Zack Rosen worked on the Howard Dean campaign, first as a volunteer and later as a staff technologist. He and others created DeanSpace, a software platform designed to connect volunteers and others interested in the campaign.

The campaign is over. But Rosen tells me he's going to push ahead with what he started, aiming to create an open platform that others can use.

He says he's gotten venture-capital funding from a California firm that looks for public-interest investments. He and his team would, he said, build a "groupware tool set" that included content-management, mail list and forum posting, blogging and much more. Initially, the goal was to create an analogue to Yahoo Groups, the online service that lets non-techies set up mailing lists, but to aim its functions at political campaigns. In the long run, he said, the goals were much more ambitious:

"To establish a permanent foundation that can spearhead social software development projects for nonprofit organizations. Unless an organization is committed to hiring full time engineers to do Web development, the only and most frequent solution is to pay tons of money hiring firms to provide proprietary 'black box' Web application products. These firms a have conflict of interest -- they live off the monthly checks so they have a huge interest in owning the organization's data and locking them into their services.

"We want to create a much cheaper, open, and powerful option for these kinds of services. The goal is to have a full-time development shop that spearheads projects inside open-source communities working on the applications these organizations need, and a consulting firm that can support the toolsets. This is a much more efficient and productive way to do this kind of development."