What if we could remove the complexity of technology as an obstacle to social
good? What if a nonprofit could become dramatically more efficient by using on
demand, Internet delivered services? Looking at the current landscape of
nonprofit technology products and services, this seems like a timely
conversation.

Some of the variables as I see them are:

The Code

Open Source

Open API's

Closed system

Service (or software) Delivery

On Demand / Web 2.0

ASP

Shrink Wrapped

The Specifics

Office Suite

Collaboration/Groupware

Graphic and multimedia production

Telephony

Hard Copies

The first grouping is interesting to the extent that there is a unique ability
of the "software" to bend to the specific context of a nonprofit org and/or the
nonprofit sector as a whole. Open Source software can be focused specifically at
the nonprofit sector (ie Civicspace, Civicrm...) or an individual nonprofit can
customize an open source project to fit their particular needs. The latter
option has proven to be the most problematic as the customization is usually
costly or klugey (word?) and quickly siloed. The current movement of rapidly
maturing open source project built specifically for the nonprofit sector seems
to me to be very promising.

The piece that is missing is hosting (this is the Democracy In Action model).
The goal here is to remove IT burden/complexity from nonprofits. To my mind, a
reasonable goal is to remove all "servers" from inside the nonprofit and replace
them with trusted "services". (Probably a thorny issue best moved to another
thread?). So, the ability to connect/integrate multiple services becomes
critical. This is the domain of Open API's. The "open" in this case refers to
existence/availability regardless of cost. Additionally, Open Source is not
Open API. If the source is open then, theoretically, one could write an API and
make it available for anyone to use or "open'. The idea here is that any one
who has full access to a service could use the Open API to create connectors to
any other service. The classic example is Google Maps and something else that's
online but we could see some more interesting integrations soon like CMS, CRM,
ecommerce, groupware.

Closed systems are dead and we don't really need to talk about them. Ask any of
the closed system vendors. They are all trying to figure out how to be provided
by an ASP or how to provide a robust Open API. Their customers are demanding
it.

So, Service (or Software) Delivery. There is clearly a trend towards the
Internet as a platform for services delivery. There are at least two distinct
flavors, On demand and ASP. While this is a subtle difference, it is a critical
distinction to pay attention to when trying to choose a service. On Demand is a
term that I am choosing, somewhat at random, to represent an application that is
built from the ground up to be provided via the Internet (ie salesforce.com, the
corporation part of the corporate foundation that employs me) as opposed to a
traditional client-server environment that is offered via the Internet by an
Application Service Provider. The distinction speaks to the services ability to
scale on the Internet as a delivery platform.

As for shrink wrap. It's dead too. It will just take a long time for it to
die. The first phase is represented by purchasing software on line to be
downloaded and installed on a local workstation our LAN server. The second
phase will be a move toward doing this like word processing (writely.com,
ajaxwrite.com) and spreadsheets (numsum.com) online.

So, if you have made it this far and you are interested in trying to figure out
what the on demand nonprofit might look like, then let's try to create some
definitions via a wiki. If you would like to play, the ground rule is that this
is NOT a space to discuss IF nonprofits should move to an on demand model, but
more to discuss what it might look like if we assume that it IS a good idea.
There is not much there now and you will need to create an account to use it.
Please check it out if it interests you.

http://www.salesforcefoundation.org/projects/ondemandnpo

Steve Wright
Program / Technical Director
w: 415.901.5606
f: 415.358.4304 (general)
f: 415.520.0124 (for CRM donations):

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-----original message-----
>> This has been a very interesting conversation. I think that your points
about the ability for open source to live on independently of specific providers
can solve one of the big challenges that NPOs (and others) face. But, I also
think that this aspect can be easily oversold or mis-interpreted, especially by
smaller orgs without extensive technical resources. Before ASPs were all the
rage, almost all online sites and many offline systems were essentially open
source because anyone with access could modify the code. And, that often didn't
create a great value for the NPOs because the systems would still degrade over
time as they became customized, siloed, and un-upgradeable.>>