CiviCon London, Europe's largest CiviCRM gathering brought together its largest ever crowd of users, developers and implementers last week - all converging to share their stories and learn of the latest developments in the fast-growing open source CRM.
How the team got on
Circle were there in force, with 7 members of the team attending for the full two day event. Director David Moreton lead a workshop on accessibility within CiviCRM with Matt Winyard from the RNIB, with some great input from both CiviCRM project lead, Donald Lobo, and Raphael Clegg-Vinell of AbilityNet. An excellent outcome of this is that David and Jon-Man Cheung of GMVCO Databases are to form the core of a new accessibility team to work on a plan for improving CiviCRM's current level of accessibility and to ensure that all future developments are assessed more thoroughly.
It didn't stop there as David was also on hand to provide the technical lead for a case study of the charity Healthwatch's migration to CiviCRM in their branches across the country and Circle developer Andy showed his Bitcoin extension to the world to great acclaim on Twitter in the popular 'lightning talks'.
Full house for the Lightning talks at #civicon taking bitcoin payments developed by @circle_int pic.twitter.com/05uwnAOkKr
— Oblongleeds (@Oblongleeds) September 26, 2014
Exciting developments...
Other exciting developments were revealed throughout the weekend as the new CiviCRM 4.5 user interface was given an outing and the conference floor was abuzz with discussion about the potential for Civi 5.0 after Tim Otten's talk (not to mention excitement about the possibilities of Angular Javascript!). We were also treated to an empassioned keynote speech from Mark Cridge of the Green Party, about how Civi has really enabled them to get to grips with their membership and make it easier to engage with new members, donors and volunteers by being more organised than ever before.
The great success of the Civi core team in getting some students around the world working on CiviCRM projects via the Google Summer of Code campaign was rightly celebrated - embodied by the frenzy generated by the most impressive of the 6 projects that one funding: Civisualise. We look forward to getting to grips with this bag of tricks and bringing some client data to life in the near future.
So overall, we're uplifted and looking forward to contributing to the ever improving functionality of Civi. Thanks to the core CiviCRM team for their incredible hospitality. Now to the sprint to make it happen!
