Sonny Cloward tweeted a nice reminder of the nonprofit technology open source vs. commercial debate that has been going on for awhile [his post, my post]. He was congratulating Johanna Bates on a very nice post on her personal view of open source and nonprofits.

All this was catalized by Eben Moglen's NTC Plenary and has been covered by Holly Ross's post.

Four years latter basically nothing has changed in the discourse, but facts on the ground have seen a sea change.

The discourse is stil either/or & black/white.

The CiviCRM guys don't point out that Salesforce has a more polished functionality and better reporting tools. The Salesforce guys don't point out that CiviCRM can do membership management, events management, seamless acceptance of online donations and mass email -- all things that nonprofit users ask for every day on their message boards.

Why?

Simple marketing.

It is virtually impossible for platform providers to acknowledge one another or integrate because you are trying to get the customer to select your platform. Salesforce says select our platform and our ecology will help you out (though over the last 4 years I have seen little in the way of software innovation avaliable on the same terms as the platform donation - volunteer management tools, member management tools, event management tools, etc. CiviCRM says wait a few months and you'll get the stuff on our roadmap (better reporting, case management, improved events, etc.). I'll leave others to invent a better model of marketing a platform.

The facts on the ground, however, are finally getting really inspiring.

Salesforce has done a great job of penetrating the market through their donation program. In the last month, they finally seem to have got their act together and put the infrastructure in place to support long term, sustainable impact on nonprofit technology. And in doing so, low and behold, they have embraced open source.

Four years ago Sonny pointed out "I could easily use Salesforce as a model of proprietary/open source partnership—a corporate developer that embraces open source integration into their product." Yet it took them until today for them to actually take the lead and open source the starter pack.

The Nonprofit Starter Pack is now and open source project and they can begin the process the CiviCRM team began 5 years ago of building out nonprofit software that works for day to day users (events, memberships, etc.). By Salesforce embracing open source, they have finally, IMHO, put the critical pieces in place to transform nonprofit technology as part of a mission rather than as part of corporate philanthropy/marketing.

As an interesting side note, the traditional commercial nonprofit software providers are being assimilated into the Salesforce borg (Convio's CommonGround, recent MicroEdge announcement). Not sure of thos implications, but very interesting.

On the CiviCRM side, the juggernaugt continues to innovate and expand with features that regular nonprofit staffers need to use every day.

Four year ago Sonny took me to task and highlighted the key point: "nonprofit staff are pining away for affordable and effective apps that allow them to do their jobs"

Today, the situation is far better than it has ever been before.

I had a conversation years back with the WiserEarth people since it pains me to see history keep repeating itself.

Recently there was an effort to fund open APIs for the WiserPlatform which had me take another look at the software ecology behind the mission. And in that look I found a priceless quote:

This is why folks in the sector need to find themselves some qualified technologists. Lets recap some of the highlights of executing this vision:

First, these guys are deserving, they run a really compelling community and they have a bunch of great ideas. But their technology execution is horribly misaligned with their mission and vision.

If Paul's vision was always to open source the platform, he either meant it in "marketing-speak"or didn't really know what he meant by "open source" - he was just using the word. This is all to common among executives and progressives with good intentions, but that doesn't make it OK. Just calling something an open source project has absolutely NO mission impact other than providing a "marketing lie" that makes people feel better about signing up at your website.

So if you want to do a social change technology project and have it be "open source," please bring in the technology strategist that knows what that means and the coders with the experience to do it correctly -- just hiring any old development firm tends to put you square in the "marketing lie" category.

No APIs?! Talk about not having a technological clue. I suppose the logic was "wikipedia doesn't have APIs, why would we need them" (even though by 2006, MediaWiki had APIs).

This is yet another area where you need a good technologist. As an illustration: 

Back in 2005, when we had to put together a "database in the sky" (which is an apt description for so many social change web projects) for a database of every missing person on the web in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina  the FIRST thing we did was define a data format. The next thing we did was define an API. Then we built what we wanted to build.

Having said all that, believe it or not, you should give a couple bucks to OpenWISER. I hope that someone will nock them upside the head and make them publish their data formats (or adopt existing ones) before they build code, but it would be a very good thing for the progressive movement to actually execute this one right.

As I read it, I realize the only voice of the companies that drive a lot of Drupal in that conversation is Dries. Sure, a bunch of people that are employees of the companies are contributing as individuals, but the companies themselves are not in the conversation.

Drupal is clearly being comercialized... folks noted that the Drupal homepage no longer has interesting stories, it's tipping toword site annoucements. The Drupalcons and various development sponsored by commercial interests is moving Drupal away from its roots.

I have two thoughts on this:

So I've been observing the Drupal  7 UE redesign project and have made another tremendous discovery. There is little (probably nothing) new under the sun. So when you want to hit the 80% principle, just copy from others.

So you have some of the intial Mark Bolton concepts & Lullabot's Buzzr UI for Drupal. Then you look at other CMS's, specifically Concrete5 and CMS Box (one of 2008's best UIs according to Jakob Nielsen). And you come to the conclusion that a CMS requires, drum roll please, a header, overlay window and inline editing -- three things that are in each of these CMSs and CMS designs.

This begs the question just how much original usability testing, getting to know your user time is really required. Couldn't you  just copy what has gone before you? Or perhaps it is really good validation that the basic concepts are right on.

And a final thought. These concepts really aren't going to make Drupal unique... something else is required.Hopefully Bolton's concept of a "Tool for Site and Page Structuring" can be that unique element.

So we tried to start a CiviCRM/Drupal based ASP to solve the constituent relationship management/website/online donation/ mass email problem that most charities face with CivicSpace.  It failed, but that does not mean that another attempt will also fail.

There are three basic approaches to doing a CiviCRM/Drupal ASP: