Developers and Activists Gather for AdvocacyDev II

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Katrin Verclas
Aspiration
413-687-9877 or 413-884-0094
katrin@aspirationtech.org
www.aspirationtech.org

Developers and Activists Gather for AdvocacyDev II: Open Source Software for Campaigns, Advocacy and Mobilization

San Francisco, California, July 7, 2005 -- Aspiration, a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting better software for a better world, is convening programmers and activists developing free and open source advocacy tools to share skills and knowledge at the second annual Advocacy Developers Convergence. AdvocacyDev II will take place in Oakland, California on July 11-13, 2005 – www.advocacydev.org

AdvocacyDev II features innovative grassroots applications and web tools used for getting out campaign messages and engaging citizens in civic and political action.

Allen Gunn, co-director of Aspiration, says, “As the activism in the Ukraine, in the Philippines, and many other countries show, cell phone text messaging, internet telephony, RSS syndication, blogging, and podcasting continue to change the way people and organizations interact with their governments and make their political and advocacy voices heard. There is a plethora of free and open source tools available for organizations and citizen groups to be involved more easily and cheaply than ever before.”

Activists and programmers from the United States, Malaysia, the Phillipines, Thailand, Canada, and Europe are expected to attend. Projects participating include Civicspace Labs (www.civicspacelabs.org), CiviCRM (www.openngo.org), Activist Mobilization Platform (www.radicaldesigns.org), the Association for Progressive Communications (www.apc.org), Advokit (www.advokit.org), Audio Activism (www.audioactivism.org), and Democracy in Action (www.democracyinaction.org), among others.

Participants will map the state of free and open source advocacy software, assess database tools for social change organizations, and take stock of promising technologies including audio blogging and cell phone text messaging. At the forefront of these efforts are open source developers and campaigners from all over the world who are building tools from the bottom up, lowering the barriers to entry for activism and towards greater democratic interactions.

Katrin Verclas, co-director of Aspiration, says, “The possibilities for ‘people power,’ technologically enabled, have never been this great.” The license stipulations of free and open source software can save organizations money; open source software can be shared and freely distributed as well as customized and adapted to meet specific technology nonprofit and activist needs.

About Aspiration: Aspiration, www.aspirationtech.org, connects nonprofit organizations with software solutions that help them better carry out their work. We want nonprofit organizations to obtain and use the best software to maximize their effectiveness and impact so that they, in turn, can change the world. We identify what is available and what is missing in NGO software arena, and foster relationships, delivery systems, and sustainability strategies between NGOs around the world.

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"Where the why meets the how. Where the doers of the work that matters work to do better."

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