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.

I hope that those of you who are at 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.

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

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 communitiesChoosing 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.

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.

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:

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

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!

There's a bunch of interesting projects on tap for NOSI in the coming year. Here's a short look at some of the highlights:

The first NOSI Salon, held at the San Francisco Nonprofit Technology Center was a definite success! About 15 people of varied organizations and roles came out to talk to the me about what they think NOSI should be doing in the coming year or so. People were happy that NOSI is back, and we had a great, wide ranging conversation about the future of open source software in the nonprofit sector, and the kinds of ways that NOSI could help increase the awareness and use of FOSS in the sector.