CiviCamp Hamburg 2024 - Retrospective

Beyond the Core, with the Core… and many more

Organized by SYSTOPIA and FlyingCIVI in cooperation with BürgerStiftung Hamburg and Aktivoli Landesnetzwerk the Hamburg CiviCamp was special, as it was an opportunity for locals and experts from all over the world to meet and connect, but also to be productive in an extended 4-day-sprint.

We are thankful for all the participants near and far, but especially for all of the CiviCRM core team members that crossed oceans to be with us: 110 participants, 16 sessions, 8 ½ lightning talks and over 50 people at the sprint. This incredibly engaged audience made for a very high level of technically advanced developments and setups to be showcased.

CiviCamp Hamburg 2024: Sessions & Lightning Talks

Keynote

Josh Gowans presented the vision of CiviCRM, the initiatives for 2024 and beyond. The core message: get involved with ideas, resources and money! Joe Murray doubled down on this call by highlighting the role of the Community Council.

Presentation (English)

CiviCRM: A quick introduction for newbies

Benedikt Kaleß and Theresa Eberle from Software für Engagierte e. V. gave an introduction to CiviCRM for newcomers. They focused on the questions: What is CiviCRM and what functions does it offer? What makes Civi different as free open source software? Who is part of the CiviCRM community and where are the interaction points in this community?

Streamlit and CiviCRM: A Winning Team for Custom UIs and Dashboards

Ulrich Meyer-Martin gave an overview of how CiviCRM works together with Streamlit. Streamlit is an open-source framework that enables developers to quickly and with minimal effort create interactive web apps for data analysis and machine learning. The implementation is carried out in simple Python scripts, supporting many widgets such as sliders, check boxes, and graphs. A sample for a CiviCRM case dashboard and case Kanban board were given.

Funding Application & Grant Management with CiviCRM

Martin Peth presented SYSTOPIA’s portal solution for funding and grant management. The customizable and expandable framework combines powerful CiviCRM extensions for managing grant applications with a Drupal-based web portal for submitting applications.

If you want to test the funding portal’s many features by yourself and assess if it’s the right fit for your organization, we invite you to try out our demo version! Contact us for more information and access to the demo.

Application Portal at MINT Zukunft

Anna Bugey and Stefan Frank (SYSTOPIA) demonstrated how a portal solution based on Webforms, Formprocessor and the CiviRemote Framework reduces the administrative effort in the application and evaluation process for MINT Zukunft.

As part of the project, we invested in the improvement of the CiviRemote Framework by newly developing features that support RemoteActivity and RemoteEntity.

Superset, Talend and CiviCRM at Viva con Agua

Patrick Köhn and Tore Buschsenjaworked together on implementing and developing CiviCRM at Viva con Agua Wasser GmbH for many years. At the CiviCamp they showcased how they use Talent and Superset as an open dashboard tool and a data warehouse with different layers for the marketing, sales and distribution of mineral water.

CiviRemote - A Powerful Framework for Online Integration and More

The CiviRemote framework is powerful toolset of CiviCRM extensions, Drupal modules and other components. Jens Schuppe and Björn Endres (SYSTOPIA) showcased how these components work together in to manage user, events or activities, which practical uses cases they already make possible and what lies ahead on the project roadmap.

Remote Form Support in FormBuilder

Tim Otten of the CiviCRM core team gave a demonstration of their recent work done on remote forms. This involved use of oembed to embed FormBuilder forms remotely in your website. The sessions mostly consisted of a live demo. If your are interested in the content, you can watch a very similar talk here.

CiviCRM for Arts and Culture at Classical:Next

Patrick Förg (civilisten) presented how they used CiviCRM as a single source of truth for event management at Classical:Next, the largest global gathering for new classical and art music. Together with Clemens Seemann (Classical:Next) and Jens Werling (nussknagger) they demonstrated how one central portal based on CiviCRM connects more than 1.400 users, provides booking features with a 2D room-model and serves external websites and a new mobile app with data.

