Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

I’m at the Open Translation event, and we’ve just had a great session on open content business models. It was very useful, and interesting, and gave me lots of food for thought. I’ve been interested in issues of how we sustain open content for a long while. I was the note-taker for the session, and I feel like there are a lot of great ideas out there.

In general, it seems like most models depend on some sort of up-front funding, whether it be an investment or a grant, to fund the initial writing of a large amount of content. The problem of how do you fund the actual writing of content was not really addressed, and I think that is one of the harder nuts to crack. There was one interesting model was asking for pledges, and if the pledges got up to a certain amount, the content would be produced. But ongoing sustainability of already written open content seems to have been at least conditionally solved by a variety of folks in a variety of ways:

• Training and consulting based on existing content
• Generating revenue by doing print on demand, with a markup
• Production of corollary items such as t-shirts
• Hybrid model - most content is free, some content is closed, and paid for
• Advertising on a site with open content
• Corporate sponsorship
• “Robin Hood” models: asking larger Northern organizations to subsidize the distribution of content for the developing world

This is very interesting fodder for my thinking about the puzzle that is how to make NOSI a strong, sustainable organization. The thing we have actually done the most of is write the primer, and I’ve got more ideas for types of open content that NOSI could get involved in doing, so these suggestions for business models are quite welcome.