 |
|
 |
|
|
About the Workshop"Making Advanced Technology Work for Community Serving Organizations: the Potential Impact of OSS and ASPs" was held May 12-13, 2000 in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The Workshop forged a strategy for improving the quality of software applications available to organizations that serve their communities but have limited resources. It involved about thirty participants with pertinent expertise. The resulting joint statement will be widely distributed with the aim of harnessing current information industry trends to the benefit of community-serving organizations. Remarkable new developments in the information technology industries are changing the way software applications are developed for, and executed by, organizations. In particular, Open Source Software and Application Service Provision promise much broader access to quality software -- especially for organizations of small size and modest means. There is a widespread expectation that small businesses, for example, will be able to take advantage of these new opportunities. The Alliance for Community Technology (ACT) is a partnership of the W. K. Kellogg Foundation and The University of Michigan through its School of Information. At ACT we see in these developments the possibility for profound changes in the capabilities of smaller nonprofit and governmental organizations. These are often grass roots organizations that provide tremendous service to their communities, but they rarely have software well crafted to the requirements of their highly diverse activities. This sector traditionally lives on the "trickle down" of advancing information technology, obtaining each wave of facilities and services around the time that larger businesses and academia are moving on to better solutions. These smaller, community-serving organizations are frequently unable to tailor databases or other software to specific needs or opportunities that differ from those of the for-profit sector. Our hope at ACT is that early intervention might allow community-serving organizations to benefit sooner, rather than later, from current technical innovations and industry trends. However, there are formidable obstacles to realizing the potential of these new possibilities. By making source code freely available to volunteers who contribute improvements, Open Source Software (OSS) development has produced some spectacular successes: high quality and free programs such as Linux, Apache, Emacs, and the GIMP. But the Open Source process does not always yield good results -- some other OSS projects have struggled. Are there particular kinds of software projects that could be valuable to community-serving organizations and that are likely to succeed as Open Source? What experiments are underway, and what are the results so far? What should be tried? How should it be evaluated? Application Service Providers (ASPs) exploit faster network communications by locating servers and application execution at Internet accessible sites, creating large economies of scale. This approach has claimed a big share of industry attention and investment in the last year. Major software companies are betting that significant portions of their future revenues will come through the "rental" of their applications running on servers that reside off the user's premises. But there can be problems with using remote applications. After all, old-fashioned service bureaus languished as soon as computers could be economically located on organizational premises. Users have very good reasons to want to be close to their data, their software and hardware, and their support personnel. With better communications and user interfaces can the ASP model be made to work for community-serving organizations? Such organizations are often small and lack significant information technology staff. Does that make them good candidates for success, or for failure? What is experience so far, and what are informed forecasts of ASP trends? What can we learn from these to guide the future choices nonprofits must make? What experiments should be tried? And how should they be evaluated? Much of the effort to increase capacity in this vital sector of our society is supported by philanthropy. That field is also undergoing dramatic change as a new generation of donors enters the scene, with an interest in new approaches to capacity building. How can these new resources for stimulating change best leverage the potential of the emerging ASP and OSS models? These kinds of questions led us to convene the Workshop. A small set of participants with specific expertise on various facets of our central concern were invited. The meeting was not a conference, but was intended rather to be a productive conversation that will shape the future. We have generated a joint statement based on the discussions and subgroup meetings. We hope that this statement will be distributed broadly in all the relevant sectors: community organizations, philanthropy, government, ASPs, and those active in supporting and observing OSS development. We want the Workshop's report to clarify the promise and pitfalls of the ASP and OSS developments for all the parties who may become involved. We believe that an informed and persuasive statement from the distinguished set of Workshop participants can have an important effect in channeling a flood of energy that is ready to be unleashed. Join the mailing listWe are considering creating an e-mail list to continue discussion about these topics. Type in your e-mail address if you would like to be notified when the list is created:
|
|
