When I worked in West Africa a few years ago, GeekCorps Mali had just started on the project that became MoulinWiki, an offline version of Wikipedia that could be burned onto a CD and taken to schools and villages without Internet access. (I didn't work on it; I was just visiting because GeekCorps had a pool and it was incredibly hot out.) The project was possible because the software that runs WikiPedia is Open Source, and so freely editable and redistributable.

A number of factors contributed to the inspiration for MoulinWiki, not least of which was an awareness of the availability of Free and Open Source (FOSS) software. More nonprofit organizations might make use of FOSS as a springboard for projects, if they only knew more about the movement.

In fact, you may already be using more Open Source software than you realize.

Let's take a closer look at WikiPedia. You've used it. How could you not? Searching for almost anything on the web generally brings up a Wikipedia result on the first page.

Wikipedia runs on top of MediaWiki, an open source program already in use by many nonprofit organizations. Below that, WikiPedia runs on the Apache web server (FOSS), which runs on the Linux operating system (FOSS). (If you're curious and/or bored, you can learn all about WikiPedia's back-end, instead of reading about J Lo's.)

Actually, most of the busiest sites on the web run on FOSS back-ends. Yahoo. Google. Micro... No, scratch that last one. But the powerhouse that is NTEN.org runs on FOSS, including the Drupal CMS. And perhaps you're reading this article in FireFox (FOSS)? Google Analytics tells us that fully half of the visitors to NTEN.org are, these days. And FOSS software powers more than half the Internet!

If you put a little time into it, you could use FOSS to replace your CMS (CiviCRM), office suite (OpenOffice) even IM program (Pidgin), iTunes (Songbird), and PhotoShop (the GIMP -- which has the added bonus of allowing you to annoy your co-workers by quoting Pulp Fiction every time they ask for a change to your org's web site).

I suspect it comes as no surprise to you that you're using Free and Open Source Software every day. But that's part of the problem: FOSS has become so much a part of the average workday, it's easy to take its ubiquity for granted and underestimate the sea change this model represents -- and even overlook it as a potential starting point for your organization's next initiative.

Many FOSS projects have finally attained a level of maturity that makes them not just usable, but customizable, even by the non-techie. You don't need to know PHP to update a Joomla! web site or create a Wiki, even in a country with an average daily temperature in excess of 100 degrees. (Just don't be surprised if you find me in your swimming pool.)

So, we hope you take some time to peruse the resources in our newsletter. NTEN believes Free and Open Source software is ready to come out from behind the scenes to impact the world in ways no one's thought of yet. After all, isn't that your job?