CiviCRM.org Blog Feed

rayogram is hosting CiviCRM co-working  Monday, May 21st, 2012 from 10-5pm.

We hope this will be a great opportunity for new and experienced developers, consultants and organizations to work side-by-side and mentor one another. We will  include a case study presentation over lunch.

We've extended this invitation to CiviCRM enthusiasts throughout the New York region so please register in advance! It will be held in our TriBeCa offices (79 Leonard Street between Church & Broadway, easily accessible by the A/C/E, 1, 6, N/R/Q, J/Z).

Hope to see you here!

While we were working hard on a number of applications for free and open source market one of the application which was released by us was the CiviSync Mobile app for Android. You can download it from Google Play on your phone or here.
The App currently only supports read only mode and allows you to check your contacts, organisations, households, activities and groups. The app is developed using PhoneGap and hence it is easy to convert the app to an iPhone, Windows Mobile or Blackberry app when the need or the requirement comes from the market.
Once again the first version relied a bit on our extended API provided by CiviSync CMS component for Joomla and Drupal but in the next version we have moved away from using CiviSync CMS and towards using the native API for the search results.
In order to use CiviSync Mobile you need the following details:

1. Username
2. Password
3. Site Key  and
4. API Key for the user should be stored in the database of CiviCRM.

CiviSync CMS is still the perfect and only extension available for CiviCRM which allows you to manage the API keys for the users and hence control who has access to the API and who doesn't.
Our site www.targetintegration.com is currently being updated to store some wiki articles on the installation and usage of the application. Please let us know your comments here and if you have any questions while using the app please visit the forum on our website.

Hey All, Thanks for your patience and putting up with the delays in the release of CiviSync Outlook. CiviSync Outlook is the much awaited Outlook integration plugin for CiviCRM. It allows information sync between CiviCRM and Microsoft Outlook. CiviSync Outlook uses CiviCRM API. Due to some restrictions with API; at one stage we decided to use our own version of the API but it's not something we would like to run with in long term and hence dropped it fairly quickly.
CiviSync now uses the native API. A detailed user manual in creation but in the meantime Target Integration's wiki page will give you some information on how to install and use it on your installation of Outlook.
Don't forget you need four things to login to a CiviCRM instance using REST API:

1. Username
2. Password
3. SiteKey
4. API Key for the user who is trying to login. You don't need the API key but you just need the API Key be created and stored in CiviCRM database. 

In order to facilitate the API Key generation for CiviSync Outlook, we developed another extension for Joomla and Drupal called CiviSync CMS which is available to download from our site as well.
The current version concentrates on providing a stable and rock solid framework which integrates well with Outlook 2007 & 2010 on Microsoft Windows XP/Vista/7 32 & 64 Bit. The current beta release provides two way synchronisation between CiviCRM and Outlook. 
There is another limitation with CiviCRM API which came up while developing this synchronisation. Outlook has address of the contact broken down in City and Country but CiviCRM API doesn't provide the broken down information and hence there is no way to synchronise back the updated/new contacts from Outlook to CiviCRM.
We are currently working on next set of features and we plan to provide a bi-weekly update to CiviSync Outlook.
So please download and give us your thoughts about how would you like to see it developing further in future.
Until next time....

I am starting a project that will allow CiviCRM to support the needs of an Australian non-profit. This non-profit is subject to the Australian Goods & Services Tax rules (GST) for some but not all transactions.
The GST requirements apply whenever the non-profit provides a tangible good or service in exchange for a payment. This is most common with their dinners, selling DVDs, and items from their gift shop. 
 I have written up the requirements and possible approaches on the CiviCRM wiki at:
http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC41/Taxes+and+Fees+for+CiviCRM
 
I would love to get feedback from anyone who would like to participate or later use the new module. 
 
- Sarah

Fellow Civilians: Wednesday, 9 May, was another CiviCRM meet-up spectacular in London, hosted by Third Sector Design at TechHub.

Topics covered:

• CiviMobile: The browser-based mobile phone app.
• Screencasting: How to create Civi video tutorials for the web.
• UK Direct Debits: Integrating paperless direct debit payments in the UK.

So without further ado...

CIVIMOBILE
PRESENTER: Peter McAndrew

SUMMARY: Browser-based mobile app that gives users access to Civi via their smart phone.

DETAIL: CiviMobile will allow people to do event check-ins, contact searches, and more on their iPhone, Android, Blackberry, and other web-enabled phones and tablets. The selection of fields will be based on profiles, allowing admins to customise what information appears onscreen for their organisation. CiviMobile, which runs on jQueryMobile, will be included with CiviCRM 4.2 as a Drupal module and fully integrated using symfony with 4.3.

TAKEAWAY: Want to see what it looks like? Hop on your smartphone and head to: Bit.ly/civim. (Tip: When you select events, pick CiviCon SF2012 for a full attendee list.)

ADDITIONAL LINKS: Presentation slides.
 
SCREENCASTING
PRESENTER: Tony Horrocks

SUMMARY: A step-by-step guide for how to create screencasts for Civi, online video tutorials to market Civi and help potential clients and current users understand how Civi works.

