Open Source’s Other Contributor: The Social Sector

Open source ecosystems are expanding in complexity, and while corporate tech firms still dominate the landscape, GitHub’s Tech for Social Good program has spent the past year charting a different set of challenges and opportunities: how nonprofits and social enterprises build and maintain open source software (OSS).

GitHub’s 2020 State of the Octoverse highlighted a key structural difference between the two spheres. Most mainstream OSS leans on “infrastructure” work—scripts for server performance, systems architecture, APIs, and other backend components. The social sector, by contrast, still concentrates heavily on graphical user interface (GUI) applications designed to fill gaps that commercial companies typically avoid.

A notable example is Dimagi, a social enterprise that develops the CommCare platform for governments and organizations. In a GitHub Satellite panel last May, Dimagi CEO Clayton Sims noted that more than 7% of the world’s population is registered in a CommCare application, including deployments for COVID-19 contact tracing.

Mature Products, Local Challenges, Global Contributions

As social sector tech has matured, companies like Dimagi are beginning to give back to the infrastructure layer of OSS—not just consume it. Dimagi software engineer Simon Kelly described recent contributions including an Ansible monit module rewrite (he is now the official maintainer of that module), a fix for the Ansible postgresql_ext bug, and an improvement to the CitusDB upgrade procedure.

Dimagi attributes these contributions to an operational environment that diverges sharply from the commercial norm. Social sector organizations tend to prioritize greatest social need over business opportunity. In Dimagi’s case, some government clients enforce data residency rules, requiring the service to run on-prem or in “cloud”-like setups, some managed by Dimagi and others by third parties using tooling Dimagi built. That mix has forced the company to adopt a broader range of OSS components—which in turn gives their engineers unique pressure points where patches such as those above surface naturally.

The prospect of more such contributions emerging from the social sector is an encouraging sign, even if GUI-based applications will likely remain its core output. As these organizations mature, their solutions may find traction beyond their own niche.