Automated Recruitment & Telemarketing at Amnesty International Vlaanderen

This session was mentioned as one of our participants’ favorites: Erik Hommel of CiviCoop showed how Amnesty International Vlaanderen uses street recruitment agencies to recruit new donors and telemarketing agencies to reactivate old donors or specific targeted groups. With a new extension (developed by CiviCooP) they can pull data from agencies and process them automatically into contacts, SEPA mandates, activities and group memberships.

Resource Management & Matching

Björn Endres and Jens Schuppe presented SYSTOPIA’s Resource Management extension. It uses CiviCRM’s custom entities and the powerful Entity Construction Kit (ECK) to manage human or physical resources and match them with resource demands. This extension is still looking for pilot users: if your organization wants to optimize the management of different resources, hit us up.

SearchKit Reporting and Visualizations

With an overwhelming amount of participants interested in SearchKit (aka The Future of Everything), Ben Walpole of the CiviCRM core team demonstrated how to build reports on CiviCRM data and make these reports visual with the new ChartKit extension. Ben presented user-level demos with some technical questions and discussed what is next for the visualization project. If you'd like to get involved, take a look at the SearchKit Mattermost channel.

Donation forms with Twingle

Marc Michalsky presented a session about connecting Twingle donation forms to CiviCRM. How is the data from the Twingle donation forms mapped in CiviCRM and how can workflows and even complex business processes be mapped? A highlight was the outlook towards a new option that allows for integrating Twingle Shops.

Improving CiviCRM’s interface: Themes of Civi Past,Present and Future… (Or how I rewrote Shoreditch in 15kb CSS)

Nic Wistreich together with Rich Lott redid the CiviCRM walls with Project Brunswick. At CiviCamp, Nic presented RiverLea - a theme framework that is doing most of the heavylifting of what a theme should do. It structures the CSS in a more easily maintainable, less redundant way and implements immediate accessibility fixes. RiverLea supports theme variations (“streams”) that are easily customized with CSS variables. Now you can test them by dipping in your feet into familiar streams like Minetta (the creek that runs under Greenwich village New York), Walbrook (the river that runs under Shoreditch, London) or by creating your own stream.

Presentation (English)

Enhance your Time Management with CiviAppointment for CiviCRM/CiviMobile

Tetiana Oliiarchuk presented Agiliway’s CiviMobile which allows constant access to CiviCRM data from mobile devices. With CiviAppointment it got a useful addition that allows users to create various types of meetings and book them for required contact. Designed to streamline scheduling processes it makes time management for organizations more efficient and a user-friendly.

Tetiana also presented a theme engine for their CiviMobile that you can try it out here.

Her colleague Maryana Cherkes prepared a succinct lightning talk to showcase CiviMultisite.

Management of volunteers with HiOrg & CiviCRM

Kai Kuschewski presented the ASB Schleswig Holstein’s need to manage a large number of volunteers who are organized in different regional associations. Many of the regional associations were already using the HiOrg software for planning operations and tracking qualifications, training and more. Together with Jens Schuppe (SYSTOPIA) they showcased a solution for synchronizing HiOrg information about volunteers with CiviCRM with the help of modern CiviCRM development tools such as API4, the Entity Construction Kit, SearchKit and FormBuilder.

Customized Workflows with the CiviCRM Extension “SearchActionDesigner”

Jaap Jansma, the original developer of the SearchActionDesigner presented the background of the extension that makes it possible to execute several actions at once in one search action. Detlev Sieber and Peter Reck presented an example of what they have done with the extension.

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CiviCamp Hamurg 2024: Sprint Highlights

Turns out getting a bunch of CiviCRM developers and users in a room with stable internet, an unlimited supply of coffee and a moderator with a German attitude towards punctuality does the trick: The sprint setup proved to be very well organized and productive from the first minute.

