Meyer Memorial Trust, Oregon’s largest private foundation, is funding a round of further development on Grass Commons’ open source WagN software, which allows communities of users to collaborate democratically on indexable research and record keeping.

Marie Deatherage, Meyer Memorial’s Director of Communication and Information, explains “This is a logical extension of Meyer Memorial Trust’s support and use of Open Source Software. This project helps further our values of openness, innovation and service leadership. We utilize and support development of OS tools because we think the future is open, and because we think it is a smart investment on behalf of nonprofits.”

WagN, which was debuted in July as the underlying software for Grass Commons’ Hooze.org combines wikis and tagging to create “wagging.” Wagging lets users create structured data as they go, so that they can hop in and start research without developing costly data structures first.

Meyer Memorial will also be using the software for its own internal knowledge management system. Given the diversity of their grant areas, the foundation must keep track of a great deal of interrelated research. They need their data to be granular, indexable, and easily queried (as in a database), but they also want to be able to add new types of information on the fly without having to build new capacities into the software (as in a wiki). WagN is designed to address both needs.

Aaron Nelson, Network Administrator at the Meyer Trust, says “The management of data is difficult, the management of complex data relationships is even more so. WagN’s design makes these relationships occur organically and grow rationally with little effort.”

The Meyer Trust has awarded Grass Commons a grant of $ 15,000 for further open source WagN development.