  About this ManualThis manual was written during a 5 day Book Sprint organised by CiviCRM and led by FLOSS Manuals. The sprint was sponsored by the Information Program initiative of the Open Society Institute http://www.soros.org/initiatives/information). 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 Tahoe in California. The 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. This turned out to be an interesting, and at times difficult, challenge. Here are the people that wrote this book.
In the back row you are looking at Michael McAndrew (London, UK), Tony 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 Mari Tilos (San Francisco, USA), Cynthia Tarascio (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 has been a pretty intense five days. Adam (our friendly Floss manuals taskmaster) has kept us realistic, on track, and hard at work - even hauling us back to work after dinner each evening. Overall it has been both fun and productive and we really appreciate the way Adam has helped us to actually produce a book within a week. Thank you. For most of us, however, the highlight of the week has been the breathtaking cuisine cooked by Jill Klein (http://www.partiesthatcook.com/about-us/). We love you Jill and wish we could take you home with us. We are also grateful to Dave Greenberg, Bob Concannon and Mari Tilos for their hospitality, and to Scout the dog just for being there.
We have had help from around the world during the preparation process, and over the course of the Sprint. Andy Oram has helped us both in the planning process and then with editing and feedback during the Sprint. We also had a number of people log in to write and edit the manual during the Sprint. They include Robert Santiago, Xavier Dutoit, Joe Murray, Sarmeesha Reddy, Jay Maechtlen, Dream Gomez, Leila Johnson, Duncan Hutty, and Kurund Jalmi.
Our office for the week was Dave and Bob's house.
We mitigated the hardship of late-night work with some tasty beverages.
And occasionally they let us out for a bit....
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