I'm on my way back to San Francisco after an incredibly stimulating three weeks of collaborating (and co-habitating) with fellow "Civi's". There were lots of very long days (12 - 15 hours) of brainstorming , designing, hammering out code... intermingled with cooking and eating some lovely meals together, a few cool adventures in the natural beauty of New Zealand, and some excellent meetups with members of the community "down-under".
This was our fourth "international" team gathering. In planning for it we tried to build on the things that worked best in our prior meetups - and learn from things that didn't work as well. We decided to focus tightly on a few key goals / projects - and worked hard at staying on task. (This meant resisting the gravitational pulls of email, forums, team members not with us etc.) We set a schedule for moving through our projects and decided up front that it was ok to move on to the next task without completing 100% of the current one.
Blogs
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May 7, 2008
By lobo Filed under Architecture, CiviCRMToday we spent a fair amount of time with Pete and Chris from the NZ greens. We got a pretty good overview of how the NZ Greens are using the system and some of their pain points. We saw some of the cool integration that Chris has done with the NZ voter database and linking the electorate ID to a CiviCRM contact ID, ability to merge the address from the voter database etc. Its kinda cool how folks can extend and integrate the systems with other db's and we need to make it significantly easier to enable folks to build such system within CiviCRM.
May 4, 2008
By michal Filed under CiviCRM, TeamsTime flies - it's been already a week since we've been together in New Zealand, enjoying face to face conversations and working together. My personal take on communication is that there is nothing like real time conversation involving two persons located in the same physical spot, so I must say I'm really enjoying this opportunity to hang out with Yashi, Dave, KJ & Lobo.
May 4, 2008
By kurund Filed under TeamsI am a big fan of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, hence i was very excited about coming to New Zealand and exploring few Middle Earth locations. I must say NZ has some of the most amazing places I have ever seen.
April 30, 2008
By lobo Filed under Architecture, CiviCRMThe past few days we've been focussed on improving the user experience of CiviCRM. This also included optimizing page size and number of database queries invoked per page load. One of the things that has bothered me for some time was the inefficient implementation of the quickform hierarchical select widget for our case.
April 30, 2008
By lobo Filed under CiviCRMWe released CiviCRM v2.0.3. This issue addresses a few issues in upgrade and fixes approx 20 bugs. We do not maintain a CHANGELOG (i think we need to start doing this), but you can see the list of changes here:
http://biryani.osuosl.org:8181/changelog/CiviCRM/branches/v2.0
April 30, 2008
By andrew Filed under TrainingAlmost 10 days have passed since the Melbourne Developer Boot Camp, but the feeling of being part of an enthusiastic and growing community of CiviCRMers "down under" is still strong.
April 29, 2008
By Dave Greenberg Filed under Training
Lobo and I woke up at 5:30am (ouch) today to conduct the CiviCRM Webinar. A dark and stormy morning in New Zealand - but evidently a good time for the Webinar (11am PDT) - as we had an awesome turnout (40+ folks registered).
The session was billed as in introduction to CiviCRM - so we spent most of the time describing the key features and components (contributions, memberships, event registration, etc.). In order to give folks a better idea of CiviCRM in Action - I created a separate slide-show with screenshots of CiviCRM pages from a variety of live sites...
User registration with CiviCRM profiles - from Amnesty International
Multiple online contribution pages (campaign-specific) - from The Conservation Fund
Membership signup - from NYAMA
Event listing and registration - from The Foundation for Prader-Willi Research
Searchable South African NGO eirectory - from SangoNet
April 28, 2008
By loboFiled under A few members of the CiviCRM core team (dave, yashodha, michal and kurund) are visiting us in Nelson, NZ. We get together a couple of times a year which is quite helpful when we all return to various parts of the globe. This also gives the team a chance to visit and explore new places.
