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Speaker

Ruth Cheesley

Ruth Cheesley

Mautic Project Lead

Ipswich, United Kingdom

Ruth is an Open Source advocate with over 18 years of experience using and contributing to many different projects.

Having served on the Community Leadership Team of the Joomla! project and built a full-service digital agency, she now works as Project Lead for Mautic, supporting the community who build and maintain the world’s first Open Source Marketing Automation platform.

Ruth is a lover of cats, a keen runner and is based in the East of England.

Area of Expertise

  • Information & Communications Technology
  • Media & Information
  • Business & Management

Topics

  • Mautic
  • Marketing Automation
  • Open Source Software
  • open source communities
  • open source
  • Buddhism
  • Marketing
  • community
  • Community Growth
  • Community Manager
  • Community Building
  • community relations
  • Community Management
  • Community Engagement
  • Open source and community
  • Technology Community

Managing contributions in an open source project

The great thing about open source is that everyone can contribute. However, this poses a challenge: how to handle the ever-increasing flow of ideas, code contributions and more?

In 30 minutes, Ruth Cheesley and Dennis Ameling will walk you through their experiences being in Mautic’s Product Team. The following topics will be covered:

Human perspective
- What skill sets are needed to form an effective Product Team?
- How to prioritize feature ideas and make sure they actually get realized?
- How to deal with time constraints when contributing to open source?
- How to deal with proposals or contributions that don’t fit with the vision for the project?
- How to deal with inappropriate behavior?

Technical perspective
- The importance of automated tests in accepting code contributions
- The benefits of an efficient CI (Continuous Integration) pipeline
- Efficiently preparing work items for developers of different levels (beginner/intermediate/advanced)
- Reviewing code contributions (PRs) and the technical knowledge/experience needed for that

Let’s make this the year of the contributor experience!

The users of your open source projects are (probably) not mountaineers .. but often we expect them to scale dizzying heights to move from being a consumer to someone who is actively supporting the project - from a ‘taker’ to a ‘maker’.

Whether that be through Everest-style on-ramps for new contributors or something as simple as not making it clear what skills are needed and how people can get involved, there are many roadblocks in the way of people trying to answer the question of ‘how can I help make this project better?’. Of course, this ends up frustrating potential contributors, and results in open source projects losing potential contributors before they even get started.

In this session we’ll explore practical ways we can make this process less like mountaineering and more like a pleasant walk in the park with the sun shining and the birds singing! I’ll draw on my experiences as a contributor to several projects, and in my role as Project Lead for Mautic where we have a Strategic Initiative this year focused on improving the contributor experience.

We’ll also look at the less traditional but extremely valuable non-code contributions, and ways to nurture and recognise contributors (individual & organisational) across your community.

We’ll cover the 40,000ft project-wide level down to the level of teams, local communities and the individuals within the community. Fasten your seatbelts and let’s take off on this voyage of discovery!

How do you change the governance model of an established open source project?

In this talk we delve into the intricacies of reshaping the governance model of an established open source project. This daunting task materialised for Mautic in April 2023 when the project's primary funder and founding company stepped back, enabling it to become fully independent.

The session unpacks the challenges, solutions, and lessons learned from this real-life scenario, providing an insight into how the Mautic community deftly adapted to this shift. It provides a deep dive into the creation and implementation of a new governance model and decision-making process, transforming a potential period of instability into an opportunity for democratisation and collaboration.

The session also offers a practical perspective on enabling democratic decision-making via a new Community Portal.

Fireside Chat: Funding and Sustainability in Open Source projects

Should open source projects expect contributors to work for free, or is that exploitative?

How can open source projects maintain the volunteer spirit at the heart of open source while also ensuring that it is sustainable for individuals and organisations to support their projects?

How can we make contributing to open source accessible to those who do not have the privilege of free time?

Should open source be exploring new economic models to make the work sustainable?

Some of the thorny questions that we will be discussing in this fireside chat between Drupal Project Lead Dries Buytaert and Mautic Project Lead Ruth Cheesley.

Building your own DXP - Getting started with Drupal and Mautic

Digital Experience Platform - shortened to DXP - is the latest buzz word in the web industry. Gartner defines it as “an integrated set of core technologies that support the composition, management, delivery and optimization of contextualized digital experiences.”

Two key elements to a Digital Experience Platform are the tools that you use to build your web-based resources (Drupal, of course!), and the tool that you use to manage the data and personalize the digital experience of the customer (Mautic).

Mautic can really help you supercharge your Drupal services, and being based on Symfony has many benefits to adopting if you’re already developing with Drupal. We also have an awesome community of contributors from around the world!

In this workshop, you will learn in a practical hands-on demonstration how to get started with Drupal and Mautic from two experts in the field - Nick Veenhof, CTO at Dropsolid, and Ruth Cheesley, Mautic Project Lead. We’ll run through the basics of how to connect these two open source tools together, and then step through the process of getting your first multi-channel, personalized campaign up and running.

You’ll leave the session with everything you need to know to bring these two tools together and start building your own powerful Digital Experience Platform.

MautiCamp Africa 2023 Sessionize Event

October 2023 Lagos, Nigeria

Mautic Conference Global 2023 Sessionize Event

June 2023

DrupalCon Portland 2022 Sessionize Event

April 2022 Portland, Oregon, United States

Mautic Conference Europe 2021 Sessionize Event

November 2021 Hasselt, Belgium

Mautic Conference Global 2021 Sessionize Event

June 2021

MautiCon 2020 Sessionize Event

November 2020

Ruth Cheesley

Mautic Project Lead

Ipswich, United Kingdom