As the fiscal positions of states and municipalities across the United States deteriorate due to deficits and budget shortfalls, school districts and educational funding are often the first casualties. While it's recognized that a strong information and communications technology (ICT) foundation is crucial to flourish in a knowledge-based economy, these same school districts often lack the basic resources to ensure that our next generation has those ICT skills and tools.

Sun Microsystems, a partner of TechSoup Global, recently embarked on a local donation project to address this at one elementary school in San Francisco. Here are some of the details of this great corporation-supporting-community project.

McKinley Elementary is a K-5 public school with about 300 students in the Duboce Park district of San Francisco. Like many schools of that size, it was looking into ways of bringing desktops and Internet access to its students in a cost-effective, easy-to-manage manner, but with limited capacity and budget to do it.

John Renko, a parent at the school and the Engineering Manager at Sun laid out some key goals to shoot toward for getting updated technology into the school with the help of Sun's generous donations.

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If you haven't already, check out TechSoup's new Disaster Planning and Recovery Toolkit. In addition to our free book, The Resilient Organization: A Guide for Disaster Planning and Recovery, you'll also find webinars, articles, and links to other information around the Internet. We think that this toolkit can be a great resource for organizations in times of health as well as those facing disasters.

A point that we emphasize throughout the book is that disaster planning isn't just a matter of being ready for a natural disaster. It's about rethinking the way your organization works and adopting technologies and procedures that emphasize flexibility and adaptability throughout your organization. An organization that's ready for a disaster is also ready for a new opportunity to expand its impact when a need arises.

I can't think of a story that better illustrates this concept than that of the Freestore Foodbank in Cincinnati, one of the winners of our Microsoft Show Your Impact contest.

Freestore Foodbank serves over 7000 individuals a month in the greater Cincinnati area, and those numbers double in November and December. Before undergoing a major overhaul of their tech infrastructure, the Foodbank’s multiple branches had a lot of trouble communicating and working together, both internally and externally. In making major infrastructural improvements and standardizing practices across all of their branches, the Foodbank was able to serve the community more swiftly; what's more, when one branch was struck by a natural disaster, the Foodbank was ready for it.

If you are a small to medium-sized nonprofit, why should you care about cloud computing? Because it can save you time, money and help spare the environment.

What Is Cloud Computing?

Here is how the CyberOptic Group describes it:

Essentially, cloud computing enables computer software and hardware resources to be accessed over the Internet without the need to have any detailed or specific knowledge of the infrastructure used to deliver the resources, much like a utility model. You really don't need to know what the phone company or electric company does on there end to enable calls and allow the lights to go on when you flip the switch; and, you really don't want to know as long as when you plug into it, it works.

I bet many of you are using a form of cloud computing without knowing it. Current examples are Gmail, Yahoo mail, Google Docs, Salesforce, and Microsoft Office Live Workspace. They are often called Software as a Service (SaaS). A company provides access to their software applications over the Internet and you access it through your web-browser. If you are using email hosted by a company, like one of those mentioned above, you and your staff don't have to manage an in-house email server like Exchange. You simply sign up for the accounts and all the back-end stuff is handled for you.

This post is by Steve Longenecker, who is a principal infrastructure consultant at Community IT Innovators in Washington, DC. Community IT Innovators, or CITI is an employee-owned, triple bottom-line company that provides computer tech support to nonprofits and socially responsible businesses. They're an important green IT practitioner in the U.S.

When one of CITI's clients needed to replace their two servers we set them up with a single server with virtualization software on it. The single server replaced an old domain controller that authenticated users and also hosted Microsoft Exchange for email and provided file and printer sharing. The other was their old terminal server that allowed users to access applications and documents on a shared network hard drive. These are very common functions for server computers.

Our clients primarily use Windows server for their server software.

Telecommuting or telework allows employees and volunteers to work from home or in a remote location and still be in touch with their office. The most basic tools of telecommuting have been phone and email, but new information and communication technologies (ICT) are available that make telecommuting much more effective.

Telework has been greatly enhanced by solutions such as virtual private networks (VPN), videoconferencing, and Voice over IP (VoIP). Be sure and check out our new GreenTech Initiative Telecommuting page for additional resources on telecommuting outside of this post.

Employee travel to and from the office accounts for roughly one-fourth of carbon emissions from all office operations. Statistics compiled by the Telework Coalition show that more than 44 million Americans are commuting less by working at home at least one day per week, and it is the same in most countries with a growing number of "knowledge workers."

The environmental impact in this area is profound. US workers alone commute an average of 10,000 miles per year each and consume 67 billion gallons of gasoline. For every day that a person's vehicle remains at home, 20% of that work-week's gas consumption and environmentally harmful emissions are eliminated. Telecommuters saved 840 million gallons of gasoline last year and reduced carbon emissions by almost 14 million tons.

Telecommuting is of course not suitable for everyone. For instance, some meetings need to be face-to-face or somebody needs to be on hand for customers or clients. However, it is an option for more and more people working in the information economy who have broadband Internet and mostly work on computers, telephones, or smart phones.

If employees must have direct access to their office phones, there are affordable new Voice over IP solutions that are emerging like virtual PBX, that allows you to set your office phone to ring at home or anywhere. Google is planning to launch a free service called Google Voice that will provide similar functions at no cost. One green company that installs virtual PBX systems is BetterWorld Telecom. They also do free telecommunications audit for US nonprofits and libraries.

For more info on Voice over IP and other ICT options check out:

This post was contributed by Nate Solloway, a new guest blogger to our team. Nate has been supporting the infrastructure needs of Community IT Innovators (CITI) clients since 1998. Community IT Innovators (CITI) is an employee-owned company committed to helping social mission organizations effectively use technology.

When it came time to plan our latest network upgrade at Community IT Innovators we opted to virtualize our server infrastructure. As a typical 60-person organization we have file, mail, database, Web and remote access servers. With our systems and software going through the usual 3-5 year replacement cycle, our IT staff was looking for a solution provided the most flexibility going forward. Virtualization provided the benefits of a smaller server room footprint and a smaller carbon footprint. What is virtualizatioin, you ask? Check out this video answering just that question from ZDNet and this article from TechSoup called Virtualization 101 for more.

We began to explore virtualizing our servers while troubleshooting existing installations with performance monitoring tools. We were consistently surprised by what a small percentage of the processor these hulking servers were using most of the day. Large in footprint and small in efficiency, we began exploring products that would allow us to consolidate the need to keep operating systems separate but on a shared piece of hardware.

Virtualizing the standalone servers in our server room proved to be consistent with the green IT guidelines that are starting to trickle down to even the smallest organizations. CDW's data centers studied the effects of virtualizing servers and power consumption. A standalone server had 75% percent of the carbon footprint of a mid-sized automobile. The same functionality virtualized and then sharing hardware had a carbon footprint of 1/6 of the original with no loss in delivering services.

We've all tried to open up a Web page and received an error such as “404 Page Not Found” or “500 Internal Server Error.” For those of us unfamiliar with such conventions, this can be frustrating. Is this a user error or a server error? Should you try again later or call your Internet service provider?