2016 Agenda

Aspiration events are first and foremost convened to strengthen the ties and social networks of technology practitioners in the non-profit/non-governmental sectors.

The #npdev session list is co-developed with participants, facilitators, and partners in the time leading up to and during the Festival. We strongly encourage you to join in the fun at this unique and interactive gathering!

The agenda is designed and facilitated using Aspiration's unique participatory model, in an environment where powerpoint slides are discouraged and dialog and collaboration drive the learning.

Our philosophy centers around getting participants into small-group discussions where they can discuss topics they are passionate about and get answers to their questions and curiosities. Sessions at Aspirations have particular traits; we de-emphasize presentations and lecture, and instead focus on "break-out" sessions that are self-organized whenever possible .

Wednesday November 16

Wednesday Breakout Session I

• Social media and filter bubbles - Aman (Note Taker - David)
• How to successfully recover from large-scale doxxing or trolling - Adria (Note Taker - Ben)
• Trump Watch database - Pratap (Note Taker - George)
• Mapping threats over next four years - Rainey (Note Taker - Scott)
• Tools for engaging with congress - Max (Note Taker - Matt)
• Intersection between organizational goals and actions against Trump - Anya (Note Taker - Ajay)
• What does effective leadership look like? - Dirk (Note Taker - Nick)
• The revolution will not be optimized - Scott (Note Taker - Jay)
• Collaborative, secure, open source tools to help run your office - Lisa (Note Taker - Erick)
• Digital humanitarian response - Willow (Note Taker - Mike)
• Security tools - Jack (Note Taker - Andrew)

Wednesday Breakout Session II

• The role of art - Kristine (Note Taker - Chris)
• Data literacy - Heather (Note Taker - Ajay)
• How to use licenses - Andrew (Note Taker - Brian)
• Mobile and Internet of Things (IOT) security - Norman (Note Taker - Lisa)
• Connecting communities with services - Greg (Note Taker - Willow)
• Role of youth in movements - Jay (Note Taker - Noah)
• Propaganda posters for good - Ruth
• Direct actions - Austin (Note Taker - Matt)
• Communications architecture in political systems - Tomas (Note Taker - Jay)

Thursday, November 17

Thursday Breakout Session I

• Backdrop Jack - Talked about different content management systems, lessons learned from Drupal. Flaws in democracy philosophy, grew to ignore the small organizations. Cool to see how Backdrop is intentional about the community it serves, progressive organizations it builds for to make it ian empoewring experience. Talked about CiviCRM
• CiviCRM Demo Neil - Open source philosophies, creating community around a code base. How to make it useful to everyone, distributing data instead of centralizing it.
• To wireframe or not to wireframe Sarah - Use and utility as a means of communication between developers, designers, customers. Suite of tools including informational analysis, scoping, narratives. But people do some sort of prototyping. Better organized you can be about that, the better. Using graph paper is fine.
• Whistleblowing and dissent Scotty (Note Taker - Pratap) - Main question being addressed was thinking about people inside the gov. How do those of us outside support them if they want to be whistleblowers? Also what networks can be set up in the inside? When people protested the Pentagon, it doesn't help with "you're scum" but it helps with "I know you're going in to do a hard thing, do the right thing." It's also difficult to take a flier, so having a sign with a URL to where to get information might make more sense. Ideas inside, how to have folk network and support one another. Important that we all figure out ways to support whistleblowers on the inside. Because there are folk inside trying to fight.
• Certificates for your website through Let's Encrypt Seth (Note Taker - Thomas) - Introduction to Certificate Authority (Free as in Free Beer) to get HTTPS on your website. Conclusion: get it. Automated, easy to use.
• Financial markets and divestment Brian (Note Taker - Logan) - Talked about fail of publicly traded groups. 50k worldwide, 6k in US. A smaller section of those are responsible for our economy. It's a human-scale problem. Also very complex. Difficult to untangle the connections, how to actually divest from coal. Look at a specific economy in the Midwest and it's a tractable problem to see the employers and where they are. Where to put money. Publicly owned utility cooperatives, how they're dispersed geographically - that indicates where to extend co-ops into rural America.
• Building personas Kristine (Note Taker - Steve) - Creating people that don't actually exist to look at target audiences. Also look at your organization and team, how to work with them., Getting feedback from community, feedback from organization. Structure and support, having an organized mindset in working with people most affected. How to create something useful versus vaporware.
• Workflows at nonprofits Beatrice and Jamila (Note Taker - Willow) - Challenges when we need a whole team to get a process completed. Organizational tasks like grant writing, combined data, etc. Crowd sourced information about this. Collaborative document editing, onboarding new people, social media campaigns.How to create processes. Second session will be about the tools to use in those workflows.
• Product management Matt - We all agreed there are different ways to approach these problems. OS projects are all organized differently. Different positions, get a sense of what those differences are, reduce gaps. Developers have a hard time being empathetic to people they don't see. Do user testing, get videos of people using the tool. Show the overlap in problems different people had. How to get a handle of that and prioritize. Project people are moving the process along, make sure it's smooth. The client is the product owner but can't be polled all the time. How to do that when they're not around all the time. If it isn't useful for 80% of users, maybe it shouldn't be a feature.
• Surveillance Self Defense Bill - split into two groups - Matt gave a training in how to give a training, metaphors to use. other group covered what could be improved about trainings in general, having a trainers help desk, recyclable material.
• How to create passwords George - How people password now, when you have 70 passwords. Password managers, brain. Diversity of characters, nonsensical phrases, using a lot of characters. Came up with strategies for strong passwords. Writing things phonetically, shapes on keyboard.
• Lifecycles of websites Grant - Family planning to zombies staggering around eating brains. Middle of life when we need more doctor visits, models for supporting that, providing that care. Counting on users, maintenance plan. Documentation and challenge with that. Content up-to-date-ness indicates if your site is alive or dead. End of life and taking a site down gracefully.

