Making Advanced Technology Work for Community Serving Organizations

The Potential Impact of OSS and ASPs: Part 2

The Promise of Application Service Provision and Open Source Software

As the ASP and OSS concepts may not be familiar to all, we give very brief introductions here. Much greater detail is available via our Workshop website, http://www.communitytechnology.org/asp-oss.

Application Service Providers (ASPs) are a new class of Internet organizations that deliver application hosting services to their customers. This means that software and data reside with the providers, and hence off of the customers' premises. They are accessed via network connections. Software applications are treated as a service and are typically paid for on a subscription or per use basis.

The great advantage offered by ASPs is that smaller organizations that cannot afford the costs of a sophisticated technology platform can have access to high-quality applications that were previously out of reach. Specialized databases, advanced tools for the support of group projects, state of the art visualization programs, and other such applications can be used by organizations that could not by themselves afford the hardware, software, and systems staff such applications now require. The pooling together of many small customers at the ASP achieves the necessary scale.

The ASP sector is growing rapidly because this arrangement can economically meet the needs of many small businesses -- and in some cases larger businesses that wish to outsource portions of their computing infrastructure that are not central to their mission. Since many small nonprofits resemble small businesses to some degree, we can foresee that newly emerging ASPs will be able to meet some needs of community-serving organizations. The participants at our Workshop were heartened by the implication that the private market will offer many such services without further intervention being required.

However, our discussions made clear that many needs particular to the nonprofit world are unlikely to be fully met by the private market. For example, the central missions of community-serving agencies involve activities such as client management, advocacy mobilization, and donor relationship management. There are distinctive record keeping and reporting requirements associated with nonprofit status and with specialized categorical program funding.

ASPs offering these kinds of specialized applications are unlikely to appear solely due to the pull of a latent private market niche. The potential customers are dispersed, lack collective articulation of their software needs, and are generally under-funded. Appropriate software is either expensive or nonexistent. These barriers, and others detailed below, will have to be overcome if the benefits of Application Service Providing are to extend into the missions of community-serving organizations. In an ASP marketplace organized completely around the needs of small businesses, the central needs of community-serving organizations may never be fully met.

Open Source Software development has become widely known by virtue of the success of the Linux operating system. However, this approach to software development has much broader implications. For example, many other utilities that keep the Internet humming, such as sendmail and the Apache Web Server have also been produced and maintained with the open source approach. Although these projects involve very large numbers of volunteer collaborators, the resulting software in these cases is of unusually high quality and reliability.

The essence of the approach is an agreement by those creating a computer program to make available without charge the human-readable version of its instructions (the "source code"). There are many forms of licensing agreement that guarantee this in slightly varying ways, but they all have the effect of making it easy and inexpensive for others to use and to modify the program. Other programmers, who may be employees of distant organizations using the program, or even unpaid volunteers, can easily find defects, or identify possible new functions. They can create and test them, and can contribute them to a shared base of code that grows rapidly in scope and reliability.

The open source community has a distinctive culture that is quite congenial to the purposes of community-serving organizations. By its nature, open source development is a process of contributing and sharing. The program being developed belongs to its community of users, not to individual programmers, and there is a strong belief in the rightness of this arrangement.

However, the open source community recognizes that even "free" software projects die without a continuing flow of resources, and so it approves of the active cultivation of resource flows around the software. For example, expert programmers make their livings working for companies that rely on the open source programs; and companies sell their expertise in supporting or integrating such programs.

The OSS culture resonates with that of many advocacy, arts, and service delivery organizations that are strongly motivated to serve the welfare of their communities but also actively cultivate resources that will allow them to make their activities as widely accessible as possible.

It is thus natural, on both technical and cultural grounds, to ask whether open source collaboration could be used to develop software that meets the distinctive needs of nonprofit organizations. We believe this is an exciting and viable possibility. As with ASPs, however, the full potential will not emerge without some well-focused interventions. We discuss a number of issues that require attention below, but one should be mentioned here. Our review of successful Open Source Software projects indicates that most have been collaborations of developers who were also users of the program being developed. This tight linkage between detecting problems and generating solutions has been a major asset of open source work. It will not generally be present in nonprofit organizations, where it will be rare that end users of a program will contribute improvements to its code.

An important advance occurred in the thinking of our Workshop as we realized that ASPs specifically serving nonprofits could be highly skilled participants in open source development. Using the knowledge they gained from directly serving nonprofits, they could articulate needs of nonprofits in open source development processes and contribute code helping to meet those needs. They could also provide representation of nonprofit needs in technical standards discussions (such as data-interchange standards), and in aggregation of purchasing power for specialized resources and technology.

Following this line of reasoning led the Workshop to envision a possible "organizational architecture" for nonprofit information technology. Our discussions of particular ASP business models or OSS project possibilities expanded to encompass a broader conception of the array of organizations and activities that collectively create the information technology environment of nonprofit action. We asked ourselves how that picture could be changed by skillful development of the possibilities presented by ASPs and OSS. We believe that there is a promising opportunity for dramatic change in the nonprofit information technology environment.

Next Page: The Potential for Restructuring Nonprofit
Information Technology Development and Use

Joint
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Part 2