Recap of DrupalCon, CiviCon and Civi Code Sprints

The past 8 days have been an amazing period for the CiviCRM community and core team members. Its been incredibly intense, extremely fulfilling and mind-blowing. A huge thank you and tip of the hat to the members of the community who participated in the event and came together from various parts of the world (asia, europe, north america) to push the project to greater heights, from a usability, documentation and localization viewpoint. Thank you to Jimmy H, Erik B, Goran G, Matheiu L, Mathieu P for working on improving CiviCRM's localization and internationalization features. Thank you to Michael M, Xavier D, Adam H, Sarah G, Mari T, Alice G, Jack A, Josue G, Kyle J for burning the midnight oil to update, improve and extend the CiviCRM: A comprehensive guide. Thank you to OSI and our program officer: Janet Haven, Chintu Gudiya Foundation, Yellow Dog Foundation and Mitch Kapor Foundation for supporting our work and this sprint. So a brief recap on some of the amazing events and highlights of the past 8 days:

• On Apr 22, we had 3 simultaneous all day CiviCRM trainings. In toal we trained close to 50 users and developers. One of the trainings was organized and led by Gregory Heller from CivicActions at the DrupalCon venue. Great sign for the community when another firm can offer training. We hope to see a lot more of this in 2010 and 2011.
• DrupalCon SF 2010 was our first DrupalCon and we got a pretty good buzz there. We scheduled 5 BoF's (birds of a feather), all of which were super well attended. It was great to see how applicable CiviCRM is to a lot of users and integrators and to get feedback from the larger Drupal community.
• CiviCon SF 2010 was a great kickoff to a hopefully long line of future CiviCon's. We had more than 70 people attend the conference and some great interactions and future collaboration possibilities. Mitch Kapor's video presentation was an awesome closure to the event
• The 4 day (Apr 25 - Apr 28) CiviCRM Code Sprint event was amazing. We had 10 developers and integrators in the room and we addressed and fixed a lot of issues. Multicurrency support, monetary locales, preferred language support, tokenized display and sort names, a new translation system (Transifex) and a lot more enhancements and improvements. It really helped to have a good combination of developers, integrators and users in the room. In the future, we should plan on inviting even more users :)
• At the same time as the code sprint, a group of adventurous souls under the guidance and wisdom of Floss Manuals wizard, Adam Hyde were involved in our second annual book sprint. After 4 days of long days and even longer nights, they released the new and improved edition of CiviCRM: A comprehensive guide. The timing of the 3.2 release and working on the book helped quite a bit, and we will try to schedule future book sprints to influence the release cycle.

We had a team meeting earlier today to figure out some of the things to do going forward, here are some ideas and thoughts:

• CiviCon 2011 will be held on March 7th, the day before DrupalCon Chicago. We'll have a committee from the community and the core team help plan and organize this event. We'll definitely have a larger room and more tracks. CiviCRM companies in Chicago willing to help spearhead this event, please contact us.
• We will do a book, code and usability sprint around that time either in Chicago or San Francisco.
• A focussed code sprint is super useful and super productive. We plan on having code sprints around our training events. This year we hope to have code sprints and training in the Fall in the East Coast (New York?) and UK (London? Bristol?)

Onwards and upwards lobo

Comments

I think you should be planning on conning & sprinting somewhere further afield ... New Zealand for example....

hey eileen:

yes, i think there are quite a few users in NZ/AU that doing a training and sprint there is definitely a possibility. Wanna help arrange and coordinate this event? we can chat on irc and decide dates/time

lobo

Now that makes me want to travel!

What a shot in the arm to the project! Great work.

BTW, it would be useful to have people post their presentation from CiviCon on the CiviCon session page or elsewhere. In particular, there was a bunch of information in your opening presentation about the community growth and number of installs, etc, that would be useful for me and I am sure others to be able to refer to.

Have a great weekend!

I agree Joe, it was an excellent conference. Not at all overshadowed by DrupalCon and in some ways (with all the BoFs) DrupalCon became the support act to CiviCon.

I'm glad to see you're planning for Chicago. And maybe all those Europeans can organise something for Copenhagen DrupalCon? With the "CiviCon South" in Wellington, NZ to happen towards the end of the year to catch the antipodean summer (nudge Eileen and Peter and... well I guess I better help too!)

Also to reiterate Joe's request - can we get the slides posted somewhere?

For those who haven't seen it yet, Gregory has posted a CiviCon recap which includes links to the live video and video of the ignite and lightning talks.

Thanks to the organisers and the individuals and various companies that contributed to such a great conference and community.