Code for Change recruiting for the fall semester

Code for Change is looking for a fall intern in the Denver, CO area. The ideal candidate is a computer science student with strong programming skills and experience with web applications (PHP and MySQL specifically).

While we got a lot done this summer, there's still more work to do on CiviCRM. As a Code for Change intern, you'll give progressive organizations an even better open source option for one of the most important pieces of software they use to help create social change.

The internship is part time (20 hours / week), runs until the end of the fall semester, and pays a $1,500 living stipend. If you or anyone you know is interested, apply here!

Code for Change is over (for now)

As of last Friday (August 17), the first Code for Change summer has officially come to a close. We set out to turn CiviCRM into a better system for helping organizers spend more time organizing and less time shuffling things around on their computers. CiviCRM is a constituent relationship management system, but that's just a nerdy way of saying that it's a program to save you from spreadsheets-pasted-into-Outlook hell when it comes to keeping track of and in touch with all of your contacts. I'm pretty excited about what we got done.

Code for Change is my brainchild, so I'm a little biased. However, other people seem to think it's cool too. The basic idea behind Code for Change is that by putting a little effort into an existing open source project, we get a lot more out of it than if we wrote something ourselves from scratch or paid someone else to modify an off-the-shelf system. We hired some computer science interns--current students and recent grads, downloaded the source code to CiviCRM, and set about turning it into a system that everyone can use (from large, complex organizations all they way down to my mom who sends out a regular newsletter to her home-based business contacts). In the true spirit of openness, all our work is open source and is planned to be released with the CiviCRM 2.0 release later this year.

From June 4 to August 17, we hacked away at it. We had a lot of help from others in the CiviCRM developer and user community, and their contributions were invaluable. Here's what we all accomplished:

• We made CiviCRM a standalone system. This means you no longer need Drupal or Joomla to use it. (Those are web content management systems, and not everyone who wants to use CiviCRM uses those.) For people who just need a CRM, this makes it much easier to get CiviCRM up and running and doesn't put a lot of unnecessary CMS functionality between you and your contacts.


• We added OpenID logins. OpenID is a pretty cool new technology that allows you to use one login for all systems that use it. No more having to remember umpteen different passwords for every system you have to login to.


• We added support for complex groups and organizational structures. The organization I work for, U.S. PIRG, is a national network of state-based organizations. This means we need a system that can keep all its data separate for each state, but still allow those of us who work centrally for all the organizations (I'm an online organizer, for example) to aggregate that data when necessary. Other organizations (such as political parties) have similar geographic and departmental structures that they need a CRM system to model. CiviCRM is now pretty powerful in this regard. You can put groups inside other groups (inside other groups, inside...) and you can affiliate groups with organizations and sub-organizations.

I'll be working over the next few weeks to actually roll out CiviCRM as the new system that U.S. PIRG uses for its online organizing, so we'll be eating our own dog food. If you want to give it a try now (instead of waiting for the official 2.0 release), you can download a preview release of CiviCRM Standalone here.

And we're not done there. We're looking to hire an intern for the current fall semester and another in the spring to continue working on CiviCRM. If you or anyone you know is interested in applying, let me know.

Cross-posted at Future Majority

Code for Change at YearlyKos

I'm in Chicago at YearlyKos, currently in a panel on building a grassroots funding culture for progressive infrastructure. In other words, small donations to fund all kinds of progressive work, not just political candidates and parties. That's an interesting idea for funding Code for Change... I'll have to think about that some more.

I'm excited about talking to people about Code for Change and the work we're doing here at YearlyKos. I've already had one person stop me to ask what Code for Change was all about when he overheard that we were working on CiviCRM. So there's definitely enthusiasm out there for open source software that helps build the progressive movement.

One thing that I haven't heard much about from the panelists is the idea of not just raising more money for progressives, but also encouraging progressives to be smarter about what they spend that money on. One of the goals of Code for Change is to show the progressive movement that open source software is a better "third way" for getting the software that we need to help us build progressive infrastructure. It's the flexibility of writing your own code combined with the ability to get up and running quickly by not re-inventing the wheel that you get when buying an off-the-shelf solution. Not only that, but you don't have to spend anywhere near as much money on it, nor is it totally on your shoulders to keep the code maintained and build new features.

I believe progressive organizations, bloggers, candidates, and individual activists should aggressively adopt open source software solutions, and they should find ways to not just be a consumer in that community (which there's nothing wrong with, per se) but to also contribute back to the community. It's been our experience in Code for Change that when we engage those communities and start working with them to add features that a particular organization needs (in this case, U.S. PIRG), those contributions are enthusiastically embraced and become official features of that software.

