I’m giving another introductory talk on CiviCRM at this year’s Drupaldelphia. In the past year, there have been some noteworthy developments for CiviCRM. Let’s start with some of the basics.

What is CiviCRM?

Well, with a spiffy new website, you can learn all about it at civicrm.org. Short answer is that it is an open source constituent relationship management system. It’s a tool to help manage information and connections with different types of contacts an organization may have. It can be configured to do mass emailing, take online donations, sell tickets and manage events, and much more!

Next weekend is looking pretty great. Philadelphia’s annual Drupal conference will be happening again at Temple University on Friday, June 22. And, Friday and Saturday PyStar Philly will be having another intro to python class for women and their friends. Plus! Saturday is a Drupal core code sprint and Mozilla’s Summer Code Party.

Whew. Busy weekend of some excellent learning and sharing opportunities. I’ll be presenting a session about CiviCRM for nonprofits again this year at Drupaldelphia. Feedback welcome on helpful Civi stuff to cover. And, I’ll be an instructor at the PyStar Philly class. Look forward to learning and connecting with folks!

This Saturday is the annual BarCamp News Innovation event at Temple University. This year, I’ll be participating as a judge of the Open Gov “News” Hackathon. I appreciate being asked to judge the hackathon and look forward to seeing what awesome mobile tools the teams of coders and journalists conjure up Saturday.

I’ve been to BCNI for a few years, and it’s always been a great chance to learn and catch up with folks. In particular, it’s been a way to see how much of a leader Philadelphia is in the news innovation community. People from up and down the East Coast (and sometimes farther!) come to Philly. We get to learn together, and Philly gets a chance to showcase the variety of nonprofit, community-based, ethnic, traditional, and other journalism efforts that it supports.

An exclamation of glee appeared on the #nicar12 Twitter stream last night. Thanks to Derek Willis (no, really, thank you!) dozens of journalists from the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting 2012 conference descended on the City Museum in St. Louis.

Today, I tried to figure out how to explain what made last night so friggin incredible. First, the museum is amazing. It’s pure fun. I realized that the museum also echoes many of the things that can happen in amazing newsrooms.

This month’s Carnival of Journalism asks what emerging technology will have a major impact on journalism next? Within the setup for this prompt is the answer: People. Changes in leadership and culture is the emerging technology that will allow those amazing new tools and opportunities to be fully utilized.

Host Steve “In” Outing says it himself:

“Who’s to blame? The answer is clear to me: Journalists and those who manage news organizations. Our industry and profession didn’t act quickly or aggressively enough to adapt to the way that new technologies would change journalism.”

What is the deal with the nonprofit news model? I think about this a lot and have plenty of different answers, but in considering it recently, my first reaction was emotional: It’s about being a part of a community.

Growing up, the publication I remember most clearly around our house was ​People​ magazine. The most talked about paper was probably the Chilton school newspaper (I kid, I kid). We read the local paper (I delivered it for four years) and watched the news, but life was not organized around the news cycle.

Do we make good journalism to support capitalism or to support our communities? Do we write to support the bottom lines of an increasingly consolidated group of corporate media conglomerates, or do we write to engage and inform our communities?

This month’s Carnival of Journalism prompt, “Can a good journalist be a good capitalist?” reminded me of conversations that followed a recent conference in Philly. The Center for Public Interest Journalism brought together journalists and citizen media makers for a conversation on “Engaging Communities.” During a session on citizen-produced media, panelists described how to engage citizens in the production of media. They also discussed an important underlying question: Why do citizens make media?

ProPublica, already a leader in investigative nonprofit news, announced the News Applications Fellowship today. This is huge. It is specifically targeted at journalists with an interest in, and facility for, becoming app developers. ProPublica will mentor the fellow and teach him/her how to build apps as a way of testing a hypothesis: “Can a smart, technical journalist with excellent and proven skills in other nerdy newsroom disciplines like graphics and CAR become a news app developer?” I can’t think of another opportunity like this, which is targeted at the journalist side of the hacker-journalist hybrid.

The new version of CiviCRM includes support for Drupal 6 and 7, and for the first time, WordPress.The version is still in beta, but continued support for Drupal 6 is an enormous relief.

Just a few months ago a make it happen project extended support for updates for Drupal 6 through March 2012. Even that extension would have required us to upgrade our Drupal 6 site immediately. For us, and  many other small nonprofit clients who love and rely on CiviCRM, a required upgrade right away would have been extremely difficult. Heck, some organizations are just moving from Drupal 5, and the much-delayed release of Drupal 7 made it difficult to plan when to do an upgrade anyway.

Hacks/Hackers Philadelphia participated in its first hackathon, with Random Hacks of Kindness, and learned that preparation and passionate team leaders can develop projects that continue beyond a fun, frenzied weekend.

Well before that December weekend, RHoK Philly organizer Michael Brennan reached out to Hacks/Hackers Philadelphia to see if we’d be interested in participating in the hackathon. At the November HHPHL meetup, Mike presented on RHoK and the group brainstormed some ideas. Two ideas gained traction in the discussion and had point people interested in building a team to work on the project.