DETAIL: Tony walked us through how to create screencasts.

To prepare, you’ll need:
    1.    Time: Approximately 1 day is needed to produce a quality 4-7 minute screencast.
    2.    Equipment: Lav (best) or other mic. Optional: An in-computer camera to record yourself.
    3.    Software: To create a professional product, you'll need the following for:
              ⁃    Slides: Keynote (or similar.)
              ⁃    Screen recording and editing: Screenflow, Camtasia (or similar.)
              ⁃    Beginning/end titles and music: iMovie (or similar.) 
    4.    Surroundings: Choose a quiet environment. If also filming yourself, make sure the background isn’t distracting.
    5.    Plan/Script: Tell people what you’re going to say, say it, and tell them what you just said.
    6.    Rehearse: Run through the script a few times before recording.

Then, to create the screencast:
    1.    Design your slides.
    2.    Record the screencast.
    3.    Edit slides and screencast together (in Screenflow.)
    4.    Add tops and tails (in iMovie.)
    5.    Export for the web.

RESPONSE: The group brought up the importance of creating a unified look for screencasts by using the same software and graphics, using available scripts (link pending), and possibly running a screencast sprint at the next London CiviCon.

ADDITIONAL LINKS: Presentation slides.

UK DIRECT DEBITS
PRESENTER: Parvez Saleh

SUMMARY: A three-step plan for integrating paperless Direct Debits with Civi, which will reduce processing time, better serve supporters, and integrate a feature often requested by clients.

DETAIL: Direct Debits enable non-profits to pull funds from their supporters’ accounts and are typically used for recurring donations. Unlike supporter-controlled Standing Orders, with DDs, the organisation can change the amount, frequency, or withdrawal date — provided they notify the payer at least 10 days before. (For example, a membership organisation increases their annual fee, sends a statement, and pulls down the funds 2 weeks later.) With Direct Debits, the supporter doesn’t have to take action.

The details of the Direct Debit process are complicated. A simple overview:

• The supporter issues a Direct Debit Instruction (DDI) with amount, date, frequency, and financial info.
• This information is confirmed, typically by a payment processing bureau (eg SmartDebit) that issues a mandate to the non-profit, allowing funds to be withdrawn at a set frequency (usually monthly or annually.)
• The non-profit can amend the mandate (eg change the date the money is withdrawn) and the supporter can cancel at any time.

Parvez outlined a three-phase plan for integrating paperless direct debits into Civi:

• Phase 1: Capturing Direct Debit Instructions online
• Phase 2: Automatically updating recurring donations
• Phase 3: Managing mandates (amendments and cancellations)

RESPONSE: The group confirmed that DDs have been a long- and oft-requested feature that has never been fully funded for development. Also, Canada and the US have different names and somewhat different processes for the same financial transaction.

TAKEAWAY: Help make this happen. Check out the crowd-sourced MakeItHappen (MIH) project: http://civicrm.org/participate/mih#ukdd

ADDITIONAL LINKS: CiviCRM Wiki on UK DDs (slides pending)

***

That’s it for this month, Civilians. Join next month’s London meet-up for another menu of the tasty delights CiviCRM has to offer.

Chris Wolfe
 
 

At the April sprint, several of us discussed improvements to CiviCRM’s soft credit functionality. For those of us who use CiviCRM for fundraising, soft credits are vital component of managing donor relationships, and there are several ways CiviCRM could be improved to make soft credits more robust and easier to use.

Thanks to Kellie Brownell and Jane Hanley for their contributions to this blog post.

Some background:

What’s a soft credit? Soft credits allow you to indicate that a second contact has a relationship to another contact’s contribution. Soft credits show up on the soft-credited donor’s Contribution tab in a table below the “hard credit” contributions.

When are soft credits used? We came up with a number of different use cases for soft credits (and there are probably others):

Facilitator credits. When someone helps facilitate a contribution, they get soft credited. Examples include:

1. Solicitor credit. The nonprofit’s Board member asks their friends to make gifts; when a friend does so, the Board member gets soft credited with the friend’s contribution.
2. Personal campaign page fundraising credit. Similar to solicitor credit but worth mentioning separately, since it happens automatically: when someone gives through a personal campaign page, CiviCRM automatically soft credits the page owner.
3. In honor of credit. Jim asks his friends to make a contribution to the nonprofit for his birthday. When his friends give in his honor, the friend is hard credited and Jim is soft credited.
4. Employer matching gift credit. An employee makes a contribution, and asks his/her employer to match the gift. When the employer sends the matching contribution, the employer is hard credited with the contribution and the employee is soft credited.

On behalf of credits. Someone makes a contribution on behalf of himself and someone else. Such as:

1. Spouse credit. For CiviCRM users that don’t use household contacts, but count a contribution from one spouse as a shared gift from the household, soft credits are crucial. We assume that while Bob may have signed the check, it’s really a contribution from Bob and his wife Joan (unless we receive some indication that they do their giving separately). Soft crediting Joan with Bob’s contribution ensures that we treat Joan as a recent donor, by giving her any benefits that come with being a recent donor and not sending her lapsed donor solicitations.
2. On behalf of credit. Auntie Sally makes a contribution on behalf of herself and her nephew Tim, so that Tim can also attend the recent-donor-only event (for instance). He gets soft credited with Sally’s contribution and receives any benefits that come with being a recent donor and does not receive solicitations.