This is the software equivalent of a broad, small donor base that amounts in a huge funding source. It's just a smarter way to get software developed for our movement, and we need to get that word out. I'll be working on doing just that here at YearlyKos.

Poor, neglected blog

Wow, it's been awhile since we posted to the blog! We've been coding like crazy lately, but that's no excuse. So here's an update on where we're at:

We just released CiviCRM Standalone v0.5, which is a very cool release. Not only does it continue to improve on the cool features we created for previous releases (such as the ability to use it as a standalone system, the OpenID login system, and the nestable groups), but it also adds a much easier installation system. We think you can get this release up and running in 15 minutes or less on a Windows, Mac OS X, or Ubuntu Linux computer. So give it a try!

I'll be traveling to YearlyKos this week, and I hope to meet up with folks who are interested in Code for Change, open source, and non-profit technology in general. If you'll be there too, let me know!

Today the CiviCRM folks merged our changes into their trunk. What this means is that the cool features that we've been putting into our CiviCRM Standalone releases which eventually find their way into the bonafide, official, 100% all natural CiviCRM 2.0 release. The plan is to have that out by the end of 2007. That's very exciting news, and was one of the major goals of the Code for Change project.

We're not done yet, though. So stay tuned for more updates on new features and more releases.

More on CiviFeatures: CiviMember

Much of this information can be found in further detail at http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC.


Membership Summary


When you first open up the CiviMember page, you will see a membership summary, which allows you to:

View all members of the organization. For each, gives type of membership, start and end dates, the source of their membership (e.g. payment, donation, check), and status: whether the membership is current or expired. For each member, there are links for View, Edit, and Delete.

At the top, shows aggregate data about memberships by type.


There are two options under the CiviMember menu, as well: Find Members and Import Members.

Find Members

There is a robust search function for members, allowing search by all fields: membership status, membership type, start and end date, source, member name, email address. You can search by OR criteria as well, to get contacts who are either of one membership type or another, for example.


Find Members leads to the following features, among others:

Export Members:

You can choose members as search results from the Find Members feature, and export them to CSV files, viewable in spreadsheet applications such as Excel.

Email Members:
You can select a group of members as search results to send an email to.


As for Import Members:

Import Members

Import member data stored in CSV format.
Field mappings: the order in which the comma-separated values in a file are stored in data fields is known as a field mapping. These can be saved for a given source file.

The Import Members feature also has built-in error correction. For instance, an email address field will correct invalid email addresses.

Nestable Groups in CiviCRM

One of the perpetual problems U.S. PIRG runs into with off-the-shelf software is that most of it assumes one of two usage scenarios:

1. A single organization with no need to isolate any sets of data from any others beyond a simple user-by-user permissioning system (if your lucky). This is the most common.
   
2. Multiple organizations with the need to access the software from many different locations, but with complete isolation between the organizations' data in the system and no easy way to combine it. This is less common.
   

Unfortunately neither of these scenarios fits U.S. PIRG (and lots of other organizations). We have a national lobbying office in D.C., many state-level organizations across the country, and a few centralized departments that work with most or all of them. So we really need a hybrid of the two options above. People in the state groups shouldn't have to wade through other groups' data to get to theirs (not to mention that an errant "delete all" command or security breach in one of those offices shouldn't affect other groups' data). But at the same time, the central departments need to be able to routinely work with aggregate data across all the groups.

Here's an example: Let's say we have a group here in Colorado called CoPIRG (we do). They have a list of online activists, a list of media contacts, a list of current staff, a list of alumni, a list of student activists, a list of donors, a list of issue experts, and so on. They want to keep all that under the CoPIRG umbrella without it getting all mixed up with other groups' data (potentially even other groups in Colorado; this would be very confusing).

Now let's say we have a centralized online organizing department (we do, and I work in it). What if we want to send an action alert to everyone on every online activist list across the country? We need to be able to quickly combine the CoPIRG online activist list with the Florida PIRG online activist, the CalPIRG list, the Maryland PIRG list, etc.

Most software makes this kind of flexibility awkward at best, downright impossible all too often.

Which brings me, at long last, to the subject of my post. We are working to support this kind of functionality more readily in CiviCRM by making groups nestable. I'm using the word "groups" here to refer to CiviCRM's feature for combining contacts into logical groupings. Making them "nestable" means you'll be able to put groups inside groups inside groups inside groups...

