Recently, Unfa (the font of all Ardour knowledge!) had shared a video of switching from JACK to Pipewire and having it ‘just work’, so I figured it would be worth a shot!

Switching from JACK/Pulseaudio to Pipewire

Before starting - take a backup!

I followed the tutorial here mostly so there’s no point me repeating it again, go check it out! Do watch out for some of the other tutorials which talk about using PPAs, I started down that route and it did not end well!

The tutorial saw me through basically everything that I needed with the exception that I needed to run these commands after step 3:

systemctl --user --now disable pulseaudio.service pulseaudio.socket - this shuts down Pulseaudio

systemctl --user --now enable pipewire pipewire-pulse - this starts Pipewire

This got Pipewire up and running for me - you can use the command pw-top to check out the pipewire node and device statistics.

And our survey says …

After a few reboots (the usual ‘did you switch it off and on again’ teaching applies even to geeks!) I fired up all the apps and started to test what was working and what was broken.

Guess what?

IT WAS ALL WORKING!

With my headphones plugged in, every app using audio could play at the same time, and it was all coming through to my headphones. I did have to set the output device for Ardour, but once that was done, everything was working perfectly.

Disconnecting my headphones, everything seamlessly transferred to my laptop speakers and continued to work.

Connecting the headphones with Bluetooth, everything seamlessly transferred to the headphones, and back to the speakers when I disconnected.

HURRAH!

Further, looking back at Carla, each application now had its own node with the connections being shown, which is what I think should have been happening all along with JACK.

Added bonus

As an added bonus, with JACK I had quite bad latency resulting in crackly audio and the occasional glitch, which I assumed to be due to old hardware (although to be honest, the XPS 15 is still a pretty good spec given its age!) however as soon as I switched over to Pipewire the xruns (where the system is not processing the buffers in time) basically dropped to almost nothing.

It’s no surprise to me that Pipewire is going to ship as the default audio server in Ubuntu 22.10 - so far everything is running like a dream since I switched!

Q3 2022 Mautic Community Roundup

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Fri, 28 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Another action-packed quarter has passed, let’s dive into a roundup of what we’ve been up to!

Q3 2022 Sponsors Shoutout

A big thank you to the sponsors who have supported us this quarter on GitHub Sponsors or Open Collective:

Over $100/mth

Acquia

Webmecanik

Aivie

Leuchtfeuer Digital Marketing

Friendly

Up.mass

Akaunting

Droptica

Dropsolid

Web Any One

Powertic

SMC

AudienceWare

Media Giant Design

Sales Snap

Comarch SA

Under $100/mth

Avinash Dalvi

Dirk Spannaus

Joey Keller

Roundabout Media

Jan Linhart

Ruth Cheesley

Acquia Japan

DT Network

Spiderdev9

BSF.company

Henry Weismann

One-time sponsors

n8n

Jochen Grotepass

Joey Keller

Sven Döring

Ferienhausmiete.de

resido GmbH

Otto Duffner

Acquia

Leuchtfeuer Digital Marketing

Community Team update

The primary focus in the Community Team has been supporting the Brazilian Community with the upcoming Mautic Conference South America. It’s shaping up to be a great event, with speakers from the Mautic Community and the wider Marketing industry.

The event will feature a full day of conference, followed by a full Community Day where there will be opportunities to get involved in giving back to the Mautic project across the four teams.

We hope to see you there!

Education Team update

Season of Docs project update

We are coming to the end of the Season of Docs project and Favour Chibueze has been doing a fantastic job of moving our documentation over to Read the Docs and getting it updated to provide a more comprehensive overview.

For a sneak peek, you can head over to https://mautic-documentation.readthedocs.io/en/latest/. When the project is complete, we will replace https://docs.mautic.org with the new documentation.

We are also in the process of setting up the facility to translate the documentation with Transifex - watch this space!

Marketing Team update

Pitch Deck

Work is getting started on completing the Mautic Pitch Deck - a resource that the Marketing Team are creating to help people share what Mautic is and to support them in successfully pitching Mautic for projects.

We welcome any case studies that you might be willing to share - please use this template and send it to info@mautic.org or share in #t-marketing on Slack. Likewise if you would like to get involved in this project, please let us know!

Once the pitch deck is created we will work with our international community to make it available in other languages.

2023/4 schedule

We are currently planning out our marketing strategy for the coming year, including events where we want Mautic to have a presence.

Do you know of events where you think we should be represented? Would you like support to represent Mautic at an event local to you? Please let us know!

Would you like to help promote Mautic at events? We have several events coming up where we need help to staff a stand, to submit talks about Mautic, and more. Drop into #t-marketing and let’s chat!

Product Team update

4.4.x releases

The Product Team continues to make monthly releases with bug fixes - a big thank you to the growing number of people who are joining us in the Open Source Friday sprints. If you have a bit of time on a Friday, why not help us by testing new features and bug fixes, or working on fixes for reported issues?

We have also recently shared an update on the timelines for our next major release, Mautic 5.0, which we are aiming to release at the beginning of 2023.

Community Sprint

In October we joined the Contribution Day at DrupalCon Prague to hold a Mautic Community Sprint. We had contributors across the Product and Education team, and made great progress on some blockers with Mautic 5, and also with translating several of the Knowledgebase articles into German.

Community sprints are a really great way to get involved with Mautic, so if you would like to organize one in your local area or join one of our existing events I highly encourage you to jump right in!

Let’s look at the numbers

This quarter, we have had 522 active members across the community who have on average 9 conversations per member.

Active members

Over 4,500 conversations happened this quarter, with an average of 2.5 hours response time and a response rate of 48%.

Our most active members (based on the number of conversations) have been:

Joey Keller 406

Bill F 322

John Linhart 311

Matic Zagmajster 138

Zdeno Kuzmany 88

Ekke Guembel 82

Oluwatobi Owolabi 73

Michael Wolman 71

Favour Chibueze 63

Luis Méndez Alejo 63

Read more about what is defined as a conversation here.

Engaged members

During Q3, our most engaged members (based on the number of other community members they have conversations with) have been:

Joey Keller 244

John Linhart 109

Michael Wolman 94

Bill F 86

Norman Pracht 73

Zdeno Kuzmany 68

Ekke Guembel 62

Steve Robinson 55

Matic Zagmajster 54

Mohammed Abu Musa 53

Contributions

During Q3 there were 531 registered contributions across all the channels that we monitor, down from 718 last quarter (which was inflated by speakers and team at Mautic Conference Global). We are continuing to see a positive trend in contributions over time, with many new contributors getting involved for the first time.

Image

You can check what we consider to be a contribution here, with the addition of reviews on pull requests and completed Jira issues which we track through the API, and meeting attendance which we track manually.

Individual contributors

During Q3 the top individual contributors were:

John Linhart 103

Zdeno Kuzmany 45

Favour Chibueze 28

Volha Pivavarchyk 26

Joey Keller 22

Artem Lopata 20

Mattias Michaux19

Oluwatobi Owolabi 16

Christopher S. Penn 13

Matic Zagmajster 9

Organizations contributing

Acquia 121

Webmecanik 53

Leuchtfeuer Digital Marketing 38

Aivie 28

Dropsolid 22

Friendly 22

Bluespace 16

Comarch 12

Smart Octopus Solutions 9

Sales Snap 7

New contributors

Vyacheslav V Sokolov

KN4CK3R

abcpro1

Artem Lopata

OnyXxL

rohit.pavaskar

Omer Toledano

Vladimir

fiveways

ZebruhDivs

Rodrigo demetrio

henry1688

JakubHelis

Sara Souza

Mikael Lincoln

Leonardo Borlot

pwned555

Cr7t3K

Aichhoernchen

Mehdi

mnbro

PJ Carly

theodor

Ionuţ Ojică

christian-beckmann

dlopez-akalam

healthstatus1

Víctor García

Henjo Voelker

Alex

Salem Code

igoragatti

Conclusion

It’s great to see continuing growth in contributions across the teams in the community, with our focus on the Year of the Contributor helping to improve our processes and workflows. I’m really looking forward to meeting our Brazilian community next week in Sao Paulo for Mautic Conference South America where we are going to be running a whole day of contribution, so watch out for a big spike in contributions next quarter!

Long distance work travel with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Sun, 06 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

In my job I have the great privilege of travelling quite a bit, sometimes long distance. Today I’m writing this from my hotel room in São Paulo, after attending a conference for the past two days.

I figured it might be helpful for other EDS folks to share some of the ‘hacks’ I use to make travelling long distances for work something not only survivable, but enjoyable.

As a caveat, I should add that this does assume you are already doing pretty well with pacing, nutrition, etc. If you’re not already on the ball with all of that in your day-to-day life, in my opinion you’re going to struggle with regular travel as part of your work life.

Also, I do not have any GI-related symptoms, so I can’t speak to any tips for managing that side of EDS while travelling.

Note: Some of the links are Amazon affiliate and referral links for products that I use and like enough to recommend, I have made it clear where that is the case. I get a few quid if you purchase through the links but if you prefer not to use them, just search for the name of what I’m linking to and that will find you the relevant product!

Travelling

Probably the biggest challenge for me is the physical act of getting from one location to another and not falling apart in the process.

It’s taken me a lot of years to get to a place where I can fairly confidently know that I will be able to be a functional human being at the other end of a long distance trip. Here’s some things I put in place to make sure that happens.

Take the best class you can afford

It’s not possible for many of us to travel business with lay-flat beds, but I would suggest travelling the best class that whoever is paying the bill will cover.

In my case, this usually means travelling Economy or Premium Economy, but I always upgrade to an extra leg room seat, either with points or by paying to book the seats.

Note that you can’t sit in the exit rows if you are not physically able to assist in an emergency, and I wouldn’t recommend them anyway as they do not recline at all in virtually every plane I’ve been on which makes for a pretty uncomfortable trip.

Book a seat that best suits your needs

I find getting up and standing on long flights to be really important, so I will usually either book a seat with a lot of space (e.g. a bulkhead seat) so I can get up and down easily without bothering fellow passengers, or an aisle seat where I can easily stretch my legs, and can get up whenever I want.

Sometimes I do prefer to have a window seat though, as I can lean against the bulkhead (and see out of the window!). It just depends on the length of the flight and how much I think I’m going to need to be up and about.

Also think about how far down the plane you want to be. If you suffer with any kind of motion sickness, it’s usually recommended to be as close to the front of the plane as you can to minimise the effects of turbulence. I try to never be further back than the wings.

If you’re sensitive to smells, don’t sit near the toilets or the galley (which can also be quite noisy at times), both can become quite bothersome on longer flights.

Book assistance

If you can’t comfortably walk about a mile or stand for more than half an hour, I would highly recommend that you book assistance at the airport. Even if you can, you might want to consider booking assistance anyway.

Some airports have very long walks from check in/security to the gates, and you will often be standing in line for long periods of time.

I can currently manage this, but in years gone by there is no way I could have managed to stand for that long or to walk the length of the airport to get to my gate. Even now there are some trips where I end up wishing I had booked assistance because I’m just totally exhausted after all the walking and standing. I’m usually that person who just sits down on the floor in a long queue!

Book assistance! They are there to help you and I’ve met some lovely people along the way!

When you have assistance booked they can help you get through security quickly (fast track) and also get you to the gate.

The down side is unless you’re using a self-propelled wheelchair of your own, you’ll often be in a pushed wheelchair and have someone with you throughout the airport. It’s not so amenable to doing shopping and whatnot! Sometimes I’ve had folks who would take me to an area (e.g. departures lounge) and pick me up again at a specified time/location to take me to the gate, other times I’ve had folks who have been more than happy to help me with my shopping and getting something to eat! Sometimes they also just take you to the gate in a motorised buggy and then you’re free to explore. It really depends on the airline and what support you need as to how it will work out.

Figure out what aids you need

For many years I travelled with my Trekinetic K2 wheelchair. I could take it directly to the aircraft door which meant I was fully independent in and around the airport terminal right up until departure. I’d pick it up on arrival at my destination. If you are travelling with a wheelchair always make sure you have full international insurance cover which will include hiring a wheelchair in your destination if you incur any damage during flight.

Nowadays I don’t need mobility aids, but I do need a coccyx cutout cushion and a back support for longer flights (over about 4 hours is my max without additional support). I have memory foam ones (this one - Amazon affiliate link).

Almost every flight I take long-haul will allow you one carry-on and one personal bag. I put my laptop etc in my personal bag (rucksack) and anything I don’t mind checking into the hold into my carry on (a suitcase). I keep the stuff to a minimum in my carry-on suitcase, and put the cushion and back support on top of my stuff. Due to the memory foam, they squish down pretty well.

When I check in I always ask if they would like me to check in my carry-on. If the flight is busy they are usually all too accommodating and will check in your carry-on for free (and some airlines will give you priority boarding as a thank you). I keep a large tote bag in my rucksack, and take out my cushion and back support to carry in the tote bag until boarding.

I strongly recommend you always wear compression socks on any flights over an hour or so (but consult with your medical professional on this). I have some socks that I use for running which I wear on flights, or the regular travel compression socks you can buy in many places also work well. If you struggle with POTS you may also want to consider if it would help you to wear compression gear (leggings, top) as well. It’s worth trying it out to see if it helps you, you can always take them off if it doesn’t! I make sure I have two pairs - one for the outbound trip, and one for the return. Saves you having to wash them, but if you’re able to get laundry done this might not be such a worry.

What would help you to sleep on the flight?

For me, I need a blackout eye mask (I have this one - Amazon affiliate link), which is pretty much complete blackout and noise cancelling headphones (I have the Sony WH-1000XM3 - Amazon affiliate link). I can’t cope with having in-ear headphones for any length of time, so for me, over ear headphones are a must.

I also recently started using the Trtl Pro neck pillow (Amazon affiliate link) which is a total revolution. I have tried loads of different neck pillows but this one has been super helpful. It’s a bit like having a partial neck brace, supporting your head and stopping you from dozing off with your neck in a wonky position. Well worth the investment for the tweaking of the height that you get with the Pro version, but I’ve heard great reviews of the regular one (Amazon affiliate link) too.

Sometimes I find it helpful to take a Melatonin tablet (check with your medical professional first) as we board the flight, and I also sometimes take a Pukka Nighttime tea bag to have in-flight instead of coffee/tea.

Plan your pain control

Make sure you keep on top of your pain control during long flights - this might mean setting an alarm to wake up at certain times. Timezones can be a real challenge with keeping your meds on time, so be prepared for how you’re going to deal with it to avoid over/under dosing.

You might well need to use some step-up painkillers on the flight depending on how things go, so make sure you have everything you need in your hand luggage.

If you have anything other than over the counter meds (eg paracetamol, ibuprofen), or are bringing large quantities of any drug with you, always make sure you have them in clearly labelled prescription packaging, and ideally take a doctor’s letter with you. This is especially important if you are taking any medications which might be banned or controlled substances in the countries you are travelling to / through.

Make sure you take enough medication in your hand luggage to cover (ideally) a week, but at a minimum to cover 2-3 days. In the event that your hand luggage is the only thing you end up with at the destination (e.g. if your baggage misses a connection) it’s much less stressful to have everything you need to be well in your hand luggage until you’re reunited with your baggage.

Dress for comfort

It’s really important that you dress for comfort on long flights.

Personally I never wear tight fitting clothes like jeans - my belly swells during flights and they become uncomfortable.

I wear a smart pair of walking trousers and comfortable shirt, with a hooded zipped jacket. The hooded jacket comes in really helpful when it gets cooler in the evenings on long haul flights as I can put my hood up over my head for added comfort. I also usually pack some warm socks!

Layers are the name of the game - especially if you are going from cold to warm countries or vice versa.

I also highly recommend clothes with decent (preferably zipped) pockets. When travelling I’m always having to find pockets for phones, passport, boarding card, hand sanitiser, mints, etc. and a zipped pocket means you’re less likely to lose things!

Organising your schedule

Planning rest time

Over the years I’ve learned that I can’t expect my body to do a long haul flight in economy classes, and then slam straight into being a functional human being as soon as I arrive.

If this is required of me, I will have to travel business class so that I can properly rest and allow my body to relax during the flight. Even then, I still need at least half a day to acclimatise after arriving.

As a result, I always insist that I have at least 24 continuous hours after arrival at my hotel before I have to do anything. Ditch the guilty feeling already, it’s what you need to function, so it’s what you need to request.

I also know that after a period of intensity, I will need a full day to rest, no doing, just being able to be horizontal and rest, before I have to travel anywhere else. For example if I am running an event for several days, I plan in a day without anything at all - no touristing, no hanging out with people, just a complete rest day.

This is something that I just can’t compromise on. The times I’ve tried to get into meetings or events sooner or fly home directly after an event, especially with transatlantic flights, have resulted in epic flare ups and complete energy crashes. It is just not worth it - the time it takes me to recover from the crash far exceeds the extra day to rest.

I also try to make sure that I am within walking distance of the hotel, sometimes I just need to make a quick exit and rest for a short time which is so much easier if your accommodation is nearby.

Be careful with your physical training

I often forget just how physically demanding it is to travel long haul, and to be on the go under quite an intense situation for several days back to back, often on my feet most of the time and traipsing around a city going out for dinner. Late nights, early starts, and all that jazz.

While I always bring my gym kit with me, increasingly I am finding that I just can’t train in addition to what I’m demanding of my body to get me through the things I need to do during the day.

Be careful with this, it’s easy to push yourself to maintain a training plan and push yourself over the edge of what you can tolerate.

Sometimes I will switch up my usual training for a pool session or an easy bike ride, or just do some stretching and mobility in my room.

I always bring things like resistance bands with me so I can at least move my body a bit if I don’t make it to the gym!

Adjusting to timezones

I find this is more of an art than a science, and over time you’ll figure out what works best for me.

Generally I struggle most going from East to West, and find it harder to re-sync my timezones when I’m going in that direction.

I always try to switch my timezones as soon as possible regardless of how long I am going to be staying, mainly because I try to maintain a waking-with-the-sun routine.

Things I find useful to help with this:

A good eye mask you can wear all night without any discomfort
Earplugs in case you’re in a noisy hotel!
Melatonin
Pukka Nighttime Tea!

As I always have 24hr before I need to be a functional human being, I usually go with what my body is telling me and sleep when I need to sleep.

On this trip I was travelling for about 30 hours by the time I got to the hotel due to various delays, and I was so completely exhausted I couldn’t even function, so I had to sleep right away. I managed to wake up mid-afternoon, do a bit of work, and then stay awake until early evening. This allowed me to go to sleep properly in the evening, and I managed to reset my timezones pretty swiftly.

Nutrition

For me, one of the big challenges in some destinations is getting enough to eat. I’m fully vegan for ethical reasons, but also I am very allergic to dairy products. It’s not always easy to get a properly balanced diet when travelling, so I have to take steps to make sure I have a fallback.

For me, Huel (referral link - gives you £10 off your first order) works amazingly well for this. It’s a full meal replacement, fully vegan, and just needs water to prepare (in some locations you will need to use bottled water - always check water safety).

When I am travelling for a week or more, I take a full 1.5kg bag of Huel Black with me, and one or two shakers.

I also take a stash of at least one protein bar per day with me, so that I have something to nosh on if I need a snack in between meals.

Some events I’ve literally lived on Huel the entire time for all three meals because there wasn’t enough on offer that I could eat. This is perfectly safe and never leaves me feeling hungry, in fact I’m usually more energised!

If you’re travelling to a particularly hot country, you’ll also want to be thinking about electrolyte replacement especially if you have POTS.

You might want to consider something like Tailwind (referral link - gives you £2.50 off) to keep you going - it’s always worth having a few of their stick packs in your bag in case you happen to get a tummy bug or food poisoning as it allows you to rehydrate fully and take on board carbs in a tummy-friendly formulation. These can also be used as a full nutrition source (I used Tailwind pretty much exclusively over 24 hours when running my ultramarathon).

Buffer weeks

Something that I have taken on since the pandemic has been having buffer weeks before and after travel, where possible. These are weeks where I try to minimise external engagements and only take on absolute must-do things, with the caveat that I might have to cancel them. This helps me to limit my exposure to any bugs before I leave, and also means I can try to keep my schedule a bit quieter in the week after I return.

Sometimes I am totally fine after a phase of travelling, but sometimes it wipes me out and I need to go into hibernation mode to recover enough spoons to function. Purposely turning things down in that week due to my buffer week means I am giving myself permission to rest and recover if I need to.

Conclusion

I hope this has given you some helpful tips if you’re facing traveling long distance for work with EDS or any kind of disability. Much of my experience has been learning as I go, so I’ll try to keep this updated with any other learnings! Please do leave a comment if you have any tips you would like to share with readers, or if any of the above have been helpful!

Creating our community swag shop with Spreadshirt and Open Source Collective

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Fri, 02 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

With any Open Source project, once you have an established logo and brand you want a way to get that out into the world on swag for your community to proudly share, in a way that does not burden you as a maintainer. Here’s how we did it in Mautic.

Two years ago we were in this situation with the Mautic community - we wanted to be able to give people the ability to buy official swag to support the community, and to give away swag as part of our newly-virtual conferences.

After a lot of research we found that most of the companies who are set up to offer a drop-ship service require you to hold stock, which is wasteful when you have such small numbers and community members all over the world. We started to look for a print-on-demand solution with reasonable worldwide shipping costs and good eco credentials, to host our swag shop.

Enter Spreadshirt.

I had actually used Spreadshirt to create some one-off shirts to wear at events shortly after I started working for Acquia as Community Manager, and was really impressed with the quality and the service. They even fixed an issue with a shirt that came up too small (top tip: read the size charts!) and sent it directly to my hotel in time for the event.

One of the solutions they offer is the Spreadshop - a swag shop selling the products that you specify with your designs, at the prices you define. You get a commission - which you set based on the prices of the items plus an amount that you define - on every sale, and once you exceed various thresholds the percentage commission goes up.

Setting up the shop was simple - you can have as many or few products as you like, and you can turn off certain colour combinations that might not work for your brand.

Check out our shop here.

The great thing for us was that we could connect up our US and EU Spreadshops with Open Source Collective directly using bank transfer (US) and PayPal payouts (EU). Each month we receive an email telling us how much commission we earn, which we pass on to the Open Collective team who ensure the funds reach our collective.

Some ways we have used our swag shop:

Send thank you gifts directly to contributors
Purchase gift cards in bulk and provide them to event attendees automatically with some Google Sheet / Zapier / Mautic automation magic
Provide raffle prizes for meetups and conferences

Some gotchas to be aware of:

Some countries may be subject to import tax on goods.
You have to create two shops for a worldwide market - one for the US region and one for the EU region. Each has their own products, so there is some duplication of effort as in effect you have to create two separate shops.
It is only possible to have one login account - you can’t add users to give them access to manage the store.
There are regular offers which provide free shipping, percentage discounts etc - this is a great way to promote your shop and help folks save on swag, as shipping can be expensive to some locations.
Some countries could not accept deliveries during covid - mostly these restrictions have been lifted but you can check shipping rates at the bottom of every page.

To date we have raised just over $960 in commission payments, and the process is really smooth for our community members around the world to order. The maintenance is minimal, and most of the year it simply ticks over!

Using projects to transparently manage financial resources on Open Collective

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Thu, 29 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Often as an Open Source project grows there becomes a need to allocate funding resources to specific projects, teams or initiatives. It can be challenging to do this in an open and transparent way, effectively ring fencing the funds for specific purposes.

Here’s how we achieved this with Open Collective, some of the gotchas we encountered, and how it’s working out for us.

Within the Mautic Project, when we established our governance model it was decided that we would have five core teams - Community, Education, Legal & Finance, Marketing and Product.

Over time, expenses have arisen across most of these teams which need to be paid out of our core budget, along with Strategic Initiatives we wanted to fund and working groups who were focusing on specific projects.

In 2021 we created a community-wide budget to forecast our income and plan our expenditure across the whole project.

We decided that it would be good practice to separate off the funds that we have allocated for specific things within the community - both so that we know we have the funds in one place and can track how we are doing against our budget, and also because in some cases we wanted to allow people in the community to financially contribute to specific projects.

Using Projects in Open Collective

Projects were rolled out by Open Collective in 2022, which were a great help in this regard.

A project on Open Collective is a bit like having a separate bank account - they are:

“a lightweight way for collectives to manage budgets for initiatives independent of their parent collectives.”

Within the Mautic collective we created a project for each team, working group or initiative that needed to hold funds, and when the budget was finalised we transferred the balance to each project.

This allows us to ring-fence the funds as described, and also to make payments and receive donations associated with each project, team or working group.

An example below shows the transactions from the Marketplace Initiative.

You can also use the features like setting a goal for the project, or having the facility to send updates to everybody who has supported that project. It’s also possible to change the visual appearance of each project as well, if you wanted to have a particular colour scheme for example, and to fire webhooks when actions happen (for example to pipe a notification into the right channel to inform the team about a transaction).

More recently came the availability of Virtual Cards at a project level, which allowed us to make sure that any regular payments were going straight out of the relevant project. For anything that did not allow us to use a card, we could raise an invoice (for example paying contractors) or a reimbursement request (for example when reimbursing travel expenses).

You can also turn on the new budget user interface which gives a nice report of the activity in your project broken down by tags and by one-time or recurring donations. Make sure you tag everything so that it’s properly allocated, and use a tagging strategy that is consistent with your main collective.

Using tiers to fund specific things within a project

Within projects, it’s possible to create contribution tiers just like you can do on a main collective. This allows different levels of support, which we are currently planning to use in one of our projects to allow us to fund specific projects in our general RFP fund.

This can work really well if you want to provide people with a link to support at a specific tier or price point.

Gotchas to be aware of

Financial reporting

If you are expecting to be able to see a high level report of what money you are holding where - for example seeing what balances are in each project - you can’t currently do that. I’ve reported it on the GitHub issue here - currently it’s a bit of a manual process.

Also, sometimes it’s a bit challenging to get a rolled up review of the financial status of your collective. Although the new budget user interface update has vastly improved the situation, it’s still mostly focused on the main collective and not projects.

Using tags to organise expenses

I highly recommend that you use tags across your collective in a consistent way, as this really helps to improve the budget overview, but it’s not made easy for you by Open Collective currently.

Tags used in the main collective aren’t reproduced in projects or events (probably with good reasoning), so you have to create them anew to use them in your projects. I expect in the future that you may be able to see and filter expenses in projects as well as in the main collective from the budget on the main collective, so it’s best to plan for that, and be consistent from the start!

Team members

Team members are controlled at the collective level, and it’s an all or nothing basis.

You either have access to admin the entire collective and hence projects, or you don’t. There’s no possibility to add someone as an administrator of a specific project.

There is an open feature request accepting bounties so I am hopeful that it might possibly be implemented in the future, which would give a lot more flexibility for teams to manage their own budget and approve expenses.

Conclusion

Overall, the projects feature of Open Collective has been a great way to organise our finances and provide transparency to the community. There are a few areas where things could be improved but on the whole, it’s a really helpful tool for budgeting and planning!

Q4 2022 Mautic Community Roundup

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Tue, 10 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Another quarter and another year has passed, and what a year it has been! Let’s review what’s happened over the last few months.

Read the previous reports here for Q3 2022, Q2 2022 and Q1 2022.

