If you do online advocacy work, you probably know about Social Actions. If you're interested in data, and making sure that data can move freely around the web in the nonprofit space, then you definitely know Social Actions.

Peter and Christine at Social Actions have been at the fore of a very important movement in the nonprofit sector: helping us all understand why sharing data is so much better for us than hoarding it.

You may have read about the transitions at Social Actions, and now they're ready to move forward.  

If you are interested in shepherding all or some of the Social Actions programs, they're inviting you to submit Letters of Interest -- by August 20. Let's make sure we keep the data flowing!

This year's NTC brought 1,430 nonprofit professionals to the OMNI Hotel in Atlanta GA. Unlike in past years, we had a large number of late registrants: 18% of attendees registered in the month prior to the conference.

As many of you know, we raised $10,020 to send 61 people to the NTC on scholarship, which has (so far) resulted in 556 views of the NTEN Community Rhapsody. Judging by the 7,034 views of the 09NTC Scholarship campaign (Holly's remake of Beyonce's Single Ladies video), I've concluded that spandex is 12 times more interesting to our community than muppets. 

Day 1 of the conference saw 122 attendees volunteer to help 58 organizations during the Day of Service, while 50 of you attended the Open Data Unconference and 139 went to We Are Media Sessions. Also on Thursday, there were 16 Affinity Group sessions; we like to think they were attended by the remainder of the 70% of conference attendees who checked-in at registration on Thursday.

Ed. Note: As we prepare for the 2010 Nonprofit Technology Conference, we wanted share a wee bit of the wisdom our speakers will be serving up, so as not to overwhelm you when you get to Atlanta. We're asking them all to share their answers to five very important questions.

Speaker: Beth Kanter & Allison Fine, Authors, The Networked Nonprofit

Session: The Networked Nonprofit: Using Social Media to Power Social Networks for Change

1. What's the most important trend in nonprofit technology for 2010?

We think that the nonprofit sector is entering a new and exciting phase of use of social media. We collectively dipped our toes into the social media waters over the last two to five years. Organizations set up Facebook pages and Twitter accounts. They've found that using social media is easy, however, using it for social change isn't always easy. Exploring what it means to use social media for social change - and more specifically what it means for nonprofits, how they have to think and work differently, is the next phase of development.

Lucy Bernholz, Blueprint R+D

Once upon a time, just a little more than a century ago, every factory that wanted to run its systems on electricity had to build its own electrical generating system. Thomas Edison and a few other entrepreneurs put an end to this by building an electrical grid -- so factory owners could focus on making shirts or chairs or widgets and not on running their own electrical plant.

Cloud computing offers us all the same freedom for our information infrastructure. On a broad scale, it will also fundamentally change how we work, where we work, and with whom we work.