Social Source

Nonprofit technology is about category killers. Andrew Blau in his paper, "More than Bit Players" (www.surdna.org/documents/morefinal.pdf), makes the point that one of the most important aspects of organizational behavior on the Internet can be summed up in two words: “size matters."

Folks like VolunteerMatch, NPower, CompuMentor/TechSoup all illustrate this concept.

When I think about my own interests in Social Source, I struggle with the apparent conflict between a single, large monolithic entity--a category killer (the implication of 'size matters') and an organization that supports, nurtures and encourages a vast number of smaller organizations.

Social Source requires the aspects of being a category killer-- 1) lead the capture earned income from the marketplace (to lead in market share) and 2) lead the capture of philanthropic dollars. At the same exact time, that revenue (both earned income and philanthropic) and the benefits of that revenue need to be effectively transferred to a vast number of smaller organizations that contribute code and serve nonprofits.

How do you be both the 800-pound Gorilla AND an equal partners with an entire community of folks looking to help the nonprofit sector?

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I have been on the "wouldn't it be great if people built open source software that specifically met nonprofit needs" bandwagon for so long, I wonder if I'm wrong, dreaming, or just plain crazy. Things are starting to look up.

For the past couple years some amazing folks have had their heads down doing stuff... Techrocks (now defunct) built ebase. Groundspring created their products and with the help of a dot com refugees, picked an open source strategy for their software. Many, many personalities and players were talking about the ideas.

Fascinatingly enough, it is the infusion of talent from both the dot com sector and the broader open source community that seems to have driven the idea of npo-specific open-source into reality. Today we have civicspace, advokit, groundspring and other projects.

The slowness of this evolution, I think, boils down to the fact that we don't have any hackers in the NPO space. The big nonprofits that do software projects hire contractors of a more traditional ilk. This is changing too, with folks like Aspiration doing a good job of bringing hackers together... to bad they don't seem to do quite as good of a job getting traditional NPOs leaders into the room.

As Bob Dylan said, "Times they are a'changin".

In 2003 a bunch of people packed into one of the "small" rooms at the last Roundup in Oakland, CA (before it got itself all corporatized into the Nonprofit Technology Conference run by NTEN -- not that there is anything wrong with that ;) That packed room had a spirited discussion about what it really was going to take to develop open source software for the nonprofit sector. In that room, strategies were hatched that said basically, the software development side of open source is theoretically interesting, but impractical. Hence the Nonprofit Open Source Initiative's quite intelligent focus on leveraging existing open source products for nonprofit use.

(I was always the guy babbling about open source software development)

As I look back on the notes we wrote down from that session. Some of which are here. I think about how much momentum is building.

I think its all pretty cool.

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So I never really thought of myself as a serial entrepreneur. Then I looked back at my past and it is just littered with start ups. There was the nonprofit back in 1998 (Youthlink) with at risk kids and web design. Then there was Eastmont, a community technology center. Then Digigroups, an enterprise software firm, then Social Source Software, and now the Beaumont Foundation of America.

Every time, I find myself pursuing the vision, building the plan, and getting organization to execute. Heck I even think I'm pretty good at it.

So now the itch has returned. Beaumont is entering a period of stability and that whole open source software development for nonprofits idea is on my mind again. Equally on my mind, however, is paying the mortgage. If anyone want to put up 250ドルk or so to get started, drop me a line. ;)

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Social purpose organizations (NGOs & nonprofits) are entering the information age with a vengeance. They are creating software systems to improve internal operations, communicate with stakeholders, and more effectively achieve their missions. Yet, social-purpose organizations lack access to affordable technology that meets their unique business processes and evolves as they adapt their processes to interact with their constituencies using technology.

This creates an organizational divide between the very small percentage of non-governmental organizations that can afford to adopt private sector software development strategies, and those that barely afford to deploy a few computers and a database in support of their mission.
Increasingly, all social purpose organizations are compelled into using the same software development strategies as the private sector, often contracting with software vendors whose other project is a corporate database. This is a vision of software that does not, and cannot meet the sector’s needs. Paying a corporation commercial rates every time mission-related software is needed is uneconomic for organizations that can better spend their money providing direct services to real people.

