Capacity Building in a Canal

Work at Aspiration has been going really well. A few things are more or less falling into place for us and we've been excited to get going with a couple of projects that we've been working on. I've continued to work on developing the ANSWR site in Joomla and I'm pretty comfortable with the CMS in case anyone needs any help (I've probably run into the same problem as you have). I've decided that I don't really like CMSes but that they're a necessary evil. Regardless though, I've really taken to this whole "building a website" thing which has pretty much cemented me into Geekdom. This, proven when the last time someone showed me a website I automatically asked "what's it built in?" *sigh*

Aspiration is putting together an event that happens next week in Amsterdam (!!!) centered around Open Translation Tools. Basically throwing a bunch of people around the world concerned with translation (spoken languages) in software for social change. It sounds kind of nitchy but it's actually a pretty vibrant community with a lot of grassroots love. Other than falling into a canal, Amsterdam will have us running an Aspiration-style event for about 75 people for whom English is not their native language which should be interesting. Afterward we're going to run a book-sprint which is basicallly where you lock a bunch of experts on a specific topic (in this case translation) into a room for a few days and they churn out a book. Sounds insane. and yes. yes it is. So for the next two weeks I'll be out there doin my thang.

Other than those little nuggets of goodness, I've been working a lot more with specific nonprofits training them to use tech. Before my role was a lot more removed from the people side and now I've had a lot more hands-on experience and I'm really diggin it. Especially because many times you're saving these organization sooo much time by teaching them how to do stuff more efficiently. And half the time you're explaining how to do something really basic in Excel works. Yeah CTC VISTA capacity building! holla!

I feel as though technology training should be mandatory for any high school degree. It would be amazing if tech skills were the foundation for people's work. Think of the time saved! gah!

So that's what's up with me. What's up with you?