Establishing an incentivised partners programme in an open source project
A presentation at FOSDEM 2022 by Ruth Cheesley
Photo by Ian Cylkowski on Unsplash IMPLEMENTING AN INCENTIVISED PARTNERS PROGRAM IN MAUTIC @RCheesley
MAUTIC PROJECT LEAD RUTH CHEESLEY (she/her) 18+ years using and contributing to open source projects Located in Ipswich, UK Working full time for Acquia as Mautic Project Lead noti.st/rcheesley for slides, resources & notes @RCheesley
E S TA B L I S H I N G A N I N C E N T I V I S E D PA R T N E R S P R O G R A M WHAT WE’RE GOING TO COVER CONTRIBUTIONS FINANCES PROGRAM How do we determine what a How do we make the financial What does the partners program contribution is, and track them over aspect equitable around the world to offer? How has it worked? What time? all potential partners? have we learned? Image by Pexels from Pixabay Photo by Ibrahim Boran on Unsplash Photo by AbsolutVision on Unsplash @RCheesley
ABOUT MAUTIC A LITTLE BIT OF HISTORY ✴ Open source marketing automation platform launched in 2015 (mautic.org / github.com/ mautic/mautic) ✴ Founder’s SaaS company Mautic Inc was acquired by Acquia in 2019 ✴ Community now has its own governance model and is operating as a self-sufficient open source project @RCheesley
W H Y D I D W E N E E D A PA R T N E R S PROGRAM? WE WANTED TO: ✴ Encourage practical contribution and financial support from businesses who depend on Mautic ✴ Help people find the ‘makers’ who are actively supporting the community ✴ Promote organisations who are contributing both financially and in practical terms ✴ Give organisations something they can be proud of and which helps demonstrate their commitment to the project and community @RCheesley
GETTING THE BASICS IN PLACE CONTRIBUTIONS ✴ What is defined as a contribution? ✴ Where do contributions happen? ✴ How do we track out-of-channel contributions? ✴ How do we associate contributions with organisations? @RCheesley
OPEN SOURCE COMMUNITY CRM SAVANNAH CRM ✴ Bring together all our community channels in one central dashboard ✴ Determine what is a contribution, and track this over time ✴ Identify organisations who are contributing https://github.com/SavannahHQ/Savannah
MONITORING CONTRIBUTIONS WHAT DO WE TRACK? 01 02 GITHUB DISCOURSE Pull Request opened Replies marked as solutions 03 04 SLACK MEETUP Help given in a chat Hosted a meetup @RCheesley
MONITORING CONTRIBUTIONS WHAT DO WE TRACK? 05 06 REDDIT S TA C K E X C H A N G E Help given in a thread Accepted answer to question 07 08 PODCASTS BLOGS Community podcasts Articles on mautic.org @RCheesley
OTHER CONTRIBUTIONS GIVING CREDIT WHERE IT IS DUE MANUAL OR API ASSIGNMENT Team Leads can manually assign credits to a contributor for anything outside of existing tracked channels (e.g. leading a sprint, speaking at a conference, proof-reading an article). The API can be used to track other activities - for example Jira issues being closed, GitHub release being made. @RCheesley Photo by Caleb Chen on Unsplash
INDIVIDUAL CONTRIBUTIONS WHAT DO WE REPORT ON? ✴ Top contributors ✴ Most active members Photo by Shane Rounce on Unsplash
O R G A N I S AT I O N C O N T R I B U T I O N S WHAT DO WE REPORT ON? ✴ Top contributing organisations ✴ Most active organisations Photo by airfocus on Unsplash
R E C O G N I S I N G O R G A N I S AT I O N S MONTHLY SHOUT-OUT
RECOGNISING CONTRIBUTORS MONTHLY SHOUT-OUT @RCheesley
GETTING THE BASICS IN PLACE FINANCES ✴ How do we accept financial contributions? ✴ How much is ‘enough’ and over how long? ✴ How do we make that amount equitable worldwide? @RCheesley
A C C E P T I N G D O N AT I O N S FINANCIAL TRANSPARENCY IS KEY ✴ Established Open Collective, hosted by Open Source Collective, to hold and manage our funds ✴ Applied for GitHub Sponsors which passes funds directly to Open Collective @RCheesley
HOW MUCH IS ENOUGH? HOW TO MAKE THRESHOLDS EQUITABLE @RCheesley ✴ Implemented the ‘Big Mac Index’ to determine how much would be the minimum contribution by country ✴ 3 months minimum term for consistent contributions (financial and practical contributions) https://www.economist.com/big-mac-index
B U I L D I N G A PA R T N E R S P R O G R A M HOW DOES IT WORK? ✴ How do organisations apply to join? ✴ What do they get as a Community Partner? ✴ How are they incentivised? @RCheesley
B E C O M I N G A PA R T N E R APPLY WHEN CRITERIA IS MET M U S T M E E T M A N D AT O R Y R E Q U I R E M E N T S ✴ At least 3 months contributing to the project (evidenced in activity in Savannah CRM) ✴ At least 3 months contributing financially at the minimum level or above for the country of their head office or primary location ✴ No Code of Conduct breaches against organisation or team members over the past 12 months (tracked in Savannah CRM) @RCheesley
PA R T N E R D I R E C T O R Y L I S T I N G PROMINENT LISTINGS ✴ Each partner has a page in the 1 directory including backlink ✴ Top 3 partners featured on mautic.org homepage ✴ Partners ranked by activity and contributions in the previous month ✴ Partners mentioned in all official conferences @RCheesley