Third party payments. These are more complex use cases, when a third party contact makes a payment for a donor’s gift—essentially it’s a contribution of the donor’s money, but the check is cut by another entity. Examples include:

1. Donor foundation or donor advised fund. Some donors use a foundation or donor advised fund to manage their charitable giving, so the check is cut from XYZ Foundation, but the funds come from the donor’s account.
2. Portal organizations that collect donations and distribute them to nonprofits. In the States, the most common example of this is Network for Good, which accepts donations on behalf of a wide range of nonprofits, then bundles the nonprofit’s gifts and cuts a check to each nonprofit.

From a donor relationship standpoint, third party payments are much closer to a hard credit than a soft credit. But many fundraisers use CiviCRM’s soft credit functionality to track third party payments because it provides an easy way to establish a relationship between a contribution and another contact.

There are two different ways to use soft credits to track third party payments:

1. Hard credit the third party payer and soft credit the donor. From a financial recordkeeping perspective, this is the most accurate way to record the contribution. But for donor relationship purposes, the donor “deserves” to have the contribution show up as a hard credit on his record. And, we’re now using soft credits to represent two very different kinds of gifts from this donor: one, the gift of his own money from his donor advised fund, and two, the gift he’s soft credited for because his grandma gave in honor of his birthday last year.

2. Hard credit the donor and soft credit the third party payer. This better represents that the donor is the true source of the contribution. But financially speaking, it’s the opposite of how we track soft credits. This option is also less viable if you’re using CiviCRM for tax and/or audit reporting … the government and your auditor do not care about donor relationships and just want to know which entity provided the contribution.

The complications.

Where soft credits and third party payments get (more) complicated:

1. You get a check from a family foundation, and the board of the fund consists of three sisters and a brother. All four contacts need to be soft credited with the contribution from the fund.
2. You get a $5,000 check from a family foundation, and it turns out that each board member gets to choose how much they want to give, and they all chose different amounts. The three sisters need credit for $1,000 each, and the brother needs credit for $2,000.
3. Similarly, third party payments from portal organizations can be a bundled set of donations, so a $120 check is made up of three unrelated contributions: two $50 contributions and one $20 contribution. Each of the three donors needs to be credited for the appropriate amount.
4. Portal organizations charge fees. That $120 in donations you received? The check is actually $116.40 because Network for Good took 3% in fees and sent you the remainder. But each donor needs to be credited with the full amount of his/her donation.

Then, all of this meticulous record keeping is used when searching for and reporting on contributions, and when generating acknowledgement letters to donors, both hard credited and soft credited.

Needed improvements.

What improvements do we need in soft credit functionality?

1. Soft crediting one contribution to multiple contacts. The database schema allows this, but the user interface does not.
2. Soft crediting one contribution to multiple contacts, and be able to specify the soft credit amount for each contact. If fees have been removed, be able to select soft credit amounts that total to a different amount than that of the hard contribution.
3. Soft credit types. Currently, all the different soft credit uses described above are lumped together into one functionality, making it hard to distinguish if a soft credit is a solicitor credit, an in-honor-of credit, a third-party-payment credit, etc.
4. A more advanced possibility is to separate third party payment functionality from soft credit functionality (rather than making third party payments a type of soft credit). For both financial and donor relationship tracking, they are very different from each other, so it would really be best to, for instance, see third party payments in a table separate from soft credits on the Contribution tab, and be able to search and report on third party payments separate from soft credits.

What improvements do we need in searching, reporting, and tokens?

1. In Contribution searches and reports, offer a checkbox option for “Include soft credits?” With this checked, the results of the search include both the hard-credited contribution/contact and the soft-credited contribution/contact. This means the soft credited contribution shows up twice in the list—once as a hard credit and once as a soft credit—so it will not reflect an accurate total of the contributions. But you will see a complete list of everyone who deserves credit for a contribution. In other software systems, soft credits are not counted in reporting totals, even if they are shown in the report. This is made possible by including them in a column separate from the hard credit gifts in the report. Alternatively, the soft-credit recipient is listed in a separate soft-credit column in a report. For example:

   Donor

   Date

   Amount

   Appeal

   Soft Credit

   Smith Family Foundation

   12/31/2011

   $1000.00

   Year End Major Donor

   Juan Smit

2. If we can create or insert existing tokens based on information stored in the soft credit table, then CiviCRM can help fundraisers tailor message templates for email receipts or PDF letters automatically. For example, I could create a conditional statement in Smarty that looks for the existence of a soft-credit attached to a contribution and the type of soft credit to determine whether the receipt should have additional information, such as the spouse's name or personal campaign page that someone used to donate.

So that's our attempt to provide a comprehensive overview of the issue! I'm very interested to hear from the community about how you're using this functionality and what you think needs to be improved.

