Idealist

There's been a recent shift in how activists are trying to bring about social change, and SJF is at the forefront of this shift.

Come find out how you can get involved!

This article has a great breakdown on this new trend of entrepreneurial activism:

For some activists, being entrepreneurial has meant the following things: treating their activist work like a business, turning to popular social media platforms to put out their own press releases and looking for people to invest in their initiative with money and not just good faith.

More about the hosting organizations:

Social Justice Fund Northwest is a foundation working at the frontlines of social change. They leverage the resources of their members to foster significant, long-term social justice solutions throughout Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana & Wyoming.

PDXNALTA is a networking group for underrepresented people of color in tech.

Idealist is all about connecting idealists - people who want to do good - with opportunities for action and collaboration. With more than 100,000 organizations and 1.4 million monthly visitors to our English, Spanish & French sites, Idealist helps people move from intention to action all over the world.

Designers and artists are discovering the power of combining their knowledge of patterns, space, and colors with code and frameworks. Not to make prettier websites, but to create art. Interactive and infinitely generative code art.

But fear not: though getting into programming can be incredibly intimidating, code art, is one path to coding that can be fun, easy, and instantly rewarding. John Brown will show you some frameworks and sites that will get you started making art quickly and easily.

Occasionally, a new discovery will come along that changes the way artists create. Pigments in antiquity or screen printing in the recent past have given artists a path to explore. Now computers, and the frameworks created for them, are hitting the sweet spot of ease of use and power. Code art is still in its infancy, and creative coding is the wild west. It’s all about exploring, layering, and trying new things. Any creative endeavor of the last 5000 years has a digital equivalent, and there are myriad digital art paths that have no physical analogue.

John Brown will show you how to get involved in creative coding. There is a great community locally he’ll introduce you to. He’ll also talk a bit on the history of creative coding, show you some of his work, and talk about the future of code art and how it fits into the greater art world.

When you leave, you’ll want to rush home and pick up a digital paintbrush and start making code art.

Let’s give Thanks4Good and celebrate local nonprofits and social change groups that do amazing — yet often unrecognized — work with technology.

For this event, we have some amazing groups lined up to speak about their nonproft tech successes, their learning moments, and more. We hope these stories spark new ideas and conversations about how to do more with technology in your own organization.

To get an idea of what's to come: You'll hear about how to mobilize a 1,000+ member volunteer group with CiviCRM, hear the pros and cons of choosing open source software for a nonprofit's IT infrastructure, and more.

Come learn and celebrate the good work your nonprofit or social change organization does for our community!

PDXTech4Good is celebrating 1,000 members! 

COMMUNITY SHOWCASE

In lieu of a single speaker, we will be offering everyone the opportunity to speak to the group for 5 minutes. Whether you have something to teach, something to ask, or something to offer, step right up! This is a great opportunity to share your passion without a big commitment.

If you already know you want to speak, sign up here to reserve a spot. Depending on response rate, we'll probably be taking sign ups on the night of, too. CLICK TO SIGN UP HERE!

SUMMER SOCIAL

Overall, this will be a relaxed event, but we encourage you to attend — some of the best ideas and plans for future PDXTech4Good events have come out of social meetups in the past. Let's gather to celebrate the awesome nptech community!

Would it be possible to get all 1,000 of our members together in one place? Watch us try!

Please join us for PDXTech4Good's July meetup, where we'll learn about community-building classifieds!

Does your community use groups on Facebook, Google, and LinkedIn? Are they frustrated by useful information getting lost in a stream of status updates and baby photos? Are they burnt out on email chains and listservs with irrelevant content? Are they looking for a place to share resources beyond just the professional? Switchboard is a platform that harnesses the power of communities by giving them a simple place to connect, transact, and build community value. There are only two types of posts: Ask and Offer.

