“Insight trumps ignorance.”

First off, a special thanks to all who participated in this survey. The sincerity of those that serve Him with their technological talents never ceases to leave us amazed and thankful. We sincerely appreciate all of you.

We are summarizing the results as of 9am CST. Assuming a few things, 21 of you (about 25% in attendance to Church IT Roundtable) took the survey. We will continue to leave it open for another week or so, just in case things get more insightful. Now, to the results…

How much does open source play overall in the role of your church technology?

43% of the respondents have about 50% of their deployed technology within an open source technology! That’s pretty cool…On the flip side, about 25% said they have no open source in their church.

When we asked what you typically think (as a first response or so) around open source:

About 25% of you are excited with another 25% putting customization at the top of your thoughts! About 20% of you were thinking about integration with another 20% of glad to see licensure go away…(us too!)

How important are each of these items in your decision to use open source software?

- Cost was a factor for over 75% you as “yep” or “abso-freakin-lutely hombre”. Not overly surprising there…

- Stability is important to about 60% of you. Seems  to point towards expectations around open source and some of the ‘traditional’ trade-offs.

- Support is pretty much middle of the road for almost 70%. More interesting, 25% said, “nope”. We think that is kinda insightful to the understanding of community around the use of open source. Support, like CITRT, is who you know, not what you know!

- Community: So, true to form for support, the follow-on question for community had over 90% of you saying it was at the top of the list. When BBC thinks community around #GetShadetree, we are thinking a central location for documentation, discussion, sharing/collaborating, and finding the latest patches/updates. Would you agree?

- Scalability is about middle of the road. Interestingly, about 30% said “yep”. You are concerned with growth and accomodating that growth.

- Integration baby! Yeah, over 70% ranked this at or near the top. When BBC thinks integration, we are thinking for you: church management system, websites, and financial. Integration is important. We hate silos too.

- Documentation was pretty evenly distributed across the board. This is probably a speak to community and support. Documentation is important, but more important is knowing that you can get the answers you need when you need them…

- Requirements was a funny one. Or, at least the results were straddled around “yep”(40%). 20% said “abso..” while 20% said “meh”. This is probably an understanding to a good deployment. We think if integration is sound, requirements are probably less of a focus for you. Is this correct?

- Expandability, apparently, is pretty danged important. Near 80% said it is tops. This is, in our interpretation, a need for an organic and growing road map of development around the open source solution you are using. It is the ability to not only choose *how you build off the platform, but *what you build off the platform. We could not agree more.

- Maturity is pretty much average for most of you. Again, this is probably part of the trade-off that is ‘traditional’ with open source answers. We give up some maturity in the application in exchange for other things.

- And seriously. About 45% ranked ‘free stuff’ as pretty important from open source! Ok…we will get the t-shirt press ready. We heard you. What other free stuff do you want besides the application?! =)

What aspect(s) of open source do you most/least appreciate and why?

This was interesting. Some focused on the ‘most appreciate’. Some focused on the ‘least appreciate’. Here are a response from each:

“the reason we usually avoid open source for most projects there’s little to no person at the other side of an 800 number that we can go to for immediate assistance. I’m a single IT guy supporting over 50 users, 100 machines across 4 buildings. I simply don’t have time to go hunting through support docs for solutions.”

“We are not held captive by vendors with different priorities than ours. If we need something fixed or changed, we can roll up our sleeves and get it done. It is not tied to Microsoft…”

Do you perceive potential roadblocks in your church that would keep you from using open source? If so, what are they?

This was also interesting. Check out a couple:

“Zero road blocks for using open source. Plenty of road blocks with proprietary systems/ applications.”

“We are using it extensively, so no.”