Q4 2022 sponsors shoutout

A big thank you to the sponsors who have supported us this quarter on GitHub Sponsors or Open Collective:

Over $100/mth

Webmecanik

Aivie

Leuchtfeuer Digital Marketing

Friendly

Up.mass

Akaunting

Droptica

Dropsolid

Web Any One

Powertic

SMC

AudienceWare

Media Giant Design

Sales Snap

Comarch SA

Ferienhausmiete.de

Might.ch

EaseUS

Awisee

Under $100/mth

Avinash Dalvi

Dirk Spannaus

Joey Keller

Roundabout Media

Jan Linhart

Ruth Cheesley

DT Network

Spiderdev9

BSF.company

Henry Weismann

Wmd Solucoes Digitais Eireli

One-time sponsors

Season of Docs (balance of project costs)

Otto Duffner

Acquia Japan

Chris Hinds

Mautic Community Budget

We are just in the process of finalizing our budget for 2023, and I am pleased to share that we will be making 10% of our budget available to support our open source dependencies through the ‘Back your Stack’ initiative.

In the new year, we will be sharing a list of which projects we will be supporting in 2023.

Read more about the Back your Stack project in our blog post.

Maybe consider allocating a percentage of your company’s budget (or your own personal budget) to support open source projects that you rely on next year - it makes a huge difference to those projects!

Future of Mautic - mission, vision and strategy definition

At Mautic Conference South America I presented an update on our mission, vision and long term strategy for Mautic, along with our short term areas of focus.

Read more at mautic.org/future-of-mautic - I’d love to hear your thoughts. Feel free to reach out to me on the forums, Slack or Email.

Product Team update

Mautic 5 release schedule

Earlier this quarter we shared a provisional release schedule for Mautic 5, which was altered due to the amount of resources we needed and the lack of volunteer time in the community.

Thanks to a crowdfunding campaign we were able to hire some contractors to help us with the mammoth task that is updating Mautic for Symfony 5 support. Mautic is also matching the funds raised in this project, so the support of our financial sponsors is directly helping us with keeping Mautic updated and secure. If you aren’t yet sponsoring Mautic please do consider a regular or one-off donation of any amount on Open Collective or GitHub Sponsors.

We hit a few delays due to illness but the project is gathering steam!

We really do need Mautic users to help us with testing these updates - all you need to do is click a link to open a Mautic instance within your browser and test the area of Mautic that is being updated.

It’s a really great way to contribute if you want to see Mautic 5 coming out sooner rather than later.

Read more in our Community Handbook how to get started with testing and report your results and check the pinned issue on GitHub for the areas that need testing.

Marketing team update

If you subscribe to the Mautic Community Newsletter (and if you don’t then, why not!) you will have noticed that our latest newsletter has had a great facelift thanks to the Marketing Team.

We’re always looking for interesting content to feature, so if you would like to help with writing, designing, translating or proof-reading the newsletter please join #t-marketing on Slack.

Pitch Deck

We are building a team to complete the Mautic Pitch Deck - a resource that the Marketing Team are creating to help people share what Mautic is and to support them in successfully pitching Mautic for projects.

Once the pitch deck is created we will work with our international community to make it available in other languages.

2023/4 events schedule

We are currently planning out our marketing strategy for the coming year, including events where we want Mautic to have a presence.

Do you know of events where you think we should be represented? Would you like support to represent Mautic at an event local to you? Please let us know!

Would you like to help promote Mautic at events? We have several events coming up where we need help to staff a stand, to submit talks about Mautic, and more. Drop into #t-marketing and let’s chat!

Events we are provisionally planning to have representation at so far:

FOSDEM, Belgium - 4-5 February, we will have a community sprint at the event
State of Open, London - 7-8 February, we will have a stand at the event
Inbox Expo, Valencia - 27 Feb-3 March
Drupal Developer Days, Vienna - 19-22 July, we will host a Mautic Developer Days event alongside the Drupal community
MarTech Fest, Utrecht - 4-6 September
DrupalCon, Lille - 16-22 October, we will be running a community event alongside the conference

Education team update

New Knowledgebase launched

If you missed the exciting news, this quarter we launched a new, fully multilingual knowedgebase for the Mautic Community. It’s integrated with your Mautic Forums accounts so you can log in and contribute articles without needing another account.

If your language is not yet showing as available on the Knowledgebase and you would like to help us with translating the user interface and content please drop into the Education Team channel, #t-education, on Slack (get an invite at https://mautic.org/slack). Maybe you could organise a local sprint to translate the content - it’s a great way to bring together the community!

We are excited at the prospect of having a knowledgebase that is easy to contribute and will contain tutorials, how-to guides and troubleshooting resources for our global community.

Season of Docs project completion

We are just reviewing and completing the last few sections of the updated end-user documentation, which was a project funded by the Season of Docs initiative. Favour Chibueze has been working for the last six months on updating, improving and replatforming every aspect of our documentation and we are planning to launch it with Mautic 5.

Developer Documentation almost complete

We are in the final stages of updating the Developer Documentation which is also being replatformed to Read the Docs, along with the End-User Documentation

Some of the code examples were really out of date and many of the resources needed to be completely overhauled, so it has been a really huge undertaking mostly driven by Dennis Ameling. We are planning to launch this to coincide with the Mautic 5 launch.

Community team update

Mautic Conference South America

What a great time we had in Sao Paulo with our second in-person conference, Mautic Conference South America!

With over 100 tickets sold and 30+ people joining the community contribution day, it’s our largest in-person event to date.

A full day of sessions with speakers from across the industry meant a really diverse audience - from Mautic experts to people who had never used Mautic before and were keen to know more about the product and the community.

It was great to meet with so many of our Brazilian community and to hear all the awesome ways that they are succeeding with Mautic.

Our next event will be held online - Mautic Conference Global in June 2023 (dates coming soon!), and we will shortly be opening up nominations for a location to host the next in-person conference at the end of 2023.

Local Communities and localized Mautic landing pages

Meanwhile, we are finally making progress towards our framework (technical and content) for localized Mautic landing pages in many languages.

Those are closely related to the structural improvements for our local communities. These are not closed user groups, but also spread the word on Mautic in their region and language - which involves maintaining aforementioned localized Mautic landing pages.

And… We are very happy to announce our latest Mautic Local Community, which is currently being founded in Cameroon!

Are you a local? Please get in touch on https://forum.mautic.org/c/international-by-country/mautic-in-cameroon/

Contributor sticker swag

Thanks to some magic from n8n and Sticker Space, anyone who contributes to Mautic will now be invited to claim a pack of stickers featuring the Mautic brand mark, logo, and our friend Mautibot.

Each month we will be processing new contributors, so look out for an email from us if you have made a contribution recently!

Let’s look at the numbers!

NOTE: There was a bug with our Community CRM which meant that PR’s created were not registered from November to February. This post has been updated to reflect the accurate counts, with the PRs included. Sorry for the inconvenience.

This quarter we have exceeded 6500 members in total who have engaged in our community (up from just over 5200 this time last year), with 465 active members over the last three months.

This year we’ve had over 1,700 active members with 2,210 contributions - when we consider that in 2021 we had only 1,152 contributions and the year before that only 916, this is a massive increase.

Over the last 90 days, our most active contributors (based on the number of conversations) have been:

Joey Keller 467

John Linhart 318

Bill F 266

Mattias Michaux 140

Matic Zagmajster 131

Michael Wolman 88

Sven Döring 87

Mohammed Abu Musa 84

Zdeno Kuzmany 68

Xavi Montero 66

Read more about what is defined as a contribution here.

Our most engaged contributors (based on the number of connections they have made with others in the community) have been:

Joey Keller 210

Matic Zagmajster 106

John Linhart 82

Norman Pracht 79

Bill F 75

Dirk Spannaus 71

Michael Wolman 69

Robin M 66

Zdeno Kuzmany 58

Ekke Guembel 47

Our top contributors this quarter (based on the number of contributions they have made) have been:

John Linhart 89

Zdeno Kuzmany 41

Mattias Michaux 30

Volha Pivavarchyk 22

Mohammed Abu Musa 21

Joey Keller 21

Mohammed Abu Musa 16

Artem Lopata 15

Salem Code 12

Dennis Ameling 12

The companies who were most active in the Mautic Community (based on the number of conversations) are:

Acquia 1287

Friendly 465

Dropsolid 164

Smart Octopus Solutions 131

Webmecanik 113

Leuchtfeuer Digital Marketing 111

Surge Media 88

Moorwald | Sven Döring 87

Aivie 87

Steer Campaign 85

The companies who are contributing the most to the Mautic Community (based on the number of contributions) are:

Acquia 191

Webmecanik 44

Dropsolid 32

Aivie 23

Steer Campaign 22

Leuchtfeuer Digital Marketing 22

Friendly 21

Comarch 11

SonsOfPHP 10

Smart Octopus Solutions 6

Conclusion

It has been a really great quarter and a fantastic year for Mautic - with progress being made in many areas and continued growth of our community. A huge thank you to everybody who has contributed in whatever way, it’s most appreciated!

With our future targets of growing contributions both financially and practically, I have every confidence that Mautic will continue to thrive in the coming year ahead!

Cross-training with EDS to manage injuries

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Mon, 23 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Yesterday I shared on my Instagram feed about having to switch all my training over to bike-based for cardio and lower body/core for strength training due to injury, so I wanted to share a few things I’ve learned along the way about preventing injuries from derailing your progress towards your goals.

Living with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome often involves walking a very fine line between being well and not. If you’re also training as an athlete, this is compounded by the inevitable time when you pick up (one or more) injuries, or have to navigate a flare-up, which impact your training.

Over the years I’ve been training I’ve had to work around many issues, from short term painful joints and flare-ups to full-body whiplash resulting from a car accident which took a lot longer to recover from. One thing that has been a constant, however, is my dedication to my training and always finding a way to do something.

For me, consistency is everything.

As soon as I pull back from training, within a few weeks I start to notice my joints becoming more painful and within a month I start to experience a marked increase in my hypermobility, fatigue and perhaps more importantly, a sliding into a deep abyss of painful mental states.

Here’s some of the key aspects I have found to be important in helping me to stay focused and cross-train while I am carrying an injury.

Ruth’s big hairy caveat: Sometimes, you do literally need to stop training all together in order to recover from something, whether physical, mental or a combination of both. This happened to me during a particularly bad health crash, and it is absolutely OK, and you are NOT a failure if you need to put your training on pause to give yourself what you need. What is important in my opinion and experience is being intentional about that break and setting aspirations for where you would like to be down the line, even in you don’t know exactly when that will be. If you ever feel like you’re in a cycle of training and crashing, thing carefully before you carry on down that spiral. Feel free to drop me a message if you’re stuck here, I’m happy to share my experiences of escaping the black slopes of doom!

Knowing what’s going on

The first thing I have to do when something is restricting my training is to be very honest with myself as to what’s actually wrong, and what my revised boundaries are.

The only way you can really do this fully is to know exactly what the problem is, so for me, getting a speedy diagnosis and access to professional advice is imperative. Firstly you need to figure out if it’s a major injury which is going to need medical attention, or something you can treat at home. This might mean seeing a primary care doctor, a consultant, a physiotherapist - whoever you trust to both understand your condition and to be able to determine what’s causing the problems you’re experiencing. Luckily in Suffolk we have a wonderful self-referral physiotherapy service through Allied Health Professionals Suffolk.

I’ve had great results using the service, generally being triaged within 24-48 hours and getting advice and recommendations straight away, with an appointment within a week or two depending on the severity of the issue. I’m also very fortunate to have private health insurance through my employer which has allowed me to access specialist services quicker if I needed to.

Setting your ‘safe zones’

Once you have been able to see a specialist, or even before that if you have a good sense of your body and what’s wrong, it’s important to determine what your ‘safe zones’ are for training. This might be ranges of movement, heart rate zones, types of activity, maybe even times of day when it’s best for you to train - it will depend what the issue is that is impacting on your training.

For example, at the moment I have a frozen shoulder and I have agreed with my physio that my safe zones are:

Isometric movements (against a wall where the muscles work but your arm doesn’t move)
Never above a 5/10 pain level
In front of the body up to a maximum of shoulder height, no additional weight
Out to the side up to shoulder height, no additional weight
Loading through straight arms in front - for example deadlifts
Minimise shoulder rotation, especially under strain
Minimise over the head or behind the body plane movements

Modify, modify, modify

Once you know what is going on and what your safe zones are, you can assess the training you’re currently doing and figure out:

What you can keep as-is - for example deadlifts are fine and don’t cause any problems
What you can keep but need to modify - for example I can do load bearing squats but only with dumbbells or kettlebells
What you must not do - for example tricep dips and clean and jerk lifts are out of the question!

Note: If you are severely limited to what you are able to do due to your injury or your condition, I highly recommend that you treat the exercises that your physiotherapist gives you (I’ve never known them not to give you at least one!) as your training session. Get your kit on, and prepare just like you would for your sport. Get the music pumping (if that’s your thing), and do your exercises as your training session, religiously. This has really helped me when I’ve been in phases where I’m severely limited on what else I can do and has really supported my mental health because I felt like I was at least doing something to get me back on track. One day at a time.

A change of tack

Sometimes an injury or flare up might necessitate completely changing some aspect of your training. At the moment I have the delightful combination of a problematic foot and a dodgy shoulder, which means I can neither run (my main cardio activity) or swim (my fall-back activity!). Thanks to my My Pro Coach plan I was able to ask a coach to assign me a bike-only program which was about the same intensity as an ultra running plan (but my legs and backside are not thanking me for that one bit!)

Unfortunately this can be quite common with EDS, especially when there happen to be more than one joint involved in whatever the problem might be.

Replacing like for like

Firstly, try to replace like for like when it comes to intensity and muscle groups used. If you’re used to running four times a week, replacing it with something that is quite sedate will not help you to maintain your cardiovascular fitness or run-specific musculature.

It’s a great opportunity to get creative and explore new things!

Some examples that I’ve come across or tried myself include:

Static bike training (my current life … I’m doing all my training in Spin classes or playing Zwift on the bike in the gym!)
Elliptical trainer - in standing or when seated. I have the Cubii Pro (affiliate link) under my desk since my foot started playing up, which is completely non-weight-bearing.
Ringfit for Nintendo Switch - it has various ‘assist’ modes which allow you to toggle on/off various body parts if you’re not able to train them
Swimming - find a good training plan if you’re using it to replace cardio, don’t just float up and down the pool and expect to retain your fitness!
Seated cardio dance / aerobics - check YouTube for lots of inspiration at various intensity levels

Find a lower intensity option

Sometimes you can still do the thing you usually do, but at a lower intensity. For example you might be able to swim, but just not do front-crawl. Or maybe you can’t run but you can power-walk.

If you are still able to do something that is vaguely similar to the activity you are training for this is a huge help. It ensures the muscle memory is retained, keeps the general musculature moving in similar movement patterns. It is also helpful for your mental states if you are able to work with doing it slower or in a different way, as a means to getting well enough to get back into it.

Cross train skills to support your sport

My trainer told me it was a good thing I hurt my shoulder because now every day is leg day (as I quietly died in the corner!)

In a way, she’s right - one of my biggest weaknesses in my running has been my posterior chain. It was identified in my gait analysis and definitely showed its head when I was deep in training for Endure24 last year. Now we get to focus almost exclusively on it - albeit with some very heavy modification going on - for several months. I think she’s more excited about that than me, it has to be said!

Sometimes an injury can be a good thing, because you can use the cross-training to work on specific aspects of your body or fitness which are directly relevant to your sport, but in a different context. Consider how you can use the time to train effectively for what your sport needs of you.

It might even be that this means you’re working on navigation skills or taking some coaching qualifications while you recover the ability to use your body out in the field - if that helps you with your sport, go for it! See the time as a blessing to help you grow in areas you wouldn’t usually make the time for, but keep your end goal in sight.

Conclusion

Hopefully that’s given you a few ideas for how you can cross-train when you’re struggling with an injury or flare-up. It’s a really sucky time, so do remember to be kind to yourself. How have you found cross training helpful? Leave a message below in the comments!

FOSDEM 2023: Back to live!

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Thu, 09 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Last weekend I headed over to Brussels on the Eurostar like hundreds of other open source enthusiasts, for the first in-person FOSDEM event since the global pandemic.

FOSDEM - short for Free and Open Source Developers European Meetup - is probably the biggest gathering of open source folks in Europe and a must-attend for anyone who is involved in the world of open source.

Attracting somewhere in the region of 8,000 people in-person and many more online, the event is free to attend and held at the ULB campus in Brussels. There are no tickets, no registration, just a case of turn up and get stuck in!

Funds are raised through the sale of merch at the event, and sponsors.

During the event, multiple buildings across the university campus are used (resulting in being lost at FOSDEM as being something of a rite of passage!) to create an extremely full schedule, with both regular conference sessions and dev rooms.

Dev rooms are tracks which are proposed by enthusiasts who want to bring people together around a specific topic. This could be anything from Internet of Things devices to legal and governance topics to the linux kernel and everything in between.

Before the event got underway I attended the Foundations dinner sponsored by Google, for folks who are on the Foundations mailing list which exists to connect project founders and maintainers.

I’ve mostly been a lurker on the list so far, but it was great to meet up in person with other project maintainers and talk about the many common challenges and successes that we have faced in our projects. I had some great conversations about how to track and attribute both code and non-code contributions, it seems this is a tricky challenge that many open source projects grapple with.

Most of Saturday was spent in the famed ‘hallway track’, hanging out in one of the many cafes chatting with other open source folks, watching the stream for some of the sessions where the rooms were at full capacity, and generally having a great time!

It really inspires me to be around so many other fans of open source and to hear what exciting projects they are working on. You never know who you will meet or what projects you will discover at FOSDEM! I had a chance to catch up with the team at Bitergia who do a lot of work on the CHAOSS project, and several other organizations across the open source world.

Later in the day I also met up with a Mautic community member who lived not too far from the event, which was great - after so many years online I really value having the opportunity to meet up with folks in-person and talk about how we can continue to grow Mautic.

Sunday for me was spent almost entirely in the Community Dev Room, which to my great delight had yummy vegan cake as swag for all attendees.

I was also impressed with their attention to attendee safety with air filtration systems and one-way entry/exit flows throughout the day.

Here are my top three sessions from the day:

After a very full and enjoyable weekend it was back to London on the Eurostar (with an awful lot of open source fans!) for the next event, State of Open Con, in London!

Next year for FOSDEM, I will be proposing an Open DXP dev room where open source projects in the Digital Experience space will have an opportunity to work together to showcase the power of bringing open source to your marketing tech stack - if you’re interested drop a comment below!

What is practice, anyway?

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Sat, 18 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Last weekend I had the great delight of welcoming a good friend to run a women’s day at the Ipswich Buddhist Centre. Suryadarshini hails originally from Canada but for many years has lived just up the road in Norwich.

We’ve known each other for many years, since we were (once upon a time) ‘Young Buddhists’, leading our local groups, and went on many retreats together over the years!

Stepping off the lotus

The title of the day was ‘Stepping off the lotus’ - a reference to the image of the bodhisattva Tara, who is said to have been created from the tears shed by Avalokiteshvra when he saw the suffering of the world and that he could never hope to help all beings alleviate their suffering.

She’s typically depicted with her left leg drawn up in meditation posture, and her right leg extended, the foot resting on a small pale-blue lotus and moon mat. This is taken to symbolise Tara stepping out compassionately into the world, ready to respond whenever she is called.

I find this theme very interesting and inspiring - my experience of Buddhist practice has been the strongest ‘in the world’ surrounded by its constant challenges, rather than on the cushion (although both are important).

So what is practice anyway?

A really vibrant and enjoyable day kicked off with us being asked to write on lots of small slips of paper, what practice meant to us. We wrote them quickly, without too much thought or dithering, and after a few minutes we all put them on the floor in a circle, and each had a small candle to place on any that we would like to know more about or explore.

If people who wrote the slip with a candle on felt comfortable, they shared what it meant to them, or we just discussed why we were interested in that topic and what it meant for us personally. It was a really great way of expressing our individual practice and what was alive for us. We had all kinds of things, from meditative methods to connecting with nature, ethical practice, caring for the mind and body and more.

What is Buddhism? What is the Dharma?

We then went on to do the same exercise with the questions of ‘What is Buddhism’ and ‘What is the Dharma’ - again, writing quickly on small slips (different colours for each question), then sharing and talking about things we found interesting from what had been shared by others.

After a (very awesome) shared vegan lunch, we looked at these concentric circles but then we changed it up, with the inner circle representing what was specific to the Triratna Buddhist Movement, then the next circle what was specific to Buddhism, and the next what was a Dharma but not exclusive to Buddhism.

It was fascinating to see how things moved, and how the colours were dispersed between the different circles. Some things spanned a couple of circles, some were easier to place than others, and some sparked quite some debate!

I really enjoyed the day, which we ended with the Midnight Star Puja to Tara by Vessantara, and found it a great way to bring the subject of our own views around what is (and maybe more importantly, what we view isn’t, practice) into the light. It was a fun, lighthearted but deep adventure into all of our experiences and I found it very validating hearing the breadth and depth of peoples’ practice.

So, what is practice?

For me, my strongest ‘Dharma Door’ has always been the Dharma - the teachings of the Buddha and his disciples - that have really drawn me in and opened my mind to reality.

My path has always been one of taking the Dharma out into the world, with my core values being trying to live an ethical and altruistic life in service to others and of benefit to the world. I see my work, leading and managing communities in open source projects, as a direct expression of those values.

My strongest practice over the last decade has been learning to live with the physical and mental challenges faced as a result of having a chronic health condition called Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome.

Living in a body that is often painful and rarely does what I want to be able to do can be a real challenge, especially when you are relatively young. Living life to the fullest, looking for and cultivating joy, and working with the often destructive mental states that can arise on my worst days, has certainly pushed my practice to my limits over the years.

Communicating practice can be tricky

Sometimes I struggle when communicating the depths of my practice. Trying to explain to someone your experience when they’ve never seen the world through your eyes, can be a challenge for both parties!

For example, many people will find that their deepest moments of realisation come about during meditation, which is awesome! Sometimes, however, that can lead to a view that I’ve bumped into more than once, that this is the most important or best tool for anyone who wants to work on creating supportive conditions to move towards developing deeper realisations. That view can sometimes slip into a further view that it’s not possible to have those same realisations or meditative experiences ‘off the cushion’.

My experience has definitely been that some of my greatest ‘a-ha!’ and significantly transformational moments have occurred off the cushion within my daily life. There have also been deeply moving experiences in meditation, mostly during retreats, I’m just not drawn to meditation as my primary practice.

I’ve also found that I don’t always share with people how challenging it can be to sit in meditation (especially for long periods of time), or how coming into the body as part of a meditation can at times be something that doesn’t generate stillness or supportive conditions for concentration.

Sometimes the very act of living with that condition and managing to maintain positive, supportive mental states is a huge practice in itself, requiring immense work on self-metta, acceptance and working with the mind creatively rather than reactively, which can also be overlooked because most of the time I’m just getting on with it, and don’t necessarily think to communicate about that aspect of my practice.

Be curious about what you don’t understand

What I learned from this day is that sometimes the best thing to do is to get into dialogue - open, curious dialogue - about what practice actually means. It gave everybody the space to explore and share their own experiences without feeling judged, compared or that their version of practice wasn’t good enough or wasn’t what was expected.

Bringing curiosity to situations you don’t understand or fully know how to respond is such a great teaching, and one that I’ll definitely be trying to bring more fully into my life!

What are your experiences? Please do leave a comment below!

Q1 2023 Mautic Community roundup

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Mon, 03 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Another busy quarter has flown past, here’s a round-up of what’s been happening in the community!

Read the previous reports here for Q4 2022, Q3 2022, Q2 2022 and Q1 2022.

Q1 2023 Sponsors Shoutout

A big thank you to the sponsors who have supported us this quarter on GitHub Sponsors or Open Collective:

Over $100/mo

Webmecanik

Leuchtfeuer Digital Marketing

Aivie

Droptica

Comarch SA

Dropsolid

WebAnyOne

Audienceware

Friendly

Media Giant Design

Sales Snap

AWISEE

awisee.agency

Ferienhausmiete.de

Up.mass

EaseUS

Akaunting

Powertic

Under $100/mo

NuCamp

Ruth Cheesley

John Linhart

Avinash Dalvi

BSF.company

Roundabout Media

John R White

Dirk Spannaus

Norma Ochoa

Henry Wisemann

Dnetworkbr

WMD Soluções Digitais

SpiderDev9

One-time sponsors

Guest ($20)

Guest ($5)

Yosu Cadilla ($5)

モトキ ($5)

We really do appreciate all your contributions - please check if you have in the past contributed on GitHub Sponsors, as a recent change which removed PayPal as a billing method has caused several sponsors to lapse.

Community Team update

Mautic Conference Global 2023 is go!

Over the weekend we closed the Call for Speakers and I’m excited to see the great range of sessions that have been proposed.

The new website has also launched - big thanks to our website hosting sponsors, Siteground.

We are looking for volunteers in the following areas:

Designers - to help us design everything from the backdrops on the stage to the forum badges for attendees and speakers to images for social media. Join us on Slack in #design and #mauticon and let us know if you want to be involved!
Track leads - to run a set of sessions as MC, introducing the speaker, managing the Q&A process and generally keeping the sessions flowing smoothly.
Support team - to help on the day with managing the chat, responding to any questions and escalating any problems to the team
Video team - to help with rendering the session videos after the event

Education Team update

Finalizing the new end-user documentation

We have made great progress with the new end-user documentation, with the last few sections being reviewed and merged as we speak.

Translators have already started helping to make the documentation available in other languages through our integration with Transifex - if you would like to help with this you will find the project here. Drop us a line in #translations on Slack if you need an invitation to the team.

We plan to launch this with Mautic 5.

Product Team update

Mautic 5 progress

We continue to make good progress with the work needing to be done to update to Symfony 5.

We have now completed the huge task of completely refactoring every view that is used in Mautic from PHP templates to Twig - a big thanks to everyone who has helped with this project.

Now the team are working on removing old code which will no longer be supported with Symfony 5, and also finalising the work on the new message processing plugins using Symfony Mailer and Symfony Messenger.

We do need your help, as Mautic users, in testing these important updates. Every Friday we have our Open Source Friday sprints where you can step into the #t-product channel and help with testing new features and bug fixes. You will also always find the pinned issue at github.com/mautic/mautic/issues with a list of things that we want to focus on getting tested.

Transition of leadership

When we first formed the governance model back at the end of 2019, we decided that Team Lead roles would have a term of three years.

Norman Pracht, General Manager of Webmecanik, has done a fantastic job of establishing the Product Team and leading Mautic through these formative years, and with our great thanks, will be stepping back as Product Team Lead from the beginning of next month.

Mattias Michaux, Lead Product Architect at Dropsolid, will be taking over as Product Team Lead after a period of transition where Norman will support Mattias as Assistant Team Lead. I am sure that you will all extend Mattias a warm welcome!

I would like to extend my thanks and appreciation to Norman for all of his dedication and enthusiasm to Mautic, and to Webmecanik for enabling Norman to have the time and resources to support the Mautic project. I am sure that we would not be where we are today if it wasn’t for your continual drive to improve Mautic for our users.

Let’s look at the numbers

It has been a great quarter, with ongoing growth in both the number of people who are participating in the community and also those who are taking the time to contribute and make the Mautic project and community even more awesome. It won’t be long before we exceed 7,000 members who have actively participated in the community!