Thursday Skillshare

• 2016 Skillshare Topics

Thursday Breakout Session II

• Working with Non Allies - Nola - Finding common ground with people you disagree with on something you do agree on. How do you prioritize what you'll tackle? If people say something else is more important, how do you have those? Made a map of people we disagree with. Things everyone can have a conversation about: dogs, food, weather. Bridges into people's mind. Then thing s on the right that are more contentious, like gov, sex, Trump. Then a meta conversation about if we're judgmental about other people, how can we move beyond that?
• Will the revolution be decentralized? - Different approaches and use cases for use cases. Put together some user stories about what could be useful and how to build it.
• RegEx2016 - Refactored regex commands. Finding words like category and dogma.
• Tor2016 - Talked about how Tor works. It's not all that complicated. Things just bounce around a lot more. Used to be a tool for anonymity, now also used for circumvention. Important here. Useful thing to do is if you have a group of trusted friends is to run a relay node together. So trust people instead. Then provide bridges so people can't tell you're running Tor. Or a hidden service as organizing information.
• Git2016 - Workflows - one is more a drupal project, the other is for a wordpress project. There are drawings.
• Social movements
• Writing2016 - use simple language, think about who you're writing for. Let me not weasel. Don't use "should" or "this might not be" just say "don't do it."
• Influence - Military process of objective focus influence. Influence foreign leaders can be used in organizing. Who are the people making the choices, where they get their information, what they value, then sneak them a message through their network or media. Be strategic.
• GrantWriting2016 - Hard and expensive but you can also get money. Extensive notes on the wiki with links resources and directories.Fiscal sponsors are good. Smaller grants are ok. How to get funding, building relationships is key. General marketing and positioning. Fiscal sponsors give you admin support while you get started. Knowing your audience is key Planning long term strategies and purposes, repurpose what you've written.
• Barriers and enablers in the health of shared resources - Dirk and Nick - Problems of community management and interpersonal versus facing teh actual platforms and how we invite people to contribute. List we're hoping to grow in how to mitigate those things. Have teams and tasks which are defined. Knowing decisions need to happen, what contributions look like. Clear asks, clear talking points.

Friday, November 18

Friday Science Fair

• 2016 Science fair topics

Friday Breakout Session II

• Building a taxonomy of digital civil disobedience tactics Beatrice