My wife’s day job helps Indian orphans through the Miracle Foundation here in Austin. On the surface, our jobs are very different; however, there is lately more and more intersection in both form and substance. It was not always like that, initially the Miracle Foundation primary engagement had been an emotional appeal: “look, these orphans are sad, they need you. Did we mention that they are orphans?”

Joking aside, there are plenty of kind people who want to help children; however, there are a lots of worthy causes with equally strong appeal. The question is how do you pick which one? Donors/Contributors want one that is both emotionally appealing and effective.

While radically different in human impact, both of raising orphans and building open source rely heavily on personal engagement and passion for success. Just like non-profits, there are many open source projects that want you to invest your time in installing and contributing to their most worthy technology.

About 18 months ago, the Miracle Foundation pivoted their strategy from tending individual children towards cultivating whole orphanages (the “NEST program”, video below). They started tracking things like how much milk and fruit each child ate and if they had been vaccinated. They connected observable data like hemoglobin levels of children to their ability to pay attention in school. They were even aware of additional days girls spent in school just because they got monthly hygiene products.

Used with Permission, The Miracle Foundation

With this new program, the Miracle Foundation can tell you exactly how much benefit each child will receive from each dollar. These are real results derived from collecting real data, and the results are powerful.

The children the Miracle Foundation nurtures are going from subsistence to flourishing. This is not happening because people care more about these children than before. It is happening because someone is keeping the data and making sure that the support they give gets the results they want. This in turn helps donors (become one) feel confident that their emotional response is delivering tangible improvements. Both are essential to TMF’s mission.

Open source projects have a similar gestalt.

People and companies contributing time and resources to a project want to both believe in the technology and see tangible metrics to validate adoption. Open source transparency makes it easier to find active projects and people are engaged contributors, but it can be harder to determine if the project is having broader impact.

For OpenStack, these tangible metrics began to surface in the last few days. Before the summit, Stephano Muffulli, community manager, launched the OpenStack Activity Board to show commit and quality data for the project. Last Monday, Tim Bell & Ryan Lane presented the results of the first user survey which showed how and what users are adopting for OpenStack.

If you like seeing this type of data driven behavior then vote with your keyboard and become part of an active open source project. For non-profits like the Miracle Foundation, voting is even easier – you just need a credit card to join in their Mothers’ Day campaign. Your mom may not understand anything you add to open source, but she can understand when you help orphans.

Want to learn more? Here’s the video about the NEST program.

Here’s the video about the OpenStack User Survey User