CiviCRM Training Camps in London: A report back

Last week Kurund, Michael, Mari, Xavier and I spent 2 days in the UK training camp and 1 day at the user camp. We had a great turnout at both camps with a 18 participants in the training camp and 8 participants in the user camp.

Training Camp
The training camp was held over two days. Similar to our other campsthis was also in an unconference format. The topics were decided by the participants and we split the day up into 5 sessions on both the days. Some takeaways from the user meetup:

• The UK NGO's rely more on government funding than on donations.
• Reporting and managing gift aid is important. We sketched out an implementation and a custom report for this on the wiki. More code on this coming soon
• Folks were quite excited about CiviReport and the reporting framework.
• Quite a few discussions on effectively supporting multi-org installations (n drupal installs, 1 shared civicrm db)
• A good discussion on how to make CiviCRM get around the "not built for UK (insert your favorite country here)" discussion. At some point in the future we should set better defaults given the installation country rather than only one set of defaults worldwide.
• How to extend and modify CiviCRM via hooks was a popular topic. We definitely need to post more examples and add even more support for this in future versions.

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