In a recent JIRA issue, CRM-9825, I suggested that the Google Map shown on Event Info pages be removed, leaving just the link to a map. Dave Greenberg suggested I write this blog entry to socialise that idea, and see if it has the support of the wider community.
 
So, what's the logic of the change?

• It's nice to have a map so people can find the event Location
• However, the Google Map takes up space, forcing key pieces of information (such as Cost) down the page

Ok, so what's the proposal?

• Remove the display of the Google Map from the Event Info page
• Change the link text from Show large map to Show map of location
• This event shows an example of the proposed change
• This patch implements the change

What do you think?

Here at Third Sector Design we're preparing for our next meet up which will take place on Wed 9th in Central London. The last one was excellent, with lots of people and 3 really interesting presentations on a wide range of topics.
This time we're going to be focusing on: 
* CiviMobile - a new mobile app for CiviCRM
* Making CiviCRM webcasts
* CiviCRM case studies
These meet-ups are a really important point of contact for Civi users. Meeting up with other members of the community and hearing about how other users work with the software is invaluable for most people. The Third Sector Design team have just got back from California where we were attening CiviCon in Berkeley and then we went on to a 10 day codesprint out in the beautiful Sierra Nevada foothills. Both events were really inspiring as well as lots of fun; there's a general feeling that the community is radiply growing as more organisatons become aware of the product and more people start to get switched on the wonders of Civi! 
The event is being held at our old office - Tech Hub, Ground Floor, Sophia House, 76-80 City Road, London, EC1Y 2BJ. The building is right by Old Street tube on City Road, opposite the small Sainsburys. If you are coming by tube, you want to get out at exit 5, walk up City Road, and Sophia House is 2-3 buildings along, on your right. Look out for the yellow Tech Hub signs. You'll need to ring the bell that says Tech Hub, and one of us will let you in. 
For existing members of the community as well as people considering moving to CiviCRM in the London area - come along on Wed 9th. It's free, and there will be drinks and nibbles and time to chat as well as some great presentations. We start at 6.30pm sharp so please aim to arrive around 6.15pm. We should be finished by 8.30pm.
Please register here: http://civicrm.org/civicrm/event/info?id=195&reset=1 so that we have an idea of who's coming, and most importantly - so that you get a name-badge!  
See you there!

The CiviCRM Drush integration recently got a fairly major refactoring (issue CRM-9986), and should be available with the CiviCRM 4.2 release.
The main user facing change is that "drush civicrm-cache-clear" has been replaced by integration with the standard drush cache-clear command. You can see it in the options by running "drush cache-clear", or call it directly (this time using the alias "cc") using the command "drush cc civicrm".
There are also aliases added for a number of commands, which should save a few keystrokes. You can examine these using the command "drush help --filter=civicrm".
There are also a number of changes to the code structure - the command callbacks now use the standard conventions making it easier for you to add your own custom pre/post hooks, validation routines are also separated from the main callback. Output (stdout), error/log messages (stderr) and exit codes should also now be more standardized and machine parsable.

When EFF began looking for a new CRM, we were incredibly impressed by the CiviCRM community. CiviCRM users were excited to speak with us about their experiences and developers responded quickly to our questions on the forums. In comparison to other products on the market, we viewed this willingness to help other users as a huge asset and important part of our final decision to adopt CiviCRM. More than eight months after migrating our database, the CiviCRM community still proves to be a tremendous resource for good ideas.
 
To welcome prospective CiviCRM users, we would like to formalize—into an Amabassador Program—what many of you are already doing informally. The program would result in a listing on CiviCRM.org of existing users, who would be happy to answer questions about why they choose and how they use CiviCRM. And room on the forums for recording some of these conversations. The following is a short outline of our thoughts so far, but we would love to hear any ideas you might have as well.
 

• First, we need to determine how many people want to participate. We don't want to overwhelm participants with too many inquiries, so the more Ambassadors, the more realistic the workload.

• Second, we need to write questions for Ambassador profiles on CiviCRM. In addition to basic contact information, questions might include: What do you use CiviCRM for? What other CRM systems have you used before? And how many resources does your organization dedicate to CiviCRM? Is your organization primarily an advocacy, performing arts, professional association, etc. organization?

• Third, we need to create a space in the forums for conversations about whether to adopt CiviCRM and how it has helped existing users.

• And fourth, we need Ambassadors to fill their profiles and start answering questions.

The Ambassador Program should complement the existing resources anyone can find online about CiviCRM by adding a personal element. It assumes that some prospective users will want to talk with someone, even if that person just points them in the right direction. Proprietary products employ sales reps to serve this function. But we think Ambassadors who are end-users will be more valuable because they share concerns with other end-users and have no financial investment in the organization's final decision.
 
From conversations I have had in the past, prospective users want to talk through whether CiviCRM will fit their needs and what kind of resources they should dedicate to managing their database. Depending on how much knowledge sharing they want, we can also help them avoid potential pitfalls and point out cool features that will enable them do their jobs better.
 
