TechSoup is working to redesign/develop our website to make it easier to use so we can get more donated products into the hands of the many organizations who need them. As part of that process, we need some folks to help us test things out and tell us how to make our future implementation better.

With that in mind, we would like to invite you to participate in a key usability study to help TechSoup improve our website. Testing will take one hour and can be done remotely or on-site at TechSoup offices in San Francisco. We'll be holding usability testing on the following days from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Pacific time:

Like many of the readers of this blog who are in the nonprofit world, I work for a nonprofit because I believe in what we do and that it does a lot to improve the state of the world. I've had a variety of jobs, internships, and volunteering opportunities with nonprofits over the span of my adult life and most of those opportunities were available to me through the help of Idealist.org.

As a nonprofit manager, I've also found great employees, interns, and volunteers to join and support the work of many nonprofits through Idealist's giant database of users. Not only is it an online source of social benefit job and volunteer info, but they hold great real-world nonprofit career and volunteer fairs in cities around the country, and they provide useful content and resources that add to the sector.

If YOU'VE benefited from this great resource over the past 15 years, take a minute to read their appeal for help and give a few bucks to keep them around. I have and I hope you will too.

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

"Americans think it takes a lot of money to make a difference," according to Rajesh Haridas, chief operating officer of Vibha, an almost entirely volunteer-run organization that aims to improve the lives of underprivileged youth in India and elsewhere.

But it's the effort of his organization's more than 800 volunteers worldwide, Haridas says, rather than money that has allowed Vibha to provide funding, support, training, and other resources to more than 190 charitable projects.

One of those projects is the Sikshana Foundation, set up to improve India's primary education.

Volunteer for TechSoup! We are in the process of making our recorded webinars closed captioned and are seeking volunteers to transcribe the audio. No previous transcription experience necessary and you can simply follow these directions to get started:

1. We are using the website dotSUB to manage the process. Watch the instructional video that demonstrates how it works.
2. Visit our page there to view the webinars that are waiting to be transcribed. Don't feel that you have to complete a webinar. Just work on as much as you can and other volunteers will jump in where you left off.
3. When the transcript is complete, please DO NOT "Mark this transcription complete." Send an email to webinars@techsoup.org to let us know. We will work our magic on this end and create a page on the TechSoup that looks like this finished one. We'll list you among our volunteers on the webinar archive page.

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TechSoup is a nonprofit that has many moving parts, programs, services, and functions. It's a lot of work to provide (what we hope is) good content, useful events, inexpensive or donated products from corporate partners, and more. With that, we need your help. There are many ways to get involved; check out the pages on the TechSoup Global site to learn about current job openings and internship opportunities. This post will discuss two of those opportunities in detail.

The TechSoup Content Team Is Seeking Volunteers and an Intern:

Mozilla Service Week is here! We've blogged about Mozilla Service Week a few times in the past few weeks, but if you still haven't gotten involved, it's not too late. The Mozilla Blog has a list of projects and challenges that still need volunteers. If you need help at your nonprofit but don't know where to start, try Jayne's list of short-term assignments for tech volunteers. Beth has some suggestions too.

All week, the Mozilla Service Week site will be featuring volunteer success stories. You can also follow the action on Flickr and Delicious.

Are you participating in Mozilla Service Week, either with your nonprofit or as a volunteer? If so, come tell us about it in the TechSoup forums.

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.

This week, Worldwide Lexicon launched its long-awaited Universal Translator plugin for Firefox. There are still a few kinks to work out, but don't wait to install this one. It's a glimpse into the future of the Internet.

Worldwide Lexicon combines translation engines like Babel Fish and Google Translate with user-contributed translations and edits. WWL maintains a database of user contributions and uses its own ratings system to give higher priority to better translators. One thing I love about WWL is that there's no signup: to start translating (or to start reading other people's translations), simply install the plugin.

A few days ago, I had the opportunity to meet Brian McConnell, head developer at WWL. Brian has big ideas about reducing language barriers on the Internet, and his enthusiasm is nothing if not contagious. In a time when more and more nonprofits are blurring the line between local and global, I think that services like WWL can make a huge difference in how we communicate and collaborate. Using WWL, you can encourage bilingual volunteers to translate your own content so that a broader audience can find it. Simply have them install the plugin, or better yet, customize your website with Javascript code provided by WWL.

Last month, Google launched their own engine for collaborating on translations, Google Translator Toolkit. It's an interesting service that's definitely worth a look, but for ductility and incorporation into your own website, WWL is the more compelling offering.

Last week, TechSoup published our new guide, The Resilient Organization: A Guide for Disaster Planning and Recovery. Before the guide even officially launched, TechSoup Taiwan had already begun an ambitious project to translate it into Chinese Traditional. I've been checking the group wiki every few days to see how the effort is going, and it's coming along rapidly. It's exciting to watch, and it demonstrates how much volunteer energy is ready to help you spread your nonprofit's message.

Photo: gcbb, CC license

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Discuss This in Our Forums

What do you think of the Universal Translator plugin? Do you have any success stories about volunteer translation? Share your insights in this Emerging Technologies forum discussion.