software

This post is by Wes Morgan, an online organizer for U.S. PIRG. Projects like Code for Change and CiviCRM and incredibly valuable as they teach young coders about the nuts and bolts of politics, young organizers of the value of open source tools, and provide free, high-quality tools for youth organizations which, as we all know, are frequently strapped for cash. Thanks to Wes for all his work and for guest blogging about it at FM. --Mike

As of last Friday (August 17), the first Code for Change summer has officially come to a close. We set out to turn CiviCRM into a better system for helping organizers spend more time organizing and less time shuffling things around on their computers. CiviCRM is a constituent relationship management system, but that's just a nerdy way of saying that it's a program to save you from spreadsheets-pasted-into-Outlook hell when it comes to keeping track of and in touch with all of your contacts. I'm pretty excited about what we got done.

Code for Change is my brainchild, so I'm a little biased. However, other people seem to think it's cool too. The basic idea behind Code for Change is that by putting a little effort into an existing open source project, we get a lot more out of it than if we wrote something ourselves from scratch or paid someone else to modify an off-the-shelf system. We hired some computer science interns--current students and recent grads, downloaded the source code to CiviCRM, and set about turning it into a system that everyone can use (from large, complex organizations all they way down to my mom who sends out a regular newsletter to her home-based business contacts). In the true spirit of openness, all our work is open source and is planned to be released with the CiviCRM 2.0 release later this year.

From June 4 to August 17, we hacked away at it. We had a lot of help from others in the CiviCRM developer and user community, and their contributions were invaluable. Here's what we all accomplished:

• We made CiviCRM a standalone system. This means you no longer need Drupal or Joomla to use it. (Those are web content management systems, and not everyone who wants to use CiviCRM uses those.) For people who just need a CRM, this makes it much easier to get CiviCRM up and running and doesn't put a lot of unnecessary CMS functionality between you and your contacts.
• We added OpenID logins. OpenID is a pretty cool new technology that allows you to use one login for all systems that use it. No more having to remember umpteen different passwords for every system you have to login to.
• We added support for complex groups and organizational structures. The organization I work for, U.S. PIRG, is a national network of state-based organizations. This means we need a system that can keep all its data separate for each state, but still allow those of us who work centrally for all the organizations (I'm an online organizer, for example) to aggregate that data when necessary. Other organizations (such as political parties) have similar geographic and departmental structures that they need a CRM system to model. CiviCRM is now pretty powerful in this regard. You can put groups inside other groups (inside other groups, inside...) and you can affiliate groups with organizations and sub-organizations.

I'll be working over the next few weeks to actually roll out CiviCRM as the new system that U.S. PIRG uses for its online organizing, so we'll be eating our own dog food. If you want to give it a try now (instead of waiting for the official 2.0 release), you can download a preview release of CiviCRM Standalone here.

And we're not done there. We're looking to hire an intern for the current fall semester and another in the spring to continue working on CiviCRM. If you or anyone you know is interested in applying, let me know.

Hi, my name is Wes Morgan. I’m an online organizer with U.S. PIRG, currently based in Denver, CO. I graduated in 2003 from Calvin College with a degree in computer science (and a minor in Spanish). Currently I’m directing a program called Code for Change. Code for Change brings together young programmers (students and recent grads) to work on open source software projects that help build progressive infrastructure. For example, this summer we’ve been adding new features to CiviCRM, part of the CivicSpace project.

There are few things that give me more hope for the future of progressive politics in the U.S. than the Internet and the rise of the netroots. The fact that regular folks like us can use the Internet to speak out, take action, and organize others to do the same is amazingly healthy for democracy. We should hang on to this for dear life.

Sadly, as most good things are, the Internet is under attack by those who wish to bend it to their narrow special interest (usually profit-driven) purposes. Net neutrality is the label we’ve given to the fight against this attack, and it is critically important that we win it. U.S. PIRG has a page with information and actions you can take on net neutrality, and Mike Connery also has some great ways to help out in a recent post to Future Majority. However, when we define what we mean by “net neutrality,” we’re usually only talking about one aspect of what’s required to have a free and open Internet. I would argue that there are three equally essential pieces to this puzzle.

1. Open networks (traditional “net neutrality”)
2. Open standards governing how the networks operate (and interoperate with each other)
3. Open software implementations of those standards (open source)

More after the jump.