Article by Jim Fruchterman and Steve Francis: “What happens when a nonprofit program or an entire organization needs to shut down? The communities being served, and often society as a whole, are the losers. What if it were possible to mitigate some of that damage by sharing valuable intellectual property assets of the closing effort for longer term benefit? Organizations in these tough circumstances must give serious thought to a responsible exit for their intangible assets.
At the present moment of unparalleled disruption, the entire nonprofit sector is rethinking everything: language to describe their work, funding sources, partnerships, and even their continued existence. Nonprofit programs and entire charities will be closing, or being merged out of existence. Difficult choices are being made. Who will fill the role of witness and archivist to preserve the knowledge of these organizations, their writings, media, software, and data, for those who carry on, either now or in the future?
We believe leaders in these tough days should consider a model we’re calling Exit to Open (E2O) and related exit concepts to safeguard these assets going forward…
Exit to Open (E2O) exploits three elements:
- We are in an era where the cost of digital preservation is low; storing a few more bytes for a long time is cheap.
- It’s far more effective for an organization’s staff to isolate and archive critical content than an outsider with limited knowledge attempting to do so later.
- These resources are of greatest use if there is a human available to interpret them, and a deliberate archival process allows for the identification of these potential interpreters…(More)”.