GreatNonprofits recently announced that 26 organizations working in the science and technology fields have qualified for the 2010 Top-Rated Science & Technology Nonprofits List, based on user reviews submitted during a national campaign in August.

In the middle of the Ecampaigning Forum, I'm trying to turn my notes about Monday's "pre-ECF" session on Social Actions and the Change The Web contest into a blog post. Peter Deitz presented his vision on making opportunities for social activism available on the web, and together with Janelle Ward, Thiago Carrapatoso, Romina Oliverio, George Irish, Amy Sample Ward and Jonathan Waddingham, we looked at 8 of the submitted application for the Change The Web contest (deadline for submissions is this Friday!). Here are my notes of the discussions we had.

Last night at the Online Community Roundtable, hosted by Webex in Santa Clara, a fascinating discussion emerged: “What does it take to activate participants in an online community?”.

It was agreed that community managers need to tune in to the most important motivators of their individual members/participants/prospectives. To paraphrase the consensus “Every community participant asks themselves 'What's in it for me?' before they contribute to content or help to solve a problem”. Various sorts of psychic rewards systems using ratings, reviews, privileges, prizes, recognition, and other kinds of incentives were reviewed in-brief.

Some readers here may know that I've started writing over at the Web 2.0 review site TechCrunch. One new service that I wrote about this week stood out as something that could be very useful for nonprofits. It's called Wufoo and it's an easy way to make online forms that can be inserted into your web page or used as separate pages. It is very flexible and honestly takes very little technical knowledge.

Social bookmarking, or using tags to organize web pages into a publicly viewable archive online, is becoming increasingly common among nonprofit organizations and supporting technologists. Social bookmarking tools are preferable to browser bookmarks or favorites in a number of ways, including accessibility from any computer, superior detail in archiving and retrieval and the ability to share our bookmarks as a whole or by tag with other people.

Most of the time it seems to me that the conversation about social bookmarking starts with del.icio.us - probably the most popular social bookmarking tool online. There are many more options available, however, and I thought it would be useful to provide some brief explanation of a few alternatives and some things to consider in making your selection.