open source

With this week's announcement that Blackbaud will buy Convio there have been many questions whether this will be good or bad for the nonprofit organizations both companies count as their clients. We have often had clients and other nonprofit organizations we come into contact with us ask about the open source tools we specialize in, and how they compare with the proprietary tools or Software as a Service offerings that they've heard about. One very clear difference is that the open source tools don't get bought up and consolidated.

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At the end of 2009 when the Obama Administration came out with the Open Government Directive (which I wrote about at the time) I had some conversations with other consultants and thinkers in the nonprofit technology world about the idea of an "Open Nonprofit Directive" that would, in many ways, mirror the OGD.

Two years have passed, and in the prognostications for the year ahead I've seen a number of references to "opening up" and increasing transparency in the nonprofit sector. Once again I am left thinking it is time for an Open Nonprofit Directive.

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Our friends at Code For America today announced the launch of CiviCommons, a place on the web for governments at every level to share the software they are building (or have built). As the Open Source ethic continues to drive itself into Government, there becomes an obvious need to share the fruits of the labor of people who'd otherwise not have such a forum.

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CivicActions has been working with Google's “Make the Web Faster” project team to make some (last minute) improvements that make Drupal 7 faster.

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Last week, President Obama's administration released the Open Government Directive, or OGD, directing all federal government agencies to publish information online in an open format that can be retrieved, downloaded, indexed, and searched by commonly used web search applications. The Open Government Directive outlines these three core values:

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Just about a month ago I returned from the NTEN NTC in San Francisco where I had the opportunity to talk with Peggy Duvette, Angus Parker of WiserEarth and Leif Utne of Zanby and organizing force behind Open Wiser. I then blogged about the OpenWiser fundraising drive to raise $10,000 to build an open API to WiserEarth's database of information about organizations around the world working towards a more sustainable civilization.

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California voters recently resoundingly rejected budget measures that would have eased, but not solved, a disastrous budget deficit. As a result, services across the board from welfare to schools face significant cuts as administrators try to close massive budget gaps. Declining state tax revenues aren't helping, either. The result is going to be a multi-year fiscal catastrophe.

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Vancouver is thinking open. A council meeting agenda calls for discussing "open data, open standards and open source software for all of its data and information resources," according to the ReadWriteWeb post linked above. The benefits of governments going open are immense and arguably fulfill the role of government in serving its people. Indeed, Open Source is, by its very nature, a form of digital democracy.

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I like many others was completely blown away by Paul Hawken's Blessed Unrest. The last 3rd of the book is a compendium of non profit and non governmental organizations around the world that are working on social justice, human rights, sustainability, environmental and indigenous people's issues as well as many others. Hawken's describes these groups collectively as a movement, the largest movement in the history of the world. A movement that is decentralized and global.

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Ok, actually, it's the New York Times which has developed an "API" for the U.S. Congress. Basically, the Times has munged together a bunch of data sources (see below) and developed an "API" to allow developers to access and use the data. The information you can get access to includes roll-call vote (voice and division votes are not available right now). The Times does extra calculations including party totals.

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