Global Reproductive Health IT Support list

["William Lester" <WLester AT engenderhealth.org>]

Happy New Year to All!

 

NTEN's annual NonProfit Technology Conference will be held this year in Philadelphia, PA from March 25 - 27. Her's an excerpt from their blurb:

 

"It's the premier annual event for anyone interested in helping nonprofits make more effective use of technology to achieve their missions. The Conference will be your best opportunity to meet peers and build relationships, share resources and ideas, and learn more about what's happening in the nonprofit technology field.

You'll hear from leaders in the field and practitioners in the trenches while you discuss the latest theories, and learn from emerging best-practices and how-to's. The 2004 Nonprofit Technology Conference will be held in Philadelphia, PA on Thursday, March 25th through Saturday, March 27th, 2004."

 

http://www.nten.org/ntc

 

For those of you who have never gone, it's a great conference, with lots of interesting stuff, and more importantly, a lot of great people who work in the area of nonprofit technology.

 

What you may not know is that this year, there are plans for 3 more days of lectures/trainings/discussions that specifically address some of our interests and needs. On Sunday  March 28, they'll be a whole day on Open Source Software and Development. Tentatively called "Penguin Day", and co-sponsored by Non-Profit Open Source Initiative (NOSI), LINC Project/Welfare Law Center, The Advocacy Project, and Summit Collaborative, it's an ambitious gathering. Here's a blurb from their concept document:

 

"Building on the momentum generated by two days of Free and Open Source Software (F/OSS) sessions, the NOSI Open Source Primer to be re-released at the NTC, the NISO Open Source Café and hands-on training sessions, and discourse at the NTEN Nonprofit Technology Conference in March 2004, the Penguin Day (PD) will provide a venue for further dialog at the crossroads of non-profit technology and F/OSS.   It will take place right after the NTC conference in Philadelphia on March 28, 2004.

 

The Penguin Day  will convene stakeholders in the development and adoption of F/OSS for NGO’s, serve as a forum to frankly address the range of challenges and unsolved problems present in scaling F/OSS capacity, as well as celebrate strengths and successes of F/OSS in the NGO sector. Based on preliminary calculations, we expect about 60-70 people to attend."

 

Following Penguin Day, on Monday & Tuesday, March 29 -30, we're planning two days of training for international eriders. The core of this training will be an abbreviated version of Compasspoint's Institute for NonProfit Consulting training, led by Tom Battin. This is a terrific program that identifies our tech staff as "consultants" with our endusers as our "customers". By identifying and training in best practices in the ngo community, we improve the quality of the work we provide to our organizations. I took this training two years ago, and it was one of the best trainings I ever did.

 

http://www4.compasspoint.org/p.asp?WebPage_ID=518

 

In addition, there will be about 20 eriders from all over the world who will participate in sessions dealing with topics dear to us - working effectively in low resource environments.

 

Along with encouraging you and your staff to attend the full conference, I'm also recruiting folks to participate in some of the workshops. EngenderHealth is bringing three of our overseas tech staff (Kenya, Nigeria, and Ghana) to the conference. If any of your staff (local or overseas) are coming, we should certainly get together for a session/debriefing on issues that face us. For instance, I could discuss the status of our Qube Clone project <g>.

 

 

If you have any questions or comments, please post them to the list, so that everyone can participate in the discussion. And feel free to forward this email to others who may not be on the list, but are part of our community.

 

Regards,

 

Bill Lester

EngenderHealth