Lena Zúñiga

This past week I’ve been attending the 3rd non profit dev summit organized by Aspiration. This is without a doubt one of my favorite conferences, events, workshop-like things on the calendar. The participants were incredible, the sessions were fun, even the food was great. Sigh. There’s so much to tell, but here’s some highlights, mostly conversations I found illuminating and inspiring.

Using Mobile Phones to Make a Difference: The Ushahidi Project. David Kobia from Ushahidi presented the project, a platform for crisis monitoring using mobiles, mapping reports on the ground etc. For many of us in the session this platform (open source, created in Africa) solves many of the problems we’ve been dealing with in the past year or so, and it sparked a lot of ideas right there. We immediately created a group to work on implementing Ushahidi for monitoring immigration raids in the bay area. I can see how this would be really useful in disaster reporting and monitoring in Central America.

Making Agile Development Methods Work in Nonprofit Contexts This discussion was very good not only because the expertise shared in the circle, but also for exploring the realities of having non-profits as clients. I feel many of the shops that were in the event were able to share specific ideas on how to manage different aspects of their projects and their relationships with clients. As a PM on the client side, I feel as more and more non-profits have technology at the core of their activities, “not knowing your tech” is not longer viable. It is a terrible excuse for being a bad client, especially when working with a shop that respects your values and your mission.

NPtech and Diversity. This discussion was great, I felt we had a lot of valuable sharing in the room. It is interesting how some of the issues I saw on open source communities a few years ago are still the same, but I feel at least now there’s a recognition of the need to address them. Not only the participation of women, but also the inclusion of people of color and sexual diversity are still a big deal. There’s still a perception that coding has a disproportionate importance in the value one adds to the community, and people who are contributing other ways (translation, design, teaching, manuals, event organizing etc) “at the fringes” of open source projects. Of course in this group everybody wants to be more inclusive, more fair, more involved, so it’s not the perfect group to get a good grasp of what’s going on in general.

Open Source Project Management In this session I got to hear from Plone, Drupal and Joomla about how they are organizing the community, especially in legal and financial aspects. A few years ago my perception is that many of these communities were talking about how to organize in terms of getting good code and managing people relationships inside the community. It seems to me that in the past couple of years the conversation has shifted towards finding a more solid structure that allows them to manage more complex situations in terms of legal defense, receiving money and sponsorships, holding the copyright of some of their products, handling the marketing and promotion of their projects, managing large scale events, and implementing mechanisms such as contributor agreements. Excellent conversation especially for people in the room looking to start their own open source projects.

Running a technology cooperative. This conversation has evolved a lot since we first had it at the devsummit two years ago. There was a diversity of models for cooperative and collective work in the room, and a lot of experience with the difficulties and rewards of a collective enterprise. After sharing our experience with a coop (somewhat different from others in the room because of context and structure of our group) I feel very happy to be able to say we have a solid model going on, one that takes care of the community and allows us to take care of ourselves as well.

Working with public data In this conversation we walked through the process of getting data from public sources, to the technical challenges of processing, cleaning and maintaining the data, to the challenge of adding value to the data and presenting it visually to different audiences. I very much liked talking not only about the technical challenges but also the political, organizational and social challenges of working with public data.

I was there with my colleague Skye to present the Corpwatch API and the Croctail application. We got a lot of good feedback. That last conversation about working with public data allowed us to talk about the issues we’ve been experiencing with our project, and it was a chance to share with people dealing with the same things. The best feeling I get from the devsummit is sharing with other people who are working in similar geeky things with the similar values. For most of us, that opportunity is rare.

The entire list of sessions and notes of the event are available on the wiki.

This year the non profit geek trivia was extremely hard. My team, the legendary Flying Luas (champions for the past 2 years), lost miserably to the Dymaxion Kraken. How did that happen? We’re reevaluating strategy for next year.

During our research on Free Software communities in Latin America and the Caribbean in 2005 and 2006, I had the chance to work with partner organizations in 6 different countries of the region. In Argentina we worked with several different Free Software groups. At the time there were very different ideas of what a Free Software user group would look like. Would it have a political role, an advocacy role, an educational role? Would it be a support desk for new users, a forum for entrepreneurs? Many of these questions were already present all over LAC, and they were quite apparent in the final drafting of the book and final reports.

