eAdvocacy Jamboree 2007 or the value of face to face meetings

Last two weeks I've spent in San Francisco, catching up on face to face conversations with CiviCRM Team members, meeting friends and attending eAdvocacy Jamboree 2007. Working in a distributed software development team and connecting with most of your users remotely gets sometimes hard, but fortunately there are those rare moments when you can at least partially catch up on meeting real people instead of interacting with your Skype contacts. First week was a lot of quality time with CiviCRM Team members, spending time mainly on discussing version 2.0 tasks, planning improvements, code and database schema optimisations, and second week was mainly eAdvocacy Jamboree 2007 sessions and meetings. It was really great to see how much traction CiviCRM is getting and all the interest that was expressed by people. A very big and especially motivating fact was seeing people starting their own projects based on (or supplementing) CiviCRM: during speed geeking session, out of 8 or 10 presentation stations, 3 were CiviCRM related: one was Rob Thorne's CiviVoter & Canvasser, one was Shane Hill's CiviMail SMTP service and one was the very CiviCRM, presented by Amanda Hickman (btw - thanks again, Amanda!) and me. It was pretty nice to see there is so much interesting things to say about CiviCRM's little world. :-) Coming back to the conference - during the conference pre-day, we (John Kenyon, Dave Greenberg and me) gave an introductory training on CiviCRM and Drupal - it was supposed to be two sessions, introductory and advanced, but since conference agenda was flexible, we focused on general introduction and presentation for both sessions - there was more interest in this level of training. Second session turned into Q&A at some stage, which was really great - hearing directly from people who use or are interested in using CiviCRM was a very good learning experience. That in general was my main theme for this conference - get to talk to people who use contact databases (not only CiviCRM), hear about their needs and figure out how we can make CiviCRM better for them. On our forums we mostly stay in touch with intermediaries - people who deploy and customise CiviCRM for their clients. This situation has many good sides, it's a group of excellent people and it's great to have them in our community, but also means that the feedback we are getting on our product is a little bit filtered. And again - even though this filtering is often beneficial for us, we sometimes miss hearing about real life experience with CiviCRM, from people who are busy solving their organisation's day-to-day problems. So - if you are reading this, and you use CiviCRM, make sure to come back to us, either through forums or directly via email to any of team members. Speaking of open source project's community building, I had a pleasure to attend really interesting session facilitated by Karl Fogel, where we had some discussions about how to provide CiviCRM's community with easier feedback mechanisms and generally encourage people to tell us how to make our software better. Lots of ideas taken out of this session and hopefully some improvements to our community tools very soon. I guess there is still a lot to say about eAdvocacy Jamboree and CiviCRM, but this blog post would become too long for anyone to read if I tried to report on everything. Just to mention one more thing - it was really great to meet all those who are using and extending CiviCRM, especially Shane and Rob. I hope it's not the last time we're seeing each other guys!