The social source technology development model—where organizations directly improve technology because it is liberated from the legal constraints of intellectual property, as long as improvements are subsequently contributed back into the community for others to improve upon—represents an unrealized opportunity for the social purpose sector to develop and disseminate state-of-the-art technology that is mission driven. With access to affordable social source technology, social purpose organizations can mould technology in their own image.
Social source software development is composed of four characteristics:

• Open source application logic. The basic application can is freely distributed and others can modify it as long as changes are contributed back into the community.
• Lowest technical requirements. Build software to the lowest possible technical requirements allowing benefits to accrue to high- and low-budget nonprofits equally.
• Collaborative. Build software collaboratively. Pool financial and intellectual resources to expand the functionality and lower costs at the same time.
• Community. Build a community around software. Over the long term, social source software can improve, evolve, and achieve economies-of-scale if there is a community of organizational users making incremental changes.

Higher education recently launched the Open Knowledge Initiative (web.mit.edu/oki/), a major social source project headed by MIT and Stanford, involving over 10 additional university partners. In the nonprofit sector, applications like ebase (http://www.ebase.org/) are being created by progressive organizations using a social source development model with contractors and in-house development staff.

Social purpose organizations can build social source software without changing their current model of releasing an RFP and hiring a contractor. In the simplest case, the contractor simply builds the software with open source technologies and that application is made available to others.

For more information on social source software and how you can use it in your organization, visit www.social-source.com.

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Community building is fundamentally about the belief that local problems can be and are best solved at the local level by local stakeholders. The experience and relationships of local communities drives the identification of solutions that are likely to work for local problems. Combined with local, regional, and national resources, these solutions are implemented and supported by the people with the largest stake in seeing the problem solved.

What if we were to apply this philosophy to technology development in nonprofit/nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)? Already, nonprofit organizations are building technology to support their needs. Organizations like the Fast Forward Neighborhood Technology Center have built databases with national resources to help other CTCs improve their internal operations. Project Open Hand in San Francisco has built a custom database to manage their delivery of over 400 meals per day to people living with HIV & AIDS.

Local technology solutions are being created to solve local technology problems. This is fundamentally different from the concept of traditional software development where an entrepreneur builds a piece of technology for CTCs or HIV/AIDs meal providers because they expect to realize a profit on the sale of that technology.

Open Source principles and practices allow the principles of community building to be applied to technology development in the nonprofit sector. The key principles are licensing, distribution, and community.

Þ Distribution refers to the availability of software—can I download it or get it via other means? Open source allows easy access to software usually via the web.
Þ Licensing refers to who has the legal right to use, modify, and distribute a piece of software. An open source license allows people to use, modify and redistribute software freely.
Þ Community refers to the ongoing group of stakeholders that support, extend, and improve the software. Open source software has a number of people continually changing the software and contributing those changes back to others.

In applying these principles to my two examples, we can see where community building and open source share many of the same goals and values.

Distribution

The CTC database embraces the open source principle of distribution by making the technology freely accessible from the America Connects Consortium web site. The existence of the technology is advertised to people interested in community technology. The Project Open Hand product, however, is not available for download. In fact, a reader of this article might never have otherwise known the technology existed.

An open source approach would mirror how the America Connects Consortium distributes the CTC database. The technology would be easily downloadable and would be advertised to people that might be interested in it.

Licensing

For licensing, Project Open Hand chose not to license their software at all. Other HIV/AIDs meal providers have no legal right to use their software. If they want similar functionality, they will need to build it themselves at a cost of over 100,000ドル. A commercial software alternative is a virtually impossibility since the potential market is so small.

Fast Forward’s database is owned by the Education Development Center, Inc. Their license reads, “This material may be downloaded, reproduced and distributed only in its complete, original form. The material can not be sold, modified or incorporated into other works or materials without the express, written permission of EDC.” As a CTC, if I want to legally add a single field to the database, I must obtain written permission from EDC. If someone wanted to modify the database to better meet the needs of local CTCs, they would need to obtain written permission from EDC.

Under open source licensing principles, local stakeholders would be able to determine for themselves how best to employ the technology according to their local needs. If the technology met needs, they could use it in its native form. If the software needed slight modification to be useful, they would not have to seek and receive permission before beginning the process of meeting their needs. If a group wished to modify the technology significantly and distribute it to an entire sub-group, perhaps PowerUp centers or Ohio CTCs, they could do so. The most common open source software license is the GNU Public License (GPL).

