What are you doing for the Magento Community?

I am bringing this on behalf of the Magento Association. The Magento association would like you to join at magentoassociation.org/join. Join today for some excellent content.?

Happy holidays.

I hope everybody is warm and safe. I hope everybody's making it through COVID. I wanted to write this to call out specifically that the Magento Association needs your help. We need to help with Magento Open-Source.?

Magento.com is dead. It is no more. It has been redirected. It's harder and harder to find any signs of life in the Magento name. It's easier to see Adobe commerce, but the open-source is getting buried in the noise. And what are we doing? I know that the open-source task force is started. The MOSCA effort is out there, and the open-source version will live, but doesn't it make sense to keep Adobe in the picture??

I'm looking for ideas. I'm looking for thoughts. I'm looking for feedback. I'm looking for interviews. I'd love to talk to you. The truth is that there isn't a good vehicle from a podcast standpoint in the community for Magento anymore.

MageTalk is still the premier podcast, but its last episode was on Oct 2nd. We would love to see more content directly from the Magento Association, but the podcast from the Magento Association seems to be a commercial podcast. I was hoping for a community podcast. I'm hoping that we can keep our Magento community together and keep going as a community as a whole.

So what are we going to do about it? How can we become involved? I love what's happening with the Hyva theme. I love what's happening with the idea of a fork. Necessarily I'm not too fond of the concept of a fork, but it is exciting that we are keeping things alive and going. I am not that excited about what's happening from the Adobe side.

What's happening from the Magento Association side??

I'm on the Magento Association membership committee, and we are doing much work. Still, as I sit in the committee meetings, I realize we are not communicating anything outside of what we're talking about in that committee.?

Today, I'm committing to talk about what we're doing in our membership committee. I'm committing to one blog post a month about what the membership committee is doing to help gain members for the Magento Association. And I'm hoping the other committee members will also do the same. The Magento Association has about 2000 members, but hundreds of thousands of Magento people are out there right now.?

Currently, joining the Association is completely free. Does that mean that there's no value in it? Of course not!? Why isn't everyone in the Magento community joining?

I feel that there's a lack of communication and transparency from the Magento Association. I'm hoping as a group. We can communicate what's happening. There is a board that is directing our goals. And right now, we are told that the goal is to have a pay version of the Magento Association. There is an open-source task force, but there's not much communication coming out of that. There's an email that happens. There's a blog post that seems to happen every week, but that is it! The blog post is either commercial or regurgitated things we learned at MA Connect. I would like to see new and exciting things coming from the community. What I think would be helpful would be to have blog posts from community members about the community for the community.?

I would like to see and hear about what people are doing in their committees. The perception is that they are doing controversial things or not meeting their goals, or may not be able to meet their goals. We don't know. Telling nothing is worse than telling that we're working on something and never saying what.

If the board is working hard at something, we should at least know what that something is. The board doesn't have to commit to one thing, but it would be great to see the board's direction. If the only thing the board is working towards is a paid version, then let's say the board is working on a paid version.? Communication and transparency have many different aspects, and we can talk about them in the open. We should keep moving forward with things that we already know.

Currently, the membership committee focuses on the oversight of membership growth, engagement, marketing, and social media channels. The diversity and inclusion committee focuses on diversity, inclusion of membership, Meet Magento events and committees, and task force.?

The events committee focuses on supporting and overseeing Magento events.? It supports other events needed for the Magento community, such as Magento connect, and there is a specific committee for MAconnect planning. The content committee focuses on:

• Source opportunities for online-based engagement,?
• Drive peer-reviewed editorial standards for MA, user, and partner content
• Advocate for increased user-generated content
• Launch of MA Podcast

Finally, the Magento open-source task force evaluates and develops strategies around Magento open source. The task force is building a plan for the sustainability of the Magento open-source platform.

I would argue that we should be working as a community focusing on the Magento Association's mission. What is the Magento association's mission?

The Magento association's mission is to advance and empower the global community and commerce ecosystem through open collaboration, education, and thoughtfully.

Open collaboration means to work together. It means that we should at least know what each of us is doing and understand each goal.

What am I doing??

I'm doing this podcast, a community-based podcast for the Magento community by the Magento community.?

What can you do? You can join the Magento association and make your voice heard. You can give feedback. You can provide updates and give your opinion.

The Magento association would like to adopt something like Patreon for some payment option to help sustain the Magento association into the future. What does that mean? How much would you pay?? Would you mind giving me your feedback on what you would like to see from the Magento Association and how you would like to see that happen?? I would love to hear your thoughts. I would love to interview you on my podcast.?

The time to step up and take action is now!