Open source Social Enterprise

I thought a useful way to begin posting articles to iFOSSF is to introduce and provide some context for the organisation, and for the strategic programs and projects that provides a framework for the activities and how you can get involved.

Principally the remit is to help increase the adoption of FOSS, and this means addressing the challenge that all technology faces: How to make it more accessible to the end-users. This requires understanding the problems they are trying to solve, and accurately aligning products, technologies and services to meet them.

Social Enterprise

One of the goals iFOSSF links to is ‘Social Enterprise', organisations that are looking to improve various aspects of society in a positive and charitable manner, such as helping to tackle poverty and social exclusion.

The role of iFOSSF, within the overall open source community, is to build a channel between them, hopefully helping to grow more social enterprise success, through enabling more access to more solutions, and also to identify any new practices that could be applied, such as "Collective Intelligence".

Its clear open source software is a powerful organizing force, and so questions that leap to mind are is this a factor of the organisational techniques used, or the motivations of the people involved? Is it the process methods used to gather and manage mass-scale software development, or is it the reasons behind why the developers get involved?

Social challenges like poverty are almost insurmountable due to their sheer size, and FOSS is such an exciting area to profile with regards to this objective because it demonstrates something operating on the scale required. It's a mammoth, co-ordinated human effort, and clearly has some "magic" that perhaps can be distilled and re-used.

Impact areas

Via blogs and projects we will be looking to explore action areas where the answers to these questions can be applied for maximum impact, and you are welcome to start and build your own.

Funding opportunities -

Funding directed towards open source software development can improve existing applications, create new ones and also provide facilities like hosting. I've recently spent time reviewing Social Funds, organisations that provide financing for Social Enterprises, and will attempt to build some kind of integrated project approach where new ventures can be launched as well as funding expansion of FOSS.

Scenario solutions -

Identifying and building use case analysis and best practices are an effective way to teach the "know how".  We are looking for success stories and use case ideas.

For example a keen focus area for me is applying the ‘Web 2.0' effect at a local, regional level, with a view to creating "social e-marketplaces", online communities that can bridge digital and generational divides and help stimulate commerce and growth.

Others will include Education, Disaster Reaction and Relief, and Business Process Management, amongst many others. One challenge of FOSS is that there is ‘too much to choose from', and so the objective of Scenario Solutions is to package best-practice combinations and skills, so that they are more accessible in practical terms.

Service provider -

And finally Service Provider will be an important role in the overall ecosystem required for the successful delivery of FOSS based solutions. Commercial delivery of open source solutions is a rapidly expanding growth market and again we'll look at how that can be harnessed for Social Enterprise.

Feel free to share your thoughts or contact me directly.