(Actually Holding My Breath)

Zach Rosen (for those of you with sex lives, he is the founder and director of Civicspace Labs) shares some alarming news:

It appears that EchoDitto has forsaken CivicSpace (“We were wrong”) and intends to build the end all open source web-app platform for the progressive movement themselves.

There is no good (i.e., comprehensive, inexpensive, and easy-to-use) web platform that does content management, blogging/podcasting, credit card processing/fundraising, bulk email management, event management, metrics & reporting, CRM, and voterfile management (yes, all of these things should be integrated) properly. Now, there are several solutions and vendors that have some of the pieces. But none of these solutions are comprehensive, and they certainly don’t play nice with one another (i.e., data sharing is non-existent) snip I think we should create an inexpensive (i.e., open source) platform ASAP that draws the best features of all the products out there. And no, I don’t think that it’s bad business to open source software, especially in nascent markets snip Who’s game? — posted by Harish Rao, CEO of EchoDitto

I hope Harish will consider the costs of starting from scratch, and dividing the progressive open-source movement into two spheres. Its no secret that I'm a loyal follower of civicspace; however, that is because of how far civicspace has come; the huge amount we still habe to learn about online communities; and the difficulty in creating tools when we barely understand their functions. For the sake of time and man power, I hope Harish will take the high ground, and start figuring out ways to fill in the holes of civicspace. I can only imagine why he'd want to start over from scratch...