CiviCRM Community Site

At CiviCon, Gunner from Aspiration Tech facilitated a session with the entire community soliciting feedback, discussion and comments on the project. It was a good opportunity for everyone to give feedback on the state of the project, things that we are doing a good job with, and things that we can improve. We ended up doing a collaborative grouping of the feedback in various categories and sorting the comments.

Some of the positives that are worth highlighting include:

The International Mountain Bicycling Association (IMBA) needed to be able to target and deliver our constituent's comments on Congressional Bills to Senators and Representatives. Thanks to this blog post we found PopVox and thanks to the good folks at PopVox, CiviCRM and PopVox are now integrated.

Following on our wonderful CiviCon day in Berkeley, several CiviCRM "evangelists" arrived at the Hilton Hotel in downtown San Francisco to help spread the word about Civi at NTEN's annual conference. Kurund and I arrived about 30 minutes before our morning session - "Is CiviCRM Right for Your Organization". The hotel was buzzing with non-profit technologists and vendors - lots of flashy signage for the large proprietary software vendors of course. But more importantly lots of folks who work in the incredible array of non-profits that belong to NTEN - networking, sharing, learning, looking for ways to help make their organizations work more effectively.

Several folks from consultancies that implement CiviCRM came to the session to help answer questions and showcase Civi projects - Frank Gomez and Michael Daryabeygi from Gingko Street Labs, Lisa Rau and Ashma Shrestha from Confluence, and Andrew Hunt from AGH Strategies.

We had our 4th CiviCon in San Francisco a few days back. It was a very well attended event with very high quality sessions. We hope to have most of the videos online in the next few weeks. I'm quite keen on watching all the sessions that I had to miss. There were lots of highlights for me personally during this event, i'll make an attempt to recreate some of them here:

• The quality of the talks I attended were very high. Most groups are using CiviCRM very creatively and pushing the limits in multiple ways. We need to continue on increasing the extensibility thus giving developers / integrators more choice.
• The quality of the Birds of a Feather session was very high. Unfortunately these were not recorded. Jim's talk on how they use Civi for theatre registration and season passes at BACT, Peters talk on CiviMobile and Rachna and Jason's talk on PopVox, CiviCRM and Advocacy were super impressive. A blog post on Popvox and CiviCRM is coming soon, definitely opens up the wide world of advocacy and contacting your congress-person/senator for CiviCRM users.

We're at the book and documentation sprint out at the very lovely Woolman Centre near Nevada city in California. A sub group of us have taken on the mighty task of analysing how the wiki content sits with the book content. We're focusing on the User and Administrator guide at the moment, which is online at http://book.civicrm.org/user/.

Yesterday was CiviCon in San Francisco. I made it to CiviCon in London last year but this was my first US CiviCon. The gathering was even bigger this year with about 130 people and 4 concurrent sessions running throughout the day. It was great to see such an enthusiastic bunch of people and to catch-up with old friends and put a face to online connections. The venue was brimming with the open honest enthusiasm which seems to be part of the North-American culture.

CiviCRM In Libya

In the process of encouraging grassroots democracy, The American Embassy USAID, the embassy’s cultural office has lent its presence and assistance to democratization activities in Tripoli and other Libyan cities by supporting Libyan NGOs, civil society efforts, and local political organizations in other locales.

International assistance provides help and support for NGOs and organizations that run projects to improve the livelihoods of local communities to stand a good chance of getting these grants.