DevSummit Report Out

A big love bomb to Gunner, Heather, Tim and the hundred-odd other fellow nonprofit software developers who made last week’s Nonprofit Software Dev Summit a fantastic experience in slightly nontraditional conferencing.

Among the highlights for me were:

  • The unexpected appearance of dear nonprofit tech colleagues such as Amanda Hickman, Laura Quinn, Teresa Crawford — in addition to the great ‘usual suspects’ like David Taylor, Rob Miller, Allen Poole, Leda Dederich and more.  All are amazing people that I don’t get to see nearly often enough, and it’s more than worth the time and effort of travel to get quality face-time with them.
  • A great demonstration from Simon Rowland of DirectLeap of his inexpensive, easy-to-use web-based robo-calling tool.  I can see some pretty powerful uses of this kind of technology, and it’s amazing to think that it is about to become accessible to small organizations. 
  • The first ever nonprofit techie geek trivia contest.  Steve Andersen, David Taylor, Simon and I put up a good fight, made a great attempt at packing our questions into the final round, but were ultimately defeated by a powerhouse team anchored by Eugene Kim and Evan Henshaw-Plath.  (Potentially trivia geeks be warned: there seems to be no bit of Silicon Valley tech trivia that Eugene does not know.)
  • Did I mention the food?  Seattle is a pretty good eating town, but San Francisco is in another league.  (Or maybe I just don’t get out enough at home!)  In four days, I didn’t have a single less-than-excellent thing to eat.  A big thanks to Joel Burton and Rebecca Weaver-Gill for being such gracious hosts. 

Some nice event photos on Flickr.  Not sure that much made it onto the wiki or into blogspace yet, but I suspect many are still recovering from brain (and fun) overload.

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2 thoughts on “DevSummit Report Out”

  1. A little Googling found the link for the DirectLeap product:
    http://www.directleap.com/communications/

    Sounds very interesting, and very timely for us here in Philadelphia where the growing and increasingly empowered netroots is supporting a bunch of progressive candidates in our municipal elections. It’s tough to beat the Dem machine, who use tools like this extensively.

  2. I can think of at least one piece of trivia I didn’t know, Mr. Let-Me-Recount-The-Entire-History-Of-Ebase. 😉

    It was a pleasure to finally meet you! Hope to continue our conversations soon.

    (Btw, check out the “npdev” tag as well. Still not much on the blogosphere there yet, but there are a ton of Flickr pictures.)

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