The CiviCRM team is pleased to announce the formation of the CiviCRM Advisory Group. We chose folks that could represent the various constituencies and different regions, and who have been active in the community. Without further ado, the advisory group members are:

• Brian Shaughnessy - an independent Joomla consultant in Albany, New York.
• Claire Sauve - from British Columbia's Physician Health Program and the CiviCase project manager.
• Cynthia Tarascio - from Philadelphia is the project manager at American Friends Service Committee (AFSC).
• Joe Murray - is a Drupal consultant based in Toronto.
• Michael McAndrew - from the United Kingdom and was instrumental in forming a CiviCRM network of users and developers in the UK.
• Peter Davis - from New Zealand and has a background in political activism, communications and sustainability advocacy.
• Roberto Santiago - from Portland, Oregon and has worked on strengthening CiviCRM's API support.
• Sarmeesha Reddy - director of DharmaTech, a non-profit software firm in Salt Lake City, Utah whose mission is to strengthen nonprofits by implementing affordable and appropriate technology solutions.
• Wes Morgan - from Denver, Colorado works with the online organizing team at The Public Interest Network (Environment America, U.S. PIRG, and others).
• Xavier Dutoit - based in Belgium and is interested in using technology to achieve social change via his venture, Tech To The People.

More details on the above folks can be found on the advisory group wiki page. We will be having a meeting next week and will post a summary of the call soon after.

We also had a good phone conference last week and crystallized some ideas on the formation and makeup of the advisory group. There are quite a few detailed comments on the wiki page also. Some of the issues that came up during the call were:

• A need to focus on training and documentation via screencasts and youtube videos. Embed screencasts in the documentation and make them specific (how some features are used in combination to solve a specific client issue). Small bite sized screencasts are preferred
• Richer set of detailed case studies from the community
• Advisory group should advocate and champion features requested by sectors of the community
• Redesign of the main web site (more marketing and information for users and decision makers)
• Strength and weakness analysis to help build business processes for different focus areas and use cases
• Best practice for consultants to contribute resources and funding to core development
• Usability improvements
• There are additional comments on the wiki page