Very interesting post from the CivicSpace listserv from kieran at CivicSpace Labs...

Hi, I was talking to Chris Wiltse from Youth Movement Records yesterday about what it would cost to move a website from this http://www.youthspeaks.com to a CivicSpace site. Youth Speaks is one of the premier youth poetry, spoken word, and creative writing programs in the country. I gave him some very detailed numbers.

However, I wanted to explain how I got this information and I wanted to validate it with the community. During my first two weeks on the job I spent a lot of time talking to people who run CivicSpace sites, people who build CivicSpace sites, CivicSpace Developers, and Community leaders who use CivicSpace to help with their organizational mission.

In effect I did a Supply Chain analysis. For those of you not familiar with Supply Chain analysis it is a common business analysis technique use to identify strategic and value opportunities. If this interests you enough to spend a couple minutes reading, I suggest this: http://www.quickmba.com/ops/scm/. If this really interests you then I suggest you read The Profit Zone: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/external-search/103-3690511-8795010? field-keywords=The+profit+zone&mode=blended&tag=mozilla -20&sourceid=Mozilla-search. Finally, if you want to be a pro at this then you must read: Michael Porter's Competitive Advantage, which is the classic text from the thought leader in the field(He used to be the highest paid professor in the world for a reason and that was still less money than a single public speaking fee!!!).

I choose to base my analysis on the supply chain in The Profit Zone. Here are the groups that I interviewed to try and understand what is involved in organizing a community online.

1) Customer Priorities- I talked to a lot of community leaders and tried to understand their priorities(i.e What they will pay money for), the costs of their business, and the barriers to organizing a community.
2) Channels- I talked to CivicSpace based companies, consulting firms that develop CivicSpace sites, lone developers who build CivicSpace sites. Basically, the people who community leaders turn to when then just want it to get up and running.
3) Offerings- I looked at what is being offered in the CivicSpace/Drupal world. What I heard back was that Drupal was a toolkit. CivicSpace is on it's way to being a product. There are a number of good pre-package solutions that are coming on-line. I won't list them because, I'll forget one and get in trouble.
4)Inputs and raw materials- This is all the stuff that goes into making Community Organizing happen. Cellphones, mailing lists, Civic Space community, Developers, Designers, Community leaders, money, open source, php, web servers, databases, community members, volunteers, paid staff, and lots more stuff.
5)Core competencies and assets- I talked to people who were leaders in online community organizing who had reputations for being leaders, in effect they are assets. Core competencies was very hard because this is still evolving but I identified, Open Source development, interactions with the community, political and social change, and creating a product. There is more but I'll leave it at that for now.

First, I am no where near done in my analysis. That will only happen when I am spending a regular 50% of my CivicSpace time talking to people in the supply chain. However, I did start seeing enough consistency that I was able to draw early observations. More on that later. What I did get more confident about was the costs involved in running a CivicSpace site.

Hopefully these numbers will really piss you off and we will get a ton of free marketing data out of the thirty responses to this thread.

1) Pay a professional firm to set up a standard CivicSpace site, host it for a year, and spend around 10-20 hours getting it working well to meet your community needs with no or very little changes to themes: Total: $2500.
2) Get an smart tech savvy person who is passionate and curious with little or no php, linux, apache, mysql skills to get a site up and running to the point where they are satisfied it is meeting their community needs. They can probably modify or even write their own simple modules. 10-20 hours a week for 3 months in their spare time. Total:120-240 hours.
3) Once the site is launched and stable getting your community to learn how to use it, not fear it, to the point where they are generally self sufficient and not calling you on your cellphone during dinner to help them log on.
5-10 hours a week for a month depending on how web savvy your user base is. Total: 20-40 hours.
4) Once you have it up and running and people know how to use it, or your community can support each other. 30 minutes a week for a skilled person who is playing system admin. Total: 26 hours a year spent weekly.
5) Get cheap hosting with 5GB storage, and 100GB bandwidth with shell access and a Cpanel web interface to create your MySQL database and configure apache, plus the cost of downloading CivicSpace and getting it up and running with basic configuration as of 0.8.0.3. $140 for annual hosting, 5 hours of time if you read the instructions and get lucky.
6) 3-4 Upgrades a year. It should cost around 10-20 hours for each upgrade in understanding requests, analyzing what is possible if you know where to look, who to ask on the community lists and IRC, and having a good methodology for upgrading with detailed notes of what when wrong last time, that you applied to your staging site. Total 40-80 hours annually.
7) Having a poorly defined mission that doesn't map the experience of the human community to the online community- Failure, depression, sadness, frustration, and the tendency to believe that you are right and everyone else is wrong. Total: -2 social skills points on a twenty sided die, and a wasted year of your life.

Ok now for the results of the magic business analysis machine.
Greatest Value to be created for CivicSpace: Organizing the community!!!!! Yep, getting their email address, phone numbers, letting community members keep their contact information up to date so it's easy to get in touch with them and get them active is the where the PHAT MONEY is. If you think it is fund raising, you don't get it. There will always be people who will help you get money and take a cut for doing it. On the other hand there are 531,000 elected offices in the US alone which means that there is going to be (1, 000, 000 online political communities and probably a X 000 0000 non-profits) times every country in the world, that need to move from their sheets of paper and excel spreadsheets to CivicSpace. Right now we are at what, 150?

Greatest Barrier: Digital Divide: I don't have a computer/I don't like computers. Please go away nerd people!!!!

Cheers,
Kieran

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.

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