Campaigning camp report back

Just finished up two days of work with CiviCRM at campaigning camp in Oxford UK bringing together members of Plone and CiviCRM community. The Camp followed on from the two day e-Campaigning forum and that was really useful in helping us keep the user at the forefront of work and discussions. And led to some really interesting conversations about a user focused approach to campaigning in CiviCRM which we plan to take further at CiviCon in April. We split in two for most of the camp, with half looking at Plone-CiviCRM integration, and the other half focusing on campaigning tools for CiviCRM. Some great first steps were made on Plone integration. Mike Rhodes from Net Insight wrote wrapper classes in Python to call CiviCRM's contact and activity APIs, allowing you to add, edit and delete contacts and activities from Python. Next steps are to use this library to record actions on a Plone site as activities with contacts in CiviCRM. Campaigning split into two groups looking at two different aspects of campaigns: petitions (led by Xavier) and canvassing (based on this wiki specification http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRM/CiviCRM+for+Canvassing+and+GOTV). We also looked at work done by Mike Haggerty at Trellon on Drupal's activism module and his roadmap to integrate these with CiviCRM. Looking at these new additions to CiviCRM, along with the existing components (like Mail and Contribute) got us thinking about how we could use to integrate different CiviCRM actions together under a 'CiviCampaign' with (amongst other things) reports and timelines showing who has been engaged and what they've done over time. Let us know if you're working in this area, and watch this space for more details.