Software > Open Source

An Abundant Commonwealth: Open Source and the Voluntary Sector

By Hugh Barnard

Everyone benefits when Open Source software is enriched and re-used. Here's a small case study that shows a very common pattern in open source, enriching something that exists and then making it available in its now 'enriched' form.

Open source software has much deeper and more subtle benefits for the voluntary sector than simply price and licensing.

Price and licensing simplicity are often immediate benefits from using open source software, however there are other deeper benefits which include:

• User modification is always possible, the source is supplied

• Contributions can be given back to a wider community

• Bug fixes and improvements are under community control

• Decreased pressure to upgrade, more economical and sustainable computing

Here's a small case study that shows a very common pattern in open source, enriching something that exists and then making it available in its now 'enriched' form.

Case study: A Student Booking Calendar

Age Concern in Hackney needed a student booking calendar for the their Silver Surfer (computer drop ins and classes for older people) project. This was necessary to provide monitoring statistics for the organisations that were funding the project. The solution needed the following characteristics:

• Simple solution for registering student attendance
• Provide monitoring statistics at end of period (usually a quarter)
• Store monitoring and contact details per registered student
• (non functional) Use free programming and database tools
• (non functional) Run on existing Linux server in main centre

The Solution

First a word about the participants in this project. Hugh Barnard, the author of this article, has been involved in computing for about thirty years and involved in open source and the web since their inception. He has worked at many jobs in computing from programming and design to project management. His work for Age Concern is mainly teaching for Hackney Silver Surfers but includes a certain amount of systems and programming work, some of this is done as volunteer work.

Richard Brine, who manages the Hackney Silver Surfers project, provided the specification for the work. It’s normally a good idea for the doer NOT to be the specifier as well!

Most of the elements for this were already in place, they just needed 'finding'. We looked in an open source repository (a place on the web where people keep open source software projects) for an existing open source solution. Here are some open source repositories:

Sourceforge

Freshmeat

Osdir

Other methods include talking to colleagues, reading mailing lists and web articles.

A hint here, when you look at any open source product, check to see how much volume there is on the associated mailing lists and forums, check the most recent posts and the trend in posting (are the volumes stable, increasing or decreasing?).

Also, check the date of the most recent release and number of downloads. All these will give some feel for the level of use and maturity of the product.

We chose and modified webcal (an open source web calendar written in Perl, a scripting language) and added a (one table!) student database using MySQL (a database is a structured way of storing, categorising and retrieving computer data like an electronic filing cabinet).

Perl is probably the oldest scripting language on the web (it’s been described as the duct tape of the web) and has an enormous quantity of open source libraries (routines that do specific things). Also, most of our currently available expertise is in Perl, another good reason.

We wrote a couple of small (and somewhat ugly!) programs in Perl to take the calendar entries (and thus students attending sessions) and produce monitoring statistics. The monitoring statistics now were produced in a couple of hours (previously several days each quarter for a paid member of staff).

We choose Perl for the statistics work, since Webcal is written in Perl and we wanted to keep just one language for the whole project.

Look for an existing open source solution (talk to colleagues, network, look on an open source repository such as Sourceforge)

None of the tools or existing programs had a monetary cost or licencing restrictions. Be aware, however, that not all open source licences are equal, this article gives a summary discussion of what can and can’t be done with the some of major types of licence.

Here's a summary of the process:

• Make a brief specification, for this project it was a couple of pages (you need this, whether whatever solution you choose!)
• Look for an existing open source solution (talk to colleagues, network, look on an open source repository such as Sourceforge)
• If there's no exact fit, look for something that can be modified to solve the problem
• (If you want to and your organisation agrees!) Give back the 'new' thing to the open source community

Looking for software that is a ‘good fit’ can be a fairly technical matter, the Circuit Riders mailing list may help if you describe the problem (you may receive a number of different opinions though, that’s the abundant part). A description of  Circuit Riders (who provide support for the voluntary sector) and the mailing list is here. 

Otherwise this needs to be talked through with a technical helper. Of course, in this case, you’ll need to agree some estimate of the cost of modifying the software to meet your needs.

This example is a small scale example, but there are more ambitious voluntary sector projects such as CiviCRM which is based on the Drupal content management system (which itself has many user supplied modules).

Giving It Back

Currently this Booking Calendar is not completely ready for a general release. It needs, for example, an installer, a Sourceforge project and some documentation. However, the software is already being re-modified to provide a booking calendar for a second related project at a much reduced cost in time and effort.

If you want to look into to using it, be in contact with me.

The Benefits

Here are some of the benefits of this approach.

• Software work done in one organisation can benefit the whole community. Whether work is paid-for, sponsored or supplied as volunteering, the 'product' can benefit the whole community.
• The open source software 'commonwealth' (as represented by products that can be freely downloaded from Sourceforge and specific websites) is progressively added to and enriched for ALL users by the actvities of SINGLE users and organisations. Closed source modifications will (usually) only benefit the specific sponsoring/paying organisation.
• Voluntary sector organisations do not usually produce software as their primary purpose. Of course, there are trade-offs between buying, developing and modifying existing tools. The activity that I have described here is fragmentary (so far) and there are arguments for specific repositories for the voluntary sector (this would make the search and selection process slightly less random and more accessible to the less technically minded).
• In general, freely available open source software will result in more resources being available for the primary purpose of the organisation. This becomes more and more 'true' as this commonwealth of software increases. It’s worth noting that there are counter arguments concerning the total cost of ownership (TCO) in the sense that open source can require more effort from the adopting organisation.
• Relationships in the voluntary sector are not competitive. Open source will reinforce links that are made via sharing and giving rather than (artificial) scarcity based relationships.

Points to Watch For and Conclusion

If you want to modify existing an open source product and use them in your organisation, here are some points to watch for:

• Communicate the proposed use of open source within your organisation, since this is also strategic and organisational direction
• Choose a base product that has maturity, active community and some documentation
• Be aware of intellectual property rights issues, not all open source licences are equal
• Separate specification and implementation (programming etc.) as much as possible
• Choose a product that will fit into the rest of your organisation’s technical strategy (you do have one, don’t you!), especially the operating system that you use and, for example, a programming language that you prefer
• Decide and discuss whether you will support what you've produced as an individual, an organisation (or not at all)
• Factor in some documentation for your product (a good idea anyway, to provide some continuity within the organisation)
• Keep a sense of proportion, it's not worth spending six months on something that has a total lifetime of six months, for example

This is an activity that is proving to be practical in the more technical areas of computing and that will enrich the voluntary sector. Gradually more specific voluntary sector repositories, products and communities will grow as this activity increases. Increased availability of open source products for the voluntary sector will also free resources in these organisations to pursue their primary purpose.