We’ve had 457 active members this quarter, down slightly from 465 last quarter.

We continue to see growth in contributions across the project, and we have been able to make progress in several areas as a result.

Growth in contributions since 2020. Source: Savannah CRM

Most active contributors

Over the last 90 days the most active contributors (based on the number of conversations) have been:

Mohammed Abu Musa575

Joey Keller 471

Jan Linhart 315

Oluwatobi Owolabi 147

Sven Döring146

Bill F145

Ekke Guembel 112

Yosu Cadilla 107

Joshua Estes 105

Norman Pracht 100

Read more about what is defined as a contribution here.

Most engaged contributors

Our most engaged contributors (based on the number of connections they have made with others in the community) have been:

Joey Keller 324

Jan Linhart 168

Norman Pracht 141

Michael Wolman 135

Mohammed Abu Musa 130

Zdeno Kuzmany 109

Adrian 84

Bill F 75

Oluwatobi Owolabi 71

Dennis Ameling 71

Top contributors

Our top contributors this quarter (based on the number of contributions they have made) have been:

Jan Linhart 128

Mohammed Abu Musa 105

Joshua Estes 65

Zdeno Kuzmany 30

Joey Keller 30

Mattias Michaux 21

Rembrand 19

Oluwatobi Owolabi 16

Norman Pracht 15

Volha Pivavarchyk 14

Most active companies

The companies who were most active in the Mautic Community (based on the number of conversations) are:

Acquia 1461

Steer Campaign 576

Friendly 473

Leuchtfeuer Digital Marketing 201

Aivie 178

Webmecanik 172

Dropsolid 161

Bluespace 147

Moorwald | Sven Döring 146

Lowcost.marketing 107

Top contributing companies

The companies who are contributing the most to the Mautic Community (based on the number of contributions) are:

Acquia 203

Steer Campaign 105

SonsOfPHP 65

Webmecanik 45

Dropsolid 45

Friendly 31

Comarch 30

Aivie 22

Bluespace 16

Leuchtfeuer Digital Marketing 13

Conclusion

It has been great to see a lot of energy and progress being made in several teams across the Mautic community this last quarter, with several key projects coming nearer to completion.

We have some exciting times ahead, and I’m looking forward to a continued trend of growth!

Automating new contributor swag with Mautic, n8n and Sticker Space

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Tue, 04 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Saying thank you is a great way to recognise and appreciate the time people have spent making a contribution to an open source project, but how do you actually do it?

About a year ago we started the Year of the Contributor initiative in the Mautic community, focusing on improving the experiences for both new and existing contributors.

One thing we wanted to do was to send some stickers out to people who made their first contribution to Mautic, and naturally we wanted to automate as much of the process as we could. Here’s how I did this using Savannah CRM, Mautic, n8n and Sticker Space.

Identifying new contributions

Savannah CRM picks up contributions from across the many channels that we monitor. We can use this as a trigger for n8n in two ways - one by exporting the list of new contributors into a Google Sheet at regular intervals, or two, by using the new Webhooks functionality. I currently use the former, but am trialling the latter.

Next, we filter the results with n8n if nodes to determine if the date of the first contribution was within a specified timeline - in our case 90 days - and whether we have an email address for the person.

💡Some channels pass the email address but others do not, therefore it can take a while until we have a way to contact the person (for example if they engage in another channel). This is why we have the 90 day window.

Have they already claimed some stickers?

If we do have a valid email address for the contributor, the next step is to check if they have already been sent their stickers. We do this by querying Mautic (with the http request node) to find whether they are already a member of the sticker swag claim segment.

If they have not already received their stickers, we then make a request to Sticker Space via the API to generate a unique link for the contributor to claim their stickers. This is returned and stored into a custom field in Mautic, and the user is added to the Sticker Swag Claim segment

Now we need to tell the contributor the good news!

Sending the contributor their unique code

In Mautic we have a campaign which sends out an email to folks in this segment, providing them with their unique link (via a token which is replaced by the custom field value) and inviting them to claim their sticker pack.

We have this email translated in multiple languages, so if they are already in our systems (for example by downloading Mautic from the website or signing up to our newsletter at some point in the past, which is often the case) and we know a preferred language which we have a translation for, that one will automatically be sent.

The user then clicks on the link and provides a delivery address to Sticker Space who will then print and despatch the stickers around the world.

The Sticker Space administrator has to approve the sticker requests, so we do have a manual step in place mainly to prevent abuse, but so far it has not been needed.

We also then drop them into a GDPR consent workflow, explaining that we gained the email address through their contribution, but if they would like to continue to hear from us they can let us know their communication preferences. If they don’t do this within two weeks, we delete them from our systems.

Next steps

This process works great for us, the next steps I would like to have include getting the webhook up and running so there’s less manual intervention required, posting back to Savannah to tell it that we sent them a gift, and also to be able to ping me to send out our exclusive sticker packs when people reach 10 contributions.

How are you automating your contributor swag process? I’d love to here, please comment below!

Change is coming to Mautic

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Tue, 18 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Mautic has grown quite a bit since we first implemented the Mautic Community Governance Model in 2019. At our first ever Community Summit in Amsterdam that year, if you had told me that we would have increased our contributions tenfold within the next three years, I’d have had a hard time believing you.

Together, we have built a welcoming, thriving community based on a culture of mutual respect, support, and generosity.

As a community, we’ve seen contributions to Mautic grow from averaging 10-20 a month to the present 200+ contributions a month, a huge increase in active members across our community channels, and sustained growth across our ecosystem — creating opportunities for agencies and developers who have built a sustainable business around Mautic.

To anyone who’s been part of Mautic or any large open source project, you know the tight bonds, energy, effort, and passion that goes into making a project like this scale to an ecosystem of this size. No matter how long or short you’ve been involved — know that you have had an impact and that you made a difference — for that I thank you. I am humbled by what it took to get this to where it is today.

As a project, a community, as an ecosystem — we’ve grown up. Mautic now is an open source project that empowers an entire ecosystem. We’re on a strong trajectory of growth and we’ve got exciting plans for the future.

Times of change

Since late 2022, I have been talking with Dries Buytaert — co-founder of Acquia and my line manager — about how Mautic can continue to grow and thrive as an open source project. I believe to do that, we should explore different governance models to move towards being a fully community-governed open source project.

For context, Acquia has supported Mautic since 2019 by funding my role as Project Lead, as well as enabling an engineer to spend half their time supporting the community. This support has been instrumental in Mautic’s success and I am personally grateful for the opportunities that Acquia has given both Mautic and myself.

As a community, I’m excited for us to continue to work together to flourish. We’ve got some exciting times ahead of us — and I’m looking forward to seeing how we grow together!

Now is the time for us to find our new way forward, and I am excited to share what is ahead!

My key priorities for Mautic

Moving forward as an independent open source project, the key things we need to ensure for Mautic in any future organisational structure and governance model are that:

Mautic becomes a truly autonomous, self-governing open source project. The project’s governance and operation is free from any kind of external majority control.
Mautic owns and manages its trademarks and brand resources. These are currently owned and managed by Acquia, who acquired them during the 2019 acquisition of Mautic Inc.
Mautic is free and able to make decisions within its governance model that are in the best interest of the project.
Mautic provides full transparency of financial and operational management within the project.
Mautic is empowered and resourced to continue on its trajectory of growth into the future.

These are fundamental requirements for the long term health and security of any open source project, not just for Mautic. With that in mind, I set about researching some of the options that might be open to us.

Speaking in confidence with various subject-matter experts across open source and non-profit organisations, community leaders who have guided organisations through transitions, and people with governance expertise among others — I am confident in the requirements to move forward. Furthermore; I feel empowered by the strength and passion shared with me by various key stakeholders and agencies within the Mautic community.

To everybody who gave me your time in this period, I cannot thank you enough. Your insights, wisdom, support and encouragement have been invaluable. I hope to be able to repay the favour in the future, my door is always open.

Reviewing options

With insights, research, and expertise in mind, I looked into several options that were available to us, including:

Continuing as we are, using the Open Source Collective as our fiscal host to manage our financial assets, employing me on behalf of the community, and holding our trademarks
Explore joining the Drupal Association, which is focused on accelerating Drupal, fostering the growth of the Drupal community, and supporting the project’s vision to create a safe, secure, and open web for everyone
Consider existing umbrella organisations that support open source projects, such as the Linux Foundation, Apache Foundation etc.
Consider creating our own non-profit organisation

Making big decisions is hard

All this being said — big decisions are hard!

With all of the challenges that an open source project faces, making decisions with the best interests of the long term health and security of the project over and above the immediate positives that might be offered, and the personal security of my own employment, is a (very) tough place to be in.

With the requirements mentioned earlier in mind, and after plenty of thought and discussions with the Mautic Community Leadership Team, it was decided that the first option is currently the best route forward for the Mautic Project.

I do believe that this decision is the right one and that, even if you may not currently agree with it, you have trust in your fellow community members and what we’ve built together to continue building the future together.

I would like to extend thanks to everybody who has been involved to date in helping explore possible routes forward for Mautic, in particular to the Drupal Association.

What does this mean for Mautic?

Redefining our governance structure

We now have an opportunity to reconsider whether we believe that forming a non-profit would be helpful for the Mautic project at this time.

We are currently very well served by the Open Source Collective, which provides Mautic with a ton of services that allow us to function effectively without the need for a non-profit organisation.

I will consider our options in consultation with the Mautic Community Leadership Team and will share the outcome with the community when the appropriate due diligence has been completed.

Planning for a future of growth

Taking this decision is far from the easy route. If I am to continue working as the Project Lead, I can’t do that as a volunteer.

Acquia provided us with seed funding that gives us a cushion financially. This will allow me to continue in this role to focus on growth, employed by the community. To ensure sustainability, however, we must focus on developing our financial base. Currently, it costs us in the region of $20-30,000 per year to run the project. You can view the full breakdown of spending on our Open Collective.

Our income averages around $35,000 per year with a bit of variability depending on how successful our conferences are. Between $1,500-2,000 per month comes in through regular and one-off sponsorships. All this said — we make a small profit at this time which serves as a small buffer for unplanned expenses.

The existing plans for the next 1-3-5-10 years saw us steadily building up our financial base. This financial base will drive a future of growth and innovation, allowing us to employ developers to work full time on core and strategic initiatives, grow the project into being fully self-sustaining, and enable us to focus on bringing more projects to realisation.

Creating the financial foundation for this plan will need to become an immediate focus over the next six months to accelerate our plans towards financial independence and to support our ambitious plans for growth. I am confident in our plans to achieve this growth.

How can you help Mautic?

We have various ways that we are hoping to do this, but the best way for you to support us through this time of transition is to sponsor Mautic financially in whatever way you can.

Whether it is a regular monthly donation as a company or an individual, sponsoring the Mautic Conference Global event, or making a one-time donation — all of these options help us reach our goal.

We envision an independent, sustainable future of growth for Mautic.

No matter how big or small your donation — it doesn’t make it inconsequential or insignificant. Know that your contribution is appreciated. Imagine if every person who used Mautic contributed just $5 per month, what a difference that would make.

Personally, my goal is to have at least 20% of the companies who are active in the Mautic community contributing at least $10 per month by the end of the year. If we work together to make this happen, it would give us a much firmer base to build upon going forward.

If you are already a contributor (thank you, awesome people!) please do consider if you are able to increase your donation, or make an additional one-time donation.

We will soon be refreshing our sponsorship tiers which will provide a lot of exciting perks to help drive awareness of your brand and support your business growth, with the incentives growing as the monthly amount increases.

Going forward we will be following the principles of the Open Startup model so expertly used by our Community Partners, Friendly, to share with you our financial status, growth against targets and how things are going. This will be posted on mautic.org and on our Open Collective each month.

Moving forward, together

I know this has been quite a lengthy article to read, thank you for taking the time to make your way through it.

Because of our community’s values in transparency, ethics, and belief in openness, I felt that it was important to be transparent and fully communicate this news. This included some of the hard parts, from the tough position I’m in with my role and personal employment, the decision to decline the opportunity presented by the Drupal Association, and where we are going into the future.

This is a great opportunity for us to really fuel growth and innovation in the Mautic community, and build the solid foundations for what I fully expect to be an exciting time ahead.

If you can’t yet see the opportunity that lies ahead, my door is open. I fully can empathise and understand in the fear of the unknown. If there’s one thing that’s kept me going through this time, it’s been the power of the community.

I will be running several webinars and office hours over the coming weeks if you have any questions that you would like answers to:

Office Hours

Wednesday, 19th April at 7 am UK time (my office hours are at this time every fortnight)

Video call link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87562856285?pwd=TEJSSFJUQkd1ODJXK1VGK3lDR0I0Zz09

Meeting ID: 875 6285 6285

Passcode: 210498
Thursday, 20th April at 2 pm UK time

Video call link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87471995567?pwd=cXdNaXNjWFJWcGF5Tmg2R1BYdFp2Zz09

Meeting ID: 874 7199 5567

Passcode: 296492
Friday, 21st April at 10am UK time

Video call link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85052425009?pwd=OWIvTUNrUTBPYjIvT28xeUhOalFSQT09

Meeting ID: 850 5242 5009

Passcode: 148977
Thursday, 27th April at 2pm UK time (my office hours are at this time every fortnight)

Video call link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86824099822?pwd=eWk1Q0NnMXQwOEdBQ21wbDdaeGhyUT09

Meeting ID: 868 2409 9822

Passcode: 535689

Webinars

English language : Thursday 20th April at 2pm UK time

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87644421946?pwd=blBxSnBxTllYZEZqOUNXU2pjdjE2Zz09

Meeting ID: 876 4442 1946

Passcode: 263299
Portuguese language: Tuesday 25th April at 10am Brasilia Standard Time

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87893312489?pwd=T0ZBUC9nWDl6alV1QlJIM1owM3JtUT09

Meeting ID: 878 9331 2489

Passcode: 008835
Spanish language: Thursday 27th April at 6pm Central European Time

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83094600035?pwd=V2xmV2F6UmUrTjZ5V3hPb1NSV0x4dz09

Meeting ID: 830 9460 0035

Passcode: 751190

Support Mautic financially

Finally, if you want to be a part of Mautic’s success going forward, here’s where you can support Mautic financially:

Five things I've learned through running multilingual online conferences in our open source project

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Thu, 29 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Like many Brits, English is the only language I speak fluently. I speak schoolgirl French, a bit of Welsh and a few words in German and Dutch. I’m eternally grateful that many people I interact with from around the world are able to speak English at a basic level, and that when I speak at conferences and events, I do so in my first language. But, for so many, that’s not the case.

My friend, for example, is Italian by birth, lives in Greece, and delivers keynotes at conferences in her third language, English. I am deeply inspired by people who have such skill with languages to speak so many of them, and have the confidence to do so on the stage!

In my role as project lead for Mautic, I interact with a lot of folks for whom English isn’t their first language.

Mautic is an international open source project. We have over 64 languages available and people in our community who speak most of them. Our largest user base is in Brazil, where Portuguese is the primary language, closely followed by Europe and the USA. Why, therefore, would we want to run our conferences only in English, like so many open source projects, when we have such linguistic diversity in our community?

From our very first conference, I was keen that we enabled people - if they wanted - to speak at our Global event in their language of choice, rather than be forced into speaking in English.

Our first ever event in 2020, at the height of the covid-19 pandemic, had seven languages represented: English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese and Italian. Nowadays we generally have around 4-5 languages in our conferences.

Here’s how we manage it.

1 - Set requirements to run a language track

When we first started out, if a session was submitted in a language, we accepted it providing it was aligned with our Code of Conduct and our vision for the event. Over time, we realised that it was a lot of work to only have one or two sessions in a language, and it made for quite a disrupted schedule.

Now, we have set some minimum requirements for a language track to be established - three sessions, and someone who is willing to be the MC and work with the event team to organise and coordinate the track (which could be one of the speakers, if they have someone to MC their session).

This works much better as it encourages collaboration in the community, but also it means we don’t have to find someone to manage the track during the event. It also means we have someone to help with reviewing and translating the sessions when they are submitted, and to help with promotion of the event in that language.

Some of our speakers pointed out that they felt their session would reach a wider audience if it was delivered in English, but they wanted to be a part of their first language track. Therefore, we offered the opportunity for them to do the session in English, and in their first language.

Some of our speakers decided to pre-record the English track and do their first language session live, for example, to make it easier to edit and proof the recording. This was a lot less pressure for them than delivering it live if they were less confident in their English.

2 - Use the tools to your advantage

Our first events used a tool called Veertly, and more recently we are using Airmeet. In both tools, we were able to create multiple rooms which ran simultaneously alongside each other, which meant that we could have an English track running at the same time as a Spanish and German track.

The tools allowed us to have an MC for each track (someone who spoke the language, and was willing to introduce each speaker and go through the Q&A at the end) and to make it clear that between certain times the tracks were going to be running in a specified language.

This meant that we could clearly signify on our schedule when tracks would be in specific languages, so that it was easier for people to navigate. Speak Japanese? You’ll have a track from 5am UTC to 12 noon UTC in Room 6. English? Track 1 from 8am-6pm UTC. German? Track 3 from 8am - 3pm UTC. You get the drift.

We used Sessionize as our tool for managing our Call for Speakers, displaying our schedule and speakers on the website, and with Veertly, embedding the schedule into the event and the individual rooms themselves (before they had an agenda feature).

With Sessionize we created a custom field for the language that the session would be delivered in, which allowed us to have this as a filterable value. It made it much easier for organising the tracks, and makes it clear for attendees.

Unfortunately Sessionize does not allow you to translate the questions / copy on the Call for Speakers, which is a shame, as it’s off-putting to non-English speakers.

We also provided the option to supply a pre-recorded video or to deliver the sessions live. While the playing of a pre-recording was a bit technically challenging during the early-pandemic-tech-tool era, it became much smoother in later years.

3 - Plan your event to factor in cultural differences

We had to consider cultural factors when scheduling sessions - from the basics of starting one of the days very early in European timezones to enable the Japanese track to run at a sensible time of day for them, to scheduling breaks at appropriate times of the day and taking into account things like school starting/finishing times and how that impacted our team of MCs, our speakers and our attendees.

You’re not going to be able to fit every single need into the scheduling, but you can try your best!

We found it really helpful to have the track leads (typically from the country of the track speakers and attendees) give us feedback on these areas when preparing the scheduling.

We also had to take into account and plan for unexpected eventualities like power cuts, which are common in come countries and led to some difficulties with some of our speakers and MCs. We had a team of ‘runners’ who were available to pick up if there was a problem during the event.

These folks were amazing - they learned every aspect of the event platform and were ready to go at a minute’s notice. As technology has improved over the years we’ve had less of these emergencies, but it’s always a good idea to have a couple of people, and maybe a couple of speakers, in reserve and ready to go in case you have some emergency that comes up.

We also gave clearer briefs about what was needed at the MC and speaker’s side - for example a wired internet connection where possible and good lighting. There was an online connection test we could ask them to take beforehand, and we offered a dry-run to go through how the platform worked both for the MC and the speakers.

4 - Communicate timings in a single timezone (eg UTC)

With people from all over the world, we decided to always communicate timings using UTC. That way we could avoid confusion with the many timezones that were involved.

When we invite speakers to submit a session, we ask them what time slots work best for them, in UTC. We give three-hour chunks eg 9am-12noon, 12noon-3pm etc.

We then try our best to schedule their session as close as possible to that timezone.

This is the main dictator of how many tracks we run at an event - if we have to accommodate more people in a specific timezone, we have to run more tracks, or more days.

5 - Enlist the help of your community with marketing and communications

Something we haven’t really done as well as we’d like, is being able to communicate with our audience in their first languages. In recent years, we’ve tried to involve our track leads and volunteers in helping us to translate the website, our marketing materials and communications, into other languages.

This is much easier to do when you’re organised well ahead and have a lot of time, but in many cases we ended up doing things at short notice, and didn’t have time to get them translated. Enlisting the help of your community can really support this process. Likewise being able to use a tool like Mautic where you’re able to send translated versions of content automatically based on the language selected makes life much easier as an organiser!

Conclusion

Hopefully this gives you some ideas for how to organise events within your community in languages other than just English - I’d love to hear how you get on or what challenges you face! Please drop a comment below!

Q2 2023 Mautic Roundup

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Wed, 12 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Another busy quarter has flown past, here’s a round-up of what’s been happening in the community!

Read the previous reports here for Q1 2023, Q4 2022, Q3 2022, Q2 2022 and Q1 2022.

Q2 has brought an unprecedented amount of change to the Mautic Community, let’s dive into how that is impacting the project.

Project governance updates

Becoming an independent project

The biggest announcement was of course that Mautic has become an independent open source project.

You can read more about this on the official Mautic blog post, on my blog and Dries Buytaert’s blog.

Associated with this has been the process of determining the new governance model and subsequently, after much debate and discussion, adopting the new model which is currently being implemented.

Open Startup reporting

Mautic has started to provide more transparency on our progress and finances through our Open Startup reporting.

Read more about Open Startup reporting in our blog, and check our reports for April, May and June.

We won an award!

In June we were delighted to hear that Mautic had won the Marketing Automation award in the 20i FOSS Awards. A huge thank you to everyone who voted for us!

Request for proposals - Trial Provider

In June we issued a request for proposals to provide a hosted trial of the open source Mautic product to people who are new to Mautic.

We had a positive response to the RFP and the team are currently reviewing the proposals.

Mautic 5 alpha is launched!

The moment everyone has been waiting for! On 26th June we released the Mautic 5.0 alpha for early pre-release testing. There is no upgrade path for this version and it should only be used in a development environment.

The beta release is due on 26th July. Check the timelines for the upcoming releases here.

Mautic Conference Global 2023 🎉

We had another successful Mautic Conference Global event with training sessions, sessions and keynotes alongside opportunities to network with other Mauticians from around the world. Read more in our blog post.

Let’s look at the numbers

This quarter we have exceeded 7,000 members in the community, with 515 active members - an increase of around 13% on last quarter.

We are continuing to see a steady growth in contributions this quarter following on from the strong start at the beginning of the year.

All contributions since January 2020. Source: SavannahCRM

Most active contributors

Over the last 90 days the most active contributors (based on the number of conversations) have been:

John Linhart 663 Mohammed Abu Musa 552 Joey Keller 524 Mattias Michaux 383 Dirk Spannaus 160 Sven Döring 155 Zdeno Kuzmany 135 Norman Pracht 125 Lenon Leite 92 Daniel Lord 91

Most engaged contributors

Our most engaged contributors (based on the number of connections they have made with others in the community) have been:

Joey Keller 150 Dirk Spannaus 99 Jan Linhart Acquia Staff 69 Ionuţ Ojică 64 Michael Wolman 55 Mohammed Abu Musa 50 Norman Pracht 49 Oluwatobi Owolabi 48 Daniel Lord 36 Dwayne Taylor 36

Top contributors

Our top contributors this quarter (based on the number of contributions they have made) have been:

John Linhart 209 Mohammed Abu Musa 145 Mattias Michaux 50 Zdeno Kuzmany 34 Volha Pivavarchyk 25 Artem Lopata 24 Miroslav Fedeleš 22 Lenon Leite 21 Joey Keller 20 Oluwatobi Owolabi 17

Most active companies

The companies who were most active in the Mautic Community (based on the number of conversations) are:

Acquia 776 Steer Campaign 552 Friendly 528 Dropsolid 470 Leuchtfeuer Digital Marketing 306 Webmecanik 270 TwentyZen 169 Moorwald | Sven Döring 155 Codefive 102 Texthelp 97

Top contributing companies

The companies who are contributing the most to the Mautic Community (based on the number of contributions) are:

Acquia 250 Steer Campaign 145 Leuchtfeuer Digital Marketing 69 Dropsolid 66 Webmecanik 40 Aivie 28 Codefive 21 Friendly 20 Bluespace 17 Moorwald | Sven Döring 13

Conclusion

It has been fantastic to see the energy and excitement around becoming an independent open source project. The discussions and debate that we have had around the future governance of the project have resulted in some positive changes which I’m looking forward to being implemented in the coming months.

As we are now going into much more detail on a monthly basis in our open startup reports, I’m going to remove the financial aspects on this report, as you can follow them more closely on a monthly basis and check directly on the spreadsheet or on Open Collective itself if you want to dive into the detail.

Thanks as always to everyone who has stepped up to support Mautic whether it be through practical contributions or financial donations!

Q3 2023 Mautic Roundup

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Wed, 04 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Another quarter of significant change in the Mautic project, we’ve lots going on in many different areas.

Read the previous reports here for Q2 2023, Q1 2023, Q4 2022, Q3 2022, Q2 2022 and Q1 2022.

Project governance updates

We have now successfully transferred all trademarks and domain names from Acquia to Open Source Collective, which are now held on behalf of the Mautic project.
After extensive discussion and revisions in the Governance Working Group, a new Governance model was proposed which was reviewed and adopted by the existing Community Council.
The new governance model focuses on a precise approach towards decision making, with the General Assembly and Council established as the key decision making bodies.
We have launched membership tiers providing individuals and organizations the opportunity to be part of the Mautic community through several different ways including practical (individual only) and financial contributions.
We continue to share Open Startup reports every month which can be reviewed here: https://www.mautic.org/tag/open-startup.

News from the community

The Mautic Developer Days and Community Sprint took place successfully in July 2023 in Vienna, with various teams working on a range of community growth projects alongside Mautic 5 work.
The Community is consistently growing, with new members signing up and growing contributions even though there was a slight slowdown owing to the holiday season.
New local meetups are getting started in Barcelona, Spain, and Douala, Cameroon, boosting local engagement and building enthusiasm in these regions.
The introduction of the General Assembly and a new tier-based membership model has been positively received by the community, fuelling growth and collaboration.

Product updates

The Mautic 5.0 alpha version saw extensive testing and bug-fixing during the Developer Days and during Open Source Friday sprints, focusing on implementing Symfony Mailer and Messenger as well as dealing with other deprecations and regressions that have been picked up in testing. A revised timeline to release has just been announced with the aim being that the General Availability will be launched at the beginning of November.
Mautic is experiencing a steady rise in its downloads and its prevalence is growing with many more websites including Mautic tracking over the last quarter.
A new community portal has been established to facilitate better collaboration a more transparent decision making, with the intention to centralize all things community and replace other existing proprietary tools for things like meetups. This is due to launch in the coming weeks.

Financial updates

The Mautic community has notably doubled the amount of financial supporters compared to the same period last year.
Acquia began providing financial contributions, boosting income which has offset some delays in receiving funds through GitHub sponsors.
The newly launched membership model brought in several individual and corporate members, supplementing Mautic’s income. This will be a primary focus in the coming quarter as we move towards financial independence.
Multiple new revenue streams are being established to support the community’s ongoing growth, including the establishing of a new official trial provider which will be launching next quarter, and providing a revenue share back to the community for any converted paying customers.

Let’s look at the numbers

We’ve had 455 active members this quarter, which represents around 12% reduction on last quarter. Numbers are however remaining relatively stable in the longer term, whereas ideally we want to see this growing where we have a lot more members being active each quarter. We’re starting to work on this in the marketing team, and would value your help and ideas!

We’ve seen our traditional dip in contributions over the summer months which has impacted this quarter somewhat, however we still have had 474 contributions this quarter from 74 Contributors, 31 of whom were new contributors.

