Last Thursday we had a developer meeting aimed at organisations and individuals developing with CiviCRM in the UK. Nine of us made it out. I'll try and give a flavour of the participants...

• 4-3-2 Drupal - Joomla - Neither
• 5-2-2 Experienced - Some experience - Just interested
• 4-2-3 Developer - Client - A bit of both

...and a couple of profiles: Ian McDonald from Greennet has been implementing CiviCRM installations on Drupal with different clients over the past couple of years. David Florence from Anthem ICT has done a couple of CiviCRM test installations. Peter Chauncy from Conflict and Change has had lots of success using CiviEvent with his team for event management. Peter Dunn, North West ICT champion, shared thoughts on what would make CiviCRM more appealing to small groups. A few people who wanted to come couldn't make it in the end - look forward to meeting them next time.

These meeting are obviously UK specific, but I try and keep the focus on 'local' as opposed to 'UK' and hope that these ideas resonate with you wherever you are. If you are interested in coordinating support locally, it would be great to hear about your successes and challenges, and to share ideas.

Our meeting followed on nicely from the global CiviCRM consultants teleconference the day before. It re-enforced some of the ideas that came up there, and bought up some others. Some highlights:

• Support for developers in the UK: There are a few organisations and consultants in the UK that are interested in using CiviCRM with their clients, but could do with some help server set up, initial database configuration, and so on. They could be the technical support of tomorrow and would be a good stepping stone between end users and core development team, but they need a leg-up. A consultant training day might work here. I talked with Lobo recently about the getting a member of the core development team over (perhaps someone more local than California!) to assist with this - let me know if you are interested.
• Usability-Flexibility trade off: Those closer to the client end of the spectrum said they found the contact screens a little daunting. Whilst they recognise the feature set is impressive, other systems might be more attractive in terms of user interface. People have started discussing this here.
• Online non profits vs traditional non profits: (related to the above) Whilst CiviCRM's feature set makes it attractive to those at home in the online world, there is a market for something simpler and more immediately user friendly for use at smaller organisations that don't have this kind of culture/support infrastructure. UK consultants and developers identified this as a seperate type of client to the more tech savvy non profit, and a type of organisation they would like to work with.
• UK specific functionality: reporting and gift aid came up again as requirements. Ian talked about his gift aid work-around using contribute. Michael and Dave talked about custom search functionality that can be implemented with a bit of SQL and coding ability.
• Second round of improvements to core functionality: There was support for the idea (floated in the consultants meeting the day before) of a second round of improvements to core components.

Communications and next steps

I'll be looking at the possibility of organising training in the UK to complement the already existing developer/consultant skill set. I'll also organise the next showcase and developer meetings. People interested helping out and following UK developments are welcome to sign up to the UK forum board.

I know that I'll have missed some people's points and views. Feel to comment and correct me. I was previously documenting these meetings on the Wiki, but think I will blog them here instead from now on.