fuzion

So the concept of getting locked in a cabin in the woods with 10 other civicrm users and developers to write a much needed manual from woe to go in 5-days was a fascinating one. And the experience lived up to the promise.

The location was Truckee California, the technology was Floss Manuals, our ‘guide’ was Adam Hyde - and the mission was a bit daunting.

After 5-days of hard slog, some very fine food and great company we hit ‘publish’ around 6pm on Friday (yes I know, I should have finished my chapter at 5pm Adam!) and the manual was immediately available as a free download PDF, and as a hard copy that can be purchased online.

So how does a booksprint work. Well, in our case, once we had divvied the book up in to chapters we all leapt in to the most relevant chapters, emptied our brains, passed it on to someone else, moved on somewhere else, came back to it later. In amongst this we argued about spelling (open source won the day and spelling was agnostic of UK or USA style English), we conferred on how exactly CiviCRM dealt with curly problems - and we laughed.

We even let some Joomla! folk participate

Did it work - undoubtedly it did. There was no manual, then there was. The concept is brilliant. There are definitely some ways I think both the technology and the process can be tweaked to ensure that even more of our efforts were fruitful. There were occasions where we clearly had to much overlap across some chapters, and there were some gaps that we will have to go back and fill in.

In terms of process, hats off to Adam for steering us through. My preference in future would be to have a more layered map of what we are aiming for - the software really only let us frame it out at the Chapter level, and I think going down another two levels on the outline - and being able to view the output in such an outlined format - would be great.

And yes, I would use a mindmapping tool such as FreeMind to manage the content outlines because it gives so much flexibility and the ability to collapse and expand infinitely.

This manual will continue to evolve online, and updates will be frequent as we get back to fleshing out the weaker parts, or adding in new elements from future releases.

Hats off to my co-writers - a really enjoyable experience.

civiCRM, communications

Congrats to the CiviCRM team who, after more than 5 months of design, development and QA have released CiviCRM 2.2 Stable. We are excited about 2.2 because it has a number of exciting new features, including…

• Personal Campaign Pages - so you can add the online networking of your activists to encourage donations
  , and
• CiviCase - which is a highly configurable case management system that will be useful to various service providers such as beneficiary action groups, mental health service providers, health management teams and others. We are looking forward to implementing this for various clients who are assessing CiviCRM at present.

an find Release Highlights here.

civiCRM

It is great to see the core CiviCRM team putting time in to more consulation with the community and setting up an Advisory Board.

I was surprised to get an invite to participate but thinking about it I can see that it would be useful to be able to contribute to this from the perspective of someone who is more on the implementation side of the equation, than on the development side.

And hopefully I can ensure that the political sectors interests get voiced. Not sure if I will be the only one from this side of the equator but good to know that the South get a voice.

civiCRM

Good work by all the civi crew and the community that have been helping with the development and the testing of 2.2. Am looking forward to making use of some of the new features that this offers, such as:

• CiviCase: a huge addition that provides a valuable tool for case management
• Personal Campaign Pages : enabling supporters to drive potential contributors to the contribution pages
• CiviEvent: discounts, early bird registration and much more
• CiviCore: ability to force Drupal registration when using Profile forms

civiCRM

NTEN have just released results from the NTEN survey in to Donor Management Software Satisfaction.
CiviCRM was not in the list of donor management software options provided in the survey. Despite this CiviCRM came out as the fifth most used package in the survey, behind Raiser’s Edge (136), OnDeposit (79), Giftworks (52) and eTapestry (40).
Over 97% of CiviCRM users would ‘recommend or highly recommend’ it to others - well above the 80% for Raiser’s Edge, and slightly higher than for either OnDeposit or Giftworks - and the figures were high across all sizes of organisations.

CiviCRM scored the following grades:
A : Quality and Reliability
A : After Sales Support
A : Delivers on Promises and Deadlines
B+ : Usability
A+ : Value for Money
A : Value for Time
A : Ability to be Configured

civiCRM

I am working on trying to secure some funding so we can get out and show a wider range of NGOs and community groups what civiCRM has to offer in the way of an OpenSource CRM database. Seems to me that a lot of NGOs end up well and truly handicapped by inadequate or overly expensive contact databases.

Having a streamlined and effective communication system so organisations can deliver the information that their contacts want is hugely helpful.

In particular, being able to send them an email that not only shows them the contact details that are on record, but also providing a link that takes them direct to a page that displays that information means keeping contact details up to date can be a whole lot easier.

The system we have been working with the civiCRM community to extend really does deliver on this.

civiCRM, communications

Having spent some time on the periphery of drupal website developments, mostly in connection with delivering civiCRM databases for clients, I have packed my ‘idiots guide to drupal’ and am heading to Drupal South for the weekend.  I’m looking forward to putting some faces to names and sharing some Canterbury hospitality. Here’s hoping I don’t fall off the steep learning curve.

Open Source, civiCRM, communications