josh's blog

If you’re not already aware, CiviCRM version 5.13 shipped this past Wednesday. In addition to this being the normal monthly release of the latest stable version of CiviCRM, it will also serve as the next version of CiviCRM ESR, officially in August. Finally, CiviCRM version 5.13 will be the last version of CiviCRM to support PHP 5.6.

There’s a lot here to digest, so let’s break it down with a few questions.

It’s been a long time coming, but we finally managed to post the Core Team’s financials online in a format that not only shows where we’re at but also breaks down our income and expenses over the past 12 months. We’ve maintained project stats online for some time at https://stats.civicrm.org so it made sense to just add a new tab there. Check it out here. The financials are currently updated each month, and we’ll continue to expand on them as we have capacity.

We came down to the wire with CiviTutorial, having less than a day to go before the Make It Happen campaign funding its development was set to expire. In the end, we had 24 awesome donors pitch in to fund the extension and make CiviTutorial a reality.

The first Wednesday of the month is an important day for the CiviCRM community. It’s the day where a new, scheduled monthly release drops. These normally include bug fixes, minor features changes and improvements. Nothing earth shattering (hopefully). Upgrades are typically routine and easy. For many, this is a fairly painless process to manage, especially as the ease of upgrade and release reliability have improved over the years. 

Contributor Elections

Of the 261 voters in this election, 199 cast ballots.

Those elected are:

• Allen Shaw, US

• Claire Williams, UK

• Erika Bjune, US

• Kathryn Carruthers, Canada

• Rose Lanigan, UK

Partner Elections

Of the 62 voters in this election, 49 cast ballots.

Those elected are:

Background

The first annual CiviCRM Governance Summit was held in New Jersey, USA on 25/26 September 2018, attended by 29 people - core team, partners, users and service providers from around the globe.

The major decision of the summit was to create a representative body to help guide the CiviCRM project.  An outline of the structure was produced, but there are many details yet to be resolved so the secondary decision was to create an interim committee, called the Establishment Committee, for the purpose of defining the eventual structure.  

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.