CiviCRM at JoomlaDays West

I had the privilege of joining a spirited and diverse group of about 100 Joomla! users and developers from places near and far at last weekend's JoomlaDays West "un-conference". The conference was held at Google's "campus" in Mountain View - and was a "sold-out" event with all available spaces taken shortly after the conference was announced. Allen Gunn (alias "Gunner") of Aspiration moderated the event with his unique style and flair - and 20 members of the Joomla Core Team were on hand to help provide in depth perspectives on the upcoming 1.5 release as well as longer term directions and goals for the project. I wanted to make sure that interested folks got to know a bit about CiviCRM and our integration with Joomla - so I sacrificed my voice and sanity and ran one of the Speed Geeking stations. This meant doing twelve five minute demos of CiviCRM for groups of 10 people without a break. Yikes - next time I'll remember to bring some reinforcements... but the feedback from folks was quite positive, and I think it was a good step in raising awareness of CiviCRM across Joomla!'s BIG community base. During the sessions, I learned a bit more about the upcoming 1.5 release - which should help us once we start testing/tweaking our integration points. We plan on starting this work as soon as the 1.5 Release Candidate is announced. I also made some inquiries about ways that we can strengthen our integration with Joomla's User Registration and User Account Details forms. It seems like we would have to build an alternate version of the user registration module in order to accomplish this. This would be an awesome contribution from someone in the Joomla developer community! Finally, I talked to Shayne Bartlett from the Board of Open Source Matters (OSM) which is the "...umbrella for legal and financial support for the Joomla! project." At the encouragement of Elin Waring - who is the OSM Board President and a long time user/supporter of CiviCRM - OSM will be evaluating using CiviCRM for their CRM and fund-raising needs. This would be a very cool and exciting development from my point of view - in part because I think it would help strengthen the ties between the two projects - and subsequently deepen/improve the technical integration points.