Good news. CiviCRM – the long-awaited, open source, web-based contact management database – has been released! It is still in beta, which means everything isn’t guaranteed to work perfectly. You can check it out at OpenNGO, where they have a “sandbox” where you can play around with the latest version without hurting anything.

This release is a good first step. In the future this software will incorporate tools like CivicSpace and others that will enable a wide range of interaction between organizations and their supporters. I’m especially interested in seeing the integration of advocacy tools like Democracy in Action.

Here’s one neat-o thing that CiviCRM does right now: integration with Google maps!