Holly Ross, NTEN

Open Source is Dead.

That's right, I said it. Promise to read the rest of this before you send me hate mail, though.

What I mean is that open source, as we knew it, is dead. For the last decade, what we've been talking about when we say "open source" is "open code" -- a set of zeroes and ones that we can configure to our heart's desire.

Arguments for the adoption of open code in the nonprofit sector have generally run threefold:

• First, it's highly customizable, so you don't have to compromise that long list of requirements.
• Second, it's cheap or free to acquire the code, so you save your precious dollars for more important things.
• Third, it's built and supported by communities, just like nonprofits are. Open code mirrors the values of our own community.

But have you ever implemented an open source solution? We have here at NTEN. We use all kinds of open source tools, including our content management system, Drupal. Sure, it's highly customizable -- by a highly trained staffer, or a highly paid consultant. The code was free, but we paid tens of thousands of dollars to get our implementation up and running. And I'm going to be honest here: I try to use solutions that reflect our values as an organization, but at the end of the day, I just need it to work. Community support can be great, but you're no less beholden to the whims of the community for support and updates than you are to any paid vendor.

For me, open source code isn't necessarily any better than proprietary code. The costs, in time and money, are just placed elsewhere. It's a difference in how we budget for software more than anything else. So, the old arguments for open source software adoption are dead to me.

Long Live Open Source.

While I think we need to drop our old ways of thinking about open source (i.e. the benefit of the code itself), there are two areas of open source to which I think we need to pay a lot more attention: open data and collaboration.

I hate to sound like a broken record, but understanding how to turn data into intelligence is going to be a key skill in the next ten years. As more stakeholder behavior moves online -- from reading the news to finding your nearest office location -- that behavior also becomes data. The articles they read, the services they request, the emails they respond to: all of this tells you something about that person. Combine that with the data you're tracking in your database about physical addresses, telephone calls to your office, and event attendance, and you get an even better picture.

Let's say you provide meal deliveries for the aging population in your community. You've got a database full of information about where you make deliveries, but how do you know you're really serving the population that needs it most in your town? If you combine your service data with local and federal government data on low-income elderly populations, you're going to get a much better picture.

Take that metaphor one step further: Let's say you're funding senior issues in your community. Your grantees provide a variety of services in the community, and they tell you how many clients they serve. But is quantity of services the best way to measure the impact of your funding? You'd get a much better understanding if you got the client location information data from your grantees and mapped it against that same local and federal data.

Open source and collaboration go together nicely. Yes, I'm rolling my eyes at myself, because collaboration has long been the fairytale of the nonprofit sector. We've talked about needing to collaborate since, well, forever. Grantmakers have gone so far as to to legislate it through their giving by only funding collaborative projects. Collaboration, quite frankly, sucks: It's hard, it's messy, and it's very uncomfortable.

But as my mother-in-law loves to tell me, "Get over it."

The issues we're addressing -- poverty, intolerance, hunger, genocide -- are not issues with simple causes or easy solutions. They require complex analysis and multifaceted approaches. No single organization is going to end hunger in any country, state, county, city, or even neighborhood. Ending hunger is as much about job training as it is food distribution. If we really want to live up to our ideals, we're going to have to work together-- and that means sharing lots of things in an open and transparent way with one another, including our data. Especially our data.

Sharing code is all well and good. It has produced some tremendous things. But, when people talk about open source ten years from now, I hope they're talking about the data, not the code. Open source is all about transparency.

What does this have to do with open source software?

None of this is to say that I think proprietary software is going anywhere. It isn't. Neither are the open source products, from Drupal to Openoffice. They're great to have as options. I just don't accept the argument that we have to support them simply because the code is available to everybody.

It's the idea that's important. If you're wondering where our sector is headed, look towards open source.

If we're really going to turn data into intelligence, and if we're truly going to collaborate in service of our missions, we're going to need to do things differently than we've ever done them before. We're going to to have to innovate to share data and collaborate. Open source provides a wonderful playground in which to do this innovation, because of its very nature. People turn to open source when they can't find a solution in the proprietary world, when they need to make something that doesn't yet exist.

And what better argument for collaboration is there than open source? Open source is collaboration. How in the world did a kid from Scandinavia convince thousands of people to work for free to build an operating system that proved vital to the growth of the Internet?

As I said, collaboration is hard, messy, and uncomfortable. But it works.