Don't know your VoIP from your POTS or even what these acronyms mean? Scratching your head on all the phone system options out there? Then this event is for you.

Join us Thursday February 18 at 11 a.m. Pacific for an informative webinar and forums event to help you avoid the buzz-word marketing and get the real picture on telecommunications.

We'll be joined by telecommunications expert and longtime TechSoup star and forums moderator, Chris Shipley of Nutmeg IT and Kevin Lo, Lead Technology Analyst for TechSoup Global. Our hosts will address the various voice communication options (VoIP, PBX hardware, voicemail, etc.) available and how these differ. We'll explore the pros and cons of different solutions, cost considerations, and examine what kinds of organizations would best benefit from different systems.

This live webinar kicks off the official launch of TechSoup's new Telecommunications discussion forum.  After the webinar, our hosts will continue the conversation in the asynchronous (not live) forums event. We've gotten the conversation rolling with topics like how telecommunications is changing nonprofit work, Google Voice, and what VoIP services organizations are using. Head on over and post your questions and get expert advice on your telecommunications needs!

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This post originally appeared on the AshokaTECH Blog. Elliot Harmon, regular TechSoup blogger and staff writer, was chosen to "Blog [His] Way to Hyderabad" for the Ashoka and Lemelson event, Tech4Society, taking place in Hyderabad, India this week. He will be live-blogging from the event so watch for more posts to come!

The event kicked off this morning with welcome addresses by Ashoka-Lemelson fellow Greg Van Kirk, Lemelson Foundation executive director Julia Novy-Hildesley, Indian School of Business dean Deepak Chandra, and Microsoft India chairman Ravi Venkatesan.

Venkatesan said that both he and Microsoft were proud to be a part of Tech4Society. He called himself a "modest student of social entrepreneurship." He said that he's long believed in social enterprise and that it's great to see the idea receiving more mainstream recognition.

On a more nuanced note, Venkatesan also said he's been puzzled by certain social innovations whose potential hasn't quite been fulfilled. He gave the example of the LifeStraw, an invention that got ample press attention and seemed positioned to bring clean drinking water to millions of people.

This post originally appeared on the AshokaTECH Blog. Elliot Harmon, regular TechSoup blogger and staff writer, was chosen to "Blog [His] Way to Hyderabad" for the Ashoka and Lemelson event, Tech4Society, taking place in Hyderabad, India this week. He will be live-blogging from the event so watch for more posts to come!

Thanks to a series of happy coincidences, I got to spend today at NASSCOM's India Leadership Forum (they're TechSoup Global's partner in India). The most interesting part was a session on e-governance featuring R Chandrashekhar and John Suffolk. Suffolk is the CIO of the U.K. government and Chandrashekhar is the secretary of India's Ministry of Communications and IT. Both men have received a lot of recognition for changing how their respective governments use technology to provide services.

Suffolk spearheaded data.gov.uk, a major step in governmental transparency that launched a few weeks ago. Suffolk mentioned this TechCrunch article on how deeper government transparency can be a catalyst for innovation. The article gives a few examples of how individuals, organizations, and companies have used the information in data.gov.uk to curate extremely specific subsets of data:

So far over 2,400 developers have registered to test the site and provide feedback, [and] 10 applications have been created. These include PlanningAlerts, a free service that emails you if someone has put in a planning application to build near your house (although to be fair it launched before the government's move). FillThatHole lets people report potholes and other road hazards across the U.K., using location data from the Office for National Statistics.

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This post is part of a series highlighting TechSoup member organizations' achievements.

"When family shows up on your front door — you let them in. No matter what, no matter what, you let them in." That's what Dave Richmond, director of special projects at the Glide Foundation, told me when I asked what his 35-year tenure at Glide has taught him about the organization's role.

Set up by the Glide Memorial United Methodist Church, the San Francisco-headquartered Glide Foundation serves nearly a million meals a year to those in need, and it helps about 7,000 others with housing, shelter, job placement, health services, and more. Since its inception in 1975, Glide has grown into an organization with considerable reach, with 165 staff members, an annual budget of $17 million, and upwards of 25,000 volunteers per year.

Dave's time at Glide has afforded him a surplus of stories, both harrowing and hopeful. Luckily, Dave's a storyteller, having written regularly for Rolling Stone and other publications before arriving at Glide.

Read on for a story Dave wrote about Norma Galvez, a young woman who was struggling with addiction, life on the streets, and other problems before she discovered Glide.

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You've got a mere few hours left, DC-area nonprofits, to apply for a $10,000 service grant from Fenton Communications to help your organization develop a stronger and more effective social media strategy in 2010. The grant recipient will receive up to $10K in social media auditing, monitoring, and strategic recommendations from industry powerhouse Fenton Communications.

The deadline is today so get on it and tell your Washington, DC-area nonprofit friends as well.

In addition, they've got a free (registration required) downloadable guide, WATTA? What Are They Talking About: Social Media, Web 2.0 and Your Online Engagement Strategy that's worth a read if you work on this type of strategy at a nonprofit or cause-driven organization. The guide goes in-depth on things the importance of "listening" to social media conversations already taking place, targeting your audience, developing active ideas to join the conversation, producing engaging content, the best ways of distributing that content, and getting social. In addition, the guide gives some great examples of strategies that have worked for real organizations and campaigns. And it's full of pretty graphics.

If you apply and end up being this year's grant recipient, I bet those are the things they'll help you develop to advance your Web 2.0 strategy. Good luck and spread the word... quickly!

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Our partners at Adobe just let us know about Youth Producing Change, a search for films about human rights issues created by filmmakers under the age 19. Adobe Youth Voices is producing this event with Human Rights Watch, and the selected films will be screened around the world as part of HRW's film festival.

Does your organization work with young filmmakers? This could be an excellent opportunity for them. Hurry: the deadline for submissions is January 15.

Software as a service (SaaS) is an undeniably green alternative to traditional computing. It's one form of cloud computing in which people use software applications that are located on the Internet rather than on their own computers or networks. A very common example of it is web-based email. The green aspect of SaaS or cloud computing is that it shifts the computing power responsibilities to a relatively small number of Internet servers and can slow the continual demand for hardware upgrades to meet the needs of new software. Essentially, a software hosting provider can utilize a server more efficiently than you can in your office; it can also make setting up and managing your software a whole lot easier. As you rely more on the cloud, you may find that you rely less on an in-house IT person. It also usually lowers your upfront costs since you no longer have to buy and maintain the server or the software. But is it the right solution for you and your organization?

Risks

Since these services usually charge some sort of subscription fee, the lower upfront costs need to be balanced against the generally higher operating costs to determine what is right for your budget. Check out the thoughts and concerns of some of our forum users in this thread (read past the first few posts about the initial article to get to the real discussion). Their main concerns were around security, potential for data loss and availability. Major SaaS providers like Google, Amazon and Microsoft have had significant outages causing inconvenience to their users, but more importantly, one actually lost data in the process.