Community

The final open source principle of community is both the most beneficial and the most difficult to achieve. Community refers to the group of people that can innovate and extend a piece of technology. Rather than have technology like a CTC or HIV/AIDs meal provider application remain static, the community makes it dynamic by adding new functionality, fixing problems, and generally making needed changes.

In both examples, the original “owner” of the technology is the only member of the community. Single-member communities are easy to manage…it is pretty easy to avoid conflicts with yourself. At the same time, there is value in the diversity that comes from community. Different ideas, different needs, and different resources lead to innovative and effective solutions. This is at the heart of why we value community building. Now we can bring some the same concepts into community technology through open source and realize some of the same benefits.

What can I do?

Þ If you participate in a technology project, take the time to examine the project through the lenses of the three open source principles of distribution, license, and community.
Þ Consider licensing software you are responsible for under the GPL.
Þ Encourage those responsible for software that you use to license their software under the GPL.

Resources

http://www.nosi.net/
Nonprofit Open Source Initiative. NOSI seeks to support nonprofits in adopting and using open source software.

http://www.fsf.org/copyleft/gpl.html
GNU General Public License (GPL). The most common open source license.

http://www.americaconnects.net/research/ctcds.asp
CTC Management Database from the America Connects Consortium.

http://www.openhand.org/
Project Open Hand

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Social Source Newsletter
August 2002 v1 #2

This occasional newsletter is dedicated to exploring the relevance of open source software development and concepts to nonprofit organizations.

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IN THIS ISSUE
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What can be learned from one of the first nonprofit open source communities? Can we learn how and why open source is relevant to nonprofit organizations from their experience?
~ What is Ebase?
~ How do they balance community, leadership & fundraising?
~ Should there be open source nonprofit software built by nonprofits?
~ What lessons can be learned?

NOTE: I am not affiliated with Techrocks and write this impression of ebase as a member of the ebase community of consultants.

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What is Ebase(R)?
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Ebase is the name of a constituent relationship management system built by nonprofits for nonprofits. The name ebase is owned by Techrocks, the underlying software is licensed under a GNU Public License (GPL) -compatible free software license. Ebase allows four "freedoms" important for any open source product:

--> Freedom to run the program, for any purpose
--> Freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs
--> Freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor
--> Freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits

As long as you don't call it ebase, you can do whatever you like with the software.

Ebase is a freely downloadable application built in Filemaker for Windows and Mac OS. Ebase v2.0 is designed for nonprofit leaders, fundraisers, activist organizers, and database administrators. It allows them to track, manage, and maximize relationships with their donors, volunteers, members and other constituents via every major touch point: email, web, phone, mail, etc.

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History of Ebase
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In 1997, TechRocks created Ebase, constituent relationship management (CRM) software built by and for nonprofits. Driven by the need of a number of environmental organizations for an affordable and robust donor management tool, Techrocks (then Desktop Assistance) created a donor management application that was latter made available to a broad range of nonprofits.

Ebase has always been built with the community in mind. The first version was built with the participation of a small number of nonprofits. In June 2000, a much larger group was convened to define the design direction for v2.0. Most recently, for three days at the end of May at a retreat center up an eight-mile dirt road in Montana, 30 people worked 13 hour days to figure out how ebase can best serve their NPO constituencies and what the community needed to do to make ebase a viable, effective alternative to commercial constituent relationship management solutions.

This was an open source process in terms of software *requirements* but not in terms of software *development*, which fell primarily on the shoulders of two Techrocks staffers: Bob Schmitt and Clif Graves.

~ It is (relatively) easy to find nonprofit partners that will help you figure out what your application is suppose to do.
~ It is hard to find nonprofit partners that will help you code (via contributing developers or contributing money).
~ Nonprofit open source seems to start from customer needs rather than the traditional open source route of starting from cool technical functionality.

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Community Process Yields Results
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Ultimately, TechRocks created an application where a nonprofit can map their business process, convert that business process into what are called item codes, and have a powerful, customized CRM application. Far from a contact manager, over a year of intensive software development on version 2.0 has yielded an application comparable with, and more useful to nonprofits than, commercial solutions targeted at small and medium sized businesses, such as Microsoft CRM (formerly Great Plains). The quality of this application I attribute mostly to Techrock's open, community process of defining what the application should do.

