[Techtalk] Seeking Participants for Linux in Nonprofits Study

[Michelle Murrain]

Sorry for the cross-posting - but I'd like as many folks to see this 
as possible. This is for an organization I'm on the steering 
committee of. I'd really appreciate it if you spread this far and 
wide in the open source community. Thanks!!
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The Nonprofit Open Source Initiative (NOSI) is developing case 
studies of nonprofit organizations that use Linux for their office 
network. We are looking for organizations with staffs of 15 people or 
more. If you work or volunteer for a nonprofit of that size, that 
uses Linux for networking (including file/print sharing, or as an 
email server), we are interested in interviewing you about your 
experience.

The idea behind the study is to convince more nonprofits to take a 
serious look at Linux. While many schools and government agencies are 
beginning to consider Linux as an option, awareness in the rest of 
the nonprofit sector, especially small-to-medium size organizations, 
remains very low. Given that these groups have very tight budgets and 
share the volunteer ethic of Open Source, you would think that Linux 
would be widespread among them. But so far nonprofits have been 
surprisingly reluctant to embrace Open Source. When it comes to 
technology, nonprofits tend to trail several years behind the 
for-profit world. Although many nonprofits use Apache, PHP, etc. for 
Web work, most treat the idea of Open Source in general and Linux in
particular the same way businesses did several years ago. The fact 
that Open Source is now mainstream in the business world hasn't had 
much impact on the way nonprofits see it.

By doing this study, we hope to show nonprofits that other 
organizations just like theirs have used Linux to cut their total IT 
costs (including training and support) and to create networks they 
can really count on. We also hope to give them a better understanding 
of what it means to run Linux vs. Microsoft/Novell networks as well 
as the issues they need to think about and the pitfalls that they 
will want to avoid if they moved to Open Source on the back end.

If you think your organization would make a good case study, please 
fill out the survey that's available on the study's web page at 
http://www.nosi.net/tco.shtml. For more information on NOSI, please 
check out our web site at www.nosi.net.

Thanks,
Reuben Silvers
Anders Schneiderman
The Nonprofit Open Source Initiative
-- 
.Michelle

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Michelle Murrain, Technology Consulting
tech at murrain.net     http://www.murrain.net
413-253-2874 ph
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"A vocation is where the world's hunger & your great gladness meet." 
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