It’s been a great pleasure for me to visit Canada and the city of Toronto for the first time for the 2026 Camp and Sprint. This diverse cosmopolitan city has great food, a relaxed vibe and it's been really enjoyable to wander around in the evening: people are out on the streets and in the parks and squares - hanging out and chatting in dozens of languages.
I’ve attended quite a few sprints and they’ve mostly been residential so it was interesting to be in an urban environment with folks staying in a range of places. This has made the evenings less intense with not so much work extending late into the evening but I don’t see this as a bad thing at all. I think we’ve all been fresher in the mornings and overall I would say it has been super productive. We’ve made progress on a range of technical issues, closing quite a few items from the backlog (although to be fair we also added a couple of new ones).
Key wins here have been:
- Made CiviCRM ready for Drupal 12
- Fixed some Backdrop integration bugs
- You can now use Composer with WordPress
- Documented 6 Symfony events
- Merged about a dozen PRs
- Added style options to FormBuilder to easily use existing CSS classes from your site's theme.
We also fixed some low impact security issues from Symfony as documented in the PSA and these will be included in the next release on the third Wednesday of June.
Not all the work was technical though. A group of us also worked on Spark, thinking about the offering and how we support it. There are now a couple of hundred instances and so we have been looking at how we can scale this further and enhance the user experience. There is now an improved plan for Spark with these highlights:
- Moved to Standalone
- Reviewed, improved and extended the onboarding emails
- Planned for extended support options
- New design for the dashboard
Beyond this and also on the non coding front, Joe Murray has been drumming up support for a larger scale UX research initiative. This has been making some gradual progress for a while but he has pushed it on further, generating some pledges to provide partner and end-user input as well as financial contributions. There was a review of work so far and a meeting with the research team to plan next steps.
As part of this initiative, a survey will be going out soon so please respond. While input from implementors and power users is always valued, in particular we want to get increased input from end-users more than ever. When this arrives in your inbox, please take a moment to look at it, respond and forward to others in your organization if appropriate. Changes from work like this have the potential to transform many aspects of Civi so please consider these options. Help out with a small amount of your time responding to the survey, and ideally find someone else who would also be willing to participate. You can also make a donation.
In addition to all the achievements above, this has been yet another opportunity to get together, share experiences, chat in ways that are just not possible online and deepen relationships. Hanging out and working together, going for walks, and even having a beer at the end of the day make us a stronger community and refreshes us. It makes our online communication better and reminds us that ultimately while we’re writing/installing/configuring software, it’s really all about people.
So on behalf of everyone who was here, I’d like to show some appreciation to the organising team for welcoming us to their city and making this a really enjoyable time for all involved. They were in alphabetical order: Alan Dixon, Allen Shaw, Dave Dantowiz, Herb van den Dool, Joe Murray, Kathryn Carruthers, Keith Nunn. Thanks to you all.
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