Trip report: 2010 Nonprofit Software Development Summit

Here’s what I learned at the Nonprofit Software Development Summit, put on by our friends at Aspiration.

There’s a social convention, allegedly originating at the Ruckus Society, of holding both hands near your head and fluttering your fingers, as a way of silently broadcasting your empathy, agreement and joy at what another person is saying. It is called “sparkling”.

This wagging affirmation is the best explanation I can offer of the warm-fuzzy feeling I get thinking about my four days in Oakland earlier this month talking about software for the social sector. Yes, important work was accomplished: Indaba was presented and discussed (8 times!), notes were taken, intellectual frameworks were hammered together, connections were made with Fluxx, Document Cloud, Craigslist Foundation and too many others to list. Important and immediately useful knowledge was imparted on sprint methodologies, wireframing tools, partner management, open source licenses, and more.

But beyond the hard evidence of return of investment, there was a true feeling of community, of shared triumphs and hardships, of membership to a fearless band-of-sisters-and-brothers that just want stuff to work well and make people happy and sometimes solve problems more important than making people buy things. These are my people. And they like what we’re doing.

Sparkle. Sparkle. Sparkle.

– Jonathan Eyler-Werve