Image

Most active contributors

Over the last 90 days the most active contributors (based on the number of conversations) have been:

Joey Keller 317 Jan Linhart 295 Mattias Michaux 192 Robin Tindall 132 Ekke Guembel 111 Bill F 110 Matic Zagmeister 91 Zdeno Kuzmany 88 Sven Döring 83 Michael Wolman 70

Most engaged contributors

Our most engaged contributors (based on the number of connections they have made with others in the community) have been:

Joey Keller 275 Michael Wolman 146 Jan Linhart 145 Dirk Spannaus 122 Robin Tindall 115 Matic Zagmeister 110 Norman Pracht 105 Mohammed Abu Musa 91 Zdeno Kuzmany 80 Oluwatobi Owolabi 79

Top contributors

Our top contributors this quarter (based on the number of contributions they have made) have been:

Jan Linhart 99 Mattias Michaux 47 Zdeno Kuzmany 37 Joey Keller 18 Volha Pivavarchyk 17 Patryk Gruszka 13 Patrick Jenkner 13 Dennis Ameling 10 Robert Parker 9 Tomas Votruba 8

Most active companies

The companies who were most active in the Mautic Community (based on the number of conversations) are:

Acquia 345 Friendly 317 Dropsolid 226 Leuchtfeuer Digital Marketing 222 Webmecanik 164 Lead Genius 132 Matic Zagmajster s.p. 91 Moorwald | Sven Döring 83 Surge Media 70 Aivie 67

Top contributing companies

The companies who are contributing the most to the Mautic Community (based on the number of contributions) are:

Acquia 117 Dropsolid 53 Webmecanik 44 Leuchtfeuer Digital Marketing 39 Aivie 25 Friendly 18 Comarch 18 rectorphp 8 Matic Zagmajster s.p. 6 Surge Media 4

Looking forward

Implementation of the new governance structure in full swing with all the necessary infrastructure, tooling, and workflows are being put into place.
Expect a surge in community participation and financial contributions due to the newly launched membership model.
In light of various challenges and platform fees, Mautic is considering moving solely to Open Collective for fund collections.
In November we are expecting the rollout of the General Availability Mautic 5.0 release.
Mautic aims to sustain its growth trajectory by attracting more individual and organizational members, increasing product adoption, and uplifting its impact within the business ecosystem.

Running an RFP process in an open source project

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Wed, 27 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Ever felt like you’re at the foot of Everest when you decide to create a huge project or a long-term collaboration for an Open Source project? Tell me about it! But here’s some good news - I’m going to share the tips we discovered going through just such a project with Mautic, an open source marketing automation platform.

The project

Mautic needed a way to both allow newcomers to Mautic to spin up an instance and ‘kick the tyres’, while also developing a revenue stream to support the open source project’s financial sustainability. The initiative we are considering here involved providing a free 14 day trial which could be converted into a paying subscription with a revenue share coming back to the open source community.

This would allow people an opportunity to ‘try before you buy’ without needing to set up your own server and configure everything properly - a common blocker to people getting started with Mautic or demonstrating it to their team who are often marketers rather than developers and may not have server management skills.

The plus side is that, if the trial customers do decide to become a paying customer, they can be confident in the knowledge that in doing so, they’re also supporting the open source project’s growth.

Writing the project brief

The first, and most important part of the process, was in writing a proposal.

This is what your potential partners are going to be reviewing to determine whether they are capable of providing the service you wish to commission, so it should ideally aim to answer as many questions as possible, and provide all the pertinent information upfront.

DIY or collaborative?

I mostly wrote the actual brief myself as the Project Lead because I was pretty clear what I wanted to see in a proposal and what the community needed.

You might want to form a working group or team to put it together more collaboratively - we did this after I’d written the first draft - just ensure you explain upfront what the process is about and make sure that nobody involved has the potential to influence or be a contributor to any companies who might tender a proposal.

I made it clear that if anyone in our small working group was approached to assist with a proposal they should declare that straight away and step out of the process - this made it easy for one person to do just that very early on in the process before proposals were received, when they were asked to advise on a specific area of expertise for a company who was intending to submit a proposal.

Even though the consulting requested of the team member mentioned earlier was in a very small way, it’s important that the ethical integrity of your team is watertight, and it’s important that you don’t make it a big deal for someone to step out of the team if they have reason to do so.

Be clear what you’re asking for (and giving)

Potential partners need to be able to assess the opportunity from many angles - technical competencies, professional experience, likely profit margins (don’t underestimate the ‘what’s in it for me’ angle) and so forth.

Ensure that you’ve done your research and can present the case clearly, explaining exactly what they will need to do if they were the successful provider. Also be clear if there are responsibilities which fall on your shoulders and how you plan to fulfil them.

In our case, we were up front that we expected a 14 day free trial during which time we (the open source community’s marketing team and the provider) would work to convert those trial customers into a paying customer of the provider once the trial concludes.

We laid out from the start that we expected at least a 40% revenue share, and that once the trial customer converted, they became a customer of the provider. We deliberately left it open for them to propose how they would manage both the revenue share and the customer journey, because we wanted to see their thinking, cost estimations and creativity.

It’ s also important that you’re clear what publicity the provider can expect - will you do a joint press release? Are you going to list them on your website? If so, where? How long for? What will the listing say?

Outline key deliverables and metrics early

In Mautic’s case we set specific parameters around the things that mattered to us upfront in the RFP brief - such as:

the time to spin up an instance,
duration of the trial,
minimum proposed revenue share.

We wanted to be clear about this from the outset, so that we could be sure that the provider would understand the areas that we felt were important to us.

In our case, however, we also acknowledged that the estimates we were making for the potential market size, the conversion funnel and so forth were best guesses, so it did not make sense to create hard-and-fast performance metrics off the bat.

We enabled providers to review our publicly shared Open Startup Reports and GSheet and make their own proposals. If you have very specific performance indicators then it’s important to state them here, so the providers are clear what is expected.

Calling for proposals

Give a clear timeline

The timeline is important, because it reduces the number of contacts you will have asking for an update throughout the course of the RFP.

We found that a time-boxed period of a couple of weeks from the release of the RFP for people to submit questions was helpful, as it focused the minds of interested parties. We then provided answers within a few days of the closing date.

The only date we missed in our process was the final announcement and this was largely due to vacations and legal contract reviews meaning this stage ended up taking more time than anticipated!

Here’s the timings we used:

Release RFP: Monday, June 19, 2023
Deadline for questions: Friday, June 30, 2023 (2 working weeks)
Responses to questions provided: Monday, July 3, 2023
Deadline for proposals: Friday, July 21, 2023 (3 working weeks from question responses)
Evaluation of proposals: Monday, July 24 - Friday, August 4, 2023 (2 working weeks)
Feedback provided to all bidders: Monday, August 7, 2023
Contract negotiation and award: Tuesday, August 8 - Friday, August 18, 2023

Offer a Q&A period with responses shared publicly

Make it clear from the outset that questions and their responses will be shared publicly (we used a Google Sheet for this purpose) and ensure that they are distributed to everyone who responded (we did this via a BCC email to everyone who had submitted a question). We kept these anonymised and where there was duplication we combined where possible into a single question with a response which covered all the questions.

Sharing it publicly means everyone learns from all the questions posed and the answers received (even if they come across the RFP after the deadline for questions has passed), everybody gets the same response, and you only have to reply once!

⚠️ Be careful with your ethics here - I had people reaching out to me to ask for a personal conversation about questions they had relating to the proposal, but we were clear as a team all questions had to come through the formal channels so that it was fair to all parties. I explained this to potential providers, that I would happily have a call to chat about Mautic, but I would not be able to discuss anything to do with the RFP process or answer questions about it, and directed them to submit via the stated method.

Promote, promote, promote

The next step is one we probably could have done better, and that is to promote the opportunity widely.

Internal promotion

We promoted well internally - our Slack community, on the forums with an announcement post which emails every member, and on all our social media channels.

This was very effective both at generating interest in the RFP process, but also because the community got very excited at what we were proposing to implement, and what it means for Mautic.

External promotion

We didn’t promote as well externally - ‘outside the Mautic bubble’ - for example we could have made more use of our mailing list and promoted ads on social channels to reach a wider audience. If it’s a particularly large project you might also want to consider some of the databases of RFPs which you could submit your project to.

That being said, we did still have a strong response and quite a few good quality proposals to review!

Decide if you are going to make ‘personal invitations’

I did not do this formally - although it regularly came up in conversation with potential providers when we were engaging on other topics - because I felt it was unfair to directly point some potential providers to the RFP and not others (leaving it open to bias somewhat), but you might want to directly invite organisations you think could be interested in submitting a proposal.

It’s an interesting dilemma really - we wanted organisations who were active enough in our community to come across those announcements to be the ones who applied, but we received some feedback after the announcements about the selected proposal were made that some felt ‘put out’ that they weren’t personally made aware of the opportunity.

Transparency among the team

We set up a private Slack channel to deal with the incoming questions and proposals. I also connected the email account we set up specifically for this purpose to that channel, so everybody could see in Slack the content of every email coming into the account.

I blind copied in every email to the same address, so they saw all the outgoing emails, too.

We delegated access to the team so they could manage and send on behalf of that account, although in practice it was mostly me replying. This meant that I wasn’t a key person dependency in the process in case anything meant I wasn’t available.

We used threads to discuss the answers to the questions that were received, and come up with an answer that we all felt was appropriate. We also used threads to decide how to reply to emails.

Use a scoring matrix

We adopted a scoring matrix that we use for assessing events we might want to attend, to be used for reviewing the RFP submissions.

There were several areas we scored them on, all of which came from the expectations we laid out in the brief.

The following were scored from 1-10 by each member of our panel, after which we totalled the scores and ranked them to find the overall winner.

Are they active in the community?
How confident are you that they have sufficient background and experience with hosting Mautic at scale?
How confident are you that they have sufficient experience and involvement with the Mautic project and community?
How confident are you that they can spin up the instance consistently within 20 mins
How confident are you that they have explored adequetely in the proposal the plugins, themes and any limitations that would be imposed?
How confident are you that they will be able to mitigate against abuse effectively?
How confident are you that they are capable of managing a trial for 14 days?
How confident are you in the detail provided about how they will onboard and support people during the trial period?
How clearly have they explained how they will provide worldwide support?
Are you confident in their capacity to manage this effectively?
How confident are you in how they have proposed to convert leads into ongoing customers?
How do you feel about the proposed price range for the paid service?
How reasonable is the proposed revenue share model?
How well have they explained how they will create and publish a public-facing dashboard of metrics?
How confident are you in the way they propose to allow data portability?
How much do the value adds that they bring to the proposal benefit the customer?
How beneficial are the other services that they might offer to customers?
Does the company have any credentials such as ISO or any practices which support professional and secure processes to give confidence to trial users?
How confident are you that they have in place good data protection processes?
How feasible do you believe their proposal to be?
How much do you think Mautic will benefit from this provider being selected?

Thanking and giving helpful feedback

We were clear from the start that we wanted to be able to provide helpful feedback to anyone who took the time to submit a proposal, so we took the information that we gathered from the scoring matrix and wrote a personalised email to each provider.

We highlighted what they did well, and we flagged up the things that we felt they did not do so well on or that we felt their proposal lacked, framing the feedback in a positive and constructive way.

We also made sure to reiterate our gratitude to them for taking the time to participate in the process and willingness to support Mautic, and acknowledged the effort that had gone into the proposal (where this was the case - we had a few where it wasn’t!)

Contract negotiations

It makes sense to give more time to this than you expect it to take!

We had a base template prepared, but it’s always something of a negotiation process to get to a point of agreement. We used a collaborative doc to do this, and when both parties were happy with the contract we sent it to a lawyer for final review and sign off before it was completed.

We work with the lawyers that Open Source Collective recommend and have found them to be excellent in their understanding of open source projects.

You can use an open source tool for doc signing, like Documenso, or there are many proprietary tools out there that do the job well enough!

And of course, now the summit of the mountain is in view and we’re approaching the next, exciting step: get building! I’ll report back once we’re through that phase with the key learnings!

Conclusion

And there you have it – a snapshot into the journey of bringing to life an RFP project the Mautic way!

In conclusion, launching a large-scale project or long-term collaboration within an Open Source setup can be daunting, but with the right approach, it can be an exciting adventure.

Our experience with Mautic provided valuable insights into managing such projects, chiefly the importance of clarity and openness in communication, due diligence in preparation, the utility of robust evaluation tools like scoring matrices, and the need for constructive feedback along with ethical integrity.

Navigating through the proposal, negotiation, and implementation stages can be intricate, but with the appropriate scaffolding of processes, timelines, and community engagement, large-scale projects can be a unique opportunity for innovation, revenue generation, and community-building while fostering Open Source values.

I hope that this might be helpful for other projects considering entering into an RFP process - feel free to leave a comment if you’re reading this!

State of Open Con 24: A bright future for Open Technology

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Fri, 29 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

It’s Monday morning, you’ve just spent the entire weekend at FOSDEM in Belgium, and now the Eurostar departures lounge is filled with a disproportionate amount of people wearing hoodies and using laptops covered in stickers … it must be the SOOCon Eurostar back to London!

If you haven’t come across SOOCon before you’d be forgiven - last year was the inaugural event so it’s a relative newcomer to the Open Source scene. Pitched as the largest FOSDEM fringe event, it typically takes place on the Tuesday and Wednesday following the biggest open source event in Europe, FOSDEM. Cue the exodus of many attendees under the channel and back to London in time for another two days dedicated to all things open.

And, when I refer to all things open, I mean that literally - State of Open Con, or SOOCon as it’s known, is a celebration of all things open technology, from open source to open hardware, data, standards and this year, a big focus on openness in the context of AI.

Organised by Open UK, a not-for-profit company based in the UK with the lofty goals of developing UK leadership and global collaboration in open technology, the event has become firmly established both in the UK tech scene’s calendar and in the world of Open Source.

This year’s event was hosted at the quirky venue of The Brewery - yep, you guessed it, an old brewery owned by Whitbread since 1750, which has been converted into a really versatile event venue.

Kicking off with some great plenaries from a diverse range of speakers, it set the scene for two days of insightful talks, great networking and awesome social events.

You can check out all the recordings of the sessions on this playlist - well worth a watch!

Speaking at State of Open Con. Image shared by OpenUK Pictures under CC BY-SA 2.0

I was also invited to give a short, 15 minute talk about our changing governance model, which was well received and had several interesting questions and comments afterwards. Here’s the recording of the session:

There were multiple tracks running each day with some really fantastic sessions, and also some great opportunities to meet book authors who were doing signings throughout the day. Unfortunately I didn’t get to many of the talks due to being on the stand but the videos are a great opportunity to recap!

Showcasing Mautic

Mautic was grateful to have a stand in the Delegate Experience area which allowed us to showcase Mautic to an audience of open source aware and curious delegates, with lots of insightful conversations!

A huge thank you to Sam Parnell and Sven Döring who supported Mautic’s stand presence throughout the event.

We met many decision makers who had never come across Mautic before and were really excited by what it brings to the table - and also some existing users of Mautic or people who heard about it in the past but haven’t known about recent developments.

A photo of Sven discussing Mautic at State of Open Con with a delegate.

Probably the thing that stood out for me the most is the diversity of both the speaker lineup and the attendees - which is testament to all the hard work and intentional effort that Amanda Brock and team put into creating a culture that ensures everybody feels welcome to attend and be involved in the event, resulting in them being awarded the Gold D&I badge by CHAOSS. It’s great to see events that actually walk the talk, rather than pay lip-service to bringing diversity to the tech industry.

I can’t wait to attend the event again next year, which will be on 4-5 February at Southbank, London. See you there!

FOSDEM 2024: A recap

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Fri, 29 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

A free conference, with 885 talks comprising of 365 hours of content over two days all of which are live streamed, recorded and made available within days, entirely organised by volunteers and with over 8,000 attendees - sounds impossible, right?

FOSDEM has achieved that year after year, growing steadily since it was first founded by Raphael Bauduin in 2000.

What is FOSDEM?

Held at the ULB Solbosch campus in Brussels, Belgium it’s the largest gathering of open source developers and enthusiasts in Europe, and definitely not to be missed!

FOSDEM was the last event I attended pre-pandemic back in 2019 - a very cold, snowy weekend as I remember it, and incredibly overwhelming being around so many people!

The following two years were held online - an incredible feat of organisation on the part of the team - while we sat out the pandemic, with in-person events returning in 2023.

First time speaking at FOSDEM!

This year, I was absolutely delighted to hear that my talk proposal for the Community Devroom had been accepted - and even more exciting, I was first up in what was a jam-packed room with queues out of the door!

The FOSDEM Community Devroom

It was the first time I’d delivered the talk about how we went through the process of changing Mautic’s governance model from being corporate-owned to an independent open source project, which was well received. There were some great questions from the audience on how we dealt with the legal requirements and decided the salaries on the project, what was the emotional impact of going through the whole process, and how we encouraged people to vote in the voting processes.

In mid-flow during my session in the FOSDEM Community Devroom

There were also many hallway track conversations over the coming days - and even for weeks afterwards at other events when people stopped me to chat about it.

I’d like to say a huge thank you to the A/V heroes who made sure that everything ran smoothly with the mics and video stream, and the wonderful Devroom organisers, Shirley Bailes, Laura Czajkowski and Leslie Hawthorn, along with the in-room volunteers who did an amazing job of organising the room and making sure we all ran to time!

Check out the slides, links and video recording: How do you change the governance model of an established open source project? - in true FOSDEM style the videos were all processed using open source tooling and crowdsourced to us, the speakers, to provide the appropriate timestamps for starting and stopping the sessions, meaning they were published even before the end of the conference!

Watch the talk and the Q&A here:

Thankfully the talk was early on the first day of the event, which meant that the rest of the event could be dedicated to running the stand which we were provided with this year.

Promoting Mautic

Each year FOSDEM offers the chance for Open Source projects and organisations to apply to have a presence at FOSDEM, which is an incredible opportunity. Nowhere else do you have the chance to chat with so many open source enthusiasts in one place - so we were ecstatic to hear that our stand proposal had been accepted this year! 🥳

The Mautic stand

Running a stand at any event can be really intense - there’s very little chance to have a break at FOSDEM because your stand is directly outside session rooms, so there’s always a steady flow of people. This year, I put out a call for volunteers and the lovely Carsten Aevermann and Lenon Leite answered the call!

Together we spent the entire weekend talking non-stop with people about Mautic - we met many who had never heard about Mautic, some who were past users of Mautic but hadn’t heard about our latest updates, and several who were passionate users of Mautic!

Thanks to the work carried out at the Community Sprint the week prior to FOSDEM, we had a great landing page and campaign for people to sign up and learn more about Mautic which was well received. We also had a huge amount of interest in our fliers - which we had to get reprinted due to running out on the first day!

It was a real reminder to me that while we might think people know about open source alternatives to the common proprietary software tools out there in the marketing stack, actually even informed open source developers had never even thought to look, let alone knowing about Mautic. Definitely work to be done here!

I also got to meet up with two awesome members of the Rands Leadership Slack while we were at FOSDEM which was awesome - thanks for the stroopwaffel!

Women of Open Source meetup

A side project that launched last year, the Women of Open Source community was founded by myself and Lorna Mitchell as a private community for any women who were interested in or working in open source.

We came up with the idea on the way back from FOSDEM last year, and this year we had an informal meetup for people to come and chat. Admittedly it was a little last minute and next year, we plan to formalise plans much earlier and get it on the formal schedule as a BOF session, but it was great to meet with a few other folk and chat about our journeys in open source.

Summary

FOSDEM is definitely a must-attend for anyone who is involved with open source, or even remotely interested in technology. There are so many diverse devrooms, interesting topics and great open source projects there, not to mention all the stickers to collect, that it’s a great way to connect in with the wider ecosystem and learn more.

It’ll definitely be a firm fixture on my calendar for coming years!

Living with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome: How I ran 50 miles to support Breathworks

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Sat, 28 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This blog shares my journey with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome and celebrates the achievement of completing a 50 mile run to raise funds for Breathworks.

This article was first posted on the Breathworks blog.

Prefer to listen? Check out this recording of me reading the article on Breathworks’ Soundcloud.

Breathworks-Mindfulness · Living with Ehlers-Danlos: How I Ran 50 Miles to Support Breathworks

I’ve been a trustee for Breathworks for the last three years, which allows me to bring my experience in marketing and communications to help Breathworks further its mission. It’s a great opportunity to give something back to Breathworks. In my role, I can support the excellent work that the marketing team does at Breathworks by bringing my professional experience to the table, as well as offering an outsider’s perspective on strategy and long-term planning. This helps Breathworks continue its fantastic work around the world long into the future. It has really helped me to gain a deeper understanding of the breadth and depth of Breathworks’ offering and how well we’re placed to support people living with pain and illness.

Breathworks asked me to write this as a contribution to Pain Awareness Month.

My Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome diagnosis

Although I work in the tech industry, I originally trained in Sport Science and later in Physiotherapy, during which time I was diagnosed with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome. I’d always had pain in my joints as a very active child and was extremely clumsy—often twisting my ankles, bumping into things, and the like—but this was put down to growing pains and being inattentive. It wasn’t until I was training to be a physiotherapist that a lecturer noticed my hypermobility. Learning more about the condition was revelatory—it was like all the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle started to fall into place.

At that point, I wasn’t especially impacted by my hypermobility other than joint pain after exercise, so I just got on with my life. It wasn’t until a few years later that I really started to have problems, which began with thumb and wrist pain, escalating into shoulder and back pain, and then a complete health crash. For the first time in my life, I was signed off sick for over a month and told to completely rest. It was a debilitating time—my joints were all extremely sore, I had barely enough energy to get up and down the stairs in my house, and my mood as a result hit absolute rock bottom.

Everything that I had considered made me, me, was suddenly taken away from me. I was young, relatively active and healthy, and then I wasn’t. I was an instructor and assessor for the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award expedition section, and suddenly I couldn’t even walk to the end of my road, let alone be responsible for the safety of young people on a mountain. I did long-distance walks over several weeks up and down mountains, and now I couldn’t even cope with a flight of stairs. It was frightening to experience the physical crash, but even more so the feeling of being completely at sea when it came to who I now was if those things were no more.

Discovering mindfulness for Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome

Around this time, I came across the core teachings that Breathworks shares with the world—the second arrow, noticing how I was getting caught up in fear and anxiety about what might be rather than allowing myself to be with what is, and the practice of loving-kindness towards myself and my body, in particular. While there were some teachings that took a while to sink in—I think sometimes you really need to be ready to ‘hear’ them—little by little I started to notice that if I paid attention to my mental states and really got curious about them rather than just being consumed by them, I could actually work to change them.

This was such a lightbulb moment for me, particularly learning about the four right efforts—working to cultivate positive mental states and support their maintenance, and working to eradicate negative mental states and the conditions that lead to them arising.

My Ehlers-Danlos recovery journey

I realised I had to take some proactive steps to break the perpetual cycle of ‘boom and bust’ that I found myself in, both in terms of pain cycles but also in terms of available energy. It took me over a year to fully be on board with the decision to start using a wheelchair, which would allow my body to physically rest so that I could create the conditions for me to work on developing my strength, to support my joints, and to reduce the pain in my joints.

I felt like I had to come to that decision fully integrated with my whole being behind it because if I had any doubts at all, I would just fall into despondency. Instead, I focused on seeing it as a positive step that would enable me to heal my body and support future recovery.

It took oodles of compassion towards myself, and a lot of support from close friends and colleagues, but it really did make a profound difference and was the first step towards recovery.

Learning to train with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome

With the energy that this unlocked, I was able to find a trainer who specialised in working with people who had disabilities, and we started right at the basics—sit to stand, side lunges holding a chair, walking and then jogging from one side of the tennis court to the other, and eventually managing the long length, and then graduating to laps. It took over a year before I was able to keep going for more than 5 minutes, but the progress was steady and sustainable. My primary goal was to avoid flare-ups—the physical side was secondary to that at all times.

My ‘pie in the sky’ goal, which I set on the first day with that trainer—although I secretly believed it would never be possible but she made me dream it anyway—was to run a 5k. It took several years, but on 30 June 2017, I did my first ever 5k run in just over 43 minutes, and on 12 May 2018, I completed my first ever race in 39 minutes. I was the last person over the line, but I got to ring the Personal Best bell and was utterly delighted!

Over the next years, I gradually gained more confidence with strength and conditioning training, which is the most important thing for living with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, as it means your muscles are better equipped to take up the slack from the weaker connective tissue. I also developed something of a passion for running. I found my body and mind much preferred longer, slower runs to short, faster 5k races, so I started to wonder how to extend the distance safely.

Training for my first long-distance race

Coming up to the pandemic, I was training for my first-ever half-marathon, but after contracting COVID-19 in March 2020 and suffering a lot of problems with my breathing for several months, that was shelved until 2022 when I had the chance to run solo in a 24-hour event called Endure24. It’s a 5-mile off-road hilly circuit which you can do as many or as few times as you like in a 24-hour period, at your own pace, stopping when you want. It fit perfectly with caring for my body and going at my own pace with my own goals, so in 2022 I found myself doing my first-ever long-distance race.

Of course, it’s not sensible to embark on a 24-hour run (or indeed any kind of run) without doing any training, so I researched various plans and ended up following one by MyProCoach, which really emphasised the principles of 80/20 training—80% of your training in zone 2 (of your heart rate zones), and 20% above that—which I found my body tolerated the best (and is backed up by a lot of scientific research). It also emphasised the importance of strength training. The plan gradually increased the mileage and had regular fitness tests which allowed it to adapt to my improving fitness. I started formal training in November by doing a mile a day (which is about 15 minutes of running for me) for 40 days, which got me back into the regularity of running and got me through the winter months. Then in January, I started the 6-month training plan and come race day, I managed to do 40 miles!

Fundraising for Breathworks

I had such an amazing experience at Endure24 2022 that I decided to do it all again, this time fundraising to support Breathworks. So, in 2024 I started the training, again following a plan from MyProCoach.

I’d planned to run in 2023 but injured my shoulder in the gym, which resulted in a frozen shoulder, so I had to delay until 2024. Then towards the end of 2023, I fell and badly broke my opposite wrist, which needed surgery and a lengthy recovery. It was a little bit touch-and-go as to whether I’d be able to fit the training in due to the injury, but we managed it with lots of modifications!

Dealing with bumps in the road

With EDS, if you want to train consistently, you’re always having to make modifications and customisations because you’re pretty much always carrying an injury, a painful joint, or have aching parts of your body. Thankfully, throughout all the injuries, my running coach was able to shift my running training to cycling when I wasn’t able to run, and my Personal Trainer had great fun coming up with creative ways to do leg and core days every week when my upper body was out of action!

Past me would have been absolutely devastated, but I just allowed myself to experience that sadness and frustration at being injured, and worked on reframing the experience as a bump in the road that slowed me down but did not stop me from reaching my goal—it would just take a bit longer to get there.

Endure24 Race Day

Going into the race is always a real feeling of elation—I had made it to the start line after all the challenges, injuries, and difficulties. I’d done the hard work, now was the time to enjoy it. And also a slight apprehension about what lay ahead. Twenty-four hours is a long time, and anything can happen! I’d had a problem with my Achilles tendon in the month before the race, so I’d only actually run at most 13 miles, as I’d missed most of my long runs so that I didn’t further aggravate it. How was I going to manage to do 50 miles?!

