Online Groups Blog

If you are a geek, or have geekly inclinations, there are a bunch of opportunities to hang out with web people in Christchurch.

The Valley in Christchurch meets monthly for casual web-related conversations that lead to bigger things.

The Christchurch Web Developers and Designers meetup also happens monthly.

There are informal beers at the Twisted Hop pretty much every Friday after work. If you’re new in town you’ll have to guess whose table to crash, or get in touch with one of us.

We Effusion Group folks often have lunch together in the CBD around 12:30. You’d be welcome to join us. Get in touch for an invite.

The Christchurch Creative Space, is a geek crafter hangout, currently happening twice a week.

If you’re looking for a place to work while you’re in town, check the OnlineGroups.Net hotdesk.

Finally, if you are suitably inclined try searching Twitter for #christchurch and #tweetup :-).

Due to the off-shoring of some of our team (Alice and Michael, but more on that later), some space has been freed up in the OnlineGroups.Net Christchurch office. Even though Marek and William from encode and Tracklr are using the adjoining office, and Julian Carver hot-desks here some of the time, things have become a little quieter. The buzz and what’s happening on Twitter and don’t quite make up for warm bodies and the bouncing of ideas that happens in a room.

If you are visiting central Christchurch, even if just from the suburbs, and you’re looking for a place to open your laptop, swing by. Anyone who wants a (mostly) quiet place with warmth and wireless, to work for a few hours, is welcome. If we get on and you’d like to make it a regular thing, then let’s talk about that.

We’re in 409 Kenton Chmbrs, 190 Hereford St, Christchurch, Aotearoa (New Zealand). You can phone on +64-3-377-5377 and +64-27-431-4928.

Now that I’ve cleared the backlog from spending last week at GOVIS 2009, here is my impression of it: two. There were two clouds, two topics, two presentations, and two conferences.

Two Clouds

From the opening keynotes to the closing ones, GOVIS was overshadowed by two clouds: the recession, and cloud computing. In his opening address, Hon Dr Richard Worth, Minister of Internal Affairs and Land Information announced that the NZ economy is expected to lose $50 billion in the next few years, and that permanent budget cuts would be made across the state sector. This meant a move towards front-line service-delivery, enabled by collaboration between government agencies, including the sharing of data and IT services. The shadow of this cloud could be see in the half-empty auditorium, and the cancellation of the keynote from SSC with a “not ready to talk” note. GTS had already been moved from SSC to DIA. Rumours were that further restructuring of the SSC would affect quite a few of the ICT people there. Cloud Computing, and its web of data was mentioned by pretty much every presenter as a major disrupter, both by reducing the cost of enterprise IT, and by opening up new data-sharing possibilities. It seems that the horror of locating government data somewhere in the sky, and paying by the minute, is being eroded by talk of 80% cost-savings.

Two Topics

The two hot topics at GOVIS were open data and public engagement. These are two sides of the same coin. Broadly, one allows government data to be used by the community, and the other enables government to hear what the community think and want. The open data message conveyed by Laurence Millar in his last blog post as Government CIO was echoed by many speakers at GOVIS. If you have the data, and it’s easy enough to open it up, there is no reason why not to. And if you do, there’s a chance that someone will do something innovative with it, maybe even something that generates income and tax revenue. At least other government agencies will be able to get it without bothering you, and you might just increase your transparency. Of course, it is not always easy to open up data, or even to share it between agencies, and there were many conversations about the problems and solutions around this. Ironically, most of the stands in the trade show were focused on data security and protection. The second major topic was public engagement. The public are using social media, so government can too. Forums and other social media can be used to let the public see the human face of government, and to increase dialogue between government and the public. The message here is pretty much Cluetrain for government.

Two Presentations

There were two main presentations at GOVIS: “it’s alright to use social media” and “you’re a dinosaur if you don’t”. The Thursday morning keynote from Fergus Hogarth of the Department for Families and Communities (Govt of South Australia) provided low risk but effective effective examples of the use of social media for engagement, mainly within the department. I expect that these made sense to many of the government folks who are relatively new to these concepts. Matt Crozier of Bang the Table also provided several examples of effective online consultations. The message from Stephen Collins of acidlabs was more urgent: participate or be hyperisolated. Joanna McLeod and Matt Lane, both of SSC also gave engaging demonstrations that if you aren’t doing social media now, you are starting to be bypassed by the real world.

Two Conferences

The most exciting part of GOVIS for me, however, was to be in the #govis09 Twitter backchannel. Whatever was happening on the stage, there was a lively conversation in the audience. What do you think of this? What’s going on in the next room? What do the people who are not at GOVIS think of this? These conversations liberated the participants from the usual constraints of passively ingesting whatever the sage on the stage is saying. You didn’t even have to be at GOVIS to participate. This heralds a new model for conferences. The conversations in the corridors are happening the whole time, and the corridors have no boundaries.

