A potted history of this CiviCRM enthusiast.

I ‘discovered’ CiviCRM in 2010 whilst trawling the Internet for an alternative to the proprietary CRM my employer, the Australian Breastfeeding Association (ABA), was using at the time.  I read the user and administrator book, played on the demo site and spent some time on the forums.

We started small, using CiviCRM for registrations for a series of seminars we run for health professionals each year.  Following on from that successful trial, ABA now also uses CiviCRM to manage memberships, journal subscriptions and donations.

My enthusiasm for CiviCRM has continued to grow and a recent holiday saw me in the UK for CiviCon London 2013 followed by the Dalesbridge sprint (and writing my first blog).

I thoroughly enjoyed the sprint.  As a CiviCRM administrator, the online user and administrator guide has been invaluable to me and I was happy I could help with updating the CiviCRM 4.4 version.   I’m now trying to work out how my annual leave and household finances can be manipulated to include a visit to either the USA or UK sprint next year – without making my partner feel like a CiviCRM widower!

Post-sprint I have switched my focus to the developer documentation for a while.  Ultimately I want to be able to contribute with code, but as an aspiring techie I need clear documentation to help me along the way.  The online developer book and the documentation wiki contain a lot of information for developers, but often both old and new ways of doing things are documented and it is not always clear which is the preferred approach.  With other members of the community, I am helping to revamp the developer section of the documentation wiki.  Others will need to review the technical content but I can provide a ‘new to developing in Civi’ perspective on its structure.  Experienced CiviCRM developers can probably find the information they want, but hopefully the re-organisation will make that easier for both experienced users who want to dabble in code and experienced coders who are new to CiviCRM.

CiviCRM is a great product and the active involvement of individuals in the community helps make it a product that is great to use.  More people involved leads to a stronger community which ultimately leads to a better CiviCRM.  For developers and implementers the forum is the obvious place to start, but non-technical users can find that intimidating.  Helping to improve the user documentation is a great way for non-coders to contribute back to the community.  We would be very pleased to have your help.  Visit https://civicrm.org/participate/documentation to find out more.