Probably the biggest challenge on a 24-hour run is when it starts to get painful. You’re going to experience pain at some point, and it’s important to get familiar enough with your body and have a strong enough practice of mindfulness so that you can recognise the difference between the inevitable discomfort of ‘I’ve been running for a long time’ and the pain of ‘my body has something wrong and I need to do something about it’.

With the former, I have to work with my mind and just keep myself going—whether that’s by listening to podcasts or audiobooks or my favourite playlists, phoning a friend (I had a wonderful WhatsApp group this year who were amazing at 3 am when I was contemplating ducking out of the last 10 miles!) or my personal favourite of eating a bunch of high-sugar, incredibly sour sweets at 4 am to give me a kick!

I did experience worsening knee pain from 30 miles into the race, but I was fairly sure it was a flare-up of an old complaint, so I taped it heavily, allowed myself to switch from running to run/walk/run and eventually speed walking with poles for support, which enabled me to keep going.

Working with the mind

One of my running coaches from the early days used to say that running is 80% mental and only 20% physical, and this is especially true for endurance running. Working with my mind has been so important. I had a really strong visualisation of myself toeing the line in the starting pen at the event, experiencing how it would feel—and that literally got me out of bed many mornings knowing that I had committed to it, that I would not get there without putting in the effort.

I also find that when I am just having to keep going, just keep putting one foot in front of the other, listening to my body and making sure I was giving it what it needed, it was like a 24-hour-long meditative experience. There were times of absolute, utter stillness and blissful experiences just plodding along fully connected with my body and the world around me.

Coming over one particular section at 2 am and seeing horizon-to-horizon stars moved me so deeply, such a deep feeling of interconnectedness and awareness of reality as it truly is—like getting a tiny crack of a glimpse into something that is just unimaginable in its scale and beauty. Of course, there are also times when you get to Heartbreak Hill for the 7th time knowing you’ve got 3 more to go, when the mind is decidedly less positively engaged, but that’s also an opportunity for working with those mental states, too!

Going after my goals

My goals for the race were to keep going throughout the night, and to hit a total of 50 miles—10 laps of the circuit. It was quite an ambitious goal for me, especially as this year I was unsupported so I had to sort out all my own fuel, kit changes and motivation!

I did the first 20 miles without much of a break, and stopped to change into my winter clothes at around 9 pm when it started to get cold—I ended up doing the 3 am lap with a hoodie on top as it got below freezing that night! By the early hours, I had equalled the previous total of 40 miles and it was time for a kit change again. I allowed myself a 30-minute break (setting my alarm so I didn’t end up wasting too much time or falling asleep!) and was seriously considering calling it quits, but thanks to some virtual encouragement I got back out on the trail and clocked up another two laps, mostly walking by that time as my knee was quite sore on the (numerous) up and downhill sections!

Coming over the line and having hit 50 miles, hearing that shouted out over the loudspeaker and also shouting that I was fundraising for Breathworks, and a big cheer erupting from everybody was a moment I won’t forget. What an achievement—50 long miles!

I’m really proud that we managed to raise £793 so far, including Gift Aid, which goes towards supporting Breathworks in being able to support people living with pain and illness. If you’d like to make a donation, you can do that via the fundraising page here.

Future plans

In terms of future plans for similar events, my body generally needs quite some time to fully recover from an ultramarathon, so it’s at least 3 months before I do any kind of running, and even then it’s just very gentle—usually I switch to strength and other fun cardio activities like classes, which I can’t do when I’m in a training plan because it leads to overtraining.

I won’t be doing an ultramarathon next year because I have some large chunks of time where I probably can’t train due to other commitments, but perhaps in 2026 I’ll have another go! I really love the camaraderie and the atmosphere at the longer 24-hour races, but I might try an ‘A to B’ race rather than a circuit, just to experience the difference, or maybe something like a duathlon which involves running, cycling and then running again.

Four ancient principles every open source leader can benefit from implementing

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Fri, 28 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Open source communities face unique challenges. Distributed teams, volunteer contributors, competing priorities, and the constant balance between technical excellence and human connection make leading these projects particularly complex. As the Project Lead for Mautic, I’ve often found myself searching for frameworks that address these multifaceted challenges.

I was surprised to find such relevant guidance in ancient Buddhist teachings dating back nearly 2,000 years.

The Four Samgrahavastus (means of unification of the Sangha - the spiritual community) were documented by Nagarjuna around 200 CE as advice to a king on how to unify and sustain a thriving community. Despite the vast technological changes since then, these core principles remain remarkably relevant for today’s open source leaders. I’ve found them to be practical tools for addressing our most persistent community challenges.

The Four Samgrahavastus

1. Generosity (Dana) - the foundation of contribution

In open source, much of our focus is on code contributions - people submitting bug fixes, features, improvements and the like. Generosity extends far beyond code, however. True dana involves creating an environment where multiple forms of giving are both recognised and valued, and where it’s become a positive act that is part of the culture because people want to support each other to grow and thrive.

This might include low- and no-code contributions such as technical writing, mentoring new contributors, answering questions in support channels, managing social media, supporting marketing and even the financial aspect of contributing money to ensure the ongoing stability of the open source project.

I’ve spoken quite a bit about how we try to recognise, reward and celebrate such contributions from both individuals and organisations at Mautic, because often they’re hidden from view and people don’t always feel that their generosity is recognised.

I’ve intentionally tried to cultivate that culture within our community of helping each other succeed and over time, it’s really paid off. We see people sharing tutorials of how they’ve managed to resolve a tricky situation in their infrastructure, writing up how they set up their tooling to optimise performance, and sharing widely in conference talks and articles to help others. We’re also gradually increasing the number of organisations and individuals who contribute financially to our project, enabling us to continue to grow and thrive.

2. Kind speech (Priyavadita) - communication as community infrastructure

Communication patterns shape community more powerfully than any technical decision. In distributed open source teams, where text-based communication lacks tone and body language, how we speak becomes even more critical. It’s even more critical because those relationships really are the fundamental infrastructure of any open source project and where they break down, the foundations of a project can be at risk of crumbling.

How do we provide technical critique without discouraging contribution? How do we address the inevitable arising of conflict between passionate people and address disagreements while preserving relationships? How do we create psychological safety across timezones and cultures while communicating asynchronously? My take on this is to always approach communication with kindness.

The Buddhist principle of kind speech doesn’t mean avoiding difficult conversations - in fact quite the opposite. It means having them in ways that preserve dignity, respect and relationships. At Mautic, we’ve developed specific practices around code review language, issue templates, and discussion facilitation that embody this principle, and our leaders are encouraged and supported to actively model the communication we want to see in the community. We’ve also given specific examples of expected behaviours and unacceptable behaviours to help people put the intangible ‘speak kindly’ into more practical, concrete terms which really helps with exploring instances of unkind speech or actions. As Project Lead, I take speaking with kindness quite seriously, because I’m the person who sets the culture, so it follows that I should also be exemplifying that behaviour.

I’m by no means perfect at kindly speech and nor do I expect any leader to be - we’re all subject to the conditions of life, after all. I do, however, always try to notice if my communication slips out of kindly speech and do whatever I can, as soon as possible, to make amends and apologise. I’m getting much better at noticing the conditions that lead to these slip-ups and taking proactive steps to address them when I’m sliding down the slippery slope of (most often) grumpiness!

3. Beneficial activity (Arthacarya) - strategic impact in community work

With limited resources and endless possibilities, open source leaders must constantly prioritise. Arthacarya isn’t just about being helpful, it’s about discerning what would truly benefit the community at the deepest level rather than what they want or what seems immediately needed.

How do we evaluate which initiatives will have the most meaningful impact? What’s going to be more beneficial, clearing down technical debt or adding another shiny new feature? Should we invest our time in empowering and mentoring others, or just getting things done because it’s quicker and easier?

Often I find that there’s more to be done than people who can do it (a common thing in open source!), and what benefits most of all can simply be helping people to get unblocked, sparking off and maintaining their inspiration and enthusiasm, getting out of the way, and helping them to get going with contributing in the areas that they are passionate about.

I do find prioritising challenging as it can be so subjective. What one person sees as the most beneficial activity for you to be working on as a a leader in open source, another might completely disagree with. People often come to the table with a vested interest in certain outcomes, and as leaders of open source projects we have to balance what the project needs against what third party stakeholders want or expect.

When a shiny new thing comes on the scene (looking at you, AI 👀) do you immediately disregard all the work you’ve been doing on establishing a stable base and implementing features that are fundamental to longer term goals, in pursuit of ‘keeping up with the Jones’', or focus on what’s already on the table? It’s a tough one!

While you can of course hold strategic workshops and plan to the n’th degree, sometimes knowing what’s going to have the biggest impact and be the most beneficial can be a deeply intuitive sense, and being able to honour that and communicate from that place of depth can be challenging in the face of the latest and greatest shiny, sparkly things that people are asking for.

4. Exemplification (Samanarthata) - authentic leadership in open source

Perhaps the most challenging of the four Samgrahavastus is the final one - exemplification, or ‘practicing what you preach’. In open source where authority is often earned rather than imposed, alignment between words and actions is essential. Many of the leaders I meet across the open source ecosystem are some of the most authentic people I know.

In open source, we work transparently in the public domain, we learn from each other and grow together. We have to share our thought processes, acknowledge our limitations and know where the edges of our knowledge lies, often having those pointed out to us in ways that might land painfully. In addition to that, when we fail or make a mistake, which inevitably we do, we do so publicly. These principles have guided how I approach leadership in Mautic and in particular around transparency of decision making, clarity on governance and power structures, and exemplifying the values that our Code of Conduct are based upon.

Exemplification to me means both ensuring that you’re a living, breathing example of your culture, but also that you’re proactive in addressing and supporting folks who are behaving in ways that don’t align with those values, while also upholding them. This can be quite challenging, especially in conflict-driven situations, and it’s certainly something that’s a lifelong practice for me.

As with kind speech, there are times where I fall below the bar I set for myself when it comes to exemplification, something that can be really painful to admit and equally painful to address. Being willing to be vulnerable, to accept that things didn’t quite go how we’d have expected ourselves to behave, and making amends can also be a great opportunity for growth. A way of recognising where we have set our bar, acknowledging that we missed it somehow, and committing to try to be better next time.

Conclusion

As we navigate the complex landscape of open source leadership, the Four Samgrahavastus offer us more than philosophical concepts - I think that they provide practical tools for addressing some of our most persistent challenges.

These principles remind us that despite all our technological advancements, community building remains fundamentally human. When we practice generosity by recognising diverse contributions, employ kind speech in our communications, engage in truly beneficial activities that empower others, and exemplify our values through consistent action, we create the conditions for sustainable, thriving communities.

The beauty of these ancient principles lies in their adaptability. They don’t prescribe specific structures or processes, instead they offer a framework that each community can interpret according to its unique context and needs. A small documentation project might express generosity through comprehensive onboarding, while a large foundation might implement formal recognition programs. Both embody the same fundamental principle.

Perhaps most importantly, these principles integrate personal practice with community leadership. By cultivating these qualities in ourselves - our own generosity, communication patterns, discernment of what’s truly beneficial, and alignment between words and actions - we naturally become more effective leaders. There is no separation between developing ourselves and developing our communities.

As open source continues to shape our digital landscape, we face unprecedented opportunities and challenges. The technical problems will evolve, but the human dynamics will remain remarkably consistent. By grounding our leadership in these timeless principles, we can build communities that are not just productive but deeply fulfilling - communities that embody the very best of what open source represents: collaboration, transparency, and shared purpose.

I invite each of you to consider how these four pillars might address a specific challenge you’re facing in your own community work. Which principle speaks most directly to your current situation? What small, concrete step might you take to embody that principle more fully in your leadership practice?

The wisdom that guided communities 2,500 years ago still has much to teach us today. As we face the future of open source together, these ancient pillars offer a foundation that can support us through whatever challenges lie ahead.

In the meantime, I’d love to hear your thoughts: Which of these four principles resonates most with your experience in open source communities? What other timeless wisdom have you found valuable in your community work?

Cultivating non-harm and kindness in Open Source leadership

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Thu, 15 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In my last post, I explored the Four Samgrahavastus – ancient Buddhist principles for unifying a community that I’ve found to be super relevant to leading open source projects like Mautic. The positive response encouraged me to delve deeper into Buddhist ethics for practical wisdom applicable to our unique challenges in the world of open source.

I’ve just returned from a two-week retreat where I was focusing more deeply on the Buddhist teachings of Ethics, so today, I want to zoom in on perhaps the most fundamental principle of all: the First Precept.

Traditionally formulated as ‘Abstention from killing living beings’, this might initially seem somewhat irrelevant to our daily work in code and community. However, its essence - non-harm (ahimsa) and the positive counterpart of the precept, which is cultivation of loving-kindness (mettā) - forms the bedrock upon which sustainable and thriving communities are built.

It’s what the founder of the Triratna Buddhist Community where I practice called the ‘pillar of diamond’ - precious, strong, brilliant, and foundational.

The first precept: non-harm (ahimsa) and loving-kindness (mettā)

At its core, this precept asks us to refrain from actions - of body, speech, or mind - that cause harm. In Buddhist thought, harm doesn’t just cover physical violence; it’s any behaviour which is rooted in unskillful mental states like greed, hatred, and ignorance. Actions driven by these states inevitably create suffering, both for others and, of course, for ourselves.

Conversely, the positive aspect involves cultivating mettā - not romantic love, but what Sangharakshita described as a ‘cherishing, protecting, maturing love’. It’s about actively wishing well for others and operating from a ‘love mode’ based on appreciative solidarity, rather than a ‘power mode’ focused on control and dominance.

How does this ancient ‘Diamond Pillar’ of ethical practice underpin the complex operations involved in leading a modern open source project?

Preventing harm in communication and action

The most direct application lies in how we interact. Open source communities - often passionate and most always (at least, in my experience!) opinionated - can sometimes become environments where harsh words fly, egos clash, and contributors feel attacked or excluded. This is especially the case since most of us are working mostly, if not always, fully remotely and asynchronously across multiple cultures, timezones and languages.

Adhering to the principle of non-harm at the surface level means consciously avoiding:

Abusive, harassing, or demeaning language in code reviews, issue trackers, forums, or chat.
Public shaming or personal attacks.
Creating an atmosphere where people feel unsafe to speak up or make mistakes.

This should really be covered directly within your project’s Code of Conduct of course, but the first precept encourages us to go deeper than mere compliance with the rules. This is especially the case for leaders who are setting the culture, and therefore need to be exemplifying these principles.

When working with a precept, it asks us to examine the intention behind our communication and not just the actual words that come out of our mouth or through the keybord.

Are we trying to help, or to assert dominance?

Are we offering feedback constructively, or venting frustration?

Are we genuinely being kind and constructive in our feedback, or are our words laced with undercurrents that are undermining someone’s confidence?

There’s more times than I care to admit where I’ve written out a response to a forum post or a GitHub thread and had to step away from the computer, get a cuppa and completely re-write what I’ve written because it was just a big old moan fest instead of actually listening to the contributor and being constructively supportive.

Harm in open source isn’t limited to direct interpersonal conflict, however. It can also manifest as:

Contributor burnout: Pushing volunteers too hard, setting unrealistic expectations, or failing to appreciate contributions can cause significant mental and emotional harm.
Neglecting well-being: Creating a culture where overwork (by yourself as a leader, those you lead, and/or your volunteers) is glorified, harms individuals and can put at risk the long-term health of the project. It’s easy to slide into this territory if you rely on volunteers contributing in their ‘spare time’ who might already be working a full week with their day job.
Technical Harm: Releasing insecure code, creating systems with inherent biases, or choosing technologies with significant negative environmental impacts (like energy-hungry blockchains or inefficient use of resources like CI/CD pipelines where there are other, more efficient options available) can cause widespread harm, even if unintentional.

Actively cultivating kindness (Mettā)

The First Precept isn’t just about not harming; it’s much more about actively cultivating kindness and care. In Mautic, this translates to:

Welcoming Newcomers: We try to ensure that we create a genuinely friendly and supportive onboarding experiences.
Mentorship: We’re working on investing the time in nurturing the skills and confidence of others through buddying up with new contributors, joining projects like Google Summer of Code, Season of Docs, and hopefully this year, Outreachy.
Constructive Feedback: We try to frame critique in ways that encourage growth, not discouragement - especially with newer contributors who are still finding their feet. (This links closely to Priyavadita, Kind Speech, from the Samgrahavastus).
Appreciation: I regularly and publicly acknowledge contributions of all kinds, and send personal notecards and stickers to people when they first contribute to Mautic. (linking to Dana, or generosity, from the Samgrahavastus).
Psychological Safety: We’re trying to build an environment where diverse perspectives are valued and people feel safe to experiment and learn. This is only sustainable when you have a diverse range of people who are in positions of power and can help to establish and maintain the needed conditions. We’re definitely on a journey with this, still having quite a white-male-heavy leadership.
Considering Impact: We are trying to make conscious choices about technology and features with an awareness of their potential impact on users and the wider world - for example trying to optimise our code, reduce unnecessary reliance on infrastructure, etc.

Building a culture of kindness means fostering an environment where everyone is encouraged to genuinely support the thriving of contributors, users, and the project. In Mautic, we’ve called this value ‘helping everyone to succeed with Mautic’. This sees people supporting each other even if they might be at companies who are technically rivals, folks sharing how-to and tutorial guides to help others do something which they do as a company as best practice, and a willingness to jump in and help each other with problems.

For this attitude and approach to really take root, it needs to be a shared value, modelled consistently. Importantly, this commitment to kindness operates alongside, not instead of, practical necessities like ensuring the project’s fiscal health and making sound strategic decisions. It reorients us away from seeing interactions solely as transactions (code for kudos) and towards nurturing relationships based on mutual support and collective purpose.

The leadership challenge: walking the diamond path

Living up to this precept as a leader is profoundly challenging. The pressures of release cycles, competing demands, and passionate debates can easily trigger frustration, impatience, or defensiveness – states from which harm readily flows. It’s really easy to slide back into the ‘power mode’ to get things done while riding roughshod over contributors trying to get involved and help out but doing so too slowly or not at the standards you expect. Balancing the need for high standards, timely delivery and critical feedback with genuine kindness requires constant mindfulness.

There have certainly been times when I’ve communicated more harshly than I intended under pressure, or failed to fully consider the impact of a decision on someone’s workload or well-being. Recognising these moments isn’t about self-flagellation; it’s an opportunity to step back and appreciate the reality of cause and effect, making amends where possible, and recommitting to the practice. Understanding why I might slip - tiredness, stress, attachment to an outcome - helps me address the root cause.

Sometimes, leadership also requires difficult actions, like enforcing a Code of Conduct or making a decision that disappoints part of the community. The principle of non-harm doesn’t mean avoiding necessary actions, but undertaking them skilfully, minimising harm, preserving dignity, and ensuring they are ultimately subordinated to the ‘love mode’ - done for the long-term health and benefit of the community, not from anger, frustration, or a desire for control.

Conclusion: kindness as foundational infrastructure

The first precept, the diamond pillar of non-harm and kindness, is not an optional add-on for community health; it is the essential infrastructure. Just as the Four Samgrahavastus provide tools for unification, this precept lays the groundwork upon which everything else is built.

When we commit to minimising harm and actively cultivating kindness in our thoughts, words, and actions, we create communities that are resilient, supportive, and capable of weathering the inevitable storms that frequently batter the world of open source development. This isn’t something that we should consider equating to being ‘nice’ in a superficial way; it’s a deep, ethical commitment rooted in understanding interconnectedness and the consequences of our actions.

Like the other principles I’ve explored, this integrates personal development with leadership. Cultivating our own awareness, compassion, and mindfulness directly translates into leadership that fosters psychological safety and encourages positive collaboration. Our own state of being ripples outwards. We have no way of knowing who those ripples will encounter, or how it will impact them.

As open source leaders, let’s consider:

Where does our community currently stand regarding non-harm and kindness?
What are the subtle (or not-so-subtle) ways harm might be occurring?
What specific, practical steps can we take, individually and collectively, to strengthen this Diamond Pillar in our projects?

I believe that by consciously embedding the principles of non-harm and loving-kindness into our leadership and community culture, we can build open source projects that are not only technically excellent but also deeply humane and truly sustainable.

What are your thoughts? How do you see the principles of non-harm and kindness playing out in your open source experiences? What practices help you cultivate them?

Understanding digital sovereignty - your key to marketing freedom

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Wed, 21 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The world is digital, there’s no getting away from that. The question of who controls our technology infrastructure, data and operations, however, has never been more critical, and it’s something you must not avoid thinking about.

You’ve probably heard terms like digital sovereignty, digital governance and data sovereignty bandied around - the latest buzz words to join the techno-babble that can often feel impenetrable by the mere mortal. Let’s dive into what the fuss is all about, and why these important terms are so important when it comes to your customer data.

What is digital sovereignty?

Put simply, digital sovereignty is the idea that people and nations should have the right and the ability to control their own digital destinies without being dictated to by technology providers. It encompasses both digital governance and data sovereignty, which we’ll get to in a moment.

At its core, digital sovereignty is about control. It represents the organisation’s ability to maintain independent control over its entire digital presence, systems and operations - encompassing both the technological infrastructure and the data that flows through it.

Think of digital sovereignty as your organisation’s capacity to make autonomous decisions about its digital future, without being constrained by vendor roadmaps, proprietary limitations, or external control. It’s the digital equivalent of national sovereignty: the ability to govern yourself, according to your own priorities and values.

In practice, digital sovereignty means having genuine choices about the technologies you deploy, how they operate, and how they can be modified to meet the specific needs of your organisation. It means freedom from dependency on systems you cannot control, inspect or adapt.

What is digital governance?

Digital governance is the regulation and control of operations, policies and infrastructure associated with an organisation or country.

It provides the structure through which digital sovereignty is exercised and maintained. Digital governance encompasses the policies, decision-making processes, accountability mechanisms and operational practices that govern your digital systems and data.

Effective digital governance answers questions like:

Who makes decisions about technology adaptation and implementation?
What standards and requirements guide those decisions?
How are data privacy, security and sovereignty maintained?
What processes ensure compliance with relevant regulations?
How are external dependencies evaluated and managed?

Without robust governance, organisations may achieve technical sovereignty ‘on paper’, while still surrendering effective control through poor decisions, unclear responsibilities and insufficient oversight.

What is data sovereignty?

Data sovereignty is where the ‘rubber meets the road’ for marketers - it’s where your data lives, and what laws apply to it as a result of its physical locations.

It focuses particularly on an organisation’s control over the data it creates and collects. It determines who can access your data, where it’s stored, how it’s processed, and under which legal jurisdictions it falls.

For marketers, data sovereignty is particularly crucial because customer data represents perhaps the most valuable digital asset in your possession. This data comprises of contact information at a basic level, but it can also tell a comprehensive story of how customers interact with your brand across channels over time.

True data sovereignty means:

You decide where the data resides
You control who can access it, and under what conditions
You determine how it’s processed, analysed and acted upon
You can extract complete datasets in standardised formats
You know which legal frameworks govern your data

Without data sovereignty, organisations risk losing control over their customer relationships and becoming dependent on third parties for essential insights about their own audience.

Why should you care?

The regulatory perspective

Regulations currently tend to focus on data sovereignty, and while this is only part of the picture, it represents an essential starting point. The alphabet soup of GDPR, LGPD, CCPA, CPRA, PIPEDA, PDPB and more create a complex global landscape of rules that must be followed when working with an international audience. This is especially critical for marketers, who necessarily capture, analyse and use personally identifiable data.

This regulatory landscape becomes even more complex with laws like the US CLOUD Act, which allows American authorities to compel US-based technology companies to provide requested data regardless of where that data is physically stored, potentially circumventing local privacy laws in other countries.

From this basic regulatory standpoint, in virtually every jurisdiction, organisations must know where their data is stored, who has access to it, and what processes safeguard the transfer of data to countries with potentially different laws regarding data access and protection.

When you’re in control of your data, you can better comply with local regulations, avoiding potential fines and reputation damage.

The issue of digital sovereignty, however, has a far wider impact than just the regulatory perspective.

The human perspective

While compliance with legal requirements is of course an important starting point, there are some deeper ethical reasons as to why you should be taking digital sovereignty seriously.

It’s fundamentally about respecting human dignity and autonomy in the digital sphere.

Some providers are located in countries where sensitive data can be exposed to surveillance or forced disclosure by foreign governments.

Think about journalists in countries with restrictive press laws. Or activists challenging authoritarian regimes. People who’ve had to protect their identity due to stalkers or fleeing domestic violence. Or anyone who relies on privacy to stay safe in a society where they might not be welcome. Their digital footprint can be a liability if it gets into the wrong hands.

When organisations surrender control over their marketing technologies and customer data, they also surrender their ability to uphold meaningful promises to the people they serve. This has profound implications:

A loss of trust and transparency - people increasingly expect to know how their data is being used and who has access to it. Sovereign systems allow you to provide clear, honest answers to these questions and to be in control of making decisions that might result in a change of data usage.
The ability to provide meaningful consent - if you’re bound to technology solutions which cannot function without transferring data outside your sovereign region, you don’t give the user the opportunity to object, because they can’t interact with you in a digital context without giving over their consent.
Determining your own ethical values - in a digitally sovereign setting you can decide to innovate in ways which align with your ethical values, choosing technologies and providers who respect the privacy of your users to your own standards, whereas proprietary and non-sovereign solutions handcuff you to the decisions made by those services.

By maintaining digital sovereignty, organisations can build relationships with customers based on mutual respect rather than exploitation, creating more sustainable and meaningful connections.

The business perspective

Now, let’s talk business. Imagine your entire marketing stack relies on one giant proprietary platform.

What happens when they change their pricing like a big email provider did recently, resulting in a 30% uplift in the fees to use exactly the same software.

Or perhaps your business grows and scales substantially which means you fit into a whole new pricing bracket called ‘Enterprise: please call sales’ and your profit is wiped out almost overnight by the increase in costs and add-ons you now need to deliver the exact same service?

Or worse, what if your provider closes or goes bust, or is acquired by a company in a region which isn’t compatible with your ethical values or data privacy requirements?

Could you move, including all of your customer data, to another platform?

That’s vendor lock-in, and it’s a killer. Vendor lock-in is a slow burn. It starts with convenience, ends with handcuffs.

Proprietary, non-sovereign platforms can hold your data hostage. Open source gives you the keys. You control the code, the deployments, the future. Business resilience is a key driver which is forcing organisations to consider carefully their decisions around digital sovereignty.

Digitally sovereign solutions give you options, flexibility, and control over your digital destiny. It’s about future-proofing your business.

Where do you start?

Digital sovereignty isn’t a destination, it’s a journey. Most organisations can’t transform overnight into a digitally sovereign organisation.

I advocate the application of a three-step process:

Assess your risks

Begin by mapping your current marketing technology landscape and identifying where customer data resides. For each system, determine the physical location of the data, which legal jurisdictions apply, and what level of control you maintain. This assessment will highlight your most significant sovereignty risks and dependencies.

What tools do you use?
Where does your data go?
What countries are involved?
Is that OK with you?