What's in it for you? Ambassadors will have the opportunity to solidify their expertise by teaching someone else about CiviCRM. At EFF, we are always looking for better ways to manage our data, and more often than not, we find a more efficient solution by speaking with other organizations. I'm looking forward to conversations with prospective CiviCRM users that help us evaluate regularly what we are doing and why.
 
If you would be interested in volunteering to be an Ambassador, please email me at kellie@eff.org. Otherwise, I look forward to reading your feedback below about how we can help onboard new members of the CiviCRM community.

For years, I've wanted to give back to the open source communities I'm a part of. Often I'm told, "Write code." More than any other project I've seen, CiviCRM has created alternative ways of contributing back. At the code sprint, I met people brand new to CiviCRM contribute meaningfully by proposing (and critiquing) workflows for new features, create how-to screencasts, and more.

But I'm a techie, not a non-profit employee. I want to make a technical contribution. I know the fundamentals of programming, but have little experience. When Lobo sent me a personal e-mail inviting me to the code sprint, I told him I didn't think I'd be useful. Lobo's response was, "Come anyway."

So I went to the idyllic Woolman School, and for six days, I was surrounded by many of the world's CiviCRM programming experts. Everyone else knew CiviCRM's code, I didn't. Everyone else had features to add, or projects to hack on - I had a general desire to "help out" while learning the code. Yashodha from the core team sat me down and explained the code fundamentals. Core team members Kurund, Dave, and Lobo answered my questions, no matter how basic. As always, I was amazed and grateful for how welcoming the CiviCRM community is.

So armed with my newfound knowledge, I began to close bugs. In four days, I'd modified a total of five lines of code - maybe a couple hours' work for a core team member. However, those five lines represented four bugs fixed, and CiviCRM is a little bit better for those changes. I spent more time learning the concepts and installing new tools than I did coding, but by the time I left I was working much faster than when I'd started. Most importantly, I'm better prepared to give back to the community, both in the forums and by submitting fixes year-round - and today I submitted my first post-sprint patch to CiviCRM.

CiviCRM team is pleased to announce the next stable release of version 4.1 - with support for Drupal 7, Drupal 6, Joomla 1.7/2.5, and Wordpress 3.3. You can download the release now from Sourceforge.

We strongly recommend that you upgrade a test copy of your site and review your critical workflows before upgrading your production site. There have been significant (~107) bug fixes since the first stable release of 4.1. You can also test-drive the release on each platform using the public demos:

• CiviCRM 4.1 on Drupal 7
• CiviCRM 4.1 on Drupal 6
• CiviCRM 4.1 on Joomla 1.7
• CiviCRM 4.1 on Wordpress

Please report any bugs or issues on the appropriate forum board (what to do if you think you've found a bug).

Here's a quick list of some of the many cool and useful new features and improvements in this release:

• Extended support for Drupal 6
• WordPress 3.3 integration
• Personal Campaign Pages for events - CRM-8534
• Scheduled Reminders for events - CRM-8669
• Social Networking plugins (Facebook "like", Tweet ...) for event and contribution pages - CRM-8737
• Support for case custom fields - CRM-8508
• Simplified Administrator menus - CRM-9059
• Assign multiple contact subtypes and change subtypes  - CRM-8357
• Consolidated cron provides a single interface for configuring the automated scripts- CRM-8358. Heads-up sys admins - existing cron jobs will need to be reconfigured.
• Find duplicate contacts has been optimized when using the  reserved dedupe rule
• Limit contact reference custom fields by group - CRM-8536
• Unlimited Profiles for event registration forms
• CiviReport - save report instance as a new report and permissioning by role - CRM-8562
• Event info pages include links to configure the event, and to view registered participants - CRM-8707
• Register, and Confirm buttons now appear on TOP and bottom of public event info and register forms

Want to learn more? Check out the complete list of new and improved functionality on the issue tracker.

New releases provide a great opportunity to get involved in the CiviCRM documentation community. Many of the new and improved features in 4.1 are not yet reflected in the User and Administrator Guide, and Developer Guide. You can get an account to edit and update the books here.
 

You can download the release from SourceForge. The filenames include the 4.1.2 labels, e.g. civicrm-4.1.2-drupal.tar.gz or civicrm-4.1.2-joomla.tar.gz or civicrm-4.1.2-wordpress.tar.gz. Make sure you're downloading the correct version: for Drupal or Joomla or WordPress.

If you are installing CiviCRM 4.1.2 from scratch, please use the corresponding automated installer instructions:

• Install CiviCRM 4.1 on Drupal 7
• Install CiviCRM 4.1 on Drupal 6
• Install CiviCRM 4.1 on Joomla 1.7/2.5
• Install CiviCRM 4.1 on Wordpress 3.3

The procedure for upgrading is described in following documents:

• Upgrade Drupal 7 / CiviCRM 4.0 Sites to 4.1
• Upgrade Drupal 6 / CiviCRM 3.x sites to 4.1
• Upgrade Joomla Sites to 4.1
• Upgrade WordPress Sites to 4.1 (from 4.1 alpha or beta)

We will continue to include automated upgrades for subsequent stable releases of 4.1 - so you should be able to upgrade your site easily over the course of the release cycle.

