.+Memeshift+.

Some great highlights for me in the past few weeks having to do with community technology.

1) The CTCNet Conference

This was great, if a bit small.  It gave me and fellow VISTAs from the CTC VISTA Project to get together and hang out.  For a few of them, it was their first conference.  The conference was sadly small (especially relative to past CTCNet Conferences, but the folks that were there were passionate about what they did.  A highlight for me was co-facilitating a ‘technology of participation’ session with Belinda Rawlins, Director of the CTC VISTA Project.   We were able to gather nearly half the conference attendees into the main dining hall to participate and asked the large question of ‘what are the challenges and opportunities facing community technology centers?’  I was particularly ecstatic to hear Ben Sheldon make the point that ‘we still exist’ - CTC’s are everywhere and we’re ALREADY doing cool things, why not just collaborate with what’s already there among us.  I’ve always promoted the idea that a community is it’s own best resource.

We were able to get incredibly valuable feedback from the audience representing old schoolers, new schoolers and folks working at almost every level of CTC - executive directors, policy makers, volunteer coordinators, program staff - and of course my fellow VISTAs:)

Belinda was kind enough to write up a report on the process and will be sharing this on the interwebs soon.

2) The 2008 Nonprofit Software Development Summit

This.  Was.  AWESOME.  Put on by the awesome staff at Aspiration Tech this is a prime conference/gathering going experience.  Aspiration’s gatherings tend to be VERY participatory and of uber high value for all involved.  Nonprofit technology evangelists, geeks, hackers, CTC VISTAs (AND alumni!) from around the country (and world!) gathered there to share their co-expertise on a HUGE range of topics.

Session highlights for me were:

• Seeing good friend Dave Chakrabarti + the other VISTAs in attendance
• Billy Bicket (Co-founder/Community Architect at NetSquared.org) leading a great session on Crowd-Sourcing Innovation for Maximum Social Impact.
• David Greenberg from CiviCRM facilitated a session on Open Source Eco-systems which had some really passionate folks attending.
• Although I didn’t get to see it, Adam Hyde from FLOSSManuals.net presented on ‘book sprints’ - gatherings of folks that get together to create technical manuals in VERY short amounts of time.  One of their last projects was a book on Bypassing Internet Censorship:

The Book Sprint was held in the beautiful hills of Upper New York State in the US. Eight people worked together over an intensive five-day period to produce the book. It is a living document of course and is available online for free, where you can also edit it and improve it.

The gathering also had a great speedgeeking session (a bit like speed dating, but instead of trying to sell your self, you’re trying to sell an idea or piece of software). You can read the full schedule of awesome sessions here (opens in new window).

3) San Diego’s Fab Lab

I got an email from my good friend Katie Rast saying that the fab lab she co-runs in San Diego with my good friend Xavier Leonard, got a great write up in the local indie newspaper.  She sent me the PDF of the write up.  If ever you are in San Diego and want to see some really cutting edge community technology in action, stop on by!  The place is strewn with all kinds of neat tools for building ust about anything your heart desires: circuit board printers, laser etchers, shopbots and drawers and drawers of knobs, controllers, more circuit boards soldering tools.  

This is not to mention that this particular fab lab is part of a global network of fab labs (funded by M.I.T.) - all running (for the most part) on open source software.  if you pop in, you can even check out the tv they have on in there with live video feeds coming in from the other fab labs.  Really forward thinking stuff…

4) New Hack Space in San Francisco!

I visited a great new space in San Francisco last night - Noise Bridge.  I had first heard about it from my friend Mitch Altman who I met at a pre-Maker Faire meetup last year.  Coincidentally, I heard about it again from a fellow named Alex (who’s URL currently escapes me!  Sorry Alex!).  Last night I thought I might pop in.  I was simultaneously pleasantly surprised and feeling immediately at home once I walked in to the space.  It was soo similar to my friends’ fab lab in San Diego.  I met a fellow named Andy who was working on an awesome remote-controlled blimp that he’d built himself to run on open source hardware and also met another fellow from Austria who was into food hacking?  There were some really neat people there and I can’t wait to visit again (see map).