The kernel of my home office

I'm almost finished a big new CiviCRM import/installation that I've been working on for longer that I'd planned. That's pretty normal, and of course there were a number of things that should have been warnings: it's a huge mass of data from an established non-profit: more than 5000 constituents, more than 50,000 contributions, from more than 10 years. it's being imported from Raiser's Edge, the cadillac of desktop fundraising software. the clients are very attached to the detailed minutae they have accumulated about their constituents, all of which were faithfully entered into Raiser's Edge. After a round of a sample import and looking at what the data might look like in CiviCRM, we were able to whittle it down a little bit, but the last month I've been working on the big final import and have developed some techniques that I expect would be generally useful with big CiviCRM imports. Two Scripting Techniques For my first test import, I pulle

On Monday October 26th, I'll be at the "Open Source Showcase for Non-Profits" at the Centre for Social Innovation here in Toronto. The showcase is a low-cost event where members of the non-profit sector can learn about open source projects relevant to their work. I'm helping organize and will do some presentations as well. The idea came from Julian Egelstaff about a month ago, and he, Jane Zhang, Joe Murray, Reema Tarzi, and I met just a couple of weeks ago and have put it all together with remarkably little work. That's a tribute to the viability of the idea, the excellent organizing tools that are now available for such events, and the quality of the organizing committee. My own contribution was to set up a CiviCRM install with CiviEvents to do registration, which was impressively easier that I expected - part of my motivation was that I'd never set up a CiviEvents page, and now I'm not afraid of it anymore. So, visit the information page and registe