In the back row, starting from the left, you are looking at Dave Greenberg (San Francisco, USA), Kyle Jaster (NY, USA), Xavier Dutoit (Geneva, Switzerland and Brussels, Belgium), Kurund Jalmi (Mumbai, India), Michael McAndrew (London, UK), Wes Morgan (Washington DC, USA) , Josue Guillen (DC, USA). T he front row from the left is Jack Aponte (NY, USA), Mari T ilos (San Francisco, USA), Sarah Gladstone (Chicago, USA), and Alice Aguilar (NY, USA).
FIRST EDITION T he first edition of manual was written during a five-day book sprint also organised by CiviCRM and led by FLOSS Manuals. T he sprint was also sponsored by the Information Program initiative of the Open Society Institute (http://www.soros.org/initiatives/information), and again, we are especially grateful to Janet Haven for pushing this forward. Having secured sponsorship, the CiviCRM Core team invited a group of people from around the globe to gather for a week at Lake T ahoe in California. T he modest goal was to transform our diverse experience of CiviCRM into a manual that we hope will help people to use this great piece of software. T his turned out to be an interesting, and at times difficult, challenge. T he following photo shows the people who wrote this book.
In the back row you are looking at Michael McAndrew (London, UK), T ony Guzman (Salt Lake City, USA), Brian Shaughnessy (Albany, NY, USA), Dave Greenberg (San Francisco, USA), Yashodha Chaku (Mumbai, India) and Adam Hyde (Berlin, Germany). In the front row are Mari T ilos (San Francisco, USA), Cynthia T arascio (Philadelphia, USA), Michal Mach (Warsaw, Poland) and Peter Davis (Wellington, New Zealand). In the very front is Eileen McNaughton (Wellington, New Zealand). We came from different backgrounds, had used CiviCRM in different ways, and had worked with very different organisations. It was often a challenge to meld these perspectives into a cohesive whole, but we hammered away at it and we think this made for a better book. We had some lively discussions about important issues, such as whether there is a "z" or an "s" in organis/zation or a "q" in check/que, and finally agreed to use both spellings in the spirit of internationalism. We also struggled with the word "constituent", which is core to the non-profit sector in America but was unfamiliar to those of us from outside America. It was been a pretty intense five days. Adam (our friendly Floss manuals taskmaster) kept us realistic, on track, and hard at work - even hauling us back to work after dinner each evening. Overall it was both fun and productive and we really appreciate the way Adam has helped us to actually produce a book within a week. T hank you.
313