Shaping the future of CiviCRM together - community spirit
We are just back from CiviCamp 2025 in Lunteren in the Netherlands. We’re buzzing from a week of inspiring conversations! So many incredible projects focussed on building tech for social good.
This time it was Rhi, Angie and Anil's turn to go; but in fact - over the years, all of our developers have taken part. Circle Interactive is a CiviCRM Gold Partner so we've been actively contributing to the project for most of it's 20 year history!
We joined developers, implementers, and non-profit leaders from around the world. The week was spent learning, sharing and enjoying time with the open-source community. Our team took part in hands-on training and joined in with development sprints, collaborating on new developments, contributing to the code and working together shaping the future development of CiviCRM. The conversations ranged from AI and automation to open-source collaboration and smarter data insight — all with one shared purpose: helping organisations make a bigger impact.
Our biggest takeaway? Staying connected to the community keeps us ahead of the curve, and that means our clients do too.
Also, gaining early knowledge and understanding of new features, and knowing the road ahead for CiviCRM gives us unique insight when we are developing our clients systems. We have already applied some of the new extensions showcased at CiviCon into our demo site, so you can try them out too. Attending these events means we ensure that our clients directly benefit from new knowledge and development.
Contributing to the conversation
Our own director, Dave Moreton led a session about secure uses of AI and how to keep data in-house which as you can imagine, sparked a lively discussion on the potential challenges and opportunities that AI presents for third sector organisations.
Another highlight was the inspiring keynote speech given by Emiel Brok - "Open by design, sovereign by choice" which delved into how building with open principles from the ground up naturally leads to greater digital sovereignty.
From Anil, our Dev team lead:
"It was great to see so many people giving their valuable time for a project that is still evolving, you can see the passion from the core team. Its a powerful community."
Themes and insights
Key topics explored throughout the week included:
Collaboration across the global community,
Innovation in Business Intelligence using SearchKit and Chart Kit,
WhatsApp integration and messaging tools,
AI in CiviCRM — how to take advantage of new capabilities responsibly.
Seeing the impact of the project
Agencies from around the world shared how they’re solving real world problems for non-profits. Seeing the real benefits to society that CiviCRM helps to deliver is so motivating for all those giving their time and energy to contribute to the CiviCRM project. The amazing work completed in these sprints really is for everyone’s benefit.
We are proud to sponsors of this years CiviCamp. Watch this space for more news about next chapter of CiviCRM!
