Santa Cruz, CA
For the last decade Karsten has been teaching and living the open source way. As a member of Red Hat's premier community leadership team, he helps with various community activities in the Fedora Project and other projects Red Hat is involved in. As a 15 year IT industry veteran, Karsten has worked most sides of common business equations as an IS manager, professional services consultant, technical writer, and developer advocate.
Karsten lives in his hometown of Santa Cruz, CA with his wife and two daughters on their small urban farm, Fairy-Tale Farm, where they focus on growing their own food and nurturing sustainable community living.
Authored Comments
A key point is that the open source methodology can be followed even if the source code isn't externally open. Knight Capital Group could engage with vendors and its own development team using inner source (as <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CollabNet">CollabNet coined the concept</a>.) Basically, you practice development with code and collaboration that is internally open. You <a href="https://www.theopensourceway.org/wiki/Stuff_everyone_knows_and_forgets_anyway#Do_not_forget_to_release_early_and_release_often">release early and often</a>. You make it possible for non-development team members to watch the project, test early versions, brainstorm ideas that help avoid catastrophic mistakes, and so forth.
As Nicole points out, building on top of open source gets all the benefits of shallow bugs, and building a solution that is also open source means the shallow bugs might end up being your own. Starting with an inner source model helps an organization learn how to act in <a href="https://www.theopensourceway.org/">the open source way</a>, so they are more skilled and more bold when it comes to collaborating externally on software projects.
Michael and Jon hit upon a very important point - copyleft is your friend in this situation. If you free your content with a license that requires modifications be contributed back to the main body, you allow a community of experts to grow up around the content with you at the center.
From the very start, your organization is the key expert, and very few other experts will drop from the sky. Most will be amateurs interested in using the materials, and if they do end up offering training or directly learning from your material, you can benefit from that in many ways - improved networking, more clients, more recognition as experts, and so forth. Some of those others will grow to be experts, and evangelize for you, be future staffers at the non-profit, start up other businesses that are interdependent with the non-profit, and so forth.
Freed content has a way of growing beyond itself as others take advantage of everything from the data to the information about it. Perhaps you could try by taking a selection of content (the beginning 101-level material? or the most advanced and hardest to reteach?), put it under a CC BY SA 3.0 license (as an example of a copyleft content license), and then curate the content and the community around it. Invite people to meet-ups and such to learn about the content, how to help grow it, etc.
What just came to my mind is, for the last 10+ years we have used the same tax preparation agent who taught a class on how to do your own taxes my wife took 12 years ago. We learned that it was going to be more than we wanted, and every year since then one of my favorite checks to write is paying her for doing our taxes, making it all so much easier, and saving us more money than we pay for her services. I know that is a classic reason people teach such classes, and I'm glad it worked for us.