On Friday, December 15, ten Boston area community organizations attended an ODB workshop at the Democracy Center in Harvard Square.

You can see a few of the new screenshots from the software that we demoed by going to our Flickr page:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/organizersdb/

Groups attending the presentation were:

Alliance for Democracy
Boston Mobilization
Chelsea Green Space and Recreation
Community Dispute Resolution Center
Green Decade Cambridge
Latin American Health Institute
Louis D. Brown Peace Institute
New Entry Sustainable Farming Project
Statewide Harm Reduction Coalition (SHaRC)
Unitarian Universalist Church of Haverhill

The 2 hour session covered the basics of using ODB for organizing and fundraising. Rich Cowan of Organizers Collaborative and Lisa Goldstein of Boston Mobilization put the new 1.0.1 version through its paces!

This event was the first public ODB presentation since February, as we have focused on infrastructure for the project, thorough field testing, quality control, and two new features since that time. Four of the groups attending were existing ODB users and 6 were organizations considering ODB as a replacement for aging Access or Excel databases.

In related news, OC shipped the 1.0.1 version of ODB out to our testing crew. One tester, Lou Townsend of the Niagara Cultural Center in Niagara Falls, NY, reported that the upgrade from 1.0 went flawlessly and that he experienced no problems in the first few hours of testing.

A final 1.0.1 release is imminent; we are just waiting to complete a bit more documentation and obtain feedback from testers on the new thank you letter/form letter generation engine. Other testers include Eve Lyman, from Boston, Jim McElhinney, from New York, and Jon Falk, from Maine. Also, Marcia Butman, from Boston has been using an earlier version of 1.0.1 since August.