The inherent complexity of this type of application requires that most nonprofits have support in implementing Ebase v2.0 and that a community of consultants and trainers be available to support ebase installations. Recognizing this, TechRocks began to build a community of users, consultants, and developers in 2002 that can support and extend Ebase using open source strategies relevant to their nonprofit mission. This process started well after the application was built.

~ Do you build the software first, build the community first, or try to build both at the same time? Techrocks is having luck with the software first and the community next.
~ The biggest pro of Techrock's approach is that the community has something concrete (defined, working software) to rally around.
~ The biggest con of Techrock's approach is that the community seems to figure that Techrock's must not need any help, making community building a difficult challenge.

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Leadership: Who Leads, How Do you Grow Leaders
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Is an open source community an egalitarian meritocracy based on socialist values?

Is an open source community composed of a single leader with a number of community members that benefit from, and support to a certain extent, the leader's work on software development?

Basically, who leads and what is their leadership style?

Techrocks is in a clear leadership position on the project which has made the production of software based on community requirements by Techrocks staff fairly simple. This same style has not stimulated other individuals and organizations to contribute to ebase with code, developers, financially, or even just with some sweat-equity writing documentation. Interestingly enough, this has not been the case with open source projects like Zope.

The more I think about this, the more I am convinced that the nonprofit sector has more experience in community, collaboration, and community leadership than any existing open source effort. The sector has worked hard on collaboration. We have built an specialty in community building. Most of the nonprofit sector is fundamentally about bringing people together. These are the lessons that should be integrated into nonprofit open source communities.

So the conclusions that I reach have nothing to do with open source and everything to do with community.

~ Strong leadership encourages nonprofit participants **not** to make significant investments because they think the leader will make those investments.
~ Collaboration is a ladder built on trust starting with information sharing leading to coordination leading to cooperation leading to collaboration over a significant period of time.
~ As the more time goes by and community matures, more and more resources external to Techrocks are being invested in ebase. Perhaps their model of taking responsibility and then seeding it the community will be effective.

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Responsibility/Fundraising: Managing it/Paying For It
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Techrocks has taken sole responsibility for managing and paying for ebase. This is fundamentally different from a community collaborative or open source community where responsibility/funding is shared among a small group of player (often the group is very small- two or three players). By taking this role, they were the sole fundraisers for the project. Without Techrocks, there is no software.

In open source communities, the software often lives on after a major partner leaves (even in communities like Zope where a corporation is behind the software). With the effort to port Ebase to a non-Filemaker platform, Techrocks is working on bringing together partners that will form more of a collaborative of shared responsibility for the code and for fundraising. This may bring ebase to the point where the software is not dependant on Techrocks.

Another characteristic that the ebase project highlights is that nonprofit open source projects are more funding dependent than traditional open source efforts. Nonprofits do not have software
development resources and therefore need to buy them as part of a project. Throw in the overhead rates, and it takes a significant amount of money for a nonprofit to participate in an open source project.

- If a single organization takes total responsibility for a project, the project is totally dependent on the organization. The open source goal of having the software live on beyond the involvement of key partners cannot be achieved.
- There are plenty of examples of nonprofit collaboratives with joint responsibilities and fundraising (mostly lead agency models), but I know of no examples of a nonprofit software project run this way.

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Nonprofit Open Source Is Different From "Normal" Open Source
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Traditional open source projects have one set of players: developers. Developers decide what to build, build it, and use the resulting software.

Nonprofit open source is a lot more complex. There are technology service organizations (TSO), intermediaries like Techrocks and NPower that deal with nonprofit technology trends and provide direct services to nonprofits. There are consultants that support TSOs and also
provide direct services to nonprofits. There are customers, the NPOs that will actually use the software. There are developers, often hired by customers or TSOs to build software.

I feel like nonprofit open source communities need to be driven by the TSOs. TSOs are the only organizations specifically focused on NPO technology trends and sector initiatives. These are the folks with the tech savvy to understand the benefits of open source and the connection with customers to ensure that something useful gets built. They are also the ones to identify, within the sector, where the commercial options fall short.

Customers will always be the source of software requirements, but are unlikely to be sophisticated in their thinking-- most ebase customers don't really want to be part of an open source community, they just want to download the software, use it, and have their questions answered.

Consultants that deal with NPO needs every day are looking for the best solutions. In the case of ebase, they find the low start up costs, ability to customize the code base, and responsiveness of the ebase community created by Techrocks, allows them to deliver solutions that meet their clients needs in ways that commercial options cannot.

