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The Potential Impact of OSS and ASPs: Part 3The Potential for Restructuring Nonprofit Information Technology Development and UseTogether ASPs and OSS may offer a productive new approach to overcoming the inherent small scale of most community-focused organizations. ASPs allow many organizations to band together to share technology infrastructure that none can individually afford. Open source development allows many organizations to share in the development of quality software that advances their missions and meets their common needs. If information technology flowing to nonprofit organizations is to be more specialized than shrink-wrapped office tools, then a complex network of supporting organizations, resources, and activities must come into being. As the attached Figure indicates, the system requires an intricate interplay among technology users in community-serving organizations and a host of other actors: software developers (commercial, nonprofit, and volunteer), intermediaries (consultants, user groups, standards bodies), and infrastructure providers (telecommunications providers, ASPs, hardware and software vendors, technology support firms). Our Figure is not offered as a complete picture of the future landscape but rather as a scenario indicating the considerable complexity and also highlighting some of the most important interactions. The keystone of this possible system is the ASP specifically focused on nonprofits. That is the novel type of organization that will have the incentive and the capability to serve and articulate nonprofit needs not being met by the regular market. If such entities become established in the nonprofit technology world, they can produce numerous important benefits. An ASP delivering case-management database services to homeless agencies, for example, might have hundreds of customer agencies. The ASP's experience through customization contracts and in meeting help requests from its member agencies would allow it to articulate generic needs for software improvements and participate in open source development of the applications it provides to its customers. It would also be able to represent the requirements of homeless agencies in issues such as data-sharing standards (e.g., the community-wide "continuum of care" reporting required by the Department of Housing and Urban Development). Where customer agencies give appropriate consent, the data holdings of such an ASP could support far more sophisticated studies of the homeless problem than have so far been possible. ASPs working with specific types of nonprofits that use open source software can also play a vital role in unleashing the energies of the information professionals. There are many skilled people in the information world who share a concern with the mission of particular agencies, who are passionate, e.g., about an environmental issue, about teaching literacy, combating homelessness, or increasing voter participation. Whatever their interests in their communities, ASPs supporting open source development for the organizations they care about can provide information professionals with a channel for contributing their expertise. As our Figure indicates, a variety of activities and organizational types must come into being for this promising scenario to become real. In full function there would be users groups, and multiple Open Source Software developers alongside the commercial developers and business-oriented ASPs that we take as a given. There would be standards bodies engaged with determining the best ways to represent shareable data and perhaps also best practices. There should be organizations designed to help rate the performance of ASPs and other technology sources (what we have called "technology better business bureaus" that could also deploy sophisticated collaborative filtering technologies analogous to those used for book and music ratings at Amazon.com). There might be an umbrella organization of the nonprofit-oriented ASPs, collecting and articulating their concerns and initiatives. These elements are roughly parallel to the rapid elaboration of organizational infrastructure in for-profit sectors that make serious use of information technology. Each of them adds to the power that advanced information technology can bring to a sector by shaping the technology's growth over an extended period of time. The key to this happening among community-serving organizations is the development of a successful model (or, more likely, models) of the nonprofit-focused Application Service Provider. Such an organization can meet and focus the needs of community nonprofits that are highly valuable, but lack the capacities needed to develop on their own the requisite vision, resources and expertise. |
Joint Part 3
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