Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

You’ve been told that insert_cool_open_source_software_project_here might be the ticket for a specific function or system you’d like to implement in your nonprofit organization. Or you’re just curious about projects you’ve heard about. How do you go about finding out whether it’s the right software, and whether the project has a healthy community, since you don’t want to adopt a project that doesn’t?

• Check out the website. Make sure that the features that it outlines there match your requirements. See if they have good documentation.
• Check out the forums of email list archives of that project. How busy is it? How easily or quickly does it seem that questions get answered?
• Look at the “download” page (or “releases”). When was the last release? How much time generally passes between major or minor releases? (Minor releases are, for example, when a project goes from 2.2.3 to 2.2.4. Depending on project, going from  x.2 to x.3 might be a major or minor release. Going to a x.0 release - for example from 2.x to 3.0 is always major.) Rule of thumb: projects that haven’t had minor releases in a year or more are definitely in danger of becoming projects that are no longer under development.
• Look at ohloh.net - they have great info on most projects - how many developers, lines of code, how active development activity is.
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• Send queries to nonprofit tech lists for experiences and information, like nosi-discussion, nten-discuss, riders-tech, and others.
• Google it - you might find articles and reviews that might be helpful
• Try it out. These are almost always free to download and try out - this is easier for some projects than others. Luckily, most web project have online demos, which will give you a feeling for the software without having to spend too much time configuring a server or webhost to use the software. Many standard virtual hosts have “one click install” or “fantastico” - which makes it easy to try out some kinds of web applications.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 20th, 2007 at 9:21 am and is filed under Nonprofit Tech, Open Source. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.