March 31, 2005 | Read Time: 2 minutes
A series of events this spring will bring together charity technology employees, consultants, and software developers to discuss the potential — and the challenges — of developing open-source software.
“We want to demystify open-source software for nonprofit organizations,” says Katrin Verclas, co-director of Aspiration, an Amherst, Mass., nonprofit group that seeks to create a software landscape in which charities have access to good-quality, low-cost tools that help them do their work.
Open-source software gives users access to the “source code” of an application, which allows organizations to make changes or enhancements to fit their needs. Developers of such software encourage users to modify the programs and to share them with others.
Aspiration is working with local technology charities to sponsor the gatherings, called Penguin Days after the mascot of the open-source giant Linux. Penguin Day Chicago took place on March 26, and events are scheduled in the San Francisco Bay Area on April 12, and in New York on May 7.
Many nonprofit organizations have very specific software needs, but the market of potential customers that share those needs is too small for commercial software companies to build those products, says Ms. Verclas. She says charities that need to develop such specialized tools can cut their costs by adapting open-source software, rather than starting from scratch.
The transparency of open-source software code can also be vital to organizations that handle sensitive information, such as international groups investigating human-rights abuses. “With open source, you can look at the code and see if there are any back doors someone could use to try to get in,” says Ms. Verclas.
But significant barriers keep nonprofit organizations from widely adopting open-source software.
Charities’ limited capacity to develop software and open-source software’s tendency to be less well-documented and user-friendly than proprietary software have combined to make open source a daunting choice for nonprofit organizations, says Ms. Verclas. For nonprofit groups to be able to take advantage of the promise of open-source software, she says, technology organizations will have to develop, enhance, and support open-source tools for charities.
For more information: Go to http://www.penguinday.org.
