Penguin Day Austin
Penguin Day Austin took place on April 28, 2007 in Austin, TX.
Penguin Day Austin was co-organized by Aspiration, EFF-Austin, Polycot, and Gmeta.
Penguin Day Austin took place on April 28, 2007 in Austin, TX.
Penguin Day Austin was co-organized by Aspiration, EFF-Austin, Polycot, and Gmeta.
Aspiration was delighted to collaborate with Google in co-organizing two events focused on the Joomla! open source content management system.
Aspiration facilitated the Joomla! Core Team Summit, which took place May 8-11 and brought together 20 Joomla! Core Team members. The core team is distributed across the globe, and this was the first in-person meeting in over a year. The agenda combined visioning and team-building sessions with working group meetings to move the project forward on a range of fronts, all aimed at delivering Joomla! Version 1.5. The team enjoyed the righteous hospitality of Google, and lots of extracurricular fun was had by all.
Following the Core Team Summit, Joomla! Day USA West brought over 100 users, developers and service providers from across the western US together to share knowledge, meet other Joomla! community members, and collaborate in the Joomlasphere. The convergence followed the Aspiration event format, meaning that the community determined what was discussed, powerpoints were an endangered species, and nary a panel was seated. Joomla! Core Team members stood by to answer questions, offer insights and explain the exciting new Joomla! Version 1.5.
Aspiration thanks Google and Joomla! for inviting us to help out at such great events!
Aspiration convened a number of open data platforms to discuss how such technologies could better interoperate. Purple Wiki, Wagn, Wiser Earth, Craigslist Foundation, Radical Designs AMP, and Social Source Commons shared their respective data models and information architectures, and brainstormed use cases for the how the various platforms might share data.
Salesforce.com Foundation invited Aspiration to design and facilitate a summit meeting of developers and users of the Salesforce.com Nonprofit Template.
The goals of this convening were to:
New and experienced implementors, developers, users, administrators, and consultants were encouraged to attend and lend their perspective to the proceedings.
iCommons and The Shuttleworth Foundation invited Aspiration to co-design and lead facilitation of the Open Education Track at the 2007 iSummit. The track was designed as a loosely integrated collection of sessions with a common focus on how to bring the commons model and philosophy into education. Sessions used participatory, interactive methods to support a shared conversation and convergence amongst people with a passion for open education. The sessions provided a space to showcase emerging open education initiatives and to explore ways to better create, share and evolve open educational materials.
Penguin Day Lowell went down on June 22, 2007 in Lowell, Massachusetts. Penguin Day Lowell was co-organized by Organizers Collaborative, Aspiration, and NOSI.
Aspiration hosted our annual eAdvocacy shindig, which we lovingly named the "eAdvocacy Jamboree", from July 17-20 at Preservation Park in Oakland. The main event ran July 18-20, with a pre-day of eAdvocacy trainings on July 17 for those wanting to ramp up their eAdvocacy skills.
Electric Embers also hosted their third annual Most Excellent AdvocacyDev Veggie-Friendly BBQ Shindig, continuing to raise the bar for NPTech hospitality!
The final agenda is online. We continued to expand the format this year, and offered several interleaved tracks:
As always, participant input dramatically shaped what happened at the event.
Event partners who worked with Aspiration to design the agenda and sessions included Blue Oxen Associates, Caltha.pl (Warsaw, Poland), Change.org, CiviCRM, CivicSpace, DemocracyInAction, Drupal, Joomla!, MobileVoter, New Organizing Institute, Non-Profit Soapbox/PICnet, Protest.net, and Radical Designs.
Surdna Foundation invited Aspiration to design and facilitate a 2-day event focused on the future of public radio. The goal of the gathering was to offer practical guidance and to suggest new ideas for leaders in the field of community radio. A central question of the event was “what new technological developments now permit us to do radio differently, and make radio viable in previously unviable places?" Participants considered the role of the internet in future community radio strategies, and also discussed policy and advocacy opportunities.
YouthNoise invited Aspiration to design and facilitate a series of Youth Summits in cities across the U.S. The goal of each Summit in the series was to engage youth in cause-based local activism by extending the YouthNoise's “MyCauseIs” program to offline contexts. The ultimate purpose of the process was to grow the connection between youth-driven ground action and the benefits of online networking, resource building, community organizing and project management.
The Mott Foundation invited Aspiration to design and facilitate a series of convenings to engage Mott grantees on how the foundation's web site could better serve their needs.
Grantees in Flint, Michigan, San Francisco, California, and Washington, DC were invited to review the current slate of online services, and offer feedback on both the value of those offerings and their ability to take advantage of the same.
"Energetic and useful. A revolution with knowledge."