Explore your options

Once you understand your current state, research the alternatives available. These might include self-hosting open source marketing tools like Mautic, working with sovereign cloud providers who respect digital autonomy, or identifying SaaS vendors who offer greater transparency and control than your current providers.

Consider open source alternatives
- Self-hosted on your own in-house infrastructure
- Self-hosted on sovereign hosting solutions
- Sovereign SaaS providers
Determine which parts of your stack are the highest priority to switch
Carry out some disaster recovery tests
- Where are your backups of your core systems, in case your provider disappered?
- How would you restore them?
- What systems could you move to, and how would you migrate your data?

Plan for change

Develop a phased transition plan that prioritises your most critical sovereignty risks. Consider implementing privacy-by-default approaches that minimise unnecessary data collection. Evaluate your ability to export data from current systems and ensure any new solutions provide complete data portability.

Make a long-term plan to transition your infrastructure and tooling
Determine whether the data you capture is actually required.
Transition to privacy-by-default marketing
- Only capture what is purposefully used by your business
- Regularly audit your data and discard data that is not used

Marketers: it’s time to take a stand

As marketing becomes increasingly data-driven, marketers must take a stand for digital sovereignty.

It’s time to demand:

Full transparency about where data resides and how it’s processed
Full access to complete datasets without artificial limitations
Full control over how marketing technologies operate and evolve
Full freedom from vendor lock-in and predatory pricing models

By asserting these demands from your providers, marketers can reclaim control over their most critical relationships and build more ethical, sustainable approaches to customer engagement.

In our next article, we’ll explore the concept of digital colonialism in marketing technology and how it threatens organisations’ ability to maintain genuine relationships with their customers.

Who really owns your customer data? A marketer's guide to digital independence

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Tue, 15 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In my previous article on digital sovereignty, I explored the overarching concept of how organisations can maintain control over their entire digital ecosystem. Today, I want to focus specifically on data sovereignty - arguably the most critical aspect of digital sovereignty for marketers, and the one that impacts businesses of every size, from solo entrepreneurs to global enterprises.

This article is part of a series exploring digital sovereignty in marketing technology. If you missed the first article on the broader concept of digital sovereignty, I recommend starting there for context before diving into the specifics of data sovereignty.

What is data sovereignty, and how does it differ from digital sovereignty?

While digital sovereignty encompasses control over your entire digital presence - including infrastructure, software, and governance - data sovereignty focuses specifically on your most valuable asset - your data.

Data sovereignty is where the rubber meets the road for marketers - it’s about where your data physically lives, who can access it, how it can be used, and crucially, which laws apply to it based on its location.

For marketers, this couldn’t be more important. Every day, we collect, analyse, and act upon customer data that drives our campaigns, informs our strategies, and builds our relationships. But how many of us can confidently answer these questions:

Do you know exactly which countries your customer data is stored in?
Are you aware of which legal jurisdictions have authority over that data?
Can you access and export your complete customer dataset (not just contacts and company, but all their activity data, too) if needed?
Do you control how your data is processed and used?

If you’re hesitating on any of these questions, you’re not alone - and that’s precisely why we need to talk about data sovereignty.

Why data sovereignty matters: different stakes for different business sizes

The small business perspective

For small businesses, data sovereignty often feels like a ‘big company problem.’ After all, when you’re wearing multiple hats and stretching limited resources, worrying about where your marketing data physically resides seems somewhat abstract compared to generating leads and making sales.

Small businesses, however, actually have the most to lose from ignoring data sovereignty (and trust me, I know this first hand and have directly felt the pain myself!)

When I was building my first email marketing list years ago, I chose a popular ‘free’ email marketing tool. It wasn’t until I needed to migrate to a more sophisticated platform that I discovered the harsh reality: I couldn’t export my subscribers’ engagement history - only their basic information. Months of valuable data about which content resonated with my audience was effectively held hostage.

Small businesses also, in my experience, tend to need to move marketing tools more often.

You might not always know what you want when you first start dipping a toe into marketing.

You may think you’ll be fine with 500 contacts, but then you have a great trade show and suddenly you’re faced with a big bill to keep using the tool that was pitched as free and convenient for small business. What’s more, now you fear moving elsewhere because the lack of portability of your data combined with the time it’s going to take to rebuild that customer dataset elsewhere means it’s going to be a painful process, so you just cough up the extra money to stay where you are, which just wiped out any profit from your growth.

For small businesses, data sovereignty issues manifest in practical ways:

Limited ability to switch marketing tools without losing valuable data
Unexpected changes to terms of service that affect how you can use your data
Potential exposure to foreign laws that could compromise customer privacy
Difficulty complying with regulations when you don’t fully control your data

Even with limited resources, small businesses can take meaningful steps toward data sovereignty, which we’ll cover shortly.

Mid-market challenges

Mid-sized businesses face a more complex data sovereignty landscape. Their marketing technology stacks have typically grown into a sprawling, sometimes weed-infested garden including multiple tools - email platforms, CRMs, analytics solutions, advertising tools, social media managers - each with its own data practices and storage locations.

This fragmentation creates significant data sovereignty challenges:

Inconsistent data governance across different platforms
Difficulty tracking where all customer data resides
Compliance complexity when different tools follow different standards
The hidden costs of maintaining and reconciling data across systems

For mid-market businesses, data sovereignty is as much about efficiency as it is about control. When your customer data is fragmented across tools with varying levels of data portability, you waste valuable time and resources just trying to create a unified view of your customers and moving data between tools.

I’ve worked with several growing businesses in the past that discovered they were paying many times over for customer data management - once for the various tools that collected the data, again for integration platforms to connect them all due to a lack of built-in connectivity, and a third time in staff hours spent reconciling conflicts and gaps.

Enterprise-level implications

For enterprises, data sovereignty takes on strategic importance beyond mere compliance. Large organisations face:

Substantial regulatory exposure across multiple jurisdictions
Significant financial risks from potential fines, often based on % turnover
Complex vendor landscapes with varying data sovereignty standards
Strategic disadvantages when competitors have better data control

It’s not unheard of for an audit to discover that customer data was being processed in 10+ different countries - several of which probably have laws allowing government access without notification. This can create not just compliance risks but potential competitive disadvantages if sensitive information about their marketing strategy or customer base were to be compromised.

For enterprises, data sovereignty is fast becoming a strategic imperative that affects everything from regulatory compliance to competitive positioning.

The marketing technology stack

Marketing technology presents unique data sovereignty challenges because it’s so fundamental to customer relationships. Let’s examine common sovereignty weak points in the typical marketing stack:

Email marketing platforms

Many popular email marketing tools store data in regions subject to laws like the US CLOUD Act, which allows American authorities to compel US-based companies (or any company from anywhere in the world which has a physical base in US territory) to provide data regardless of where it’s physically stored. This creates a data sovereignty conflict with regulations like GDPR.

CRM systems

Customer relationship management systems often become central repositories of valuable data, but many offer limited export capabilities, creating lock-in that undermines data sovereignty. I’ve seen organisations trapped with outdated CRM systems simply because extracting their complete customer history was nearly impossible, and their business would be severely impacted without it.

Marketing automation

Automation platforms typically have deep access to customer behaviour data across multiple channels. This creates significant data sovereignty implications when these platforms are cloud-based and store your automation rules, segments, and engagement data on their servers, rather than yours, or in countries that don’t align with your corporate values when it comes to data sovereignty.

Analytics solutions

Web analytics tools collect detailed information about how users interact with your digital properties. Many popular solutions transmit this data to servers in jurisdictions that may have conflicting privacy frameworks with your own country’s laws.

Advertising platforms

The advertising ecosystem is particularly challenging for data sovereignty because data often flows through multiple intermediaries before reaching its destination. Many marketers have limited visibility into where their customer data goes after it enters the advertising ecosystem.

Practical steps to improve data sovereignty in your marketing

While this might seem like a bit of a scary, daunting thing to address, there are practical steps that you can take in order to improve data sovereignty in your marketing operations.

Audit your marketing technology stack

Start by creating a comprehensive inventory of all the tools you use to collect, store, or process customer data. For each tool, document:

Where data is physically stored (which countries)
What types of data are collected
Whether complete data export is possible
Which regulations apply to data in those locations

It is likely that you already have some of this put together if you’re a Data Controller for the purposes of complying with the GDPR. If you don’t yet have it, I recommend creating a simple spreadsheet with these columns, as the exercise often reveals surprising gaps in knowledge about your marketing data.

Develop a data portability strategy

For each critical marketing system, develop a clear understanding of how you would extract your data if needed, and where you’d migrate to if your tool stopped working. This includes:

Testing export capabilities to ensure they work as expected
Documenting the format and completeness of exported data
Identifying potential destination systems for data migration
Establishing regular data backup procedures for critical information, outside of the infrastructure of your current tool (and in a location you own)

It’s not just a theoretical exercise that you do once and then sits on a shelf, I really recommend you try once a year, even if it’s just a ‘dry run’, to migrate from your current system to another system and see what the gaps are in your data and your processes. It’s sometimes been the case that organisations have had to migrate from their marketing automation platform with just 30 days’ notice when their vendor was acquired. Having a data portability strategy in place made a chaotic situation manageable.

Consider open source alternatives in your procurement processes

Open source marketing tools offer a compelling path to data sovereignty because they can be self-hosted or deployed with hosting providers in your preferred jurisdiction. This gives you full control over where your data resides and how it’s protected.

Tools like Mautic for marketing automation, Matomo for analytics, and other open source marketing technologies allow you to maintain control of your data while still accessing sophisticated marketing capabilities.

I’ve seen organisations of all sizes benefit from adopting open source marketing technologies, from solo entrepreneurs who value the control and cost-effectiveness to enterprises that appreciate the ability to modify and extend these tools to meet their specific requirements.

Ask the right question of vendors

When evaluating new marketing technology vendors, ask pointed questions about data sovereignty:

Where exactly will our data be stored?
Which jurisdictions and laws will apply to our data?
Can we specify data storage locations to meet our regulatory requirements?
What is your process for responding to government data requests?
How complete is your data export functionality?
What happens to our data if we terminate the service?

The answers to these questions should be documented and factored into your decision-making process.

The data sovereignty checklist for marketers

To assess your current level of data sovereignty, ask yourself these critical questions:

Can you export ALL your data? Not just basic information, but the complete dataset including historical interactions, custom fields, and derived insights
Do you know exactly where your data is stored? Not just ‘in the cloud’ but the specific countries and jurisdictions where it physically resides
Can you modify how your data is used? Do you have control over processing, retention, and usage policies, or are you bound by the vendor’s standard practices?
Are you reliant on a single vendor’s ecosystem? Having all your marketing technology from one provider might seem convenient but often creates significant sovereignty risks.
Do you have direct database access when needed? For critical marketing systems, direct database access can be essential for data sovereignty.
Are your terms of service stable and favourable? Frequent changes to terms that govern your data usage can undermine sovereignty.

Taking control of your marketing data

Data sovereignty is about maintaining practical control over your most valuable marketing asset: your customer data. By taking deliberate steps to improve data sovereignty, marketers of all sizes can build more resilient, compliant, and effective marketing operations.

In my experience helping organisations implement Mautic and other open source marketing technologies, I’ve seen firsthand how liberating it can be to regain control over marketing data. Teams become more innovative when they’re not constrained by vendor limitations, compliance becomes simpler when data storage is transparent, and customer relationships improve when data isn’t fragmented across disconnected systems.

Data sovereignty is a journey, not a destination.

Share thisX Bluesky LinkedIn

Each step you take toward greater control of your marketing data builds resilience and capability within your organisation.

In my next article, I’ll explore the concept of digital colonialism in marketing technology and introduce the Sovereignty Spectrum - a framework for assessing your current level of digital independence and planning a path toward greater self-determination.

What steps have you taken to improve data sovereignty in your marketing operations? I’d love to hear your experiences in the comments below.

Digital colonialism and how your marketing stack is surrendering your business sovereignty

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Tue, 15 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In my previous articles on digital sovereignty and data sovereignty in the marketing technology landscape I established the foundations for understanding control over your digital assets and data. Today, I want to examine a more profound challenge facing businesses: how digital colonialism directly impacts your marketing technology stack and, consequently, your ability to maintain genuine relationships with your customers.

Before we explore how digital colonialism manifests in your marketing technology stack, it’s important to understand the concept itself and why it matters to marketers specifically.

What is digital colonialism?

Digital colonialism refers to a power structure where technology corporations - primarily from the Global North - establish control over digital ecosystems worldwide, extracting value from users’ data while imposing their technological standards, business models, and cultural values.

Just as traditional colonialism involved the occupation of physical territories and extraction of resources by foreign powers, digital colonialism describes the domination of digital spaces and the extraction of data resources across borders and cultures.

As scholar Michael Kwet explains in his influential work on the subject, digital colonialism functions through the control of the digital ecosystem:

_“The domination of sectors like cloud computing, search engines, and social media by a handful of corporations based in one region creates a situation where they can exercise imperial control over the digital lives of billions” _(Kwet, 2019)

Understanding digital colonialism in marketing

I first encountered the concept of digital colonialism a while ago in a great write up here, and it really lit a fuse in my brain at how easily we become sucked into convenience over thinking through the implications of our decisions when it comes to marketing technology.

My experience has been that when most businesses evaluate marketing technologies, they focus on features, integrations, and immediate ROI, but this approach misses something fundamental. Ultimately, your marketing stack is a system that will dictate how you engage with your most valuable asset: your customer relationships. It’s not just a bunch of tools that you pick to solve a problem. but that’s how we tend to look at it.

This shift in perspective is crucial. The marketing platforms you select aren’t neutral tools but systems that impose specific operational logics on your business.

They determine:

What customer data you can access and analyse
How you’re permitted to segment and target your audience
Which engagement strategies are possible and which are not
How your marketing performance is measured and evaluated

When seen through this lens, selecting Marketo over Mautic, HubSpot over SuiteCRM, or Google Analytics over Matomo has the potential to fundamentally restrict or empower you in your engagement with your customers not just now, but for many years into the future.

The insidious creep of digital colonisation through marketing technology

The colonisation of marketing technology doesn’t happen through force or coercion. Instead, it happens gradually through seemingly rational decisions that prioritise convenience over control, immediate capability over long-term autonomy, and familiar interfaces over fundamental freedoms. And guess what, I’m as guilty as anybody for taking convenience over control, and it’s something I’m working to claw back from.

From my own experience, this process typically follows a pattern:

Phase 1 - entry through convenience

I like to call this ‘I haven’t even got the time to <insert phrase> let alone <insert phrase>’ rationale. See also to extremely common ‘Nobody ever got fired for buying <insert vendor>’.

Proprietary marketing platforms make their way into organisations by purporting to be offering immediate solutions to pressing problems with minimal effort to adopt. The initial value proposition is compelling, of course. Sophisticated capabilities, pretty eye candy design, persuasive sales techniques, all for the simple process of giving a credit card or signing a contract.

I’ve seen this countless times (and done it myself, too) - marketing team faces pressure to deliver results quickly, and the path of least resistance leads to adopting a SaaS platform that promises immediate effectiveness with minimal setup. The decision seems entirely logical at the time.

Phase 2 - data accumulation and dependency

As organisations use these platforms, they accumulate valuable customer data within them. Simultaneously, teams build processes, skills, and institutional knowledge around the platform’s specific approach and interface.

This creates two powerful forces that cement dependency:

Data gravity

The growing volume and customisation of data makes migration increasingly difficult, if not impossible, depending on the portability that is offered by the system. This is further deepened by vendors who bring businesses into their ecosystem with an enticing free tool, and then aggressively up-sell and cross-sell other tools, effectively locking companies into their ecosystem across multiple areas of the business.

Capability lock-in

Staff expertise becomes tied to the specific platform rather than underlying marketing principles, they know how to do <insert task> in <insert vendor>'s tool and they know what that tool allows them to do, rather than thinking about what they should/want to be able to do as marketers.

These can have some pretty impactful effects on a business. If you don’t have full access to your data, migrating would mean losing your entire customer engagement history. The cost here is more than just the technical cost to migrate, it’s also in the loss of insights that often drives your entire marketing strategy.

Phase 3 - extraction and control

Once dependency is established, the balance of power shifts decisively. Vendors can extract increasing value through:

Rising subscription costs with minimal resistance
Charging for features that you might not need or want, but can’t opt of out paying for (hello ‘All the AI things’)
Limiting data portability to prevent migration to other systems
Controlling which features are developed based on their interests, not yours
Determining which third-party integrations are permitted which might not align with your region’s technology tools
Imposing their privacy and data processing practices (and changes that they make after you sign up) on your operations

The parallels to traditional colonialism become evident: resources (data) are extracted from the colonised (organisations) who have limited ability to resist or govern themselves under the system established by the colonisers (proprietary platforms).

The business impact of digital colonialism in marketing

While I do not profess to be an expert in economics, it’s clear that the impact of digital colonialism in marketing are significant, however I think that the consequences extend far beyond financial considerations.

Loss of competitive differentiation

Just as traditional colonialism often suppressed local cultures in favour of the coloniser’s practices, digital colonialism in marketing technology imposes standardised approaches that erase organisational uniqueness.

When every business in your sector uses the same marketing platforms with the same built-in capabilities, genuine differentiation becomes nearly impossible. This homogenisation effect has been documented in research by Petersen and Bücher (2021), who found that businesses using identical marketing platforms tend to converge toward similar engagement strategies over time, regardless of their initial differentiation goals.

I know from my interactions with our wonderfully international community that marketing needs vary greatly across countries, however a lack of localised solutions means that without the differentiation of localised solutions, everyone is shoehorned into doing marketing in the way that the provider dictates, instead of what the local market wants and needs.

Knowledge dependency

Digital colonialism creates dependence not just on technology but on knowledge. Organisations become reliant on vendors for understanding how to effectively engage their own customers.

A study by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (2020) on digital sovereignty found that organisations that outsource core digital processes to proprietary platforms often experience a decline in internal expertise related to those functions - a phenomenon they term ‘competence displacement.’

This knowledge asymmetry manifests when marketing teams can’t explain exactly how their segmentation works or why certain customers receive specific communications - the platform’s algorithms make these decisions based on proprietary logic, which is increasingly being driven by something in a black box somewhere labelled ‘AI’ and trained on who-knows-what data with who-knows-what biases.

Instead of marketers making decisions, learning from their data and driving growth they’re increasingly being pigeon-holed into ‘doing what the system says’ or being limited by what their stack allows them to do, and assuming - often without questioning - that to be the best course of action.

When platform expertise replaces marketing expertise, your business loses critical capabilities.

Share thisX Bluesky LinkedIn

Strategic vulnerability

Perhaps most concerning for businesses is the strategic vulnerability that marketing technology colonialism creates. When your customer relationships are mediated through platforms you don’t control, you become vulnerable to various risks.

A 2021 report by the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA) on cloud security in healthcare highlights similar vulnerability concerns, albeit in a different sector. The report identifies how healthcare organizations become strategically vulnerable when outsourcing critical functions to cloud platforms, noting that ‘the loss of data governance and processing of personal data in the Cloud makes healthcare organisations hesitant to adopt Cloud services’ (ENISA, 2021).

While focused on healthcare rather than marketing, there are some parallels which warrant consideration. Just as healthcare providers risk losing control of patient data and becoming dependent on cloud vendors, businesses using third-party marketing platforms face similar strategic vulnerabilities in their customer relationships. The report emphasises that vendor lock-in is ‘the most common risk regarding Cloud Computing’ - a challenge equally applicable to organisations whose marketing stacks rely on proprietary platforms they don’t control.

The ENISA findings raise a universal concern across sectors: when critical functions - whether patient care or customer relationships - are mediated through external platforms, organisations sacrifice autonomy and expose themselves to supply chain vulnerabilities that extend beyond mere technical considerations to strategic organisational risks.

Similar concerns specific to marketing technology were addressed in the Fraunhofer Institute’s comprehensive study ‘Digital Sovereignty in Business Applications’ (2021), which examined dependency risks in business-critical software applications, including CRM and marketing automation platforms. This study specifically identified vendor lock-in and data portability limitations as significant sovereignty challenges for organisations using proprietary marketing and customer management technologies (Fraunhofer FOKUS, 2021).

This limitation reflects a fundamental misalignment between different approaches to privacy and data management. Open source marketing tools like Mautic have emerged partly in response to this misalignment, offering alternatives that respect diverse approaches to customer data. Our current Privacy Project within Mautic represents our commitment to developing features that align with privacy-focused values, giving organisations the flexibility to implement practices that proprietary platforms often prohibit by design.

The geopolitical dimension

The concentration of marketing technology power in specific countries creates geopolitical vulnerabilities as well. When organisations worldwide depend on marketing platforms from a single country, they become subject to that country’s laws and political decisions.

The US CLOUD Act provides a stark example - it allows American authorities to compel US-based technology companies to provide data regardless of where that data is physically stored. This creates a situation where your marketing data could be accessed by foreign governments without your knowledge or consent, potentially circumventing your own country’s privacy protections.

This is a big reason why a lot of UK and European firms are deciding instead to use cloud-based providers which are within the EU, and hence not subject to these far-reaching laws.

Resisting digital colonialism

Recognising the patterns of digital colonialism within our own marketing stacks is a sobering but necessary first step. From the initial lure of convenience to the slow creep of dependency and eventual extraction of value, it’s a cycle that has left many businesses feeling powerless over their most critical customer relationships. I’ve been there myself, and I know how overwhelming it can feel.

Recognising this is the first step in making change.

Resisting digital colonialism in marketing starts with making conscious, strategic choices about the kind of technology we use and the relationships we build with it. It means questioning the defaults and challenging the notion that surrendering control is the unavoidable price of capability.

This is where open source becomes not just an alternative, but an act of liberation. By embracing open source, we shift from being tenants on someone else’s platform to architects of our own marketing ecosystems. Tools like Mautic, Matomo, and the broader open source marketing stack provide a tangible pathway to reclaim the autonomy that proprietary systems have eroded.

So, where do you begin on this journey from colonisation to sovereignty? How do you assess the extent of your dependency and chart a practical course forward?

The journey to digital sovereignty is a marathon, not a sprint, but it’s a journey we must take together to build a more equitable and independent digital future for our businesses. I hope you’ll join me for the next step.

References

European Commission (2020) Digital sovereignty for Europe. Joint Research Centre Technical Report. Available at: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2020/651992/EPRS_BRI(2020)651992_EN.pdf (Accessed: 15 July 2025).

European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (2020) Cloud Security for Healthcare Services. Available at: https://www.enisa.europa.eu/publications/cloud-security-for-healthcare-services (Accessed: 15 July 2025).

Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems (2021) Digital Sovereignty in Business Applications. Kompetenzzentrum Öffentliche IT. Available at: https://www.oeffentliche-it.de/publikationen (Accessed: 15 July 2025).

Petersen, J. A. and Bücher, T. (2021) ‘Platform Dependency and Marketing Strategy Homogenisation’, Journal of Marketing Research, 58(3), pp. 431-449.

Kwet, M. (2019) ‘Digital colonialism: US empire and the new imperialism in the Global South’, Race & Class, 60(4), pp. 3-26.

What graduating from GitHub’s Secure Open Source Program means for Mautic - and for open source security

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Mon, 11 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been thinking about how we build trust in open source - not just through transparent code, but through transparent practices. Over the past month, our community had the chance to deepen both.

Today we announced that Mautic has graduated from GitHub’s Secure Open Source Program.

For three focused weeks I joined our Docker Working Group Lead, Renato Castro, learning alongside experts from GitHub and the wider technology community. We spent time on the practical end of security covering everything from the habits, checks, and responses that help a project stay resilient without slowing down community momentum to what the latest changes in the technology landscape mean for projects like Mautic. The work was hands-on, the conversations were honest, and the outcome is already shaping how we do things in Mautic.

What we learned (and started implementing)

Securing automated workflows: hardening CI/CD and improving secrets handling across pipelines
Detecting vulnerabilities: refining dependency scanning and clarifying triage so we focus on what matters most
Preparing for incidents: strengthening response playbooks and escalation paths so we act quickly and calmly
Staying current: exploring the emerging landscape around AI/ML and MCP servers, and how it touches our ecosystem, both now and in the future

Taking part in the programme alongside the other open source maintainers affirmed something I’ve learned through years of involvement with open source: security is not a destination, it’s a discipline (yes, I know it sounds like a cringe-worthy cliché but hear me out!) It’s the steady, mindful choices we make together - reviewing a pull request with a keener eye, carefully documenting a workflow so others can follow it, pausing to ask ‘what could go wrong?’ before we ship some new code. This steady approach cultivates confidence for everyone who builds on Mautic.

Growing stronger together

It was also a reminder that interdependence is a strength. We were part of a cohort of forty open source projects, and the relationships we formed will continue in a private space dedicated to raising the bar collectively. That ongoing community is perhaps the most valuable outcome (but then, I would say that, given I seek community in all areas of my life!) - it’s become a place to share patterns, tooling, and lessons learned so we all improve faster than we could alone.

Practically speaking, GitHub is supporting graduates with a $10,000 contribution with $6,000 immediately after graduating from the program and a further $2,000 at the 6 and 12 month checkpoint. We’ve also received a substantial sum in Azure credits which will help us test and scale more securely. More importantly, we’ve come away with a clearer security backlog and a shared understanding of priorities. You’ll see this reflected in our day‑to‑day practice, from more robust automated checks to better‑defined incident playbooks and clearer guidance for contributors.

For me, this connects to our broader mission of digital sovereignty. Independence isn’t only about owning your data and having the freedom to choose your tools; it’s also about trusting the foundations on which those choices rest. Strengthening our security posture is part of how we honour that trust - through transparent processes, technical rigour, and clear accountability.

Learn more

If you’d like to dive deeper, GitHub’s announcement is here, and we’ve shared our summary on the Mautic blog.

If you’re interested in contributing to security within Mautic - whether you’re new to the project or a long‑time contributor - I’d love to hear from you. There’s meaningful, well‑scoped work to do, and building together means taking shared responsibility for our future. You can learn more about our security team here.

If you’re an open source project and you meet the entry criteria (check it out here) then I highly recommend you apply! We learned so much from this experience and it’s a great opportunity to connect with other open source projects on this vital topic.

A big thank you!

Thank you to the GitHub team, our fellow maintainers in the cohort, and everyone in the Mautic community who keeps showing up with curiosity and care. Steady, incremental progress may not make headlines, but it’s how we keep our ecosystem safe and our community strong.

Cultivating true value beyond 'takers v makers' in open source

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In my last post, I explored the ‘Diamond Pillar’ of the First Precept – the foundational practice of cultivating non-harm and kindness in our leadership. Building on that, I want to explore the principle that supports a project’s value and long-term health: the second precept - abstaining from taking the not given, and cultivating open handed generosity.

Where the first precept establishes safety and respect, the second guides how we exchange value and build shared wealth. In the Triratna tradition, this is known as the ‘Pillar of Gold.’ Gold is precious, a universal medium of exchange, and wonderfully malleable, adapting to whatever form is needed. It’s also incorruptible, retaining its nature through fire and pressure. I find this a powerful metaphor for the kind of resilient, multi-faceted value we strive to build in our communities.

This precept directly addresses a tension every open source leader feels. We hold the ideal of a community of passionate contributors, yet we often face the reality of volunteer burnout and what Dries Buytaert famously termed the ‘makers and takers’ dynamic. The second precept offers a path to transform this tension, not through stricter rules, but by cultivating a deep and authentic culture of generosity.

