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.

i4d (Information For Development) magazine is a print publication distributed from India, with a global audience in mind. The magazine aims to provide a platform for opinions, research and practice around the ICT4D sector. The website i4d online compliments the print publication with interactive features and up to date information. I’ve had the pleasure of meeting some of the editorial and program staff of the magazine, and they do an amazing job by keeping a relevant publishing calendar and a rich rotation of authors, both academics and practitioners.

i4d has published two of my articles in English. The first was entitled “A social movement for freedom of knowledge”, a basic first overview of our research objectives for FLOSS communities in Latin America and the Caribbean. It was included in their October 2004 number. The second one was entitled “Commons in Latin America: Creative, collective and for all”, and it was included in their edition for July 2006, presenting some of our findings in the area of the commons, beyond the research of free software communities.

Voces Libres de los campos digitales resume los resultados de tres años de investigación sobre Software Libre en América Latina y el Caribe, con el apoyo de ICT4D Americas (IDRC). El libro está impreso en Español y está acompañado de un CD con todos los datos de investigación. Esta publicación es el resultado del trabajo conjunto de 6 contrapartes en toda la región. Todos los contenidos se pueden encontrar y bajar en línea.

Free voices from the digital fields gathers the results of a 3 year research on Free Software in Latin America and the Caribbean, with the support of ICT4D Americas (IDRC). The book is printed in Spanish and comes with a CD with all the research data. This publication is the result of the work of 6 organizations in the region. All contents, including an English Version (pdf) of the book, can be downloaded at the website.