josh's blog

Seeking community members to help shape CiviCRM’s future

Last week, stakeholders from the CiviCRM community came together to discuss issues of governance and sustainability, and to review recent developments in CiviCRM as well as how it’s managed. We called it a Governance Summit because there was a lot of interest in governance. Regardless, this was fundamentally a “Community Summit” where members of the community could work together to improve CiviCRM as a whole. This post is a recap of much of the work that took place at the summit. 

We’re continuing to use Gitlab (https://lab.civicrm.org/explore/groups) more and more as both a project management and development tool. One area that we’ve been tinkering with over the past several months is using Gitlab for feature requests in CiviCRM. As you can imagine, there’s real potential here to empower the CiviCRM community to create, discuss and promote new features and functionality in CiviCRM.

The recent DevCamp in New Jersey presented several sessions on new developments in CiviCRM land as well as showcased several of its inner workings. One session presented by Core Team member Tim Otten stood out for me: Form Builder. If you’re like me, you listen to folks like Tim with a great deal of respect and appreciation for what they say (and do).

The CiviCRM Core Team is pleased to announce what we hope will become an annual event; a combined governance summit and code sprint. This year’s event will begin on September 25th, immediately following CiviCamp Hartford, and will be located in West Milford, New Jersey (within an hour from major airports). Full event details including agenda and discussion are online (or will be soon) here: https://lab.civicrm.org/community-team/governance-summit-code-sprint/wikis/home

Last year, we overhauled the CiviCRM contributor program, allowing individuals to submit details about their contributions online as well combined the contributor and partner listing. So far this year, we’ve seen an increase in contributions being logged as well as a new revision to site that improves visibility of contributions. We thought it’d be a good time to recap where the program is at, answer a few common questions, and highlight where we see it going.

Over the past 18 months, the CiviCRM Core Team has focused heavily on project sustainability and on balancing our own internal capacity. During that time, our infrastructure has been consistently (and thankfully) managed by Mathieu Lutfy, a member of the Canada-based partner Coop SymbioTIC.

Along with the Core Team, several contributors in the community have been testing Gitlab as an overall project management and communications tools for the CiviCRM community. Though it’s still a work in progress, we’re happy to start pushing it out to the broader community in hopes that it can provide a more cohesive platform for project management and community engagement.

CiviCon St. Louis is taking shape, and early bird rates are still in force until April 7th. If you're planning to attend, now's the time to register and secure your lodging. Still evaluating CiviCRM? We've got something for you...

If you contribute to CiviCRM, we want to know about it. Now, you might ask "don't you already know given that contributions improve the code, coordinate events, extend the system, etc.?" Well, yes, that is true, but coordinating all of that information in such a way that we, as a small Core Team, can recognize it effectively is no small task.