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As you can see from the site, we have a new logo! Thanks to Noah Scalin, from Another Limited Rebellion. If anyone wants to design us a new drupal theme that fits with the new logo, we'd love to have you do it. You wouldn't get paid, but we'd shout your name out from the rooftops!

There has been a lot going on with NOSI both in front of, and behind the scenes. We've had three salons, two Penguin days, a couple of sessions at NTC, and participation in the Nonprofit Developers Summit, all in the course of four months! We'll be synthesizing what we've learned into a strategic plan, which we'll share with everyone and get comments and feedback on the direction we'll be going in over the next year or so.

We'll be announcing a new project soon, and some other things. Stay tuned!

As you might have learned, in order to comment on the site, you need to sign up for an account. We're sorry about this - we get an incredible amount of comment spam and false accounts, so we don't have a choice - unless we want to spend all day cleaning up after bots.

Also, some of you have had to wait for much longer than we'd like before getting accounts activated - mostly that's due to the time it takes to wade through the dozen false accounts to find the good ones. But I think we're now all up to date, so every real person who has signed up for an account, is active.

If you just don't want to deal with this, but want to weigh in on the logo discussion, send me an email at michelle at nosi dot net.

We had a great Penguin Day in DC today! There was an incredible amount of energy in the room, and lots of great conversations. We had a bunch of people talk about the kinds of barriers they find in the ability of nonprofits to adopt open source, and ways that NOSI can help to lower those barriers.

We've gotten some great ideas over the past 3 days, in conversations, in a strategy session, and at Penguin Day, and we'll be exited to share those ideas, and the actions they will spawn, over the next month or so.

There's a lot more to come.

Thanks to the wonderful folks of Aspiration and PICNet - it was a great collaboration!

I hope that those of you who are at NTC got your penguin.

NOSI has had a good presence here at the conference. We did a "Geek Out" on Linux - helping a few folks install Ubuntu, troubleshooting some issues (mostly wireless cards,) and just having fun. NOSI designed and moderated a session on "Case Studies of Open Source Software" - with Jon Stahl of One Northwest, Kim Lowery of Kabissa, and James Jones of the American Red Cross. We had an overflow crowd many people had to sit on the floor!

Next up: Penguin Day -a day chock full of great open source information. Hope to see you there. We'll be posting a post-conference summary soon!

I listened in on the conference call about the merger of Get Active and Convio, because I was curious, and I wanted to find out what the lessons are in terms of both open source options, as well as openness of data. I was pleasantly surprised about how much was talked about in both of these realms. If this had happened a couple of years ago, I doubt much would have been said.

On the call: Gene Austin: Convio, Sheeraz Haji: Get Active, Tom Crackeler: Get Active, Dave Crooke: Convio

They talked about being excited by the openness of the Get Active architecture with Get Active Extensions - they expect to accelerate the openness of the Convio architecture. Sheeraz talked about having both development teams working on opening up the Convio and Get Active systems and APIs

They seem quite committed to provide openings and hooks into their applications that allow clients to get at their data. There was quite a lot of talk about APIs, and integrating the applications with other applications, including Google. They will use the need to move data from Get Active to Convio as a way to create ways to create external transactions and the like that will be opened up completely. Convio uses Salesforce for their customer relations management. They are a big Salesforce user, but they haven't had many requests for integration with Salesforce.

A question was asked about open source - whether they were moving in that direction. David Crooke talked about how they think that open source is a great model for developing software. Both companies use a lot of open source components in their development. They think open source has a lot to offer to the nonprofit sector. They don't envision opensourcing their codebase. The value isn't the software, it's the service.

And in terms of integration with open source CMS systems such as Plone or Drupal, as they develop integration between CRM and CMS we'll also put that in. Talked about Get Active hooks with Plone. They envision doing more like that. It will never be as tightly integrated as the Get Active CMS - but they want to make it possible to have their customers work with whatever CMS they want.

All in all, it was an interesting call. I'm glad I listened in. It provokes the thought of a post on "openness vs. open source" that I'm marinating in my head.

This is a call for participation in NOSI's varied activities at the next NTC in DC in April. If you're coming to NTC, here's what we're up to:

1) Two NOSI-organized sessions:

Choosing Open Source, connecting with project communities

Choosing open source tools to solve nonprofit technology problems can be a daunting task. There can be different options, and choosing an open source project can seem not as straightforward as choosing a regular software vendor. Open source tools, for the most part, are driven by a community of developers, technologists, and users who work together to make the project better. Some open source software projects have more vibrant communities than others. This session will help you find and choose open source tools, and connect with project communities for support, and get involved in making open source projects better.

Case Studies in Open Source Software use in the nonprofit sector

Come and hear case studies of using open source software. We'll have some individuals from nonprofits and from technology providers talk about their experiences using open source software. You'll hear about why they chose the software project they did, how they implemented it, what ptifalls they might have run into, and what the final results were.

