Josh here with the CiviCRM Core Team. Each January we publish an annual report that highlights our past operational and financial performance as well as our plans for the coming year. This year, we’re taking it a step further and hosting quarterly community round tables in conjunction with the CiviCRM Community Council (the next one is on July 13, details forthcoming).
First of all, it’s been a huge privilege for me to be able to attend the Global Community Summit in Barcelona and all of us here agree that first and foremost we owe this to the amazing team at iXiam for organising a fantastic event! Being new to the community, I was a little concerned that it might be a little too dev-centric but I needn’t have worried.
In late January, the CiviCRM Core Team published its 2019 annual report which laid out its objectives for 2020. While we’ve managed the occasional update somewhat randomly in the past, we’d like to stick to a cadence of quarterly updates going forward in order to communicate progress on our priorities. This update provides an overview of the first quarter of 2020 as well as reflects on what we see happening for the remainder of the year.
Let’s start with priorities that we cited where we’ve made some headway.
On 15 August 2019, we switched the contributor log (previously a webform/civicrm) over to Gitlab. Details on how to track time can be found here. We did this because more and more of the project management was taking place in Gitlab and because of weaknesses in the contributor log, specifically it was clunky and it was difficult to assess the legitimacy of contributions reported.
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.
Late last year CiviCRM won some seed funding from Mozilla’s MOSS fund to support the core team, and also research our community priorities. We're focussing on two questions connected to CiviCRM’s future growth and sustainability:
Last month I attended Sustain Summit 2018: an inspiring 'one-day event for open source sustainers' organised by Open Collective. It was great to spend a day with people who are working hard to tackle the sustainability problem. Some focused on their own projects, others looking more broadly across the open source ecosystem. The sustainability conversation has moved on significantly since the last time I looked, in about 2013, and there are lots of new ideas and projects with the potential to impact how we work.
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
Of the 62 voters in this election, 49 cast ballots.
Those elected are:
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
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.
