There are various CiviCRM events coming up in London this February, indeed there is 'something for everyone' regardless of your level of experience and familiarity with CiviCRM.  If you can't make it over to the US this April, you should definitley consider participating in one or more of these events...

For the past couple of years (since May 2009) we've used Flossmanuals to write our CiviCRM books. In August this year, our old faithful Comprehensive guide to CiviCRM became two: The CiviCRM user and administrator guide and The CiviCRM developer guide. The user and administrator guide is now in its fourth version and we're currently writing new training guides for administrators and developers. We are also experimenting with sector specific introductions and it feels like we are headed towards a pretty comprehensive set of documentation for CiviCRM.

Continuing our amazing productivity during sprints, we introduce our 9th and final sprint of the year. This sprint is being held at the offices of De Goede Woning in Netherlands from Dec 12th - Dec 16th. A big thanks to the sponsors  - De Goede Woning - for offering facilities, bosworX for installing WiFi and to Erik H and Erik B from EE-atWork for sponsoring the food, drink and accommodations.
This sprint we are trying something a bit different. In addition to the folks gathering in the NL, we will have a virtual sprint going on at approx the same time on the #civicrm IRC channel. Considering we have developers spread across different time zones (europe, india, US east coast, US west coast, new zealand), we should be going pretty good around the clock :) We'll have a virtual meeting on a daily basis @ 3:00 pm NL time (click on the link to find that time locally)
This sprint is focussed on these areas: Unit and Web Tests, Documentation, and CiviMobile.

Good documentation is mission critical for the success of any software project. As a project we essentially have three audiences for our documentation:

1. Users
2. Site Builders
3. Developers

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 amazing code and book sprint in UK, here are some of the moments.

I´m Abril from Mexico City, I´m working in Alternativas y Capacidades, a civil society organization that was founded in 2002  to contribute to Mexico’s social development, by strengthening civil society organizations and grant makers, working towards a favorable environment for their professionalization, promoting their advocacy capacities and encouraging inter-sectoral collaboration.

I came to England to meet the CiviCRM community  and to learn more about the software,  because in Alternativas we believe that CiviCRM is a powerful tool that can support the work of many organizations in Mexico. In my country there’s almost nobody implementing CiviCRM and we would like to spread all the knowledge of the trip with other Mexican organizations.

We've been working hella hard on the sprint so far and yesterday was no exception!  at least for the book sprinters, the coders went off on a social to Stamford castle.  Although they weren't out of contact for long, we met up with them on IRC while they stopped for a Costa coffee "Come for the coffee, stay for the WiFi" or so the saying goes .  

We've nearly reached the end of the third day of booksprinting here at Cawthorpe Hall in the UK.  This is my first sprint and first blog post. I'm one of the few end users attending the sprint and so far, the experience is demanding, but the best way yet of experiencing the Civi community in action. It's been really valuable for getting to know people involved in Civi development, including Donald Lobo, Dave Greenberg, Michał Mach, Kurund Jalmi, Yashodha Chaku, Michael McAndrew, Xavier Dutoit, and many more dedicated developers.

Goals for this sprint are quite ambitious - three books instead of updating only one, so second day was quite intensive. Alice with Robyn from Progressive Technology Project are making incredible progress on describing CiviCampaign, Michael from Third Sector Design (who's also book maintainer) and Dave from Circle Interactive are putting together freshly spinned off developer handbook, and Abril from Alternativas y Capacidades and myself writing about applications of CiviCRM in human rights work. Not too much more to say about today - everyone is typing their keyboards furiously, since there is still a lot of work ahead of us. Helen from Flossmanuals joined us today - she will be working with us as editor for the rest of the spring, looking out for inconsistencies in the book and helping us make more polished.

Maybe a few words about what we do with Abril - out goal is to prepare small booklet for organisations working in human rights field, with descriptive information about how CiviCRM can be used to make their work easier and more effective. We are writing about using CiviCRM as human rights violation documentation system, but also decided to describe a few most common activities, like fundraising, mobilising supporters, managing volunteers and also do a bit more research about existing examples. We're still at early stage - writing a log of notes, researching and exchanging ideas, but it seems like it will be quite interesting and useful material. Hold your fingers!