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CiviCRM is a free open-source software platform for “Constituent Relationship Management” or “Citizen Relationship Management”, that is, for working with contacts and with processes connected to contacts. CiviCRM provides a large number of powerful tools, but offers only limited guidance regarding purposes or workflows.

Chaz Hutton: Desire Paths. London 2025. https://chazhutton.com

Although the software has been developed and used worldwide for more than twenty years, its practical appropriation still presupposes considerable prior knowledge. The software is not self-explanatory. It becomes powerful primarily in the hands of those who already possess the knowledge and methods required to understand how and for what purposes such software can be used. Accordingly, the existing documentation remains predominantly feature-oriented and only to a limited extent unfolds along the lines of real-world usage situations. This paper builds upon my reflections in “Toward Overcoming Suboptimal Provision of Free and Open-Source Software: The Case of CiviCRM”. Because there is no systematic representation of the typical ways in which people without prior knowledge solve everyday organisational problems with CiviCRM, the dissemination and practical use of the software remain below its potential.

I therefore propose the concept of the “desire path” as a guiding metaphor for describing functioning modes of use. Continue reading →

[Abstract] This text examines the suboptimal provision of free and open-source software (FOSS) using the example of CiviCRM, a software for constituent relationship management that has been developed worldwide for and by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) for 20 years, that holds significant market potential within the EU, and that is already used by thousands of NGOs across the EU. The suboptimal provision of CiviCRM is understood in this text neither as a temporary deficit nor as the result of individual failure, but rather as a stable development path emerging from rational individual decisions made by the actors involved. Analytically, a distinction is made between the provision of software functionality and the capacity to appropriate the software. The text is structured in four steps: it first describes an observable suboptimality in usage and diffusion, then explains this as an emergent result of rational decisions in the sense of the collective action problem as described by Mancur Olson, and subsequently discusses institutional governance approaches, drawing on Elinor Ostrom, for overcoming this suboptimality. The aim of this analysis is to make visible the welfare potential of the software that has not yet been realized and to identify points of leverage through which this potential can be unlocked under realistic institutional conditions. In an additional note, the existing governance structure of CiviCRM is reconstructed and assessed in terms of its scope, representativeness, and capacity. In addition, it includes a risk analysis with regard to the geopolitical and legal embedding of central elements of CiviCRM’s governance in the United States, as well as an exploratory attempt to approximate the scale of suboptimally bound resources and welfare potentials. Finally, the existing situation is interpreted not only as a structural problem but also as a strategic opportunity: particularly for implementation agencies, which can contribute to the transformation of the existing development path through standardized services, scaling, and constructive integration into governance structures. Continue reading →