This Thursday, the first ever CiviCon took place. After five years of constant development of the CiviCRM project, we felt it was definitely time to have an in-person gathering of CiviCRM community members, talk about past, plan the future and enjoy being together. It was really a great day.

We started the day with presentations by Dave and Lobo, introducing the project team, reviewing project history, summarising biggest wins and fails - taking a look at the past and the project's current situation. After that, we had a great keynote presentation from Nathan Yergler, the CTO of Creative Commons. Nathan discussed CC's history with and commitment to CiviCRM, and stressed the importance for non-profits of investing in free software platforms - software that they own.

Next, we started thescheduled sessions, where community members and CiviCRM users presented their use cases, discussed the different areas where CiviCRM is used, as well as the future of the project. Many of those sessions will be described in followup posts.

At the end of the day, Mitchell Kapor and his creative team had a wonderful surprise for us. We had a screening of a short movie, explaining the most important concepts behind CiviCRM and congratulating the team and the community for our accomplishments. We ended the event by going to the roof and taking a group photo to commemorate the first ever CiviCon.

The report back from CiviCon wouldn't be complete, if we didn't mention all the people and organisations which made it possible to organise it. First of all, great thanks to following companies:

• Mitchell Kapor Foundation for providing wonderful meeting space and hosting us with incredible hospitality - and for wonderful video.
• CivicActions, for sponsoring the event. Special thanks go to Gregory Heller and Ian Rhett, who run excellent Ignite session and Mobile brainstorming session, helped is with livestreaming from the event, with promotion and put a lot of enthusiasm into our event. Thanks Gregory! Thanks Ian!
• Rayogram - for sponsoring the event, for excellent session presenting New Your State Senate case study, and most of all for designing and producing great event t-shirts.
• JMA Consulting - for sponsoring the event.
• Web Access Global - for sponsoring the event.

Really special thanks should also go to Michael McAndrew from Third Sector Design

for helping us a lot with event preparations, as well as for beging really awesome community member!

It was a really great day for the CiviCRM core team - being able to meet so many great people from our community, being able to talk to them, sharing and discussing our ideas and plans was a really wonderful experience. All the enthusiasm that we experienced made us immediately start thinking about CiviCon 2011. So - see you next year!