CiviCRM HR-Book-Code Sprints - Final Report to OSI for August 2011 Sprint

Summary

On August 22nd, CiviCon happened in London, with 90+ attendees from 15 countries. There were several sessions at the conference focused on using CiviCRM for Human Rights work as well as for grass-roots organizing and advocacy.

Immediately after the conference, a group of community members and guests moved to Cawthorpe, where we’ve run 8 days of sprints focused around improving usability, adding functionality as well as working on CiviCRM documentation (book sprint with Floss Manuals). One of the goals for the series of meetings was to get people working with HR issues in South America involved with the CiviCRM community and start communication between these two groups. We had 3 people attending the CiviCon conference and User and Administrator Training, and one person working with us on a “CiviCRM for Human Rights Organisations” guide during the book sprint. We also had a group of employees from Amnesty International at the training.

Through conversations with practitioners and research on existing tools (done in preparation for putting together first draft of “CiviCRM for Human Rights Organisations” book) we came up with a set of initial recommendations and ideas for further promotion of CiviCRM software among human rights organisations (see below).

Events highlights

• The CiviCRM book (http://en.flossmanuals.net/civicrm/) went through a major update regarding functionality introduced during the past year. The most significant additions cover functionality suitable for advocacy work: CiviCampaign, CiviPetition and CiviSurvey. The book can be read online, downloaded for offline consumption and ordered in a bound printed book format. We believe it is a strong knowledge source for many organisations including those working in human rights field.

• A completely new book - “CiviCRM Developer Guide”  - has been created. Some materials previously included in the user-oriented book were extracted, and then supplemented with lots of new material.

• During the book sprint, we started work on a third book: “CiviCRM for Human Rights Organisations” (http://booki.flossmanuals.net/civicrm-for-human-rights-organisations/_edit/), which is intended as a compact but comprehensive guide for organisations working in human rights field - introducing them to the advantages of using CiviCRM in their day-to-day work. A lot of research has been done, comparing CiviCRM functionality with existing HR-oriented tools (Martus and OpenEvSys by Huridocs), and gathering information about human rights work specific workflows. The new book covers both advantages and caution points when it comes to making decisions about using CiviCRM in specific fields of work. Development of this book will be continued over the next few weeks to make the guide release-ready, with the plan to make it public at the beginning of 2012.

• The code and book sprints brought together a diverse group of CiviCRM developers, users and integrators. This gave the core team an opportunity to look at CiviCRM from a big picture user lens and hence see some of the shortcomings that are now targeted to be addressed in future releases. Having human rights work as a significant conversation aspect during all 3 events created a diverse set of input points.

• A number of improvements to CiviCase - the CiviCRM component currently used most extensively by human rights oriented users - were discussed, designed and implemented during code sprint, including:

• Substantial performance optimizations were made to the CiviCase dashboard which provides one-stop access to cases with upcoming and recently completed tasks.
• Case records can now be extended with user-defined custom fields. This enhancement was requested by several HR organizations as well as other CiviCase users.
• We simplified the process of "trying out" the case management feature set by eliminating configuration steps which were previously required before users could work with sample cases.
• Allowed new contact / client records to created "on the flow" while defining relationships (applicable to both case work and other CRM tasks).

Human Rights work and CiviCRM - conclusions

If we wanted to create a definition of human rights oriented work, it would probably be very broad and involve many different kinds of tactics and activities. CiviCRM, being a platform integrating many different tools can certainly help with putting most of them into practice. Having only limited amount of time and assuming that common advocacy workflows (knowing organisation’s constituency, engaging supporters via mailings, petitions, surveys, canvassing, etc) will not significantly differ from workflows common in other types of organisations, we focused only on two kinds of activity that we believe are specific to human rights organisations. First one is monitoring and documenting human rights abuses, second is spreading information about such abuses and getting the word out to large groups of supporters in order to mobilise them to take action.

Our discussions ended with the conclusion, that main CiviCRM advantage for human rights organisations is combining data on abuse and on advocacy/word spreading information in one database and being able to easily analyse information about correlation between them. We would like to plan for investigating such usage scenario with human rights practitioners, like we already do with Front Line Defenders at the moment.

Because of (not always, but often) highly sensitive nature of human rights work, we spent significant amount of time discussion potential disadvantages and risks of using CiviCRM. Main caution point (and practically the only one) was data security, especially in case of some types of human rights abuse documentation work. CiviCRM as a project, not being strictly dedicated for sensitive human rights work, doesn’t put the same amount of stress on security features as other projects do (like Martus, where security is one of main focus points). CiviCRM provides possibility to store data in very secure way, but it requires certain level of expertise to implement and is not offered out-of-the-box. In situations where gathered information is highly sensitive, it’s advised to use CiviCRM as strictly backend database (through specific system installation procedure) and use separate CiviCRM instance (not containing sensitive data) for public facing advocacy activities. However, having two databases with data structured in the same way, it’s relatively easy to combine information available in both of them (in yet another secure installation) strictly for data analysis purposes and achieve the advantages mentioned earlier.

Another interesting discussion around data security happened during “CiviCRM and human rights work” session at CiviCon. One of the participants mentioned working on “cloud based” hosting solution (allowing to host CiviCRM among other tools), where users has full control over geographical location of their data, hence allowing them to choose legislative jurisdiction for their data. Common understanding during the discussion was that such functionality might be both interesting and useful for many human rights organisations.

Another discussion point during multiple conversations was comparison with other tools available. Organisations working on documenting human rights violations incidents often have their own way of structuring information and have specific requirements about what kind of data is gathered. We reviewed other great recommendations for both data structure and incident categorisation (like OpenEvSys or Martus), and also discussed how organisations develop their own, customised systems to record information in the way that is most relevant and effective in the context they work in. The conclusion from this part of discussion was clearly stating, that throughout our promotion of CiviCRM as human rights oriented tool, we should be very clear and open about existing alternatives and always expose our understanding of strengths and weaknesses of CiviCRM in comparison to these other tools - therefore making it easier for user organisations to make conscious and informed decisions about which tool to use, based on specific requirements.

Final conclusions about further steps were:

• at the beginning of 2012 we plan to release “CiviCRM for human rights organisations” book
• we will continue promoting CiviCRM as both advocacy tool and case management tool for human rights organisations
• further investigation (looking for partners and projects) will be made for evaluating CiviCRM as human rights abuse documentation system
• we will work on increasing prominence of CiviCRM in South America through newly established relationships with Abril Rocabert from Alternativas y Capacidades, Juan Casanueva of Telar Social and Mario Roset from Wingu. Even though Huridocs people didn’t make it to our events, we hope to continue our conversation with them about their use of CiviCRM.

Additional reading

The series of blog posts about book sprint:
http://civicrm.org/category/civicrm-blog-categories/civicrm-book-sprint

The series of blog posts about code sprint:
http://civicrm.org/category/civicrm-blog-categories/civicrm-code-sprint

Budget Details (all amounts USD)

Note: Because of HURIDOCS representative resignation from travel to CiviCRM events and Abril Rocabert’s travel expenses being lower than originally expected, we shifted part of the travel budget to supplement Flossmanuals.net fee.

Other Financial Highlights

• More than 1,500 combined hours were spent on improving the project during the sprint
• Participants spent more than USD 30,000 of their own funds on expenses related to the sprint.
• Additional food, housing and travel expenses were covered by the proceeds of CiviCon.
• The CiviCRM foundation gave an additional grant of $3,750 to FlossManuals.net

Participant information

• Dave Greenberg - CiviCRM Core Team
• Alice Aguilar - Progressive Technology Project
• Robyn Perry - Progressive Technology Project
• Yashodha Chaku - CiviCRM Core Team
• Abril Rocabert - Alternativas y Capacidades
• Helen Varley Jamieson - FlossManuals
• Michal Mach - CiviCRM Core Team
• Peter McAndrew - Third Sector Design
• Tim Otten - Athlete Relationship Management Software (ARMS)
• Dave Jenkins - Circle Interactive
• Eileen McNaughton - Fuzion
• Erik Brouwer - EE@Work
• Dave Moreton - Circle Interactive
• Xavier Dutoit - Tech To The People
• Dave Dantowitz - Physician Health Program British Columbia
• Dominik Lukeš - Dyslexia Action
• Kurund Jalmi - CiviCRM Core Team
• Jamie Mcclelland - Progressive Technology Project
• Donald Lobo - CiviCRM Core Team
• Adam Hyde - FlossManuals
• Michael McAndrew - Third Sector Design