summary

Vision

Imagine a world where thousands of software industry professionals make a positive daily difference in the lives of tens of thousands of youth as they learn together through creative challenges with nonprofit staff in every sector. Imagine that their cooperation and collective innovation shape an era where nonprofits' initiatives are never hindered by the inability to find or use information. Imagine a world where nonprofits globally save hundreds of billions dollars in time and resources each year, and the savings directly help people with greater effectiveness than ever before.

Floss4Good is about making that world ours.

What is Floss4Good?

Floss4Good is to the software industry what Habitat for Humanity is to the housing industry. Instead of building homes for families of individuals, it builds effectiveness-amplifying software for sectors of nonprofits. It supports and encourages low-risk, low-commitment relationships between software industry professionals, youth, and nonprofit staff. The outcomes are beneficial for everyone.

The vast majority of nonprofit software solutions are created by organizations working inside traditional project constraints. The resulting software is either expensive, difficult to use, or dependent upon technical proficiency to use/install/maintain/customize/deploy.

Floss4Good is different. As a relationship-focused organization, Floss4Good is flexible, sustainable, and very small. Its core is a scalable collaboration process that enables decentralized innovation, production, and support of software. That process operates outside of traditional project constraints. It can produce high quality, low maintenance, user friendly software of any scope for any sector without passing on any cost.

This Site

Floss4Good.org is an informational site for sharing my work and theories on global nonprofit software improvement. This fall I plan to start a nonprofit and begin the process of making it a reality. On the status page, I'll be posting semi-regular updates as work continues. The theories are based on personal nonprofit experience, advice from others, virtual community ethnography, open source psychology, agile software methods, a number of business books, and a three foot stack of academic research papers on my desk.

A Closer View of the Problem

Today we face many global tragedies such as poverty, AIDS, illiteracy, and climate change. They cause enormous suffering for millions of people. There are thousands of nonprofits struggling to eliminate those tragedies. They are doing great work, but the question must be asked “Could they be doing better?”

From finding and fostering collaboration, to diverse and creative fundraising strategies, to internal and external communication, weaknesses in locating and managing information prevent many nonprofits from achieving optimum effectiveness and efficiency. Here are a few quotes from a recent survey by dotOrganize.

"There are multiple spreadsheets all over. We have to check a half a dozen places to get information that we need. Updating data is a nightmare for the same reason."

"None of our software talks to each other easily. We have to pry out information to compare. We don't have an accurate count of how many supporters we even have names and addresses for."

More...

"It seems that the tools out there are designed for money tracking rather than for organizing."

"We love [technology], but are frustrated that the perfectly integrated system does not exist for us."

Idealware references the survey in one of their articles:

Many organizations struggle with the volume of information they’d like to track and the number of methods they use to track it. ... over half the small to medium-sized nonprofits who responded said they store information about contacts in more than four different places. In fact, 20% said they store it in more than ten places! Many of them use solutions that make it hard for the whole staff to access it – 58% used Excel, 52% used a personal contact manager like Outlook, and an alarming 55% reported using slips of paper.

The result is a lot of frustration. Organizations don’t know where the most current contact information sits on a day-to-day basis. And creating a list of all supporters – for instance, to let everyone know about an event or fundraising drive – can be a multi-day affair.

Close...

Goal

Produce 5% increases in the effectiveness and/or efficiency of 200,000 humanitarian and environmental nonprofits by 2020, then continue setting new goals that increase the impact for all nonprofits indefinitely.

Strategy

Floss4Good's primary role is providing structure and support for collaboration between software industry professionals, youth, and nonprofit staff. Also, by engaging each nonprofit sector (or sub-sector) as a virtual community formed through the development and support process, Floss4Good also enables geographically distributed nonprofits to share sector-specific knowledge, support, and resources.

Floss4Good relies heavily on its values for direction.

Target Market

Floss4Good's initial target market will include small to medium humanitarian and environmental nonprofits in the United States. The eventual target market is every nonprofit/NGO on the planet.

Product

The initial product will be a secure, web-based, fully integrated suite customized for the needs and vocabulary of nonprofits in one sector. It will require no installation and will be co-created with a diverse group of pilot nonprofits from that sector. Once those organizations are satisfied, Floss4Good will release a beta version to the sector as a whole.

Integrated web-based solutions are a good starting point. They're both easy to pilot and a common request today. However, a web-based platform falls well short of Floss4Good's capabilities. As Floss4Good progresses beyond the pilots, it will allow nonprofits to determine which products to build by providing a relational interface for them to submit, clarify, and collectively rank their sector's software needs.

Desktop... mobile... RFID... GPS... it doesn't matter. Floss4Good is not a specific solution, it's a social, educational, and technical collaboration process that can equip nonprofits in their areas of need, while adapting to any programmable information management environment.

Summary Detail

This is a graphical overview of the Floss4Good strategy. For more diagrams outlining different parts of the project, please visit the status page. (Warning: I update this image regularly, but the rest are too much to update frequently as I continue refining the theories)