Web-based publishing is easy to do, and is an example of a technology that can help people communicate across the country or across the hall. Blogs, forums, and wikis are three easy-to-use tools to help any organization improve communication and collaboration.

Blogs, or weblogs, are usually personal journals penned by a single author, although exceptions certainly exist. Many blogs allow readers to add comments, thereby facilitating a degree of collaborative conversation. Within an organization, a blog could be used for announcements or all-staff memoes, committee or director's reports, or more.

Forums allow multiple simultaneous conversations between participants. Forums present a structured display of conversations with the most active discussions at the top of the list, and an historical record of all conversations. Forums have sophisticated features for quoting previous posts, including pictures, and formatting text. A forum can be a great way to facilitate long-term planning across teams, or with virtual groups.

Wikis are basically group-edited web pages. Wikis are considerably more free-form than blogs or forums, allowing any reader to create or modify Wiki pages. Wikis are often used for product documentation, allowing group members to collectively author and edit. Pages can be password-protected to ensure that only certain people are allowed to edit, while everyone can read. An organization might put their Employee Handbook in a Wiki: changes made by the HR team would be instantly available to all staff members.

Blogs, forums, and wikis all have two things in common. First, they run on a web server, a computer connected to a network (public or private) that runs software to deliver web pages to visitors. Second, the only requirement of visitors is a connection to the network and a web browser, like Internet Explorer or Mozilla. Blogs, forums, and wikis can run on the internet, publicly accessible to everyone or they can run privately, accessibly only to an organization's staff.

There are quite literally hundreds of blog, forum and wiki software packages available. Not all are Free Software. Here's a very short list of a few recommended Free Software packages:
blogs

• Wordpress is a state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability.
• Blosxom is a lightweight yet feature-packed weblog application designed from the ground up with simplicity, usability, and interoperability in mind.

forums

• phpBB is a high powered, fully scalable, and highly customisable open-source bulletin board package.
• miniBB ("minimalistic bulletin board") is flat linear (non-tree) version of highly customizable bulletin board.

wikis

• MoinMoin is a nice and easy WikiEngine with advanced features - said in a few words, it is about collaboration on easily editable web pages.
• WikiTikiTavi is a wikki engine -- it is a PHP script that runs wiki sites.

Non-profit organizations often receive donated computers, many of which simply are not powerful enough to run current versions of commercial software. Samba, one of thousands of Free Software applications, allows a non-profit organization to improve collaboration, protect data, and save money using their donated computers. It turns an older computer into a powerful file server allowing Windows-based desktop computers to share files and printers.

An older Pentium class or higher PC with a modest amount of RAM (128 megabytes or more) and a moderately large hard drive (4 gigabytes or larger) can make an excellent file server. A file server is a central repository for files and documents, kind of like an electronic filing cabinet. Desktop computers can talk to the file server over a local area network, and users can copy their files on to it. This solves two problems. First, it's easy to share documents electronically with other office workers, without the need for floppy disks. Second, the file server's copy of data serves as an effective backup of that data. If the user's desktop PC blows up, all that user's data can be retreived from the file server. This is an invaluable time saver, and a good safety net.

A network file server, acting as a central repository for data, can greatly improve collaboration on documents. Office workers can easily open documents from the file server, make changes, and save them back to the file server, where they will be available to others for review. Confidential documents can be protected on the file server by restricting access for specific users. For example, the HR department could have a private, secured space on the file server that only HR staff members could access. In this way, HR staff could be granted access to confidential employee records, but anyone else attempting to access them would be denied access.

A file server can also manage printers that are connected to the network. One or two printers can be strategically placed and connected to the network. When a user prints, the document goes from their computer to the file server, which then acts as a concierge for all the incoming print jobs, making sure they all get printed. A few network connected printers can easily replace many individual desktop printers, possibly saving an organization quite a bit of money.

Free Software can turn these older computers into valuable Information Technology resources. Samba, under constant development for the last ten years, is one of the best examples of the power and flexibility of Free Software. Read more about Samba here:
http://www.samba.org/samba/docs/using_samba/toc.html

"We're trying to do more with less," is a common complaint among non-profit organizations. They often lack the funding, the time, and the talent to put information technology resources to their best use, assuming they have any IT resourced to use! Free Software is a way that these organizations can do more -- a lot more -- with less.

The Free Software Foundation says "'Free software' is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of 'free' as in 'free speech', not as in 'free beer'". The FSF then goes on to list four specific freedoms that Free Software grants to its users: freedom to run the program, for any purpose; freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs; freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor; freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits. It should be immediately obvious how this contrasts with the rigid licensing requirements of proprietary software, where the user pays a license fee for the right to use the program but does not actually own the program.

Using Free Software means that non-profit organizations can dedicate their precious resources in much more effective ways. Instead of paying for the right to use a piece of software, organizations can spend money on training people how to use their Free Software. Instead of spending time keeping track of their license compliance in the dreadful event of a software audit, organizations can spend time actually using -- or improving -- their Free Software. And instead of diverting their capital to a corporate headquarters in a different state, organizations can focus on growing local talent and giving back to their own communities.

With very little profit motive, Free Software developers can concentrate on making excellent products, not just excellent revenue streams. Free Software developers listen to their users, and have an active interest in implementing the features they need. Because the software is Free (as in speech), end users are allowed to modify it for their specific needs, adding or removing features as they see fit.

One of the major complaints against Free Software is the lack of professional support. It's true that most Free Software projects lack professional support. Conversely, though, most Free Software projects can provide outstanding technical support for free by email or web-based discussion forum. And in most metropolitan areas, there's another invaluable resource available to Free Software users: the Local User Group, or LUG. LUGs are informal special interest groups that meet semi-regularly to discuss Free Software, offer "how to" training sessions, and generally build community. A non-profit organization could easily earn the affection of a LUG, as well as competent technical support, by providing a meeting facility for the group.

Free Software is not the solution to all of an organization's challenges. But the use of Free Software does allow an organization to better allocate their limited resources in order to achieve effective, socially-responsible solutions.