TechSoup Blog

About two months ago, I moved into a new building. Emptying my file cabinet of its seemingly endless supply of legal pads, I realized two things. First, I was using a lot of paper. Second, somewhere in that blur of yellow and blue lines, there were probably a few good ideas. There were probably a few important notes I'd scribbled down during a meeting and promptly forgotten about.

I decided then that I would try an experiment. I would not allow any paper in, on, or near my desk. If I needed paper, I would have to stand up and walk across TechSoup Headquarters, get a single piece of paper from the supply room, and walk back to my desk.

We weren't the only ones who noticed Dear Adobe, the irreverent Web site for Adobe user feedback. Photoshop developer John Nack has posted a funny reply to some of the site's most popular criticisms of Adobe software (link contains slightly off-color language and humor).

Are you too busy to leave your desk to learn a new skill or idea? Is your budget so tight that covering the cost of traveling makes attending training sessions impossible? If this describes you and your organization this list is for you! Take advantage of these low cost training solutions that you can participate in from the comfort of your own desk. If you offer online seminars and would like to be included on this list, contact ols@techsoup.org for more information.

Nonprofit Storytelling: How to Write Your Nonprofit’s Best Stories, hosted by Nonprofit Marketing Guide
September 10 • 1:00 p.m. EST

You may remember Ushahidi, winner of this year's NetSquared Mashup Challenge. Ushahidi was created to address the post-election crisis in Kenya. By aggregating information from text messages and other instant communication, Ushahidi presents a clearer picture of the violence taking place than is otherwise available either to Kenyans or to the rest of the world. According to Ushahidi's NetSquared proposal, "Kenyans have demonstrated their capacity for selective amnesia time and time again. When this crisis comes to an end, we don't want what happened to be swept under the rug in the name of 'moving forward' — for us to truly move forward, the full story of what happened needs to be told. Ushahidi is our small way of contributing to that."

Today, Ushahidi announced that they'd secured a grant of $200,000 from Humanity United, an organization dedicated to stopping human rights abuses around the world. The grant will allow Ushahidi to rebuild their engine to track atrocities worldwide. The new engine will be open source and other organizations will be encouraged to customize it for needs specific to their regions. It's great to see an organization using such innovative tools in ways that would have been impossible even a few years ago.

The 2008 US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Stats on Electronics Recycling and E-waste are now out. Find a summary of them and the full factsheet (PDF) to learn more about how electronics and computer equipment are handled and recycled.

Discarded electronics still make up around 2% of the municipal solid waste stream, and remain among the fastest growing solid waste streams.

As many of you know, TechSoup recently experienced an unplanned service outage from Thursday morning, August 28 – Friday evening, August 29. The problem was a hardware connectivity issue at the facility that hosts TechSoup's Web servers.  Our IT team worked with this facility to successfully bring our sites back up.

A new site has popped up as a forum for people to share their thoughts or vent about issues with Adobe products, pricing, and support. It's called DearAdobe and aside from being hilarious to read, it might be a good place for nonprofits to be able to discuss their NPO-specific issues with Adobe products. And, it's also a forum to show your love for their products as well, though you'll likely be outnumbered. It's a hot-head's paradise over there. And they've got a pretty funny blog too.

UPDATE 8/31: TechSoup is back! Thanks everyone for your patience and support as we got things up and running again.

TechSoup Staff

The World Bank, perhaps better known for their highly influential role in international development, just launched a video contest Vulnerability Exposed: Social Dimensions of Climate Change.

They are looking for 2-5 minute videos from around the world that document how climate change is affecting the livelihoods of people in the realms of "conflict, migration, the urban space, rural institutions, drylands, social policy, indigenous peoples, gender, governance, forests, and/or human rights."

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 was released to market on August 6, and it's already available as a TechSoup Stock donation. Microsoft SQL Server is one of the most popular database servers in the world, and we're glad to help Microsoft get this powerful product into the hands of medium and large nonprofits.