Registered nonprofits can work through TechSoup to get donated products from Adobe, Microsoft, Symantec, Cisco and other companies for remarkable discounts: Office 2003 for $20, for example, or Dreamweaver for $25. And TechSoup also offers extensive online support as well as consulting services. (MSNBC.com is a joint venture between Microsoft and NBC News.)

A year ago, Ben-Horin and his team broadened their focus from packaged software to the new Web-based tools that organizations and communities can use to self-organize.

“We imagined the same kind of energy that has been mobilized for Wikipedia being mobilized to fight AIDS or hunger or homelessness,” he says. “We don’t know how that will happen, but we think it can happen.”

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In search of the “how,” CompuMentor launched a site called NetSquared.org , subtitled “Remixing the Web for Social Change.” They equipped it with various community tools, and started organizing the actual conference in as Web 2.0 a fashion as possible.

The result — hosted by Cisco in their new Santa Clara conference center — was as inclusive as the topic demands. The attendees were an international roster of groups, from established names like Amnesty International, the Kiwanis Club and the American Cancer Society to newer organizations such as Blogher, the Genocide Intervention Network and One Laptop Per Child. And thus the two days included dozens of examples of how the Web can organize: from the Katrina PeopleFinder site (created almost overnight by dozens of volunteers around the country) to the MySpace pages that helped mobilize hundreds of thousands of generally apolitical young people for the March immigration protests.

The examples also included information gathering. Dan Gillmor, author of We the Media, provided an interesting perspective on how the social Web can amplify citizen journalism:

“The citizen witness with a camera is not new — consider the Zapruder film of the JFK assassination. But imagine what would have happened if there had been a thousand cameras at Dealey Plaza that day, and they were all hooked to the Internet. Overnight, we’d have had 3D renderings of exactly what took place.”

On an international level, Ethan Zuckerman’s Global Voices Online aggregates (and often translates) blogs from around the world.

“Africa, for example, has a thriving blogosphere," he says. “What we try to do isn’t to speak, but to point. It’s getting easier and easier to let people speak for themselves.”

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