The JP Allen Blog

Robin Teigland at the Stockholm School of Economics and Anders Lundkvist were kind enough to organize a meeting of local social media experts at the offices of Springtime, a Swedish PR and communications firm.  I gave a short presentation on what I saw as the ‘conventional wisdom’ on Web 2.0 and social media back home in Calfornia, and asked if it was any different in Scandinavia.  It was difficult for me to get a word in–my favorite kind of group!

The reluctance of large corporations to embrace social media tools, because of security and control concerns, was a consistent theme.  One takeaway for me was the idea that, in some respects, not-for-profits, government, and small start-ups could take the lead because they can embrace the latest, most efficient tools (e.g., Skype, Google Wave) without being blocked by corporate IT.  What interesting times we live in, when openness is not an additional burden, but actually the most efficient and effective way to do things.

In partnership with the Department of Technology at the City and County of San Francisco, I’ve been studying the deployment of new applications using open source.  We looked at three projects (including the recoverysf.org site), and found the people involved reporting results that seemed almost too good to be true:  working systems developed and deployed in record time, at very little cost, that increase the skills and importance of locally-employed IT talent.  It seems like an ‘IS miracle’, especially in these tough times.

While cost-cutting is often seen as the big selling point for open source, faster ‘time-to-market’ for new applications is the focus of our results.  To quote one of our respondents:

“Now, you can stand up that site in 8 hours, four hours, have it done by the
end of the day.  It flips the customer out.  Really?  I thought it would take 2
months.  Being responsive is huge.  Technology changes fast, but business
requirements change faster.”

For example, there’s no way the recoverysf.org site would have been built in less than three weeks without using an open source platform (WordPress), and without a new technology mindset.  It’s a mindset where the IT department sees itself as offering great new products for its diverse customers, rather than trying to control and constrain them all the time.

The paper with our preliminary research results is currently under review.  Please contact me if you’d like a draft.  Special thanks to the City’s CTO Blair Adams, USF MBA Dave Geller, and all of the study participants.

The open source platforms I admire the most, and are most useful for business, are the ones with the largest communities behind them.  For open business platforms, it’s not just the contributions to the core software that matter.  It’s the number of extensions (or modules) and the number of themes (or styles) that’s critical.  Having many extensions and themes to choose from give business users the best of both worlds:  a standard software package, and lots of easy customization possibilities.

I presented some preliminary research on open source communities for business platforms at OSCOMM 2009, the first international workshop on open source communities, held after OSS 2009 in Skövde, Sweden.  Our data shows that the best supported platform with the highest number of community-contributed extensions is WordPress, followed by Joomla, phpBB, MediaWiki, and Drupal.  Moodle, SugarCRM, Elgg, Magento, and Gallery are the next five, with not much in the way of community contributions after that.  Only award-winning open source software packages that a business user would directly interact with were included.

The paper and slides are available at the OSCOMM program website.  The paper is called “Community Building for Open Source Business Applications:  The Core-Extensions-Theme Pattern”.