CiviCRM 2007 Goals

This is a draft outline of plans and goals for the project for 2007.

Overall Goals for CiviCRM in 2007

Documentation: Incorporate good detailed documentation in the form of tutorial / manual / podcast / screencast / online help as part of each release.
Usability: Engage with UX experts to guide us in improving and simplifying the product. Incorporate usability design and testing as part of each release
Stability: Incorporate both unit tests, functional tests and load tests as part of each release. This should help reduce the number of minor releases per major release.
Release Scheduling: Formalize the release process and probably split releases into developer and user releases. Continue with release early, release often scheme.
Financial Model: Increase and diversify current income stream.

Continue supporting the community via email lists. The goal is to have 90% of all emails answered in less than 48 hours. Encourage folks in the community to step up and support each other.
Introduce centralized support via forums (currently only available for Joomla users).
Grow the community by more marketing and outreach, with particular focus on increasing international adoption.
Support deployment of CiviCRM via hosting providers and ASP's, and initiate regular interaction between professional services providers and the CiviCRM project team.

Goal: Raise $300K
Increase the number of consulting projects to five in 2007 (up from two in 2006). Increase consulting revenue to $200K
Obtain one major new foundation grant for $100K

Focus on the value added components: CiviMail, CiviContribute, CiviMember, CiviEvent and CiviReport and take them to the next level.
Productise and deploy the Branner Project for other similar applications (school applications, scholarships etc)
Add support for common NPO processes and workflows including duplicate detection and merging, and householding.
Simplify / automate the installation process for basic (single-site) installs.
Provide easier mechanisms for customizing core screens (e.g. contact view and edit).

Incorporate dojotoolkit across all aspects of CiviCRM. Migrate CiviCRM to a more desktop-like interface.
Incorporate and automate Selenium, Grinder and SimpleTest tests as part of each release.
Focus on reducing memory footprint, optimize the core to make it leaner / meaner. Ideally the software can handle smaller datasets efficiently in a typical shared hosting environment, and can scale to handle very large datasets with dedicated server(s) .