Rod Drury’s ten trends in accounting are spot on, but they could all be encapsulated in the first: “Online accounting won’t exist as a product category for long.” Rod writes…

Small Business don’t do integration projects but in the SaaS world vendors are encouraged to work together to integrate their products so small businesses don’t have to. Some vendors may decide to develop the surrounding modules and have full suites and others will make it easy to link with complimentary solutions.

Like all software, accounting software is becoming part of an ecosystem. As the ecosystem evolves, components evolve and connect to diverse related components. The emergence of standardised APIs, integration with other business modules and with banking systems, and the emergence of a market for integrators are all artefacts of this.

What Rod misses is that the exact trends he predicts are strongly favourable to open source accounting software components. Accounting software is the classic example of the “critical non-core” category where open source works best. As Geoffrey Moore points out, accounting software doesn’t by itself make anyone any money, but everyone has to have it. There is therefore no threat to competitive advantage in collaborating around it. In a component-based environment, even business models that do rely on particular transaction flows derive their advantage from implementation, rather than the components themselves.

Another trend that favours open source accounting solutions is the suspicion of business models based on lock-in and datamining. With open source cloud solutions, the customer has greater freedom to move between service providers without having to change the software that they use.

In the last couple of weeks, I have heard of two projects to integrate time and job management modules with the open source accounting system that we use, Ledger SMB.

Microsoft has announced that MSN Groups will close in February 2009.

They have made a deal with Multiply so that MSN Group Managers can create a group on Multiply, migrate their content and invite their group members from MSN Groups. The migration process worked pretty well on the small MSN group I created today, but managers of large MSN groups report long migration times, incomplete migration and other problems. Still, I think getting most of the content over is doing pretty well, given the challenges of integrating disparate systems.

Multiply groups are great for posting photos, videos and music, and their site customization is pretty flexible. What I haven’t found at Multiply is good old email discussion group functioning. You can get email delivery with a Multiply group, and you can post via email using a “Secret Pin”. There is a scary form in the HTML email that flips you to the site to make a comment. This is a web forum with an email interface, and a long way from the equivalent participation using web and email provided by Yahoo! Groups, Google Groups and OnlineGroups.Net. My MSN Group works pretty well that way, too, although the forum interface feels pretty old school and the text at the top of the email body is slightly disconcerting. I can, however, post and read posts using email or the web. I am sure that MSN Group users would find that OnlineGroups.Net groups compare pretty favourably with the MSN Groups messages feature, after the small time that it takes to get used to anything new.

You can’t delete posts with OnlineGroups.Net groups, but we think that’s a feature not a bug, as most posts are emailed out to most people. If spam is a problem, it’s easy to put new members on moderation.

The messages system at OnlineGroups.Net is not totally vanilla, though. Online groups topics are great for document-sharing, and make a passable photo album, and you can post YouTube movies quite easily. OnlineGroups.Net groups also have live chat.

A Multiply group gets its own subdomain (like my group at http://test20081027.multiply.com/), as do people (like me at http://danrandow.multiply.com/). If you have multiple related groups, I guess you just have to link between them, like you do at MSN. A big difference with OnlineGroups.Net is that you can locate multiple related groups on a single site with its own domain such as http://demosite.onlinegroups.net/. This is perhaps of more appeal to organisations than it is to MSN Group Managers who, I am guessing, tend to be individuals. If there are clusters of MSN Groups looking for a single location, however, then starting an OnlineGroups.Net site would be a good option. [Update: clearly many MSN Groups have multiple message boards. Groups like these, whether convened by organisations or inviduals, could benefit from starting multiple groups on an OnlineGroups.Net site.]

Another difference from both MSN Groups and Multiply is that OnlineGroups.Net sites have no ads. We charge for private group members (although they’re still free just now), so the business model is clear. Use a free public site and bring us customers who might buy the premium service. We want OnlineGroups.Net sites to reflect our customers’ identity as much as possible, rather than ours or some arbitrary third party’s. We even invite site adminstrators to put their own domain on an online groups site for free.

So, MSN Group Managers, if it’s good old email and web discussion that you want, with some file, photo and video-sharing and a bit of live chat, an OnlineGroups.Net site could be well worth considering. If you also want to have multiple related groups located on a single site, and you’d rather have no ads, I’d like to know what other option beats ours.

Unfortunately, we can’t offer the same migration process that Multiply can. I can’t find an API at MSN Groups or any way to export messages or user profiles. If you can get a list of group members’ email addresses, it’s pretty easy to invite users to join an OnlineGroups.Net group, in batches of up to 100.

