CRM API team charter

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It's extremely unlikely that there will ever be "A CRM" for Drupal because there are so many different perspectives on what that means: Is it a sales pipeline tool? A call center tool? A nonprofit management tool? Business to Business? Even the letters CRM mean different things! However, several concepts and data models are consistent across all CRM solutions. By working to identify overlap, the Drupal community can minimize duplication of effort on "core crm" functionality, while permitting the flexibility to implement industry-specific solutions.

The CRM API team is a loose collection of developers working on CRM solutions for Drupal. These developers are working on separate projects that serve their current needs, audiences and timelines. However, in the interest of long-term sustainability and growth; each developer has agreed to participate in an ongoing communication process to provide updated status information and to identify possible areas of collaboration. This charter describes the goals and communication process of this group of CRM developers.

CRM API Team Goals

What problems are we trying to solve?

  • Identify "least common denominators" for all/most CRM systems: specific entity types and features that must be present
  • Define a common language for terms and concepts that are common.
  • Prevent duplicate effort as a result of not knowing what other developers are building.
  • Provide end users and developers with opportunities to weigh in appropriate ways.
  • Provide clear and information on the current "state of CRM" for the Drupal community at large.
  • Identify and eliminate barriers to communication and productivity for CRM delveopment.

What problems are we NOT trying to solve?

  • Duplicate effort due to differing opinions, timelines, or requirements.
  • Building a specific module or product. Individual developers and teams are working on this separately.
  • Specifically define how something a feature should be implemented.
  • Defining what can/should/will be part of any CRM solution for Drupal.
  • Becoming a support venue for "getting a feature into CRM" or answering questions about what it will include

Why don't you all just converge and work on one project?

We have attempted to do that in the past and it has not worked yet. There are differing visions, oppinions, timescales etc amongst the developers that it is simply not practical to fully converge on everything at the moment. So instead we decided on these regular meet ups so that conversation can still take place. It is possible that we may converge at some point in the future if that would work, however it is also possible that there will forever exist slightly diverging crm projects that can interoperate.

Participants, time commitments, and responsibilities

  • Allie Micka: Interested in working on a general API and common process, dedicating at least 15 hours per month through 2011.
  • James Abrahams (Yautja_Cetanu): Particularly interested in CRM used to help churches. As a non-techie person spends most of his time with documentation, organising the meetings and keeping in contact with the various people involved. Dedicating every friday to CRM with rlmumford.
  • Rob Mumford (rlmumford): Primarily works with the party module. Dedicating every friday to CRM with James Abrahams.
  • Joachim Noreiko: Primarily works with the party module. Dedicating time on an ad hoc basis.
  • Kyle Cunningham (CitizenKane): Works with Trellon working on his entity based CRM system.
  • Yan Loetzer (yanniboi): Working with Rob Mumford and Jamie Abrahams on CRM related stuff. (Relatively) New to Drupal but committing increasing amounts of time on this project.
  • Your Name, Your interest/project, Your time commitment

Communications

IRC

The CRM API group meets in #drupal-crm on irc.freenode.net.

Regular Skype call

There is a regularly-scheduled Skype call every two weeks. At the end of each call, notes will be posted and an event and agenda will be posted on groups.drupal.org/crm-api for the next call. To join the call, enter the IRC channel and let us know your Skype handle so that you can be included.

A loose agenda for each 30 minute call includes:

  • Status update from each of the developers: what have you been working on since the last meeting. Any progress? Any hurdles?
  • Followup on action items set during the previous meeting
  • Identify discussions of note from the CRM and the CRM-API groups: What decisions have been made there? What needs further discussion?
  • Set goals/action items for the next 2 weeks

Everyone is welcome to listen in, but please remember that this is mostly a status update for developers who are working on CRM solutions. It is not an appropriate forum to ask for specific features or support. Please remember that most of our productivity thus far has come from listening to what each other has to say, and not from telling people what they need to do.

It may be necessary or desirable to speak in person about more "in the weeds" topics. Ideally try to offline these to separate calls, discussions or meetings so that we can keep the check in meetings short and sweet. We will aim to strictly keep to 30 minutes for our agenda. However it is possible we may continue with non-essential technical discussion after the meeting which most people could leave.

Drupal working groups

Most of the technical discussions and decisions will appear in the CRM API group. End user input is welcome on these discussions, but also in the CRM group. Developers are encouraged to join both groups.

DrupalCon

We will organize a BoF for end users at Denver and subsequent DrupalCons. We will organize a code sprint for developers on code sprint day of each DrupalCon. Everyone is encouraged to attend, time/budget permitting.

CRM API

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