We are excited to announce that the members of the Global Leadership Council are headed to San Francisco to take part in some exciting programming at TechSoup Global headquarters next week!

As mentioned in our previous posts, Global Leadership Council members will share their experiences and expertise in ways that help to foster programing, events, and growth associated with the NetSquared Local groups.

The San Francisco programing will offer our inaugural group of GLC members the opportunity to further their own personal learning while providing NetSquared and its organizers significant networking and influencing opportunities to benefit the NetSquared community at-large. The gathering will include all members of the Net2 HQ remote team and nine Net2 Local volunteer organizers from regions all around the world.

As mentioned earlier this week, we held the Global Leadership Council kick-off meeting on Friday, January 20, 2012. It was awesome to get the members on the phone for introductions as well as a discussion about expectations for the year and to jump into a conversation about the recent NetSquared surveys. Marc Manashil, NetSquared’s Community Evangelist, moderated the conversation while several others from the NetSquared team observed.

The Discussion:
The main focus of the discussion was to review lessons learned from the NetSquared surveys that had been distributed to Local organizers and the community at-large. Members reflected and shared insights on the following questions:

• What do you see as the biggest challenge Net2 is facing this year?
• What is the greatest opportunity that we need to seize during 2012?
• What topic or theme would like us to devote a meeting discussion to this year?

We are very excited to announce the members of the 2012 Global Leadership Council:

• April Kyle, San Francisco, California, USA
• Aysegul Guzel, Istanbul, Turkey
• Eduardo Bejar, Guayaquil, Eduador
• Eli van der Giessen, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
• Ivan Boothe, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
• John Wells, Sydney, Australia
• Maria Zaghi, Guatemala City, Guatemala
• Steven Flower, Manchester, United Kingdom
• Tierney Smith, Toronto, Canada
• Yudi Emmanuel, Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire

Congratulations and welcome! This inspiring group of NetSquared Local leaders will work together to help us improve NetSquared programs and services. We cannot wait to see what ideas and solutions surface over this coming year.

This post was authored by Ariel Gilbert-Knight, Technology Analyst for TechSoup, and originally appeared on The TechSoup Blog.

There's good news and bad news about mobile security. First, the bad news: mobile security is a rapidly growing problem. The good news is that there are some basic steps you can take to protect the mobile devices you use in your nonprofit or library.

Last week we announced the Global Leadership Council, a group of global leaders that will work together to explore creative ways of addressing challenges in the NetSquared Local network.

Members will be committing to sharing their experiences and expertise in ways that help to foster programing, events, and growth associated with the NetSquared Local groups. The Council will also be helping to identify current capabilities of Local groups, what works and where there are hurdles, to improve support, program design, and other desired capabilities of the Local groups and community.

Hackathons, coding sprints, app challenges -- oh my! While these types of events can focus on the creation of many things, we are seeing an increase in app-for-good related events. There is no question that such events with an app focus can offer a great deal of collective momentum to address social issues. They are a great -- and fun -- mechanism for bringing together people who are passionate about a cause and connecting them to opportunities to enhance civil society, create social change, and have a real-world impact. 

I am excited to announce the inaugural year of the Global Leadership Council (GLC). You may remember conversations earlier this summer about the Net2 Local project. Over the summer we had many conversations with NetSquared Local organizers to discuss how we could best develop opportunities for the Net2 Local network as well as provide organizers with greater support. Together, we wanted to define how we might work together to improve the experience for Local groups while improving communications across the network, and more.

A couple of weeks ago NPR ran a segment entitled, A New Generation of App Developers, discussing the emergence of creative and youthful app developers. This story chronicled a middle school student who built an app to help him stay organized in the coming year and the revelation that more and more young people are developing their own creative solutions to problems.

Not only did the piece showcase the uniqueness of this particular student, but also the opportunity to cultivate creativity through technical awareness and skills development in children, teens, and young adults.

In my companion blog post on Why Apps Are Green, I talked about how apps permit the use of lighter IT infrastructure like mobile phones to accomplish things we previously used to do just on PCs. Mobile phones use much less electricity than PCs, and another benefit is that they make Internet and IT readily available in developing countries.

Another way that apps can be green is because some of them do environmental things. There's a surprising array of them actually. Planet Green's 7 Best Green Apps for Mobile Phones are a good example.

This post was authored by Ariel Gilbert-Knight, Technology Analyst for TechSoup, and originally appeared on The TechSoup Blog.

I'm very excited to introduce a new Microsoft-funded project we're working on here at TechSoup, called "App It Up." Apps can be very helpful tools: they can help engage and inform constituents, tell your organization's story, and improve your internal workflows. However, many nonprofits and libraries aren't using apps, for various reasons. The App It Up project is here to help, by identifying - and even creating - apps specifically for nonprofits and libraries.