I landed in the midst of a regional tornado warning for the 2012 Grants Managers Network Conference, where we were grateful to be invited by our friends at Mitchell Kapor Foundation to share Aspiration’s take on how Foundations think about using the so-called cloud in a session titled What Cloud Computing Can Do For You and Your Grantees.

The slides don’t fully reflect the concerns that were discussed in the session. Great questions led to back-and-forth about appropriate levels of distrust for corporate cloud storage and ulterior motives of for-profit entities providing free and cheap cloud offerings to 501c3 organizations.

A huge thanks to Tiffany Price at Kapor and the whole GMN Conference team for inviting us to be a part of the fun!

Have a look at the slideware and let me know what you think!

I’ve been following the online discourse (e.g. NTEN-DISCUSS, Information Systems Forum, Progressive Exchange and Nonprofit SalesForce) around Blackbaud’s announced acquisition of Convio.

As some express optimism and positive spin about that merger, I feel the need to speak up on behalf of the organizations and activists we serve. Please pardon me if I sound a tad strident, these thoughts have been years in the making.

It was a blast to be in Berlin at the start of February participating in Transmediale.11 with great friends from Mozilla Drumbeat and FLOSSManuals. I helped to facilitate sessions on Strategies of Political Participation and Open Activism, and slowed down long enough to opine about obfuscating personal data in the cloud.

Hot off the presses, our end-of-year newsletter is yours for the clicking. In this edition:

• Nonprofit Software Dev Summit Caps a Rich Year of Events
• eAdvocacy Mentoring and Capacity Building Enters 4th year
• Help Us Test the Answr Platform
• New Aspiration Book: Open Translation Tools
• Doing Our Part to Create Better Tools and Resources

And if you didn’t receive the newsletter by email, please consider joining our mailing list. It’s low-volume and targeted at people who care about improving the state of software for social change.

Our friend and colleague Laura Quinn at Idealware reviewed twenty-seven lower-priced online software tools that accept donations from an existing website. She found that many affordable tools are also powerful, friendly, and flexible. She offers in the report recommendations for high-quality tools, as well as a method to choose the right tool for you.  View the report 

Great work, Laura!