Hey friends,

From our California capacity building to our emergent work in digital humanitarian response, we are springing forward with a continued dedication to helping frontline communities determine their own technology destinies. See what is happening, and check out ways to get involved.

• Participate in the Humanitarian Technology Festival
• Happening now: Build with us on our CA Training Roadshow
• Talkin' social justice and tech at the Allied Media Conference
• Explore tactics for online conflict resolution: Weaponized Social
• On the horizon and in the rearview mirror

Digital response @ Humanitarian Technology Festival

Register

Willow continues to develop our work in digital humanitarian response, a program designed to facilitate transparency and accountability between disaster responders and frontline communities. This work strives to increase local agency during crises to make communities more resilient. Our first event in this field will be the Humanitarian Technology Festival on May 9 and 10.

• Sign up to participate in the Humanitarian Technology Festival on May 9 and 10 at the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts.


• See what this program and event are all about, from the words of Willow on the Civic Media blog

Thanks to all the people who have collaborated to support us in this work. Contact us if you want to chat.

In Los Angeles? Join us on our CA Training Roadshow

As you read this, we are 350 miles into our California Training Roadshow! We are excited to be in Los Angeles for a week of collaborative learning and building with nonprofits and community organizers. There's still time to join us.

• Sign up for the Social Justice Technology Skillshare on Wednesday, May 6.


• Register for the Spanish-language Comunicaciones para Organizadores Comunitarios workshop on Friday, May 8, co-organized with IDEPSCA.

Read more about what the Roadshow is all about. Many thanks to David and the rest of the team at CPEHN for making space on their blog for us to share our plans.

Sessions at the Allied Media Conference

Nothing signals summer like the Allied Media Conference in Detroit happening from June 18-21. The AMC convenes thousands of people doing transformative work with media in places where it intersects with communications, art, technology, and social justice. We are excited to be a part of the AMC and will be hosting three of our own sessions! Build a digital security culture in your work: Why security matters for grassroots activists, with tactics to raise cost of surveillance. Online identity health checkup for your organization: How to manage online identity as a social justice organization. How to do online communications as an organizer: Ways to use online communications as a tool for community organizing. Are you going to the AMC? Let us know! We hope to see you in Detroit this summer.

Weaponized Social: From Nairobi to the Bay Area

We invite you to participate in Weaponized Social in San Francisco on May 16 and 17. In a world where negative online interactions are increasingly resulting in offline harms, we will strive to re-think the social scripts (i.e., learned patterns of interaction) that shape the online realm. We plan to build guides for creating safe online space and explore tactics for conflict resolution.

• Sign up now for Weaponized Social SF.


• We hosted Weaponized Social in Nairobi on May 2. Special thanks to AkiraChix in Nairobi for supporting us in Kenya.


• Check out notes, ongoing work, and emergent resources in our collaborative wiki.

On the horizon and in the rear view mirror

On the horizon:

• Several members of the Aspiration team will travel to Ottawa, Canada to facilitate the International Open Data Unconference On May 26, and Open Data Conference on May 28 and 29.


• The Shuttleworth Fellows Gatherings have become a happy twice-a-year highlight on our calendar, and we are already in process facilitating the Spring 2015 meeting in Toronto, Canada.


• We are looking forward to leading the mid-year Code for America Fellows Retreat in June, just north of the Golden Gate Bridge here in the San Francisco Bay Area.


• We are gearing up to rough it in Whistler, Canada in June at the Mozilla Work Week, helping to plan the 2015 Mozilla Festival along with roadmapping the rest of the Mozilla Foundation's 2015 efforts.

In the rearview mirror:

• We are still feeling the afterglow from facilitating five events at the week-long Circumvention Technology Festival in early March in Valencia, Spain.


• We joined the Responsible Data Forum in Manila for RDF Human Rights Documentation on March 21 and 22. Read Ruth's report-back from RDF Manila.


• We helped organize the New England Complex Systems Institute Salon in Boston, MA on February 25.


• The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team graciously invited us to faciliate their Curriculum Sprint in Washington, DC at the end of April.


• We had a great time helping to design and facilitate I Annotate 2015 in San Francisco on April 23 and 24. We also had fun getting to know the whole Hypothes.is team beforehand as we roadmapped their 2015 strategy and platform plans.


• We were in DC in early April for our 3rd go-round facilitating the Information Security Coalition's Global Workshop, where a diverse range of human rights technology projects rubbed shoulders with frontline human rights activists, trainers and allies from all over the world.

See you soon

We are looking forward to connecting with you at various happenings over these next few months. Thanks for continuing to grow with us and the communities we work with.