Building CiviCRM Community Infrastructure

Facilitated by DharmaTech

This session is designed for anyone who uses, integrates, or contributes to CiviCRM. As an organization that plays all three roles, we will host a discussion on improving the CiviCRM community by drawing parallels to the Ubuntu community from Jono Bacon's book "The Art of Community". The outcomes from the discussion could include:

• recommendations for strengthening the community infrastructure
• improving features and stability of CiviCRM in future releases
• empowering the community to influence the future direction of CiviCRM

Session Notes

introductions - who you are, how you use it

• sarmeesha - user, implementor, contributor
• marcus - wants to see how a community can grow
• colleen - wants to figure out to use civicrm
• deanna - uses civicrm to track donors, wants to learn more about civicrm
• dave - wants to increase sustainability in this open source community
• michelle - user and implementor wants to see it flourish
• jason - what aspects need to be improved
• lobo - interested to see what we can and should do with community
• alice - integrator for community organizing groups, how to participate
• walt - same as jason and sarmeesha

art of community - jono bacon

• informal connection of integrators, needs more structure
• would be great to hear how other integrators are solving problems
• the people who implement is a pool of contributors
• people should share the *how* they've done something

integrator session proposal for drupalcon networks of networks to help build vs. blasts what avenues should we follow, meetups, conferences, webinars, etc. association of fundraising professionals (afp) meeting to discuss civicrm

• integrators need to encourage their clients to publish case studies talking about the work and the impact
• how can people feel like they belong to the community
• what are the obstacles to belonging
• didn't know a civicrm community existed before this conference
• look at using organic groups w/in drupal to add structure
• needs a "welcome to the community" post project
• if sending newsletters, continue to reinforce that people belong.
• support is a barrier being in a community, for everyone, it isn't important to belong.

infrastructure issues

• core team, how to balance response time in the forum vs. giving a chance for others to respond
• civicrm more modular - would then support development moving at different pace
• code-driven documentation