Freezing in August

My first month out here in San Francisco at Aspiration has been cold. I'm used to humid, high 80s in August and I come here and get 50s? Craziness. Other than realizing I didn't pack enough long sleeves, my concerns have focused on getting familiar with the programs that I need to use on an everyday basis for Aspiration. As the Community Manager for our website, Social Source Commons, one of the things that both my boss Gunner (real name, Allen Gunn) and I want to do is really step up the community aspect of the website. Right now it's a place to find software tools for nonprofits but it lacks a real person to person interactivity that we really want to include into the overall feel of the site. On top of figuring out how to fernaggle more people into the site, I've also been put in charge of revitalizing the blog. In the near future it will turn toward more bug-finding, member-interviewing, and behind the scenes web work. But for now I'm content working in the broader “idea” level.

Finding a place to live in this city (on an Americoprs stipend no less) is on the same level of lottery-winning. It's ridiculous. Luckily I found a cheap place in a good neighborhood that I could afford with the stipend. Sure, the apartment itself is super sketchy and my roomies may or may not be mentally stable BUT who needs to stay home when they live in a city like San Francisco? Other than providing a warm couch to sleep on while I endlessly searched for housing, my supervisor Gunner has been really awesome. He's helped me out with everything that I could have asked for and always makes sure I have what I need. Because Aspiration is relatively small, Gunner, Mike (the operations manager) and I have become pretty close, both literally and figuratively. Luckily they are both really good at what they do. Which I would say is almost a bad thing because in reality, Aspiration could use about 3 Gunners and 2 Mikes but they both enjoy doing everything so they are constantly busy. One of the worries that I had when I first got here was that I would have to really fight to fit myself into their schedules and while that's been true to a certain extent, I feel like they do a good job of not forgetting that I have a job here that's rather separate but still important. We'll see how it pans out in the months to come.

Gunner is mildly paranoid about Microsoft and government interference, (most likely due to his affiliation with protest groups) so our office is very pro-open source. We use Open Office for all of our document needs and we'll soon be transitioning to Ubuntu as the office operating system. It should be sweet because I've always wanted to get into using Linux but never had the right push to do it. Other than working on open source programs, I use a lot of tech mailing lists (NTEN, TechSoup, Riders) and blogs (Beth's Blog, Zen and the Art of Nonprofit technology) to stay on top of the nonprofit technology sector.

Things are going well for the first month and all I can hope is that they stay good when I start getting more into the bulk of what I'll be doing. Luckily, right now when I'm still learning the ropes, my coworkers have been really helpful and the tool resources that I've come in contact with have saved the day. Hope everything is going well for everyone!

Comment from Jules Goins on August 22, 2008 - 11:36am

Matthew:
Just wanted to say those links you have in your report were great reading, esp. Beth's Blog. Thanks.

Comment from Edward Gonzales on August 25, 2008 - 2:52pm

I just want to give props to Gunner for his presentation last year at Craigslist Bootcamp titled "Weaving the Internet into Your Nonprofit Strategy: Best Practices for Communicating, Campaigning, and Organizing". It was very informative yet entertaining. I highly recommend it for anyone who has not listened to it.

Comment from Carrie Cook on August 27, 2008 - 3:41pm

I'm glad to hear you found a place! I'm bummed I missed Laura's party, it would've been good to see you guys. We should do another bay area VISTA outing soon!

Comment from Jack Waugh on August 29, 2008 - 4:57pm

In re the cool weather, yes, well, that's what one of my Oakland friends referred to as "the winter in the summer". San Francisco, Berkeley, and Oakland occupy a very special pocket of climate different from the rest of the US on account of the arrangement of the mountain ridges in combination with, I guess, prevailing winds, and the ocean. As in Africa, there's a dry season and a wet season. In the dry season you can count on it not raining; that's what people who live in Oakland and San Francisco told me.

There might be at some point (when people are a little less busy) some opportunities for your org and my org to learn from each other, since mine also consults with nonprofits about their tools. http://ccts.ubalt.edu/

In re preference for open-source operating systems and non-monopoly software tools: Yay! I just upgraded my notebook to Hardy Heron, the most recent Long-term Support version of Ubuntu, and it's working great. Hardy loads a nice modern version of Firefox and Flash; they play videos fine (unlike the versions of Firefox and Flash the prior Long-term Support version of Ubuntu loaded). I briefly brought up the OOo word processor and it seems to work; I think I checked the spreadsheet program the same way.

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Jack Waugh

Comment from Josh King on September 7, 2008 - 11:25pm

I think Gunner is one of the people who gave presentations at a technology conference that was held at the same time as my own PSO. He seems like a cool guy. I sympathize with the whole paranoia thing: my hard-drive is encrypted, my email digitally signed, and one of my coworkers once told me that he had rigged all of the servers at work with a script to scramble their hard-drives at a moment's notice, in case we were ever raided by the FBI ;)
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In Solidarity,

Josh King
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CTC*VISTA Leader