One of our Project Champions, Sean Stannard-Stockton, interviewed Daniel Ben-Horin, Founder and President of CompuMentor and TechSoup, ( NetSquared's "parents") for his podcast.

If you've ever wondered how NetSquared came about, here is Daniel's answer to Sean's question: "Tell us about the vision behind NetSquared. How did you get into this, and how is it evolving?"

Daniel: I have two words to say about NetSquared, and those are "Marnie Webb." Marnie is our Vice President for Knowledge Services, and really the intellectual author of NetSquared. I certainly would want to credit her as the main strategist of this project. It's a two-year-old project.

Marnie and I were looking at this burgeoning 2.0 world--put yourself back in the fall of '05. We were testing an idea, which was that the shift of technical intelligence from the desktop to the web, the array of web services, and the different kinds of ways that people could utilize technology that resulted from that platform shift represented a particular opportunity for non-profits. That was the idea we were chewing on.

We thought that there was a case to be made that one of the key ramifications of this shift--of the proliferation of web-based services--was that the onus was being taken off the stuff non-profits had the least of, which was money and resources of that kind that they needed, hard resources that they needed to buy stuff.

The shift was going toward--actually, non-profits had more of than anyone else, and that was access to communities, if they did it right. It suggested to us that there was something over the horizon that was very exciting: non-profits that could tap into their communities to such an extent that they could actually get social impact work done on a much higher level.

A metaphor that we always like here is that if you think of everything that has gone into Wikipedia, with so few staff and so much contribution from the community that is excited by the concept of an encyclopedia built on collaboration and which accepts a set of protocols that enable it to function in an efficient way. If you take that idea and think could that be applied to AIDS, could that be applied to hunger, could people be so motivated to solve a social problem that they operate at the same degree of contribution and efficiency as characterized by Wikipedia, and quite a few of the other noteworthy social web projects.

So, from that intellectual starting point, we thought about what could we do as an organization. What do we have to bring to the table? Now, what we think we have to bring to the table is a set of relationships.

We're an unusual organization in that because of the product program, we have strong corporate relationships. Because we serve non-profits, we have a huge database of opted-in non-profits. We've been working closely with philanthropy for 20 years; we have, we hope, a significant degree of trust and competence there. We have a lot of people who are right out there in the blogosphere and highly woven into the web, and bring us back that form of intelligence and contacts. We consider ourselves a social change organization--an activist organization--from the outset, so, in that sense, we're connected on more than a technical assistance level with the non-profit sector and the social change sector.

The idea was could we bring all these audiences into one place and create a discussion that was distinctly oriented toward impact--toward how can we help projects that have potential succeed. And that was the first NetSquared, a very lively, if talk-heavy, conference. Very disparate speakers: speakers from Microsoft, Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!, Hong Eun-taek from OhmyNews in Korea, Dan Gillmor, the list goes on, and Angela Glover Blackwell of PolicyLink; a very disparate set of speakers at a technology conference who got people very excited.

But, for the second NetSquared, which is coming up at Cisco on May 29th and 30th--the first one was also hosted by Cisco, for which we're extremely grateful--we decided to really shift the dial toward helping specific projects succeed. That led to the nomination process. We ran the community vote; a process we're in the middle of now, of preparing the projects--the 20 that were selected out of the nomination process--helping them to develop their pitches. Then, they'll compete at NetSquared for a share of the $100, 000 innovation fund we set up, and for a lot of other resources--non-monetary--that will be in the room. We hope to continue to keep coming to the table for these kinds of projects on an on-going basis.

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You can hear the rest of the interview and/or read the transcript on Sean's blog, Tactical Philanthropy.