Community support and engagement is the force that sustains and drives CiviCRM forward. This release would not have been possible without the incredible contributions of these people and organizations:

Adam Wight, Andrew Harris, Andrew Perry, Alice Aguilar, Andre Gurgel, Brian Shaugnessy, Coleman Watts, Dave D, Dave Moreton, Eileen McNaughton, Erik Brower, Erik Hommel, Henry Bennett, Jamie McClelland, Jim Taylor, Jonathan Mark, Joe Murray, Marianela Zucotti Bozzano, Michael McAndrew, Steve Colson, Stuart Gaston, Tim Otten, Tom Kirkpatrick, Xavier Dutoit.

AGH Strategies, Amigos Library Services, Association for Learning Technology, Attendee Management, Benton Consulting, Circle Interactive, CivicActions, Community Builders, EE-atWork, Fuzion (NZ), Giant Rabbit, Kindling Trust, Korlon, International Mountain Biking Association, International Society for Bayesian Analysis, Josiesque Designs, Michigan Parents for Schools, New York State Senate, Nonprofit Association of Oregon, Nonprofit Solutions, Powered by Action, Progressive Technology Project, Resolutions Northwest, River Pool at Beacon, Rooty Hollow, San Francisco Baykeeper, Scotland's Colleges, Switchback, System Seed, Tech to the People, The San Francisco Orff-Schulwerk, Third Sector Design, Voluntary Action Westminster, Vpod Schweiz, Woven.

Chris Ward has organised a meetup in Melbourne for this Monday:
 
Report back from CiviCon and a code-sprintette

Melbourne CiviCRM
Monday, April 23, 2012
6:00 PM
Inspire9
1/41 Stewart Street
Richmond
Will you attend?

We are currently working with an organisation that has a staff member that accesses their machine using a screen reader only (he uses Jaws). He has been working hard to see which core bits of CiviCRM (4.1.x on Drupal 7) he can access and has fantastically been working with us to feedback. In some instances we have been able to hardcode in menu links etc to increase his level of access.
This is real feedback from a user with genuine access requirements. Hopefully his experiences can lead to core code changes which will increase the accessibility of the system in the longer term for other users. We are also looking for ways in which we can increase his access levels in the short term. Please comment if you have any thoughts on core code changes that would make a difference, if you would like to get involved or if you know of users that have had similar experiences.
 
Generally he can navigate round a contacts summary screen, edit users, search via the basic Find Contacts screen, search for Activities and add basic Activities. There are some basic elements of the system which are inaccessible as detailed below;
- Contact Tabs; he cannot access a Contacts Tabs such as Activities, Relationships - he can access the summary screen only. He is using workarounds, like an activity search on the full contacts name, to find their activities.
- Lookups (including the LHS quick lookup) - He can type directly into these if he exactly knows someone's full name already. As he types the list of found contacts is not read to him. This affects his use when adding Activities, Shared Addresses etc. I understand this may be impossible to get around due to the way the lookup contact lists are generated.
- Collapsed Field Set Headers; these are invisible to the Jaws screen reader. As a workaround on the contact summary page we are forcing all custom fields to be open by default and on the contact edit page he is using Expand All tabs to access the field sets. He cannot however access any of the closed field sets on the Advanced Search screen. Would it be possible to add an Expand All Tabs function to the Advanced Search screen?
- Edit Page issue; on the edit page all the fields describe themselves to him as he tabs down except for the 'On Hold' and 'Bulk Mailings' check boxes.
- The on screen CiviCRM menus are invisible to the screen reader; as mentioned above we have added a hard coded extra menu which replicates the top Civi menu.

I hope the feedback is useful and we are sure that the staff member would be happy to further feedback on any future changes that were made to core.

Oliver Gibson, IT Enterprise Manager GMCVO

At CiviCon, Gunner from Aspiration Tech facilitated a session with the entire community soliciting feedback, discussion and comments on the project. It was a good opportunity for everyone to give feedback on the state of the project, things that we are doing a good job with, and things that we can improve. We ended up doing a collaborative grouping of the feedback in various categories and sorting the comments.

Some of the positives that are worth highlighting include:

• Folks loved the responsiveness, culture and support on forums and IRC.
• The Make It Happen feature is a big hit. The ability to read detailed descriptions on a blog post and comment on that is appreciated.
• Progressive Tech Project, PalanteTech and core team got quite a few appreciations.
• Lots of mention of the open welcoming nature and passion of the community.
• Raising and talking about the gender issue was appreciated.
• Lots of positive mentions of API V3

It was good to take a step back and appreciate all the positives we've acheived to date.  It's interesting to note that a lot of the things that people praised come from various different community efforts, and it has been great to see these initiatives growing over time. We're excited about all the new developments that are happening at the moment and we and want to make things even better - we should continue to help each other out online and offline, be respectful of everyone, and continue pushing and improving the code.

