How I Spent My 2015 Technology Initiative Grants Conference

January 20, 2015 Peter Campbell
1 Comment
Access to Justice, NPTech, Technology

I’m back from our (Legal Services Corporation) 15th annual technology conference, which ran from January 14th through the 16th  in San Antonio, Texas.  It was a good one this year, with a great location, good food, great people – nearly 300 of them, which is quite a record for us. There were plenty of amazing sessions, kicked off by a fascinating keynote on international access to justice web app partnerships. Slides and videos will be up soon on LSC’s website. But I did want to share the slides from my sessions, which all seemed to go very well.  I did three:

Are You Agile

I kicked off the first morning doing a session on agile project management with Gwen Daniels of Illinois Legal Aid Online. My slides provided a basic overview of project management concepts, then Gwen did a live demo of how ILAO uses Jira and a SCRUM methodology to develop websites and applications. Having studied agile more than actually practicing it, I learned a lot from her.  The combined slides will be up on LSC’s site. I pulled my intro from this broader presentation that I did at the Nonprofit Technology Conference in 2013:

Shop Smart: How A Formal Procurement Process Can Safeguard Your Investments

On Thursday, I summarized everything I know about software and vendor selection, writing proposals, and negotiating contracts into this dense presentation on how to purchase major software systems.

Security Basics

And on Friday, usual suspect Steve Heye and I led a session on security, factoring all of the things that we think orgs should know in an era of frequent, major breaches and distributed data.

I’ll hit some of these same themes in March at the Nonprofit Technology Conference, where I’ll be speaking on contract negotiations (cloud and otherwise) and information policies (with Johan Hammerstrom of CommunityIT. See you there?

NPTech
NPTech

One Response to “How I Spent My 2015 Technology Initiative Grants Conference”

  • Matt
    9 years ago

    Hi Peter,

    Thanks for the write up on the sessions at the Conference. It looks like you had quite a few good sessions. The contracting/vendor slides are very helpful and the contract auto-renewal warning is worth saying twice.

    On the security front, I agree about the implementation of 2FA. It’s a lot easier to do now. I like seeing it as part of SSO vendors solutions so you can minimize the number of usernames and passwords and provide better logging and reporting (Azure AD, OneLogin, OKTA, etc).