Reflections from CiviCon

We had our 4th CiviCon in San Francisco a few days back. It was a very well attended event with very high quality sessions. We hope to have most of the videos online in the next few weeks. I'm quite keen on watching all the sessions that I had to miss. There were lots of highlights for me personally during this event, i'll make an attempt to recreate some of them here:

• The quality of the talks I attended were very high. Most groups are using CiviCRM very creatively and pushing the limits in multiple ways. We need to continue on increasing the extensibility thus giving developers / integrators more choice.
• The quality of the Birds of a Feather session was very high. Unfortunately these were not recorded. Jim's talk on how they use Civi for theatre registration and season passes at BACT, Peters talk on CiviMobile and Rachna and Jason's talk on PopVox, CiviCRM and Advocacy were super impressive. A blog post on Popvox and CiviCRM is coming soon, definitely opens up the wide world of advocacy and contacting your congress-person/senator for CiviCRM users.
• Gunner's session on community tuneup was quite cool. Gunner and aspiration tech do a great job of getting everyone involved and talking. Doing it before lunch helped continue the conversation during lunch and for the rest of the event. We'll have a blog post summarizing the takeaways and action plan from that event in the next day or so.
• Seeing and talking to so many people that we interact with on a regular basis on the forums and IRC. At the next Con, we need to include people's forum/IRC/Twitter handle to identify folks more easily :)
• Seeing so many users and orgs who are deploying CiviCRM and are so so passionate about the project, the community and the power of open source.
• The David Brower Center was a really nice venue for this CiviCon. Lots of tables and space for small group discussions

Quite a few of us are currently at Woolman on a mega-sprint involving documentation and features for 4.2. Its great to see such an exciting, healthy and passionate community and we hope to build on this to continue pushing CiviCRM to even higher heights!