Aspiration Runs Joomla! Day Las Vegas

Date: 4 April, 2009

Location:
Las Vegas, Nevada, USA

Event Details:

Aspiration was honored and delighted to direct the festivities at Joomla! Day Las Vegas, held at the oh-so-Elvis-compatible Montelago Village Resort off the strip. The event focused on building knowledge about Joomla!, a GPL-licensed content management system which is proving increasingly popular for publishing nonprofit web sites.

The event brought together the Joomla! core development team, the Open Source Matters team, and almost 100 members of the Joomla! community to talk about all things Joomla!, including the upcoming 1.6 release, template and extension design, and plenty of participant-driven sessions.

Aspiration employed our open licensed, collaborative event methodology to drive a fast-paced agenda focused on knowledge sharing, interactivity and community building.

The extended post-event debrief took place at various collaborative venues along The Strip.

Information Activism Camp

Dates: 19 February, 2009 - 25 February, 2009

Location:
Bangalore, India

Event Details:

Aspiration led development of the curricula and directed the facilitation at an intensive seven day, hands-on workshop that brought together 130 advocates at a retreat-style venue in Bangalore, India, in partnership with Tactical Technology Collective.

Gunner opines on "Social Media, Social Justice" at the California Endowment

20 November, 2008

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Community

The California Endowment invited Aspiration down to Los Angeles to participate in a panel discussion on Social Media, Social Justice. The event was a wide-ranging dialog on how nonprofit organizations and campaigns can employ social media strategies to support social justice work and build healthy communities.

Gunner joined Chris Rabb of Afro-Netizen and Jessy Tolkan of Energy Action Coalition on the panel, which was moderated by Sloane Berrent of Causecast.

A video of the Q&A part of the event is available on the California Endowment web site.

2008 Nonprofit Software Development Summit

Dates: 17 November, 2008 - 19 November, 2008

Location:
Oakland, California

Event Details:

The 2008 Nonprofit Software Development Summit was the second annual convening of people and organizations developing software tools, web applications and other technology to support social justice causes. Bringing together a diverse range of developers, technologists, managers, eRiders, integrators, users and other practitioners who self-identify under the umbrella of roles around “developing nonprofit software”, the 2008 DevSummit provided an opportunity both to gather as a community and to take stock of the field, while building connections and capacity.

The event targeted a range of audiences, including developers writing code to support nonprofit needs, nonprofit users with strong opinions about what software you need developed to empower your programs and operations, integrators deploying tools for nonprofit and social justice organizations, and individuals who just care about seeing better technology developed to address the broad range of issues we face as a global community.

The event was supported by the generosity of 2008 Dev Summit sponsors Sun, NetSquared, Google, Open Source Matters, and CiviCRM, as well as anonymous donors.

To learn more about what went down…

Aspiration Paper: Open Translation Tools

28 September, 2008

Aspiration has published a paper entitled "Open Translation Tools: Disruptive Potential to Broaden Access to Knowledge", documenting learnings and outcomes from the first-ever Open Translation Tools Convergence. The event brought together two passionate communities: those creating open source software tools to support translating open content, and those with a need for better tools to support translation of the open content they create.

In addition to the paper, participants were interviewed for the event video Voices From Open Translation 2007, sharing their views on the open translation movement, and reflecting on where they envision the field evolving in the future. In the 10-minute piece, developers and content creators discuss the mandates for open content and open source, and the natural marriage between the two communities of practice.

OTT07 participants also mapped out and categorized almost 50 open translation tools, and the results are now published using Aspiration's Social Source Commons platform. Have a look, and if we missed any tools you know about, please add them!

Open Translation Tools 2007 was co-organized by Aspiration and Multimedia Institute (MI2), and was supported by the generosity of the Open Society Institute, with additional support provided by TechSoup.

Aspiration and The Nonprofit Open Source Initiative (NOSI) Announce Plans to Join Forces

25 September, 2008

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Community | Press Releases

Aspiration and NOSI announced today that NOSI will become a project of Aspiration (see press release).

Since 2003 NOSI has provided the nonprofit sector with information and education designed to help nonprofits leverage the benefits of using free and open source software (FOSS) in their work. As the author of the groundbreaking “Choosing and Using Free and Open Source Software: A Primer for Nonprofits,” NOSI provides nonprofit staff and decision-makers with both tools and information, allowing them to assess free and open source software’s capacity to support the needs of their organizations.

The merger will allow the two organizations to focus their collective energies on growing free and open source capacity in the nonprofit sector, working with developers, integrators, and end users. A number of open source tools, including the Firefox web browser, the CiviCRM platform, and a range of open source web publishing systems, have reached a state of maturity that makes them excellent options for nonprofits. But much work remains to be done in supporting the creation and sustainability of FOSS options in a number of other mission-critical software categories. Aspiration and NOSI welcome the challenge.