The Free and Open Nonprofit

As part of our efforts to update the Non Profit Open Source Initiative's Primer, we're putting together a profile of software used by an idealised non profit that relies totally on free and open source software. In the first part of this exercise, we asked people for suggestions on categories that an average non profit would need. Now that we've finished compiling the list of categories, here's the fun part. What software would you recommend for each category?

We want to keep this simple, so we're requesting one piece of open source software for each category. Please try to imagine what you would recommend for the ordinary non profit to use. Remember that this is supposed to be a GENERIC non-profit. The main criteria is that the software should work 'out of the box', without any need for getting external help to setup. If possible, the software should also have an active development community and good documentation available.

Here's the The Free and Open Non-Profit's Profile:

• Size - Small, 8 Staff people plus a team of maybe 10 volunteers they work with.
• Budget - Lean
• Bandwidth - decent but not good enough to download large files
• Tech culture - they have an small training/set up budget but, ultimately they would want things that they can install and use easily.

Here's our list of software categories:

Desktop

• Operating System - the package of software that allows you to interact with your computer
• Office Suite - word processing, spreadsheet, presentations, etc
• Email Client - for downloading, organising and storing emails on your computer
• Calendar/To Do Client - to keep track of appointments, tasks and deadlines
• Bookkeeping/Accounting - to keep track of accounts, income and expenditure
• Web-browser - for searching, browsing, surfing, conducting research, etc
• Image editor - for creating and modifying images
• Instant messaging client - for text based internet communications, such as GTalk, Yahoo Messenger, AOL Instant Messenger
• VOIP - for secure voice communications
• Media Player - for viewing movies and listening to audio files
• Social Media Client - for monitoring trending topics on Facebook, twitter, etc.
• Back Up - for assuring important data/files are copied to media that can be restored if they are erased or damaged.
• Anti-Virus - for assuring you aren't picking up malicious files and software and passing them on to others.

Shared Organisational Apps

• Project Management - including shared calendar, task/to-do management, & resource management
• Shared file storage - a central repository of organisational files that is accessible to all staff (and presumably no one else)
• Contacts database - to allow shared access to the relationships that the organisation develops

Internet

• Content Management System - to support staff contributing and organising content on the organisational website
• Website analytics - to measure and analyse website traffic

Are we missing any software categories from this list? Any suggestions on what else to include?

Feel free to contribute to this list by either sending me an email - dirk (at) fabriders (dot) net or editing this directly on the FOSS Manual site where we are editing the current version of the primer.