Blog posts by lobo

As some of you are aware, I'm currently living in Nelson, NZ. We've been moving quite often in our quest to find a long term furnished rental (which was surprisingly difficult and cumbersome in a small town). We did manage to find a pretty good place in Tahunanui, Nelson and moved in this weekend. Unfortunately our good friends at Telecom NZ, worthy recipients indeed of the Supreme Ass awards, could not switch on broadband at the new place till later this week.

I originally wrote this in an email to the civicrm-dev list, but figured putting it on the blog for the record would be a good idea.

Community support and input is super important to us in all respects. It lets everyone know how folks are using the product for their organization / business / group. A lot of the features and direction that CiviCRM has gone in has been heavily influenced by the needs and comments of the community on the mailing list and forum.

Please continue sending us your thoughts / reviews and critique. Please take the time to make CiviCRM a better product by:

Earlier today Convio announced that they will acquire GetActive. I wont bother speculating too much on what this does to Open API's et al. I suspect the two orgs will be quite busy munging two large closed systems into an even larger closed system (speaking a bit from experience here!)

Mark Shuttleworth from Ubuntu recently had an article titled Keeping it Free. This article to a large extent summarizes what we at CiviCRM think and feel. From his blog entry a couple of paragraphs that really put things in context for us (and hopefully for you):

From our regular scraping / rss feeds of the web in an attempt to get a rough idea of what folks are using CiviCRM and why, here are two interesting projects that we came across:

NTEN (Non-profit Technology Enterprise Network) recently posed a series of questions to software vendors serving the non-profit community. Here's a draft of our response. We will be revising this entry over the next few days. Would be great for the community to comment and/or contribute to our response. The questions are in bold type.

We recently moved our downloads from our server in Poland to Sourceforge.net. The main reasons for this move was to make the download faster and reliable. A side benefit was saving bandwidth and hence costs. One of the unforeseen benefits of this move was we get pretty good download stats from the service and a few surprising results. You can see the stats here.

Over the past few releases we've been having quite a few people use and exercise the api. We are getting to the stage where people want to use the api to integrate with other applications (e.g. integration with Thunderbird).

As we begin our 3rd year - the team took some time to lay out broad goals for 2007. These goals are intended to help us focus on things that will improve the platform, grow the community and sustain the project for the long term. So without further ado, here our the 2007 goals: