Partner & Contributor Program Improvements
Partners and contributors are vital to the sustainability and improvement of CiviCRM. Though programs exist to "incentivize/reward" partner and contributor support, these harve largely remained unchanged for several years. The purpose of this item is to consider revisions/improvements to the programs in order to 1) benefit participants more and 2) foster ecosystem growth.
These are the notes from the Partner call of 4/19/18.
- More structure to help drive the project
- Open source, but people get upset when things go wrong - commercial code expectations from an open source project
- we get a lot - support, sales leads, recognition in the community
- Feeling more bugs in last six months than any time in recent history
- quality of leads an issue - geographic based? more word of mouth
- want more stability in the code base (minimal requirement)
- way to give back
- decision to use Civi is preceded by decision to use open source
- stable extension ecosystem - where do extensions fit in?
- lack of structure makes it hard to know where to plug in in terms of working on the product - need more connection between partner membership / leadership and the product development
- excited about governance summit
- who's making the buying decisions at nonprofits is changing - now more marketing / fundraising driven than technology driven
- Josh - point of governance summit is to put together a unified voice about what the product needs, and what partners need
- Core Team is a b2b enterprise that needs to support the partners in delivering CiviCRM
- we don't focus enough about how the product can improve, as well as comparing to other products
- partners don't spend enough time testing
- more comprehensive road map
- more active role for CT in managing the product management process