Holly Ross, NTEN

That's right, I said it.

What I really mean is that open source, as we knew it, is dead. Over the last decade, what we've been talking about when we say "open source" is "open code" -- a set of zeroes and ones that we can configure to our heart's desire.

But, have you ever implemented an open source solution? We have here at NTEN. We use all kinds of open source tools, including our content management system, Drupal. Sure, it's highly customizable -- by a highly trained staffer, or a highly paid consultant. The code was free, but we paid consultants tens of thousands of dollars to get our implementation up and running.

To me, open source code isn't necessarily any better than proprietary code. The costs, in time and money, are just placed elsewhere. The old arguments for open source software adoption are dead to me.

But please: promise to read the rest of this before you start sending me hate mail.

Michelle Murrain, NOSI

For years and years -- basically, as long as software has been purchased by nonprofit organizations -- the basic model has been: a nonprofit organization pays a fee (sometimes rather large) to a software maker for a copy of software to install on your desktop or server to do a particular task, whether it be tracking donations and constituents, tracking clients, running campaigns, or the like.

What this meant was that each individual organization spent thousands -- or tens, or hundreds of thousands -- of dollars a year to implement software for their organization. The economics of that form of IT investment are hard to manage in a climate where the survival of nonprofits is increasingly endangered, and many are closing or merging.

But other models exist -- namely implementing, investing, and collaborating in open source software.

Eric Leland, Five Paths, Laura Quinn, Idealware, Chris Bernard, italics media

Donors are the lifeblood of nonprofit organizations. You need them to survive. But how do you manage all the information about their giving along with all the personal details that are key to maintaining successful relationships, all for a price that won’t break your bank?

A donor management system is sometimes called a fundraising system or a donor database. At its most basic level, it’s a system that manages information about donors and gifts so you can understand how much you’ve raised, keep track of all the useful information you know about your donors, manage mailings, emails and campaigns, and print reports on all this information.

There are a huge number of systems available, ranging from the basic to those that offer all sorts of additional features and functionality. Costs vary as well -- and there are even some Free and Open Source options. In our free report, "A Consumers Guide to Low Cost Donor Management Systems", we take a look specifically at 33 lower cost systems, but here, let's take a quick look at four of the FOSS options.

Jonathan Hedstrom, OpenSourcery

Any community, online or otherwise, is about communication between individuals. As such, when it comes time to create or grow an online community, tools that allow for and encourage communication and interaction are vital.

There are two major hurdles that must be overcome for an online community to succeed: the selection of appropriate community (or "social-networking") features that make sense for the community in question, and, secondly, actually implementing those features in your online application. The first is often overlooked in favor of the more exciting second step. When this happens, the community rarely benefits from the resulting application.

Every community has unique needs that determine how they should select features. Once a community has determined its needs, however, utilizing open source software presents a more rapid, sustainable path to implementation.

The co-located conferences CommunityOne West and JavaOne are shaping up to be a great opportunity for techies for good to get some information, inspiration, and maybe even some hands-on training at these FREE events in San Francisco next month. Here's the official low-down:

After Idealware's latest report reviewing Open Source CMS tools, there were, as might be expected, a few dust-ups in the open source developers and users communities, which includes NTEN members like David Geilhufe. David wrote this response. NTEN board member Michelle Murrain, one of the authors of the report, responded to some of the criticism. 

Deborah Elizabeth Finn kicked off another lively discussion by asking other nptechies how they factor their organization's Twitter "follow cost" into their Twitter communications strategy. There was a long discussion in the NTEN Discuss group, one of the affinity groups in our online community. Amy Sample Ward took up the discussion on her blog. 

In other news, Lindy Dreyer has been working on a series of posts about organizational Social Media policies, including one addressing your organization's official presence on external existing networks (like LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter).

09NTC NTENny Highlights:
Starting with the 2007 Nonprofit Technology Conference, we've recognized NTEN members who contribute that extra "something" to the work of NTEN and this nonprofit technology community every year. Unlike your more traditional association credentials or awards, these "NTENnies" honor the spirit of the NTEN community by pointing out the lighter side of nonprofit technology.

I'll introduce each member of this year's class of NTENnies in these weekly member round-ups.

First up: David Neff, Director of Web, Film, and Interactive Strategies for the American Cancer Society's High Plains Division. He's the co-organizer of the Austin 501 Tech Club and a presenter at the upcoming NTC. We heart David and all that he's doing to engage nonprofit staff and techies-for-good in the Austin area using social media. We voted him "Most Likely to Be Promoting a Social Media Event Using Social Media While Attending a Social Media Event." You can see his "Meet NTEN" profile here.

Flickr Photo by Green MoonPenguin Day is coming to San Francisco on Saturday, April 25, 2009, right before the NTC. Full details about this opportunity to explore open source software are at http://www.penguinday.org.

The latest agenda can be found here. They encourage anyone who wants to add a session or topic to do so!

Sessions will include:

If there's one thing I've learned in my 6+ years at NTEN, it's that people love to hate their web sites. Perhaps that's why there are so many choices when it comes to CMS (oodles of which are rated in our CMS satisfaction survey). Ask anyone in the nonprofit technology community about Content Management Systems, and they're likely to mention one of the following:

• Drupal
• Joomla
• Plone

We like them because they're free. We love to hate them because there are so many twiddly bits to adjust. Thank goodness we have Laura Quinn, Executive Director at Idealware. She's going to sort out some of the differences between the three and make sense of it all, in terms even non-geeks can understand.

I spoke with her about her session at the 2009 NTC, "Comparing Open Source CMSs: Joomla, Drupal, and Plone", and why CMS seems to be the area where open source has really taken off in the sector:

Flickr Photo: FaysterNow that the stimulus package -- or the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, if you're keeping score at home -- has been signed into law, the work of making it all happen begins. No matter what you think of the law itself, everyone in our sector needs to pay very close attention to Recovery.gov.

You've heard a lot on this blog, and many others in the sector, about the power of social media and the web to bring more transparency to our work. I know that as good, smart people working at good, smart organizations, we believe in the power of transparency. But it's difficult to put the theory into practice.

When data is stuck on servers, web publishing is slow and centralized. When your stakeholders can't chew on, discuss, and disseminate your data and messages, transparency can't happen.

But the hurdles to transparency are vanishing rapidly. More and more of our data is in the cloud, or accessible via APIs. Publishing to the web is now, in the worst case scenario, easy, and in the best case scenario, automagic. Social media tools give your stakeholders ways to interact with data like never before.

That's where Recovery.gov comes in.

Obviously, there's not a lot on the site yet. But it could be a very good model for how nonprofits can use the web to open up all the way and be as transparent as possible. On the site, you can already read the bill, see the big breakdowns of how the money is being spent, and explore the projected timeline for implementation and impact. My favorite bit so far is the jobs map.

Obviously, you aren't overseeing a stimulus package -- but you can use the same set of tools and ideas to show your stakeholders exactly what you're up to. That's what turns a one-time donor into a long-term supporter.

Here's what I think we'll see on Recovery.gov that nonprofits should think about:

I love the way they put it on their award information site:

Good deeds do get rewarded! If you know someone who’s been toiling in the open source vineyards, developing software that’s helping nonprofits succeed, check out the Tides Foundation Pizzigati Prize, a $10,000 annual award for outstanding contributions to software in the public interest.

The competition, judged by a panel of national leaders in public interest computing, is now entering its third year. The application deadline for this year’s prize: March 2nd, 2009.

You can find out more and apply or nominate someone online here.

The award winner will be announced at April 28th at the 2009 NTC. (By the way, the early bird deadline for the conference is this Saturday!)