Hi everyone--

I'm Megan Keane (aka Penguin Kuhn in Second Life) and I'm the Online Community Manager at TechSoup. I'm excited to be attending my first Net2 conference and have been overwhelmed already by the amazing people, interesting ideas, and innovative projects that are here!

Join in the Celebration of the Launch of the Second Nonprofit Commons Sim! Nonprofits and their supporters will be hosting a mixed reality grand opening celebration in San Jose as part of the NetSquared conference and in the metaverse on Wednesday, May 28, 2008, starting at 10:00 A.M. PST/SLT (Second Life Time), in the new second Nonprofit Commons location.

Highlights:

TechSoup’s free day-long online event is coming up this Wed. May 14th: Online Activism: Social Media Tools for Social Change in the TechSoup online forums.

Dive into the conversation with hosts Heather Mansfield, owner of DIOSA Communications and Online Community Manager for Change.org and Carie Lewis, Internet Marketing Manager for the Humane Society of the United States, as they explore the ins and outs of using social networking sites and strategies for determining how, why, and when to use different applications to broadcast your message. In discussing the dos and don’ts of effectively fundraising and promoting your cause, we’ll also look at lessons learned from successful (and not so successful) online campaigns.

Join us Wed. May 14, for a free, one-day online event, in the TechSoup Emerging Technologies forum as we discuss issues such as:

Three ways to be a hero.

One event to launch them.

The Second Life Event April 26th will celebrate the launch of:

Windows Server 2008

Visual Studio 2008

SQL Server 2008

Here at TechSoup we have a lot of different projects--from Net2 to MaintainIT to the TechSoup community forums and a large network of communities across our programs. However, we often find that there's not always a lot of overlap between these groups. In fact, they often often don't even know about one another.

'Tis the season for spending. In fact, consumers are about to unlease over $100 billion in holiday spending. The holidays is also the time of year where nonprofits make the push for seasonal donations. Several nonprofit giving sites have found ways to help nonprofits harness some of the huge holiday expenditures towards their own causes.

With all the recent buzz on OpenSocial, Google's new open API for social networks, Web Guild's event: OpenSocial--High Octane for Widgets and Web Apps caught my eye. So I headed down to the Googleplex on Wed. night to listen to the panel discussions to find out more about OpenSocial with an eye for how nonprofits can leverage this platform.