Feedback on things we should focus on improving include:

• Improved forum and learning experience. More user friendly less technical docs, better search, better forum structure, more forum mentors and responders
• More focus on Marketing and Outreach. How do we tell the story of Civi?
• Better integration of various places where info is shared: Book, Wiki, Forums, Issue Tracker, IRC, Website.
• Better ways of increasing civi consulting practices, transparency around consultants. Avoid recreating wheel for similar orgs.
• More online training and webinars. Ability to allow remote folks to participate in various events. More training resources
• Improved support for extensions and directory of extensions.
• Give beginners an easier onramp into the product and community. Help them with how to participate
• Help people to connect locally and peer-to-peer support

So to summarize, we need to work on better helping the non technical people in our community, start focusing a lot more on marketing and outreach at a local level, integrate online trainings and screencasts into the product, and better integrate the various tools we use - all areas where individuals and organisations have the opportunity to step up and help out. 

Overall there are a lot of great comments and ideas in that document. We do encourage you to download and read the entire data set. If you do analyze the data and infer things, please do share your findings with the community as a comment.

The International Mountain Bicycling Association (IMBA) needed to be able to target and deliver our constituent's comments on Congressional Bills to Senators and Representatives. Thanks to this blog post we found PopVox and thanks to the good folks at PopVox, CiviCRM and PopVox are now integrated.

PopVox's advocacy tools enable organizations, like IMBA, to embed a customizable Write Congress widget directly onto an organization-branded website so grassroots activists can send messages to Congress, which POPVOX delivers and then aggregates into graphical statistics of support of and oppostion to a particular bill.

Things that define PopVox's service:

• Take action forms (widgets) can be embedded into an organization's website using an iframe
• PopVox inserts contact information from the constituent taking action into CivCRM using the CiviCRM API (v3, JSON)
• PopVox verifies both postal address and email address of constituents to ensure the quality of information delivered to Congress
• Delivery of constituent messages is guaranteed
• The aggregates of bill support and opposition are openly available on PopVox.com
• PopVox requires a user to create an account at PopVox so individuals returning to POPVOX may check the status of their letter and bill
• Widgets and message must be tied to a bill in Congress.
• There are free and paid "Pro" options -- CiviCRM integration is only availalable with paid options

Integration with CiviCRM is pretty straight forward. Organizations register for an account at PopVox and create a widget in support or oppostion to a bill. The embed code is inserted into a page on the organization's site. Using a username and password provided by the organziation, PopVox utilizes the CiviCRM API to add new and update existing contacts. Additionally an organization can pass data to the PopVox widget to pre-populate user information. An example of populating the email field of the widget in Drupal is below.

Here is a great starting point for finding out more about PopVox and their service:

https://www.popvox.com/about/whyitworks

<?php
global $user;
$user_info = array(
"email" => $user->mail,
/*
"first_name" => "",
"last_name" => "",
"zipcode" => "",
"prefix" => "",
"suffix" => "",
"address1" => "",
"address2" => "",
"city" => "",
"state" => "",
"phonenumber" => "",
*/
// Use this only if the user has been logged in with a username and password
"authentication_hmac" => hash_hmac("sha256", $user->mail, "8362CV9WSSYD72HQ"),
);
echo "#user_info=" . urlencode(http_build_query($user_info, "", "&"));

About 45 participants attended the session. We did some polling of the room at the start to see who was there. I started by asking how many folks were familiar with the concept of open source software and I was happy to see most folks raising their hands. There was a mix of consultants and NP staff / managers, and only a few were already using CiviCRM. Most folks were already using some kind of CRM and came to explore if Civi might serve their needs better. Interestingly, a large percentage of folks were familiar with or using one of our supported CMS's (Drupal, Joomla, WordPress).

We walked through an introductory presentation - but most of the time was spent on Q & A. Questions ranged from "does it scale", to "how much does it cost to implement", to "is it hard to upgrade if you've customized it"?

In the afternoon Kurund and I set up our booth at the Science Fair (vendors and sponsors exhibit hall). This is the first time CiviCRM.org as a project has done a booth at a conference - so we were pretty uncertain as to how it would go and whether it would be worth the time and effort (and cost). We hung up our spanking new banner, and got the new CiviCRM.org website up on our laptops. Joe Murray from JMA Consulting printed off some nice 3-fold "brochures" about Civi as handouts. Of course there were lots of pretty elaborate booths at the fair, but I think we held our own appearance wise :-) with minimal expense.

Even before the exhibit hall had officially opened, we had groups of folks coming by to chat and ask questions. Frank, Michael, Kurund and I were all super busy talking to people non-stop from 3pm until around 6pm. It was quite exciting to see the level of interest AND to find out that lots of folks at NTC "had heard about" CiviCRM and were interested in learning more.

This experience really reinforce for me the importance of having a presence at conferences like NTC. This can and should happen in lots of different ways:

• More folks from organizations using Civi giving talks - as Micah Lee from EFF did at DrupalCon in March
• Consultants doing sessions which showcase their client's successes with CiviCRM, and educating folks on open source in general - like Andrew Hunt did in the Ignite session at NTC
• … CiviCRM.org "booths" co-sponsored by the project and consultancies (like we did this time at NTC) as well as consultant/integrator booths which co-brand the CiviCRM platform.