Finally, professional software developers don't have much of a role in ebase. The ebase development team is on Techrocks' staff. This is one place that where the quality of software can be increased if professional developers are engaged in building the tools in the first place.

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Is There a Need for NPOs to Create Software?
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One of the most common reactions to Nonprofit Open Source in the NPO technology community is that nonprofits are not software developers. They should just take software " off the shelf" from commercial vendors (or even the traditional open source community) and use it. Along with this argument comes the one that NPOs need never find themselves in a situation where they need to build custom software.

Yet the fact is, today, millions of dollars are being spend by NPOs on custom software.

Should nonprofits like Techrocks build software?
They met an unmet need and are currently number 3 in the marketplace. The market seems to think it was a good idea. They serve a size of NPO that few commercial entities would consider a market.

Should collaboration (via GPL License) be the rule in nonprofit software development?
So far ebase is the only major example. Most of the TSO community seems not to think it is a good idea (the software they build is not open source).

What is the strength of nonprofit open source?
Depends on from whose perspective you examine the question. Ebase works well for TSOs, consultants, and customers. Does it work better than commercial solutions? The installed base of ebase seems to indicate yes. So perhaps the strength is that it more precisely aligns the functionality of the software to the needs of customers.

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TAKE ACTION
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~ Explore a partnership with another organization to build a piece of software critical to your mission, but not provided by commercial software developers.
~ Send david an email with 5 reasons open source *is* or is *not* relevant to nonprofit organizations.

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REFERENCES
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http://www.ebase.org/
http://www.techrocks.org/
http://www.zope.org/
http://www.fsf.org/

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Open-source for nonprofits is a broad field. NPOs can adopt existing open source software (OSS). They can influence open source projects. They can start open source projects.

NPOs often focus on open source that solves needs that are common across industries (Samba for file sharing, Linux for the operating system, etc.). They are just beginning to explore this first stage of adopting software and have little visibility into the potential for starting their own projects.

This is where the potential revolutionary impact of open source for nonprofits comes in. Most NPOs have very unique business processes, data collection, and evaluation needs. However, within nonprofit sectors, these needs can be defined generically. Every fundraising process starts with a donor, proceeds to an ask, and succeeds with a check. Every community technology center program starts with a participant, proceeds to an educational event (class, e-learning, etc.) and succeeds with the accomplishment of an educational objective.

Nonprofits are beginning to learn that automating these business processes leads to higher organizational impact at lower costs. So some folks are going out and building applications to automate these business processes.

Food banks are building applications that manage client intake, reporting to funders, nutrition services, kitchen operations and delivery operations. Most of the time, they end up building these applications in a closed source fashion with the expectation that maybe, “someday” they can sell the resulting application to other organizations. I have yet to see one successful example on this business model, but unsuccessful examples abound.

What if all the food banks pooled their pennies to collaborate on an open source food bank management application? And they have a lot of pennies… three major food banks could easily scrap up 100ドルk apiece for such a project, if they understood the potential.

The only change to their current behavior would be to insist contractors work on the projects using open source software development strategies and that the code be released under an open source license (preferably GPL).

The benefits would be:
Higher levels of functionality at a lower cost than any single organization could achieve.
Organizations without the resources to build their own applications have access to industry best practices embedded into the open source applications.
Applications are updated and extended more regularly because rather than starting from scratch every 15 years with a new application at a high cost, an organization could update their internal application from the open source project every five years at a lower cost.
And many more.

BIO

David Geilhufe has worked in community technology since 1995 when he began teaching Washington DC at-risk youth Internet and programming skills and placing them in full time employment. He latter founded the Eastmont Computing Center, a community technology center serving individuals and organizations in Oakland, CA. As a founding board member of the Community Technology Centers’ Network (CTCNet) he worked to ensure affiliates received useful and direct services from the national office. Currently, David runs Social Source Software, LLC which specifies, designs, and builds complex open-source web applications for nonprofit organizations in the U.S. and abroad.

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Welcome to the home page for the CTSoft concept. I need your help to define and articulate a concept that has been developing in my mind over the past year.

In 2000, I left Eastmont Computing Center to become the Senior Product Manager at digiGroups, leading our effort to build online collaboration software for Fortune 50 companies. With 12ドル million from Accel and other venture capitalists, it became clear that building enterprise quality applications is not rocket science.

