Yesterday was a great day for CiviCRM in Madrid. During the CiviDay, in Madrid, we announced the creation of a new CiviCRM working group that would start working the 11th February. We limited the number of participants to 25... and we had to close the inscription form fast because a lot of people was interested! Finally, we had our first meeting, and everybody was there. :-)
People
It's a very diverse working group. Some people are already working with CiviCRM, some of them were developers or integrators who wanted to know a bit more about the platform and other people just wanted to have a first view of the application because they need a CRM for their organizations.
In general, most of the people wanted to know a bit more about CiviCRM to see if it fits the needs of their organizations. At the same time, most of them works, or volunteers, in organizations that have little budgets, so they are looking for an open source solution.
But we have one thing in common. We all love the collaborative approach of CiviCRM community! :-D
Space
One of the cool things that contributed to the success of the working group, was the space where we celebrated it. We are organized the CiviDay and the working group in a place called MediaLab-Prado. Its a very nice place that promotes common good, and therefore, open source, free software and free culture in Madrid.
MediaLab-Prado gave us also a digital space (at comunidad.medialab-prado.es) where we can collaborate, organize our meetups, etc. We are now using it to share the contents that we use to guide our sessions.
Content
Given the fact that most of the people was having their first experience with CiviCRM and they wanted to test it, we decided to guide them through a easy local installation. We invited everybody to bring their laptops and we gave them detailed instructions on how to install the Bitnami CiviCRM Stack and start testing it.
From now on, we will organize a meetup on a monthly basis. The next meetup has been scheduled for the 4th March. The content, for our next session, is currently being discussed in a dedicated post in our digital collaborative space. Some of the ideas that have already been suggested, are:
- A guided introduction to CiviCRM functionalities (based on a real use case).
- How helps CiviCRM to integrate different contact databases (several participants had their contacts in different Excel and Access databases).
- How to use CiviCRM to manage memberships (that's, in fact, a big deal in Spain because CiviCRM is not, by default, sufficient for basic and common needs in Spain). We'll have to work on it!
- How to create and manage custom fields.
- What possibilities does CiviCRM provide in security aspects (access-control groups, etc).
As long as we will have several meetups, we are trying to choose the most basic things for the beginning and leave the complicated stuff for the latest sessions.
Ideas are welcome!
