We had a good conversation at our last dinner (at Guelaguetza - best mole ever) and an interesting presentation from folks at Adobe about Breeze (a former Macromedia product) that allows for webconferencing/ remote training/ meeting online. Thanks much to the Adobe staff who joined us and brought presents.

The group seemed to be gravitating towards two main goals -
1. providing/ creating referrals for nonprofits to technology training opportunities - provided by group members/ corporate partners/ other nonprofit service agencies.
2. creating a case study project with a women's group to demonstrate how improved technical capacity can support and enhance a social change/ nonprofit group's mission.

One other thing - since I'm working on an election-related project, I won't be able to keep coordinating the LA events - let me know if you have ideas for great partners-in-crime in the Los Angeles area who should be more involved in LA NetSquared.

I'm happy to report that our first LA Net Tuesday was a success - we had an interesting diversity of attendees and a presentation from www.stickam.com on their live streaming video of the May 1 immigrant rights demonstrations. People who came were a mix of nonprofit folks (California Association of Nonprofits, Asian Pacific American Legal Center), freelance programmers and technologists, people working in the for-profit technology sector interested in social change (Yahoo, NetworkLive) and politics (LA Councilmember Garcetti's Communications Director). We were a small enough group to have an interesting discussion about the role of technology in the organization, documenting, and analysis of the May 1 demonstrations - as well as our responsibilities as technologists to be aware of and try to minimize the digital divide. We had fun discussing the role that myspace.com had in organizing student protests, brainstorming tools we need to better filter information to support progressive debate, and thinking about how linguistic differences limit the adaptation of progressive technology solutions for immigrant communities. We talked a little about topic ideas for another session, and people seemed interested in coming up with a project or goal for the group (maybe helping to do communications training for students organizing on immigrant rights issues?). Come to the next event and find out more - we may move out to the west side for our next meeting...