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March 26, 2004
Deanspace goes *-space
Posted by Clay Shirky
Dan Gillmor is reporting that Zack Rosen, leader of the
DeanSpace effort (itself build on the open-source
drupal) is now building an
easy-to-use open source groupware toolset.
Rosen tells Gillmor his goal is
To establish a permanent foundation that can spearhead social software development projects for nonprofit organizations. Unless an organization is committed to hiring full time engineers to do Web development, the only and most frequent solution is to pay tons of money hiring firms to provide proprietary 'black box' Web application products. These firms a have conflict of interest -- they live off the monthly checks so they have a huge interest in owning the organization's data and locking them into their services.
We want to create a much cheaper, open, and powerful option for these kinds of services. [...]
This is huge. Since the Dean organization was more movement than campaign, the lessons from its use of social software are more broadly relevant than to just political groups.
I can't tell you how often I talk to people who have a sense that there is some set of collaborative tools on beyond email that could help their organization, but don't know where to begin. Part of it is confusion -- they think they want weblogs for conversation, BBSes for shared document creation, wikis for personal publishing, and so on -- and part of it is standard-issue tech anxiety -- can we install it? can we maintain it? how much will it cost? and so on.
These conversations tend to be long and meandering, starting with a plaintive "Where do I even start?" If Rosen achieves what he's setting out to do, it will be a great pleasure to be able to short circuit that conversation by saying "Here. Start here."
Comments (4)
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1. Nicolas Kruchten on March 26, 2004 4:34 PM writes...
I work (ok, volunteer :) for Engineers Without Borders Canada (http://www.ewb.ca/) and we have been dealing with this sort of tech issue for a while now...
EWB has 20+ chapters and 6000+ members across Canada and I have been working to build an Intranet system to manage our membership, yearly dues, chapter executives, overseas volunteer applications, mailing lists and discussion boards for the past year.
Last summer, when I was designing our system, I spent a long time researching to see if an appropriate system existed that we could easily adapt to our needs, but found that there were none, so, being a reasonably capable software engineer (in training) I built something from scratch.
Here are some points I feel are important:
- there are too many 'total' open-source CMS systems out there with way too many features that simply cannot be separated out or turned off
- I could not find any system whose features I could use, but based on our existing membership/user authentication database rather than that system's internal db, so instead of grabbing an open-source discussion board, I had to roll my own to interface with the rest of the Intranet (very frustrating to have to reinvent the wheel)
- The same applied to mailing list software: I found the technical challenge of integrating our membership management database with existing list software seamlessly to be insurmountable, so I used open-source building blocks to build our own mailing list management software
My conclusions here are that it would be nice if people focused on building COMPONENTS rather than total systems, so that organizations could put together their own systems out of heterogeneous parts more easily, as lots of people have existing legacy databases and systems that they want to keep using, rather than moving whole-hog into someone else's idea of what a user- or member- database looks like...
my 2 cents. you can check out the EWB Intranet at http://member.ewb.ca/ but the mailing list/discussion board/groupware package will only be brought online next week.
Cheers,
Permalink to CommentNick
2. Nicolas Kruchten on March 26, 2004 4:36 PM writes...
sorry, my personal site is at nicolas.kruchten.COM not .CA as i mistakenly typed in the comment above
Permalink to Comment3. Nicolas Kruchten on March 26, 2004 4:56 PM writes...
sorry for the triple-post, but in the drupal forums, at least one other person shares my concerns, though no one seems to have answered him...
http://drupal.org/node/view/5950
Permalink to Comment4. Korby Parnell on March 27, 2004 4:37 AM writes...
Hi Clay,
Permalink to CommentWhen I chatted with him in February, Dave Winer sketched out an idea similar to Rosen's, calling it the "Voter Support System of the Rational Person's Party (VSSRPP)" [1], or the Platform, for short. Quite a virulent meme. Anyway, I look forward to meeting you and discussing the state of things at the intersection of society and technology on Monday night.
[1]http://blogs.msdn.com/korbyp/archive/2004/02/11/71621.aspx?Pending=true