Joomla! Day UK is scheduled for March 13 and 14, 2009 in Kent. The organizers would like to include one or more CiviCRM-related sessions, depending on interest and availability of presenters.

If you are interested in or planning on attending OR if you are interested in helping to organize / present at a CiviCRM or NGO / Non-profit session - please post back to the forum topic.

If there's a decent number of folks planning on attending - we can look at organizing an additional user group meetup in Kent either before or after the conference (and possibly get one of our core team members to Kent to join in the fun).

You can read about the Joomla! Day UK on their event site.

Looking for an opportunity to network and share expertise with other folks in the non-profit technology eco-system? The Nonprofit Dev Summit takes place in Oakland, California next week - November 17-19. Depending on attendee interest, I'm prepared to facilitate several CiviCRM-related sessions - as well as a few training modules (intro, advanced and/or developer oriented). I'm also planning on sharing a first look at the upcoming CiviCase case management module. And... there are lots of cool-sounding session on topics ranging from cloud computing to security audits and hosting. You can browse the current list of proposed sessions on the Aspiration wiki.

"The 2008 Nonprofit Software Development Summit will be the second annual convening of people and organizations developing software tools, web applications and other technology to support social justice causes. Bringing together a diverse range of developers, technologists, managers, eRiders, integrators, users and other practitioners who self-identify under the umbrella of roles around “developing nonprofit software”, the 2008 DevSummit will provide an opportunity both to gather as a community and to take stock of the field, while building connections and capacity."

It would be great to have a solid group of CiviCRM community members at this summit - so check it out and join us if you can.

We've begun our planning for CiviCRM trainings and meetups for 2009 - and we'd love to get feedback from folks in the community about interests and availability for these events ...

We're considering three different types of events for the calendar:

• Advanced User Training - We held several 2-day sessions this year - focused on the skills needed to configure, customize and use CiviCRM advanced features. These sessions were well received - so we're planning on doing several more in 2009. Fees for these sessions are based on operating expenses.
• User Group Meetings - Half or full-day meetups where folks can share experiences and learnings, network, and discuss the future of the platform.
• Developer Camps - These 1 or 2 day sessions are "learn by doing" events where developers can work together with core team members on specific projects

Today was the second (and, unfortunately, last) day of the SF CiviCamp.

The day started with Rob Thorne’s presentation on using CiviCRM 1.x contacts as CCK fields and his work on CiviNode. Given that in the meantime all of CiviCRM, CCK and Views released version 2s, the outcome of the discussion was that it’s best to rewrite this code from scratch.

CiviCamp day1 started with good number of participants with a total count of 14. We started with introduction and complaints about civicrm. Most of the complaints were about APIs, upgrades and support of previous versions. Discussions on APIs are scheduled for day2. Regarding upgrades it looked that older version (1.9 or below) generally have problems with upgrades since it requires some technical expertise. Walt was working towards developing a tool which could tell in advance if there are potential problems with the db which could make the upgrade fail.

Day 1

CiviCRM team members had the opportunity to attend the BADCamp Oct. (11/12) held in University of California, Berkley. We decided to sit through the lectures of our respective interests.

As most of the core CiviCRM team will be in San Francisco for this year’s Bay Area Drupal Camp, we’ve proposed two CiviCRM sessions: an introductory session on CiviCRM and its components for end-users, evaluators and administrators, and an advanced developer session on CiviCRM’s internal architecture, the use of APIs and general code overview of the project for developers.

If you’re planning to attend BADCamp 2008, please consider voting for these two sessions. :)

The Nonprofit Technology Network - NTEN - is holding it's annual conference in San Francisco next April. This is the largest annual gathering of the non-profit tech community in the U.S - and it's a great opportunity for folks in our CiviCRM community to connect and share and help promote CiviCRM.

This year NTEN is using a new voting process to decide which sessions get included in the schedule. Three exciting CiviCRM-related sessions are on the "ballot" - thanks to David Geilhufe, Michelle Murrain (Non Profit Open Source Initiative), Sue Gardner (Wikimedia Foundation), Wes Morgan (Fund for the Public Interest), Rick Cohen (National Council of Nonprofit Associations), and Jeff Porter (Foundation for Prader-Willi Research).

Even if you're not sure about attending NTC - help get these sessions on the schedule by taking a few minutes to vote for them. All you need to do is go to the linked pages below and click on the "stars":

• Anatomy of Open-source Fundraising - Wikimedia Foundation
• Events Management: Tales from the Trenches
• Selecting and Implementing Open Source Constituent Relationship Management: views from the trenches with CiviCRM, MPower & Sugar
• The New Peacebuilding Paradigm: Women in Connection x the Internet = Exponential Change

Take a few minutes and VOTE NOW. It's a quick and easy way to "give back" and help CiviCRM grow and thrive.

If you're going to be in Los Angeles for DrupalCamp this weekend, stop by the Sunday 3:00pm (or possibly 4:15pm) session on the beginners track for an Intro to CiviCRM. We'll cover basic some basic set-up, usage, and have a brief discussion about what makes CiviCRM different from other Drupal modules. Appropriate for Advanced Drupal users who are new to CiviCRM, or total newbies.

**EDIT: Time corrected, but watch the posted schedules at the Convention center to be sure.

Thanks to the folks who expressed interest in attending a CiviCRM Boot Camp in Philadelphia this summer. Unfortunately we didn't get a sufficient number of signups to justify the expense of running the session (given that we'd be covering
airfare, housing expenses etc.) - so we are forced to cancel the session.