Business - Written Tuesday, June 10, 2008 by Denis Hancock - 2 Comments

‘Be Prepared’ goes open source: The Boy Scouts of America

The motto of Boy Scouts America is elegant in its simplicity: “Be Prepared“. As reported on ComputerWorld (which i found via Slashdot), the 98 year old organization has decided that “Open Source Software, built for the community, by the community” will help them better live up to this motto. This is no small endeavor – the software will aim to support the almost three million Scouts in America, in addition to the 1.1 million adults in the group. Interestingly, it appears that their decision was made based on the advice of a group of corporate CIOs (remember the days when corporate CIOs were the ones against open source?), and the open source site went live a month ago to help centralize and streamline application development. To quote Gregory Edwards (a contractor who helped create the site):

“It’s a true golden opportunity for the open-source community, too… by connecting it with a large group of interested adults and tech-hungry children who can be inspired to use and learn about open source. The open-source community and the Boy Scouts can spread the word on it.”

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