Report from the latest San Francisco User Meetup

The second SF Bay Area User Meetup was hosted last night by Wikia and Wikimedia Foundation folks (big claps). We had an excellent turnout (the room was packed) - with a nice mix of backgrounds ranging from prospective users to experienced folks and a few developers. The first part of the meeting featured 3 presentations:

• Case Study: Chez Panisse Foundation - Evaluating a CRM solution and the process of migrating to CiviCRM (Max La Riviere-Hedrick : futurepruf.com)
• Case Study: Generations Community Wellness: Donate Your Fat - Building a rich community engagement site on top of CiviCRM (Roberto Santiago : raSantiago.com). You can download Roberto's slides here.
• What's coming up in v3.0 (yours truly - with a great slideshow created by Brian Shaughnessy - Lighthouse Consulting and Design)

  Then we had a break with time for networking (not enough time really as the conversations were really lively). Finally, we did 2 breakout groups - a general QA for new folks and a discussion focused on relationship building / fund-raising techniques. The ended almost an hour later than scheduled - 2 hours just wasn't enough time :-) I did a quick feedback session with some folks at the end of the meetup - what worked? what should we do differently? Overall people were quite happy with the session. One suggestion was to ask folks about specific small group topics when they register so we can plan for that ahead of time. We're shooting to make this a bi-monthly gathering - so stay tuned for an October meetup announcement.