josh's blog

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.

The marketing of CiviCRM benefits from a large number of individuals that work to promote CiviCRM in their own way. At the same time though, CiviCRM’s marketing efforts tend to move in spurts, often without clear direction or cohesion. Whether it be through running an event, creating some collateral, or hosting a CiviCRM 101 Webinar, there are a number of opportunities to market CiviCRM, and each effort sometimes takes a different approach in doing so.

A few weeks ago, we rolled out an outline of how we’ll manage contributions to CiviCRM going forward. Full details about the framework are now online here. For this post, we’re pleased to announce that we’ve taken the effort forward by enabling self-reporting on contributions via a simple contribution log.

The CiviCRM Core Team is pleased to announce that it will begin hosting monthly webinars for project contributors and supporters (members, partners, sponsors) beginning December 8th, 2016, and continue on the second Thursday of each month throughout 2017. These webinars will be a mix of overall project updates (provided quarterly) and technical improvements and demonstrations (provided 8 months out of the year). A full schedule and details will be provided in advance at http://civicrm.org/webinars

Long time contributor Eileen McNaughton recently won the New Zealand Open Source Award for Open Source Contributor, so we thought we’d reach out to a few members of the community to get input on her efforts with CiviCRM. Erik Hommel and Dave Greenberg are kicking off this blog post with their own personal thanks to Eileen. If you have a comment, story, or just want to say thanks, post it in the comments!

Earlier this year, we did a community wide survey to better understand the CiviCRM user base as well as help refine our priorities as a Core Team. While there were a few surprises in the results, one item that we expected to stand out was a need for ongoing training. Let’s face it… CiviCRM can be complicated, at least for those that leverage its full potential and adapt it to their own business processes.

Nearly 78% of sites using CiviCRM are on either version 4.6 or 4.7 (check out CiviCRM stats online). Why is that significant? Because those are the only two community supported releases currently. If you’re not on one of these versions, most importantly, don’t be alarmed. There might be a reason you’re not… perhaps you’re using a partner that continues to support an previous version, or have customizations that prohibit an upgrade. If that’s the case, feel free to skip the rest of this post.