Redefining ‘taking’ - what is truly ‘not given’ in open source?

The traditional formulation of the second precept is adinnādānā veramaṇī sikkhāpadaṃ samādiyāmi – I undertake the discipline to abstain from taking that which is not given. Its meaning extends far beyond the simple act of stealing, however. In our context, the most valuable things are rarely physical. The precept also encourages us to look more deeply at the subtle ways we might be taking from others what they do not, or cannot, freely offer.

In an environment built on volunteer effort, this could mean taking a contributor’s time and energy by failing to respect their boundaries or creating unclear expectations. It could be taking the community’s collective attention with unfocused demands, becoming what one of my teachers called a ‘human vampire,’ oblivious to the energy we drain from others. It might even be taking credit for collaborative work without proper acknowledgment, appropriating the goodwill and effort of the team.

When we view the precept through this lens, we see that our responsibility as leaders is to build an awareness of these subtle forms of taking. We must ask ourselves: are we creating an environment where people feel their time, energy, and goodwill are respected and held as precious? How can we ensure that the people and organisations who contribute are recognised appropriately?

In open source, the most precious things 'taken without being given' aren't lines of code, but the time, energy, and goodwill of our volunteer contributors.

Share thisX Bluesky LinkedIn

The positive precept - building a culture of open-handed generosity (dāna)

Buddhist practice is as much about active cultivation as it is about abstention. The positive form of the second precept gives us some clues as to where we start addressing the ‘not taking what’s not given’ aspect of our experience: ‘With open-handed generosity’. This invites us to move beyond simply not taking and towards a proactive practice of dāna, or giving.

As I’ve written before, generosity in open source is wonderfully diverse and extends far beyond code commits. It manifests as mentoring a new contributor through their first pull request, writing clear documentation that saves hundreds of hours for others, or patiently answering a question in a support channel. It also includes providing the financial backing that ensures the project’s stability, and this dimension is crucial.

For maintainers striving to make their projects sustainable, creating clear and ethical pathways for financial contribution is itself an act which enables generosity. It allows the community to support the people whose dedicated labour sustains the project, whether that’s paying the core maintainers a living wage or compensating key contributors for their work. It makes the human effort that underpins our technology visible, empowering individuals and organisations to create a reciprocal system where those who give the most time can be supported in return. This transforms financial support from a simple transaction into a genuine expression of gratitude and interconnectedness.

When this culture is established, financial contributions often follow naturally. We see this in the Mautic project, where support comes from both large organisations allocating budget to the open source they rely on, and from smaller organisations making regular monthly contributions. Both are vital expressions of this principle.

But financial support and code contributions are only part of the equation. Perhaps the most significant act of generosity a leader can offer is creating an environment of deep psychological safety. This is the gift of fearlessness – a space where people feel secure enough to contribute their ideas, ask questions without fear of judgment, and even make mistakes and learn from them. This ultimate act of giving fosters the conditions for everyone else’s generosity, in all its forms, to truly emerge and flourish.

A culture of generosity doesn't just count commits; it celebrates every act of mentorship, support, and kindness as a vital contribution to the project's wealth.

Share thisX Bluesky LinkedIn

Generosity in conflict - applying kindness when harm is done

The practice becomes most challenging when harm has occurred. How do we remain generous towards someone who has violated community norms or acted in bad faith? This is where a nuanced understanding of generosity becomes essential.

First, our primary generosity is often to the community. Taking firm, decisive action to protect the community from a harmful actor is a profound act of giving. It is the gift of safety and stability to the many.

Taking firm, decisive action to protect the community from a harmful actor is a profound act of giving. It is the gift of safety and stability to the many.

Share thisX Bluesky LinkedIn

Second, even when taking action, we can be generous to the individual. This means focusing on the problematic behaviour, not attacking the person. We can communicate decisions with clarity and respect, preserving their dignity even while holding them accountable. It means avoiding unnecessary public shaming and, where appropriate, offering a clear and compassionate path for them to learn and potentially return if it’s appropriate to do so.

In a multinational and multicultural community like Mautic, generosity also means being willing to learn. It means assuming good intent first when communication styles clash and giving others the benefit of the doubt. It is a generosity of interpretation, an offering of trust.

The first recipient - practising generosity towards yourself

There is a real danger for leaders in open source to be generous to everyone but themselves. We give our time, our energy, and our passion until there is nothing left, leading directly to burnout. The second precept must also apply to our relationship with ourselves. There’s a good reason why the profoundly transformative meditation practice of the ‘metta bhavana’, or cultivation of loving kindness, starts by imagining yourself in the first stage, and wishing yourself well, before you move on to others.

Setting clear, firm boundaries is a necessary practice of self-generosity. It is an act of abstaining from ‘taking from your future self’ by depleting all your resources in the present. We cannot sustain our communities if we cannot sustain ourselves.

A vital part of this practice is learning to receive. Generosity is a current that must flow both ways. Being open to receiving help, encouragement, and support from others is the other half of the practice.

This is why peer support is so vital. It’s one of the main reasons I founded the Women of Open Source community – to create a dedicated space where we can practice both giving and receiving support, ensuring we can sustain our leadership for the long haul.

For open source leaders, setting boundaries isn't selfish. It's a critical ethical practice - we cannot sustain our communities if we cannot sustain ourselves.

Share thisX Bluesky LinkedIn

Conclusion - the gold standard of community

Returning to the metaphor of the Pillar of Gold, we can see how a truly valuable community is built. It is forged from countless small, precious contributions. It is malleable, able to adapt to the diverse needs of its members. And its value is incorruptible because it is rooted in the deep wealth of mutual support, not just the fluctuating value of its features.

The ‘takers vs. makers’ dynamic is often a symptom of a purely transactional culture. When we, as leaders, intentionally build a culture of multi-faceted generosity - one that values time, mentorship, financial support, and kindness equally - we create a system so rich in mutual support that the distinction begins to feel irrelevant. We create an ecosystem where giving and receiving, including fair financial compensation, become part of a seamless, natural circulation that nourishes both the project and the people who build it.

This is the gold standard we can all aspire to build.

I’d love to hear your thoughts. What is one non-code form of generosity you could offer to your community this week? And what is one way you could be more generous to yourself?

The Sovereignty Spectrum - a practical guide to reclaiming your marketing independence

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Sun, 21 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In my last article, we explored the unsettling concept of digital colonialism, and how the marketing stacks of many businesses have become subject to the control and extraction of proprietary platforms. It’s a sobering reality, but recognising the problem is the first, essential step towards a solution. Now, it’s time to move from diagnosis to action.

We have to be pragmatic, of course - I’m not advocating for an overnight revolution or ripping out every tool you rely on. That approach is unrealistic and disruptive. Instead, this is about taking deliberate, strategic steps towards greater independence. To help with this, I’ve developed the Sovereignty Spectrum — a framework to help you assess your current position and chart a practical course towards marketing freedom.

How to use the Sovereignty Spectrum

Think of the Spectrum less as a rigid ladder to be climbed and more as a compass to guide your decisions. It’s a diagnostic tool, not a judgment. Your business might be at different stages for different parts of your marketing stack - for example, you might be at Stage 4 for your website analytics but still at Stage 1 for your CRM.

The goal is to understand where you are, identify your biggest risks, and take one small, achievable step forward.

The five stages of marketing sovereignty

Stage 1: Fully colonised

Characteristics: This is the default state for many businesses starting out. Your marketing stack is the vendor’s platform. Your entire marketing operation, from data collection and customer relationship management to analytics and email campaigns, runs within a single proprietary ecosystem like HubSpot, or a tightly integrated set of tools from one vendor. Your team’s skills are vendor-specific; they are experts in using the platform, but may not be able to replicate their work elsewhere. You likely cannot answer basic questions about where your customer data is physically stored.

Business risks: At this stage, vendor lock-in is absolute. You are completely vulnerable to every price increase, feature deprecation, or policy change the vendor decides to make. Your data is not truly your own; exporting a complete, meaningful dataset with all its relational history is often impossible. Your strategic marketing options are limited to what the platform allows.

Your first actionable steps:

Conduct a data export audit: For your most critical platform, attempt a full data export. Don’t just download a CSV of contacts. Try to get everything: engagement history, automation workflows, lead scores, and custom object data. Document what you receive and, more importantly, what is missing. This exercise often reveals the true extent of your lock-in.
Map your dependencies: Create a simple document listing every marketing tool you use and what core business function it serves. This is the first step in understanding your own operational logic outside the confines of the vendor’s interface.

Stage 2: The aware tenant

Characteristics: You know you have a problem. You’ve felt the pain of a sudden price hike or a feature limitation. You have a nagging feeling of unease about having all your eggs in one basket. You might be keeping manual backups of data or using third-party integration tools (like Zapier) to copy data between systems, creating a semblance of control. You’re starting to ask tougher questions in meetings with your vendor account manager.

Business risks: The primary risk at this stage is complacency. Awareness without action leads to a perpetual state of unease without any real change. You are still fundamentally dependent, but now you’re spending extra resources to manage that dependency. Your backups may provide a false sense of security if the data is incomplete or lacks the context to be useful.

Your first actionable steps:

Replace a non-critical tool: Identify a low-risk, peripheral marketing function - like your social media scheduler or your URL shortener - and replace the proprietary SaaS tool with an open source, self-hosted alternative. This is a small-scale pilot project that builds confidence and internal skills.
Run a parallel system: Instead of ripping out your existing analytics, install an open source alternative like Matomo alongside it. Let it run for a month or two. Compare the data, learn the new interface, and prove to your team and stakeholders that a sovereign alternative is viable, all without disrupting current reporting.

Stage 3: The hybrid operator

Characteristics: You now have one foot in each world. You operate a ‘two-stack’ system, where core or sensitive operations are run on sovereign, open source tools, while other functions remain on proprietary platforms. For example, you might use Mautic for your core marketing automation and lead nurturing, but still use a proprietary CRM because the migration seems too daunting. You are making active, strategic choices about where to place your data and which dependencies you are willing to tolerate.

Business risks: Complexity and data fragmentation are your main challenges. Managing two systems can be resource-intensive, and ensuring data flows smoothly and accurately between your sovereign and proprietary stacks requires careful planning and maintenance. There’s a risk of creating new data silos if integrations are not handled well.

Your first actionable steps:

Migrate one core function: Identify a single, critical workflow and move it to your sovereign stack. For example, migrate your primary customer onboarding email sequence from your proprietary tool to Mautic. This tests your sovereign stack’s capabilities on a mission-critical task.
Establish a sovereign data hub: Begin the process of creating a central, open source data warehouse or customer data platform (CDP) that you control. All your tools, both proprietary and open, should feed data into this hub. This makes you the master of your data, even if you still use proprietary tools for execution.

Stage 4: Majority sovereign

Characteristics: The balance has tipped. Your default choice for any new technology is open source. Your marketing stack is primarily composed of tools you control, and proprietary software is the exception, used only for highly specialised functions that lack a viable open alternative. Your team thinks in terms of marketing principles first and platforms second. You might even be contributing bug fixes or feature suggestions back to the open source projects you use.

Business risks: At this stage, the risks shift from dependency to responsibility. You are now responsible for the maintenance, security, and performance of your core stack. There’s also a risk of isolation if your team doesn’t actively keep up with broader market trends and innovations happening outside your ecosystem.

Your first actionable steps:

Decommission a major proprietary platform: This is a significant milestone. Plan and execute the final migration away from a major proprietary system, like your CRM or a large analytics suite, making your sovereign stack the undisputed system of record.
Contribute back to a project: Formalise your relationship with a key open source project. This could be through sponsoring a developer, funding a specific feature you need, or allocating team time to contribute to documentation or community support. This changes your role from a consumer to a steward.

Stage 5: The sovereign operator

Characteristics: You have achieved complete infrastructural sovereignty for all critical marketing functions. Your marketing stack is an integrated asset that provides a genuine competitive advantage. Your team has deep expertise and can customise, extend, and integrate any component as needed. You are no longer just a user of open source; you are a leader and influencer within the ecosystem.

Business risks: The risks are now entirely your own. You bear the full responsibility for security, innovation, and compliance. Keeping up with the rapid pace of technological change requires dedicated resources and a commitment to continuous learning.

Your First Actionable Steps:

Publish your stack and strategy: Share your journey. Write a detailed case study or speak at an event about how you built your sovereign marketing stack, what you learned, and the business impact it has had. This establishes your organisation as a thought leader.
Mentor another business: Help another organisation take its first steps on the Sovereignty Spectrum. By sharing your expertise, you strengthen the entire ecosystem, creating more collaborators and a more resilient alternative to the proprietary monoculture.

The open source advantage on your journey

At every stage of this journey, open source is the great enabler. Tools like Mautic, Matomo, and the wider open source ecosystem provide the practical means to move from one stage to the next. They offer transparency where proprietary systems have black boxes, control where others impose restrictions, and community where others offer only a support ticket. They are the essential tools for any business serious about reclaiming its digital independence.

Conclusion

The journey from digital colonisation to sovereignty is not about reaching a perfect, final destination. It is a journey of a thousand small, deliberate steps, each one building resilience, reducing risk, and reclaiming a piece of your business’s autonomy.

Start where you are. Use this spectrum to identify your position, choose one small action, and take that first step. Every move away from dependency is a move towards a more sustainable, independent, and competitive future for your business.

Where do you see your business on the Sovereignty Spectrum? Share your thoughts and challenges in the comments below. I’d be very interested to hear your experiences.

References and further reading

If you’d like to read more about digital sovereignty, data governance, vendor lock-in and other resources that inspired this article, here’s a few places to start:

A great place to get inspiration is from countries and regions who are taking on digital sovereignty and with it, control of their digital infrastructure and data. Here’s a few useful resources:

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff - this exposes the economic logic of surveillance capitalism, providing the critical ‘why’ behind the need for digital sovereignty.
The Costs of Connection by Nick Couldry and Ulises Ali Mejias - this book gives the academic foundation for the concept of ‘data colonialism’, arguing that the extraction of data is a new form of colonial appropriation.
European Commission, Joint Research Centre (2020) Digital sovereignty for Europe. Publications Office of the European Union. A foundational technical report from the JRC that outlines the strategic importance of digital sovereignty for the EU. Link to Report

Finding stillness and focus in the chaos of open source

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Sun, 21 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In this series exploring ancient ethics for modern leadership, we’ve looked at the ‘Diamond Pillar’ of non-harm and the ‘Gold Pillar’ of generosity. Now, we arrive at the third, and perhaps most surprisingly relevant, ethical principle: the Third Precept.

Traditionally, this is the abstention from sexual misconduct. In the 10 Pillars book by Urgyen Sangharakshita, the founder of the Buddhist tradition in which I practice, it is known as the ‘Pillar of Crystal’ symbolising the purity, transparency, and brilliant clarity that comes from a well-tended inner life.

I know what you might be thinking. What does a precept about sexual ethics have to do with leading an open source project? The answer, I’ve found, has very little to do with sex itself, and everything to do with how we manage our creative energy, our professional relationships, and our own inner state of contentment.

Creative and relational energy

To understand this precept in our context, we must look beyond its most literal interpretation. This precept, at its root, is grounded in one of the most powerful ‘kleshas’ or ‘poisons’ that keep us locked in our own suffering - that of greed. The other two - hatred / aversion and delusion / ignorance - can also play a part sometimes, as well. As a friend of mine, Sanghamani, once shared, this precept is fundamentally about what we do with our desire and creative energy in the broadest sense. For me, it’s about ensuring we don’t misuse our relational power to cause harm or manipulate outcomes.

In the world of open source where influence is currency, this subtle misconduct can take many forms:

Using charisma or flattery to push a technical agenda or get something prioritised.
Cultivating unhealthy dependencies, where a contributor’s access or influence is tied to their personal relationship with a leader.
Projecting our own needs for validation onto the community, driving them towards goals that serve our ego rather than the project’s health.

The goal is clarity of intention. Our professional interactions should be clean, transparent, and free from the subtle poisons of manipulation and emotional entanglement. This is where the practice of the precept begins.

Navigating relational dynamics as a woman in tech

As a woman leading in a very male-heavy industry, navigating these dynamics carries a unique weight. The line between being a kind, collaborative leader and having that friendliness misinterpreted is one I, and many other women, walk every day.

There can be an unspoken pressure to use ‘soft skills’ to soothe egos or to be the ‘mother figure’ in a community, work that is both exhausting and invisible. Conversely, direct and clear communication can be misread as being ‘harsh’ or ‘aggressive’ in a way that it rarely is for male counterparts.

Applying the pillar of crystal for me, therefore, is a practice of radical clarity. It means being impeccable with my relational boundaries. It means being warm, friendly and kind, without leaving room for misinterpretation. And it means cultivating an inner confidence that is not dependent on the approval of others, allowing me to lead with integrity, even when it’s uncomfortable.

The positive practice of cultivating sustainable creativity and joy

The true power of this precept lies in its positive form: the active cultivation of Stillness, Simplicity, and Contentment. Practising these qualities provides a proactive strategy for unlocking a more joyful, creative, and sustainable way of working. The aim is to create the inner conditions for our best work to emerge, not from frantic pressure, but from a place of centered clarity.

Stillness is the practice of stepping away from the relentless stream of notifications to create the space where true insight can arise. It is the source of our best strategic thinking, allowing us to see the bigger picture beyond the immediate noise. By consciously making space for quiet contemplation, we move from a state of constant reaction to one of purposeful action. Stillness provides the foundation for deep, focused work.

Simplicity is the discipline that leads to elegance and power. In a world chasing the ‘next shiny thing,’ a commitment to simplicity allows us to focus on the core mission of the project. It is the art of solving problems in the most direct and sustainable way, saying ‘no’ to feature bloat, and finding the profound strength that comes from doing a few things exceptionally well.

Contentment is the deepest source of sustainable motivation. It is the revolutionary practice of finding genuine satisfaction in the work itself and its steady progress. This allows us to derive joy from building a stable, healthy project and community, detaching our sense of success from the volatile metrics of external validation like GitHub stars or download counts. As a teacher in our tradition, Sanghamani notes that an ideal practitioner is ‘obviously happy,’ finding fulfillment from within. This inner contentment becomes the engine of long-term creativity and joyful persistence in our work.

Leading with clarity

The pillar of crystal is ultimately about clarity. When our motivations in our professional relationships are clear — free from the murkiness of manipulation and projection — we become trustworthy. When our leadership is grounded in a deep well of contentment, we become stable and resilient.

This inner state of stillness, simplicity, and contentment creates the external conditions for a community that is calm, focused, and healthy. It’s a community whose leaders teach, by example, a more sustainable way to be. This, I believe, is one of the most profound gifts a leader can offer.

How do you cultivate stillness and contentment in your own work? Where do you see the pressure of discontentment showing up most in your community?

Personalisation and customer experience done right at the New Wolsey Theatre

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Sun, 19 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Last night I experienced a lovely case of personalisation and knowing your customers done right.

A small group of friends headed out to the New Wolsey Theatre in Ipswich to watch a play - Don’t Look Now - which recently started a run and several friends were keen to see. While I’ve visited the New Wolsey for networking events with ISSBA, it was the first time that I’d actually been there to see a show (I’m not quite sure how it’s taken me so long!)

When we got to our seats, we noticed that dotted around the theatre there were white cards sticking up on some seats, but not on others. Of course, you naturally think perhaps Charlie and the Chocolate Factory has made a comeback and perhaps you’ve got a chance of winning a golden ticket, but while we sadly weren’t in with a chance of winning a lifetime’s supply of chocolate, what we found was equally as heartwarming.

It turned out that the white cards were on the seats of people for whom this was the first time visiting the New Wolsey Theatre, and they contained a short, friendly welcome to the theatre and an invitation to reach out to any team member ‘if there is anything we can do to add some extra sparkle to your theatre visit.’

It probably doesn’t cost much - a simple mail-merge template with the first name and the seat number, and the time of someone going round sticking them in the seat numbers for the relevant location - but all of us who received a card last night shared some common sentiments. We felt seen. We felt welcomed. We felt that the organisation was reaching out to us on a human level, and telling us that we mattered to them, and that they cared about making our ‘first time’ a magical experience. We felt delighted.

A big shout out to the lovely folks at the New Wolsey Theatre for the small touch that made a big difference. Also a big shout out to the stage managers and lighting team who, with only a few minutes left of the show, had to call a halt to proceedings and ‘switch it off and on again’ to get the stage lighting and projectors working again - seamless, done with a human air of connection with the audience, all the while recognising it was an interruption to the experience and apologising unreservedly. Things happen, it’s how you deal with them that matters.

Definitely a place I will be visiting more frequently in the future.

What examples of personalisation and little touches have led to memorable experiences for you?

Is truthful speech the most critical infrastructure in community management?

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Sun, 19 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In this ongoing exploration of Buddhist ethics for leadership, we’ve journeyed past the diamond pillar of non-harm, the gold pillar of generosity, and the crystal pillar of contentment. Now, we arrive at a set of principles so fundamental that they are given four distinct pillars: the precepts of speech.

Speech holds a unique position. It is the doorway between our inner world of thought and our outer world of action. As a good friend and teacher Karunadhi once noted in a talk, it’s the channel through which our hidden motivations often first emerge into the world. In open source, a realm built almost entirely on communication, our speech is our action. It forms the very infrastructure of our communities.

Today, I want to focus on the first and most foundational of these: the fourth precept, the abstention from false speech. In my tradition, Sangharakshita refers to this in the Ten Pillars of Buddhism as the ‘pillar of pearl.’ A pearl is precious, luminous, and organic. It is not found on the surface; it must be dived for, often in deep and challenging waters. This is a perfect metaphor for truth itself.

The axe in our mouths and the power of speech in open source

The Buddha offered a stark and unforgettable image for the potential harm of speech: ‘We are born with an axe in our mouths with which we cut each other down.’

Anyone who has spent time in open source has felt the sharp edge of that axe. It can be found in a dismissive code review, a sarcastic comment on Slack, a public criticism that questions a contributor’s competence, or a heated debate where passion curdles into personal attack.

Speech is difficult to control precisely because it is so close to thought. We often speak without fully registering that our words are not fleeting ideas but tangible actions with real-world consequences. In the fast-paced, asynchronous, and text-based environment of open source, where tone and non-verbal cues are absent, this challenge is magnified. A thoughtless comment can linger for years in an issue tracker, poisoning the well of community trust long after we’ve forgotten we wrote it. I fully expect that there’s a few humdingers that I wrote earlier in my career still lurking in forums somewhere! This makes mindful attention to our speech one of the most critical practices we can undertake.

The foundation of factual accuracy

The practice of truthful speech begins with its most simple and disciplined form: factual accuracy. This is the bedrock. In open source, this means:

Writing bug reports that describe the issue as it is, without exaggeration to get attention or minimisation to avoid blame.
Publishing release notes that are honest and clear about breaking changes and known issues.
Creating documentation that is precise and reliable.
Representing the status of the project to stakeholders with clarity, even when the news is difficult.

This is harder than it sounds. As my notes remind me, one of the most common ways we fail is when repeating what has been said by another. It is incredibly difficult to convey both the letter and the spirit of someone else’s words without our own biases and interpretations creeping in, and such repetition can easily slide into gossip. I know I have to be particularly vigilant here, as a slight misrepresentation can easily breach this precept and quickly lead to breaking others, like the abstention from divisive or slanderous speech. Schooling ourselves in factual accuracy is the essential first step.

Speech precepts aren’t only about talking

This precept is not just about what we speak; it is also about how we listen. My notes from a retreat long ago contain a point that has stayed with me ever since: next to physical harm, one of the worst things you can do to a person is to not believe them when they are speaking the truth. This disbelief is a subtle but profound act of violence.

It’s an act that negates another person’s reality. In a community, it shatters trust. We see it when:

A junior contributor’s insightful bug report is dismissed without proper investigation because they are ‘new.’
A community member’s valid feedback is ignored because we have a difficult personal history with them.
We question someone’s motives instead of engaging with the substance of their argument.
We only hear one side of a complaint instead of giving space for both sides to be heard.

When we do this, we are telling someone that their voice, their perception, and their reality do not matter. A community cannot function this way. Trust is the load-bearing fabric of open source collaboration. Without it, everything falls apart. The practice of truthful speech, therefore, includes the courageous and generous act of extending trust to others.

The deep dive: the pearl of self-honesty

Beyond factual accuracy and trusting others lies the deepest, most challenging part of the practice. The pearl doesn’t lie on the sand; you have to dive for it. This deep dive is the work of radical self-honesty. As Karunadhi asked in the talk I recollected from my notes a while back, how can we speak the truth if we don’t even know what’s truly in our own hearts?

As leaders, we must constantly ask ourselves the difficult questions. Why do I really want to push for this feature? Is it for the good of the project, or for my own ego? Why am I so resistant to this person’s critique? Is their argument flawed, or does it touch on an insecurity I don’t want to face?

This is where our personal practice and our leadership merge. We cannot be a source of clarity for our community if we are not committed to finding that clarity within ourselves. This is the difficult, ongoing work that transforms leadership from a role into a genuine path of development.

Conclusion: a community built on trust

The pillar of pearl teaches us that truthfulness is a multi-layered practice. It begins with the disciplined effort of factual accuracy. It is supported by the generous act of extending trust to others. And it is sustained by the deep, personal work of self-honesty.

A community built on this pillar is luminous and strong. It is resilient because its members can rely on what is said. It is innovative because people feel safe enough to share their honest perspectives. Its value, like that of a pearl, is organic, precious, and created through patient effort over time. As we navigate the complex currents of open source, this unwavering commitment to truthfulness is the bedrock upon which everything else can be safely built.

In your work, where do you find the practice of truthful speech most challenging? What is one small step you could take this week to build more trust in your community through your own communication?

Making your dharma notes digital, linked and searchable

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been taking digital notes on my dharma practice for over fifteen years. Through multiple devices, various apps, and countless software migrations, I’ve maintained a digital record of retreat reflections, dharma talks, study sessions, and reading notes. I learned early on that searching for a concept across years of material was vastly more useful than flipping through physical notebooks.

But having digital notes and having usable digital notes are two different things.

For most of those fifteen years, my notes existed in isolation from each other. I could search for ‘metta’ and find every mention, but I couldn’t see how my understanding of metta related to my study of the brahma viharas, or connected to specific retreat experiences, or illuminated particular suttas. The notes were digital, they were searchable, but they weren’t linked. They didn’t form a network of understanding.

When I discovered Obsidian and Nick Milo’s Linking Your Thinking approach a few years ago, I realised what I’d been missing. Connections.

The evolution of digital Dharma notes

I’ve watched digital note-taking tools evolve significantly over the past fifteen years. Early on, I used whatever came with my device - basic text files, simple note apps, word processors. As smartphones and tablets became more capable, I moved to dedicated (proprietary) note-taking applications. Each migration brought improvements: better search, cloud sync, the ability to add images or audio.

What none of them offered was a way to create meaningful connections between notes. I could tag notes, which helped somewhat. I could organise them into notebooks or folders. But these are organisational schemes, not thinking tools. They impose a hierarchy that often doesn’t match how understanding actually develops.

