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) - Everyone agreed with me, gave me thumbs up. How do bubbles work beyond politics? Simplicity of like button. Subvert, crack. How much does fact checking and media literacy actually help? Didn't want to just suggest funding public education.
• How to successfully recover from large-scale doxxing or trolling - Adria (Note Taker - Ben) - What the invidual or allies could do such as being time bounded and specific. Interest in removing personal data from online. Varying might actually be more useful. Discourage trolling by listing rules. Voting records are public information. how to prepare for and deescalate.
• Trump Watch database - Pratap (Note Taker - George) - Lots we can do. TrumpWatchers.org Lots of conclusions on lots of levels. Need actions for individuals, need information streams for people to link locally and nationally to what others are up to. Lots of ways to organize a deck of cards
• Mapping threats over next four years - Rainey (Note Taker - Scott) - What could possibly go wrong? - taxonomy of our nightmares, use as research for multi-pronged tool for understanding and action.
• Tools for engaging with congress - Max (Note Taker - Matt) - Tools for committing comments to congress, API. Have yoru comments weighted more heavily. They shoudl be a part of a larger campaign. Area we'd be interested in is distributed where affiliates could write a campaign and have it plug into the larger efforts.
• Intersection between organizational goals and actions against Trump - Anya (Note Taker - Ajay) - All very curious about making movements work. List of things we need from high level to tactacle. One we'd like is a template for communities who want to build a coalition (goals, vision, tactics and tools). And an IFTTT decision making structure for those in coalitions trying to bring people together who are potentially very far apart in ideology.
• What does effective leadership look like? - Dirk (Note Taker - Nick) - What will leadership need to be on the progressive side? Disentangling power and leadership. The left has issues with authority, leadership, power. Leadership involves listening, consensus, but also accountability for choices.
• The revolution will not be optimized - Scott (Note Taker - Jay) - Encryption tools usable by everyone.
• Collaborative, secure, open source tools to help run your office - Lisa (Note Taker - Erick) - Braindump of documents of what organizations need (different types of documents, for instance). Storage, rocessing, management, messaging, calendaring. What have we found? The link in the corner has a shared spreadsheet to collaboratively organize that information. Wait to go to the link.
• Digital humanitarian response - Willow (Note Taker - Mike) - Logistics to organize people once they're on the ground (how to get them information, get info etc where it needs to go), how to organize volunteers. How to get volunteers know they're helping. How to make your tool useful in a crisis (route around official response sometimes). Prep work (before things happen), how do you then support the first responders as a frontline member? Communication plans to the public. Handbook sprint so people can respond quickly.
• Security tools - Jack (Note Taker - Andrew) - Who is at most risk? How do we figure out what those groups need, how do we define success in serving those groups?

Wednesday Breakout Session II

• The role of art - Kristine (Note Taker - Chris) - discussed art, incusion, what swe've been inspired. Flash mobs. Themes of community engagement, nourishing various forms. if you want to make public art, put it on a sticky note. or patches. put it on a sticky note.
• Data literacy - Heather (Note Taker - Ajay) - Data ownership is key to people being engaged. Accountability, incentive, ethics. People using data that they had made helped them feel engaged.
• How to use licenses - Andrew (Note Taker - Brian) - Different license for software content and data. Knowing which is best involves knowing the end user. Don't forfeit contributors, make an agreement for them and volunteers.
• Mobile and Internet of Things (IOT) security - Norman (Note Taker - Lisa) - Mobile security threats - how cell phones and smart phones and IoT things work. Where teh data goes. Where problems can happen (stingray, data not being encrpted, things being way more open to internet). Why those things are true.
• Connecting communities with services - Greg (Note Taker - Willow) - when organizations provide people services which the people don't pay for, they don't have incentives to be found by more people. Keeping track of who is doing what is then done by external parties and held as the thing they make money on. Open Referral is working on open standards.
• Role of youth in movements - Jay (Note Taker - Noah) - talked about social justice and health. Make sure it's on a platform that makes sense to young people (no MySpace). Talked about wifi and access, inclusion to work with every type of youth community (sexuality , gender, racial, disibility status). Cons are cyber bullying, privacy issues. Pros are peer networks and organizing online.
• Propaganda posters for good - Ruth - so many good arts. Going to write preferred attribution on this wiki.
• Direct actions - Austin (Note Taker - Matt) - What direct action is, involve transgression against rules or laws, direct confrontation of power. Lots of tools and technologies. Tactics, offline things. How tech tools can be used in different actions. Facebook means far reach, but other things need to be kept completely off it.
• Communications architecture in political systems - Tomas (Note Taker - Jay) - great discussion but philisophical, need second session to make it actionable. Facebook is evil but we knew that. Talk about it at the bar.