Here's how this would play out in the example above:

CoPIRG would be a CiviCRM group. So would CalPIRG, Florida PIRG, etc. Each of these groups would have a nested sub-group called "CoPIRG Online Activists," "CalPIRG Online Activists," you get the idea. We would also have a top-level group called "National Online Activists." Each of the "XXPIRG Online Activists" groups would also be sub-groups of this. (We're supporting multi-parent relationships between the groups.)

CoPIRG staff would have read/write permission for their whole group (and thus any sub-groups of it as well). The staff in my department would have read/write permission for the entire National Online Activists group. This keeps our data isolated when it needs to be, but combined when necessary too.

We would then repeat this setup for the local and national media lists, alumni lists, donor lists, etc.

Obviously this is nowhere near the only usage scenario nestable groups will enable CiviCRM to support. The new flexibility, especially when combined with the new permissioning system being planned for the 2.0 release (also when nestable groups will make their debut), will make CiviCRM a much more flexible system overall.

We already have the basic functionality working. The main thing left to do is implement an intuitive widget to create and edit group nesting relationships. We're hoping to get this out the door in the next few days as CiviCRM Standalone v0.4. Stay tuned!

CiviContribute

CiviContribute enables you to collect and track and create reports on contributions from members. With customizable collection pages and many Payment Processors to choose from it's easy and secure. Offline contributions can be imported using the import feature of CiviContribute. Searching the data is easy with the search tool and there are a wide number of criteria to choose from for searching including Contributor, dates and contribution form used. You can create contribution pages by copying previous contribution pages or one of the example pages, as well as creating pages with a 6 step wizard.
Collect, track, report -- CiviContribute takes care of your constituent contributions.

CiviEvents: Why It Rules

Here's a sketch of the features of CiviEvents. It's a bit thick and dry now, but expect a more polished version in the near future, along with many of the other optional features of CiviCRM. More documentation is available at http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC/CiviEvent.

Matthew and I will be compiling these into a presentation, which we will also post here. Comments about the cooler aspects in this list are welcome. We're looking for all the input we can get.


Event Summary Page

The Event Summary Page lists all of the events you have created. You can edit events by clicking the "Configure" button next to the name of each.

Sorting features allow you to view event participants in alphabetical order of participant name or event, order of the fee level, dates at which they take place, event status, and the role of the participant. A console for viewing, editing, or deleting event registration for a given contact also exists, beside each contact's entry in the summary.

- A Find Participants feature allows you to search for participants by event name, date, etc.

- There is a wizard for creating a new event, as well. You can select an existing event type or configure/add new event types in Administer CiviCRM. (Cool potential feature that doesn't exist now: add different fields to event types.)

Import Participants

Import participant data stored in CSV format Field mappings can be saved for a given source—very useful Automatic detection of invalid fields

Total Rows - Total rows (contact records) in import file. Rows with Errors - Rows with invalid data in one or more fields (for example, invalid email address formatting). These rows will be skipped (not imported). You can also Download Errors. Valid Rows - Total rows to be imported.

The information shown previews the results of importing your data. Review the totals to ensure that they represent your expected results.

If errors are detected you will see the message:

CiviCRM has detected invalid data or formatting errors in # records. If you continue, these records will be skipped. OR, you can download a file with just these problem records - Download Errors. Then correct the errors in the original file you are importing, cancel this import and begin again at step 1.

Event Creation

Address/Email configuration for Event Location

Event Fees—Configure paid vs. unpaid, contribution type, options for amounts, and default amounts

CiviEvent Registration:

Modes for both paid and unpaid registration
Extensive configuration for event registration, including registration link text (e.g. "Register Now!")

Registration start and end dates
Introductory and footer text
Customizable Confirmation and Thank-You Screens
Customizable Confirmation Emails
You can test-drive registration for events.

CiviCRM Standalone v0.3.1 released

I forgot to mention on here, we released CiviCRM Standalone v0.3.1 yesterday. You can grab a copy of it here.

This release incorporates lots of bugfixes for the OpenID login system, and it's probably the first release that's generally usable without having to tweak things in the database first. It even has a "new install" page that helps you setup your first user right after you install it.

The other exciting news is that we have this version up and running on our demo server. You'll need an OpenID (these folks can help you out there), and then you can login to the demo server here. Obviously you probably don't want to put confidential data in there since it's a public server.

Let us know what you think!

