Making Advanced Technology Work for Community Serving Organizations

The Potential Impact of OSS and ASPs: Part 4

Barriers That Must Be Overcome

If something resembling our scenario is to unfold, there are numerous problems to be confronted and resolved. To this point we have focused our statement primarily on the promise of ASPs and OSS, but our Workshop brought many concerns to light. A conversation of several days among thirty people cannot be rendered briefly, but we can provide an illustrative list of examples.

Most community-serving organizations lack awareness of either ASPs or OSS, and hence have no vision as yet of the possibilities they present.
The needs of practitioners that should be reflected in mission-relevant software are often difficult to articulate. Repeated cycles of development and testing are required to bring software into alignment with actual practice.
In the nonprofit world, as mentioned earlier, end-users of software will rarely be equipped to program improvements themselves. A tight relationship will have to exist between end-users and others with the technical skills required to author improvements.
Many agencies have deep fears about the security of vital data located off their premises. In some cases these are even legal restrictions, but more commonly they are worries about the delegation of control and responsibility to another organization.
Many nonprofits also fear being "stranded" if the ASP fails.
The ASP model requires affordable high bandwidth to connect customer organizations to service providers. Such high-speed networking (e.g., via digital subscriber telephone lines or cable modems) is not yet available in many regions, especially outside major cities, and is complex, unreliable or high-priced in some regions where it is available.
Standards are absent for beneficial sharing of data and the great potential value of such standards is under-appreciated by many community-serving organizations.
An attractive business model for many ASPs is a for-profit structure in which total income from service fees significantly exceeds costs. Some nonprofit organizations may be reluctant to contract with such for-profit providers, even if the software being provided is open source.
Open source projects have no corporate single entity that can be held responsible for an application. Some organizations may fear that this will mean an increased probability of being left without future upgrades or help services.
Much open source software has been produced with an assumption of technically adept users, but nonprofits need applications that are nearly "transparent" in use as training costs are an enormous and frequently recurring burden.
The incentives for sharing solutions among nonprofit organizations have traditionally been weak, and the diffusion of innovations in the sector is poorly understood; these conditions make the job of appropriate social investment harder.

The list of barriers, like the Figure, provide ample evidence of the complexity of the situation. Yet we are optimistic. Many of the barriers will be the object of serious attack by the private market. Low-cost high speed connectivity, for example, will be widely promoted by various cable and telephone companies.

Fears of data insecurity may yield to experience as have fears of Internet credit card use. (This may be assisted by institutional developments such as certificate authorities, encryption key repositories, clear codes of service provider ethics, and reliable processes of professional certification.) There is growing awareness that many open source projects live as long as, or longer than, companies, and that many generate quick and high quality help -- often for free.

Many of the problems that involve awareness can be addressed with dissemination of relevant information and with results from targeted research. Other problems require more extensive efforts to implement and evaluate promising options. We turn now to a list of projects that we hope will soon begin.

Next Page: Activities and Experiments That
Should Now Be Undertaken

Joint
Statement

Part 4