ReadWriteWeb

Silicon Valley design agency ZURB is holding their fourth annual ZURBwired event on August 18, in which the firm donates 24 hours of their time to accomplish one mission for a nonprofit partner, whether it's designing a website, creating a fundraising campaign, or solving any other problem they can think of. The deadline for nonprofits to apply is Friday, August 5 (tomorrow). The proposal submission can be found here.

This past weekend marked the five-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina's destructive landfall in New Orleans, Louisiana. While the flooding caused by the hurricane was horrific, the events brought out the best in humanitarians - many of whom leveraged the power of the Web to help raise money and gather supplies for relief efforts. Half a decade later, the Web has become a power platform through which to donate to charitable organizations, and one company - Endorse for a Cause (EFAC) - hopes their platform can take this trend to a whole new social level.

Popular group-buying daily deal site Groupon has gone back to its roots with the launch of an initiative called "G-Team," which harnesses the collective consumer power that has made Groupon such a success, in order to connect users to local fundraisers, campaigns and other charitable causes. The causes will be tied to the deals posted to Groupon so as to attract like-minded shoppers with community organizations whose campaigns they may be interested in.

For example, a deal on canoe rentals might be tied to a campaign to clean up a river, a deal on bike tuneups might be linked to a campaign to donate bicycles to disadvantaged youth and so on.

A while ago, I wrote a rather condemning post on how most "social media for social good" efforts were heavy on social media activities but came up short on actual social good.

Still, there are organizations such as Kiva, The Extraordinaires or SocialVibe and many others that do turn user microactions and technology to affect change and do good in very tangible ways. Those are just three of the tech nonprofit or philanthropic organizations I can think of at the moment, but we at RWW would love to know more. Tell us in the comment what your favorite tech nonprofit is and why.

WordPress, the popular, open-source CMS/blogging software loved the world around, has just welcomed another addition to its homonymous family.

WordPress founder and Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg has just announced that his nonprofit, charitable foundation is officially an open shop. The WordPress Foundation is an organization dedicated to supporting and promoting the very mission of WordPress itself. Simply put, as on the Foundation website: "to democratize publishing through Open Source, GPL software." Everybody dance!

Today, Americans are celebrating a very somber but inspiring national holiday: Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.

As Twitter co-founder Biz Stone wrote in a blog post a few days ago, "People all over the United States are urged to honor Dr. King's legacy by making this holiday a national day of service." Stone reminded us of this wonderful quotation by King: "Life's most persistent and urgent question is: What are you doing for others?"
But often in my sojourn through the social Web, I find myself with no decent answer for that question as I watch hordes of well-meaning people throw their supposed social capital at hashtags and fan pages without doing anything more meaningful than that. What do you think: Is your "whuffie" enough of a donation to a good cause?

Volunteer-run organizations often spend thousands of dollars on quarterly newsletters and direct mail solicitations. While the groups have the best of intentions, they often lack the in-house graphic designers and high-quality printers to actually produce these goods. Nevertheless, they almost always have blogs, websites and social media profiles for outreach purposes. In the past few months ReadWriteWeb has seen an influx of blog-to-newsletter media solutions. While many technologists have criticized print as a dead medium, blog-to-newsletter tools may be fantastic for advocates and service orgs. Below are a few companies to help get you started:

Individuals often have to sacrifice their livelihood for a cause. It's not fair, but it happens. But what happens when they're forced to volunteer at a corporate job? This morning CNBC and Web Guild published articles on how some individuals are "volunteering" to defer pay to maintain their positions or fill time between job interviews.

As "volunteering" is defined as "working on behalf of others without being motivated by financial or material gain," this seems like a strange use of the word. In the case of employees deferring pay, this seems more like an unfortunate burden rather than an act of volunteerism. If you're an experienced professional looking to stay sharp and you've got the freedom to contribute to actual volunteer-driven efforts or you'd like to try working for a cause-based organization, below are some great resources:

ProPublica is an independent, non-profit newsroom with headquarters in Manhattan. ProPublica's newsroom employs 32 journalists and receives financing from the Sandler Foundation and other contributions. The organization's mission is to continue the tradition of investigative journalism at a time where a lot of newspaper organizations have had to cut back on their newsroom operations. The really interesting thing here, though, is that ProPublica is giving away all of its content to other newspapers and online publishers for free under a non-commercial, no-derivatives Creative Commons license.

Chips, dip and government data are everyone's three favorite things to take to a party, right? Ok, so government data is actually quite boring on its own, but in these exciting times of democratized programming, government data can be turned into some pretty exciting mashups.

That's just what the nonprofit Sunlight Foundation is aiming to make more possible with its work to make government and related data more available with its new Apps for America contest. More than 40 open source applications and websites making use of that data entered the contest and today the six fabulous winners were announced. We've got a five minute screencast tour of the winners below.