CiviCRM Standalone v0.3 delayed slightly

Our new CiviCRM Standalone release, version 0.3, is almost ready. We had hoped to get it out the door this weekend, but there are still a couple of show-stopper bugs in there we wanted to squash first.

It may still get released tonight, so stay tuned. It's a pretty cool release and probably the first one that will be easy to get up and running (you had to do some database sit-ups for the others).

If it doesn't get released tonight, look for it tomorrow (7/3/07).

Some of My Favorite Places

Working for code for change and PIRG has kept my mind coming back to the Environment. Living in the state of Colorado it's not hard to think about it. With the mountains so close and looming over Denver all the time, and calling me to come and play. But I've noted a disturbing trend over the couple of decades I've been here. Time and time again I've found that there is a house or a fence or some other obstruction or sign that says one of my favorite hiking spots is off limits now. And from what I can tell whomever "bought" that piece of land now basically controls access to that huge chunk of State or Federal Park that now lies out of my reach.
One in particular was near Moffat Tunnel. We used to hike there two or three times a year. Then one time we were greeted by a 12 foot high horse fence at the trail-head. We had heard that access was supposed to be granted, and the owner saw us and welcomed us to cross, but didn't open the gate, we had to climb over.
Another spot is on famous Mount Evans. There is a house and a road somehow inside of what used to be park land. Barbed wire and warning signs are also to be found. It's a sad thing. And I know with time that there will be more and more of this happening. I don't go to those old spots anymore. So I guess who ever they are has won. I guess I let them.

Keeping Up With PHP and MySQL Changes

PHP and MySQL are open source software. Open source software changes frequently, rather than once every year or two like commercial software does. It changes when the developers feel that it's ready. It also changes quickly in trspose to problems. When a serious problem is found, such as a security hole, a new version that fixes the problem can be released in days. You don't receive glossy brochures or see splashy magazine ads for a year before a new version is released. Thus, if we don't make the effort to stay informed, we could miss the release of a new version or be unaware of a serious problem with our current version.

Importing Membership Data into CiviCRM

Managing Constituent Relationships are all about data. Who, what, when, where and we know why. Getting your membership data into CiviCRM is fast and easy. CiviCRM can take your Comma Separated Value (CSV) data and import directly into the CiviCRM database. Just map your fields to the CiviCRM fields and import. You can even save the field mapping for later imports that have the same format saving time and possible errors. This can be especially handy if there are multiple organizers bringing in membership data.
There is duplicate handling for records built in, with 4 choices of how you can handle duplicated records (skip, update, fill and no duplicate checking). There are also multiple date formats to choose from. After mapping the fields you get a preview of the data. And when you are done importing there is a summary of what actions have been taken. More good reasons for making CiviCRM your Constituent Relationship Management System.

PHP vs. Perl

We've now reached one of the more challenging steps in our project. CiviCRM is written in PHP and WebGUI is written in Perl. Yet we have to integrate the two.

Our three options are:

1. Use WebGUI's built-in HTTP proxy asset to display CiviCRM's public pages (like contribution forms, event registration forms, etc.) inside WebGUI templates.
1. The downside here is that this often messes up forms, which are pretty critical to basically everything we'll be displaying from CiviCRM.
   
2. Use WebGUI's built-in web services client asset to get enough data from CiviCRM's SOAP interface to build the public pages inside WebGUI templates.
1. Frankly, I'll be surprised if this works. But who knows...
   
3. Write a new WebGUI asset that calls the CiviCRM web services (in REST fashion, of course) and gets the data it needs to build and display the public pages inside WebGUI templates.

Obviously we'd love for #1 to work. If it doesn't we'll drop down to trying #2. If that doesn't work, we'll sigh and get to work on #3. #3 will take a little longer, and probably push something else off the list of things we can get done this summer.

We'll see which one ends up working. :)

Why we use CiviCRM

Unified view of every constituent. Store information about individuals, organizations and households and your interactions with them.
Strong free and open source community. A rapidly growing open source community of developers, consulting firms, consultants and others support, extend and maintain the software.
Designed for the social sector. CiviCRM was designed from the ground up for non-governmental organizations that engage in advocacy, community and political organizing, and non-profit work.
Seamless integration with web sites. CiviCRM integrates directly into popular open source CMS packages, including Drupal and Mambo. Registration and visitor interactions are logged directly into the system, including end-user maintenance of their own addresses and custom fields.
Internationalized & Localized. CiviCRM was built from the ground up as a product intended to be used globally. It can store data in many localized formats and supports most languages.
Open source & open standards. Licensed under the free softaware license for web services applications, the AGPL, users can make any modification to the software, can benefit from modifications made by others and can effectively interoperate with other applications.
Affordable and cost effective. CiviCRM is available without a license fee and is supported by a community of nonprofit-focused consultants.

