Hello wonderful supporters of Mautic!

We're well and truly into the Autumn here in the UK, and despite the widespread flooding and storms all is mostly well here in Ipswich!

Thank you to everyone who reached out with well wishes after my accident and surgery, I'm pleased to say after 8 weeks I'm almost back to typing and the wrist is healing well!

A lot of exciting stuff has happened this last month in the Mautic community so I'll do my best to round it up for you, but also do check the Open Startup and Quarterly Reports for more detail.

Of course the most exciting news is that we've released the Beta of Mautic 5, and we're on the verge of making the Release Candidate available. We still have some reported bugs that we want to get fixed before we make the General Availability release but we're making good headway.

Central to the new governance model is having a system which allows us to manage decision making processes in a democratic and transparent manner. For several months I've been working on the new Community Portal which was launched last week.

It's exciting to see it getting used across the community for everything from team meetings to discussions on product feature development and electing our new Council.

Over the coming month we will be transitioning our meetup groups away from meetup.com over to our community portal which will also result in some substantial cost savings.

We're seeing a gradual increase in both individual memberships and interest in corporate memberships, with several of our regular monthly sponsors converting to become members.

We're making good progress against our financial targets but we have more work to do if we're to hit our end-of-year targets for revenue generation. I'm going to be spending more of my time over the next two months focused on this side of things. If you're not yet a member, do take a look at the blog post announcing the memberships and sign up today!

After a thorough RFP process we have identified a provider we will be working with for the next three years to offer a fully-featured trial of the open source Mautic product in a hosted environment.

There will be the option to convert into a paid account with 40% of the revenue coming back to the community. We're just dotting the i's and crossing the t's on the legal paperwork and will be making a public announcement once that's all in hand.

We held our first ever MautiCamp - conferences organised by the local community rather than the Mautic project - in Lagos, Nigeria last month. I was honoured to be invited to attend and open the conference, explaining more about Mautic as a project and community, and the value that it brings to businesses and entrepreneurs.

Mautic Meetup Lagos has been our most popular meetup group which started just before the pandemic caused lockdowns, and has just got back to meetings happening in-person. Two of our leadership team are involved with running the group - Oluwatobi Owolabi from the Marketing Team and Favour Kelvin from the Education Team.

We had a great day of diverse talks, lots of networking and of course the mandatory jollof rice which was wonderful! The team also organised some cultural activities the day after the event which included a treetop walk in the nature reserve, a truly incredible experience!

Not to be outdone, several other communities around the world are planning their own MautiCamp events in the coming year - watch this space!

We're really focusing this year on trying to drive awareness and adoption of Mautic, so it's great to see more Mautic Meetup groups starting including Barcelona, Spain and Douala, Cameroon alongside Valencia, Spain resuming in-person meetings.

If you'd like to organise one please just submit an application on the new Community Portal!

That's all for now folks, thanks as always for your support of Mautic - we couldn't do it without you!