Making Advanced Technology Work for Community Serving Organizations

The Potential Impact of OSS and ASPs: Part 1

Introduction

This document is a joint statement resulting from a Workshop held in Ann Arbor, Michigan on May 12-13, 2000. The thirty participants represented a wide variety of backgrounds, including nonprofit operations and technology use, Open Source Software development, Application Service Providing, social investing, and research on information technology and on nonprofit organizations.

Our discussions have deepened our conviction that two new developments in the information technology sector, Open Source Software and Application Service Provision, offer enormous potential benefits to community-serving organizations. Open Source Software could allow organizations with similar needs to share their limited software development resources and provide opportunities for contributions by skilled programmers. Application Service Provision could allow for more reliable and lower cost information technology infrastructures through economies of scale, identification and aggregation of common needs, and effective outsourcing of development, maintenance and support. Each has the potential to increase the effectiveness of community-serving organizations. Together they also offer important synergies.

For this potential to be realized, prompt social investment by foundations, corporations, and skilled volunteers is required. In the remainder of this statement we lay out our views on:

why these developments are especially promising for the nonprofit sector to which we are deeply committed;
the potential for dramatic restructuring of information technology use, especially in smaller, community-serving organizations;
the barriers that must be overcome if that potential is to be achieved; and
the most promising activities and experiments that should now be undertaken.

Our joint statement is a call to action. Many of those who attended the meeting are already mobilizing their own resources to make a start on experiments involving nonprofits and ASPs or open source software. Some of their efforts are detailed in an appendix to this document. But their efforts will not suffice. We are therefore distributing this joint statement as widely as possible in order to attract the energy and additional ideas of a crucial group of citizens: those who are intent on harnessing the information revolution to the benefit of our communities by bringing more effective technology to the organizations that serve and build those communities.

Next Page: The Promise of Application Service
Provision and Open Source Software

Joint
Statement

Part 1