What we can do is to reply to email. If you have any questions about migrating from MSN Groups to OnlineGroups.Net, we’d love to hear from you in the OnlineGroups.Net Admins group. [Update: Here are some details about the benefits of OnlineGroups.Net for MSN Group Managers and a demo group that you can join to try out OnlineGroups.Net.]

Here at OnlineGroups.Net, we don’t just provide sites where people can collaborate in online groups. We also build and release GroupServer, the software that underpins OnlineGroups.Net, and we help organisations to implement GroupServer to create successful online groups and communities. Sometimes, that involves technical work such as hosting, configuring, customising and maintaining software. At other times, it involves social and organisational consulting, to get people engaged and participating in online groups. I affectionately refer to the latter as “wrangling”.

One of the wrangling projects I’ve worked on recently is establishing the Canterbury Online Public Issues Forum. Now that the forum is up and running, and looks like it’s going to be a sustainable part of the local democratic landscape, I’ve written the Aotearoa Local Online Public Issues Forum Guide (PDF, 445kb), which aims to help others to get similar forums started. The guide is based on our experience with the Canterbury Forum, and includes the text of various documents that we used to get the forum started.

One of the main contributors to the Canterbury forum project was funding provided by the Community Partnership Fund. The 2008/2009 funding round of the Community Partnership Fund will open on 6 October 2008. If you are interested in starting an online public issues forum in Aotearoa New Zealand, you may be also able to get some support from the CPF. You can use the Canterbury forum as evidence of what can be achieved, and use the guide to increase your chances of creating another sucessful forum. I would also be happy to help you in any way that I can, so feel free to get in touch.

If you plan to start a local online public issues forum outside Aotearoa New Zealand, the guide will probably be of some use to you, too. Of course, I also recommend you get in touch with our friends, customer and colleagues at E-Democracy.Org, because they are the world experts in local online participative democracy. It was only with their help that I was able to achieve what I have in Canterbury. Thank you Steven Clift and Tim Erickson for your inspiration, assistance and leadership. My thanks also to Ron Kjestrup, Nicki Reece, Plains 96.9FM, Andrew Groom and the Canterbury forum steering team, and the participants and Guest Speakers in the forum, Environment Canterbury, and Christchurch City Council, who have all been instrumental in the success of this project.

Today’s Computerworld lists the finalists for the second NZ Open Source Awards, and I’m happy to say that we are there in the “Open Source Software Project” category with GroupServer.

Almost as cool is to see the health of open source software in Aotearoa New Zealand. This is the second year for the NZ Open Source Awards, and they received nearly 100 nominations. Among them are our good friends Dave Lane of Egressive, Hagley College of Computing (big ups, Josh Campbell) and Glynn Foster of Sun Microsystems. Finalists also include Wellington’s Silverstripe, whose CMS powers the US Democratic Party National Convention website.

The awards will be announced at a gala event on Wednesday 24 September in Wellington. That promises to be a fun night!

The other night, I was at dinner with some friends, and some friends of friends. The conversation turned to OnlineGroups.Net. One of the guests I didn’t know so well said “Oh yeah, I use that. I really like it. I just delete the emails.”

I was happy of course to hear that she liked our system, but I was happier to hear why. OnlineGroups.Net was making it easier for her to deal with email.

Why does it make me happy that people are deleting emails that are sent using our system, especially when there’s an implication that she is deleting them without even reading them? Because this is exactly what we hope people will do.

We don’t want people deleting all their email unread. Email works just fine for ad hoc conversations in small groups, especially groups of two. In this case, the subject line is more or less irrelevant (in fact, I often have trouble choosing a subject line for social emails and have even been known to commit “no subject” sin).

In groups, however, the task of a group member is often simply to keep track of conversations. Often, detail is irrelevant, and it is sufficient to know that A and B are discussing X.

Email without OnlineGroups.Net defeats the task of keeping track of conversations in the following ways.

• The recipient usually needs to open and read the emails to find out what is being discussed and who is participating in the discussion.
• The recipient usually has some obligation to keep the email, in case they need to refer to it later.
• If they do need to refer to the email conversation later, it is likely to be difficult to find, especially if the subject line has changed during the conversation.

Email with OnlineGroups.Net supports the task of keeping track of conversations in the following ways.

• The email subject always shows the group name which provides instant cues as to the participants in, and the purpose of the conversation.
• There is no need to keep or file the email, as it is kept on the server.
• If there is a need to refer back to the conversation, it is easy to find the email, and the other emails in the same conversation.

Actually, these benefits don’t just apply to OnlineGroups.Net users. Yahoo! Groups, Google Groups and all list servers with a web interface provide the same benefits. If you’re using one of these systems, really, try this: just delete the emails.

