Forum OpenACS Q&A: Response to ArsDigita/OpenACS meeting summary
excellent points and have some great ideas. if i may, i'd like to
add some to the discussion, present an idea some friends and i
are working on and propose some future steps.
we are starting a company in new york city called musea
technologies whose purpose will be to provide non-profits with
effective open source software solutions along with the technical
expertise they need to implement their web presence and
improve their IT. clearly, openacs is the answer for most of their
problems. you're all probably more familiar with the reason than
i am, so i won't waste anytime listing them for you.
however, after studying some of the issues that various
non-profits have with their IT, we realized the most helpful
service we could provide is not an internet presence but cheap,
reliable, scalable, etc. software that would improve their
efficiency at REASONABLE costs. in short words, they need an
intranet solution designed for non-profits.
Unfortunately, the market is dominated by expensive bloatware.
One
glaring example is Blackbaud, "the Cadillac of donor software".
Zillions
of features, mostly unused, and a price tag of $10,000 for 2-4
users, $18,000 for 8-10 users, then $5000 after that for every 5
more you add.
That's not counting the NT/Novell server and network, nor the
$3,000 for
the training tutorial CDs. And those guys sell a _lot_, because
they're
some of the only robust, scalable, reliable software out there.
acs includes all the basic components to build a similar system,
and with openacs we get postgresql, a great database. the
intranet modules, customer relationship module, contacts,
bookmark sharing, file sharing, etc. all can be refined to provide
a package that meets all the needs of non-profits. if they have
tech people, then all they need is a download. if they don't have
an tech infrastructure, there are plenty of acs consultants out
there that can help them.
so now that i've filled a good amount of space and thrown this
idea out there, i'm interested in:
what you guys think
how many people are interested in being involved in this
what other ideas you guys might have
as i said, i'd be more than happy to host a development website
to non-profit acs programmers. uh, lemme rephrase that. acs
programmers that want to help non-profits. and i'd be happy to
implement all the ideas that don and michael were throwing
around. it could be a companion or a compliment to
openacs.org if that was best.
as a company, our long-term goal is to have a non-profit
organization be in charge of maintaining & improving the free
software, as is done with many open-source systems. (for now,
to minimize accounting hassle, we're incorporating normally).
please email me directly or contribute to this thread!!!
talli
mailto:talli@panix.com
