Blogs

During last few months Piotr and I have been working on preparing the deployment of CiviCRM for Polish organisation called Foundation for Social and Economic Initiatives (FISE). The long term goal of the project was to deploy our software to support and improve FISE's internal operations in contact management domain, and the short term goal was to use it for "Searching for a Polish model of the social economy" initiative, as the first testing field of the long term strategy.

FISE's first initiative to use CiviCRM is a project aiming to support non-governmental organisations working in unemployment area. Large group of selected consultants and researchers will be working with more than 300 target organisations on improving their effectiveness, training their workers and providing opportunities to extend their activities. CiviCRM will be used to monitor these interactions, provide the ability to share the contact information between project stakeholders and improve final reporting upon project's end. A series of trainings will be conveyed as one of the initiative's components and CiviCRM will be playing significant role here as well. We want it to provide the ability to manage the database of thousands of workshop attendees and support running the evaluation of their job situation improvement 6 months after the workshop.

This past year was an exciting one for CiviCRM. We experienced an exponential increase in the number of downloads, and a strengthening and diversification of our active community members. International adoption and translation activity also increased - although we like to see more growth for this in 2007.

Earlier today Convio announced that they will acquire GetActive. I wont bother speculating too much on what this does to Open API's et al. I suspect the two orgs will be quite busy munging two large closed systems into an even larger closed system (speaking a bit from experience here!)

Mark Shuttleworth from Ubuntu recently had an article titled Keeping it Free. This article to a large extent summarizes what we at CiviCRM think and feel. From his blog entry a couple of paragraphs that really put things in context for us (and hopefully for you):

From our regular scraping / rss feeds of the web in an attempt to get a rough idea of what folks are using CiviCRM and why, here are two interesting projects that we came across:

dojo is an open-source Javascript Toolkit which is designed to facilitate integration of advanced Ajax and DHTML features into web applications. CiviCRM has started incorporating Dojo widgets as of 1.6 - including:

... and we are planning on adding more features in 1.7 as we work on streamlining the user interface and creating more desk-top like work-flows.

NTEN (Non-profit Technology Enterprise Network) recently posed a series of questions to software vendors serving the non-profit community. Here's a draft of our response. We will be revising this entry over the next few days. Would be great for the community to comment and/or contribute to our response. The questions are in bold type.

We recently moved our downloads from our server in Poland to Sourceforge.net. The main reasons for this move was to make the download faster and reliable. A side benefit was saving bandwidth and hence costs. One of the unforeseen benefits of this move was we get pretty good download stats from the service and a few surprising results. You can see the stats here.

Over the past few releases we've been having quite a few people use and exercise the api. We are getting to the stage where people want to use the api to integrate with other applications (e.g. integration with Thunderbird).

The team is making excellent progress on the 1.7 release. We've got 19 issues resolved of the approximately 50 issues posted for this release - and the new CiviEvent component is starting to take shape.

We are targeting code-freeze / alpha release for the end of February, and there's still quite a lot to do. Hence, our plates are getting pretty full in terms of additions for 1.7. That said, if you have critical requirements or fixes that aren't already on the list, speak up! If you're able to pitch in with some code, and engineering resource and/or detailed specifications - that's a big plus.

As we begin our 3rd year - the team took some time to lay out broad goals for 2007. These goals are intended to help us focus on things that will improve the platform, grow the community and sustain the project for the long term. So without further ado, here our the 2007 goals: