One thing that has always impressed me about Open Source Software (OSS) is how it can aggregate the small contributions of many people, with diverse talents, working all over the world, and turn that into something wonderful.  But the model isn’t limited to software — we’ve seen it applied to web design, citizen journalism, and many other fields.  Why not charity?

The Problem With Closed Source Charity

How much good can a charity do if donors and clients have never heard of them?  Precisely.  That is why most charities spend gobsmacking amounts of their time, money, and effort on what are, essentially, marketing activities.  The American Institute of Philanthropy, a respected watchdog, estimates that well-managed charities will spend about 40 cents out of every donated dollar on overhead.  Fourty cents!

This problem is endemic to the traditional charity model, which is connecting the needs of some people to the ability of others to underwrite them.  But what if there were a better way?

The OSS Charity Model

My friend Andy (who happens to live on the other side of the world from me) told me about the Jaipur Foot, which is a low-cost medical advice that allows amputees to walk again.  It is, simply put, brilliant, and they give away the significant engineering know-how required to mass produce the device for the world’s poor.  But setting up a production plant, unlike copying an Ubuntu distribution, costs significant amounts of money.  So they ask for donations.  And up until 30 seconds ago you had, like me, probably never heard of them, because they specialize in making feet and not in making news.

So they could spend fourty cents out of every dollar putting together a worldwide charity-seeking apparatus… but why?  When they’re clearly much better at making people walk?  We should be able to do that better… faster… cheaper.  We have the technology.  (Sorry, old TV show buff here.)

The Seeds of An Idea

Andy and I both happen to run small software businesses on the Internet.  Neither of us knows the first thing about prosthetic feet, but Andy knows all about spreading good ideas on the Internet, and figured programmers would leap at the chance to help this if they knew about it.  So he spent a bit of time making programming T-shirts as a way to persuade programmers to donate to the cause.

I don’t know the first thing about T-shirts or design, but I am pretty good at snapping together Internet technologies and OSS components.  If we want people to hear about this, we’re going to need a website.  Wordpress.  Bam.  It is going to need to look pretty.  Open source web design.  Bam.  We’re going to need a community… apt-get community… drats, that doesn’t appear to be in the repository yet.

Charity Is A Community Effort

Just like OSS makes ample use of the pre-existing International Brotherhood of Code Monkeys and builds a new, socially-focused community on top of it, you can build a charitable community right on top of the communities you’re already in.  Andy is a respected small-business owner, for example, so he sent out the word to his small-business blogging buddies to get the word out to their communities, and many answered the call to help get the word out.

What Do We Still Need?

We need you to help.  Absolutely everybody is good at something, and absolutely everything can help this open source charity drive:

• Got a blog? Write about these two deserving charities, Jaipur Foot and SightSavers, on your blog.  You can find more information on our sidebar or on their websites.  Or you could write about how you’re using the principles of OSS to make the world a better place.
• Got money? Both charities are happy to take your monetary contributions directly.  See their websites.
• Got presents to buy? Consider buying one of the programmer t-shirts that Andy designed.  He’s collecting the commissions on them and will forward them to the charities.  (There is a store in Europe which is more convenient if you happen to live there.)
• Got an idea? Send Andy your idea for a T-shirt we can use (it must be original, no copyright violations).
• Got a face? If you contribute in some way, add a photo of yourself via the Flickr group and it will automatically get added to this blog.  (Isn’t technology wonderful?)