Open Source

Open Source Is Dead! Long Live Open Source!

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.

Read more |

"Live Together, Die Alone"*

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.

Read more |

Open Source Donor Management Systems: Know Your Options

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.

Read more |

Building Community with Open Source

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.

Read more |