Yesterday was CiviCon in San Francisco. I made it to CiviCon in London last year but this was my first US CiviCon. The gathering was even bigger this year with about 130 people and 4 concurrent sessions running throughout the day. It was great to see such an enthusiastic bunch of people and to catch-up with old friends and put a face to online connections. The venue was brimming with the open honest enthusiasm which seems to be part of the North-American culture.
I didn't see everything all the talks & it would be impossible for me to tell everything that happened through the day but there are a few things that stood out from what I did see.
- EFF did an inspiring talk telling us about how important it is for non-profits to have access to CiviCRM. They talked both about the non-profit sector* and about the experience EFF had with CiviCRM. They talked about the importance of good affordable tools to support the work that non-profit groups do. EFF moved to CiviCRM from Convivio and found that CiviCRM gave them the option NOT to collect extra information about their supporters (such as click-throughs on CiviMail) and this allowed them to practice what they preach. The nicest moment though, was when EFF told us about the tangible success of their internet black-out campaign and the room broke out into spontaneous and sustained applause.
- Tim Otten presented the CiviX code creator he blogged about recently and impressed the group by creating a custom CiviCRM module to render a new CiviCRM content page in under 10 minutes (with only a little copy-and-paste from one he put in the oven earlier). We also got a sneak preview of the CiviMobile App that Peter McAndrew has been working.
- Gunnar from Aspiration ran a fun session about the community which culminated in an orgy of post-its. Lobo & Michael McAndrew are going to blog about these later in the week but I stole the title of this blog from one of the post-it notes.
- PopVox spoke to a small group about their advocacy product which is a delivery focussed way to get messages to congress & the senate. Popvox found that messages to congress were often not getting through or being delivered in a useful manner so their focus has been on improving that (and if everything else fails they hand deliver them!). They have working with Jason from National Mountain Biking Association on integrating it with CiviCRM so that their widget can be on your site, supporting (or opposing) the bills you want your supporters to take action on and the data gets put into CiviCRM at the same time as it goes into Popvox. Popvox is a commercial product but it does have a range of services and pricing starting from $0
- API appreciation - a year after the launch of API v3 it was great to find that everyone seems to be using it and have a really good level of knowledge about it - I even met people who had read my blogs :-)
I'm at the sprint now & looking forward to sharing ideas and learning from the FOURTY people whoto have made it to the boonies of Nevada to write code & documentation.
(*OK - I couldn't bring myself to translate my writing into American English - but feel free to substitute non-for-profit & constituents for non-profit & supporters :-) & a smattering of z's for s's)
