SiliconBeat

I can be as cynical as anyone when I hear someone droning on about how technology can solve all the world’s problem. I often find that Silicon Valley can sometimes have an almost messianic faith that we’re just a few lines of code away from solving any social ill. Just believe in the power of free markets and progress through technology, and we’ll be fine.

Nonsense, of course. But still, there is potential to do good at the intersection of technology and philanthropy. And that was certainly in evidence at the Netsquared Conference held May 27 and May 28.

I stopped by on Wednesday afternoon and found a lot of positive, and practical thinking being applied to everything from monitoring the issue of genocide to boosting local recycling efforts.

The event was sponsored by TechSoup, a San Francisco-based organization that supports a variety of non-profit iniatives, and held on the Cisco Systems campus. TechSoup allowed organizations to nominate themselves, and then allowed people to vote on which non-profits represented the best ideas. TechSoup then flew people in from 21 of those non-profit startups to San Jose for the conference.

At the conference, each startup pitched its idea to a room full of developers and philanthropists. And for most of the next two days, the group broke up and developers sat down with the various projects to provide development support and ideas. Many of the nonprofits I talked to were happy to just get this help. By the way, you can see the list of 21 nonprofits that attended here.

At the end of the second day, attendees voted on the ideas they liked best. The top three each also received a cash prize:

Social Actions:$10,000

KnowMore.org: $15,000

Ushahidi: $25,000

I’ll look forward to year four next year. It’s a great idea, and I’ll be interested to see how the various projects progress.

Here’s an interview I did with TechSoup founder Daniel Ben-Horin.