At Eastmont we did a lot of begging to get the software we needed. In fact, we shelved a number of online neighborhood organizing projects because we could not find affordable software (we weren't even looking for free software, just affordable).

What if we had the software we needed? What if it met many of our key needs? With an open-source platform delivering web applications with 80% of the functionality we need, we would have embraced it, deployed it and used the software to create outcomes.

This led me to an effort to figure out whether open-source, community technology software development is something that I can make a contribution in. To decide that, I have some questions:

1) Was Eastmont unique, or is this story replicated across the CTCNet membership, the AFCN membership, the Neighborhood Networks Sites, the Department of Education CTC sites & others?

2) Can a critical mass of open source users be created to generate the cash required to continue to build & extend the software platform and applications?

3) What applications are needed? What applications can be funded?

4) If we build it, they will not necessarily come. How do we support the level of deployment, adoption and use that is required to achieve the benefits of open source software communities?

5) Last a personal question: Is there enough interest, traction and commitment to the concept? Is there a team, a community and a shared vision? When is it time to consider quitting my job and join a team and a broader community to make it happen?

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.NGO
The Nonprofit Web Application Platform


1. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

1.1. The Problem
Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) face significant barriers to using Internet technologies to improve their ability to fulfill their mission. In a technology environment dominated by Fortune 500 corporations and .COMs, NGOs lack access to technology that is affordable, meets their unique business processes, and evolves as nonprofits adapt their processes to interact with their constituencies using technology.

Without access, NGOs will never discover how to deploy state-of-the-art, mission-focused, Internet technologies. Mission-driven NGO technology is at risk of forever being relegated to being generations behind the for-profit sector, consisting of outdated, obsolete, inefficient tools.

1.2. The Opportunity
In spite of the barriers to mission-driven NGO technology, a number of leading NGOs are building mission-driven web applications today, often forced by limited resources into using inferior technologies originally designed for the needs of corporations with vast armies of technical staff. By bringing these organizations together to create the .NGO platform under an open source development model, the partners can transcend their resource constraints to create state-of-the-art, mission-driven, NGO web applications. Applications built to meet the needs of NGOs.

The Open Source software movement has created a model of software development that can vault to mission-driven NGO technology to standing shoulder-to-shoulder with its for-profit sector counterparts. The open source technology development model -- where anyone can improve technology because it is liberated from the legal constraints of intellectual property, as long as improvements are subsequently contributed to the community for others to improve upon -- represents an unrealized opportunity for the nonprofit sector to develop and disseminate technology that is mission driven. As technology development environments become more accessible, nonprofits can mould technology in their own image.

1.3. The Plan
The .NGO project will bring together organizations that are already funded and building web applications. Through self-selection, a subset of these organizations will be supported in creating a state-of-the-art, open source web application platform common to all participants. Their diverse applications will ride on top of the application platform, much the same way that MS Word rides atop MS Windows.

Compared with autonomous efforts, such a platform reduces total software development costs to all participating organizations, increases the functionality available to end users in each of the applications, and expands the number of organizations capable of using mission driven information technology.

The .NGO initiative has three goals:

• Bring nonprofit leaders currently developing web applications into a forum to explore how open-source application development can improve their current and future applications projects. (Phase One)
• Explore the possibility of standardizing on a single technology platform, allowing the partners to share resources and radically reduce the cost of application development.
• Develop a concrete action plan to enable participating partners to build a joint, open-source platform for their web applications. (Phase Two)

To achieve these goals, .NGO will conduct four national meetings. The first, sponsored by Stanford University and web cast nationally, will present an unbiased assessment of major open source technologies relevant to mission-driven NGO web applications. This essentially provides the menu of technologies that can be chosen to form the core of the .NGO platform.

Two additional regional meetings will facilitate the process of evaluating and agreeing upon a single technology platform.

The last meeting, sponsored by the Alliance for Community Technology/ University of Michigan, will bring together committed participants to develop a concrete work plan to map out the creation of the .NGO platform.

David Geilhufe and Vlad Wielbut will staff the project. A steering committee composed of 12 leaders in community technology will provide governance.

The project requires 50,000ドル to complete, with in-kind commitments already received from Stanford University and the Alliance for Community Technology. Potential funders are asked to consider contributions of 50,000ドル or 25,000ドル.

