Matt Garcia joins Aspiration as Community Manager for our Social Source Commons platform. Matt will maintain the SSC blog, engage users to learn how we can enhance the system to better serve their needs, and oversee community outreach for the project, working with the rest of the team to make SSC a more valuable resource for those looking for nonprofit software.

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.

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, while making sparing use of one-to-many and several-to-many session formats such as presentations and panels.

The International Development Research Centre (IDRC) invited Aspiration to design and facilitate an event focused on Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) development in Africa.

Despite the use of informal and occasionally salty language, Craigslist Foundation was kind enough to post a podcast of Aspiration Executive Director Allen Gunn’s recent presentation at the 2007 San Francisco Boot Camp.

Using the soap box as his publishing platform, gunner opined on a range of nonprofit tech challenges, best practices and pathologies before heading off to babysit his nephew and niece.

Thanks to Craigslist Foundation for creating a venue in which people passionate about nonprofit technology were able to come discuss and share knowledge while strengthening the network of nonprofit practice!

San Ng is transitioning from the Aspiration Board Room to Aspiration headquarters. San joins Aspiration as Director of Programs and Operations after serving as Program Director for ICT for Governance, Law and Civil Society at The Asia Foundation. Welcome San!

Heather Carpenter, Aspiration’s outgoing Assistant Director, is moving south to San Diego. Heather will be a PhD student in Nonprofit Leadership at the University of San Diego and Executive Director of the Jenna Druck Foundation. Heather has done a FANTASTIC job getting Aspiration’s operations into top-flight shape, and we’ll miss her passion for nonprofit excellence. Thanks and best wishes to Heather!

San has more than 13 years of non-profit experience in ICT in international development. Prior to joining Aspiration, she was the Program Director for ICT for Governance, Law and Civil Society at The Asia Foundation, a non-profit, non-governmental organization committed to the development of a peaceful, prosperous, and open Asia-Pacific region.