Call for participation

Open Research, together with the Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa, is developing an open source information portal to assist non-profit organisations throughout Africa to make informed and strategic use of free and open source software (FOSS). To assist in this decision-making process Open Research is working on a series of case studies on organisations that do already use FOSS. The intention is to highlight the challenges, benefits and obstacles that other organisations might face in adopting FOSS. To this end Open Research is calling for participation from all non-profit, governmental and educational initiatives that would be prepared for their experiences with FOSS to be written up and made available to the broader community.

This call for participation is not only limited to organisations working exclusively with free and open source software, but also to those organisations that have made a partial switch to either FOSS operating systems or applications. Likewise the case studies are not limited to desktop usage.

If you and your organisation would be willing to participate in this very important documentation project, please consider one of the following actions:

1 - If you have the capacity please consider writing up your own experiences using the outline below as a guideline;
2 - Alternatively, if you have access to the internet complete the online form that can be found at www.openresearch.co.za/case_study_input.html
3 - Or email your contact details (phone and email) together with a short description of your organisation and FOSS experiences through to us at [email protected] and we will contact you to collect the relevant information.

If you have any questions regarding the development of the open source portal, this call for participation or Open Research please visit our website at www.openresearch.co.za or email [email protected]
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Case Study Guidelines
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Summary Box
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In this summary section please provide short answers. Space for more detailed answers is provided for below.

- Organisation/project name:
- Area of work (eg Aids counselling, ICT implementation, education):
- Open source software used (eg OpenOffice, Apache, Desktop, Linux servers):
- Reason for using open source software (eg Costs, political decision, donor encouragement):
- Key benefits of using open source software (eg cost savings, viruses):
- Key challenges of using open source software (eg support, compatibility):
- Conclusion (was moving to OSS a good move?)

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Case Study
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In this section please provide as much detail as possible for each section where applicable to your organisation.

1 Overview
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- Brief summary of organisation: Area of work, history and involvement in/with technology.
- Who finances your project/organisation.
- Target community/users/audience.

2 Technology overview
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- What do you use technology for? (eg 'mainly for administration' or 'technology specific organisation providing ICT services for development or support to non-profit organisations')
- Number of PCs in organisation.
- Operating systems used and applications that are key to organisation.
(The OS and applications required for your day-to-day tasks or to fulfill your mandate.)
- Are your PCs Networked?
- Does your organisation have access to the internet and email?

3 - Why does the organisation use open source software?
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- Why open source? (financial, community- or donor-driven, or political decision) Please explain.
- Where do you use open source software? Applications only? Operating system and applications? Server? Online publishing/Web applications?
Explain.
- What particular software does the organisation use in each of these areas? Why?

4 - Benefits/disadvantages of using OSS
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Please explain in as much detail as you can your experiences with open source software. Try and highlight the benefits and disadvantages you have experienced. Things to look at include cost savings/downtimes/uptimes/viruses/customisation/localisation etc. If you migrated from another operating system please explain what the main challenges were in making the move to open source software. Did you have to make sacrifices (or did you gain) because of the move?

5 - Conclusion
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Short summary: would you or your organisation recommend moving to or using open source software? Or would you warn others against it? Did it benefit your work on the ground or hinder it?