Political groups and campaigns have been some of the earliest users of CiviCRM. We've had quite a few political parties using CiviCRM: Green Party of New Zealand, Green Party of Canada, Oregon State Democrats, Vermont Progressive Party and even the Pirate Party of Germany! One of the features missing from CiviCRM has been Canvassing, GOTV, PhoneList and WalkList functionality. This has been long requested and there have been various specifications on the wiki for this.

Earlier this year we worked with Progressive Technology Project (PTP) on CiviEngage, a Drupal Module that brings address parsing, walklist and phonelist support into CiviCRM. You can read more about this work here: Canvass and Phonebank.

At the same time Will Brownsberger, a state legislator from Massachusetts, started using CiviCRM to support his office and campaign operations. As part of his campaign he wrote a drupal/civicrm module to do voter canvassing. Will was kind enough to attend and demo his module at the CiviCRM Boston Developer Camp in February.

Every year in June, around the 10th day, a commemorative event happens in Akron, Ohio - the annual celebration of the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous. Hosted at the University of Akron, over 10,000 participants from around the world gather to celebrate the founding of this wonderful fellowship. In recent years, registration for this all weekend event has moved from mail-in forms to an online registration process. Online registration challenges from the past few years had made us seek a solution to that could handle a surge of registrations in the first 24 hours, and collect all the necessary information required by the University.

In past years, Zen Cart could handle our registrations - it may have even been able to handle it this year, except we needed to collect more infomation than in years' past, and we wanted to still be able to allow multiple registrations per transaction. One serious issue from last year was the server became overloaded as thousands of registants came to the site to register at midnight. We had 42 days to pick a solution, and implement.

Following some issues to integrate drush and making civicrm upgrade process accessible from script, I started looking at drush on how we can take advantage of it for civicrm, and was surprised with the ease I was able to reuse drush code to add few utilities for civicrm. Some of the utilities currently implemented are:

CiviCRM is considering applying to be a mentoring organization in Google's Summer of Code program (GSOC). If you're not familiar with GSOC, you should be! (http://socghop.appspot.com/) -- it's a fantastic program that can jointly help open source projects advance development, while encouraging students to become involved in the open source community. The basic thrust of the program is that Google sponsors students (monetary stipend) to work on projects for open source software.

As some of you might know, CiviCRM Standalone came out of a project we did with US PIRG. The project lead was Wes Morgan who also was supporting the standalone version along with a few other features he worked on in Civi (SQL Import, REST API etc).

Last Thursday, a dozen local CiviCRM users, developers and persons interested in learning about the system met at the NEXUS Resource Center to discuss the Boston CiviCRM training and challenges that we each have faced during implementations. Thank you to the The Green Roundtable for allowing us to utilize their space for this meetup.

We are excited to announce that CiviCRM 3.1.3 has been released, and is now available for download. You can also try it out on our demo site. This release includes jQuery performance improvements for drupal and 50+ bug fixes/improvements to existing functionality.

In a month, on March 25th and 26th, FairSay invites you all to Oxford, UK to join us for a two-track CiviCRM/Drupal and Plone Campaigning Camp (free with lunch and tea break included!).

CiviCon - the first ever 'global' CiviCRM conference - is coming to San Francisco on April 22nd. We're getting really excited about the fantastic array of speakers and sessions already on the agenda ....

• Nathan Yergler, Creative Commons CTO will be kicking off the day, sharing his thoughts about the importance of open source software like CiviCRM to the success of non-profits and grass roots organizations, why Civi is important to Creative Common's mission, and what the horizon looks like.
• Cedric Brown, Director of the Mitch Kapor Foundation, along with Mitch Kapor (via video link) will be closing the day with their thoughts on the benefit propositions of open source software.
• In between, there will be a lots of great user AND developer oriented sessions including:
  

This is a follow up to my earlier blog entry at http://civicrm.org/node/651

The topic of how to properly greet and send mail to couples, such as "Jane and John Doe" has been discussed many times, such as at the blog post: http://civicrm.org/node/558. But the problem with the approach described there ( and included in CiviCRM 3.0 ) Is it requires information about someone's spouse in their contact record and marking half on the contacts "Do not mail" even though there are times when I DO want to communicate with just one spouse or the other for different events.

So I wrote some code that implements some new tokens called "joint_greeting_casual", "joint_greeting_formal", "joint_greeting_formal_firstname". The code can be downloaded from civicrm_extras.zip. After downloading and unzipping the file, follow the directions for using hooks with Joomla or Drupal at the CiviCRM wiki.