API's -- Application Programming Interfaces

I always liked the sound of the words. Even before I knew what they meant. It's been a lot of years and the meaning has changed for me quite a few times over the last decade. Wikipedia describes and API as a source code interface that a computer system or program library provides to support requests for services to be made of it by a computer program. But that isn't what it means to me. It means access. Access to all the code written by the knowledgeable people who wrote the application. So without having to know everything about what was happening inside of the black box, I was given some handles so that I could manipulate the box to do work for me.
Especially when I was first starting as a coder that was very important to me. I knew enough to be dangerous. I more than once watched as a printer in our computer science lab tried to dance off it's stand due to some misbehaving code I had created. In some ways the API's gave me the ability to be even more dangerous, but for the most part they left the complexities of the low level code to the experts, while still giving me a way to realize my vision of what I wanted my code to accomplish.
I spent today looking through CiviCRM's API's looking for the structures that would allow me to unleash it's power without breaking too many things, or torturing too many brain cells. I can feel the sense of possibilities coming on. But it will take some time to see. If we have access to what we need.

Woo hoo!

CiviCRM Standalone v0.2 is out! This version not only improves the stability of the new standalone option in CiviCRM (meaning it doesn't require a particular content management system, or any at all), but it also introduces the new OpenID login system.

This release represents some hard work on the part of the Code for Change team, and we're very excited to bestow it upon the world.

You can download it here.

Make it easy

Every week in Code for Change we have a "Release Friday." We all gather in the 2nd floor conference room of the office building where U.S. PIRG's Denver offices are located and we code until we have a release ready of what we're working on. We start out the day by making a list of which tickets (bug reports) we need to close in order to have something release-worthy.

One of the agenda items we had up on the board this past Friday (yesterday) was "Make it easy." This was a brainstorming session where we all came up with ideas to make it easier to install and play around with CiviCRM. There is quite a bit of interest out there in an open source CRM tool, especially now that we've removed the requirement to run it inside of Drupal or Joomla. But asking people to setup Apache, PHP, and MySQL as the first three steps is a bit intimidating.

Here are some of the ideas we came up with to make it easier:

1. Setup a live public demo site. This would be the easiest way to try out CiviCRM, but perhaps the least useful, since you wouldn't want to put any real data in there.


2. Create a one-step installer for Apache, PHP, MySQL, and CiviCRM that gets everything up and running in one step so that you (and anyone else on your network) can start using CiviCRM right away. There are already one-step installers for the WAMP stack (Windows, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) that we could start with and add in CiviCRM. This installer would be a Windows release first, since that's what most folks are running on. We'd also like to do a Mac OS X version at some point too.


3. Create a "virtual appliance" of Linux running CiviCRM that you can launch in VMWare Player and then access with your web browser.


4. Write step-by-step instructions for getting CiviCRM up and running on a Linux server for those who want to do it themselves.

So, dear readers, we'd love to know which of these options seems most exciting to you. Or, if we left one out, please let us know! We'll be working on 1 or 2 these in the coming weeks, so stay tuned.

Release today, the 2nd time!

Today, we give out our second release. Finally I can reach my weekly goal this week. I did better than last week. I found a QQ group named "Open ID". In this group, they are all interested in Openid, open source. We can talking about every one's current difficulties and ask for help. But now we seemly have similar problem. Everybody expect to get experts help, but we know, open source is a good way to learn and exchange our knowledge.

You can download the release here:
http://www.codeforchange.net/downloads

My posts are deleted

My last tow posts are deleted, because we need each post original work.
I have some problems to use linux.

How can I install Skype in linux? Because my Windows XP is Chinese edition, and I have translate software in there,It's easy for me to contact persons in my list. I switch Linux to Windows all the time. I should hanging on IRC more time. In QQ group, even though you are not here, when you log in there next time, you can see the chatting record by your other group member. You can know what happend on that time. So I hope I can get a copy of chatting record. If I can use Skype in Linux, I don't need go back to Windows to contact my lists.

How can I watch video or listening on line? I download some helpful online lessons, but I can't watch it under Linux. Can I watch on line program under Linux? Some of my video format ".avi".

I really need some help to use Linux better. I know linux has more function than I used.