My partner in Argentina was SOLAR (Software Libre Argentina). This group is definitively about Free Software, but they have a clear mandate oriented to human rights and social justice. Their principles are explicit about non-discrimination, sustainability, solidarity and democratic participation.

Among other activities, Solar educates users (institutions and individuals) on the use of Free Software, and endorses spaces for discussion, from conceptual issues of free culture to a platform for technical support. They also help organize CRISOL, a strategic discussion event with topics specifically adapted to the needs of different provinces of the country. These events are usually organized with local Free Software groups and mostly put together by volunteers. This year the event was in Formosa and the topic was Free Software for Education and Social Inclusion.

In this event government representatives, local activists and FLOSS geeks got together to discuss the use of free software in the local e-government initiative. There was a Free seed exchange (seeds free from patents and pesticides). There was a talk about using free software for digital inclusion and fighting discrimination, and a debate over free software in local education initiatives. There were presentations by a workers cooperative that offers free software services and a Film production collective working with free software and open content licenses. Sounds amazing, right? Have a look at the chronicle (in Spanish). If you can read Spanish I also recommend to take a look at some of their other projects.

The “innovation on the lake” event was co-organized by Common Ground and Aspiration.

The venue, provided by the Rockefeller Foundation, was the Bellagio center in lake Como, Italy. The idea was to bring together a group of facilitators, mostly tech and social media strategy people, with a group of Ashoka Fellows, who have social innovation projects all over the world. These projects had particular problems to solve, and they were looking to incorporate a social media strategy as part as the solution.

I met great people, facilitators and participants, and I’ll be writing about some of their projects in greater detail in the upcoming posts. It was also really great to meet with an excellent group of facilitators, all willing to share their experiences with technology instead of “evangelizing” about their products. We got to talk about social media and advocacy, using mobiles for campaigns, measurements and impact evaluation, digital storytelling, and the use of specific tools such as blogs, twitter and social media dashboards.

You can read more about what the event was like on the website, or you can read almost all the notes on the wiki, where you can also find links to all people and projects.

Sulá Batsú has been working on the project “Information and Knowledge Management (IKM)”. The project is reflecting about and improving the knowledge processes, as well as the connection between diverse types of knowledge. It is a global project with 4 different work teams, one of them looking at local knowledge processes, and Sula’s initiative fits into that work area.

Sula’s project is directed towards youth empowerment and intergenerational knowledge sharing supported by ICT tools. The idea is to generate a collectively constructed product based on the experience of key actors and stakeholders, analyzed from the perspective of young members of the community. There is a blog to follow up on the project advance. The group so far has created a variety of methodologies including games, photography, painting, storytelling, interviews and group dynamics, all directed to recover the history of the community and to create capacity to generate and share new knowledge.

There’s more information about the project in Spanish, and there’s a video about some of the project activities (activate the English subtitles by clicking on the CC link of the Youtube video).* There is also a Flickr account for the project, where we have photos taken mostly by the children in the communities.

*A technical detail: I helped with the subtitling of this video. I used Jubler to do the subtitling and then used YouTube feature for including subtitle files. Days later, I learned the folks at Miro are coming up with a cool solution for subtitling in multiple platforms. Remind me of writing a post specifically about that.

This year we started sharing office space with Accion Latina, a non-profit organization publisher of El Tecolote newspaper. El Tecolote is part of the history of the Mission district in San Francisco, and has been a vital part of its arts and social justice movement since 1970. It has also been a training ground for many aspiring latino journalists. I’ve been helping out with occasional translations, and it’s always a thrill to see my name in old-fashion news print!

As many other independent media outlets, El Teco has been feeling the economic downturn and the challenges of adapting to new media, social networking tools and citizen journalism. Recently, they have started an alliance with Mission Loc@l, a project of hyper-local online news coverage developed by UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism.

A couple of days ago I translated this article (english) about the upcoming Encuentro del Canto Popular, a folk music festival that Accion Latina has been organizing for 28 years with local performers.

*Photo by edgehill

During the last year I’ve been working at CorpWatch with a fantastic group of developers and researchers on the CrocTail project. The name came to us only a few days before the launch in September 2009: it was know as the EDGAR project when we got funding from the Sunlight Foundation after presenting the idea at Netsquared 2008.

