Using “open source” software rather than proprietary tools is a moral issue that extends beyond technology and affects all of the causes and people that nonprofit organizations serve, Eben Moglen, founder of the Software Freedom Law Center, argued at the Nonprofit Technology Conference.

The idea that knowledge is something that can be owned and therefore controlled is the cause of most human misery, said Mr. Moglen, who is also a professor of law and legal history at Columbia University Law School.

“There are people who will die because the knowledge of the molecule that might help them not to die is owned knowledge,” he said. “Someone has secured for the substantial portion of a human lifetime the exclusive right to deploy that knowledge, which raises its price, decreases its availability, and condemns some people to extinction.”

Knowledge as a commodity also explains why such a ...

New technology tools allow organizations to make their online videos more interactive, Michael Hoffman, chief executive of See3, a Chicago consulting company, told participants at the Nonprofit Technology Conference.

Among the nonprofit videos he pointed to as examples: That’s Not Cool, a new campaign designed to help teenagers recognize the role that technology can play in unhealthy or abusive relationships. The online campaign was developed by the Advertising Council, in partnership with the Family Violence Prevention Fund.

The campaign uses a light touch to talk about what can be a difficult issue.

In one video, sock puppets portray a teenage couple in which the young man is overwhelmed by the constant text messages he receives from his girlfriend asking where he is and what is he doing. After laying out his dilemma, the video asks the viewer what he should do:

A — You have ...

The turbulent economy is very much on the minds of nonprofit organizations as they think about their online fund raising.

Nick Allen — chief executive of Donordigital, a consulting company in San Francisco that specializes in online fund raising, and a speaker at the Nonprofit Technology Conference — spoke to The Chronicle about what he has heard from his nonprofit clients.

Microsoft wants to know how its software donations through Tech Soup have helped charities and libraries in the United States and Canada — so it’s holding a contest to find out.

Winners of the Microsoft Impact Story Contest 2009 will be chosen based on their ability to show how the software helped the organizations stabilize and strengthen their technology systems, improve the services they provide, or do their work in new ways.

Contest winners will be announced June 26, and receive $5,000 in cash and Microsoft products worth $25,000.

The Internet is transforming the ways that groups come together and take action, Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody told participants at the Nonprofit Technology Conference.

“We are living in the middle of the biggest expansion of expressive capability in the history of the human race,” said Mr. Shirky, who is an adjunct professor in New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program.

Previous communications revolutions were either good at sending one-way messages to large groups of people, like the printing press or broadcast television, or at getting small groups of individuals to talk to each other, like the telephone, he said.

“The Internet is the first media that brings the many-to-many pattern, two-way group communication into the media landscape,” Mr. Shirky told the audience. “For the first time, we have the ability to put them together. It...

A new guide to low-cost software systems that help charities manage their donor records was released at the Nonprofit Technology Conference.

The report — which was published by the Nonprofit Technology Network and Idealware, a nonprofit group in Portland, Me., that provides information on software designed for charities — reviews 33 fund-raising packages that cost less than $4,250 the first year a charity uses them and compares the features that they offer.

The guide also provides in-depth reviews of 12 of those systems.

Laura S. Quinn, executive director of Idealware, spoke with The Chronicle about the report’s findings and offered advice about the steps charities should take when they are looking for new fund-raising software.

Founded a decade ago, the New York charity iMentor pairs adults and children to meet in person and to intensify their ties through online communications.

High-school students in the New York City nonprofit program meet with their mentors once a month, but weekly online messages that adults and students send to each other are a critical part of helping the relationships grow.

Early in its life, iMentor realized that it needed to build an online system that would allow for safe, guided communication, says Dana Saxon, director of partnerships at iMentor Interactive.

“We needed to know how to track those e-mail messages, and really importantly we wanted to be able to monitor the communication,” she says. “Since the majority of the students are under 18, it’s important for their safety.”

In addition to allowing staff members to monitor the electronic conversations going on between...

More than 1,300 charity technology officials, consultants, and company representatives are gathering here in San Francisco this week for the Nonprofit Technology Conference.

Sessions at the conference — which is organized by the Nonprofit Technology Network — will focus on topics like fund raising on mobile phones, nonprofit technology careers, ways to attract new online donors, measuring the effectiveness of social-media efforts, and creating podcasts.

Among the speakers will be Eben Moglen, founder of the Software Freedom Law Center, and Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, a book that looks at how people are using new technologies to organize in nontraditional ways.

Jacqueline Novogratz sees business as part of the solution to poverty in developing countries.

The organization that she founded, the Acumen Fund, in New York, raises philanthropic dollars, which it then invests in businesses in South Asia and East Africa that provide health, water, energy, and agriculture products and services to people earning less than $4 a day.

Too often, says Ms. Novogratz, traditional aid breeds dependency. But at the same time, she says, market capitalism alone isn’t enough to lift poor countries out of poverty. She describes the Acumen Fund as a middle approach.

Ms. Novogratz, who was in Washington to speak at the Global Philanthropy Forum, talked to The Chronicle about the effect the world economic crisis is having on the Acumen Fund’s work and the businesses that the group invests in.

The tumultuous economy will test the leaders of charity-run businesses in a way they have never been tested before, Kevin Lynch and Julius Walls, Jr., authors of Mission, Inc., told participants at the Social Enterprise Summit. But at the same time, they said, the downturn offers exciting opportunities.

Staying on top of the business’s cash flow is critical.

“If you run out of cash, you’re done,” said Mr. Walls, who is chief executive of Greyston Bakery, a charity-run business in Yonkers, N.Y., that provides employment to people who are recovering from addiction, returning from prison, or have other problems that make it difficult to get a job.

Six weeks ago, Rebuild Resources, a screen-printing business in St. Paul that employs people who are recovering from substance abuse, instituted pay cuts to cut expenses during a tight period.

But the pay cuts were driven by the...