Austin 501c Tech Club

I went to the Austin 501c Tech Club meeting tonight at Austin FreeNet, a public computer lab serving a low income area on the east side, still run by the indefatigable pair, Dale and Christie.  A guy from IBM (which has ~6,500 local employees) gave a presentation on the various public support projects they're involved in.  In no particular order, some links from that:

World Community Grid - This is along the path SETI@Home blazed so long ago, but instead allows you to crunch data for various research projects.  My quad-core intel is currently curing cancer, finding a cure of Dengue Fever, maximizing food staple yields, and analyzing human proteome folding! 

SME Toolkit - Knowledge and support for small entrepreneurs around the world.

Traducelo Ahora - Spanking good English to Spanish translation tool (or so I'm told, since I don't know Spanish)

I think these are great tools, and IBM does a lot more to help the world.  However, I think they could do a much better job opening up their internal volunteer opportunity boards and content repositories.  Currently, they require nonprofits to find an IBM employee to work with before that can send them documents from what looked like an impressively large and well maintained repository of information on nonprofit-related technology.

Unrelated to the meeting, I stumbled across a couple interesting New York Times pieces from a few months back.  Both topics come up quite a bit in the meta-non-profit arena:

Is the Non-Profit World Teeming With Fraud?

How can you Maximize your Charity?