3.0 Bug Hunter/Huntress Challenge - and the winner is...

Remember the announcement of Bug Hunter/Huntress Challenge? CiviCRM 3.0 went out a while ago, everyone have been busy with kicking off next version and fixing those few tiny little bugs that showed up in 3.0 stable, but at the same time, the core team has been having IRC, Skype, lunch and other forms of discussions about our contest results. So after this long process, we finally made the decision about contest winners from out wonderful crowd of community members. First thing - we would like to thank everyone who was involved in testing and improving CiviCRM 3.0. We have always been getting a lot of excellent input from our community, but the 3.0 cycle was quite exceptional. We saw a lot of involvement, passionate discussions on forums, patches, improvements to documentation and so on. Thanks, everyone - all this work is helping make CiviCRM better serve the needs of advocacy, non-profit and non-governmental groups around the world. Big kudos! Before the big winner is named, lets start with 5 t-shirt prizes (yeah, I know we were saying it would be 4 - but sometimes it's so hard to decide). In alphabetical order, our 5 lovely, most active contributors in the 3.0 cycle are:

• Ed Phillips (EdP)
• Eileen McNaughton (Eileen)
• Tom Kirkpatrick (mrfelton)
• Jim Taylor (jalama)
• Peter Davis (peterd)

Thank you, guys! Your hard work on testing and improving 3.0 helped make this release work really great! We hope you will be wearing those t-shirts with pride! :-) If you remember from the original announcement, those will practically be the very first CiviCRM project t-shirts ever produced. Ok, we wanted to give away prizes to everyone who contributed, but at the end, we had to choose one person who put the most effort into helping us improve CiviCRM 3.0, whose contributions were the largest, who would score the iPod touch with special dedication from the team engraved on it. The big winner is...

• Dave D (Dave D) of Physician Health Program-British Columbia!

Dave, apart from contributing a lot of code, mainly for the CiviCase component, also spent really a lot of time on tracking bugs around 3.0 alpha and beta, filing issues and verifying fixes, and contributing patches. Thanks Dave! Once again, thanks to everyone who has put effort into improving CiviCRM 3.0. Things move forward, the team is working hard on 3.1 and since this is going to be a quick release, we're going to enter alpha/beta testing stage pretty soon. It's a good occasion to remind about how you can contribute to making the next version better and more robust:

• Contribute code, patches, customizations - we love code contributions!
• Help us write unit tests. If that's within your skill level, submit a test together with bug/issue report - you'll speed up the fix and decrease the chance this kind of bug shows up again in the next versions.
• There is always a lot of work on documentation. Go to http://docs.civicrm.org/, review the contents, introduce appropriate changes, describe things that you think can be useful to others!
• Be active on forums! Post problem reports there to seek support, but also help others to solve their problems.
• When alphas and betas are announced, please help us test - download the tarballs, install them on your machines, do test upgrades (on backup copies of your sites). Based on your feedback, we usually fix bugs and introduce improvements on a weekly basis.
• If you don't have access to your own machine to install CiviCRM, test on sandbox and demo installations.