In the wider world of hosting, "shared" services are the discount offering that you use when you don't value your site or really don't have any budget. But amongst non-profits and open-source projects, sharing is a positive value, and in many cases essential. Can we reclaim the concept?
I've been hosting CiviCRM sites since 2007. About 3 years ago, before I knew anything about containers, I started looking at my services, how I deliver them, and what I wanted to change. It was a much bigger investment than I was expecting, but a year ago I finished converting all my in-house hosting services over to using containers. I've been trying to write out the interesting parts of that story, and here are a few of them:
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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.
Now that we have a few months of data on the new log, how it is going? Qualitatively speaking, feedback has been mixed. Some seem to be managing quite well with it whereas others either don’t engage on Gitlab enough or have run into permission issues that have frustrated them. To accommodate ease of entry, we likewise created a bulk import tool that bypasses Gitlab and allows users to log time en masse. The format of the...
Read moreIt’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.
The purpose of providing these financial metrics is to help demonstrate how CiviCRM functions as well as how it’s currently funded.
Things we like to see in the numbers:
- Overall, we’re seeing some stability in income and expenses. While that’s good, most of this balancing has come in the form of a smaller core team. In and of itself, that’s not necessarily a bad thing and the community has stepped up...
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:
- how do non-profits chose their CRM? what would make them consider and chose CiviCRM or not?
- how well do users of CiviCRM in languages other than English interact with CiviCRM and what should we focus on improving?
There’s a lot of possible answers to the first questions, which spans from marketing to visibility, features to usability, costs to risk. Almost everyone in the community has a viewpoint on it; and that’s what’s driving this research inquiry - we want to identify general trends, while tapping into the huge breadth of knowledge between us. We’ve created separate surveys for CRM end-users themselves (who may not be CiviCRM users) and CiviCRM...
Read moreLast 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.
In this post, I want to try and do two things: give a comprehensive account of CiviCRM's sustainability story; and share some ideas that I think could be useful for the road ahead.
Our sustainability story
A couple of times during the conference, I found myself telling our sustainability story (my version of it at least) and it struck me that although we often share parts of it at events and in blog posts, we have never written the whole thing down...
Read moreContributor Elections
Of the 261 voters in this election, 199 cast ballots.
Those elected are:
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Allen Shaw, US
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Claire Williams, UK
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Erika Bjune, US
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Kathryn Carruthers, Canada
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Rose Lanigan, UK
Partner Elections
Of the 62 voters in this election, 49 cast ballots.
Those elected are:
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Alice Aguilar, US - Progressive Technology Project
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Andrew Hunt, US - AGH Strategies
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Erik Hommel, Netherlands - CiviCooP
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Peter Davis, NZ - Fuzion
What’s Next?
Over the next two months, the committee will develop...
Read moreThe 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
This event will be comprised of a governance portion and a code sprint portion.
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Governance Summit
This portion of the event will take place over the first 2 days and is intended to provide a forum for general project management and governance for the project as a whole. Partners, members, sponsors, and active contributors are invited to participate in this portion of the...
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. Though there are a ton of resources to help, such as documentation, videos, training events and webinars, most could likely benefit from ongoing training opportunities. That’s why we’re psyched to roll out two new member benefits focused on training: Ask the Teacher, and access to CiviDesk’s CiviTips!
Ask the Teacher
Starting in February 2017, CiviCRM member organizations will have access to quarterly online webinars in which Stuart Gaston, aka CiviTeacher, will answer all...
Read moreLast week, I wrote about the CiviCRM community and tried to boil it down to a very simple venn diagram. Not only does 'community' play a huge role in producing the software through new features, bug fixes, etc., it also is invaluable for helping promote and raise awareness about CiviCRM the software.
Part of the diagram outlining the CiviCRM community includes providers and organizations that financially give back to CiviCRM, like partners, members and, as is in the title of this post, event sponsors. We often say that CiviCRM is free to download, but not free to maintain, support and improve. Those end user organizations and providers that financial support CiviCRM truly go above and beyond to make certain that the software is maintained and continuously improving.