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.
• Mapping out NGO Workflows 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.
• Bridging episodic social movements Shahid
• 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 Breakout Session I

• NGO workflows and how to choose your tools - if we're coming into an organization, do we want things to be open, sustainable, etc? How do our tech match those values? If we have things like dropbox google drive etc, what questions do we need to ask to reflect the values? We set forth questions, the culture in which it's happening.
• Freelancers21016 - 3 areas for feeling happy in your work. Autonomy, mastery, purpose and meaning. Added security, stability, living wage, validation, etc. Took some time to think about the list of tips and tricks, advice, learning, etc from folk in the room in working towards achieving those.
• Threat Models - process to do participatory threat modeling. What is the threat landscape now? The threats we often think about like Google and NSA might not be that big of a threat. Maybe it's the public.
• Engineering meets social science - En Espanol! California and US create tech products to serve our needs. Needs of other places in other parts of the world are not focused on individualism. Group identity maybe more important. In a rural area, people have gotten together to put together a network. Here we ant things easy and individual. There communication is important. Suluatsu looks for direct help like nursing. They work to say computers and technology can help other people. Direct help and indirect help, both are good. Compared different products and locations.
• Being a white ally - White fragility is frustrating. Focus is on how to talk to other white people about their biases and prejudice. How much is it worthwhile to the individual, or finding other ways to do the work. Lots of history which is flaring up. This nation is founded on genocide and slavery, we haven't come to account for that. Acknowledging where we're from, how you can do for indigenous places. Are we looking for what support they want? They have a land trust, buy back land as a non-federally recognized tribes. Treaties never ratified. They ask us to donate what of our taxes would go to something else. Address is in the notes.
• How can we tell if we're making progress? - We have a puzzle in knowing if we're making progress. Strong vision of success. How it applies to stakeholders, the populations we're trying to affect. Instead of trying to wait for the tactic or process to be over and then evaluating, evaluate along the way and make adjustments. You might spend a lot of time and money on a tactic and not get what you want, but evaluating as you go allows you to adapt
• How to prepare for what you're not prepared for - Willow - Crisis cycle: prepare, respond, recover. also mitigation changing how we do each of those. threat models should include environments and personal care, piggy back on what's already happening. don't panic, respond rather than react. Slow down, act strategically. Don't just act to act. Create separate time in meetings for contingency plans, don't make a "we need to do this now." Identify capacities and resources in your community beforehand, what might take a hit in a crisis? Flag burnout patterns - response takes longer than you expect, so pacing selves. Self care is a part of the response for reals. If you let yourself crumble you won't be able ot help.
• Box - Project for a hardware box for dissident and activist groups. Web server for meetings. Take it offline or online. Take it with you or hide it. Run from local apartment. Lots of the tech is already solved, some things yet to do. Help folk do collaboration with out dealing with firewalls.

Friday Science Fair

• 2016 Science fair topics

Friday Breakout Session II

• Building a taxonomy of digital civil disobedience tactics Beatrice - Expressing dissent online besides angry facebook status. Many of these can be used with any level of technological literacy. Boycotting investments, misinformation campaigns.
• Behavioral economics - Nola has evil mind powers. Parts of our brains are there but manipulated all the time. How to tell what's happening and respond all the time. Things that are happening now are weird in time. When the reaction is happening, know it's happening, consciously put our thinking into another part of our brain to respond with empathy and love. Lots about the election. What you feel when you've got it versus when you're asked to give it up.
• Barter - Really great time. Have lots to do.
• SelfCare2016 - What does self care look like for different people. not looking at the capitalistic care of going to Hawaii for a week. how you share love, how others share love with you. Valuing your life your experiences. Tools and skills we'll post to the wiki.
• Using social media to connect and have conversations in red states - Technological and social techniques. Common ground, forming groups aimed across the isle. Moderation techniques, technology like Thunderclap which tries to gain the trending mechanisms on social media. Talked about the fake news phenomena, talked about the history of newspapers. Opportunities for federated social media for sharing. Weaponized Snopes.
• Training Knowledge Share - what we've learned over the last 3 days about digital security, what we still need to learn. list of events where to learn more about these topics. It'll be on the wiki. List of organizations and networks local and otherwise who provide this sort of training. Some insights like the shelf life of digital tools. Concerns about parachuting trainers into a situation and then parachuting back out again. Trainer help desk, community point person. Finding a way to not come in as "you've got to be like me about this" but what their needs are, from the community towards realization.
• OpenGov2016 - Covered good, bad, ambivalent. License plate readers, shot spotter. Open microphones all the time. What has made opengov data better is to tell people not to get creative so we have familiar, predictable data across the board. As much online access and availability as possible. Then fewer violations of staff. They shouldn't get in trouble.
• Hiring, managing, firing engineers - hiring has competing pools of technologists, what makes it matter to folk. Sense of how to get more women and PoC involved. You might have to change the questions you ask women so you can get answers (like getting credit). Men who are underqualified or people who are overqualified. Organizations might think about putting non tech descriptions first for priority. managing developers, diversity challenges - increasing teh gravity of tasks in order to help people improve. Geek culture can be exclusionary. Talked about gender and safe places to work. Implicitly give credit - name, credit, prove.
• EthicalConsulting2016 - Talked over some complex situations and talked through them. Lessons that came out of it. Concrete outcome is an Aspiration-hosted listserv which is low volume and for these sorts of questions.
• Tor Relay Setup - Covered the operational elements. Relay versus a bridge, exit traffic, looked at config, hosting, what your needs will be.
• Facilitation techniques - Deepdiving into technology of participation. Talked about resources, when to detail interpersonal techniques, how to get folk to engage, navigating different values, structure of events.
• Cultivating a network of change makers within change-resistant institutions - generating togetherness like happy hours, camaraderie. Delivering value like delivering tools, business cases they can use internally, making reliable consultants. And a bit about hacking funding like the things you want to do together that funders don't want to fund, package together things you've already done, and if we get all this done we'll do this other thing.