WHAT IS A WEB APPLICATION PLATFORM?
A platform provides the shared building blocks for web applications. Almost every web application needs some of the same functionality- security, permissions, content management, authentication, etc. Rather than reinvent the wheel each time a new application is built, starting from a platform enables faster development times, cheaper projects, and more extensive functionality.

WHY NOT A COMMERCIAL SOLUTION?
Commercial solutions are costly. A Fortune 500 firm make the large investment because they can deploy the software across the entire corporation. Sharing a web application across a network of human rights organizations, for example, would cost tens of thousands of dollars to each organization.

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Community technology organizations suffer from the paradox that they help communities take advantage of technology, yet are challenged by the lack of access to technology that is affordable, meets their unique business processes, and evolves as these organizations discover new ways for mission-driven technology to serve their communities.

The open source technology development model—where users can directly improve technology because it is liberated from the legal constraints of intellectual property, as long as improvements are subsequently contributed back into the community for others to improve upon—represents an unrealized opportunity for the nonprofit sector to develop and disseminate state-of-the-art technology that is mission driven. As technology development environments become more accessible, community technology organizations can deliver technology that creates a positive impact.

The Children’s Partnership and the Blacksburg Electronic Village have taken the lead in documenting two critical areas where community technology can have a significant positive impact on local communities: the creation of on-line content[1] and community networking[2]. PolicyLink, a national advocacy, research, capacity building, and communications organization, recognizes the opportunity to develop an inventory of community building applications that can become tools for community problem solving[3].

Even with well-documented need, community technology organizations must continuously re-invent the wheel by building web-based applications designed to support content and community networking. Often, they lack the resources for even the most rudimentary web applications available in the commercial sector.

The .COMM initiative delivers a toolbox for community problem solving on the web by having the needs and requirements of local communities define the functionality of an open-source web application toolbox. It focuses on serving community technology organizations with a basic technology capacity as “neighborhood technology experts,” and a history of community involvement. The membership of organizations like CTCNet[4] and the grantees of programs like TOP[5] provide a target list of these institutions already existing in U.S. under-served communities.

The project will address the most significant barriers to widespread adoption by community technology organizations by tackling the hard questions as an integral part of the initiative:
How do you support adoption by organizations with limited financial and technical resource, but a track record of community technology successes? (Initial Answer: Use free open source software packaged on a CD-ROM—two hours from CD-ROM to a useful, non-customized installation)

How do you support daily technology use by individuals in communities with limited technology access and knowledge? (Initial Answer: Over 600 community technology centers have been answering this question over the past five years)

Since software needs vary across communities, the .COMM initiative does not seek to deliver a pre-built solution, but rather a toolkit that reduces the cost of web application development and increases the impact of content and community networking applications. Out of the box, the .COMM platform will deliver value. Customized to the needs of a local community, it will provide reduce the barriers that prevent communities from realizing the benefits of creating on-line content and community networking.

The .COMM platform will be deployed in two California urban communities for a BETA test. Project FSS-TECH serves will serve the neighborhoods of the Pico and West Adams in mid-city Los Angeles. An additional site in the San Francisco Bay Area will be selected.

Lessons from the BETA deployment will inform the final distributions of the toolkit. After release, communities will be able to download the free, open-source software and deploy it in a meaningful way in less than a day with a minor investment and minimal technical skills.

The total cost of the .COMM initiative will be approximately 500,000,ドル forty percent devoted to software development and sixty percent to supporting local communities in developing, deploying and supporting the technology (training, technical support, etc). Sustainability can be achieved since targeted community technology organizations will not hire new staff and already have the basic technology skills to maintain a community network.

We are currently seeking partners for the .COMM initiative. Please contact David Geilhufe at dgeilhufe@yahoo.com if you are interested.

[1] Online Content for Underserved Americans (//www.childrenspartnership.org/pub/low_income/index.html)
[2] BEV Research Summary (//www.bev.net/project/digital_library/)
[3] Online Community Content and Applications (//www.independentsector.org/pdfs/srf01/kirschenbaum.pdf)
[4] CTCs as local technology experts (//www.ctcnet.org/ctcandta.htm)
[5] TOP Evaluations (//www.ntia.doc.gov/otiahome/top/research/EvaluationReport/evaluation_report.htm)

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