OnlineGroups.Net has released the source code of GroupServer, the software that powers our web and email collaboration service. This means that, if you are technically savvy and have access to a server, you can download, install and run GroupServer sites for free. You can inspect the inner workings of GroupServer and even make changes to it, if you like. Why would we do this, when we charge money for premium online groups sites here? Here are the reasons we do this.

Transparency Builds Trust

People who use our online groups trust us with their data. Like other service providers, we have a privacy policy, but think words should be backed up with actions. We want our customers to know what’s under the hood of the system they trust with their data. Of course, not everyone has the technical skills to understand the workings of the systems, but the option is there for those who do.

GroupServer is a fairly sophisticated system to administer, so we make it easy to start sites and online groups, here at OnlineGroups.Net. Sites with only public groups are free, but we charge a subscription for sites with private groups. Even though that’s how we make money (there are no ads on our sites), we want our customers to use that service by choice, not because it’s their only option.

We want people to feel good about us, so that our customers spread the word about our service.

GroupServer will Get Better Faster

One of the main things that makes open source software successful is that people who like the software help to make it better. People who use OnlineGroups.Net already do that, by providing feedback in the OnlineGroups.Net Administrators online group, by only people who adminster GroupServer behind-the-scenes can give us technical feedback about it.

As organisations use and benefit from GroupServer, they are likely to want improvements to it. Some of our customers engage us to improve GroupServer now. There is no penalty to them if we give those improvements to all our customers, and they benefit because other customers do the same. In many open source projects, organisations who use the software engage their own developers to make the improvements, and contribute those back to the core of the system.

GroupServer is built in a modular way, so that it can easily support a large community of developers working on it at the same time.

We Like Interesting Gigs

Believe it or not, we like doing real work that makes a real difference. By giving away GroupServer, we know that we’ll get asked to do consulting and development on interesting projects: we already are. We also provide custom hosting for GroupServer sites, and software maintenance to keep sites running on the latest version of GroupServer.

Open Source Software Attracts Awesome Developers

One of the challenges in the software business is finding awesome developers, when you need them. One of our goals in building a developer community is to get to know people who are experienced with our product, whom we can call on to work with us on projects.

Collaboration Software Should be Built by Collaboration

Releasing the source is consistent with our philosophy of collaboration, where it makes sense. After all, collaboration is what our software is for. We believe that software that is built by collaboration is better at supporting collaboration. We’re building it for something that we do, not something that only other people do.

Of course the tools that we use, Linux, Zope, Python, PostgreSQL, Apache, Postfix and others are all open source. Because we benefit from those tools, it makes sense to contribute back.

Giving Software Away Just Feels Right

We want to make significant, widely-installed software. It doesn’t cost us to give away software. We figure that the more we can give away, the more good things will come back to us.

Protect IP by Giving it Away

The fact that there is no licence fee for GroupServer doesn’t mean there is no licence. GroupServer uses the GPL, which strictly specifies that anyone releasing modified versions of GroupServer, must apply the same open licence to their code. This does not guarantee that everyone will play nicely and keep GroupServer open, but the bigger the community that uses GroupServer, the less the impact of breaches will be.

It is even possible that a competitor could start offering a service providing sites and online groups like we do. That competitor, however, would be just as exposed as we are to a second competitor and a third entering the scene. Actually, if you’d like to get involved with GroupServer, come and talk to us. Maybe there’s some way we can work together. Or just go ahead and install it. We are creating an ecosystem here, not an empire.

We’re Not The Only Ones Doing This

Finally, we didn’t think this up for ourselves. Automattic have built a successful business based on the open source blogging tool WordPress. SugarCRM give away their software, as well as providing hosted access to it. Read/Write Web recently described how you can Build Your Own Reddit With Reddit, discussed how niche software service companies can benefit from open sourcing their code.

Collaboration platform provider Grou.ps (who, like, us are not advertising-based, and do email lists with a forum interface) have just raised $1.1 million, and open sourced a version of their software, as discussued on Read/Write Web and TechCrunch.

Update: Scott Dietzen of Zimbralog writes about The Merge of SaaS and Open Source echoes our views about customer like-in, vs lock-in. Zimbra has blended SaaS and OSS from the outset.

“The cynic would argue why give up proprietary intellectual property and lock-in unless your customers or competitive pressures are forcing you to do so? Indeed, the lock-in with SaaS may prove to be more onerous than it has been with proprietary software—not only is an organization tied to a proprietary software service, but its data is now resident in someone else’s data center.”

Data portability is a topic that I will cover in a future post to this blog (we can provide it, but it is not yet standard on OnlineGroups.Net). Scott also writes about the choice between hosted and in-house provision.

“While SaaS allows organizations to ramp up new software with minimal investment, open source means they could always bring it in house later or move to an alternative provider (or at least have the negotiating leverage for doing the same).”