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. :)
Blogs
I had a great discussion with Michal Mach and Dave Greenberg of CiviCRM about the new case management features in CiviCRM. I had a look at them, and I felt they are a good start. But they need some help. Getting a free and open source software tool for small organizations to do case management has been something I'd hoped for for a while, and having written a case management tool or two, I have a soft spot in my heart for this problem. I volunteered to gather a small team together of folks who would help the CiviCRM team by coming up with some good use cases, and helping them figure out features that would be necessary for organizations to adopt CiviCRM to do case management. If you know some things about case management implementation in small organizations (this tool would, at this point, probably not work for large orgs with major case management needs) and are interested in helping out, please drop me an email.
You can contact Michelle at michelle at nosi dot net
For several versions now, CiviCRM ships with version checking mechanism that pings our server from time to time (every time you visit the Administer CiviCRM page of your install, but not more often than once a day) and lets you know if there’s a new major stable version available for download. (This mechanism can be turned off by visiting Administer CiviCRM → Global Settings → Miscellaneous Settings.)
We have delayed CiviCRM v2.0 code freeze (and hence alpha/beta/final) dates. This was primarily because of other commitments, specifically developer boot camps and our combined travel schedules. We expect to have the code freeze in the second week of January (01/07/2008) to be followed by alpha, beta and final releases spaced out over the next six weeks.
A few of the NY based CiviCRM folks gathered together near Union Square in NY. We lucked into a pretty good meeting spot, thanx to fellow CiviCRM'er Chris P. We had 10 people participate in this meetup. This included a couple of folks who were in the investigative stages regarding CiviCRM. The agenda and some of the highlights include:
This is an old report, Check the latest report here: CiviCRM gets a solid A in the 2009 Data Ecosystem Survey Report (we did even better this time around!)
We just concluded our second boot camp in San Francisco earlier today. Running a boot camp is a bit harder than it seems. We'd like to thank the good folks from Chicago Techonology Cooperative (Tom, Brandon), Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) (Blake, Patricia) and USPIRG/FFPIR (Wes) for attending and being willing and gracious bootcamp participants
Kurund and Lobo will be in New York City on Dec 19th / 20th. We will tailor the session based on the needs of the folks who sign up :)
If you are interested please send me an email (lobo at yahoo dot com) along with ideas on what you'd like the session to be about. We'd love to get some user feedback, comments and critique of CiviCRM. We'll spend some time explaining a few things coming in CiviCRM v2.0
We will be hosting the meetup on Dec 19th at 9:00 am - 11:00 am at:
CRS (Center for Remembering & Sharing) 123 4th Ave, 2nd FL New York, NY 10003 212-677-8621