CiviCRM stumbled into my life back in 2007 when I was evaluating future products for the closed source consultancy who employed me. Who decided to look into open source? Well that was me! I’d been in IT for a while and could see the changes in software were coming, no longer were the niche technology stacks that giants such as Oracle and Microsoft owned proving to barriers, instead open technology and the power of the enthusiast guided by the brilliant were taking shape.
Blogs
I’m pleased to report on our next batch of approved User Summit sessions.
I have just completed the first cookbook on CiviRules, with 2 basic examples and an example on how to automatically classify donors based on their contributing behaviour. Have a look, any comment is highly appreciated :-)
http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC/CiviRules+Cookbook
The team is super excited to announce that CiviCRM 4.6.6 is now available for downloading AND you can try it out on the 4.6 demo site.
A Make It Happen page (now closed) has been set up for getting CiviCRM ready to roll when Drupal 8 hits the stores.
This Make It Happen is for $10,000 to fix breakages as the final release candidates of Drupal 8 roll out (such as dealing with Symfony conflicts), and setting it up to work with BuildKit so we can provide a Demo site as part of the civicrm.org set of demo sites.
The Australian Greens developed 2 new custom searches to enable us to do data clean-up and to monitor for spam records that were coming into our system, mainly through the Drupal user registration form.
Cividesk is one of the leading CiviCRM service providers. Giving Back is a cornerstone of our company culture, and we proudly support many charitable and humanitarian organizations with pro-bono or reduced-cost services.
Karin used to write code for musculoskeletal computer models/simulations at The University of Calgary and at Arizona State University as well as in a corporate research environment. It was great fun to laser digitize and reconstruct Australopithecus Afarensis in computer code to make 'Lucy' walk and to help design and evaluate the performance of high-end soccer boots using computer models. Then one day a (now) dear friend came over for coffee.
We started and ended CiviCon Denver this year by talking about community participation. In her keynote presentation, Stormy Peters of the Mozilla Foundation introduced it and discussed the value of participation in open source communities as well as how it represented a competitive advantage to proprietary software alternatives.