Getting my blog on…and more thoughts on apps for nonprofits

I’m finally getting to some overdue blog reading. Perhaps having just posted about Salesforce, I have nonprofit apps on the brain. David Geilhufe article on the Death of Mission-Based Software Developers has caught my interest and I have to admit, my irk. Saying nothing of David personally—although we’ve never met, I have a very high regard for David from his blog and listserv postings. His latest blog posting has been a catalyst for a slow brewing frustration I have towards trends I see emerging in the NTAP community.

As the for-profit social software/mission based app sector consolidate, the conversation about things to come is getting stalled in an either/or debate: Either you’re an open source disciple or you’re a corporate ho. While a monotone NTAP community sings the utopian praises of open source, nonprofit staff are pining away for affordable and effective apps that allow them to do their jobs—without compromising programmatic goals whilst chasing a technological holy grail (be it corporate or grassroots). To get away from this polarizing dynamic, the conversation needs to take a BOTH/AND approach and embrace both proprietary and open source app development communities: Truly creating a vibrant ecosystem where nonprofits can thrive.

I could easily use Salesforce as a model of proprietary/open source partnership—a corporate developer that embraces open source integration into their product—but I’ll refrain. I need to go no further than the program I’m currently typing in; the most widely adopted open source app ever: Firefox (ok, I don’t know that for sure, but it’s a good bet). The beauty of Firefox lies in its open standards which give it the ability to be extended to be virtually anything to anyone. I use this now invaluable open source tool to access and plug into (with extensions) mostly corporate applications: Bloglines, Gmail, Yahoo, Typepad, Craigslist, Basecamp, etc. I believe, in the convergence of open source and proprietary development—where social forces meet market force—lie an untapped potential for nonprofits to leverage their technology expenditures and administrative/programmatic effectiveness.