The past 8 days have been an amazing period for the CiviCRM community and core team members. Its been incredibly intense, extremely fulfilling and mind-blowing. A huge thank you and tip of the hat to the members of the community who participated in the event and came together from various parts of the world (asia, europe, north america) to push the project to greater heights, from a usability, documentation and localization viewpoint.

Thank you to Jimmy H, Erik B, Goran G, Matheiu L, Mathieu P for working on improving CiviCRM's localization and internationalization features. Thank you to Michael M, Xavier D, Adam H, Sarah G, Mari T, Alice G, Jack A, Josue G, Kyle J for burning the midnight oil to update, improve and extend the CiviCRM: A comprehensive guide. Thank you to OSI and our program officer: Janet Haven, Chintu Gudiya Foundation, Yellow Dog Foundation and Mitch Kapor Foundation for supporting our work and this sprint.

So a brief recap on some of the amazing events and highlights of the past 8 days:

• On Apr 22, we had 3 simultaneous all day CiviCRM trainings. In toal we trained close to 50 users and developers. One of the trainings was organized and led by Gregory Heller from CivicActions at the DrupalCon venue. Great sign for the community when another firm can offer training. We hope to see a lot more of this in 2010 and 2011.
• DrupalCon SF 2010 was our first DrupalCon and we got a pretty good buzz there. We scheduled 5 BoF's (birds of a feather), all of which were super well attended. It was great to see how applicable CiviCRM is to a lot of users and integrators and to get feedback from the larger Drupal community.
• CiviCon SF 2010 was a great kickoff to a hopefully long line of future CiviCon's. We had more than 70 people attend the conference and some great interactions and future collaboration possibilities. Mitch Kapor's video presentation was an awesome closure to the event
• The 4 day (Apr 25 - Apr 28) CiviCRM Code Sprint event was amazing. We had 10 developers and integrators in the room and we addressed and fixed a lot of issues. Multicurrency support, monetary locales, preferred language support, tokenized display and sort names, a new translation system (Transifex) and a lot more enhancements and improvements. It really helped to have a good combination of developers, integrators and users in the room. In the future, we should plan on inviting even more users :)
• At the same time as the code sprint, a group of adventurous souls under the guidance and wisdom of Floss Manuals wizard, Adam Hyde were involved in our second annual book sprint. After 4 days of long days and even longer nights, they released the new and improved edition of CiviCRM: A comprehensive guide. The timing of the 3.2 release and working on the book helped quite a bit, and we will try to schedule future book sprints to influence the release cycle.

We had a team meeting earlier today to figure out some of the things to do going forward, here are some ideas and thoughts:

• CiviCon 2011 will be held on March 7th, the day before DrupalCon Chicago. We'll have a committee from the community and the core team help plan and organize this event. We'll definitely have a larger room and more tracks. CiviCRM companies in Chicago willing to help spearhead this event, please contact us.
• We will do a book, code and usability sprint around that time either in Chicago or San Francisco.
• A focussed code sprint is super useful and super productive. We plan on having code sprints around our training events. This year we hope to have code sprints and training in the Fall in the East Coast (New York?) and UK (London? Bristol?)

Onwards and upwards

lobo