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 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.

A partir de Noviembre estaré trabajando con Corpwatch.org coordinando el proyecto Crocodyl.org. Crocodyl es un sitio wiki para la investigación colaborativa sobre corporaciones. Colaboradores en diferentes partes del mundo escriben sobre temas de Derechos Humanos, corrupción, impacto ambiental y prácticas laborales de las corporaciones. En el próximo año, Crocodyl incluirá nuevos elementos tales como datos de empresas subsidiarias, un proyecto que fue presentado en Netsquared 2008.

Since November 2008 I’ve been working with Corpwatch.org as a Project Coordinator for Crocodyl.org. Crocodyl is a wiki site for collaborative research on corporations. A group of researchers and collaborators around the world writes about human rights, corruption cases, labor and environmental practices of corporations. Next year, Crocodyl will go through a re-design and the implementation of new elements, such as subsidiary data extracted from government databases. This project was presented during Netsquared in 2008.