CiviCRM Advisory Group: Meeting Summary

We had a good phone meeting with the Advisory Group yesterday. We also used the CiviCRM IRC Channel as the back channel for questions and related chatter. The planned agenda and pre-meeting discussion is documented on this wiki page. Dave Greenberg did a great job facilitating the meeting. We had all 10 of the advisory group members there (go group!). Here is a brief summary of what transpired and a few action items from the meeting:

Advisory Group Process

• Accomplish and get done at what you commit to doing for the month
• Attendance expectation: 2 excused absences a year (this is common with most professional groups)
• Term limits: 2 year term. The first group is special, since half the group will only have a 1 year term. This allows us to maintain continuity and momentum within the group
• Group review every 6 months
• The mailing list and wiki will be the main coordination tools

Eat your own dog food

The CiviCRM core team has committed to doing the following before the next meeting

• Upgrade civicrm.org to Drupal 6.x
• Install CiviCRM v2.2 on CiviCRM.org
• Use CiviContribute (via paypal standard) as the primary donation mechanism
• Use CiviEvent to collect participant information for the user and developer meetups in April (after NTEN NTC)
• Use CiviMail to send the monthly newsletter

At a later stage we will use the install to:

• Maintain the list of consultants and reviews on them (using CCK, Views, Voting Module?)
• Maintain the list of hosting providers and ratings
• Use CiviPledge to raise money for community sponsored projects
• Use groups to maintain and communicate with regional members (UK specific groups etc). Another option here is Organic Groups

2.3 - Focus on Usability

The group recommended that we have a relatively acclerated release of 2.3 (3-4 months after 2.2 goes final) with the main goal being to improve usability of the product. The initial spec and coordination will take place on the advisory group project wiki pages. The end goal will be a set of detailed issues and/or prototypes for the team to implement. The group decided to focus on three main areas:

• Navigation - includes menus (style, order, naming, page location ...), tabs, and possibly configurable links for frequently used tasks.
• Layout and CSS - includes standardizing page layout / markup conventions, improving readability, reducing CSS bloat and possibly making CiviCRM pages (especially public facing pages) inherit properties more consistently from the surrounding CMS theme.
• Contact Edit and Summary Screens - includes overhaul of Contact Edit form and Contact summary screen to make them less location-centric and more customizable. We will consider providing a mechanism for field-level configurability for the edit form and summary screen (include / exclude core fields, set order and grouping...).

We will incorporate past feedback from users / clients, and seek new feedback from the community based on draft specs and prototypes. The wiki pages will include pain points, use cases and scenarios, and potential solutions. Some members will also do a competitive analysis and see if we can incorporate a few good ideas from other commercial and open source products. A competitive analysis matrix will be maintained so we can document this information. The next meeting will be on March 25th at 11:00 am PST

Comments

Good stuff. Be sure to let me know when the D6 upgrade of civicrm.org is done; I still intend to make good on my promise from CiviCamp to build the community contributions directory.

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