Thoughts on local support from the CiviCRM Europe developer camp

[Michael McAndrew]

At the recent CiviCRM European developer camp, we can a discussion on the often overlapping themes of local support and better marketing CiviCRM to end users.  Here are my thoughts and recollections from that discussion...

    * the groups prototype and idea was well received
    * people emphasised the importance of having a directory of orgs that are using CiviCRM as well as orgs  as important, as orgs that are delivering CiviCRM.  We talked about the current case study infrastructure and how we can improve it - IMO a user node type where you can delcare yourself as a user (which you can then upgrade to a case study if you have the time and inclination) would be a great way to encourage people to delcare themselves as part of the community and then come back and write a case study later.  i.e you can just start off with your org name, contact details if appropriate and then a line or two about how you are using CiviCRM.  Then, you can com back later and write a couple of paragraphs.
    * we talked about making more
    * We talked about vertical markets as being as important as geographical markets, i.e. if you work at a housing co-op in France, and you see someone that is using it in Holland in a housing co-op, that would be really useful knowledge. So maybe that is another cross cutting theme that we can add at some point in the future.  what market do you develop for.

Inevitably after a few days it is hard to remember everything that was said.  I know there are some gaps, and I've added thoughts of my own since then.  If anyone who was there wants to add more to this, that would be really useful.

[Michael McAndrew]

Oh, another discussion we had at the dev camp was around the idea that we should try harder to convey what the CiviCRM community was.  Everyone had warm fuzzy feelings from coming to the camp and realising that it was a smart way of working, and a 'fun' community to belong to.

we thought that this was a good selling point and that is would resonate with the non profits that we work with but that at the moment, we don't do a great job of conveying what it means to be part of the civicrm community, and why it is a good thing on the website....

[Erik Hommel]

Hi Michael,
good list. I remember we also discussed that it would be a good idea to have a common place (on the wiki) were we can share our marketing material, local training stuff and all sorts of goodies we can easliy adapt to a local situation or a vertical industry. In fact, I will probably create a wiki like that in the nex couple of days and stick our stuff on there. Is the wiki the best spot?

[Michael McAndrew]

Hey,

Yeah, I think the wiki is the best spot.  There are a couple of already existing places that spring to mind where it would be good to add that stuff:

http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRM/Marketing+Materials
http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRM/CiviCRM+Training
http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRM/*+Meeting+recipes

And actually, we should probably look at tidying that up - there's definitley overlap between the last two.

Plus there might be other places on the wiki where people have deposited these kind of docs.