Supported Open Source

I’m at an interesting intersection in my career path. I just concluded eight years at a small, statewide health care reform nonprofit in Massachusetts called Community Partners. I was Technology & Strategy Director there. Like so many orgs around us, we went under a month ago due to the bad economy. Though I am sad to lose my wonderful co-workers, it was coming for a long time, so I was somewhat prepared. A long time ago, other organizations and foundations started asking me lots of technology questions. This has naturally parlayed into consulting.

At this juncture where I have a sense of what it's like to work in a small org and am also looking at and helping larger orgs and foundations to make decisions about tech and use it in smart ways, I’m thinking a lot about something I call "supported open source."

"How do I choose a CMS?" is one of the most frequent questions I get. "Should I go with a closed but well-supported system or should I venture out into the Badlands of Open Source?" There is another way! That is supported open source.

The perception is often that if you choose open source—even if you hire additional expertise to initially build your site—you have to have skills in-house to keep it going after launch. I think the perception that you're on your own with open source is one of the barriers to its adoption for many businesses and nonprofits. But there are companies and consultants that will stick around, long after your site is launched, to give you the help and support you need. And there are different ways of doing this based on your org's budget.

At Community Partners, we ran things on a shoestring. I build web sites, but I don't write custom PHP code. When we wanted to use a profile module to collect contact information from users on our Drupal site and sync it with our Access mailing list database (yes, I know... Old Skool...), I found the module. It didn't work right. This functionality was a priority for us, though. Luckily, we maintained a contractual relationship with a Drupal consultant who would help us out with our site when our budget allowed. We only paid him to help us when something was broken, or when we wanted a new feature we couldn't implement ourselves and we had the funds to do it.

Having someone you can pay to give you support only when you need it is clearly cheapest way to go. If you're rolling in money, however, having a company on-call 24-7 to support you with anything you need is the other end of the spectrum. And everything in between exists. I want to disclose here that at present, I have a paid relationship with a consulting firm called OpenIssue LLC, which offers a spectrum of services for open source CMS platforms. I am working with them because I am becoming increasingly convinced that supported open source is has some serious advantages for our sector.

I am dogmatic about not being dogmatic, and the needs and mission of an org should always determine what technology they choose, not the other way around. You're never married to a piece of software and you should change platforms if and whenever it serves you. But particularly during this time of economic uncertainty, there is something comforting to me about software that's being developed by a worldwide brain trust. Open source software can't be yanked out from under you if funds (temporarily) disappear, or if a contract expires, because we all own it.

Though this community code base can be messy, open source development specialists know how to clean it up for you. So you get that worldwide scope of innovation, plus the focused attention on your org's particular needs. For orgs that want to stay innovative but don't always have cash flow, this can be a great solution. Ongoing support can be stopped and re-started as needed when there are budget troubles.

I know of a few companies out there that explicitly offer ongoing support for open source platforms. My fave among these is PICnet. Non-Profit Soapbox is designed to be an affordable, fully hosted, software-as-a-service (SaaS) way for nonprofits to build sites quickly and easily in the Joomla! CMS. PICnet has been around for a long time, and honestly I don't know why more companies aren't offering open source SaaS for nonprofits. Seems like a great idea to me. Here are a couple more companies that offer ongoing support:

• Community IT Innovators (CITI)
• Jazkarta

I predict more of these companies will emerge in the coming year, and I think it will be a great leap forward for our sector. Do you know of a company or a consultant that offers ongoing support for open source software platforms? If so, I'd love to know about them. Please add them in the comments.

Cloud computing and taming the desktop

Cloud computing is one of those buzz phrases that has come to mean everything and nothing depending on your perspective.



Cloud computing is neither good or bad: it is increasingly an element of planning and strategy even for small to medium organizations. It is new technology that happens to correspond to, accelerate and enable us to respond to larger economic and social trends. At the risk of oversimplifying, I tend to break it down to two challenges and three opportunities.


Two Challenges

Cloud computing wrestles with two fundamental challenges of the modern computing era: infrastructure and the desktop.

Without a doubt, the bits and pieces of organizational infrastructure have gotten cheaper. Putting all those hardware and software pieces together, managing them, securing them, updating them, backing them up, and ensuring 24x7 global up-time remains challenging and expensive.

