Blogs

Following on our wonderful CiviCon day in Berkeley, several CiviCRM "evangelists" arrived at the Hilton Hotel in downtown San Francisco to help spread the word about Civi at NTEN's annual conference. Kurund and I arrived about 30 minutes before our morning session - "Is CiviCRM Right for Your Organization". The hotel was buzzing with non-profit technologists and vendors - lots of flashy signage for the large proprietary software vendors of course. But more importantly lots of folks who work in the incredible array of non-profits that belong to NTEN - networking, sharing, learning, looking for ways to help make their organizations work more effectively.

Several folks from consultancies that implement CiviCRM came to the session to help answer questions and showcase Civi projects - Frank Gomez and Michael Daryabeygi from Gingko Street Labs, Lisa Rau and Ashma Shrestha from Confluence, and Andrew Hunt from AGH Strategies.

We had our 4th CiviCon in San Francisco a few days back. It was a very well attended event with very high quality sessions. We hope to have most of the videos online in the next few weeks. I'm quite keen on watching all the sessions that I had to miss. There were lots of highlights for me personally during this event, i'll make an attempt to recreate some of them here:

We're at the book and documentation sprint out at the very lovely Woolman Centre near Nevada city in California. A sub group of us have taken on the mighty task of analysing how the wiki content sits with the book content. We're focusing on the User and Administrator guide at the moment, which is online at http://book.civicrm.org/user/.

Yesterday was CiviCon in San Francisco. I made it to CiviCon in London last year but this was my first US CiviCon. The gathering was even bigger this year with about 130 people and 4 concurrent sessions running throughout the day. It was great to see such an enthusiastic bunch of people and to catch-up with old friends and put a face to online connections. The venue was brimming with the open honest enthusiasm which seems to be part of the North-American culture.

CiviCRM In Libya

In the process of encouraging grassroots democracy, The American Embassy USAID, the embassy’s cultural office has lent its presence and assistance to democratization activities in Tripoli and other Libyan cities by supporting Libyan NGOs, civil society efforts, and local political organizations in other locales.

Greater Manchester Centre for Voluntary Organisation (GMCVO) require an ICT Officer who can customise and develop open source software (PHP), work with hosting environments (Linux), and install and configure open source databases/websites for external organisations (Drupal/CiviCRM).

Has a magazine ever thought CiviCRM could be adapted to manage subscriptions? Yes and yes. However, there does not seem to be a showcase project showing that it can be done.

Just a quick shout out to all those who attended the Philly CiviCRM meet up earlier this month.

I thought the session was excellent.  2 hours straight of Q&A with a host questions and a lot of excellent experience shared.  I think we all learned a lot and are looking forward to our next meetup.

Register for our Q2 Meet up here

Many CiviCRM customizations have been packaged and distributed as Drupal modules. This can be desirable when a customization delves into both the CMS and CRM functionality, but -- when a customization focuses only on CiviCRM -- Drupal modules are a drag: they need to be patched for CMS upgrades (D6/D7) as well as CRM upgrades (Civi 2.x/Civi 3.x), and they don't work with CiviCRM's other CMS's (Joomla and WordPress). This article introduces a proof-of-concept solution.

Last week I wrote a blog about technical debt (comparing it to keeping a kitchen in order). I got a lot of feedback - most of it constructive. I'm going to resist belabouring the whole metaphor & limit this blog to a quick summary of some of the discussion that came out of it.