Global Voices Online is reporting how social media is playing a role in the latest parliamentary and council elections in Botswana. While they note that their use of social media tools is behind countries like Nigeria, Uganda, or South Africa, there are promising signs that individuals like journalists and students are using such tools to monitor and report on the ongoing elections. One blogger in particular, Patricia Maganu, notes that:

Whenever I've gone to tech conferences, it's always the engineers in the crowd who stand up and ask why on earth we can't all agree to standardize the plugs and inputs on electronic devices. Most of us nod in agreement, but invariably someone observes that it's simply the price we pay for having a free market industry.

Hold the phone! The mobile phone industry has decided to do something about this. Mobile phone companies including Apple, LG, Motorola, Nokia, Samsung, and Sony Ericsson (which together account for over 80% of the mobile phone market worldwide) have struck a deal with the European Union to introduce the one-size-fits-all or universal mobile phone charger by January 2010.

This post is cross-posted on my personal blog and on the NetSquared Blog.

On Thursday, I attended the unconference/open space portion of SOCAP09 (Social Capital Markets 2009). I found a few tech sessions that were relevant to the purposes of TechSoup, and as is always the case, I collected the business cards of some intelligent people doing good work. The spontaneous conversations in the halls, are really the reason why we go to conferences, right?

That is really the reason we even do face-to-face these days, as much of the content at conferences is pretty much the same conversation again and again, at least in the nonprofit tech world (Twitter or Facebook? What's the best platform to use for online collaboration? And so on.) Here is what you missed, so you don't have to regret not having gone.

Meet these smart people whom I met, and you may not know about, but should:

• Jill Finlayson, Social Edge Social Media guru
• Greg Berry, Systems Designer of Nuance Intelligence
• Boyd Cohen, of 3rd Whale
• Dawn Bowles, of Dreambank.org

These people were talking about very different topics, but there were some emerging and complementary high-level themes that I observed across conversations.

One such theme that emerged is that there is a justifiable fear of the duplication of efforts.

Ana-Marie Jones is the Executive Director of CARD - Collaborating Agencies Responding to Disasters, a nonprofit located in Alameda County, California. Created by local community agencies after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, CARD trains and supports nonprofits and their special needs clients in disaster preparedness, response, and recovery activities. CARD has been a TechSoup partner for developing The Resilient Organization: A Guide for Disaster Planning and Recovery, a new 77-page manual for nonprofits to prevent and recover from any disaster.

Cell phones and "smartphones" are easily the greatest additions to accessible emergency preparedness and disaster response. Virtually any nonprofit can dramatically increase its level of emergency preparedness and planning efficiency by embracing cell phone technology. Since many employees, volunteers and consumers already carry cell phones, this approach doesn't necessarily require buying anything new. If the phones are already familiar to the user, little time will be needed to  teach new technology, and the tech support systems for cell phones is readily accessible — in stores, via phone, and online. Remember that even if the reception and signal fail, the programmed information is still available!

Among the most useful ways to embrace the cell phone solution is to dedicate a few minutes at staff meetings and gatherings to help program phones. Have people pull them out and enter these numbers and information immediately. Some of the most basic things to program include:

TechCrunch, the popular technology blog, just published a survey and matrix on some online apps to share large files. We had a forum thread on a similar topic a few weeks ago, and as the responses in the blog post and forum thread suggest, there is no clear "winner" in this field, and the best tool for you will depend on your organization's needs.

I don't know about you, but I have always found the terminology around telephone systems a little complex and unnecessarily confusing and I come from an IT background. PBX, POTS, PSTN, Trunk Lines. What does all that mean? Wikipedia can help you decipher some of it. Our recent article, Unified Communications Options for Nonprofits can too.

Today, I want to talk about one of those technologies that I think could actually be a windfall for small and very small (1-2 people) organizations; the virtual PBX. Don't get scared off by the name. I'll try my best to explain it in plain English.

What is a virtual PBX?

Before defining virtual PBX, let me just explain what PBX is. It stands for private branch exchange and is basically a private phone system you might have in an office, company, or business. It's the type of system many of our organizations probably have already, where you have multiple extensions and can transfer, leave voicemail, and use call forwarding.

In my opinion, web conferencing is one of the easiest ways to be greener with technology. Think about it. If you have a meeting with 10 people who would normally drive 20 miles each to get to a meeting or worse yet, fly to a training… how much CO2 is being saved? Also, if you had the meeting in person, how many copies of your slides would you print out?

You keep hearing how mobile phones are a great way to reach a large audience of people, but how can your nonprofit or library use this technology, and where do you start?

Join Kami Griffiths on Thursday, July 16 for a webinar about using mobile technologies for outreach and education. She will interview Adam Shyevitch, Teen Initiative Director at Boston After School & Beyond, who will share information about how their organization is using mobile technology for their outreach efforts. We will also hear from Michael Sabat of Mobile Commons, a company that develops web-based applications to launch interactive mobile campaigns including text messaging, voice calls, and web-based components.

If your nonprofit or library works with supporters or community members who have difficulty hearing or are deaf, there's a cool new freebie out there to help ensure that people can communicate well by phone with you and everybody else. Please feel free to share this info with your networks, local community centers, or health care facilities.

As of January 2009, American Network has "been approved by the Federal Communications Commission to provide IP Relay, Video Relay Services (VRS) and Internet Protocol Caption Telephone Service (IPCTS)." This phone captioning service is free because it is funded by the Federal Communications Commission. 

PhoneCaption.com provides free captioning for telephone calls to help those who are hard of hearing. PhoneCaption.com supports standard phones and IP phones and sends voice dialogue via text through the Internet or your IP phone screen. The caller receives captions to read of what is being said, via the web or a Cisco 79XX IP phone screen display for example.

Last month, TechSoup Talks hosted a free one-hour webinar on ways your nonprofit or library can use new affordable telecommunication tools like Voice over IP (VoIP), virtual PBX, and virtual private networking (VPN) to reduce your need to travel and better enable telecommuting and virtual meetings.