Nonprofit technology is a rarified field; let's admit that right off the top. There are a lot of fields that are "sexier" when it comes to helping the poor, feeding the hungry, saving the wild animals and providing safe drinking water.

On the other hand-- and this is what I really realized this week, talking to my friend Marisa-- this is where the most committed and dedicated and HOPEFUL people are in the left, progressive, get things done, change the world sector. This is where it's happening, folks, and the nonprofits which realize this and get on the bandwagon are the people who are going to have the money, the systems, the software, the PEOPLE to get their work really done in the years to come.

All those other committed folks...they are going to be left in the dust, and the folks they are supposedly helping are going to be the big losers. But let's not even get into this fight. Let's focus, instead, on what technology is already doing and can do for people who want to do good.

That is what this conference is all about, and I'm once again blown away by the passion, the dedication, the sheer quantity of folks who have dedicated themselves to this effort. "Because," says the NTEN slogan, "if you want to change the world, you need the tools to do it." If you can't get at the numbers, the result of your actions, then, really, let's face it, you don't have a clue whether you've done any good or not. Maybe you spent upteen-eleven hours helping Johnny read, but if Johnny stays unemployed, stays uneducated, stays with his homebuddies on the street corner, you ain't done squat. And the folks who have poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into your literacy campaign, sooner or later, are going to get jaded or discouraged or both and whoosh, like the wind blowing off the Sahara Desert, your funding is going to dry right up.

Today, I heard about an organization in DC that works with kids who have been arrested but not yet tried, an alternative to the only two other solutions--simply letting them go or putting them in jail while they wait to be tried. They have software that tracks every single one of their clients, and their social workers can share case information, and every client's progress --or backsliding-- is logged into the system.

I heard about an organization that has invested in a satellite internet connection so its web-based systems are up and running 99 per cent of the time. So the organization can have employees literally all over the whole world that are connected with functioning email, with shared systems, with video conferencing, with a shared financial system, with shared planning tools.

I learned about www.beehive.org, a web portal written specifically for low-income clients, aimed at their problems and concerns, written is simple but not stupid English...and available in Spanish, so that what they get online is not just email but also answers to their most pressing problems.

I heard about legal services lawyers creating online systems, sort of like Turbo Tax, for filling out any government or legal forms, and then walks the clients through taking them to the proper government office to file them.

I learned about several systems that walks low-income clients through the Earned Income Tax Credit, which puts money in their hands, even though they earn just a little income. Many, many low-income people simply don't know about this source of money, or if they do, they don't know how to get it for themselves without paying someone who'll eat a huge chunk of it.

What is all this? Giving power to the people who traditionally have the least. The internet can be used to transfer this power. Agencies leveraging the free and low-cost tools available in nonprofit tech can pass this power straight through to their constituents. It's one of the best kept secrets, also one of the most exciting pieces of news today.

We can keep on doing stuff we've always done, and we'll keep on getting the results we've always gotten. But there are people out there who want to do new things, to innovate, to shift the power, to create cool stuff that helps, just a wee tad, to change the world.

One amazing example: Sahana, which just won a major award:

"Sahana is a Free and Open Source Disaster Management system. It is a web based collaboration tool that addresses the common coordination problems during a disaster from finding missing people, managing aid, managing volunteers, tracking camps effectively between Government groups, the civil society (NGOs) and the victims themselves."

There has been some bad news about the money raised and the effectiveness of disaster response during the 2004 tsunami, but this project is one of the quiet fabulous things to come out of that tragedy. Who knew? A bunch of techies.

Back at the conference today: I learned about email fund raising-- including the parts of an email campaign, what to put in the various subject lines, how to get the maximum amount of donation, the most often, from the largest number of donors.

I keep bumping into the people who go with the names I associate with the giants in the field, people who constantly give to share their knowledge, who build new systems, who come up with newer or more different ideas. Beth Kanter. Theresa Crawford. Bill Lester. Okay, I don't expect my friends list to have major name recognition here, but just let me assure you they are some of the stars and it's a great boost to meet them in person.

Tags: nptech, ntc07