Designing an appealing brand of hand soap typically might not follow the same process as designing a solution to a life-threatening, global health problem would. So it’s not often that I discover processes used for designing consumer products that are also well-suited to solving complex social problems.

Design Thinking may be one of the few exceptions.

I have recently been looking at examples of effective digital activism and tools that enable everyday activists to leverage the power of technology to create positive change in local communities.

One of the best examples I have seen of digital in action for social change comes from Egypt -- and to my pleasant surprise there was even a Net2 connection!

Is digital activism truly democratic? While encouraged by great examples of digital activism in action, I remained uneasy with universalizing narratives about an equal, liberating and benevolent digital frontier.

Is the social change potential of digital realizable in the same way for everyone, everywhere? Can local communities, especially ones that have been historically marginalized, use digital tools to solve chronic problems such as poverty, political persecution, and racism, offline? Or do we just leave this important business to the big names in the social change market (i.e. large NGOs and the digital experts hired by those organizations)?

In the wake of the controversial KONY2012 video and its related drama and theatrics, I was left feeling somewhat jaded about the power of the digital to affect meaningful and tangible change on the ground (offline).

Surely, a successful deployment of technology for social good can offer us more than a soap opera like media frenzy. Can the success of such efforts be measured beyond YouTube views and money raised?

In Part 1 of this series we covered the basics of a WordPress Do-it-Yourself (WP DIY) project. In this post we will take a deeper dive and cover WP hosting, installation, themes and plugins.

As mentioned in the first post, there is an almost overwhelming amount of WP resources on the web. Our goal is to provide some simple, effective WP DIY guidelines and in addition, point to select resources we have found to be useful. i.e. not overwhelm you.

As someone who just launched their first WordPress website, I’ll just come out and say this without hesitation. WordPress is impressive! If you are looking to do-it-yourself (DIY) and build a small business website, an online portfolio of your work, a blog dedicated to your dog or just trying to impress family and friends with your web talent, you need not look much further.

Any conversation about the future of web design has to come to terms with a fundamental and rapid shift in the way we view the web. By 2014, mobile Internet usage will surpass desktop usage. And from desktops and laptops to smart phones and tablets of differing sizes and resolutions, viewing device options are also growing at an increasingly steady rate.

For web designers and developers, it simply won’t work to build websites for just one or two types of devices, and the days of checking your site in a few web browsers and launching are long gone.

This month our friends at Random Hacks of Kindness (RHoK) led a global hack for humanity, bringing together close to 1,000 people to hack for social good in over 28 cities including Warsaw, where they worked in close collaboration with NetSquared and Fundacja TechSoup. Technologists teamed up with subject-matter experts to solve a wide range of social and environmental problems by building software applications.

As you may have seen here on the blog, the Net2 All-Star Invitational submission deadline has been extended to December 15. 

In the 10 Challenges hosted on Net2 since 2006, we’ve have seen some incredible stories of social innovators working hard to create positive change all over the world. Here are just a few that have really taken off:

Elliot Harmon, Staff Writer at TechSoup recently wrote a great, information-packed blog post that we want to share to wrap up our series on human capital. Our goal was to share tips, resources and examples of how civil society organizations can best tap into the human capital potential.  In this post Elliot shares key ingredients to make technology volunteering projects successful as well as some additional useful tips and resources. 

-- Originally posted on the TechSoup Blog --