Two new CiviCRM-related articles just got posted on the NTEN.org website - and might be of interest to folks...

Michelle Murrain writes about Open Source CRMs - How Do They Stack Up.

... and John Kenyon posted an article where he "puts a human face" on open-source software, and features an interview with yours truly (blush). Open Source Software - Who Makes This Stuff.

Most of you are probably aware that CiviCRM is developed and maintained by a team of dedicated developers spread around the world (India, Poland, USA and New Zealand). We have had regular team meeting over IM / Skype the past couple of years on a weekly basis. We figured it might make sense to try holding the meeting in a public forum so more community folks can participate in the development and running of CiviCRM. We plan on evaluating this after a few meetings to see if it's useful to the community and the team.

Our current meeting time is 5 am UTC on Wednesday May 21st, which means 5 pm in NZ, 10:30 am in India, 7 am in Poland and
10 pm (Tuesday) in San Francisco. We will meet in the #civicrm channel on IRC (irc.freenode.net). We try to keep the meeting time to 60 minutes or less. You can find more information on IRC here.

The agenda of the meeting is:

• Status and team reports. Progress on issue queue, any issues to highlight/defer etc
• Testing status from various groups (http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRM/Test+Coverage+-+2.1)
• Other items (Schedules, dates, consulting projects)

I'm on my way back to San Francisco after an incredibly stimulating three weeks of collaborating (and co-habitating) with fellow "Civi's". There were lots of very long days (12 - 15 hours) of brainstorming , designing, hammering out code... intermingled with cooking and eating some lovely meals together, a few cool adventures in the natural beauty of New Zealand, and some excellent meetups with members of the community "down-under".

This was our fourth "international" team gathering. In planning for it we tried to build on the things that worked best in our prior meetups - and learn from things that didn't work as well. We decided to focus tightly on a few key goals / projects - and worked hard at staying on task. (This meant resisting the gravitational pulls of email, forums, team members not with us etc.) We set a schedule for moving through our projects and decided up front that it was ok to move on to the next task without completing 100% of the current one.

We were already into some serious testing mode, when we started 3rd week of NZ Meetup. After deciding strategy for "CiviCRM Test Suite", we decided to split up into 3 groups.

Dave and me started specking out few new features for CiviEvent, that would be part of CiviCRM v2.1 release. We shortlisted 3-4 features based on community request. But after some discussion with entire team, in our 2.1 roadmap we would address :

Time flies - it's been already a week since we've been together in New Zealand, enjoying face to face conversations and working together. My personal take on communication is that there is nothing like real time conversation involving two persons located in the same physical spot, so I must say I'm really enjoying this opportunity to hang out with Yashi, Dave, KJ & Lobo.

I am a big fan of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, hence i was very excited about coming to New Zealand and exploring few Middle Earth locations. I must say NZ has some of the most amazing places I have ever seen.

Coming to work, a major focus of the NZ Meetup was improving usability. So we decided to tackle CRM-3000 - "Prevent reloads of new contribution, event registration, new membership, new relationship forms by Implementing dojo method to add custom fields to the form."

The results of the first day of our Mumbai meetup were quite impressive. We successfully knocked out around 7-8 issues.

Day two started out with high energy levels. We divided the day into three sessions.

In the morning session, Piotr introduced us to the world of internationalization and some of the do-s and don’t-s about using ts() (the translation function). He also gave us a demo on using the Pootle-based translation server.

In the afternoon session, we started working on the issue list and managed to knock out few more issues.

In the evening session, we had two presentations. First presentation was by Marie and the topic was using Jing and screencast.com to create CiviCRM screencasts. The screencasts are really useful for giving visual demos of CiviCRM. Second presentation was by Lobo, who introduced us to the fascinating world of controllers and state machines. After that we had brief discussion on handling time zones and the optimization of upgradeMembership.php script, as well as some general best coding practices.

Thus, the second day of the camp saw 8-10 issues knocked off of the 2.0 issue list.

And at the end of the day, we celebrated Junia’s birthday, the India team’s Dojo geek. Happy Birthday, Junia! :)

Several CiviCRM folks will be attending two upcoming conferences in the San Francisco Bay Area. Both conferences should provide great opportunities to learn, share and network with other folks in the non-profit and open source software communities.

Aspiration will be hosting the 2007 Nonprofit Software Development Summit in Oakland next week (February 21-23). I am looking forward to lively conversations there regarding best practices and trends in FLOSS non-profit software development. Michal Mach from our Polish contingent is hoping to join us there and lead a session on Localisation approaches and challenges. We can also carve out time for an informal CiviCRM "users" gathering if there's interest.

As some of you are aware our development team is fairly distributed. We have developers in Mumbai - India, Warsaw - Poland and San Francisco - US. Effective next week, we will have a presence in Nelson - New Zealand. I'm moving to NZ for 9 months and am looking forward to it. You could follow our adventures on my newly created personal blog. If there are any CiviCRM'ers / Drupal'ers in the Nelson area, would be great to form a co-working space, join forces and spread the open source paradigm with organizations in that area.

Dave Greenberg will also be on vacation for a large part of December. We are pretty confident that the rest of the team will do a great job of keeping the project and community moving forward at our normal blistering pace. Feel free to keep them busy and on their toes with a constant supply of feature requests, bug reports and installation issues :)