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GROWING AND SUSTAINING RELATIONSHIPS

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Michal Mach

Core Team Member, Developer, Implementor

CiviCRM, Caltha

http://civicrm.org

I've always been passionate about what non-profits and advocacy groups can achieve using technology. For me, CiviCRM shows an essential example of how non-profit and technology worlds can come together to provide real change - working as community, creating value for yourself, but also for others in non-profit sector.

GROWING AND SUSTAINING RELATIONSHIPS
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David Moreton

Consultant

Circle Interactive

http://www.civisites.com

We help many not for profits implement CiviCRM through consultancy, training, configuration and custom development. Many of them come from a painful world of old Access databases, multiple spreadsheets and even paper. It's really satisfying to
help people move on with a system that's so much in tune with their own ethics of sharing and collaboration. We also 'eat our own dog food' and use Civi in-house for our client records because we love the flexibility and control it gives us.

For us it's important to share code and advice with other members of the community when we can because we know we get it back in help at other times. The community really is awesome and one of the friendliest and undaunting I've come across. We appreciate the huge value of the software to us and our clients so we try to contribute back and make it even better.

GROWING AND SUSTAINING RELATIONSHIPS
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Allen Shaw

DEVELOPER

NS WEB SOLUTIONS

http://nswebsolutions.com

I'm quite impressed with the responsiveness of the CiviCRM community, both from the core developers and many experienced users who have quickly provided answers and ideas in areas where I just needed that extra insight, or where we needed to do something totally new. After several years working with open source software, I'm finding the CiviCRM community to be the most responsive and helpful I've seen.

We make CiviCRM one of our primary offerings because it just provides so much right out of the box that our clients need, without a line of custom code. And when we need to extend it for the clients' unique needs, the APIs and programming hooks let us add in features that would be impossible in some other systems. This means we can provide great value to our clients with quick turnaround times and reasonable budgets, which is great for our clients and for us.

GROWING AND SUSTAINING RELATIONSHIPS
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Ken West

End-user, Administrator

City Bible Forum

http://citybibleforum.org

City Bible Forum is an Australian not-for-profit Christian organisation. We need to communicate effectively with our constituents, and CiviCRM gives us a comprehensive set of tools for managing relationships. Interestingly, we often find that new features are being added just as our need for those features is becoming apparent. It's the right fit for us.

GROWING AND SUSTAINING RELATIONSHIPS
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Stacy Liou

Implementor, Developer, Trainer

elMobile Inc.

http://www.elmobile.com

As developers for various OpenSource CRM applications, we learned a lot from CiviCRM on its scalability and ease of customization.
CiviCRM community is truly organic cultivating growth for users and developers.
We wish to continue learning with CiviCRM and to tackle future challenges with CiviCRM.

GROWING AND SUSTAINING RELATIONSHIPS
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Brylie Oxley

End-user and Developer

Woolman Sierra Friends Center

http://woolman.org

Working with CiviCRM enriches our commonwealth. Any investment in CiviCRM is
shared by the community as a whole. Community organizations naturally complement the spirit of Free/Libre Software.

GROWING AND SUSTAINING RELATIONSHIPS
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Tim Otten

DEVELOPER AND IMPLEMENTER

CiviCRM

http://civicrm.org
GROWING AND SUSTAINING RELATIONSHIPS
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Richard Hunter

Administrator, End-user

AustLII

http://www.austlii.edu.au

AustLII is the leader in the free access to law movement and has a philospophical bias towards open source systems. After investigating all the other possible major alternatives it seemed logical to turn to CiviCRM. We have software developer resources, and though it is not core business, we may be able to direct some of these resources towards improving CiviCRM for the community.

GROWING AND SUSTAINING RELATIONSHIPS
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Micah Lee

Developer

Electronic Frontier Foundation

http://www.eff.org

I work for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. We switched to CiviCRM so that we could be sure that our membership data stays safe, secure, and private. Now we have control over our CRM and can customize it to work for our needs.

GROWING AND SUSTAINING RELATIONSHIPS
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Michael Daryabeygi

Implementor

Ginkgo Street Labs

http://ginkgostreet.com

CiviCRM enables me to empower my clients with a database that suits their unique needs.

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Michael McAndrew

Implementor, Trainer, Documentator and Developer.

