Code for Change <3s CiviCRM

Code for Change, a group internship program for computer science students, is working on adding several features to CiviCRM this summer. U.S. PIRG launched Code for Change this summer for several reasons:

• Get some great work done on open source software that benefits our work and that of all other organizations doing political advocacy work.
• Identify and recruit students and anyone else who is interested in gaining software development experience and contributing to open source software projects that help progressive political advocacy groups make progress on some of the most pressing issues in the world today.
• Lay the ground work for a community of progressive "software activists" that help organizations keep their open source software ahead of the curve and allow them to focus on what they do best.

This summer we're adding some features to CiviCRM. Namely:

• Standalone -- CiviCRM currently (until v1.8 comes out) requires a CMS to plug into to be usable. Usually it is used with Drupal or Joomla. In the first three weeks of our program, we have completed the standalone feature. So now CiviCRM can be used with any CMS (or none at all). There will be a basic version of this feature in CiviCRM 1.8, and on Friday we'll be releasing a fairly mature version of it complete with OpenID authentication (which we added since CiviCRM usually relies on the encompassing CMS for authentication).
• Integration with WebGUI -- Once CiviCRM is working as a standalone system, we will enable it to be used conveniently with the WebGUI CMS. This involves setting up single sign-on and wiring up the political action forms in WebGUI (which U.S. PIRG developed and will be releasing as open source software as well) so that they record actions in CiviCRM.
• More types of actions -- Currently CiviCRM has a few activity concepts it can track like donations, event RSVP'ing, event attendance, etc. We will be teaching it how to track other activities like signing online petitions, calling decision-makers, and writing letters to the editor of their local paper.
• New list segmentation features -- This project phase is not totally fleshed out yet, but we will probably be adding some new features to the list segmentation ability built in to CiviCRM. This feature is for sending emails to subsets of the contact lists stored in it.

We're very excited to be working on CiviCRM and with the rest of the CiviCRM community. We also want to help grow it! We have lots of projects that people can help us with. From adding documentation to our website, to finding and fixing bugs, we need all the help we can get! If you're interested in contributing to the project, please join us in #civicrm on Freenode or contact us here.