I’ve spent the past two months working on openFn, a non-profit, open-source project that aspires to eventually allow social-impact organizations to incorporate new information technology solutions as effortlessly as you add apps to a smartphone. The project builds on something I, and so many other fellows, learned during the Global Health Corps (GHC) fellowship. Information technology—while not a solution on its own—has the potential to help global health and other social sector organizations dramatically increase their impact. Unfortunately, finding and using the right tools comes at too high a cost both in dollars and, more importantly, staff time. OpenFn aims to unlock technology’s potential to help impact-first organizations with tools to assist organizations in identifying, implementing, and integrating technology solutions to fit their needs and circumstances.
My excitement about openFn is largely based on my experience as a Monitoring & Evaluation (M&E) fellow with Gardens for Health International (GHI) in Rwanda. During my fellowship, I was tasked with building GHI’s M&E system. This meant both understanding the organization’s operations and figuring out the best technology to manage their processes, store data, and report information internally.
We wound up working with Vera Solutions, a social enterprise that designs and implements data systems for some of the leading impact-first organizations around the world, to set up a data management and reporting system using Salesforce (Full Disclosure: Vera co-founder Taylor Downs now leads the openFn initiative). Not without its bumps in the road, the implementation of our Salesforce system was a success that enabled both more rigorous M&E and greater program efficiency. I’m happy to report that the system lives on today maintained and improved under the stewardship of several generations of GHC fellows that followed me.
The results of this technology implementation were profoundly positive, but lower information costs and easier integration with other tools could have made our selection process more systematic, the system’s evolution faster, and its impact greater. We wound up finding and selecting Vera through the Echoing Green network, which certainly spoke to the organization’s credentials, but it was also a matter of convenience. There was limited consideration of alternatives because the information cost of seeking them out was just too high. During implementation, we relied almost exclusively on Vera’s expertise because there wasn’t a centralized place for other NGOs to share information about using Salesforce. After implementation, we realized that our system would be that much more powerful with offline mobile data collection, but the investment—financial and in terms of staff time—has remained too high largely because of the difficulty of integrating different tools.
OpenFn’s tools aim to mitigate each of these issues by lowering the information costs of comparing and selecting solutions, the transaction costs of knowledge sharing, and the integration costs of connecting new tools. The core of openFn is an open-source, point-and-click integration platform called openIntegrations that lets users connect their technologies so that vital data syncs and updates automatically across systems. We’ve already got OpenDataKit and SurveyCTO integrated with Salesforce, and our early adopters have synced nearly 60,000 mobile surveys creating hundreds of thousands of new records in Salesforce. In the coming months, we’ll be working with product developers to integrate more tools.
Of course, integrating new tools isn’t much good if you don’t know which tools to use and how to use them. That’s where the openMarketplace and openContent come in. OpenMarketplace provides organizations with a list of potentially-useful technology solutions as well as tools like detailed overviews and filtering on standard categories (tags) to help them find technologies suited to their needs. OpenContent builds on the marketplace by providing case studies and implementation guides from experienced organizations and consultants. These resources will lower both the information and implementation costs—technical, process, and staff-related—for organizations looking to leverage new technology solutions.
If openFn succeeds in this, it will be extremely exciting. OpenFn believes that lowering these costs will help to redefine the technology-for-social-impact market. Once these costs are mitigated, organizations will not have to rely on do-it-all technologies that combine disparate tasks like offline mobile data collection and SMS community outreach. Instead product developers can focus on building a new wave of modular apps that focus on doing one thing extremely well and help to magnify the impact of organizations.
Success is hardly guaranteed. The integration tool certainly sets OpenFn apart from other attempts to help organizations find and implement technology. Just as important, however, is openFn’s commitment to its community of stakeholders from product developers to end-user organizations. That’s why we’re committed to putting the power and responsibility for guiding the project in the hands of this community. As a GHC Fellow who learned so much about the power of community during my fellowship, I know that the commitment to creating this community is the real foundation of openFn’s transformative potential.
If you’re interested in getting involved or have feedback of any kind, please connect with us via GitHub, Facebook, Twitter, or Medium, or email.