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young hacker is holed up alone in his apartment. His face is lit by a laptop screen, monitor split between a live video stream and a text editor filled with code. Fueled by Ramen Noodles and caffeine, he codes away through the night, monitoring the latest hashtags on Twitter, never a few seconds behind the newest exploding meme, instantly transmitting the latest news to others in his social graph. ((This is a scene that is played out in the rooms of countless hackers and their "lean startups" around the world. Only for the past few weeks, it could have just as easily described an entirely new, organic, philanthropic phenomenon: Hacktivism. Hacktivism is the use of hacking and the startup mentality to tackle and support social good causes.

If a nonprofit dabbles in web design this is more specific to design choice for the web creator but it was worth the inquiry for myself. Drupal has been proven to better the better choice for a larger organization that wants more features. Wordpress has held an advantage for the smaller startups for ease of use. There is a convergence between the two that is occurring but Drupal still maintains a lead. The problem with the more complex applications in a site is that it will require more maintenance which a very small nonprofit or company would seek to avoid. I generally consider it very difficult to maintain a mobile web solution and keep a good selection of applications running without some expert support. The old standard of a simple website appears to be waning quickly. The choice now appears to be how much work you want to pay your website manager to do rather than determining if you need one.

Interesting, but please help me understand how this connects to nonprofit or government use of technology. Sometimes such announcements do have an impact, but if it isn't evident, please explain the connection with a comment! Thanks!

This is a pretty interesting way that people are recruiting for summer work. It really begins to show the strength of services like Facebook, YouTube, Reddit and many others today.