We continued our collaborative love affair with the Joomla! Project at Joomla! Day West 2010, held at eBay Town Hall.

The event focused on building knowledge about Joomla!, a GPL-licensed content management system which is proving increasingly popular for publishing nonprofit web sites.

The event brought together members of the Joomla! Leadership Teams, and board members from Open Source Matters, along with over 150 members of the Joomla! community to talk about all things Joomla!, including the upcoming 1.6 release, template and extension design, business models, and plenty of participant-driven sessions. Aspiration employed our collaborative event methodology to drive a fast-paced agenda focused on knowledge sharing, interactivity and community building.

We also had the pleasure of facilitating Product Leadership Team meetings before and after the event. Thanks to the whole amazing Joomla! posse for inviting us along for the fun.

Open Plans was the host with the most as we partnered with the Participatory Culture Foundation to convene the first-ever Open Subtitles Design Summit at the Open Plans penthouse meeting space in New York City.

Held as part of the Universal Subtitles project, the event brought together a broad array of people passionate about making video subtitling technologies more open and accessible. Outcomes included a Quality Manifesto and an inventory of subtitle formats. The event wiki chronicled the proceedings, and those interested in following the project can join the Event and Best Practices discussion lists as participants follow up on the 30-day and 12-month plans generated at the Summit.

It was an honor and a pleasure to collaborate with the fine folks at PCF, who summarized the outcomes in a fine blog post. We really salute their leadership and vision in building a broad-based coalition of stakeholders to move the open subtitles field forward. The event was generously supported the Open Society Institute.

In the latest chapter of our ongoing collaboration with the United States Institute of Peace, we traveled to DC to run the first-ever Open Simulation Platform Conference.

The Open Simulation Platform is a new and state-of-the-art open source learning platform for teaching conflict resolution. Based on an interactive role-playing paradigm, the platform lets instructors author multi-user role-playing simulations and then run them in synchronous or asynchronous learning environments. This disruptive technology will provide an open alternative to expensive and proprietary simulation tools which have historically been the norm in the field.

The event was structured as a simulation authoring sprint, with a dozen sims created over the course of 3 fun and collaborative days of work.

We had a blast collaborating with USIP, Partners for Democratic Change and Positive Relating to pull the event together. And we look forward to OSPCon II in 2011!

In the fertile foothills of Palo Alto, California, we enjoyed the opportunity to partner with Peer 2 Peer University and host their first-ever Open Assessment Workshop, an intimate meeting of educators on the leading edge of open assessment.

The workshop focused on how P2PU and other innovators in online education could best apply learnings from various models for assessment and reputation modeling in order to certify learners in P2PU online courses and other virtual learning domains. Event proceedings were captured on the wiki, and a mailing list was established for ongoing collaboration.

The event was generously hosted by The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching at their headquarters. We look forward to working further with P2PU in Barcelona at their annual meeting as well as at the Mozilla Drumbeat Festival.

The LearnPhilanthropy Symposium brought together invited leaders from across the country who represent the stakeholder organizations in grantmaker education and learning, ranging from the learners themselves to those who develop, provide, present, or invest in grantmaker education.

We were excited to be part of the amazing team that planned and facilitated the event.

The LearnPhilanthropy Initiative is bringing people together to create a stronger, more rational, and less fragmented system for grantmaker learning than exists today — one that builds a new culture of professional development in the field, works better for the individual learners involved in philanthropy, and better for the many groups and organizations that provide learning programs and resources. Aspiration is providing technology leadership as the project continues into its second phase.

Aspiration Executive Director Allen Gunn was delighted to speak at the 2010 Annual Conference of the Forum of Regional Associations of Grantmakers, on one of his favorite topics, Effective Social Media Workflow.