We've had some great session proposals on the wiki but are still on the look out for more. CiviCon is your chance to debate the parts of CiviCRM that matter to you, so if you have something you want to show off - or something you' like to get off your chest - then sign up for CiviCon and add your proposal.

We've split the day into three tracks

• Developer track
• CiviCRM in action track
• Usability and community track

Exactly one month from now, a team of CiviCRM developers, implementors and users will sprint to update 'Understanding CiviCRM: A Guide for Non-profits'. We've heard from lots of folks that to have this free online book as a learning resource is really important. And we're pretty excited about this sprint, especially given the amount we achieved last time.

There is lots to update and improve and we'd like your input to make the new version of the book as useful as possible to you. There are a few ways in which you can help now.

We had another engaging NYC meetup on March 16th, competing with the first warm sunny day after the crazy noreaster, where around 20 people spent the evening to dig in to CiviCRM.

After our usual intros where folks can express what they'd like to get out of the evening, Fred kicked off a case study of how he used civi for the Man Up Campaign, and demonstrated the use of profiles to collect information from individuals who would like to engage or contribute to the campaign.

Every year in June, around the 10th day, a commemorative event happens in Akron, Ohio - the annual celebration of the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous. Hosted at the University of Akron, over 10,000 participants from around the world gather to celebrate the founding of this wonderful fellowship. In recent years, registration for this all weekend event has moved from mail-in forms to an online registration process.

Following some issues to integrate drush and making civicrm upgrade process accessible from script, I started looking at drush on how we can take advantage of it for civicrm, and was surprised with the ease I was able to reuse drush code to add few utilities for civicrm. Some of the utilities currently implemented are:

CiviCRM is considering applying to be a mentoring organization in Google's Summer of Code program (GSOC). If you're not familiar with GSOC, you should be! (http://socghop.appspot.com/) -- it's a fantastic program that can jointly help open source projects advance development, while encouraging students to become involved in the open source community. The basic thrust of the program is that Google sponsors students (monetary stipend) to work on projects for open source software.

Last Thursday, a dozen local CiviCRM users, developers and persons interested in learning about the system met at the NEXUS Resource Center to discuss the Boston CiviCRM training and challenges that we each have faced during implementations. Thank you to the The Green Roundtable for allowing us to utilize their space for this meetup.