Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

The dust is settling. I looked over Allan Benamer’s post on the Convio and Kintera initiatives, I looked harder at the Convio Open and Kintera Connect docs, and I also had a chat with some Kintera folk. I have a few comments.

Allan is right - the Kintera API is more comprehensive, and provides for more flexibility than the Convio API. Of course, the API was only one part of Convio’s initiative, so I do still think they come out ahead, a bit. But it may well be that for more complex integrations, the Kintera API will provide more power.

REST vs SOAP: Kintera seems to have chosen the “more power, harder to code” choice. I could argue it either way.

Methinks vendors in this space still just don’t grok, really, what “open” means. While I appreciate that one can, theoretically (I have yet to test it) easily become a “partner” with either company - but that doesn’t quite count as open. Allan hit the nail on the head when he said:

Again, this is a lesson in Web 2.0 transparency both for the sector and the vendors who serve it. Control? Let it go. I really mean that. From both a business point of view and from the point of view of how our sector should work to heighten transparency in society at large, there’s no reason to limit the ability of coders to learn about and discuss the API at hand. And the big guys have already done this work, check out the way Google and Amazon distribute their APIs. Those shine as industry-standard examples of how open APIs need to be distributed.

He’s right. Open it up, let anyone bang on test data to try things out, and you never know what might happen. The drive toward open everything is pretty inexorable, and the pressure is only going to get greater.