In the current recession, cloud computing has become the means to translate technology from capital costs to operating costs. That is, instead of investing in longer terms cycles of network servers, other office hardware and software, cloud computing says, pay as you go over the Internet. Business planning articles have commented on this as an imperative about this recession—with which the maturing of cloud computing happens to coincide.

Formerly, organizations planned on upgrading locally installed network servers every three to four years. Or should have. The cost of not doing so might be a catastrophic failure with days of down time. The cost of an upgrade includes new hardware, usually new network software to be compatible with the new software, ancillary updates to security systems, back-up software, email software and so on. The cost also includes migration, planned instead of emergency downtime, reconnecting desktops and lots more. Big costs, hard to consistently budget for, particularly in a recession, and particularly for smaller businesses and nonprofits in recessionary environments.

These one-time costs can be enormous even if the pure cost of a server has gone down. Cloud computing aims to turn these capital outlays into ongoing operational costs. They can be metered as usage grows or retracts instead of planned over multiple year period.

Cloud computing also can alleviate the budgeting for support costs. It’s not that there’s necessarily less to watch or do. It’s more the scale and scheduling of support these days. Even if system consoles have become somewhat more straightforward to manage, the burden of responsibility may not have. More organizations support staff working at home or in the field at odd hours. More organizations have multiple offices or close partners sharing systems. More organizations maintain connections between internal data systems and their website. These all imply closer and closer to 24x7 support, even if an organization nominally has traditional office hours.

The other big challenge on the mind of IT strategists today is the desktop. Twenty five years or so into the “PC Revolution,” we’re grappling with what to do with the desktop. We all wanted its promise; now we have to contend with the consequences. Desktops have become more and more powerful. As they do, they also become more and more difficult to tame and manage.

Before PCs, everything ran off of servers, and desktops were relatively cheap, dumb, easy to maintain. Support was centralized on the server. While those servers and related infrastructure cost more, support costs were perhaps more predictable.

Even as purchase costs for a new office computer drop, analysts still consistently talk about total costs of ownership to a business or organization dwarfing that initial cost. (I’ve recently heard 15% as current ratio of initial to total cost.) The total cost includes acquiring and configuring the computer, maintaining it with security and software updates, supporting its users, and then managing its replacement down the road. Windows-Mac-Ubuntu each have their proponents in this regard. Travelling around to different offices, I see universal complexity on the typical staff person’s desktop and unending monthly support requirements.

Jonathan Zittrain’s excellent “The Future of the Internet—And How to Stop It” (http://futureoftheinternet.org/ ) writes about the fundamental openness of the PC environment. And this is true whether Windows, Mac or Linux. By their nature, unlike earlier devices that sat on office workers’ desks, they provide endless choices for installing software and configuring things. Endless choices mean endless headaches for IT staff.

Troubleshooting why some configuration no longer works on a particular machine (it is hardware? Software? Malware? User error?...) is probably the least fun part of an IT dept’s week. Zittrain argues for keeping that creative openness against the forces that want to put computer usage back into “walled gardens.” (This is the “future of the Internet he wants to stop.) Yet he also recognizes the pressures facing IT departments in wanting to lock things down or limit choices.
It would be hard to impossible to imagine giving up the computing power now at everyone’s finger tips on their desktop. The challenge is to provide that power with less support complexity.

Three Opportunities

From two challenges come three opportunities: “Software as a Service,” “IT as a service,” and “Platform as a Service.”

Software as a Service means taking strategic business or organizational software applications and moving them up to the web as pay as you go services. For example, on a small scale—Constant Contact. On a large Scale—Salesforce. Things run in the browser and operate like household utilities.

Platform as a Service takes a similar model and provides software developers the tools to build complete applications. For example, instead of doing your own Drupal thing, you develop complex sites from within the Acquia Drupal Platform.

IT as a Service (or Infrastructure as a Service) aims to move your whole network infrastructure out of your office and up onto the web somewhere. Instead of worrying about configuring Outlook on everyone’s desktop, everyone uses the same desktop software image centrally maintained and managed.

The first two of these meet the challenge of the desktop by minimizing what runs there versus what runs in your browser. IT as a Service meets the challenge by taming and centralizing what runs on the desktop. All three aim to reduce the capital expense footprint of IT. There is more to say. (For one thing, I've oversimplified a bit what Acquia and Salesforce offer). In part II (yes, sorry, there is a part II of this), I’ll assess these three a bit more.