Earlier today we had a conference call with a few consulting firms and individuals who integrate and deploy CiviCRM for clients. There were approximately 15 folks in the room. The agenda and quite a few comments are documented on this wiki page.
Blog posts by lobo
Some links to recent blog posts about CiviCRM. We've also started tweeting about CiviCRM. You can follow us here
I spent some time analyzing data that we've been collecting over the past few months. In v2.1 we added a ping back feature which lets us know what component folks are using and the size of some of the tables (which gives us an estimate of the size of the site etc). All information is hashed and we do not record any IP addresses. Details of what we collect are in a prior blog post
Some personal info to set the background: I have two kids who started kindergarden and pre-k earlier this year. We've also been involved with the KidZone Museum (in truckee, ca). Small schools and museums have a large part of their annual budget come in via live auctions. I did a bit of digging around and could not find any open source software that addresses this sort of fund raiser auctions.
The team has been focused on doing a pretty extensive QA cycle for the CiviCRM 2.2 release. We have approx 10 issues to resolve and another 10 issues to verify. 2.2 seems to be looking quite good so far :). The list of features, improvements and schedule is on the 2.2 wiki page
CiviCRM 2.1.2 release with bug fixes, as well as a fix for a critical security vulnerability is now available for download. CiviCRM 2.0.7 a maintainance release fixing critical security vulnerabilities is also available for download. The vulnerability addressed could allow a remote user with insufficient permissions to access CiviCRM functionality via the API and / or command line scripts.
The CiviCRM core team is currently meeting in San Francisco. We tend to meet 2-3 times a year. These meetings help us crank out a few large projects as a group and also help improve our communication when we return to our respective home bases.
Implementing support for multiple organizations with hierarchy is one of the main themes of the phase 2 part of the CiviCRM / The Public Interest Network (PIN) project. PIN has a fairly complex structure. It is a federation of organizations which include US PIRG, Environment America and others.