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Donate Now!Aspiration Publishes a Pair of Papers
31 March, 2008
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As anyone familiar with our work knows, Aspiration is passionate about delivering high-quality technology events to a broad range of social change communities and sectors. But we’re usually so busy designing and facilitating the agendas that we rarely enjoy the opportunity to step back and reflect on either our methodology or the specific learnings and outcomes from the events themselves.
Thanks to the generous support of some of our favorite funders, we’ve taken the time to publish two papers about our work and learnings in the field of nonprofit/nongovernmental technology gatherings.
Creating Participatory Events: Aspiration has organized and facilitated over 60 interactive and collaborative events focused on technology for social change. These convenings have shared a common, participant-driven agenda format and philosophy that focus on maximizing collaboration and peer sharing. Shuttleworth Foundation has generously underwritten the authoring of a paper documenting this approach to the creation of participatory events. The paper is divided into conceptual and practical sections; general guidelines and how-to’s for participatory events are presented, followed by a case study based on the Open Education Track at the 2007 iSummit in Dubrovnik. We invite you to have a read, and to share your reflections, reactions, and critique!
Good to Great FOSS: Learnings from Africa details learning outcomes from the Good to Great FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) meeting held in Nairobi, Kenya in October 2007. Several of the Open Source projects funded by International Development Research Centre (IDRC) were invited to come together in a workshop to talk and learn about what constitutes good practice in developing an Open Source project in Africa. This paper documents the state of open source software development in Africa from the perspective of the projects that participated in Good to Great FOSS. In addition, the paper includes an overview of best practices for open source development in the African context as detailed by event participants, as well as a summary of recommendations made at the event on how to better support and propagate open source efforts in Africa.
Managing Nonprofit Technology Projects II - West Coast!
20 May, 2008 - 21 May, 2008
Oakland, California
Aspiration and Idealware will host the second Nonprofit Technology Project Management event in Oakland, California 2008. The first event in New York was extremely well received, and sold out weeks in advance.
Managing Nonprofit Technology Projects will examine the tools and best practices that will help nonprofits deliver successful technology solutions - whether websites, packaged software implementations, or custom applications.
Interactive sessions and demos will allow a diverse group of participants to compare processes, tools, successes, and lessons learned. We will discuss areas such as team collaboration, project planning, software selection, migration, and project rollout, and map out the software tools – from project management packages to collaborative communication to issue tracking and more – that support successful technology projects.
You can check out the latest agenda on the MNTP Wiki
And feel free to join the MNTP discussion list, which we’ll be using for shaping the event and the agenda.
Also see Accommodation and Transit Information for MNTP.
Aspiration’s skill in facilitating practitioner knowledge combined with Idealware’s experience in providing mental frameworks and research based information will ensure an informal, collaborative, and information-rich event.
Penguin Day New Orleans
22 March, 2008
New Orleans, Louisiana
Penguin Day New Orleans was a grand success! Participants explored the potential and the role of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) in nonprofit organizations, in sessions designed to answer questions and curiosities!
Penguin Day New Orleans took place Saturday, March 22nd, at Basin Street Station, right next to the Easy Rider Cemetery.
Penguin Day New Orleans was organized by Aspiration, NOSI, PICnet, Joomla! and Chicago Technology Cooperative.
5 Things Every Nonprofit Should Know About Their Hosted Data
12 March, 2008
San Francisco Nonprofit Technology Center
As nonprofits increasingly depend on hosted web applications to support their operations and programmatic work, each organization is creating a complex, unique and distributed set of information resources. These assets live on different servers, in different formats, managed by different software, under different licenses, in different jurisdictions.
Managing Nonprofit Technology Projects - NY
10 January, 2008 - 11 January, 2008
New York City
Aspiration and Idealware hosted the first-ever Nonprofit Technology Project Management event in New York in January 2008.
Managing Nonprofit Technology Projects examined the tools and best practices that help nonprofits deliver successful technology solutions - whether websites, packaged software implementations, or custom applications.
Interactive sessions and demos allowed a diverse group of participants to compare processes, tools, successes, and lessons learned. Topics discussed included team collaboration, project planning, software selection, migration, and project rollout, and map out the software tools – from project management packages to collaborative communication to issue tracking and more – that support successful technology projects.
Feel free to join the MNTP discussion list, which we’re using to continue the dialog.
Aspiration Leads Telecentre Leaders' Forum at GK3
9 December, 2007 - 10 December, 2007
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Aspiration was delighted to lead event design and facilitation of the TLF that took place before Global Knowledge 3 in Kuala Lumpur.
The Forum provided a unique opportunity for people leading grassroots telecentre networks around the world to deepen relationships, share skills and shape the future of the telecentre.org community.
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