TechSoup recently received funding from ZeroDivide, whose CEO I just interviewed, to provide mentors for 4 of their grantee organizations:  Southern California Library, Craigslist Foundation, Women’s Audio Mission and the San Diego Futures Foundation. These organizations need advice on everything from e-commerce, to marketing and communications strategy, to intellectual property issues, to business plan development.

Please take a moment to scan through their projects and mentoring needs to see if you have time and skills to donate to their work. If you're interested in being a mentor, contact Sheetal Singh, NetSquared's Grants Manager, at sheetal@techsoup.org.

Southern California Library
Project: SCL proposes a community enterprise that will use web 2.0 technologies to provide greater access to the valuable historical documents, records, and materials; facilitate on and off-line creation and sharing of community members’ own stories, ideas, and insights; and generate revenue through the sale of Library products and services.

Need: They need advice on generating an e-commerce business plan; legal advice on copyright issues; and assistance identifying technology vendors/services.

1. The Community Technology Foundation changed its name to ZeroDivide in early 2008. What prompted the name change, and what else has changed about the organization along with its name?

We were founded in 1998 by a collaboration of 10 coalitions representing underserved communities to impact the “digital divide” by promoting community technology. “Zerodivide” was a concept we always used to describe the aspirational goal of bridging the digital divide while understanding its relationship to the socioeconomic and cultural divides existing in low-income, minority and undeserved communities. As we gained more practical knowledge about the common determinants for increasing technology access and addressing civic engagement, social services and economic self-sufficiency, the need to change our name to call out this interconnection became pretty self evident. The bigger changes however have been in our strategy.