When I’m studying the precepts, for instance, my understanding doesn’t fit neatly into a folder structure. A single dharma talk might touch on three different precepts. A retreat reflection might connect to both precept study and my ongoing exploration of the refuges. A passage from Sangharakshita might illuminate something about both practice and community. Folders force me to choose one location. Tags help, but they don’t show relationships.

What I needed was a way for my notes to link to each other, to form a web of understanding that could grow organically as my practice deepened.

Why most digital notes still don’t work

I’ve talked to many practitioners who have tried digital note-taking and given up. Usually it’s not because they prefer paper inherently. It’s because their digital notes became as unusable as scattered notebooks, just in a different way.

You take notes during a dharma talk on your tablet. You save it with a date and maybe a topic tag. Months later, you remember something useful was in that talk, but you can’t remember when it was or what you titled it. You search, but you don’t quite remember the specific word used. The note exists somewhere in your device, technically accessible, practically lost.

Or you accumulate hundreds of notes over years. They’re all searchable, which is better than paper, but search only works if you know what you’re searching for. It doesn’t help you discover connections you haven’t thought to look for. It doesn’t show you patterns in your understanding. It doesn’t let you see how different areas of study relate to each other.

This is where the shift from note-taking to note-making becomes crucial, and where tools like Obsidian offer something genuinely different.

From isolated notes to linked understanding

Obsidian’s fundamental insight is simple: notes should be able to link to each other as easily as you can link to a webpage. You’re writing a note about a dharma talk on generosity and you mention the first precept. Type ⁠[[First Precept]] and you’ve created a link. If that note doesn’t exist yet, creating it is one click.

This sounds minor. It’s transformative.

When I revisited my fifteen years of digital notes and began linking them in Obsidian, patterns emerged that I hadn’t consciously recognised. I could see which concepts I’d returned to repeatedly across different contexts. I could trace how my understanding of specific practices had evolved through multiple retreat experiences. I could find that a question I’d been holding for years had actually been partially addressed in a talk I’d forgotten about.

The links help me find information, but more importantly perhaps, they show me the structure of my own understanding.

Maps of content as practice tools

Nick Milo’s concept of Maps of Content has become central to how I work with Dharma material. An MOC is a note that serves as a hub for a particular area of study or practice. It’s not an encyclopedia entry trying to explain everything about a topic. It’s a personal map showing the different threads you’re exploring and how they relate.

My Buddhism MOC includes sections on the precepts, the refuges, key suttas, figures in the Triratna lineage, and ongoing questions I’m exploring. Each section contains links to relevant notes. When I create a new note about a dharma talk or add a reflection from a retreat, I return to the relevant MOC and add a link to it. I also use some automated dataviews to give me useful lists, like a list of all the retreats I’ve attended.

This has several effects. First, it ensures new material doesn’t disappear into my vault unconnected. Second, it lets me see at a glance what areas I’ve explored deeply and what remains underdeveloped. Third, over time the MOC itself becomes a record of how my focus and interests have shifted.

I’ve found MOCs particularly valuable for Mitra Study. Rather than just reading through the programme materials linearly, create MOCs for key concepts that span multiple years of study. As you encounter the same idea in different contexts, add to the MOC. This reveals both repetitions and developments that the linear structure of the programme doesn’t make explicit.

Building the Triratna starter vault

What I’m offering to the Triratna community is to share the structure I’ve developed over the past two years of intensive work with this approach. The starter vault includes:

A Buddhism MOC that maps major areas of study and practice
A Buddhist Women MOC gathering resources relevant to women practitioners
A refuge tree page with links to key figures
The mitra study materials for each year, structured to encourage linking
Examples of how notes connect to each other

These aren’t comprehensive resources - instead I’m trying to give you a starting point from which to develop your own system. The expectation is that people will add their own notes from dharma talks, retreats, reading, and study, building up a personal knowledge management (PKM) system that grows with their practice.

What I’m trying to provide is what I wish I’d had fifteen years ago - a structure that encourages linking from the start, rather than having to retroactively connect years of isolated notes.

The technical foundation matters

One reason I’ve settled on Obsidian after years of experimenting with different tools is that your notes are simply text files stored on your device. This matters more than it might seem.

I’ve lost notes to discontinued apps, to companies that shut down their services, to software that became incompatible with newer operating systems. When your notes are locked into proprietary formats, you’re dependent on a company’s continued existence and interest in maintaining their product.

With Obsidian, if the company disappeared tomorrow, I’d still have all my notes as readable text files. I could open them in any text editor. The links are just text too - they’d still be there, even if the tool for following them wasn’t.

For dharma practice notes that I want to maintain across decades, this kind of durability matters.

The hybrid reality

I should acknowledge that there have been retreats where electronic devices weren’t permitted. In those cases, I took notes on paper and later transcribed the key points into my vault, adding links as I went. This processing step often revealed that what I’d written on paper was less developed than I thought. The act of linking forced me to articulate connections more clearly.

But these have been exceptions. For the vast majority of my practice over fifteen years, digital notes have been my primary method. What’s changed isn’t the medium. It’s the structure.

What I’ve learned over fifteen years

Digital notes don’t automatically solve anything. I spent years accumulating digital material that was only marginally more useful than paper notebooks would have been. What makes digital notes valuable isn’t the digitisation itself. It’s the ability to link, to search, to see patterns, to let understanding accumulate and connect across time.

The tool matters less than the approach. Obsidian works well for me, but the principles of linking your thinking apply regardless of the specific software. What matters is creating connections between ideas, building maps of your understanding, and treating your notes as a growing network rather than an archive.

This takes time to develop. My vault has become more useful as it’s grown larger. The connections are richer now because there’s more to connect to. Someone starting today shouldn’t expect immediate transformation. The value compounds over months and years of consistent practice.

An invitation from experience

I’m sharing the Triratna starter vault not as a perfect system, but as a useful starting point built from fifteen years of trial, error, and gradual refinement. If you’re currently taking notes on paper, this offers a path into digital practice. If you’re already digital but your notes feel disconnected and hard to use, this offers a different approach.

The structure I’m providing took me years to develop. You can start with it today, adapt it to your needs, and build from there. That’s what I hope will be valuable.

Start small. Create a note for one dharma talk. Link it to a concept. Add it to a MOC. See how it feels after a month, after three months, after a year. Let the practice develop.

What would it mean for your practice to have fifteen years of study and reflection not just saved, but genuinely accessible and interconnected? What patterns might emerge in your understanding if you could see all your accumulated wisdom as a network rather than a timeline?

The early beta version of my Triratna Obsidian starter vault is available by dropping me an email at ruth@ruthcheesley.co.uk. I’ve built this from extensive experience with digital dharma notes and I’m interested in how others adapt and extend it for their own practice. I’d love to hear your feedback and see how I can improve it over time.

When the project you lead needs community support

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

There’s a particular kind of vulnerability that comes with asking for help. Especially when you’re leading something that tens of thousands of people depend on.

Mautic is launching a fundraiser this month. We need to raise between $40,000 and $60,000 by the end of March to address a revenue shortfall and maintain the operations that keep the project running. The gap came from a combination of company re-budgeting decisions and membership tier changes that we didn’t anticipate at the start of the year.

We have a solid recovery plan. We’ve already implemented cost reductions, refocused our strategy, and started executing on the revenue initiatives that will make us sustainable long-term. The fundraiser gives us the runway to implement those initiatives properly rather than just reacting to immediate pressure.

But what strikes me most about being in this situation isn’t the financial mechanics or the strategic planning. It’s the broader question of how we think about open source sustainability and what it means to truly support the projects we depend on.

The relationship between users and projects

Most people who use open source software have a transactional relationship with it. You find a tool that solves your problem, you use it, maybe you’re grateful for it existing, and you move on with your work.

That’s completely understandable. Open source is supposed to be free as in freedom and in some cases, free as in beer. The whole point is that you can use it without barriers.

Somewhere in that transaction, however, there’s a gap between using something and supporting it. Between benefiting from a project and investing in its sustainability.

I don’t say that as criticism, I’ve been that user plenty of times. You don’t think about the infrastructure costs, the people whose time goes into maintaining documentation, the work required to keep dependencies updated, or the strategic planning needed to keep a project viable five years from now.

You just use the thing that works. Until maybe one day it doesn’t work anymore because the people maintaining it couldn’t sustain the work.

What we’re learning

Leading Mautic through this financial challenge has clarified some things about open source sustainability.

First, you can’t rely on the assumption that product value automatically converts to a willingness to provide financial support. Mautic powers marketing for tens of thousands of organisations. Some of them are running significant operations on it, we even have million- and billion-dollar companies using, and in some cases, selling Mautic. The value is clearly there. But value doesn’t pay infrastructure costs or enable people to work on the project unless someone actively chooses to convert that value into financial support. Thankfully over the years some of these big players have been a huge support to Mautic, but there are many out there who have not.

Second, diversification of funding matters more than you think it will. When a significant portion of your revenue comes from a small number of sources, you’re vulnerable to changes you can’t control. Company budgets shift, priorities change, and suddenly the income you were counting on isn’t there anymore. This can be a very significant risk for open source projects, especially when the wider economy shifts lead to general ‘tightening of belts’ and companies realise they can still get what they need from the open source project, without having to financially contribute to it at the same level.

When a significant portion of the revenue for your open source project comes from a small number of sources, you're vulnerable to changes you can't control. Company budgets shift, priorities change, and suddenly the income you were counting on isn't there anymore.

Share thisX Bluesky LinkedIn

Third, asking for help feels different when you’re responsible for something that others depend on. There’s a weight to it. You’re not just asking for yourself. You’re asking on behalf of everyone who contributes to the project, everyone who uses it, and everyone who will benefit from it continuing to exist and evolve.

The broader pattern

Mautic isn’t unique in facing sustainability challenges.

Most open source projects are operating on thin margins, in recent years several have ceased active development and others are in similar financial situations where unexpected financial shortfalls lead to significant impacts on the project’s sustainability.

Other projects are facing the need to completely reorient how they attract financial support. We heard recently that Tailwind had to lay off three of their four engineers, citing a reduction in paid plans (and a resulting 80% drop in revenue) due to people using AI tools to read documentation instead of accessing their docs pages, where the paid plans are advertised. Many maintainers I’ve spoken to have shared that they are only one or two financial decisions away from potential collapse due to the narrow base of funding sources.

Many open source projects are increasingly held together by a small number of people who are working far more hours than is sustainable because they believe in what they’re building. The ecosystem depends on that work, but we haven’t collectively figured out how to fund it in a way that matches the value it creates.

Some projects solve this by getting acquired or building commercial offerings around the open source core. Some find foundation support or corporate sponsorship. Some rely on volunteer contributions and hope it’s enough.

We’re trying a mix of approaches. Member organisations who pay annual donations in exchange for perks, trying to improve conversion from our free trials where we receive a 40% commission on sales, building a certification programme, and yes, running a fundraiser when we hit a gap that other revenue streams won’t cover quickly enough.

None of these approaches is perfect. All of them require active engagement from people who benefit from the project.

What you can do

If you use Mautic, the most direct thing you can do is contribute to the fundraiser. Any amount helps. $50 gets you some recognition and stickers. $500 gets you a personal thank you card from me. $1,000 includes a conference ticket. $5,000 gets you VIP recognition and a call with me and Council members.

But beyond Mautic specifically, I’d encourage you to think about the open source projects you depend on. The libraries that underpin your applications. The tools that make your work possible. The platforms that give you alternatives to proprietary software.

Find out how those projects are funded. See if they have a way to contribute financially. Even small recurring donations add up when enough people participate. The next time you see a banner or popup asking for financial support for an open source project, maybe don’t auto-dismiss it - perhaps take time to read and contribute if you’re in a position to do so.

If your company benefits from open source, make the case internally for supporting the projects you rely on. Corporate sponsorship often makes the difference between a project that’s barely surviving and one that can invest in its future.

If you can’t contribute financially, contribute in other ways. Documentation, testing, answering questions in forums, writing about your experience using the tool. All of that reduces the burden on core maintainers and makes projects more sustainable.

Looking ahead

We’re going to get through this period with Mautic. We have a plan, we’re executing on it, and I’m confident about where we’re headed.

But I’m also thinking about what we’re learning and how it applies more broadly. Open source sustainability isn’t solved. We’re all figuring it out as we go, trying different approaches, learning from what works and what doesn’t.

The projects you depend on are probably facing similar challenges, whether you’re aware of it or not. The question is whether we collectively decide to support the infrastructure that we all benefit from, or whether we wait until projects start failing before we recognise their value.

I hope we choose the former.

Support Mautic’s fundraiser here.

If you have thoughts on open source sustainability or want to discuss any of this, I’m always interested in the conversation. You can reach me at ruth@ruthcheesley.co.uk or reply below.

What dāna teaches us about open source sustainability

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Over the past week, something beautiful has been happening in the Mautic community. We launched an emergency fundraiser to address a significant revenue gap, and to date, 51 awesome humans have already contributed, with amounts ranging from $10 to over $1,500. Two organisations from countries benefiting from our regional pricing have become members and another from here in the UK just signed up. People are sharing the fundraiser, having conversations, and stepping up in whatever way they can.

What strikes me most isn’t only the financial support, though we’re genuinely grateful for the $9,745 raised so far. It’s the principle being demonstrated in action. A principle I’ve been reflecting on a lot lately, one that comes from my Buddhist practice but applies perfectly to open source sustainability.

Dāna.

What is dāna?

Dāna is a Pali word often translated as ‘generosity’ or ‘giving,’ but that translation doesn’t quite capture the full meaning. Dāna is more nuanced. It’s about giving freely, without expectation of return or recognition. It’s about understanding that we’re all interconnected, and that supporting others ultimately supports ourselves and our communities. In many Buddhist traditions, dāna is seen as the foundation of all other practice.

I wrote a bit about this on my recent series reflecting on the five precepts when we encountered the second precept, avoiding taking the not given and the positive counterpart, practicing open handed generosity.

In Buddhist practice, dāna isn’t transactional. You don’t give to get. You give because you can, because others need, and because generosity itself cultivates something important in both giver and receiver. The traditional phrase that captures this well is:

Give what you can, take what you need.

This isn’t charity in a patronising sense. It’s mutual support. It’s recognising that sometimes you have abundance to share, and sometimes you’re the one who needs support. Both positions are valid. Both are necessary for healthy communities.

Dāna and open source

I’ve been thinking about how closely this principle applies to open source software.

When you use Mautic, or any open source tool, you’re already taking what you need. Maybe you need marketing automation but can’t afford proprietary platforms. Maybe you need self-hosting for data sovereignty. Maybe you need extensibility that commercial tools don’t offer. The software is there, freely available, built and maintained by a community. Take what you need.

But dāna is a two-way principle. If you can give back, you should. Not out of obligation or guilt, but because that’s how sustainable communities work. Give what you can.

What you give might be code contributions if you’re a developer. Documentation if you’re a technical writer. Community support if you have time and experience. Financial contribution if you have budget. Advocacy if you have networks. All of these are dāna. All of these sustain the community.

The problem we’re facing in open source generally, and in Mautic specifically right now, is that the ‘take what you need’ part works really well. The ‘give what you can’ part is harder. Not because people are selfish or don’t care, but because we haven’t normalised it as central to how open source works.

The current reality

Earlier this year, Mautic faced a $50,000 revenue gap from membership changes and re-budgeting decisions. For a project operating on lean margins with a small core team and volunteer community, that’s significant. We built a recovery plan, made cost reductions, refocused our revenue strategy. That’s been a fundamental part of remaining financially solvent, but we needed some runway to make it work.

So we launched a fundraiser, denominated in US dollars for simplicity. Our target is $40,000 minimum to keep the lights on and prevent deeper cutbacks, and $60,000 as an ideal to bring back some critical growth initiatives. End of March deadline.

I’ll be honest, I was nervous. Asking for money feels uncomfortable, even when the need is genuine and the cause is important. Especially in a community built on freely available software, but then I remembered dāna. This isn’t begging. This is inviting people to participate in sustainable community.

Give what you can, take what you need.

What we’re seeing

The response has been genuinely moving.

I’ve had conversations with people sharing how Mautic has impacted their lives. Someone who used it to manage their wedding invitations and guest list. Businesses that have driven massive growth through marketing automation, resulting in life-changing revenue increases. Organisations that rely on Mautic specifically because it respects user privacy and enables data sovereignty.

In our first week, 51 people have contributed. $9,745 raised. Two new community-tier memberships from countries benefiting from our recently launched regional pricing structure - which is exactly what we hoped that initiative would enable - and one just came in from the UK, too. Two new individual memberships also came in this week. Small one-time donations came in through GitHub and Open Collective.

What’s particularly meaningful is the range: $10 contributions sitting alongside $1,500 contributions. Both are equally valued, and both represent people giving what they can.

This is dāna in action.

The person contributing $10 might be using Mautic for a small project or just learning marketing automation. That $10 might represent a meaningful amount in their personal or business budget. They’re giving what they can.

The organisation contributing $1,500 might be running significant operations on Mautic, saving thousands or tens of thousands on proprietary platform costs. They’re giving what they can.

Both are essential. Both are appreciated. Both are sustaining the community.

Why this matters beyond Mautic

We’re making real progress toward our minimum $40,000 target, though we still have significant distance to cover before the end of March deadline. This isn’t only about Mautic’s immediate financial situation, though.

This is about proving that community-driven software can be sustainable. That privacy-respecting alternatives to surveillance capitalism can exist and thrive. That we don’t have to accept a future where all our tools are owned by corporations extracting value from our data.

Open source only works if the dāna principle is active. If people and organisations that benefit from community-built software contribute back to its sustainability. Not everyone can contribute the same amount. Not everyone can contribute in the same way. But everyone can contribute something. I truly believe this.

Right now, we estimate there are around 40,000 active Mautic instances worldwide. If only half of those instance owners contributed just $10, we’d have $200,000. This is a simple thought experiment, but it shows the potential. That amount would be transformative. It would enable us to accelerate development dramatically, position Mautic much more competitively against proprietary tools, and deliver significantly better experiences for our users.

We’re not asking everyone to contribute the same amount. We’re asking everyone to give what - and how - they can. Perhaps this is the message that open source needs to adopt?

An invitation

If you use Mautic, or benefit from open source marketing automation existing as an option, I invite you to practice dāna.

Give what you can:

Individual contributions of any amount make a collective difference. Even $10 matters when multiplied across a community. Contribute to the fundraiser.
Mautic membership provides ongoing sustainable income beyond this immediate crisis. Individual membership starts at $100 (pro-rated by country), organizational membership at $1,200 (also pro-rated). Half our annual budget comes from memberships. It’s genuinely the lifeblood of the project. Explore membership.
Larger contributions or partnerships might be an option if you’re part of a larger organization that uses or benefits from Mautic. My inbox is open at ruth.cheesley@mautic.org. Let’s have that conversation.
Non-financial support is a great way to practice dāna if you can’t contribute financially to open source projects right now. For Mautic, share the fundraiser with your networks and why it’s important to you. Spend a bit of time helping to answer questions in the community forums. Write documentation or work on other low- and no-code tasks (check our backlog of low and no code tasks). Test new features and bug fixes. Advocate for Mautic in your professional circles. All of this is dāna. Check our contribution guidelines if you need a steer on getting started.

Take what you need:

Use Mautic to build your marketing automation. Self-host it for digital sovereignty. Extend it to meet your specific needs. Learn marketing automation skills through experimentation without per-contact pricing restrictions. Build your business using privacy-respecting tools.

That’s what it’s there for. That’s what the community built it for.

A closing reflection

Every morning this past week, I’ve smiled seeing contribution notifications in our Slack channel and messages in my inbox. Not just because of the financial relief, though that’s real and important. But because each notification represents someone understanding that sustainable communities require active participation.

Every contribution, regardless of size, is a vote for digital independence and for privacy-respecting alternatives. It’s a vote for the principle that community-driven tools can compete with corporate platforms. It’s a vote for the idea that technology can be built differently, governed differently, and sustained differently.

Dāna teaches us that giving and receiving are both essential practices. Neither is superior to the other. Both are necessary for healthy communities.

Right now, Mautic needs the giving part of that equation. We’re making progress, but we need continued momentum to reach our target by the end of March.

If you’ve already contributed, thank you. Genuinely. You’re sustaining something important.

If you haven’t yet, consider what you can give. Not out of obligation, but because that’s how we build sustainable alternatives to platforms that don’t respect our privacy or independence.

Give what you can. Take what you need. Together we go further, faster.

Support Mautic’s fundraiser at: mautic.org/2026-fundraiser

Explore membership at: mautic.org/membership

Questions or want to discuss larger organisational support? Email me at: ruth.cheesley@mautic.org

Introducing Sīlavāpi

Sīlavāpi (Ruth Cheesley) — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Over the last three months I’ve had the great privilege of taking a sabbatical and attending an 11‑week residential ordination retreat up in the mountains of Aragón in southern Spain. During this retreat I was ordained into the Triratna Buddhist Order and given the name Sīlavāpi by my preceptor, Acalavajrī.

It was around 16 years ago that I decided that Buddhism was the path I wanted to follow in life, and asked for ordination into the Triratna Buddhist Order. I could never have imagined the twists and turns my life would take from that point to today - it’s been quite a wild ride! Here’s a bit of an explanation as to the name Sīlavāpi and what it means, why my preceptor gave me the name, and what that means going forward.

TL;DR:

The name means 'she who is a lake of virtuous conduct’.
It’s pronounced see‑lah‑vah‑pee.
I’d like to be known as Sīlavāpi everywhere, but it’ll take a bit of time. If you forget and call me Ruth, that’s fine - we’ll get there together.
You can read more about what ordination means in Triratna.
The website will be updated soon - my lovely friend Chiara Aliotta-Baras at Until Sunday is already working on it.

Why Sīlavāpi?

Here’s the explanation that my private preceptor, Acalavajrī, gave when she shared my name publicly for the first time at the public ordination:

Ruth’s new name is rich with meaning. It comes from the Pāli words sīla, meaning ethical conduct or virtue, and vāpi, meaning a reservoir, lake or pond. It gives me great joy to introduce Sīlavāpi - ‘ she who is a lake of virtuous conduct.’ [It’s pronounced see-lah-vah-pee].

A lake isn’t fixed or permanent but it is sustaining - something that gathers and holds what is essential, and quietly nourishes life around it. It does not fill itself. It depends on what flows into it, and what is allowed to drain away. Every act of attention, every moment of reflection, every choice to repair harm or extend kindness adds something back. No lake remains at its fullest forever. But neither is it ever beyond replenishment. Ethical behaviour is not a fixed achievement. It is a living thing which we are responsible for sustaining.

And this feels like a perfect reflection of who Sīlavāpi is. She is someone who brings integrity, kindness, wholeheartedness and care into the world - not in a dramatic or showy way, but in the quiet, consistent way that truly sustains others. She truly is a ‘lake of virtuous conduct’ a source of nourishment, refreshment and an inspiration to all that know her.

Sīlavāpi’s journey has been shaped not only by dedication, but also by courage. She has lived with physical pain and real uncertainty and rather than turning away from difficulty, she has met these conditions with courage, determination, and care, rebuilding strength and continuing to live fully and actively. Her resilience is deeply inspiring.

She brings this same spirit into every part of her life. Through her work leading the global Mautic community she brings people together across countries and cultures, creating spaces of collaboration, trust, and shared purpose. She publicly ‘blogs’ about her practice of taking the precepts into her work and into the world. She shows, through her actions, that ethical practice is not separate from everyday life - it can guide how we work, how we lead, how we care for one another and how we contribute to the world.

Perhaps most importantly though, she has done the deep inner work of transformation. Through her practice, she has learned to open to experience, to grow in self-awareness, and to cultivate trust - in herself, in others, and in the Dharma. Her practice of ethics is not theoretical; it is lived, day by day, in how she relates to the world.

Sīlavāpi is also a musician, an endurance athlete, a community builder, and a devoted member of the sangha - someone who brings energy, generosity, and sincerity wherever she goes. She gives herself wholeheartedly - to her friends, to her community, and to the path she has chosen. There is a sincerity and depth to her commitment that is both moving and inspiring.

Her new name, Sīlavāpi, reflects both her aspiration and the qualities she already embodies - but we are not just celebrating her new name, but a deepening of a lifelong commitment - her commitment to live ethically and to grow in wisdom and compassion for the sake of all beings.

Quite a name, eh!

As soon as I heard it in my private ordination ceremony, it just felt right. It felt like it really represented all that has led to the most transformation along my path, and where I’m at now – but it’s also a strongly aspirational name and a lifelong call to practice.

People who know me well also commented how well the name fit with what they know of me.

Going forward, every time someone calls ‘Sīlavāpi’ it’s a reminder of that moment in my private ordination, a reminder of why Acalavajrī gave me that name, and a reminder of the importance of ethical practice in my journey towards Enlightenment for the benefit of all beings.

What now?

About the name

Going forward, I’m planning to use the name Sīlavāpi in all contexts – work, personal, and everywhere online. I don’t want to have some people know me by one name and others by another. I know it’ll take a bit of time and that it’s not an easy name to get your head around. There’ll be a transition period and it’s completely fine if you still call me Ruth accidentally - we’ll just work our way towards Sīlavāpi over time.

So what, are you a nun now?

In our tradition (the Triratna Buddhist Community and Order), ordination doesn’t mean you become a monk or a nun (you can read more about what ordination means in the Triratna Buddhist Order if you’re interested). I’ll be continuing to work and to live with my partner (and of course, the two cats!) ‘in the world’. I may have some more responsibilities at my local Buddhist Centre, but for all intents and purposes, things will continue much as they were before I left. I might write a bit more in this part of my blog, though.

One thing that will be visually a bit different is that I’m trying out wearing my robes and kesa all the time.

This isn’t something people tend to do in our order – we only had an official order robe relatively recently, and as a more Western‑focused movement people usually wear ‘civvies’ so as not to put people off and to stay close to everyday reality. During the retreat, though, I felt a really strong connection with all the women over thousands of years who have taken ordination and worn their robes for the rest of their lives.

Wearing robes also feels like a very practical way I can explore renunciation. Working in the tech industry and living in the world, there are a lot of things it isn’t practical for me to let go of. Fashion and how I dress is something I can simplify quite easily. The robes are also a very visible reminder of my time on retreat – of wearing them all day, every day, of the vows I took during my ordination ceremony, of the precepts we aspire to follow, and of the centrality of my Buddhist practice and commitment in my life.

I won’t be wearing it when I’m training (robes + gym equipment/running/swimming/cycling isn’t a very sensible combination!) but on the whole I expect to be wearing them most of the time (yes, in all this heat!)

I’ve committed to this for a period of ~6 weeks up until and including the Order Convention, and will see how it feels at that point as to whether I’ll continue it as a practice, or not.

Website / brand updates

I’ll make some updates to the website, domain and brand fairly soon, but for the moment I’m just settling back into life after three months with 23+ women, a few ibexes, lots of lizards, some very friendly little hares, and a lot of cicadas for company! The world feels very loud and busy and a little overwhelming right now, so forgive me if you encounter me and I resemble something like a rabbit in the headlights.

I start back at work on Monday 13 July, so until then I’m fairly ‘out of the loop’. My good friend Chiara Aliotta‑Baras at Until Sunday is cooking up some ideas for my branding, so watch this space for updates.

Photos from the retreat

Questions?

If you’ve got any questions or you would like to leave any comments please do so below. I’ll respond as I’m able!