 So, hello everyone, hello everyone and thank you for attending this session. My topic today is email marketing down the open source way. I will talk about an email marketing software tool which is for sending new letters and email campaigns. Let me introduce myself first. I am a community advocate and community manager for PHP list. I am a Fedora ambassador which I suppose does not impress anyone here. I work in media volunteer and an open labs member which is a local open source community back in my country where I met all of these open source communities that I am involved with. So, PHP list is 100% open source software. It is licensed under the AGPL version 3 license. It is hosted on Github, was in Italy around 20 years back in 2000, in March 2000 and it is a community driven project. This is a simple screenshot from the PHP list dashboard which is what the administrators see. As of context, just a small parenthesis, I am employed to PHP list limited which is a company that offers support for customers that do not want to host the software themselves and they just want to use it. So what is this session about? About two years ago, we started thinking and reconsidering the development cycle we used to follow. So we started researching and meeting with each other and talking to each other and see what other development approach we could follow at that time until we end up to what we have here. Another thing to have in mind was that three different projects that were running simultaneously was the PHP list 3 which is the software we have now currently on version 3.5.0. PHP list 4 and the rest API which are working progress, PHP list 4 is a rewritten version of the one that we have now and the CMS which is the software used for the hosted clients. Why was considered a different development approach? First of all, releases at that time were feature based and not time based and that means that we would have a new release every time that all these list of features that were preset was met and implemented and not have a specific and concise time frame of the releases. Why was that a problem which we realized two years ago? First of all, we had a consistent time frame of the releases and nobody knew when we would have a new release and we would have a new release every three months or maybe every seven months. It would take way much longer for the community actually to benefit from the software itself because it would take longer to deliver the final product. The community couldn't get further involved and another thing that was very important to us was the testing phase which would take longer at the time because it was internal and there was no better version of the software. So meeting started, calls started going on because most of the team was spread in different cities and countries and we started considering an agile approach. What was considered on the way? So agile was the first thought but actually we had to put way much more thought from behind because we could not be as strict as agile would suggest. So we had to adapt somehow our activity and with the community and the releases and the features that we wanted to add. So how agile actually could we be? Do we have the resources to do that? How quickly could we adapt? How that would affect the way we're doing things? These are some of the challenges and thoughts that we had before we actually decide what to do and which we tried to resolve later. Some of the options that we had in mind was a six-month or a three-month or a one-month release cycle. We soon realized that the most agile approach would have been the one-month releases and that would solve actually the problem with earlier. How that would affect the way we are doing current things? We were doing current things at that time. But actually we were able to meet our deadline because one month is a very short amount of time and did we have the resources to implement everything that we had in mind at that time? As of context, the community was not much involved on the testing phase. So another thing that would come up was the upgrading process which would conclude on a ton of errors and we didn't want to have people spend time troubleshooting, upgrade or configuration problems, but we want them to focus on actually testing and using and trying the software. So that was then when the automatic updater was introduced. The automatic updater is a process in order to update the software easily and low the risk of errors. It's an automatic process and you don't have to actually have any technical skills in order to upgrade to the latest version. So we had to choose our tools, what we had in our defense. We kept using, instead of introducing actually a new learning curve, we thought that it would have been better to keep what we had and adapt it on a new way of doing things. We kept Mantis. Mantis is an open source back tracker in order to put our roadmap there, discourse in order to be in touch with the community. Next slide for our meeting notes and Jitsi for the daily stand up calls. The daily stand up calls were a key element actually to the communication between the team. They were very short calls of ten minutes where people who just mentioned what is a blocker to them and what they will do next. Just that. No questions. If you would have questions, you would schedule a different meeting in one on one meeting. Some of the challenges faced was actually deciding what is a priority and what is not. In a small team of developers, there is not much room of setting very high or more goals. So we had to be realistic on what we can actually achieve or not. And what to expect from the community. What happens when the roadmap goals are not met? Managed in the backup. How to manage the community involvement? We had people actually submitting very useful PRs and people who would just ask for features they dreamed about. So where we send after 17 months of working that way? We have a software which is 17 times more updated now. 17 times updated does not mean that have been implemented on the 17 features. It's more than that. We are currently on version 3.5.0 which was released only 10 days ago. We have community members submitting full requests on every release and I'm very happy and proud to announce that on every single release there have been at least one community contribution. Features get faster delivered back to the community and I would also want to add that the community is also involved on the testing process because about a week before the final release we have scheduled the beta release, the release candidate where people can actually install and check it. So that is all for me. It was a short presentation. I would like to thank you all for listening to me. Thank you. I'm interested to know how you became a community manager for this project? Oh, sure. Can I ask you to repeat the question? Oh, yeah, so the question was how I became the community manager of the project. About three and a half years ago in 2016 I joined Open Lab Server Space which is a community in Toronto, in Albania, in my country. And we organized a conference which is named Open Source Conference in Albania, Oskar. And there I met Fedora, I met Wikimedia and of course Ph. Belize, they had a book there. So I