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.

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?

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.

 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.

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!

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?

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.

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!