Tuesday, September 16, 2008

smallworks

I recently met Chris Berg, the chair and founder of smallworks.org. This site aims to offer free services to non-profit organizations that might not otherwise have the funds or the know how to make good use of software technology. Unlike the open source approach, smallworks is oriented towards providing the end software as a service to users rather than as a package or code base to developers.

Overall, it's a good idea, but I think smallworks would benefit from opening up so that others could contribute to the code base. Cobra has certainly benefited from going open source earlier this year.

Smallworks is web-based in order to avoid installation headaches and to achieve its goal to connect givers and receivers. There appears to be a lot of work still to do on the site, but it'll be interesting to see how smallworks evolves in the future.