Aspiration is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization and if you are a U.S. resident, your contribution is tax deductible. Our tax returns are also available at Guidestar.
Donate Now!Managing Nonprofit Technology Projects - Washington DC
22 July, 2009 - 23 July, 2009
Washington, DC
Aspiration and Community IT Innovators (CITI) will host the third Nonprofit Technology Project Management event in Washington DC on the 22nd and 23rd of July.
Managing Nonprofit Technology Projects will examine the tools and best practices that help nonprofits deliver successful technology solutions - whether it be websites, packaged software implementations, or custom applications.
Interactive sessions and demos will allow participants to compare processes, tools, successes, and lessons learned. Discussion topics will include team collaboration, project planning, software selection, migration, and project rollout, and mapping out software tools – from project management packages to collaborative communication to issue tracking and more – that support successful technology projects.
And feel free to join the MNTP discussion list, which we’re be using to discuss the agenda in the time leading up to the event.
Aspiration’s skill in facilitating practitioner knowledge combined with CITI’s experience in managing nonprofit technology projects will contribute to an informal, collaborative, and information-rich event.
Open Translation Tools 2009
22 June, 2009 - 24 June, 2009
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Answer the Open Translation 2009 Call for Participants!
Aspiration is delighted to announce Open Translation Tools 2009 (OTT09), to be held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, from 22-24 June, 2009. The event will be followed by an Open Translation “Book Sprint” which will produce a first-of-its-kind volume on tools and best practices in the field of Open Translation.
Both events are being co-organized in partnership with FLOSSManuals.net and Translate.org.za, and generously supported by the Open Society Institute and the Ford Foundation.
Agenda partners for the event include Creative Commons, Global Voices Online, WorldWide Lexicon, Meedan, and DotSUB.
OTT09 will build upon the work and collaboration from Open Translation Tools 2007 (OTT07; see paper, video, and toolbox). The event will convene stakeholders in the field of open content translation to assess the state of software tools that support translation of content that is licensed under free or open content licenses such as Creative Commons or Free Document License. The event will serve to map out what’s available, what’s missing, who’s doing what, and to recommend strategic next steps to address those needs, with a particular focus on delivering value to open education, open knowledge, and human rights blogging communities.
Primary focus will be placed on supporting and enabling distributed human translation of content, but the role of machine translation will also be considered. “Open content” will encompass a range of resource types, from educational materials to books to manuals to documents to blog content to video and multimedia.
We invite all prospective participants to answer the Open Translation 2009 Call for Participants.
The agenda goals of the 2009 event will be several:
Aspiration Discusses Sustainable Online Processes at Fundraising Day 2009
5 May, 2009
Aspiration was delighted to answer an invite from Michael Stein, Robert Weiner, and the Golden Gate Chapter of the Association of Fundraising Professionals to speak at Fundraising Day 2009.
Aspiration Executive Director Allen Gunn and Executive Director David Taylor of Radical Designs led an interactive session entitled “Pragmatic Innovation: An Integrated Approach to Online Social Marketing and Fundraising”. The 75-minute workshop surveyed best practices in social networks and online social marketing for fundraisers. The discussion ranged from ways of identifying online audiences and donors to adoption of shared messaging calendars, social media dashboards, and other processes for coherently maintaining all online activities.
Of particular note was a set of visuals provided to convey the spectrum of tools for online engagement through lenses that included target audience, tone and voice, control of message and brand, time and labor requirements, and return on investment.
Slides from Aspiration’s presentation are available for download.
Penguin Day San Francisco
25 April, 2009
Odd Fellows Hall, San Francisco
Penguin Day San Francisco is coming! Participants will share knowledge and discuss the state of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) in nonprofit organizations, in a festive and collaborative environment designed to answer questions and curiosities!
Penguin Day San Francisco will take place Saturday, April 25th, at:
Odd Fellow Hall
26 7th St (at Market St.)
San Francisco, CA 94103 (Close to Civic Center BART; see Map)
Penguin Day San Francisco is generously sponsored by Google.
Check out the latest agenda; sessions will include…
- Introduction to Free and Open Source Software
- Introduction to Free and Open Source Desktop Applications
- Introduction to Linux
- Publishing on the Web: Making sense of Free and Open Source Content Management Systems
- Introduction to Blogging
- Intro and Advanced sessions on Joomla! and Drupal
- Managing Organizational Contacts—Intro to CiviCRM 2.0
- CiviCRM 2.0 - Advanced Topics
- Increasing Access with Community Broadband
- Learnings from Summers of Code
- Mobile Volunteering: The ExtraOrdinaries Project
- Healthy and Sustainable Free and Open Source Communities
- Helping Techies and Non-Techies Communicate and Cooperate
- Free And Open Source Online Advocacy: Tools And Best Practices
- Creative Commons And Open Content
- Free and Open Source Firewalls
Penguin Day San Francisco is being organized by Aspiration, NOSI, PICnet, CiviCRM and Chicago Technology Cooperative.
What Should a Web Site Cost?
9 April, 2009
»
Aspiration was delighted to accept Network for Good’s invitation to speak in their “Nonprofit 911” free training series, on the topic of “What Should a Web Site Cost?”. The transcript, podcast, and tastefully minimalist slideware are all available for download.
Executive Director Allen Gunn addressed two of the most pervasive sources of angst in nonprofit technology budgeting: web site creation and redesign. There are in fact relatively few well-defined models for specifying, costing and managing web site projects in a transparent fashion, let alone ones that engage all organizational stakeholders in the process. Cost overruns are the norm, and processes for dealing with the evolving feature definition of most sites are usually elusive at best.
The session focused on three primary aspects of the issue:
- A range of cost points for different types of web sites, from basic “brochure-ware” to higher-end web applications
- Ideas on different project models and cost curves associated with different types of web site technologies
- Philosophical approaches to framing and managing Web projects to maximize internal and external approval while constraining cost
In addition, we listed many of the web site implementors that love to work with and recommend to others.
We thank Network for Good for letting us share our take on web site costing and associated dynamics of nonprofit technology!
Aspiration Runs Joomla! Day Las Vegas
4 April, 2009
Las Vegas, Nevada, USA
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.
Front Page
Delicious
Digg
Reddit
Magnoliacom
Furl
Facebook
Google
Yahoo
Technorati