The California Endowment invited Aspiration down to Los Angeles to participate in a panel discussion on Social Media, Social Justice. The event was a wide-ranging dialog on how nonprofit organizations and campaigns can employ social media strategies to support social justice work and build healthy communities.

Gunner joined Chris Rabb of Afro-Netizen and Jessy Tolkan of Energy Action Coalition on the panel, which was moderated by Sloane Berrent of Causecast.

A video of the Q&A part of the event is available on the California Endowment web site.

Aspiration has published a paper entitled “Open Translation Tools: Disruptive Potential to Broaden Access to Knowledge”, documenting learnings and outcomes from the first-ever Open Translation Tools Convergence. The event brought together two passionate communities: those creating open source software tools to support translating open content, and those with a need for better tools to support translation of the open content they create.

In addition to the paper, participants were interviewed for the event video Voices From Open Translation 2007, sharing their views on the open translation movement, and reflecting on where they envision the field evolving in the future. In the 10-minute piece, developers and content creators discuss the mandates for open content and open source, and the natural marriage between the two communities of practice.

OTT07 participants also mapped out and categorized almost 50 open translation tools, and the results are now published using Aspiration’s Social Source Commons platform. Have a look, and if we missed any tools you know about, please add them!

Open Translation Tools 2007 was co-organized by Aspiration and Multimedia Institute (MI2), and was supported by the generosity of the Open Society Institute, with additional support provided by TechSoup.

Aspiration and NOSI announced today that NOSI will become a project of Aspiration (see press release).

Since 2003 NOSI has provided the nonprofit sector with information and education designed to help nonprofits leverage the benefits of using free and open source software (FOSS) in their work. As the author of the groundbreaking “Choosing and Using Free and Open Source Software: A Primer for Nonprofits,” NOSI provides nonprofit staff and decision-makers with both tools and information, allowing them to assess free and open source software’s capacity to support the needs of their organizations.

The merger will allow the two organizations to focus their collective energies on growing free and open source capacity in the nonprofit sector, working with developers, integrators, and end users. A number of open source tools, including the Firefox web browser, the CiviCRM platform, and a range of open source web publishing systems, have reached a state of maturity that makes them excellent options for nonprofits. But much work remains to be done in supporting the creation and sustainability of FOSS options in a number of other mission-critical software categories. Aspiration and NOSI welcome the challenge.

Matt Garcia joins Aspiration as Community Manager for our Social Source Commons platform. Matt will maintain the SSC blog, engage users to learn how we can enhance the system to better serve their needs, and oversee community outreach for the project, working with the rest of the team to make SSC a more valuable resource for those looking for nonprofit software.