I got to spend one day at CiviCRM developer camp this week. Unfortunately, it came after 4 long days of conferencing, after many exhausting days of work, so I wasn't at my peak. But I learned a lot, and thought I'd share some of what I took away from that day. First, the core team shared some of the new stuff coming out in version 2.3, and it is awe-some. One of the major reasons CiviCRM gets dinged as a CRM/DMS is that it doesn't have reports. Well, that problem is about to go away with the release of CiviReport in 2.3. There will be a number of canned reports, and some really nice ways to create reports. Plus charts! Yay! There were some pie charts, and regular bar charts. I don't have the new svn trunk of CiviCRM installed, otherwise, I'd show some screenshots, but it looked really nice. (I'll be installing CiviCRM from svn in the next week, and I'll probably blog more as 2.3 develops.) There are some really nice usability improvements coming up in 2.3 as well - to make the basic contact pages much easier to navigate. And there is a new menu system, which will make things a lot easier. And, for Drupal users, some sweet Views 2 and CCK integration. CiviEvent is getting waiting lists, registration approval, and user-modifiable registrations, and some other improvements. The Alpha of 2.3 should be out by July. I also learned about CiviCase, which is actually present in 2.2. I saw the example of it used for the Physician Health Program in Canada. It's quite good, and there are some useful docs to see it at work on the CiviCRM wiki. I'd love to find an organization, such as a small human services organization, in need of case management software, that could use CiviCase - it would be a great, and relatively inexpensive alternative to current offerings out there. And more organizations using CiviCRM for case management would help CiviCase get even better. I also dug into some of the internals and code of CiviCRM, and feel better equipped to start contributing more than ideas and feedback to the project.