Greetings to you all! I'm really thrilled that Ploneability has catalyzed so much energy and enthusiasm around Plone in the NGO sector. It was great to read Paul's writeup, and to hear about it first hand from Andrew Hatton this morning. (Thanks for staying late to chat with me, Andrew!)
While it's tempting for me to dive into a list of features and products that Plone really needs right this very minute, I thought I'd try to step back a little and offer some "lay of the land" type observations that I've gathered along the way. My hope is that they provide something of a frame for future in-depth conversations, and help both Plone developers and nonprofit communications folks get on the same page together. First observation: the NGO sector is huge, and hugely diverse. NGOs are over 10% of the US economy. NGOs, like businesses, come in sizes from mom-and-pop around the kitchen table to large multinational organizations like Oxfam. More importantly, NGOs have very diverse missions which lead them to a huge range of business activities -- everything from providing social services to scientific research to political advocacy to selling goods and services. (And let's also not forget that most US higher educational institutions are NGOs.) I mention this only to ground us in the reality that when we generalize about "NGO technology needs," we are probably over generalizing and should be careful to consider what slice of the NGO sector we're *really* talking about. Second observation: A lot of what NGOs need from Plone is very, very similar to what non-NGOs need. While nonprofits are not always "early adopters" of technology, an increasing number are becoming quite sophisticated, and smaller nonprofits are often nimble enough to move quite quickly to adopt new practices if they really believe in their value. Some examples of things that I think are of keen interest to both NGO and non-NGO users of Plone include: -- Astounding ease-of-use -- Team collaboration features (versioning, notifications, etc.) -- Blogging and RSS -- Smooth handling of large files -- E-Commerce -- A better membership management story -- Event registration -- etc etc. (Others have written well about this, and I urge folks to go back and re-read Nate's reposting of Leda Dederich's research, which I have tremendous regard for.) So, we should look at more sophisticated nonprofits of all sizes as "leading edge" customers for Plone, and assume that if we do a great job of meeting mainstream NGO needs with Plone, then that's a pretty good proxy for a lot of non-NGO customers, too. That said, there are going to be a few things that are somewhat peciuliar to NGOs, or to specific sectors of the NGO world, or of significantly greater interest to NGOs than to others. Third observation: NGOs and open-source have compatible values. Many NGOs value openness, sharing and community, just like open-source advocates. While most NGOs aren't "software ideologues" they are generally receptive to the kinds of collaborative relationships that open-source software developers seek, and are often more than willing to share and share alike. Fourth observation: Plone has wide use in the NGO sector, but there is strong competition for market- and mind-share from PHP-based CMSes like Mambo/Joomla and Drupal. Drupal in particular has made a strong push to market itself towards "accidential" technologists in the nonprofit and political advocacy sectors. PHP-based solutions are able to leverage a lot of (shallow?) PHP knowledge in the NGO sector, and the widespread availability of cheap LAMP hosting makes it attractive for NGOs to experiment with PHP-based solutions. Drupal (and to a lesser extent Mambo/Joomla) are also pitching an attractive "all-in-one" story that combines CMS, membership management, e-commerce and email broadcasting. These may not be "enterprise" solutions, but they are "aiming up" at Plone. Fifth observation: One of Plone's greatest assets is its stable, mature and sophisticated community. If you haven't yet read Martin Aspeli's masters thesis on the Plone community, I can't recommend it highly enough. (http://dissertation.martinaspeli.net/) OK, that's enough for now. ;-) I hope this sparks some useful conversation. My next part will cover some big-picture challenges that I think Plone faces. best, jon ---------- Jon Stahl ONE/Northwest www.onenw.org -- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Five-Observations-about-NGOs-and-Plone-t1739392.html#a4726772 Sent from the Plone NGO forum at Nabble.com. _______________________________________________ NGO mailing list [email protected] http://lists.plone.org/mailman/listinfo/ngo
