Wow - to me personally, the first day of Book Sprint was quite a surprise. I knew there is a really cool and knowledgeable group of people here, and I also knew that getting away from everyday work really helps with focusing, but I just couldn't guess how productive this day will be.
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Long awaited day came - a bunch of good folks from CiviCRM Community arrived to Truckee to work on CiviCRM book! Some of us have been hanging out in San Francisco for some time already, attending NTEN and CiviCRM Developer and User Meetups, some of us arrived only today. First item of business was finalising book outline so that we can be ready to do actual writing on Monday morning.
Google has once again continued their commitment to open source technology through the annual Google Summer of Code (GSoC) program. The program runs from April through September and awards students a stipend for working on and completing qualified open source projects.
A quick reminder that the week long CiviCRM book sprint starts this Monday and you're welcome to participate by writing, reading and commenting on chapters and sections.
We'll be using the Floss manuals infrastructure. The best way start is by saying hello in the IRC chatroom which is available on the Floss manuals site or via an IRC client at #flossmanuals on irc.freenode.net.
I recently blogged about my approach to open source software as a non-profit techie here: OpenProgress.
One of our requirements for CiviCase was a higher degree of security than what is normally associated with a community website. Users reach our CiviCase implementation via https, which is great, but leaves open the whole password issue. Those of you who live in the corporate IT world will be familiar with the two-factor ID solutions that are available on the market, from RSA, CryptoCard, and maybe others.
The adoption of CiviCRM in the past couple of years has boomed, and as of late Trellon has taken on some rather large implementations of the CRM system for advocacy and international development organizations. The CiviCRM community has been lacking local user groups to support developers, administrators and persons interested in learning more about the platform. In response to this need, we have decided to start the first Washington DC CiviCRM Meetup group.
Several members of our core team just got back from a 3 day CiviCase meetup in beautiful Vancouver, Canada - hosted by Physician Health Program - BC (PHP-BC). Our main goals were:
Get face-to-face feedback from PHP staff who are using CiviCase about what's working and what needs improvement in the existing implementation.
Do some code sprints to get some quick wins for implementation within the current release cycle (2.2.3)
Review the list of candidate features for Phase 2 in order to get a better understanding of the requirements, and discuss a range of implementation "solutions".
Prioritize the Phase 2 list and come up with a scope of work and specifications for the 2.3 release.
The PHP-BC staff did a fantastic job of welcoming us, arranging logistics for housing and meeting space, and keeping us well fed (they hosted several incredible lunches and dinners)! We built an agenda that allowed us to get in-depth feedback on the current version, and then follow-up with time to code and share improvements and/or design ideas.
I had to add some price sets to our recent project and I think I managed to get both the existing system and the price set system to work side by side. To give you an idea of why I had to do it, think of this; you have a specific membership open to organisations, the amount that the organisation needs to pay to join is based on its size. A company of 2-4 people will pay less than a 300+ employee company.
We're in the midst of preparing for a UK developer camp and meetup this June - an event where CiviCRM developers, administrator and users from the UK and Europe can get together around CiviCRM - and we'd like you to tell us what you want to see at the camp.