In no particular order, here are some of the topics that were discussed, presented, learned about and worked on within our four busy days of sprinting:

• Dev Training: Tim Otten (CiviCRM LLC) offered a short introduction to new developers.
• Documentation: Erik Hommel (CiviCoop) took a look into CiviCRM showcases and videos and together with others made some progress with updating the CiviCRM documentation.
• Accessibility: Thomas Renner and Rositsa Dikova (Webshapers) picked up the accessibility work by raising some new issues, e.g interactions in the interface that depend on hovering. Thanks for making CiviCRM more accessible!
• Extension review: At SYSTOPIA, we have a lot of stable extensions that just never got officially reviewed. We would like to make them available for automated distribution and therefore easier to find and installed through the UI. A working group around Johannes Franz took a look at the review process and checked some of the criteria.
• New extensions: Some new and lesser known were presented at spontaneous presentations during the sprint: Luciano Spiegel (iXiam) presented the next generation of Campaign Manager – part of which was discussed to move into the core.Patrick Figel presented Greenpeace’s impressive work on the Support Case extension as a CiviCRM integrated helpdesk tool. And, as a fresh new addition, the team of the civilisten prototyped CiviVote during the sprint, an extension for different voting functions in CiviCRM.
• CiviRemote: The CiviRemote framework is a toolset to create rich web frontends for events, intranets, funding, other applications... or anything that happens in CiviCRM. During the sprint some PRs have been finalized for the next version of remote events, including making localisation work and continuing development on price options.
• Order API: A working group around Björn Endres and Jens Schuppe (SYSTOPIA) discussed Order and Payment API4 implementation. You you can find notes from the sprint here.
• SQL Tasks: Greenpeace worked on the improvement of the SQL Tasks extension.
• CKEditor: Luciano Spiegel (iXiam) demonstrated the issues we have with CKEditor3/4/5. A viable alternative is Summernote. An extension is available to integrate the Summernote editor.
• Mailing with CiviCRM: Ulrich Meyer-Martin presented and discussed some best practices for mailing, Joe Murray demonstrated Mailjet as alternative to Mosaico with a lot of free templates. There will be an extension available soon to install the Mailjet integration.
• Fundraising with CiviCRM: A fundraising working group brought together users and developers perspectives and are planning regular fundraising round table sessions.
• CiviOneClick: Theresa Eberle (Software für Engagierte) led a working group on CiviOneClick. With support from abroad videocalling in they had important discussions on the architecture of CiviOneClick in order to make it adaptable for as many flavors, user stories and different contexts as possible. If your want a brief introduction to CiviOneClick, you can also find Theresa’s lightning talk presentation here.
• Financial Sustainability: The German community had a round-table discussion to address current issues of imbalance when it comes to sharing the costs of maintaining, updating and fixing extensions that are crucial for our customers, like CiviBanking and CiviSEPA. We identified the most pressing issues and brainstormed possible solutions to improve dialogue and cooperation in the community.

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What we’ve learned

We were very happy with the event and the overwhelming positive responses by all participants. A lot of praise was owed to our the location: The Youth Hostel Hamburg Horn hosted us with a very professional conference service. With the technical infrastructure taken care of and an in-house cafeteria with vegan food, we could focus on getting things done.

Another highlight of the sprint days were the organized get-togethers every evening to regroup and chat in a more relaxed setting. Our local hosts Nina Carstensen and Ulrich Meyer-Martin invited us out to see Hamburg sights: From the St Nikolai Memorial (run by a non profit association that uses Civi!) to a late-night Harbor tour (not a Civi user – yet?) and ending up at the scenic “roofdrop” bar at Viva con Agua (a Hamburg-born, globally active nonprofit that also uses Civi, of course).

What can we do differently? With a very technical focus of this CiviCamp, the offers for CiviCRM newcomers could be improved upon by adding more trainings and introductions to the program. Also, while Hamburg is not known for sunny weather, we are sorry for optimistically planning our evenings around outdoor activities and dining places. We wish the best to the participants who caught a cold or COVID.

Thank you all for a productive and joyful week in Hamburg!

We’re looking forward to see you soon: to celebrate CiviCRM’s 20^th birthday in Manchester 2025 – and maybe a Belgium/Netherlands/Germany CiviCamp in 2026…?

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