Political groups and campaigns have been some of the earliest users of CiviCRM. We've had quite a few political parties using CiviCRM: Green Party of New Zealand, Green Party of Canada, Oregon State Democrats, Vermont Progressive Party and even the Pirate Party of Germany! One of the features missing from CiviCRM has been Canvassing, GOTV, PhoneList and WalkList functionality. This has been long requested and there have been various specifications on the wiki for this.

Earlier this year we worked with Progressive Technology Project (PTP) on CiviEngage, a Drupal Module that brings address parsing, walklist and phonelist support into CiviCRM. You can read more about this work here: Canvass and Phonebank.

At the same time Will Brownsberger, a state legislator from Massachusetts, started using CiviCRM to support his office and campaign operations. As part of his campaign he wrote a drupal/civicrm module to do voter canvassing. Will was kind enough to attend and demo his module at the CiviCRM Boston Developer Camp in February.

As some of you might know, CiviCRM Standalone came out of a project we did with US PIRG. The project lead was Wes Morgan who also was supporting the standalone version along with a few other features he worked on in Civi (SQL Import, REST API etc).

Earlier today NTEN released the 2009 Data Ecosystem Survey Report (you need to be an NTEN member or pay $50 to access this report). Long time users might remember that CiviCRM came out on top in the 2007 NTEN CRM Satisfaction Survey. Some of the tweets about this survey include:

• @pearlbear: GPA on Donation Managment from #nten report: CiviCRM:3.85, Salesforce:3.67, Raiser's Edge:3.62, DIA:3.25, Convio:3.22.
• @geilhufe: CiviCRM gets straight As in 5/8 parts of an NPO's data ecosystem (NTEN Data Ecosystems
• @geilhufe: CiviCRM far ahead of competition yet again in independent Report
• @civicactions: Nice marks for @civicrm in the #NTEN 2009 Data Ecosystem Survey

We have quite a few paid training events lined up for this year. You can read some of the reports on prior trainings on our blog. Participants who have attended these trainings have remarked as to how much it has helped demystify CiviCRM for them (and their clients). Learn some valuable tips and tricks from the core CiviCRM developers and help the project! We offer a User training mainly for the CiviCRM end user / newbie, an integrator training for the CiviCRM administrator and a developer training for folks who want to extend and customize CiviCRM. Our current training schedule is:

• Integrator (Jan 21) and Developer Training (Jan 22) in Boston.
• Developer training on February 8 - 9, 2010 in Brussels.
• User (April 7), Integrator (April 11) and Developer (April 12) training in Atlanta.
• User (April 18) and Integrator (April 18) training in San Francisco.
• The first CiviCon - April 22, 2010 immediately after DrupalCon San Francisco. More details on this in future blog posts.

Workflow has been an important piece missing from CiviCRM. We figured that integrating with the Rules module in Drupal would address this problem. I decided to tackle it on as a weekend project :)

Kudos to the rules developer, Wolfgang Zeigler for designing AND documenting an excellent module. The developer documentation is very comprehensive and along with the integration modules, i was able to write an integration module in a few hours. The source code for the module can be found in our svn repository

We hope to address and answer some of the integration questions with the community, similar to how the Views Integration Module has been developed. CiviCRM has got pretty good hook support, so I suspect adding extensive rules support is very feasible, i.e. fire rules based on CiviCRM hooks. We need to answer a few other questions to help us move this integration forward in a fruitful manner:

We are working with PTP and Dharmatech to incorporate their work on Canvass and Phonebank into CiviCRM v3.1. Initially we plan to package and release this as the civicrm_canvass drupal module

As part of this work, we need to "extend" the core demographic information in a seamless manner. CiviCRM holds the gender / birth date / deceased date as core fields. However PTP also wanted to collect additional demographic information: ethnicity, primary language, secondary language and number of kids. We plan on storing this additinal demographic data as a custom group. We had to inject this custom group into the demographic section for the contact view and edit forms. We also wanted to hide the custom group showing up as a tabbed pane in the contact view screen.

We accomplished all this using the all powerful and mighty hook system. We could inject a complete custom group into the edit field by implementing the buildForm hook and using some internal CiviCRM functions

Some of you'll are aware of the work i've done for The San Francisco School using Drupal 6.x / CiviCRM 2.2. You can read more technical details about this project on my blog.

Database

• Maintain name/email/phone/address information for people associated with the school (students, staff and parents)
• Maintain relationships between parents and their children
• Maintain relationships between a teacher / advisor and their students

Current Features deployed at SFS

• Give all parents and staff a login/password
• Online signups for all Parent Teacher Conferences
• Online signups for all extended care activity (classes after school)
• Sign-in / Sign-out for students attending extended care
• Computation of how many "activity" blocks a student has spent on extended care
• Parent viewing of the various extended care activities their kids have attended in the past
• Online maps of "Where we Live" of the school families
• Online directories of the schools and grades.

This is a continuing series of blog posts on deploying CiviCRM at San Francisco School. In the previous blog posts we discussed how to expose relationship information in a profile and how to manage parent teacher conferences. There are also some slides explaining the module from a recent training seminar

Our latest project was automating the extended care (classes before and after school) system. The previous process was quite manual and labor intensive (and error prone). The attendance sheet was printed (via a CiviReport) from the students signed in. The students queued up and were signed into the extended care program. Some of the students had to be manually written in (if they were not signed up). At the end of the day, the parents would pick up the child and locate the childs name in the multiple sheets and sign them out. Typically 10-20% of parents would not sign their children out. The business office would then take this piece of paper and then calculate the "activity blocks" (based on time spent in extended care) and enter them in an excel spreadsheet. There were a few exceptions to the rule (children of staff, students who signed up for unlimited extended care and some activities are free)

Worried that CiviCRM integration with Joomla is not keeping pace with Drupal? Wanna take CiviCRM / Joomla integration to the next level? Want better permissioning support for CiviCRM in Joomla? Want more front end exposure of CiviCRM in Joomla?

If you want any (or all of the above), then do attend the Joomla Develoepr Conference in New York from Dec 5 - 7. We definitely need more participation and support from the CiviCRM/Joomla Developer community to help bridge the gap and strengthen the integration. This is a great time and moment for CiviCRM/Joomla to take the next leap forward.

Details and event registration are found here: http://opensourcematters.org/devconferenceinformation.html (note the reg form uses Civi for event info/registration!).

We are looking to put together a team of Joomla+CiviCRM developers to attend and work together at the camp. We currently have 2 confirmed developers attending the camp, and need at least 2-3 more developers to make progress on any of the above topics. You have to be experienced with PHP and be familiar with the internals of CiviCRM or Joomla to help out.

For those of you who are non-programmers, encourage / sponsor / coerce your local programmer / consultant / development partner to attend the conference

The past two days a group of us gathered at the Mitchell Kapor Foundation offices in downtown San Francisco for the first CiviCRM Test Sprint. Some of the highlights of the event were:

• Introducing the concept of testing and our current framework for unit testing. CiviCRM uses PHPUnit for unit testing. We also use XDebug for code coverage. You can see the latest results of our testing here