I never thought I would be in the Bay Area, which is within 2 hours from the Silicon Valley, for almost one full week without seeing my number one tourist destinations: the Googleplex and Yahoo offices. Ooh, and if time permits Live.com offices.
But somehow I did and it was worth it. Here's why:
For past week, I have been participating in the 2007 Nonprofit Software Development Summit. If I previously mentioned that I would attend this summit then it was lie because nobody attends conferences organized by Aspiration. Everyone participates!
The Sessions
There were sessions on Agile Development, Usability, AJAX, Ruby on Rails, Apache and Mozilla Foundations, Open APIs, Telephony, Single sign on/Identity and so many others as listed on the Event Schedule Wiki. The problem was that at any given time, these sessions were run in parallel with others. Of course, that's why we managed to cover all these sessions. But the good news is that all the sessions have updated the Wiki with notes of what was discussed. Not only that, but these notes are available to everyone including you.
On my part and with assistance from Jeff Rafter, I facilitated a session on Software Development in an African context where we looked at challenges that are unique to Africa and the developing world and how Baobab Health Partnership is using its appropriately engineered technology to tackle these challenges.
I also demonstrated and gave pointers on creating Addons for Firefox especially Extensions in a skills share session while Jeff shared his XML skills.
The People
The summit attracted about 100 participants from Latin America, Africa, US and Canada. In between sessions, I had a chance of meeting some of these wonderful people including the co-founder of Apache Project and Foundation, Brian Behlendorf and many others.
It was an interesting experience to meet Michal whom I previously met about a year ago in Uganda at AfricaSource II. This time he was quick to show off some eye-candy on his Xgl'd Ubuntu Edgy Laptop. Or is it AIGLX'd?
By the way, I won the award of the longest traveled participant by far ;)
A lot of thanks to Tech Soup and Google for sponsoring the event and to Aspiration for making it happen. Now browse through the wiki and catch-up on the sessions.
Photo by itzpapalotl on Flickr
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