2) A NOSI Organized geek-out:

Title: Bring your Laptop, Penguin or Not

Description: Bring your laptop for a collective installfest and troubleshooting session. Have Linux already, and haven't gotten that wireless card to work yet? Can't seem to change the resolution on your screen? Having trouble using Flash? Or, if your laptop currently has that will be unnamed proprietary operating system on it, come get a Penguin! We'll help you install a flavor of Linux and show you the ropes. If you have a really old laptop, bring that, too and you can install one of the lightweight, bare bones Linux distros, instead of lumbering along with a crufty copy of Windows 98. We'll have several flavors of Ubuntu Linux handy, if you want to try something else out, do bring it with you. If you're a Linux newbie, or an expert, or somewhere in between, this is the chance to get help, give help, chat about, and get your hands dirty with Linux.

We've also proposed a couple of Affinity Group meetings - we'll let you know more about that when we know.

First off, if you're going to be at NTC, please put these sessions in your conference calendar. Second, if you are a Linux geek, and are going to NTC, please email me (michelle at nosi dot net) and let me know - I'd love to get some additional Linux expertise at the geek out. And, also, if you think that you've got a particularly compelling case study or experience with open source communities, send me an email as well. I'll also been soliciting some participants individually.

Also, don't forget about Penguin Day! NOSI is co-organizing Penguin Day, which is the Saturday following NTC (April 7th)

Thanks all, and I look forward to seeing NOSI folks at NTC!

The Plone community is also a great source of nonprofit focused projects. A new one just came out called "eCampaigning Tool." It's designed, in their words, to enable "the set-up and management of advocacy (campaigning) actions such as petitions, letters to targets, etc. It is designed around campaigning best practices and has a rich range of advanced functionality that allows for highly effective online actions"

It's still in development - they are looking for feedback, etc. It's worth a look, if you've been running Plone, or thinking of running Plone. The Plone community also has a NGO-focused mailing list.

One of the things we'd like to do at NOSI is keep track of nonprofit-focused open source tools. There aren't a lot of them out there, although there are an increasing number.

One of them is CiviCRM. CiviCRM is a set of LAMP components that can be used with Drupal or Joomla/Mambo. In their words:

CiviCRM is the first open source and freely downloadable constituent relationship management solution. CiviCRM is web-based, open source, internationalized, and designed specifically to meet the needs of advocacy, non-profit and non-governmental groups.

They have a new annual report - worth checking out. I look forward to see how it develops, especially given the new realities in the nonprofit CRM field.

Here's a short survey of open source database management systems:

• MySQL - MySQL is, I think, the most popular, and best known open source DBMS. It is cross-platform. It is the most popular because historically, it has been the fastest of the open source DBMS, but it has always lagged behind in terms of ACID compliance and other features. You can access a MySQL database via many many different drivers that people have written for just about any programming language. It is also possible to access MySQL databases via ODBC (Open DataBase Connectivity) or JDBC (Java DataBase Connectivity)
• PostgreSQL - PostgreSQL has always been my favorite. I've been using it since it was called Postgres95 - before version 6. (Wikipedia has a great entry on PostgreSQL, including some history). PostgreSQL has always been ahead of MySQL in terms of ACID compliance and robustness, and still is. It lagged behind MySQL for years because of speed issues (it was much slower,) but that has changed with the newest versions, such that in fact PostgreSQL is faster and more scalable than MySQL. PostgreSQL is also cross-platform, with binaries available for Linux and Win32 from Postgresql.org, and Mac OS via Darwin Ports. A PostgreSQL database can, like MySQL, be accessed via APIs written for just about all programming languages, JDBC, and ODBC (which I have quite a bit of experience with.)
• Firebird - this is a newer kid on the block, sort of. It has a very long history, though, since it is based on Borland's InterBase codebase. It's doesn't have nearly the user base, or the amount of available tools, but InterBase is a pretty interesting product, with some good features (like a small footprint, server performance tuning, and a great rollback and recovery system.) It is also cross platform.
• Apache Derby - a DBMS written entirely in Java. This project has a small footprint, and is designed to be easily embedded in other Java projects. It comes with a scripting language and interpreter, called 'ij' which is how you can interact with Derby on the command line. Also, of course, using JDBC is a way to access Derby. I'll be doing a fair bit of experimentation with Derby ('cause I'm curious.)
• SQLite - a small footprint C library that implements an ACID compliant DB engine. It has a command-line tool, and it is possible to use C/C++ and Tcl for database access. Unlike the others, that are released under varied open source licenses, the code for SQLite is public domain.
• There are a few others (see list here,) but they are either research-focused (like Ingres,) developed very little, or have small user bases, and seem not relevant to nonprofit technology.

Nonprofit technology take home lesson: MySQL is certainly the leader - it's most commonly thought of as the "M" in LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl/Python), which is a nptech web mainstay. I'd argue that PostgreSQL is a better choice, but for most nptech applications, it doesn't matter - what matters is what your tech/consultant knows, and that's much more likely to be MySQL. The others are most likely of interest to pretty small niche groups, for specific kinds of projects.

I just discovered the site ohloh.net. It is a great place to find detailed information about the developers of a project, what kind of licenses there are, etc. It's a great resource if you're thinking about different open source CMSs, for instance. Here's the page on Joomla, and the page on Open Office. Neat stuff!