Community and cooperation

As alluded to in the last section, CiviCRM is as much about a community of developers, integrators, implementers, administrators, and end users, as it is an off-the-shelf piece of software. The reason CiviCRM can be offered for free and has such a robust history of new features and new versions is because organizations and developers have supported it financially and through active code contributions.

Whether you intended to or not, when you began using CiviCRM you became part of that community. The more you get engaged in that community, the more opportunities you will have to grow, learn from, and contribute to the community. There are several ways to get more involved.

A growing way to learn about and share experiences with CiviCRM is local meet-ups. These relatively informal events generally include demonstrations of how people in an area are using CiviCRM, perhaps some technical discussion, and a chance to chat and ask questions. So far, there have been meet...