This July 27th and 28th we are planning a friendly and informal CiviCRM Sprint at Kaleider Studios in Exeter UK.
Sprints are in person events where the main focus is working together to contribute back to CiviCRM. They are often large events, many months in the planning but this one will be a lot smaller and more informal.
Last month I attended Sustain Summit 2018: an inspiring 'one-day event for open source sustainers' organised by Open Collective. It was great to spend a day with people who are working hard to tackle the sustainability problem. Some focused on their own projects, others looking more broadly across the open source ecosystem.
A couple of months ago, I made the first commits to a repository in which I have been experimenting with CiviCRM Buildkit on Docker. It's gone quite well so far.
Preparing for a session at CiviCon London last month, I realised I needed better data than the out of the box sample data. It's a situation I've found myself in a few times so rather than write a one of script to generate the data, I decided to try and write something more generic and reusable. The result is something I am calling CiviPop (or Pop if three syllables / 7 letters is too much for you).
If you've been using CiviCRM for a while, you most likely already know that it is developed by a diverse bunch of people from around the world. Sprints are the time and place when these folks get together to get things done.
It's been on our agenda for a good while to improve the way that we recognize the contributions people make to CiviCRM. I'm pleased to report that we've made some decent progress on this front. We now have a way to regularly 'poll' 'sources' for 'tasks' completed by 'contributors' to CiviCRM.
In September last year, the core team started using Slack (a proprietary chat platform) to improve our internal communication and co-ordination. It worked really nicely for us and coordination and we wanted to role it out more widely, but there were a couple of limitations: the free version of slack has limited history (you can only search and browse the most recent 10k messages) and the full version costs $8 per user per month, which isn't going to work financially for us.
There is still time to register for the 2016 CiviCon! Visit www.colorado2016.civicrm.org for a complete list of sessions, the schedule, and FAQ's about the event.
Over the past few months we've had a few requests for more clarity in on how the CiviCRM community is structured - how things are organized, lines of accountability, etc. It's crucial that this stuff is well understood by everyone that uses and contributes to CiviCRM. It helps us stay productive, helps newcomers understand how they can get involved, and helps us to scale.
We've built a new home for CiviCRM's documentation. Here's a quick run down of what we've done, why we've done it, and how you can help with the move.
First, a quick recap of our documentation's long and illustrious history:
