Hosted by Cividesk's Regional Account Manager Neil Planchon at Swan's Market Cohousing, Oakland, CA
CiviDay was an opportunity for Dave Greenberg, a CiviCRM founder, to look back at 10 years of CiviCRM, plus allow two presenters to talk about how CiviCRM let them support their organizations – James Meehan, for Bay Area Children’s Theater, and Josh Mailman, for NorCal CanciNet, WARMTH and Piedmont Yoga Initiative.
The event was attended by 42 people representing various organizations.
We started by introducing ourselves and the organizations we represented – they include Open Oakland, Bay Area Children’s Theater, CiviCRM itself (Tim Otten, Dave Greenberg), Bikes East Bay, SF Bay Keepers, Aspiration, Event Proplan, Abrahamic Alliance, East Bay Meditation Center, (ex) Giant Rabbit, Rockford Leadership Institute, Backdrop (a new CMS-to-be, being worked on by Jen Lampton and cohort of Drupal fame, check out https://backdropcms.org/), Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California, Friendship Circle and Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Dave Greenberg gave a high-level introduction to CiviCRM, talking about how he, Michacl Mach and Donald Lobo started building Civi as an antidote to data silos, where they found themselves building the wheel again and again, so to speak – to provide wheels to non-profits became their mission. Civi is meant to 1). Be easily integrated with existing web software, 2.) establish legitimacy, particularly as against large commercial enterprises (Salesforce.com), and believes that 3.) organizations should own their data/code and 4.) success = doing social good. Coming up for Civi – StackExchange site, (more) automated testing, extensions. The next release includes updates to CiviMail, Recurring Events & Activities, and handling of sales tax. Civi’s revenue target for 2015 - $600 K.
Looking toward summer, Civi is again hoping to participate in Google Summer of Code – if you know any IT students who may be interested and eligible, tell them about it – if you have any suggestions for projects or want to be a mentor, let us know!
Next CiviCON is planned for April in beautiful Denver, Colorado, check http://denver2015.civicrm.org
James Meehan presented the work he’d done on the Bay Area Children’s Theater website, implementing ticketing – users can buy tickets using a flex pass or credit card, from a calendar or show page. The enhancement/contribution James made is CiviBoxOffice, based on an implementation of FusionTicket to allow for a seat map from which to select a seat or group of seats. Asked about the time/resources spent on making this extension he estimated about 20 hours for proof of concept plus ~10-12 K to Giant Rabbit for testing and other work.
Josh Mailman next talked about how his life-changing episode with a rare form of cancer (similar to Steve Jobs’ ) brought him to work with various medical boards – in particular NorCal CarciNet. He got involved with Oakland Running Festival for which he used Civi for event handling. For the WARMTH organization, Josh joked about the nightmare of trying to work with PayPal and a bank in India, where PayPal limited transactions to $200/month. He was helped out by Stephen Bestbier of iATS, and Spreedly, which he recommended highly for dealing with foreign wire transfers. He then talked about his own experiences with data siloing, in particular MailChimp for mailing, instead of CiviMail and mentioned that 1) organizations lose control of their own data and branding even though it may seem ‘easier’ to use MailChimp or Eventbrite and 2.) he has a history with email in spite, or because of, his name – just say ‘eFax.com’ .
Thanks to the CiviCRM people, Neil and Cividesk, and both our presenters for a great CiviDay 2015 (may there be more meetups in future!)
Lesley Evensen
(zorgalina)
