Events

Aspiration is organizing a track of 14 sessions and clinics on technology innovation in the nonprofit sector at the NTEN National Technology Conference in Chicago.

The NTC is the largest nonprofit tech conference and aimed at IT staff in nonprofits and the people supporting nonprofits and their IT needs. The Aspiration Innovation Track at the NTC will focus on these themes:

1. Project/Risk Management: How to you choose software? How do you manage IT projects in your organization? How do you decide whether to build/buy/or bend? How to you manage risk?
2. Innovation Slams: Learn about tools while having some fun! Partake in Aspiration's famous SpeedGeeks and clinics;
3. Free and Open Source Software--cheaper, better, faster software tools and development for nonprofits? Why is open source innovative? How do you leverage f/oss for nonprofit organizations?
4. What’s next for nonprofit technology and software innovation? What's up and coming that NPO techies should be aware of? What do we need to realize the potential of IT for our organizations?

Sessions include: Blogs and RSS, Content Management with Open Source Software, and Successful Project Management of Web Development Projects, to name just a few.

Clinics and speed geeks feature security tools, blogging, taming your website with a CMS, and using Linux in your organization.

Please contact us at info at aspirationtech dot org if you are interested in participating in this track or like to see specific topics covered in the sessions.

We and the designated session designer welcome your input, ideas, and suggestions for this series!

Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) offers a promising alternative for meeting the software needs of civil society across the African continent. But much work remains to be done in building understanding, capacity and community among developers interested in creating tools to support the sector.

The first FLOSS Developer Roadshow convened African software developers to meet one another, share skills and build knowledge, while designing and implementing appropriate tools for civil society. The event was aimed at meeting sustainable development needs while enhancing the pool of appropriate software skills in the regions. Participants left with with a better understanding of the potential and reality of FLOSS for civil society, new expertise and an enhanced network of contacts and potential collaborators.

Allen Gunn of Aspiration facilitated the event. The Developer Roadshow was hosted by our colleagues at CSIR and supported by a grant from the Open Society Institute.

Aspiration and Tactical Technology Collective hosted a Localization Sprint in Warsaw, Poland from the 20th to the 22nd of November, 2004. The event brought together a diverse group of leaders and innovators in software and documentation localization to share experiences, compare projects and practices, and document the same. More information and the wiki are at the Localization Developers site.

Aspiration supported and facilitated this colloquium on (www.ict-humanrights.org) in in partnerships with Human Rights Education Associates and Benetech that brought human rights program and IT staff together for a three-day knowledge sharing and hands-on training event on using information technology in human rights work. Collective knowledge was documented at wiki.ict-humanrights.org, and the material was being used to author a human rights technology strategy paper.

Aspiration designed the agenda and facilitated this convergence of developer and users of the ActionApps web publishing platform, who traveled from all over the world to discuss the vision and direction for the platform, and plan for capacity building and sustainability of their open source community. Focus areas including training materials development, support for online advocacy features, multi-lingual web sites, and hands-on skillshares. The content management system (CMS) landscape was mapped and discussed, and user survey results were presented.

Another outcome of the first Advocacy Developers Convergence, this event brought together activists and SMS experts to work on building applications to take advantage of cell phone text messaging in various advocacy contexts. The sprint produced a working “SMS Blaster” capable of sending very large numbers of messages to subscribed cell phones. The blaster was used in various Get Out The Vote (GOTV) and elections monitoring projects around the US elections. In addition, substantial new content was posted for NGO use at wiki.advocacydev.org.