About this project
About
What this is, where it came from, and who it is for.
The origin story
In 2026 I took a three month sabbatical in the Spanish mountains to be ordained in the Triratna Buddhist Order, after sixteen years of training. I was completely off grid, uncontactable, for the whole time.
Preparing for that meant confronting every single point of failure in the Mautic project. Who has access to what. How decisions get made without me. What the answer is if I do not come back.
Working through those questions turned up more gaps than I expected, and very little existing material to work from. Most of what I could find assumed either a corporate HR department or a foundation with staff. So I wrote what I needed, ran a workshop on it at GitHub Universe in October 2025, and other people started adding what they had learned the hard way.
Who this is for
The resources here are being written to work in four settings.
Open source projects. Maintainers, release keys, governance, and what happens when the person who has always done the release stops answering.
Charities and NGOs. Trustee and board succession, funder and grant relationships held in one person's head, regulatory continuity, safeguarding leads, and the finance officer who is the only signatory.
Companies. Most already have a business continuity plan. Very few have one that covers key person knowledge risk, which is the part that actually takes six months to recover from.
Small teams, collectives and volunteer groups. Where one person carries most of the operation without anyone having counted.
The underlying failure is the same everywhere. The vocabulary is not, so each resource has an overlay that translates it into the language of your sector and adds the risks specific to it.
The approach
None of this is theoretical best practice. It comes from transitions that really happened: maintainer departures, burnout, sudden absences, corporate spinouts, governance handovers, and the messy human business of keeping something alive through change.
Everything is released under CC0. Take it, adapt it, put your own branding on it, and do not credit me if that is easier. It works better when it is yours.
Contribute what you have learned so the next person starts further along than you did.
Beyond the free resources
The community resources are the foundation and stay free. Alongside them:
- Workshops and facilitated sessions for your team, organisation or event
- Implementation support for specific transitions
- Advisory work where the situation is complicated
Get in touch if any of that would help.
About me
I am Sīlavāpi Cheesley, Project Lead for Mautic, an open source marketing automation platform. I led Mautic through its transition from corporate control to community independence, and have spent years building governance that is meant to outlast the people who wrote it.
I was ordained in the Triratna Buddhist Order in 2026 and took the name Sīlavāpi. You may know my previous work under the name Ruth Cheesley, which still appears in my older writing.