Last month, I got to attend Ashoka's Tech4Society conference in Hyderabad, India, as a guest writer for the AshokaTech blog. TechSoup Co-CEO Daniel Ben-Horin was also attending Tech4Society as an Ashoka senior fellow. By coincidence, Nasscom (our partner NGO in India) was hosting its annual India Leadership Forum that same week in Mumbai, and several of our partners had staff attending the conference. It was the perfect storm: we knew it was time to host a meeting of TechSoup Global's partners in the Asia/Pacific region.

For me, getting to attend the partners meeting was the icing on the cake of an amazing week. I've worked with several of our partners as they've developed their educational resources for NGO, but had never been involved with one of these meetings before. It's great to spend time with partners and learn more about the work they're doing and challenges they face. Representatives from Connecting Up Australia, Frontier Foundation (Taiwan), Hong Kong Council of Social Service, NASSCOM Foundation (India), and NGO Pulse (South Africa) were in attendance.

One big topic in the meeting was how the TechSoup network can help respond to major disasters. Both on our blogs and on our special Haiti spotlight page, we've worked to draw attention to the relief efforts in Haiti; but there's a limit to our impact if we're not partnering with people and organizations taking on that relief work directly. In the wake of last year's Australian bush fires, TechSoup and DonorTec agreed to waive administration fees for organizations impacted by the disaster. That's a great start; how can we use our relationships with technology companies to provide even more to the sector in times of need?

That conversation has become especially pertinent in the last few days, with the recent earthquake in Chile. Unlike Haiti, TechSoup Global has a partner in Chile with a commendable plan for helping NGOs get back on their feet. One of our goals is to develop a reusable plan for responding to disasters. This plan will include using our networks to draw attention to the relief efforts, but it will also include leveraging our connections in the technology industry to help get the right technology to the organizations that need it.

The other side of disaster planning is distributing expertise. Our partners have become very adept at finding information and presenting it in a way that's useful for local NGOs. At the same time as we were putting the finishing touches on our disaster planning and recovery manual, NGOs in Taiwan were struggling to respond to last year's floods. I sent a Word document of the near-complete book to Petra Lin, a contact at Frontier Foundation/TechSoup Taiwan, and within 24 hours, volunteers recruited by Petra had already translated a substantial portion of the book. It's great to see that kind of community energy in action; we need to find ways to harness that energy in times of health as well as times of disaster.

Software as a Service was another big topic at the meeting. Products like Office Live Workspace and Google Docs have the potential to bring a major shift in how nonprofits conduct business, but they also have the potential to make a big change in how TechSoup does business. TechSoup's software donation program is based largely on a traditional software model, but cloud solutions are becoming more of a reality for the sector. Everyone agreed that as software changes, it's important to keep our focus on the value and expertise that we can offer to our member organizations.

Finally, we discussed the way in which we tell our story as a network. It's the story of the services and knowledge we offer to organizations, but just as importantly, it's the story of our member NGOs, nonprofits, and public libraries, and the amazing work all of those members are doing all over the world. The issues organizations work with are global issues; how can we highlight the work our members do on a global scale? As John Fung asked, "How can we tell the TechSoup Global Network story together, rather than individually telling lots of different stories?" We started to put together a plan; expect to see more on that soon.

Top: Roger Abraham, Vice President of Products, TechSoup Global; David Barnard, Executive Director, NGO Pulse; Doug Jacquier , CEO, Connecting Up Australia; Elliot Harmon, Staff Writer, TechSoup Global. Middle: Prashant Pandit, Manager of BIGTech, Nasscom; Rufina Fernandez, CEO, Nasscom; Madhu Anand, Director, TechSoup Global Network; Shu-Fang Tsai, CEO, Frontier Foundation; Daniel Ben-Horin, Co-CEO, TechSoup Global. Bottom: Ann Kao, Program Director, Southeast Asia, Frontier Foundation; John Fung, Director, Information Technology Resource Centre, Hong Kong Council of Social Service

All photos courtesy of Nasscom Foundation. See more.