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:

Holly Ross, NTEN

That's right, I said it.

What I really mean is that open source, as we knew it, is dead. Over 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.

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 consultants tens of thousands of dollars to get our implementation up and running.

To me, open source code isn't necessarily any better than proprietary code. The costs, in time and money, are just placed elsewhere. The old arguments for open source software adoption are dead to me.

But please: promise to read the rest of this before you start sending me hate mail.

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.

Eric Leland, Five Paths, Laura Quinn, Idealware, Chris Bernard, italics media

Donors are the lifeblood of nonprofit organizations. You need them to survive. But how do you manage all the information about their giving along with all the personal details that are key to maintaining successful relationships, all for a price that won’t break your bank?

A donor management system is sometimes called a fundraising system or a donor database. At its most basic level, it’s a system that manages information about donors and gifts so you can understand how much you’ve raised, keep track of all the useful information you know about your donors, manage mailings, emails and campaigns, and print reports on all this information.

There are a huge number of systems available, ranging from the basic to those that offer all sorts of additional features and functionality. Costs vary as well -- and there are even some Free and Open Source options. In our free report, "A Consumers Guide to Low Cost Donor Management Systems", we take a look specifically at 33 lower cost systems, but here, let's take a quick look at four of the FOSS options.

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.

If there's one thing I've learned in my 6+ years at NTEN, it's that people love to hate their web sites. Perhaps that's why there are so many choices when it comes to CMS (oodles of which are rated in our CMS satisfaction survey). Ask anyone in the nonprofit technology community about Content Management Systems, and they're likely to mention one of the following:

• Drupal
• Joomla
• Plone

We like them because they're free. We love to hate them because there are so many twiddly bits to adjust. Thank goodness we have Laura Quinn, Executive Director at Idealware. She's going to sort out some of the differences between the three and make sense of it all, in terms even non-geeks can understand.

I spoke with her about her session at the 2009 NTC, "Comparing Open Source CMSs: Joomla, Drupal, and Plone", and why CMS seems to be the area where open source has really taken off in the sector:

NTEN's yearlong focus on Free and Open Source Software continues with "Setting up a Joomla! Organizational Website": great software, questionable punctuation.

Does an ! really make a word more exciting? Let's see: Waffles! Hmm, that's not quite fair -- waffles are already exciting. How about: Sand! Huh, maybe it does work. Those Joomla! folks must know what they're doing.

They've certainly made a very easy to use CMS system. The webinar, presented by FOSS expert, NTEN board member, and all around good person Michelle Murrain, will take you through the installation and basic setup of Joomla!, and what you'll need in order to make your new Joomla! site a success.

Michelle Murrain, NOSI

Constituent Relationship Management systems are one of the bread and butter tools of nonprofit organizations: tracking donations, constituents, activities and the like are critical to accomplishing mission.

It makes sense then, that CRM and fundraising software are the most plentiful and mature software product vertical in the nonprofit sector. And there is an increasing amount of change and innovation in this realm: from open APIs on such stalwarts as Convio and Kintera, to newer open source alternatives like CiviCRM and MPower Open

The question is, how do the newer open source alternatives stack up to the long standing proprietary packages that people have gotten used to?

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.

John Kenyon, Nonprofit Technology Strategist

While open source software is a great concept, people don't just relate to concepts, people relate to people. Most of the people who make open source software for nonprofits do it to make your life easier in support of achieving your mission. While often portrayed as pale, anti-social "geeks" working in basements and living off junk food, like all stereotypes, this is false.

Dave Greenberg has worked in the nonprofit sector as Psychiatric Counselor in a Community Mental Health clinic, and has a Masters degree in Social Work. He also has experience engineering/developing large software systems for the electronic commerce and banking industries. Combining his skills and values, he is now part of the international core development team for CiviCRM, the built-for-nonprofit open source CRM software.

I talked to him about his work with open source software. His insights are important for everybody interested in nonprofit technology.