O R G A N I S AT I O N L I S T I N G SHOWCASE S E RV I C E S A N D CONTRIBUTIONS ✴ Company overview ✴ Highlight contributions ✴ List active contributors ✴ Quarterly activity graph ✴ Relevant case studies ✴ Promote partnership opportunities ✴ Lead generation form @RCheesley 2
R O A D M A P P R I O R I T I S AT I O N FEATURE REQUESTS 3 ✴ Partners may submit up to three features to the Project Lead per calendar year (funded or unfunded) for consideration to include in the roadmap, without going through the community voting and prioritisation process @RCheesley
NEWSLETTER MENTIONS PROMOTION ACROSS CHANNELS ✴ Social media and email promotion on joining ✴ Featured on every community newsletter with links to their partners page ✴ Re-sharing relevant news and content @RCheesley 4
HOW HAS IT WORKED? WE HAVE: ✴ Seen significant uptake in sponsorships from organisations ✴ Enrolled six partners with one in review ✴ Seen sustained contributions from partners ✴ Gained new contributors from new partners ✴ Enabled community members to build partnerships with ‘makers’ in the community, driving mutually beneficial growth of the ecosystem @RCheesley
W H AT D I D W E L E A R N ? TRANSPARENCY MATTERS ✴ Have clear policies and workflows to cover the whole process ✴ Be clear on expectations with promotion of partners ✴ Set clear content guidelines for their listing pages Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash
W H AT W O U L D / W I L L W E C H A N G E SOME THOUGHTS: ✴ Automate / embed as much as possible on the portal (currently fully manual process) ✴ Improve search/filter capabilities to include location, language, services offered ✴ Automated follow up if partners are declining in their activity ✴ Considering possibility of having a tiered program ✴ Sponsored content
MAUTIC PROJECT LEAD RUTH CHEESLEY (she/her) What questions can I answer? ruth.cheesley@mautic.org noti.st/rcheesley for slides, recording, links and resources. @RCheesley
While money is helpful in open source projects, hands-on contributions are probably more valuable to the long term health and sustainability of the project.
In the Mautic project, we wanted to establish a partners programme which would allow us to highlight to our community the organisations who were both financially supporting the project as a sponsor, and were actively contributing to the project.
In this session I’ll outline how we came up with a way to make the financial element equitable for partners around the world, and the steps we took toward ensuring that organisations couldn’t just buy their way to partner status.
We’ll dig into thorny topics like determining what we mean by contributions, how we recognise non-code contributions alongside code contributions, and the tooling that underpins it all.
I’ll also explain how we’ve built our partners portal to incentivise active contributions from the organisations, and some of the improvements that we’re thinking of making in the future.
Video
Resources
The following resources were mentioned during the presentation or are useful additional information.
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Mautic
Mautic is an open source marketing automation platform which is disrupting the marketing automation industry. It’s free to download and use, with a growing ecosystem of SaaS providers including Acquia, the primary sponsor of the open source project.
It’s built by a worldwide community of marketers and developers, united by our belief in empowering organizations with the tools they need to deliver world-class automation and personalized experiences to their customers.
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Mautic on GitHub
Mautic’s codebase on GitHub
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Savannah CRM
Savannah is an Open Source Community Relationship Manager (CoRM), which is like a Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) but with a focus on community building rather than sales.
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Mautic’s 90 Day Savannah Report
Our publicly shared report detailing activity in the Mautic Community over the past 90 days.
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Big Mac Index
The Big Mac Index is a price index published by The Economist as an informal way of measuring the purchasing power parity between two currencies, and provides a test of the extent to which market exchange rates result in goods costing the same in different countries. We use this in Mautic to determine the minimum monthly contribution to become a partner.
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Mautic Partners Program
The Mautic Community Partners Portal
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Policy for becoming a Community Partner
Our formal policy which outlines how you can become a Mautic Community Partner.
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Policy for promoting contributors, sponsors and partners
Our formal policy which outlines how we promote contributors, sponsors and partners.
