Time flies - it's been already a week since we've been together in New Zealand, enjoying face to face conversations and working together. My personal take on communication is that there is nothing like real time conversation involving two persons located in the same physical spot, so I must say I'm really enjoying this opportunity to hang out with Yashi, Dave, KJ & Lobo.

CiviCRM 2.0 doesn’t only start introducing significant code oriented architecture changes, we’re also using the occasion of having a nice, round release number to introduce some new things in the process. This version is the first one where we want to announce official string freeze stage in our release process. From now on, every beta3 release of an upcoming version (2.0.beta3, 2.1.beta3, 2.2.beta3, etc.) will be officially the point at which translators can be sure that they won’t be “racing” with developers to provide decent translation of new version in their native language.

After 2.5 weeks in India, the Polish team is happy (hmm...?) to report safe landing in Warsaw last Tuesday. :-) We spent the first two weeks in Mumbai, hanging out with our mates from the India team, and with Lobo. Before that, I had the opportunity to meet only some members of the team, during other travels. It was the first time, when (almost) the whole group was gathered in a single physical space.

Last week, another one of excellent events organised by Aspiration happened in Zagreb. It was Open Translation Tools 2007 and it covered a variety of topics, starting from cultural aspects of both content and software localisation, through managing open communities, mapping translation and localisation tools and resources, also including machine translation mechanics.

A while ago, I gave a brief
preview of new CiviCRM's functionality in 2.0 on this blog. "Two-point-oh"
was a bit of a "wild dreams" back than - but it didn't really lasted
long when we got into the stage where this milestone version is behind
the door.

There we go, code freeze for CiviCRM 2.0 is scheduled in two weeks, and
it will contain some exciting new things. One of them is first version
of case management functionality.

This has been posted by my fellow team mate on the forum, but I since we want as many translations as possible, let's make others know, here's a repost to our blog. :-)

Piotr Szotkowski wrote:

I’m happy to announce that the CiviCRM 1.8 POT and PO files are generated and that the CiviCRM 1.8 area is open at our translations server.

For people preferring the raw POT/PO files, these can be easily obtained from our repository.

Thanks a lot for your hard work and do feel free to bug us with any string issues in the new files!

Last two weeks I've spent in San Francisco, catching up on face to face conversations with CiviCRM Team members, meeting friends and attending eAdvocacy Jamboree 2007. Working in a distributed software development team and connecting with most of your users remotely gets sometimes hard, but fortunately there are those rare moments when you can at least partially catch up on meeting real people instead of interacting with your Skype contacts.

Lots of exciting things happening around – as recently mentioned the Kabissa project is getting up on speed, in the same time we are also approaching the finish of another project that we internally called HRD, after Human Rights Defenders. It’s a CiviCRM deployment and customisation for Front Line Defenders, a Dublin based organisation working on protection of human rights defenders globally.

We are glad to announce that in reply to recent requests we are launching a new support and discussion tool for our great community of users - CiviCRM Forums:

http://forum.civicrm.org/

We encourage everyone to use the Forums for all support questions and discussion (except for technical developer topics), starting immediately.

Our aim is to centralize all support on CiviCRM Forums and transfer most of the traffic from mailing lists and Joomla forums that we were using so far. We will continue to use the civicrm-dev mailing list for developer discussions.

During last few months Piotr and I have been working on preparing the deployment of CiviCRM for Polish organisation called Foundation for Social and Economic Initiatives (FISE). The long term goal of the project was to deploy our software to support and improve FISE's internal operations in contact management domain, and the short term goal was to use it for "Searching for a Polish model of the social economy" initiative, as the first testing field of the long term strategy.

FISE's first initiative to use CiviCRM is a project aiming to support non-governmental organisations working in unemployment area. Large group of selected consultants and researchers will be working with more than 300 target organisations on improving their effectiveness, training their workers and providing opportunities to extend their activities. CiviCRM will be used to monitor these interactions, provide the ability to share the contact information between project stakeholders and improve final reporting upon project's end. A series of trainings will be conveyed as one of the initiative's components and CiviCRM will be playing significant role here as well. We want it to provide the ability to manage the database of thousands of workshop attendees and support running the evaluation of their job situation improvement 6 months after the workshop.