community technology

When Dreamfish started up, the core team's toolkit was comprised of methods from social sciences and community arts. With our dream to support a global network of collaboration and participatory learning, experts in community technology, and open source software engineers, joined Dreamfish. For the next years, we learned as we worked together and grew our capacity to blend participatory software, arts and social sciences to enable collaboration. 

capacity-building

In 2008, our first community technology project failed during the financial crash. With a partner network of organizations, we were building a software platform for global collaboration. It extended open source software and featured innovative features to enable networks of people to work collaboratively. Suddenly, our financial backing evaporated. It was a painful moment for all stakeholders, and heart-breaking to our team. 

Yet, with our improvisational capacity, we weathered the financial storm, through volunteers' labors of love and by re-purposing our unique skillset to consult to other organizations on how to collaborate for sustainability. 

By 2009, in the San Francisco Bay Area, Dreamfish was building community capacity for collaboration through public learning events, such as Wiki Wednesday. Wiki Wednesday was a free community event, in which people learned about wiki, and learned across discipline about relational ideas and methods. (The slideshow is of Wiki Wednesday, featuring the book launch for Andrew Lih's book, Wikipedia Revolution.)

education

In Nairobi, 2011, Dreamfish launched a community technology project.  The project goals were educational, to teach about collaboration, how to build user-centered collaboration technology, and how to work in an open source community.  

Co-led by Grant Bowman and Tiffany von Emmel, senior professionals paired with Dreamfish Interns at each stage in the development of the project, from user experience interviews, card sorting, paper prototyping, graphic design, coding to user testing. 

open source

Many Dreamfish folks swam in the waters of the open source community. In our Open Source partnership, we accomplished these goals:

A. Support diversity among open source engineers, particularly women, LGBT, and engineers from diverse socio-economic backgrounds in developing countries. 

B. Provide access in developing regions to open source projects through education and outreach