Introduction

Hello all,

I was quite excited to learn about the Debian Nonprofit project at the 
Plone conference last week.  I am a system administrator for 
DiscipleMakers, a relatively small Christian campus ministry in 
Pennsylvania, USA.  We have had great success using Free software over 
the past several years, and we want to help other nonprofits benefit as 
well.  A collaborative effort like this is definitely something we're 
interested in.

In many respects, my organization is a typical small nonprofit.  We have 
about 45 staff, including nine full-time administrative staff in our 
headquarters.  Nearly all of our staff rely exclusively on personal 
support raising for their funding.

In the area of computing, though, I think we're quite different from the 
average small nonprofit.  I am one of two full-time sysadmins, and we 
have one full-time developer and another raising his support.  We've 
been working hard to find free software solutions for our needs.

Our software developer has spent the last year or so working on 
"Doulos," an extensible application framework.  A beta version is 
available at http://doulos.sourceforge.net/  He's well along in 
developing a conference registration system built using this framework, 
and will work on a receipting system next.  We welcome anyone's 
involvement in this project.

It looks like there hasn't been much activity on this list of late, 
which I hope does not mean that people have lost interest.  I would very 
much like to learn about how other nonprofits are using free software to 
meet their requirements, and I hope to be able to help.

Brian