The CiviCRM team invites you to CiviCon 2012
 
CiviCon – the annual conference for CiviCRM developers, implementers, administrators and users – is happening in the San Francisco Bay Area on April 2nd. Early bird registration is just $75 and ends less than a month away on January 30th, so reserve your spot now.


CiviCon is the annual CiviCRM event bringing together the people who develop, design, implement, administer, and use CiviCRM. We'll have great speakers, breakout sessions and panels highlighting real-world examples of nonprofits growing and sustaining relationships using CiviCRM. Find out about the future of the platform through discussions with the core team. You'll have ample opportunity to ask questions, meet other users and developers, make valuable connections, and get involved in the community.


 

For those of you who are thinking about ways you can promote your business as well as help support and grow the CiviCRM community :-) ...

DrupalCon 2012 is in Denver in March and the deadline for session proposals is October 26th (less than 2 weeks away). If you're planning on attending DrupalCon, and you have some exciting stories to share about client successes using CiviCRM + Drupal - this is a great opportunity to "blow your horn." You can also check out already submitted proposals for examples. It would also be great if a group of consultants were up for co-sponsoring an exhibit hall booth.

NTEN's annual conference is in San Francisco April 3-5 (starting the day after CiviCon North America 2012) - so you can easily attend both conferences. Several session proposals were submitted for NTEN, and we hope that they are accepted. In any case, it would be great to have a strong presence at the NTEN conference - including a booth at the "Science Fair" exhibit hall (April 3rd 3pm-8pm). We need some consultancies to step up to co-sponsor and help setup and run the booth.

If you're up for co-sponsoring a booth at DrupalCon and / or NTEN - ping me back ASAP and I'll get folks connected (dave at civicrm dot org).

... and please join us at the next Marketing IRC meetup - Friday October 28th at 3PM GMT (not BST!), 11am US/Eastern, 8am US Pacific, 5pm Warsaw, 8:30pm IST.

Hi,

We have continued the research to see how often someone tweeted about organisations that happen to use CiviCRM. We analysed 2023 tweets by 724 users about 175 sites. Not a lot of new sites since last month, but a lot more tweets.

Hi,

Two weeks already since civicon, the dust has settled and Amy Dobbs and the team at skillmatters have filmed and uploaded the sessions.

I’ve just come out of the Code and Book Sprint in Lincolnshire where we made good progress on lots of fronts and had a really good time. It was great to put faces to names and share food as well as ideas. A major breakthrough means D6 support should continue, while the main CiviCRM manual got a thorough overhaul and spawned a new Developer Manual, and some good thinking made serious improvements in CiviCase scalability. All good stuff and it all drives the project forward on one level or another. However, for me one of the most important things that happened was a much smaller conversation in the kitchen - missed by many - about Marketing.

We reviewed the marketing output of the last year, which didn’t take very long, and set to thinking what we can do to move things forward. Filled with the excitement of the moment (or perhaps with my workload radar impaired by the long days) I volunteered to get things going with a blog post, some ideas and organising a regular irc meeting for anyone interested in this aspect of the project.

One of the issues seems to be that the wonderful CiviCRM community provides an easy way for its more technical members to start contributing in simple stages:

• take part in a forum discussion
• answer a how to question on the forum
• find a bug and report it
• find your next bug and provide a patch
• before you know it folks will be hassling you to write unit tests

It's been a tradition for 3 years now that CiviCRM community members and team members convene after CiviCon to take part in code- and book sprints. This year we are staying in beautiful Cawthorpe Hall. A group of developers is here to work on improving the user experience in general and on further development of CiviCase. The other half of the sprintgroup is working on CiviCRM books under the excellent facilitation from Flossmanuals.

Seven of us this morning started discussing what to achieve over the next 6 days. Luckily, some more people will be joining the booksprint tomorrow and over the weekend because we set ourselves ambitious targets to have achieved by next Monday. By then, there will be an updated version of "Understanding CiviCRM: A comprehensive guide". There will also be the first release of a new book for developers of CiviCRM and a second new book describing possible uses of CiviCRM in human rights organisations. 

These are some graphs I created from the data publically available at CiviCRM's Sourceforge.  Sourceforge provides limited data only on the release dates of a version (i.e. 3.1.5) and then the number of subsequent downloads to date but we can still interpret some useful conclusions from the data.  Dave Greenberg shared one of these graphs at CiviCon.  The data is from Mar 1, 2011 so I wanted to publish them before the data became too stale.

The first graphic is the simplest to understand - CiviCRM all versions 2.x compared to all versions 3.x.  Note that the timeframe measured in this graph is similar.  As such, we can conclude that the number of downloads for 3.x have increased about 27% compared to 2.x.

We held our second CiviCon in Chicago on Monday Mar 7, 2011 at TechNexus. We had an amazing turnout of 100+ community members. CiviCon 2011 was made possible by a great group. I'd personally like to acknowledge and thank the folks who made this possible...

• Young-Jin Kim and Matthew Vincenz from emphanos for being such great hosts and coordinating a large part of the logistics for the event.
• Mary Kay Bianchi and SNTial Technologies for helping with the logistics of the event and sponsoring drinks and food at the after party :)
• The Gold sponsors: Rooty Hollow, Ninjitsu Web Development, Web Access and CivicActions
• The Silver and Bronze sponsors for helping make the event happen.

We just got back from Chicago where we had an eventful CiviCon 2011 on Mon, Mar 7th. We had more than 100 participants (registration, attendance sheets and name badges managed with CiviEvent) from across various parts of the US and Canada. We also had a successful sponsorship program with 4 Gold Sponsors, 5 Silver Sponsors and 10 Bronze Sponsors (managed by CiviContribute and the CiviEvent discount module). A companion blog post highlights all the wonderful women and men (and organizations) who made this event possible. Some of my personal highlights of the trip:

This was my first CiviCon.  I missed the chance last year.  It was great to meet all the people I have chatted with on the forums and IRC over the last couple of years -- finally.  I was gratified to be part of the sessions here.  I presented a UI Customization session with Jim from Rooty Hollow; I shared a couple of case studies along with Gregory from CivicActions.  Chatting with Lobo, Dave G, Kurund, Ninjitsu Matt and Deepak was fun and interesting.

During CiviCon I reflected both privately and publically about my first introduction to CiviCRM in '08.   I've gone from a 'noob in the forums asking dumb questions to someone who knows a little about a lot - but who still knows I have a lot more to know.  My personal story about the open-source CiviCRM community is a story of cautious enthusiasm, warm welcomes, giving back, and eventual understanding.  I took a leap of faith but it turned out well for me.  I encourage others to try the same approach.