came in touch with email marketing. I had no idea what it was at the time, I was just a student. I was not interested into this marketing part. So I started meeting actually developers that used to work on that and people that were involved and about a year ago last year I also got employed and became the community manager. And I'm very happy. It was a step-by-step process. I think CEP is the right thing for that conference. Yes, it happened yesterday, I think. Some of the organizers are here. You can talk to them. Some of them are standing next to you. Yes, the CEP is already open so everyone who is interested can apply. Another question? I have another one. Sure. How did you find switching to a time-based release schedule? And how did you find that? Future-based. Now we are time-based like we have monthly releases. We have the release candidate on the 5th and the final release on the 11th of each month unless something urgent comes up and we schedule it for a few days. And have you noticed that that's changed the engagement with your community? Yes, because actually if I'm using something and I don't know when an update will come, we had updates if you go back and check the releases from the previous year you will see a release every three months and then every seven and then every five. So that was not consistent and people didn't have something to wait for because they didn't know when it will come. So now people have something to wait for and they know it's going to be there and the announcements are on the forum. I guess also if you're evaluating something like should I debt my tech stack on this piece here? If nothing happened to seven months, you're like... Yeah, yeah. Yeah, is this thing dead or? Yeah. Yes. Yeah, sure. How was your experience of managing your community? Has it been challenging for you at all? Can you raise your voice? Oh, sorry. Yeah, I was thinking about your experience in managing your community and getting contributions. Was it challenging to get people to contribute to it? Yeah, okay. So the question to summarise it is whether was there any challenging managing the community? So the BHPD community actually is consisted of people who are quite technical because the software itself, the software process requires some technical skills in order to install it. So people actually contribute are quite technical themselves and we don't expect young students to contribute. So most of these people, the way why they get motivated as they understand it is because they want a software as much complete as it could be with much more features. So that's why they get their hands dirty and work and submit all the time. So there are months and certain periods of time where we have more pull requests from the community and there are months where it's not that intense but still the fact that it's continuous, I would say, that's a very positive outcome from their engagement. Any other features that they're initiating by the portal because they are very in touch with them and they initiate community calls and they fold and they also criticize different changes that are made but the thing with our community, I feel that they have very strong opinions. And they are probably participating. We also support different community members. Councilor Ruffin, from that question, how technical do you need to be to be a community manager? Oh, you don't have to. Well, I'm not that technical as the community members but what I try to do, for example, we have scheduled several community calls where we would gather some community members and we were very interested in hearing their feedback because as Sola mentioned, which is also part of the team, some of them are, let's say, resellers, if I can call them like that, for the software itself, so they know it from the inside. So we are very interested in knowing actually what they want from it, how they want to see it in the future. So managing, I mean, I don't write code myself. I can read but I don't write code myself. So I would say that you don't have to be that highly technical in order to manage this group of people. I have a question about that. So if you don't need to be as technical as the community to be the community manager, what do you say are kind of like attributes or skills or qualities that you need to be successful as a community manager? On that particular case, I would say that I have been for more than three years involved with open source community as a community member myself. So I started actually as a volunteer before I get to this position. So at that time, I felt like the community manager was the person to actually go and ask questions and guide me until I figured out that I can do things and just let them know that I did that. And this is what people actually do because they are more experienced than me and I am very happy to hear from them what they do but they also don't expect me to approve it somehow or I don't know. We have also more technical people in the team so if they face technical problems or technical issues or the pieces of code that they submit on GitHub, so there are other people that can answer their questions and help them troubleshoot anything that comes up in the way. And it's also another thing that they help each other so they don't expect someone else to deal with their issues. So if I'm not the technical person but for example, I'm doing email marketing, right? So I can be also part of the community to join to this discussion and show what I'm expecting maybe from the software. Yes, absolutely. So another thing that I would love to see for Piet Pilis is that our forum is mainly full of technical issues. For example, I try to install it and then the database and error came up but I would love actually to see more marketers come on the way because most of the community, not necessarily the community but the people involved in this are system administrators themselves or coders or stuff like that but I would love also to see people that use the software in order to promote their business and make profit share tips and advices so that would be great to have such contributions. And one more question. So do you have any experience with like internal email marketing? Like do somebody use it for the internal marketing? So yes, we try to do our email marketing as well and send some newsletters and try. The last one that was sent was about a month ago where we actually asked for people to evaluate the product on other independent websites and platforms. Do you have another question? Yeah, I'm just wondering. Do you use Piet Pilis to do those email marketing? Absolutely! So you said that right now in the community it's primarily system administrators so what brings them to the community? They're not the end users of the product, right? Yes. What brings them there? We have many resellers actually of the product. So it has been proven that Piet Pilis is the most popular open source product and hence it's free and open source people are free to modify it so they change a lot of stuff so companies actually use the product and they ask for it from the system administrator to do their job. To figure it out. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We are running quickly out of time so any last question?