MINNEAPOLIS--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Zanby, a Minneapolis-based maker of online community software, recently announced at the Open Gov West conference in Portland, Ore. that it is going open-source. The company released the code for its enterprise groupware under a GPL3 license and launched a community to encourage software developers to build new projects and help improve the Zanby codebase.
“We feel the best way to drive wider adoption of Zanby's unique groups-of-groups architecture is to give it away and invite the open source community to collaborate with us to solve the most difficult collaboration problems in the world,” said Zanby CEO Chris Dykstra. “We chose to announce this at Open Gov West because the open government movement is all about promoting transparency and collaboration – both between citizens and government, and government-to-government – to drive accountability, efficiency, and civic engagement.”
Zanby’s group-of-groups architecture makes it stand out in the crowded field of collaboration software. “Governments, businesses, and nonprofits alike are wrestling with how to drive more effective collaboration across their organizations and between organizations,” explained Leif Utne, Zanby vice president of community development. “Zanby lets you create clusters of groups called ‘Group Families’ that make it easy to map online groups to real-world organizational structures.”
Zanby has been used for a wide variety of applications, including private corporate intranets, professional communities of practice, government civic engagement programs, conferences, and national and international advocacy coalitions with thousands of groups.
With the move to open source, Zanby’s business model will focus on hosting, customization, and strategy services. Zanby provides a full range of community and technology consulting services including community strategy and design, community management, and social media strategy. Custom software development and hosting and support services are provided through sister company Warecorp, and “transparency services” -- live-streaming, media production, citizen engagement -- are provided through a partnership with The UpTake.org.
About Zanby
Zanby provides
collaboration as a Web service to all kinds of groups -- from small
neighborhood groups to businesses to enterprise-class organizations in
the public, private and nonprofit sectors. Zanby Group Families are a
powerful, patent-pending idea that can consolidate and manage
communication, content and activities across enterprises of all sizes.
Zanby's group architecture makes it possible to create networks of
groups that map to a company or organization exactly. Based in
Minneapolis and launched in 2005, Zanby is a for-profit social
enterprise committed to not only making a profit, but also improving
quality of life locally, nationally and internationally. To learn more
or to join the Zanby open-source community, visit www.zanby.com,
or follow Zanby on Twitter (@zanby)
and Facebook www.facebook.com/zanby.