Aspiration has published a paper entitled “Open Translation Tools: Disruptive Potential to Broaden Access to Knowledge”, documenting learnings and outcomes from the first-ever Open Translation Tools Convergence. The event brought together two passionate communities: those creating open source software tools to support translating open content, and those with a need for better tools to support translation of the open content they create.

In addition to the paper, participants were interviewed for the event video Voices From Open Translation 2007, sharing their views on the open translation movement, and reflecting on where they envision the field evolving in the future. In the 10-minute piece, developers and content creators discuss the mandates for open content and open source, and the natural marriage between the two communities of practice.

OTT07 participants also mapped out and categorized almost 50 open translation tools, and the results are now published using Aspiration’s Social Source Commons platform. Have a look, and if we missed any tools you know about, please add them!

Open Translation Tools 2007 was co-organized by Aspiration and Multimedia Institute (MI2), and was supported by the generosity of the Open Society Institute, with additional support provided by TechSoup.

Aspiration and NOSI announced today that NOSI will become a project of Aspiration (see press release).

Since 2003 NOSI has provided the nonprofit sector with information and education designed to help nonprofits leverage the benefits of using free and open source software (FOSS) in their work. As the author of the groundbreaking “Choosing and Using Free and Open Source Software: A Primer for Nonprofits,” NOSI provides nonprofit staff and decision-makers with both tools and information, allowing them to assess free and open source software’s capacity to support the needs of their organizations.

The merger will allow the two organizations to focus their collective energies on growing free and open source capacity in the nonprofit sector, working with developers, integrators, and end users. A number of open source tools, including the Firefox web browser, the CiviCRM platform, and a range of open source web publishing systems, have reached a state of maturity that makes them excellent options for nonprofits. But much work remains to be done in supporting the creation and sustainability of FOSS options in a number of other mission-critical software categories. Aspiration and NOSI welcome the challenge.

Matt Garcia joins Aspiration as Community Manager for our Social Source Commons platform. Matt will maintain the SSC blog, engage users to learn how we can enhance the system to better serve their needs, and oversee community outreach for the project, working with the rest of the team to make SSC a more valuable resource for those looking for nonprofit software.

As anyone familiar with our work knows, Aspiration is passionate about delivering high-quality technology events to a broad range of social change communities and sectors. But we’re usually so busy designing and facilitating the agendas that we rarely enjoy the opportunity to step back and reflect on either our methodology or the specific learnings and outcomes from the events themselves.

Thanks to the generous support of some of our favorite funders, we’ve taken the time to publish two papers about our work and learnings in the field of nonprofit/nongovernmental technology gatherings.

Creating Participatory Events: Aspiration has organized and facilitated over 60 interactive and collaborative events focused on technology for social change. These convenings have shared a common, participant-driven agenda format and philosophy that focus on maximizing collaboration and peer sharing. Shuttleworth Foundation has generously underwritten the authoring of a paper documenting this approach to the creation of participatory events. The paper is divided into conceptual and practical sections; general guidelines and how-to’s for participatory events are presented, followed by a case study based on the Open Education Track at the 2007 iSummit in Dubrovnik. We invite you to have a read, and to share your reflections, reactions, and critique!

Good to Great FOSS: Learnings from Africa details learning outcomes from the Good to Great FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) meeting held in Nairobi, Kenya in October 2007. Several of the Open Source projects funded by International Development Research Centre (IDRC) were invited to come together in a workshop to talk and learn about what constitutes good practice in developing an Open Source project in Africa. This paper documents the state of open source software development in Africa from the perspective of the projects that participated in Good to Great FOSS. In addition, the paper includes an overview of best practices for open source development in the African context as detailed by event participants, as well as a summary of recommendations made at the event on how to better support and propagate open source efforts in Africa.