When PICnet first grew legs in early 2001, there was one new group that we watched closely in our sector: the Non-Profit Open Source Initiative. After a few years slowly quieting down, NOSI has been given a new lease on life by its leader, Michelle Murrain, of Zen and the Art of Non-Profit Technology fame.
I met with Michelle in San Francisco's ferry building yesterday to discuss everything from NOSI to open source sessions happening at this year's Non-Profit Technology Conference. She's found her way back to non-profit technology after a short hiatus, and has been finding a variety of ways to throw herself back into the ballgame. For instance, Michelle and I are working closely with Holly at N-TEN to make sure that open source is a strong part of the sessions, affinity groups, and geekouts at the upcoming NTC.
Meanwhile, Michelle is on a mission to make NOSI a self-sustaining organization that once again lead our non-profit open source community. I think partnering with great groups like N-TEN and Aspiration, she'll be able to pull it off. What's going to be necessary, as Michelle knows, is for NOSI to have a tangible deliverable to our community, much like what they produced in the open source primer for non-profits.
She's got a couple of great ideas for NOSI, and I don't want to steal her thunder, but I think that anything that brings together open source and best practices/case studies from real non-profits will better aid organizations that are interested in using open source.
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