CiviDay 2013 recap

It was amazing to see and hear so many reports from CiviDay meet ups happening all over the world this Wednesday. It's an awesome example of the power of the CiviCRM community - and open source networks in general - to make things happen. It was only last month that we decided to create a CiviDay and put up a blog post inviting people to participate. In that time we managed to organise 24 meet ups in 5 continents with an estimated 250-300 people attending - and it was not hard to do.

Here are just a few highlights so far (feel free to add your highlights as comments below)

• DC folks decided it is time for a CiviCamp on the East Coast of the US this Autumn - watch this space for details
• France rocked! and amongst other things, found out how Wikimedia France raised 1.6m euros with CiviCRM - congrats!
• We sparked a collaboration amongst integrators at different meet ups around "LDAP integration" aka being able to view and edit CiviCRM contacts in other places where you normally find them like Outlook/Gmail/Thunderbird/your phone etc - ask Xavier about a google hang out on that coming up soon.
• Nevada City had "a great first-ever meetup - half a dozen people came and all were keen to learn what Civi could do for their organizations"
• SF has a super end-user focused meet up with Max La Riviere-Hedrick of futurepruf.com and Linda Marshall from SF Center for the Book (SFCB) covering their migration to CiviCRM and Drupal from filemaker
• Australian groups are planning to co-ordinate events around Connecting Up in Melbourne as their next step along the way to CiviConferences down-under
• In London we decided we needed more user focused meetups/usergroups (as well as our implementor focused meet ups) and and Owen and co. at Leukaemia and Lymphoma Research are ready to push this forward
• Mumbai discussed how to improve CiviCRM awareness in and around Mumbai and to hold regular meetups once every quarter (woo!)
• Portland discussed CiviCRM presentations and classes as part of the upcoming DrupalCon there. These will be held in collaboration Free Geek - let Stuart (stuart at korlon dot com) know if you'd like to get involved in that
• Montreal focused on multi-lingual and localisation issues, including much improved translation performance via Native Gettext - check it out if you work with Civi in another language
• NYC are looking at alternating meet-ups with CiviCRM co-working days every other month - which sounds awesome!

As important as the above, were all the personal connections made, tips shared, light bulb moments, and new features and tricks discovered. Meeting up in person really helps to push CiviCRM foward - generating new ideas, and helping people understand how they can contribute. If you missed your meet up, then don't despair - there are many other ways that you can get involved - hopefully the above has given you some inspiration. If you have an idea for pushing things forward, then go for it and let us know in the forums, blogs, etc.

Over the next month or so, we plan to put in place much more resources to help local meet ups get started. If you want to get involved in that, let me know. We'll post back here soon to let you know what is happening. Thanks for everyone that took part.

Looking forward to CiviDay 2014!