Gregory Heller, CivicActionsNot long ago, open source software was seen by most as the choice of fringe geeks with political motivations. Either the Grammys and the White House are now run by fringe geeks, or there's been a groundswell of open source adoption. Gregory Heller and I know it's the latter. Grammy.com and Whitehouse.gov are Drupal sites. CiviCRM got great scores in NTEN's Data Ecosystem Report.

Open source is now mainstream.

Of course, mainstream as it is, working with open source software is different than working with proprietary software. There are challenges -- and benefits -- which Gregory Heller, a strategist at CivicActions, will explore in his session, "Working with Open Source Software and Vendors" at the 2010 Nonprofit Technology Conference.

Check out our full conversation:

Michelle Murrain, NOSI

For years and years -- basically, as long as software has been purchased by nonprofit organizations -- the basic model has been: a nonprofit organization pays a fee (sometimes rather large) to a software maker for a copy of software to install on your desktop or server to do a particular task, whether it be tracking donations and constituents, tracking clients, running campaigns, or the like.

What this meant was that each individual organization spent thousands -- or tens, or hundreds of thousands -- of dollars a year to implement software for their organization. The economics of that form of IT investment are hard to manage in a climate where the survival of nonprofits is increasingly endangered, and many are closing or merging.

But other models exist -- namely implementing, investing, and collaborating in open source software.

Jonathan Hedstrom, OpenSourcery

Any community, online or otherwise, is about communication between individuals. As such, when it comes time to create or grow an online community, tools that allow for and encourage communication and interaction are vital.

There are two major hurdles that must be overcome for an online community to succeed: the selection of appropriate community (or "social-networking") features that make sense for the community in question, and, secondly, actually implementing those features in your online application. The first is often overlooked in favor of the more exciting second step. When this happens, the community rarely benefits from the resulting application.

Every community has unique needs that determine how they should select features. Once a community has determined its needs, however, utilizing open source software presents a more rapid, sustainable path to implementation.

After Idealware's latest report reviewing Open Source CMS tools, there were, as might be expected, a few dust-ups in the open source developers and users communities, which includes NTEN members like David Geilhufe. David wrote this response. NTEN board member Michelle Murrain, one of the authors of the report, responded to some of the criticism. 

Deborah Elizabeth Finn kicked off another lively discussion by asking other nptechies how they factor their organization's Twitter "follow cost" into their Twitter communications strategy. There was a long discussion in the NTEN Discuss group, one of the affinity groups in our online community. Amy Sample Ward took up the discussion on her blog. 

In other news, Lindy Dreyer has been working on a series of posts about organizational Social Media policies, including one addressing your organization's official presence on external existing networks (like LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter).

09NTC NTENny Highlights:
Starting with the 2007 Nonprofit Technology Conference, we've recognized NTEN members who contribute that extra "something" to the work of NTEN and this nonprofit technology community every year. Unlike your more traditional association credentials or awards, these "NTENnies" honor the spirit of the NTEN community by pointing out the lighter side of nonprofit technology.

I'll introduce each member of this year's class of NTENnies in these weekly member round-ups.

First up: David Neff, Director of Web, Film, and Interactive Strategies for the American Cancer Society's High Plains Division. He's the co-organizer of the Austin 501 Tech Club and a presenter at the upcoming NTC. We heart David and all that he's doing to engage nonprofit staff and techies-for-good in the Austin area using social media. We voted him "Most Likely to Be Promoting a Social Media Event Using Social Media While Attending a Social Media Event." You can see his "Meet NTEN" profile here.