Manchester Sprint

Following on from the training last week, about 40 of us have been up in Manchester recently for the CiviCRM Sprint where we've been working on replacing some of the admin forms and some of the core display screens with more up to date technology. There's also been work on updating the documentation and some thinking about how that process should actually work.

There were talks on a range of specific areas such WYSIWYG editors and Stripe but the main focus was around Search Kit and Form Builder. As well as the technological developments, we've also been discussing easy next steps in moving the UI forward and thinking about a significant new UX initiative that the new forms will allow.

As always with these events, it was also a great opportunity to see old friends in real life again. This was especially the case after a break of a couple of years! It was also really good to meet some new members of the community who are just getting involved as contributors.

This was the biggest meeting since Covid and people came from Germany, Spain, Netherlands, France, US, Canada and New Zealand and of course all over the UK. Manchester is a great city to be sure and it's always a pleasure to visit but the real attraction was being together with a group of people with a shared purpose. One of the key takeaways has to be how energising it is to be in a room with that many people all focussed on moving the project forward in various ways and how that positive creative energy really is hard to beat. 

So I think for many of us one of the key sessions was Jaap's discussion around the community and how we can encourage people who may be peripheral to become more engaged, moving from one or two contributions to a more regular series of contact points and inputs. Some automation might be useful for reminders to have more personal touchpoints. It would also be good to involve some more of the "already committed" to be part of an on ramp for those making their first steps. There is some further discussion going on and if you'd like to be part of that, please comment here. We'll aim to write some more about those ideas over the coming weeks/months.