Comic Relief Makes Codebase Available to Other Charities
In a move that demonstrates how the world of non-profit can embrace technology sharing to support social responsibility and community gains, Comic Relief has taken the innovative step of sharing its codebase with other charities.
Its in-house development team has migrated on to an open-source platform for building new websites, apps and other digital assets, and the charity has taken the exciting step of making its digital code available for free for other charities that want to develop their own digital presence but who don’t have the big budget needed to begin a development for scratch.
Benefiting the Charity Sector
Speaking to Charity Finance magazine, the charity’s representatives said that Comic Relief had made the decision to share its coding assets in the hope that the sector could benefit from improved software and less duplication.
By making the open-source software and associated coding publicly available under licence, other charities can use it and adapt it. They explained that the development team were excited to know that their work had been made publicly available and that others could contribute to it. They found this motivating and a sign that their endeavours could have broader benefit and application to the charity sector.
Engaging with the Open-Source Community
Comic Relief said that they hoped the measure would allow them to further engage with the growing open-source community and then obtain further external help to grow the codebase to its next level. They could get help from a digital Drupal design agency such as https://www.website-express.co.uk.
The charity’s sister organisation, located in the USA, has already used Comic Relief’s code to create its own Red Nose Day website, which slashed months of development time from the project.
Contributing to the Open-Source Field
Because Comic Relief is using open-source software, such as Drupal, it also believes that it has a duty to feed back into the contribution loop in order to reduce sector duplication and to help other charities in a way that extends beyond simple finances.
You can see examples of the code in action at GitHub. The charity is asking coders to provide their feedback and to share examples of how they have adapted the code under licence in order to further create and innovate for the benefit of charities and the communities that they serve everywhere.