5 Questions: Working with Open Source Software and Vendors

Submitted by Holly on Wed, 03/10/2010 - 9:13am
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Ed. Note: As we prepare for the 2010 Nonprofit Technology Conference, we wanted share a wee bit of the wisdom our speakers will be serving up, so as not to overwhelm you when you get to Atlanta. We're asking them all to share their answers to five very important questions.

Speaker: Gregory Heller, CivicActions

Session: Working with Open Source Software and Vendors

1. What's the most important trend in nonprofit technology for 2010?

Free and Open Source Software. Whether it is on the desktop like Firefox and Open Office or the Ubuntu Linux operating system, or on servers (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) and running CMSs and CRMs (like Drupal and CiviCRM). I think that many nonprofit organizations are looking at these open source tools as they have really matured and been adopted by government and big companies including many fortune 500s. The late 2009 release of the Open Government Directive is really exciting and I'd like to see an analog in the nonprofit community -- an Open Nonprofit Directive if you will, to encourage transparency, participation and collaboration. Of course Twitter and social media in general will continue to be big, and we may see advanced collaboration tools like Google's Wave gain adoption in 2010 as people figure out how to use it.

2. Why do you think your session topic is important for nonprofits to address?

We're in a deep recession. Nonprofit funding is not what it may have been 2 or 3 years ago. When you don't have to pay for proprietary software licenses, or work with only a small group of vendors providing proprietary tools, I think there are great values to be found. Last year's Keynote speaker Eben Moglin talked about the morality of free and open source software and what he really identified as a moral imperative for nonprofit organizations to spend their limited resources advancing FOSS rather than boosting profits at proprietary software companies. My session, "Working With Open Source Software and Vendors", will give non profit decisions makers an idea of how to identify and work with open source vendors and tools and provide an opportunity for them to ask questions of vendors, software project developers and people like them who have gone down this road already.

3. What's the one thing you want attendees to remember from your session?

Free and Open Source Software is mature, robust and enterprise ready. Choosing the right vendor for your organization is important as your vendor will, in a big way, define your experience of the tools. That's two things, and they should remember them both!

4. Which Muppet do you most identify with and why?

Gonzo. Gonzo is an entertainer, a showman, and a daredevil. I like to take the stage, show off new and exciting technologies, and every once in a while, get fired out of a cannon. Gonzo was also a traveling plumber, and that is something I can identify with. Over the last four years or so, I've traveled to work with many clients helping them unclog the the internet strategy "tubes" and get things flowing.

5. Where can people follow you online (twitter, blog, etc.)?