Recognising contributors, sponsors and partners
Background information
The Mautic Community wishes to encourage initiative/team/working group teams to acknowledge and thank their sponsors and contributors, but without the *.mautic.org web properties or the Mautic application becoming overly cluttered with advertising or promotional messages.
Additionally, we want to ensure that companies do not ‘game’ the system by providing minimal contributions in order to be recognized (e.g. with logo placement/links).
Recognizing that the community norms around such messages are continually changing and that it is probably impossible to codify a process precisely, the recommendation is that we establish a policy framework for the Community Leadership Team to use when evaluating each situation, and leave the final decisions in the case of any disputes to the Community Council.
Definitions
Contributor: there are many way to contribute to Mautic projects ranging from committing code to writing good bug reports to helping with documentation to doing community outreach to funding developers to work on the project. Even organizations and individuals that are "merely" adopting Mautic can be extremely useful contributors if they provide good, detailed, and timely feedback about requirements and bugs.
Individual Contributor: a contributor who is a person.
Organization Contributor: an organisation that employs a one or more people who are contributors.
Significant Contribution: a significant contribution is defined by its significance to the outcome of the project, not by the size of the contribution. Typically larger contributions are more significant, but that does not preclude an extremely valuable two line fix to a critical, but difficult to find, bug from being "significant". Nor does it preclude a giant code dump of rarely used code from being "not significant". As a general rule of thumb, somewhere between 25% and 50% of the contributions to a project are significant.
Current Contribution: a current contribution is one that is included in the current major release cycle, e.g., if the project is working on release 4.0, then a current contribution is a contribution whose code or effect is still significant in the 4.0 code base. The currency of a contribution fades with time, even if that contribution is still part of the code base. For example, bug fixes to release 1.0 are probably no longer "current" when the current major release is 4.0.
Current Significant Contributor: a Contributor who has made one or more Significant Contributions that are also Current Contributions.
Web resources: Including but not limited to Confluence spaces, mautic.org pages, community handbook pages.
Sponsor: An organization or individual who are financially supporting the Mautic Community on a regular basis, listed at mautic.org/sponsors
Partner: An organization who are financially and practically supporting the Mautic Community on a regular basis, and have met the criteria to become a Mautic Community Partner, listed at mautic.org/mautic-community-partners
Policy on promotion of contributors
The Mautic policy on recognizing contributions on mautic.org, in the Mautic application and in releases is as follows:
- Contributions to Mautic will not have the contributor/s visibly identifiable in the application or the code - for example any themes which are contributed will have the author marked as ‘Mautic Team’ rather than an individual or organisation contributor.
- Contributors will be recognised using the All Contributors bot on GitHub where they have a GitHub account - contributions without a pull request can be added on this issue. The bot is enabled on all repositories in github.com/mautic and we will soon be rolling up contributors into one single list.
- All conversations about which contributions will be recognized as significant by the initiative/team/working group must occur in a public location such as Slack, GitHub or the Community Forums.
- Team meetings in the Product Team Slack channel are preferred, but publicly posted meeting minutes may be acceptable provided that those minutes clearly document any conversations about the suitability of any contribution, including both pros and cons and the +1/0/-1 position of all meeting participants.
- Each initiative/team/working group is encouraged to list and update its current significant contributors (both individuals and organisations) on its web resources. If more than 50% of the work for an initiative/feature has been carried out and/or funded by an organization contributor, the initiative/project/feature may be communicated as ‘sponsored by ’ in communications, where appropriate including a logo and/or link to their homepage.
- Current significant contributors can be listed by name and photo or corporate logo as applicable or, at the initiative/team/working group’s discretion, name only. All contributors must be given the opportunity to be listed the same way and all contributors must be given the opportunity to anonymise (eg Developer from Organization or using an avatar rather than photo) or opt out of any such listing if they'd like their contribution to be less public.
- Each initiative/team/working group that is recognizing or promoting the work from current significant contributors in a release must state that it is doing so as part of each release planning meeting, and must provide the list of contributors to be recognised to the release leader at least one week prior to the GA release date.
- Each initiative/team/working group's leadership chain (leads and assistant leads) are responsible for vetting, and potentially filtering, the current significant contributor list in order to conform to the overall goal and community norms of this policy.
- Persons or companies who believe they are being unfairly precluded from being identified as a current significant contributor can contact the Project Lead to discuss and, where appropriate, resolve the issue.
- Individuals or companies so recognized may promote that fact, publish that they have been recognized, and link to the recognition. Such an individual or company may not, however, imply any endorsement of their product(s) or service(s) by Mautic or others based on such recognition.
- The Project Lead and Community Council reserve the right to remove any recognition at any time at their discretion.
Policy on promotion of sponsors and partners
The Mautic policy on recognizing sponsors and partners on mautic.org, in the Mautic application and in releases is as follows:
- Sponsors who are contributing over $100/mth will have a logo and link listed on mautic.org/sponsors for the duration of their active sponsorship.
- Sponsors who are contributing under $100/mth will have their name or organization name listed on mautic.org/sponsors.
- Infrastructure sponsors who are providing a service used by the Mautic Community at free or discounted price will have a logo and link to the most relevant page on their website for as long as the membership is active, listed at mautic.org/sponsors.
- If a sponsor cancels their sponsorship or the service is no longer being used, the link will be removed as soon as notification of cancellation is received
- Event sponsors will be listed on the event websites, and will not be eligible to be listed on mautic.org unless they are a regular monthly sponsor in addition to supporting the event.
- Partners will be announced on social media and email when they become a partner, announcing their joining of the programme.
- Partners will be featured in the email template of the Mautic Community Newsletter with a logo and link to their partners landing page.
- The top three partners each month will be listed on the mautic.org homepage with a link to their partners landing page.
Credits
This policy is based on those used by several other Open Source communities including:
Eclipse: https://www.eclipse.org/org/documents/Recognizing_Project_Contributions_Policy_2008.pdf
KDE: https://ev.kde.org/rules/thankyou_policy/