As you already know, CiviCRM is participating as a Mozilla Service Week partner. For the last few days we've been thinking about the specific shape of our contribution to this project and decided that we would like to offer consulting assistance to the community of organizations using or wanting to use CiviRM. The core team as a whole will pledge 100 hours to help organizations with CiviCRM related issues during Mozilla Service Week.

We would like to divide this pool of hours into two parts: for short term support and medium term projects.

• Short term support includes activities like: phone conference consultation
, install / debug / configure / manage your CiviCRM install
, help with setting up some more advanced features or help with integration issues on Drupal and Joomla
.
• Medium term projects are slightly larger and can provide your organization with customizations to your CiviCRM installation. We would like to work with 3 selected organizations, for approximately 20 hours each to provide them with CiviCRM related services. That can include putting together some custom code, like new or enhanced custom searches and reports, or potentially some custom modules. We estimate, that 10 of these hours can happen during Mozilla Service Week (September 14th-21st) and the rest immediately after it.

So how do you "sign up" for CiviCRM core team's services? Please go to this forum board and describe your needs. As mentioned above, it can be either a short support request that will allow you to work with one of team members, or a proposal for medium term project. In general, we will be trying to choose projects on first-come basis, but will also make sure to pick projects which will be generic enough to provide other CiviCRM users with useful functions (and - of course - those which will fit in the estimated hours range).

If your proposal or support request gets accepted, and you get support from the team, we ask for one thing in exchange. Please share the description of what has been done with other members of the community. We will kindly ask you to post back the story to the forum - what you have learned, what problem was fixed and how did it happen, etc. Basically, we want others to benefit too. :-)

Finally, if you have CiviCRM expertise and are interested in joining in this effort, drop a quick email to michal at civicrm dot org. Include details about your areas of expertise and your availabiilty. Hopefully as a community we can help lots of organizations kickstart or improve their use of CiviCRM!