The first North of England meetup took place on the 12th of January 2012. It was really well attended with fifteen attendees. The attendess consisted of people interested in CiviCRM, users, implementers and developers. Some of these people had travelled quite a long way to get there and we were really pleased to see them.

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...

 
Please join us for the CiviCRM MeetUp Thursday, December 15 5:30-7:30pm by registering today!

Four of the fr_CA translators team met in Montreal yesterday to discuss how to communicate, prioritize and exchange tips and tricks on how to translate CiviCRM.

We would also like to get in contact with other translation teams to know how they work. Here are some topics we discussed:

San Francisco Baykeeper's case study of moving from Blackbaud Raiser's Edge to CiviCRM was the featured topic at this month's San Francisco meetup. I previously wrote about our transition in this blog and wanted to provide an up-to-date look at that process, plus our latest advances and ongoing challenges. Baykeeper has now been successfully using CiviCRM for almost a year.

There were around 15 people at the meetup, and we had a lively discussion with lots of Q and A during the presentation.

Join us on 19 October 2011 in Montreal (QC, Canada) for a meetup on the state of the fr_CA CiviCRM translation. Location: at the Brulerie Saint-Denis (near the Berri-UQAM metro station) starting at 19h (7 PM).

Scheduled topics include: translation workflow, lexicon, book translation and marketing materials.

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

Just one day after arrving back from weeks of holidays I found myself in the train from Brummen (The Netherlands) to London for CiviCon 2011, of which we were proud Silver sponsors. We arrived in time, and it was great to meet my API friends Xavier Dutoit and Eileen McNaughton (who I had never met IRL) and Kurund Jalmi and Yashodha Chaku from the CiviCRM Core team.

Monday morning we had a quick coffee with a pain chocolat (yes, it was London) and walked to Skills Matter, the venue for the CiviCon. After a spirited kick off by Kurund Jalmi and Dave Greenberg, the sessions started. In the morning I attended an interesting CiviEngage session by Xavier Dutoit and Alice Aguilar, and co-presented the API session with Xavier Dutoit (yes, he was on stage almost all day :-)) and Eileen McNaughton. Apart from the sessions it was also very good to see such a large crowd and meet all the Civi enthousiast from over the globe.

After lunch I was proud to see Krista Brouwer and Annet Lugtenberg from De Goede Woning present their CiviCRM project, with CiviCase and synchronization with an Oracle application. As we supported their implementation it was really nice to see how well they did! My final session was the Ajax magic by Xavier Dutoit, showing his CiviMobile initiative which will hopefully be further developed with support from lots of interested parties. A couple of beers and tapas with lots if Civi boys and girls was a perfect end to a very enjoyable and interesting CiviCon!

Good day all,

This is to let you know that we are starting a user group for the german speaking countries (aka germany, austria, switzerland).