CiviCRM Mumbai Meetup: Day One

Most of the CiviCRM team is currently in Mumbai, India where we are having our first world wide developer meeting. :) We are missing Dave Greenberg who unfortunately had to cut short his trip to India. :( But he is present via the wiki, blog and issue queue prodding us along. :) This was the first time the India team was meeting Piotr and Michał from Poland. They are spending close to ten days with the India team. Part of the activities include a long weekend visit to Mahabaleshwar. We also have quite a few excellent meals planned (JaiHind, Bade Mia/Baghdadi, Madras Café, etc.). As always folks in and around the Mumbai area are invited to come and hang out… We spent the first part of the morning with introductions and getting to know each other a bit more. We also spent a fair amount of time reviewing the things we did well in 2007 and some things we should improve on in 2008. Some of the highlights include:

• The team was happy with the quality of the 1.8 and 1.9 releases (compared to the previous versions). Our strategy of QA-ing the past two version issues seems to have raised the quality significantly.
• However, this is still a very manual process. One of our top goals in 2008 is to do automated testing. We plan on coming up with some benchmark numbers we want to hit in the 2.1/2.2/2.3 releases.
• We took a big step forward with regard to documentation in 2007. We will continue this effort and hope that the community steps up and writes more detailed documentation and HOWTO manuals.
• We had 4 releases in 2007 (1.6-1.9). We hope to have 3-4 releases in 2008 (2.0-2.3/3.0?)
• We need to figure out how to get better traction and adoption internationally. While we spend a fair amount of time ensuring that we are i18n/l10n enabled, we have not seen significant CiviCRM adoption in non-English languages. :(
• We’d like to consider easing the CiviMail adoption for smaller organisations and/or shared hosting, although that’s far from being trivial.
• The community is terrific with regard to filing feature requests and bug reports. We need to work with the community and figure out how to get folks to step up and help on the forum / documentation wiki / respond to our feedback requests. :)
• We had five large consulting projects in 2007. We hope to significantly increase this number in 2008 and/or attempt to get a major foundation grant. Any help/leads will be much appreciated.

Later in the afternoon, we split up into three teams of 4-5 developers each and tackled the remaining open 2.0 issues as a group. Each group was responsible for solving one issue with the entire team and potentially split the other issues into pair programming/debugging teams. We’ve made great progress and managed to knock 5-6 issues this afternoon/evening. It does help that most of the team is still at work (it’s past 10:00 pm in India now). The goal is to get the issue queue to under ten by Wednesday and then do a first alpha release. Deepak and team have made some great progress with the 1.9 → 2.0 upgrade script. We ran a test on a fairly large database earlier today (60k contacts) and are close to having that working. We’d love for the community to test out some of their favorite bugs/features at sandbox.civicrm.org. We’ll be producing a daily blog report over the next week. If there are specific things you’d like to see in this report, please let us know. :)