David Geilhufe has a new post on his blog, entitled "Social Source Socialist?" It raises an important issue, and I’ve been wanting to talk a bit about the ways in which open source software in the nonprofit space is related to our economic system. This is pretty airy-fairy pie-in-the-sky stuff, but why have a blog if I can’t do that?
The nonprofit sector (often called the "Third Sector") is primarily (although not exclusively) geared toward the betterment of human lives. The "First Sector" (or is it the "Second Sector"? I never know.) which is capitalist enterprise, is primarily (although not exclusively) geared toward maximizing profit. It is true that this sector provides some betterment of lives based on employment, but as we’ve seen lately, this tends to mean paying as many people as little as possible, leading to their need of Third Sector services. The real betterment of lives this sector provides, at least in the last 20 years or so, has been the very few at the top.
One of my pet peeves, over the time I’ve worked with nonprofits, is the extent to which they’ve incorporated business (that is, capitalist enterprise) processes and ethos into their operations. I have to say that one of the most disheartening and troubling things that I come across is nonprofits that see other nonprofits as their "competitors." How is it that nonprofits "compete" to better all human lives? Doesn’t this detract from what the core ideals are? I understand the reasons that this happens – decreasing revenue, and competition for the same private donors, foundation grants, and government grants. But I wonder if it is really necessary as many nonprofit "gurus" say it is.
It has always been my argument that the way an organization does its work is as important as the work it does. Corporate practices (competition, resisting unionization, efficiency as means of maximizing revenue, etc.) are usually not consonant with the goals and ideals of most nonprofit organizations.
So this leads me back to software. How could changes in the ways that nonprofits look at the way they do their work, and where they get their software change the kinds of software they use? If nonprofits thought differently, more collaboratively, a natural outgrowth of that would, I believe, be collaborative IT projects, leading to the kinds of economies of scale that large nonprofits (or corporations) can achieve. And it might lead to rethinking the use of closed-source commercial software in favor of open source software that can benefit the commons, instead of the few.
David says:
"Shouldn’t technology enable nonprofits to do more and to do it more effectively? Restricting nonprofit use of fundraising tools (through expensive proprietary software licenses) limits the number of people nonprofits can engage, the volume of donations nonprofits will receive, and ultimately, the universe of people nonprofits can help."
I couldn’t agree more.
