However, it’s a little ironic that Convio is calling out Blackbaud for not being open and claiming that the primary reason they should be more open is because it benefits us, the consumers of their technology. Yep, that’s right, Convio! Now take it a step further.

Open source benefits all of us even more than open architectures or other attempts at “open-washing.” With open source, you can bring all your non-profit’s resources to bear on your software needs, not just a monthly stipend to rent someone else’s technology. Organizing skills, project management skills, volunteer recruitment and retention skills, and yes, software development skills and money can all help move an open source software project towards your requirements.

While Convio is to be commended for their more open architecture, they shouldn’t throw stones at Blackbaud unless they’re prepared to really open up.

So what are you afraid of, Convio?

There is a mostly-untapped opportunity just waiting to reach its tipping point at the intersection of these two worlds. Open source software communities create technology via grassroots organizing (self-organizing in this case) and non-profits, campaigns, and individual organizers need technology and have organizing skills and tools (and not much money).

The two traditional approaches for obtaining technology are:

1. Buy it, or rent it, from a vendor. This requires (a lot of) money, and is not very flexible. It does get you up and running quickly and doesn’t require as much time or expertise on your part. But, sales teams tend to promise the world before you sign a contract, then they fail to deliver once you’re locked in.

2. Build it yourself. This is relatively cheap and extremely flexible. But it requires quite a bit of time and expertise to get up and running and to maintain down the road. It also doesn’t fit well with the rise-and-fall nature of campaigns (they swell in staff, money, and other resources as they near their deadline, such as an election, and then fall off again once the goal date is reached). If the people who built your state-of-the-art tech leave staff after the campaign is over, you’re stuck with a black box that will be very expensive to maintain down the road.

Open source could represent a best-of-both-worlds third way to getting the technology we need if approached as an organizing opportunity. Open source software communities are already self-organizing at a grassroots level (via the Internet) to create some of the most reliable, efficient, and secure technology available. If social changers engage these communities and use their organizing skills to drive things in a direction that fills their technology needs, then we all (as a progressive social change movement) benefit from that.

Of course open source software doesn’t care who is using it and for what purpose. So conservative groups and individuals could just as easily benefit from it as well. This is a common argument against this approach from those who are afraid of helping out the opposition. It’s not entirely without merit, but one of the fundamental principles of the progressive movement is that when regular people are empowered, heard, and act, we win. We don’t need to control everything because we’re advocating for common sense, public interest solutions to society’s problems. Open source software has a much lower barrier-to-entry than expensive proprietary solutions. If we make open source technology the best technology, I believe it will benefit progressive groups and causes more in the aggregate because it’s more accessible to “our kind of people.” It’s a classic special interest vs. public interest scenario.

And just so you don’t think this is all theory, I’m currently eating my own dog food at my day job. I’m an online organizer / tech developer for U.S. PIRG, Progressive Future, and a few other groups. Currently I’m working with the CiviCRM (an open source CRM written in PHP) community to get it to a point where it can take over from our existing home-brew database. We’re using a combination of sponsoring features, some coding and testing work of our own, and working with other groups who have similar needs to drive things in a useful direction. We also obviously benefit from the all years of effort that have already gone into making CiviCRM a really great tool. We aren’t 100% responsible for maintaining the features we sponsor or build down the road (the core developers and rest of the community helps us out because they use those features too, especially as they mature). And we aren’t locked into a particular feature set that a vendor decides is what we need. As our needs and available resources change down the road, we can shift to using more developer time on our end, or more money, or both, or neither. We’re not locked into a monthly payment for 3 years like we would be with most vendors. Yes, we have to pay for our servers every month, but we need those anyway so it’s a sunk cost. For those who don’t already have their own servers, cloud hosting/VPS companies like Amazon’s EC2, GoGrid, or Slicehost give you a very cheap way to get started.

So far it’s working out really well, even with the tiny amount of resources we’re putting into it. Progressive Future is already using it as their CRM full-time, and U.S. PIRG will be moving in that direction soon too.

Open source is helping us out of our technology “rock and a hard place” between not having enough time to keep up with everything we need and not having (or wanting to spend) enough money to use a vendor solution which doesn’t get us everything we need anyway. This is exactly the sort of thing I want to chronicle, advocate for, and help others do with this blog.

Want to join me? Get in touch and we’ll see about making you a contributor. Think I’m crazy? Leave a comment below. I’m pretty excited to see how far we, as a progressive movement, can go via a grassroots, distributed partnership with open source software communities. Either way, it will be a fun experiment.