Making Advanced Technology Work for Community Serving Organizations

The Potential Impact of OSS and ASPs: Part 5

Activities and Experiments That Should Now Be Undertaken

Our argument has been that nonprofit-focused ASPs can be the key to unleashing more productive use of advanced technology to further the missions of community-serving organizations. The natural dynamics of the private market will provide only weak forces for the creation of ASPs dealing centrally with nonprofit needs. We, therefore, strongly recommend that foundations, public-spirited corporations, and interested private individuals begin investing in projects intended to demonstrate the feasibility of such providers. We believe that visible, well-measured demonstrations will suffice to jump-start the proliferation of nonprofit-focued ASPs. We believe this will be much harder to do once many nonprofits have moved to outsourcing their computing to ASPs oriented to small businesses.
As we have mentioned, the crucial barrier to open source development for nonprofit needs seems to us to be the disjunction of user experience from programmer skills. We believe the nonprofit-focused ASP can solve that problem by aggregating the demands of its customers. And we see numerous areas where open source development could aid the effectiveness of community-serving organizations. Therefore, it is imperative that experiments begin now with the combination of open source development of software targeted on nonprofit needs and delivery of that software via nonprofit-focused ASPs.
We expect that a number of ASP and OSS projects will be funded as various social investors make analyses and receive funding requests along the lines of the scenario we report above. A consortium of interested social investors could improve the yield on these investments by disseminasting information about other experiments, about technical issues that may arise in proposals, and about evaluation methods and performance metrics that might be employed to document the actual effects of the projects. Some funders -- or a constortium -- might even establish metrics for the performance of projects and require that they be made available to others.
It also seems important that some organization take on the responsibility for monitoring the experiments that do occur in order to accumulate lessons learned. An array of methods seems relevant here: carefully instrumenting some projects in order to determine their impacts on the missions of the community-serving organizations that use them; surveying service deliverers, developers, and users; convening gatherings of such groups; maintaining a website repository of relevant reports and discussions; collecting and sponsoring related research on information flows and diffusion of innovations in the nonprofit sector...
Our Workshop discussions returned repeatedly to the key role of standards in the development of a new nonprofit information environment. More and better standards - especially for the description of data and procedures - will provide clear targets for open source development, bases for guaranteeing interoperability of multiple applications, and possibilities for valuable data-sharing and lower cost research. We see particular opportunities to exploit the widespread deployment of eXtensible Markup Language (XML) along these lines, but there are many other possibilities as well. Investment is required both in standards development processes, and in demonstration projects that make visible the value that standards can supply.

We do not present our joint statement in the belief that it solves all the problems. Quite the contrary, the wonderful range of possibilities opening before us will clearly involve many issues that we have not anticipated or that we have noticed but cannot now resolve. Should ASPs for nonprofits themselves be nonprofit or for-profit? Can open source development be made to work for database applications as well as it has worked for systems software? Can a useful body be created to facilitate social learning about ASP and OSS in the nonprofit world?

Our hope that many new ideas and experiments will be stimulated by the outlines we have sketched for a new structure of nonprofit information technology development and execution. In particular, we believe that these trends provide an excellent opportunity for collaboration among many kinds of social investors: traditional foundations with experience in program design, new philanthropists with new ideas about forms of social investment and metrics for success, as well as skilled volunteers from information technology industries. To influence the unfolding of the trends there need to be deft and swift interventions. But the costs appear manageable, and the potential benefit is enormous.

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Participants Endorsing the Joint Statement

Joint
Statement

Part 5