I've combined my notes from the CiviCRM affinity group meeting and the user meeting and added notes from one conference session. In general, there were more people at the affinity group meeting this year than last year, more sessions that included CiviCRM, and I sensed more enthusiasm for CiviCRM. (One person told me she had been to the affinity group meeting and will be using CiviCRM.)
CiviCRM Affinity Group Meeting, April 26, 2009, at the NTEN conference, San Francisco, about 56 people
At the Developer camps on the 28th and 29th of April, 2009 (ie last week) one of the major tracks for all the breakout sessions was usability. Which is a major theme of the 2.3 version upgrade. In two of the groups I participated in we talked about the usability of the CiviEvent module from a an administrators perspective. One frustration that we decided need addressed was the 5 step wizard to create an event.
We had a CiviCRM developer Camp on April 29th and 30th at Mitchell Kapor Foundation in downtown San Francisco. This was our largest developer camp with approx 25 attendees and 6 folks from the core team (Dave, Kurund, Deepak, Michal, Yashodha and me).
Second day of the sprint behind - manual pages count is now 117. We started at 9am as day before and continued writing until lunch. When we were sleeping, our off-site editor Andy came through a few chapters and introduced quite a lot of propositions, remarks and edits - so it was not only writing new text, but also integrating fixes to whatever was written so far. Second day was also the first one when off-site authors started contributing their chunks of text to the book.
Wow - to me personally, the first day of Book Sprint was quite a surprise. I knew there is a really cool and knowledgeable group of people here, and I also knew that getting away from everyday work really helps with focusing, but I just couldn't guess how productive this day will be.
Long awaited day came - a bunch of good folks from CiviCRM Community arrived to Truckee to work on CiviCRM book! Some of us have been hanging out in San Francisco for some time already, attending NTEN and CiviCRM Developer and User Meetups, some of us arrived only today. First item of business was finalising book outline so that we can be ready to do actual writing on Monday morning.
Google has once again continued their commitment to open source technology through the annual Google Summer of Code (GSoC) program. The program runs from April through September and awards students a stipend for working on and completing qualified open source projects.
A quick reminder that the week long CiviCRM book sprint starts this Monday and you're welcome to participate by writing, reading and commenting on chapters and sections.
We'll be using the Floss manuals infrastructure. The best way start is by saying hello in the IRC chatroom which is available on the Floss manuals site or via an IRC client at #flossmanuals on irc.freenode.net.
