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Today we spent a fair amount of time with Pete and Chris from the NZ greens. We got a pretty good overview of how the NZ Greens are using the system and some of their pain points. We saw some of the cool integration that Chris has done with the NZ voter database and linking the electorate ID to a CiviCRM contact ID, ability to merge the address from the voter database etc. Its kinda cool how folks can extend and integrate the systems with other db's and we need to make it significantly easier to enable folks to build such system within CiviCRM.
Time flies - it's been already a week since we've been together in New Zealand, enjoying face to face conversations and working together. My personal take on communication is that there is nothing like real time conversation involving two persons located in the same physical spot, so I must say I'm really enjoying this opportunity to hang out with Yashi, Dave, KJ & Lobo.
I am a big fan of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, hence i was very excited about coming to New Zealand and exploring few Middle Earth locations. I must say NZ has some of the most amazing places I have ever seen.
The past few days we've been focussed on improving the user experience of CiviCRM. This also included optimizing page size and number of database queries invoked per page load. One of the things that has bothered me for some time was the inefficient implementation of the quickform hierarchical select widget for our case.
We released CiviCRM v2.0.3. This issue addresses a few issues in upgrade and fixes approx 20 bugs. We do not maintain a CHANGELOG (i think we need to start doing this), but you can see the list of changes here:
http://biryani.osuosl.org:8181/changelog/CiviCRM/branches/v2.0
Almost 10 days have passed since the Melbourne Developer Boot Camp, but the feeling of being part of an enthusiastic and growing community of CiviCRMers "down under" is still strong.
Lobo and I woke up at 5:30am (ouch) today to conduct the CiviCRM Webinar. A dark and stormy morning in New Zealand - but evidently a good time for the Webinar (11am PDT) - as we had an awesome turnout (40+ folks registered).
The session was billed as in introduction to CiviCRM - so we spent most of the time describing the key features and components (contributions, memberships, event registration, etc.). In order to give folks a better idea of CiviCRM in Action - I created a separate slide-show with screenshots of CiviCRM pages from a variety of live sites...
User registration with CiviCRM profiles - from Amnesty International
Multiple online contribution pages (campaign-specific) - from The Conservation Fund
Membership signup - from NYAMA
Event listing and registration - from The Foundation for Prader-Willi Research
Searchable South African NGO eirectory - from SangoNet
A few members of the CiviCRM core team (dave, yashodha, michal and kurund) are visiting us in Nelson, NZ. We get together a couple of times a year which is quite helpful when we all return to various parts of the globe. This also gives the team a chance to visit and explore new places.
The next NOSI/NTEN webinar will be on CiviCRM. The event is scheduled for April 29th, 11:00 am Pacific time. We'll be up bright and early and host this event from Nelson, NZ. We will give an overview of CiviCRM, examples of its use, and have lots of time for questions. Register on the NTEN Site. More details about the agenda can be found here.
