(MONEY Magazine) – It was January 1999 in Silicon Valley, the epicenter of the dotcom bubble. Seated in his parents' living room in Santa Clara, Nipun Mehta, then a 23-year-old software developer, was pitching his idea for a new kind of charity. The concept: a purely volunteer effort to provide nonprofits with technology services, such as building websites that would "help charities to help others," as Mehta told a small group of friends. A few months later CharityFocus.org was launched, and it quickly grew to involve more than 2,000 volunteers in the U.S. and overseas. It has provided tech assistance worth millions to more than 900 nonprofits, primarily small humanitarian groups--organizations ranging from a San Francisco alliance for the mentally ill to a Florida agency for the blind to a support network for exiled Tibetan nuns. By soliciting donations of goods and services, including software and Web design packages from corporations such as Adobe and Macromedia, the group can offer tech support at little or no cost to its nonprofit clients. The volunteers mainly work at home on their own computers. "We've created a massive online infrastructure to coordinate all our activities effectively," says Mehta, who quit his job and works part time in order to focus on his charitable project. "We've created a Napster of compassion."

--PENELOPE WANG