There are different levels of support that a community built around these ideas could give. I have a certain dream of what I'd like to see but I currently don't think it's possible.

I envision a volunteer group that would be able to act as sys admins and maintenance developers for non-profits. When a non-profit ran into an issue with one of their apps, they would be able to contact this group for help. The group would then be able to dispatch help to the non-profit with as little overhead as possible (the non-profit wouldn't need to vet the volunteer themselves or send all the required information that the volunteer would need since the open community support group would already have it). The volunteer would then solve their problem, enter the problem/resolution into a database for others to reference later and be done. I see it working much like a paid support group, but really only for smaller non-profits that couldn't even dream of actually buying support.

That's the dream, but can it become a reality? I would love to be able to handle anything a non-profit might need and bother them with as little as possible. That would require knowing a lot of information about there setup, which could easily be stored in a Wiki, but can you really store sensitive information like logins and passwords in a wiki like that? Obvious answer is no, but a distributed group of support volunteers would still need access to that kind of information to get any work done.

It brings up the major issue of trust and vetting the volunteers somehow. Who gets access to this information? Do certain volunteers get assigned to certain companies? What if none of them have the time but there are other volunteers that could? And you can't open it up to everyone, there are too many opportunistic people out there that would love to get their hands on a non-profit's mailing list or donor information. How do you restrict that information but still be able to do work?

There's also the idea that you have a project manager or gate keeper that has access to all of the non-profits information and then can take the code or problems and turn around to the volunteers to get a solution. That way you have only a select group of people with access to sensitive information and still have a group of volunteers behind them to take care of the hard work.

But would that be a full time job for the project managers? How would they get paid? How do you pick the project managers and vet them properly in a distributed environment? I think this might be the better model to try and follow, but it does bring up a number of other hard questions.

And I guess that's what I'm really left with, a bunch of hard questions. I don't think that's a bad thing, but I also don't think I can be the sole person to answer them. In that frame of mind, I may set up a Google Group to try and get a discussion going on this. (I'll post a link at a later date.) Will an answer come out of this? I'm not entirely sure, but I sure want to try. I think it's probably the most important next step in Open Source and kind of the holy grail that a lot of people have been aiming for; to use the power of distributed volunteers to help make the world a better place using open source software. The less money non-profits spend on tools and support, the more they can spend on their core mission, whatever it might be. I'd love to be a part of that and I'm interested in seeing what might come out of my random ramblings.

Comments?