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.

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?

The generosity of others is a beautiful thing. For nonprofits, it is our lifesblood. If you find that you are challenged with needing to manage large lists of donors, or manage large groups of volunteers, I think that you may want to check out GiftWorks Standard and GiftWorks Volunteers. 

GiftWorks Standard can help you more effectively manage donors and prospects. You can gain greater insight into vital donor and donation information, with customizable reports on trends, revenue, segmentation, and more. The software even includes a feature allowing for the creation of custom mailings targeting your constituents or printed solicitations for attracting donors.

Here's a great project that Mozilla has put together in conjunction with Idealist, Social Actions, and others. For one week in September, tech experts all around the world will donate their time to organizations and individuals who need help accessing and using the Internet. It makes sense for Mozilla to take the initiative to put together a project like this; after all, it's largely volunteer efforts that have put together Mozilla products, translated them into dozens of languages, and built plugins to extend functionality in every conceivable direction. Imagine the impact that those developers, designers, and translators could achieve by focusing all of that attention on their own communities for one week.

If you head over to the Mozilla Service Week site, you can sign up as a volunteer or as an organization in need of help.

As we've noted previously, The Chronicle of Philanthropy has been running a series of online discussions on how nonprofits can use social media tools. In addition to these open discussions, the Chronicle has been conducting a series of recorded interviews.

In the latest, Allison Fine interviews Joe Green, one of the creators of Facebook Causes, and Amy Eldridge, Executive Director of Love Without Boundaries. These podcasts are available at http://philanthropy.com/media/audio/socialgood/. Topics to date include:

If you weren't in the Bay Area on June 20, or wished you could've cloned yourself to attend multiple sessions at the same time, never fear. You can see presentations from anywhere, anytime online.

The Craigslist Foundation's annual Nonprofit Bootcamp was a fantastc one-day conference, chalk full of workshops on topics ranging from marketing advice (PPT 10.1MB) to advanced ideas about the future of technology (PPT 1.7MB) for nonprofits, which featured our very own co-CEO, Marnie Webb. Many of the slideshows presented at the event are already available to be viewed on their site. Downloadable podcasts will be available for most sessions soon (we'll update you when they become available but in the meantime, check out the podcasts from previous years!)

Aside from Marnie's presentation, TechSoup was there with bells on as a sponsor and exhibitor. I was there along with my colleagues Elliot Harmon, Ricci Powers, and Barbara Shaughnessy. We really enjoyed the opportunity to get to talk to throngs of people from established nonprofits around the country, start-up organizations, and future nonprofit hopefuls.

Last week, representatives from TechSoup Global's international partners came to San Francisco for a three-day meeting. It was great to meet our partners in person and learn about both their successes and their challenges. Over the next couple of weeks, I'll be sharing a few observations and insights from the Summit.

In discussing online community building, Marnie Webb (one of TechSoup Global's CEOs) made an opportune point. While it's true that managing an online community is a necessarily hands-on process (I wrote about this a few weeks ago), it's possible to be too hands-on. "If you do everything," Marnie said, "people will let you keep doing everything." Jane Zhang, director of TechSoup Canada, echoed that sentiment. She said that it can be difficult to get people to start helping each other rather than (or in addition to) calling customer support.

TechSoup's online forums have amassed a top-notch group of hosts who can quickly respond to a wide range of inquiries, but that group has taken years to develop. Those people would have never risen to the top had they not been given the opportunity to help in the first place.