All of these activities can really help raise awareness about the project, and help sustain and grow the community. I encourage everyone to look at the conferences and gatherings coming up in their area and "make it happen".

 
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:

• The quality of the talks I attended were very high. Most groups are using CiviCRM very creatively and pushing the limits in multiple ways. We need to continue on increasing the extensibility thus giving developers / integrators more choice.
• The quality of the Birds of a Feather session was very high. Unfortunately these were not recorded. Jim's talk on how they use Civi for theatre registration and season passes at BACT, Peters talk on CiviMobile and Rachna and Jason's talk on PopVox, CiviCRM and Advocacy were super impressive. A blog post on Popvox and CiviCRM is coming soon, definitely opens up the wide world of advocacy and contacting your congress-person/senator for CiviCRM users.
• Gunner's session on community tuneup was quite cool. Gunner and aspiration tech do a great job of getting everyone involved and talking. Doing it before lunch helped continue the conversation during lunch and for the rest of the event. We'll have a blog post summarizing the takeaways and action plan from that event in the next day or so.
• Seeing and talking to so many people that we interact with on a regular basis on the forums and IRC. At the next Con, we need to include people's forum/IRC/Twitter handle to identify folks more easily :)
• Seeing so many users and orgs who are deploying CiviCRM and are so so passionate about the project, the community and the power of open source.
• The David Brower Center was a really nice venue for this CiviCon. Lots of tables and space for small group discussions

Quite a few of us are currently at Woolman on a mega-sprint involving documentation and features for 4.2. Its great to see such an exciting, healthy and passionate community and we hope to build on this to continue pushing CiviCRM to even higher heights!
 

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/.
 
What we're doing, is each taking a section of the book at a time, then going through the wiki - http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC and finding all related content.
 
We're then labelling the wiki pages in 2 ways:
1. According to which section of the book the page corresponds to e.g. 'basic-set-up' or 'events'.
 
2. An indication of the relationship between the wiki page and the book. One of the following 4 labels: 
Legacy - Content which may be outdated, or perhaps doesn't seem that useful or relevent. 
Included - Content which is already included comprhensivley in the book. 
Intended - Content which is not included in the book and that we think it would be useful to include. 
Additional - Content where some of it has been included, but we think that it would be beneficial to include other parts of that page.
Remaining - Content where it is appropriate for it to remain on the wiki
 
We think that with the combination of the chapter tag and the status tag, this is a really good start to mapping the relationship between the book and the wiki. This feels like stage 1 - getting a handle on the terrain. Stage 2 will happen at some point, which will be adding the relevant bits to the book, and using useful wiki content to edit existing parts of the book. 
If you have any ideas that you think would be useful for us, we're working on this over the next few days. Also, if you want to get involved (virtually) just comment here and we can liase on section assignment so we don't tread one each others toes.
I'll give an update later on in the week.  

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.
 
I didn't see everything all the talks & it would be impossible for me to tell everything that happened through the day but there are a few things that stood out from what I did see.
 

• EFF did an inspiring talk telling us about how important it is for non-profits to have access to CiviCRM. They talked both about the non-profit sector* and about the experience EFF had with CiviCRM. They talked about the importance of good affordable tools to support the work that non-profit groups do. EFF moved to CiviCRM from Convivio and found that CiviCRM gave them the option NOT to collect extra information about their supporters (such as click-throughs on CiviMail) and this allowed them to practice what they preach. The nicest moment though, was when EFF told us about the tangible success of their internet black-out campaign and the room broke out into spontaneous and sustained applause.

• Tim Otten presented the CiviX code creator he blogged about recently and impressed the group by creating a custom CiviCRM module to render a new CiviCRM content page in under 10 minutes (with only a little copy-and-paste from one he put in the oven earlier). We also got a sneak preview of the CiviMobile App that Peter McAndrew has been working.

• Gunnar from Aspiration ran a fun session about the community which culminated in an orgy of post-its. Lobo & Michael McAndrew are going to blog about these later in the week but I stole the title of this blog from one of the post-it notes.

• PopVox spoke to a small group about their advocacy product which is a delivery focussed way to get messages to congress & the senate. Popvox found that messages to congress were often not getting through or being delivered in a useful manner so their focus has been on improving that (and if everything else fails they hand deliver them!). They have working with Jason from National Mountain Biking Association on integrating it with CiviCRM so that their widget can be on your site, supporting (or opposing) the bills you want your supporters to take action on and the data gets put into CiviCRM at the same time as it goes into Popvox. Popvox is a commercial product but it does have a range of services and pricing starting from $0

• API appreciation - a year after the launch of API v3 it was great to find that everyone seems to be using it and have a really good level of knowledge about it - I even met people who had read my blogs :-)

I'm at the sprint now & looking forward to sharing ideas and learning from the FOURTY people whoto  have made it to the boonies of Nevada to write code & documentation.
 
(*OK - I couldn't bring myself to translate my writing into American English - but feel free to substitute non-for-profit & constituents for non-profit & supporters :-) & a smattering of z's for s's)