Mission Minded

mission minded weighs in

Great to read Open hGrant’s technical lead, Jason Camp, weigh in on our plug-in over at Mission Minded. He talks about how this small tool

…creates a big opportunity to collect, catalog, map, and analyze giving across multiple organizations around the country. Not only do grantmakers using the plug-in get an easy way to display searchable, sortable, customizable grant listings, they also can instantly share their data with the Foundation Center.

Around the country and around the globe: thanks for Foundation Center’s partnership with the International Aid Transparency Initiative, reporting globally is just one click away with Open hGrant for WordPress.

 

Open Source It, Why Don’t We?

A cascading thought on What If… very quickly rushed up on us:

If we’re building a plug-in that not only gives grantmakers a searchable database of grants on the web in a format that’s readable by big data initiatives…

…why not make it free, open source code?

Community cooperation, a driving concept of open source, is also signature of our shop. Our grantmaking seeks to leverage public-private partnerships and collaborations for results that no single actor can accomplish.

However, we’re well aware of the tendency in our field to develop solutions to common challenges in isolation and with proprietary tools. In grantmaker technology it’s quite pronounced, with solutions developed grantmaker by grantmaker, leading to a proliferation of data types, taxonomies and infrastructures.  Bradford K. Smith’s post to the Philantopic Blog takes this on directly, a “data dilemma” by his reckoning with some bold recommendations for philanthropy.

So, Yes, Do, Let’s.

We are approaching this challenge with the intent to share our techniques and tools with our peers, embrace open source philosophies, and do our part to expand funder participation in transparency and open data initiatives. We agree with the Foundation Center that we’re seeding richer data sets that can drive effective collaboration, strategic decision making, and a more engaged philanthropy sector.

With our partner Mission Minded we’ll publish Open hGrant source code to the public, enabling anyone to copy, modify and redistribute the source code without paying royalties or fees.

Let’s see what we make of it.