You can check out an example Switchboard for the Portland Startup Community here: https://pdxstartups.switchboardhq.com/

And one for the Women's Bicycling community here http://wheelwomen.switchboardhq.com/

And one for Oberlin College:
https://oberlin.switchboardhq.com/

Switchboard is being used by colleges, universities, non-profits, community groups, summer camps, professional organizations, conferences. Learn how the simple format of Ask and Offer can strengthen your community, while interdigitating with existing social media tools.

Presenter

Mara Zepeda is co-founder and CEO of Switchboard. Based in Portland, Switchboard is a community building platform that empowers members to ask for what they need, offer what they have to give, connect directly, and strengthen their network. Mara has spent her career working with nonprofits and in higher education as a program director, consultant, community builder, board member, and volunteer.

Your organization is probably already using the Internet to support and involve volunteers in some way. But could you do more? Jayne Cravens's presentation on virtual volunteering will help you identify even more tasks that volunteers would love to take on for your organization. She will review why it's worth your time to develop microtasks and involve online volunteers in short-term tasks.

While the Idealist headquarters is in New York, it also has an office in Portland and is where all of its technology operations are based. Ami Dar is excited to share an overview and history of Idealist and how Idealist is helping people take one (or more!) good next steps to closing the gap between intention and action to make the world a better place.

Agenda

Networking and refreshments 6pm-6:15pm

Presentations 6:15pm-8pm

Please make sure to arrive by 6:30pm as Idealist's doors will lock at that time.

Presenters

Jayne Cravens, TechSoup: Jayne Cravens is an internationally-recognized trainer, researcher and consultant. She is a pioneer regarding the research and practice of virtual volunteering, and she is a veteran manager of various local and international initiatives. She has been quoted in articles in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and the Associated Press, as well as for reports by CNN, Deutsche Well, the BBC, and various local radio and TV stations. Resources from her web site, coyotecommunications.com, are frequently cited in reports and articles by a variety of organizations, online and in-print. She is currently based near Portland, Oregon in the USA.

Ami Dar, Idealist.org: Ami is the founder and executive director of Idealist. Built in 1996 with $3,500, Idealist.org has become one of the most popular nonprofit resources on the web, with information provided by 90,000 organizations around the world and 100,000 visitors every day. Ami was born in Jerusalem, grew up in Peru and in Mexico, and lives in New York.

Accessibility

Mobility Access: This venue is wheelchair accessible. 

Hearing Access:  We will not have access to a PA.

Sight Access:  Presentations will use a projector

We want everyone to be able to participate in the PDXTech4Good community and events. Please don't hesitate to let us know what we can do to accommodate your needs.

This month's meeting will be beginner-focused, but as always, everyone is invited! Note: This meeting is happening at Idealist, not Urban Airship.

• Pythonic Andragogy: Teaching Python to Adults by Kirby Urner
• Python: The Adventures of a "Noob" by Portia Burton

Join us afterward at Bailey's to continue the discussion over a beverage.

Do you have something you'd like to share? Email us.

Join us on our python.org mailing list and on #pdxpython on Freenode. All are welcome! http://pdxpython.org/ http://twitter.com/pdxpython

The Salt Stack team is very pleased to announce the first multi city Salt development sprint. In true Salt fashion we are hosting a distributed sprint. This, thanks to a generous donation from the Linux Fund and the accomidations generosly donated by C7 datacenters in Salt Lake City Utah, Cars.com in Santa Monica California, and Idealist.org in Portland Oregon.

This development sprint is being conducted with the express hope of adding more complete unit and integration test coverage to Salt, but as always, feature additions and bug fixes are welcome!

The three cities and location sponsors are, I hope, only the first locations where we can gather Salt developers for this sprint. The goal of Salt Stack is to develop something great, powerful, and open. I hope that this is the first of many multi city sprints that will enable Salt to continue pushing forward and becoming an ever more powerful system.

The Sprints will be held all day on the 30th of June. Attendees will get T-shirts and there will be a live video feed from all the cities involved. There will also be food and drink!