CrocTail provides an interface for browsing information about several hundred thousand U.S. publicly traded corporations and their many foreign and domestic subsidiaries. Information from company Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings has been parsed and annotated by CorpWatch to highlight specific corporate accountability issues. CrocTail also serves as a demonstration of the features and data available through the CorpWatch API. Skye, one of the developers, has a great blog post with video visualizations of how corporate structures change over time.

This project is an extension of the Crocodyl.org Wiki, an online compendium profiling the accountability and transparency track records of multinational corporations. I’ve been managing and editing Crocodyl as part of my work in Corpwatch.

Information Management Resource Kit (IMARK) is an e-learning initiative to train individuals and support institutions in the effective management of agricultural information. Since 2008, I’be been working with the Association for Progressive Communications to create a learning module on Social Networking.

The web 2.0 and Social Networking module is divided in two units. The first unit illustrates the basic concepts related to Web 2.0, social media, social networking and user generated content and describes their strategic value for an organization. It contains basic concepts, privacy and security issues and some strategic info for individuals and organizations. The second unit talks about social media tools and describes how they can be used strategically to more effectively collaborate and exchange knowledge. This part includes specific lessons on group productivity and collaboration tools, hosted services, Feeds and Syndication, Tagging and Social Bookmarking, Blogging and Microblogging, Online video and image sharing and Podcasting and online radio. More about the module here.

Sulá Batsú is also in charge of translating and localizing the module to Spanish, using local examples and language appropriate resources. We had localized other materials for this series, including the module “Building Electronic Communities and Networks“. Other modules in the series have also been localized to French, Arabic, Russian and Chinese.

*Photo by Ilya Eric Lee

A few months ago I contacted Voice of Witness because I was interested in their work using storytelling to highlight the voices of human rights victims. I started collaborating in a small way by proofreading the Spanish versions of some of the stories compiled in the book “Underground America: Narratives of Undocumented Lives“. The book is a collection of oral histories from men and women struggling to carve a life in the United States.

All the stories were touching and inspiring in their own way. I was humbled by the struggle and the determination of the people who shared their stories for this book. As a recent immigrant going through the complicated legal process to remain in this country, I can only begin to imagine the difficulties and uncertainties that illegal immigrants are facing under the current social and economic climate. The human rights of this always growing population are under constant threat.

The Spanish version, named “En las Sombras de Estados Unidos: Narraciones de Inmigrantes de Indocumentados“, will be presented at the San Francisco public library on November 19, 2009.

The Soul of the New Machine: Human Rights, technology and new media, was a conference organized by the Human Rights center of the University of California at Berkeley. The conference, held on May 4 and 5th, touched on two aspects of this topic: evidence gathering and documentation, and advocacy and outreach. I attended as a volunteer, live-blogging and providing Spanish translation for some of the sessions and plenaries.

The blog posts and interactions generated during the conference were placed at a Ning site. One of my favorite plenaries was the opening talk by Trevor Paglen author of Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon’s Secret World. I transcribed and translated his talk as best as I could at the time. A lot of the session’s video can be seen on the conference website. I have to say I was disappointed by the “Corporate Responsibility and Complicity” panel, because, well, there were a lot of corporations talking without opposition.

I recommend checking out all the winners of the Mobile Challenge prize. These were truly innovative projects and I wish there had been more time during the event to talk about their applications.

*Photo by Maneno.org

This second Open Translation Tools event, held in Amsterdam in June 2009 co-organized by Aspiration, was a follow up of the fun we had in Zagreb on 2007. The other organizers were Flossmanuals.net and Translate.org.za. These events bring together people working 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.

You can read almost all the notes from the sessions and break out groups at the Event Wiki. Which, by the way, is one of my favorite things about Aspiration events: you can read about it in great detail, practically the same day. What you cannot do from the wiki is to bear witness to the Cultural Beverage night, but that’s a different story.

After the event, we spent five days at The Waag in a beautiful room, concentrated on a Book Sprint. Using the Flossmanuals.net platform for collaborative writing, the group in the room plus a group of remote participants, was able to finish a great resource that basically compiles the most important topics in the subject of open translation. It covers some basic concepts, an overview of the translation workflow, a few issues such as quality control and community management, special case studies and specific resources for translating text, video and images. You can read the book online, download it as pdf or buy a print version.