Third Sector Design

http://www.thirdsectordesign.org

CiviCRM helps us help non profits to do fantastic things with their data.
Being closely involved with the developers and documentation team on a daily basis ensures that we can give our clients the best and most up to date advice on how they can use CiviCRM to meet their needs.

GROWING AND SUSTAINING RELATIONSHIPS
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Amy Bucaida

Administrator

Missouri Credit Union Association

http://www.mcua.org

We are a full CiviCRM install with Drupal.

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User and Admin Guide book review - get involved!

Submitted by Michael McAndrew on February 19, 2012 - 10:02

If you have a look back over the documentation (previously book sprint) blog tag, you'll see that over the past few months we have been making slow and steady improvements to our documentation.  We've moved the books over to CiviCRM.org and clarified the relationship between the book and the wiki.  It has been pretty fun so far, but there is still lots to do, one of which is a decent review of the user and admin guide...
After the last book sprint we realised that we have come to a point where, in order to be really effective at a book sprint, we need to have a solid understanding of the state of the current book before we start.  In earlier sprints, this wasn't such a big deal as we could just get together and pump out the content, but now that our book is over 300 pages and pretty comprehensive (toot toot!) we need to do the prep, have the long discussions and debates, get clarity, etc. before the sprint, so that when it comes to the sprint, we can concentrate on writing quality documentation.
I'll blog a bit more about our plans for the book sprint closer to the time, but right now I wanted to draw people's attention to the book review and invite you to get involved.
We still love the Wiki, and to show our love, writing the review of the user and admin guide book review on a wiki page.  Everything you need to know is on that page, but to summarise, we want to:

  • Work out what parts of CiviCRM we haven't covered
  • Work out where the poor quality content is
  • Agree on any high level changes to the structure of the book

This is interesting stuff (well I think so anyway!) and it would be great to get your feedback and thoughts the book as it stands.  Have you read the book (or parts of it) and thought that you could do better? Have you been meaning to read or review a section and not found the time? Now would be a great time for you to do that.
The bottom half of the wiki page is a list of book sections where the review is starting to take shape.  As you can see we've made a decent start already with a fair number of contributions for different community members.  Now it is time to ramp up the process and make sure we've covered all the sections in time for the next book sprint (early April).  Please take a section, read it, and add your thoughts on that page.  Ideally, you should take a section that no one has covered yet, but feel free to read a section that has already been reviewed - the more voices the better.
Once we've done a section-by-section review, we'll look at the bigger picture and see if and how we can shift stuff around, refactor it, etc. to make it more accessible and easier to understand.
So what are you waiting for? Get stuck in and/or tell your friends and colleagues to do the same!
Oh, and one last thing. I also wrote this page on http://civicrm.org/documentation as a starting point for people who want to understand where our documentation is and also those who want to help writing it - it would be good to get your thoughts on that as well.

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Comments

What about the dev book?

Permalink Submitted by xavier on February 20, 2012 - 01:24

Not that I'm thinking spliting the book in two was necessarly a bad idea, but looks like the dev book is not receiving a lot of attention ;(
 
Would be cool to keep them together when defining the processes

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processes apply to developer and user and admin

Permalink Submitted by Michael McAndrew on February 20, 2012 - 12:46

Hey Xavier,
IMO, these processes do apply to both books.  I don't think we are at a stage with the developer book that warrants a review yet - though i am looking forward to the day that that happens :)

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CIVICRM


GROWING AND SUSTAINING RELATIONSHIPS

WHAT IS CIVICRM
  • Community
  • Case Studies
  • Experts
  • Contributors
  • Core Team
  • Licensing
  • Contact Us
WILL CIVICRM MEET YOUR NEEDS?
  • Contacts
  • Contributions
  • Communications
  • Peer-To-Peer Fundraisers
  • Advocacy Campaigns
  • Events
  • Members
  • Reports
  • Case Management
GET STARTED
  • Evaluate Your CRM Needs
  • Evaluate CiviCRM Features
  • Read Books
  • Documentation
  • Demo CiviCRM
  • Download CiviCRM
  • Find An Expert
PARTICIPATE
  • Join the CiviCRM Community
  • Read Our Blog
  • Community Forum
  • Attend a Training or Meetup
  • Make It Happen
  • Contribute
  • Become A CiviCRM Developer
  • Issue Tracker
  • Help with Documentation
  • Translate