Earlier this month, we successfully launched our second cohort for advanced digital policy practitioners. These Cohorts are designed to complement our Emerging Leader Cohorts and address more advanced practices and topics, designed to align with the goals of more experienced practitioners. As with all our cohorts, our overall objective is to create a space where we collectively explore policy leadership themes, share our experience and knowledge, and work through policy challenges.
After the wind down of the conference, and sleeping off my red-eye flight back to Maine, now I’m a little nostalgic. Ah, the people, the knowledge, the horrible geek trivia… But to keep the momentum going, I thought I’d document the commitments I’ve made to move things forward – so at a minimum I’ll feel really guilty if I don’t follow through. We crystallized a number of initiatives that I’m excited about:
I'm here at the Nonprofit Software Development Summit and have been doing mostly logistics, however today I was able to attend a session facilitated by Laura Quinn of Idealware called "Gaps in Nonprofit Software" the notes from the session can be found here.
It was an exciting discussion for me because the first twenty minutes or so we discussed gaps in back-end office software (or what I call nonprofit operations software) specifically:
The community-building activities at the start of the Summit revealed a surprising diversity of opinions within the npdev community. What most surprised me is that there's mixed opinions about whether nonprofits are ideologically obligated to support open-source software. My own thought is that social entrepreneurship will take off in the tech sector, and there will be successful nonprofit businesses that promote and develop open-source software that is just as reliable and usable as any proprietary software: ethical dilemma solved.
The final preparations of the summit are underway at Aspiration - nametags, folders, lunch orders; Gunner sent out an updates and reminder email earlier this afternoon; check out the final agenda. I am interested in quite a few sessions, some of which are in simultaneous tracks; choosing is going to be difficult. Not too bad though, irrespective, it is going to be interesting and a learning experience - moreover, I can always share/swap session notes with the other attendees. Looking forward to it!
