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title: Open Source Project Management
date: 2025-12-27
summary: Tools for coordinating volunteers, tracking initiatives, and managing community projects. When your project management lives on infrastructure you control, your institutional knowledge stays with your community.
draft: True
---
Every community organization juggles projects—campaigns to coordinate, events to plan, initiatives to track, volunteers to organize. Without good systems, this work lives in scattered spreadsheets, email threads, and people's heads.
Commercial project management tools like Asana, Monday, and Jira solve this problem, but at a cost: per-seat pricing that scales with your team, data stored on corporate servers, and dependency on companies whose priorities may not align with yours.
Open source project management tools offer the same capabilities with different tradeoffs: your data stays yours, your costs stay predictable, and your institutional knowledge stays with your community.
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## Why This Matters for Communities
### The Unique Challenges of Volunteer Organizations
Community organizations face coordination challenges that commercial tools weren't designed for:
**Unpredictable availability**: Unlike employees, volunteers contribute on their own schedules. Tracking who's doing what becomes essential when you can't assume consistent availability.
**High turnover**: Volunteers come and go. Without good systems, institutional knowledge disappears when people leave. Project management tools preserve context across transitions.
**Transparency requirements**: Nonprofits and community organizations often need to demonstrate accountability to funders, members, and the public. Visible project tracking helps.
**Flat structures**: Many community organizations avoid hierarchy, but still need coordination. Project management tools provide structure without bureaucracy.
### The Cost Argument
A 50-person volunteer organization using commercial tools might pay $6,000-18,000 per year in subscription fees. That's program budget being spent on software.
Self-hosted open source alternatives cost only hosting fees—often $20-100 per month. The savings can fund actual community work.
### The Values Argument
Organizations that advocate for open, democratic, community-controlled systems should use tools that embody those same values. Using proprietary software while advocating for digital commons is a contradiction.
### The Sustainability Argument
When your organization's institutional memory lives in a commercial SaaS product, you're one acquisition, one price increase, or one pivot away from disruption. Open source tools put you in control of your own continuity.
---
## Key Features Communities Need
### Kanban Boards
Visual workflows are perfect for volunteer coordination. Anyone can see at a glance what's "To Do," "In Progress," and "Done." No training required—the interface is intuitive.
### Gantt Charts
Grant-funded projects have milestones and deadlines. Gantt charts help demonstrate to funders that timelines are being met and resources allocated properly.
### Collaboration Features
- Comments and @mentions for asynchronous communication
- File attachments to keep documents with related work
- Activity feeds to see what happened while you were away
- Notifications to stay informed without constant check-ins
### Role-Based Permissions
Different people need different access:
- Board members see high-level progress
- Project leads manage tasks
- Volunteers see only what they need
- Sensitive information stays protected while transparency is maintained
### Time Tracking
Many grants require reporting on hours spent. Built-in time tracking eliminates separate timesheets and ensures accurate reporting.
---
## Choosing the Right Tool
### OpenProject: The Full-Featured Option
Best for organizations needing traditional project management with Gantt charts, work breakdown structures, and time tracking.
**Strengths**: Most feature-complete; strong for traditional PM methodologies; excellent for grant reporting and complex projects.
**Used by**: Greenpeace Germany, City of Cologne, Siemens, universities and research institutions.
### Taiga: The Agile-Friendly Option
Best for teams who want a beautiful, intuitive interface with strong agile methodology support.
**Strengths**: Beautiful UI/UX; intuitive for non-technical users; excellent Scrum and Kanban support; wiki documentation built in.
**Used by**: Software teams, design teams, civic tech organizations.
### Wekan: The Simple Option
Best for teams wanting a simple, Trello-like kanban experience they fully control.
**Strengths**: Simplest to use; lowest learning curve; lightweight; Trello muscle memory transfers directly.
**Used by**: Small teams, privacy-conscious organizations looking for a Trello replacement.
---
## Open Source Options
| Project | Description |
|:--------|:------------|
| [OpenProject](https://www.openproject.org) | Comprehensive project management with Gantt charts, agile boards, time tracking, and more. <br><small>📊 Used by Greenpeace Germany, City of Cologne, universities worldwide.</small> <br><small>📦 [GitHub](https://github.com/opf/openproject) · GPL-3.0</small> |
| [Taiga](https://taiga.io) | Beautiful agile project management with Kanban, Scrum, and wiki. <br><small>📊 Popular with software teams and civic tech organizations.</small> <br><small>📦 [GitHub](https://github.com/kaleidos-ventures/taiga-docker) · MPL-2.0</small> |
| [Wekan](https://wekan.github.io) | Open source Trello-like kanban board. <br><small>📊 Used as Trello replacement by privacy-conscious organizations.</small> <br><small>📦 [GitHub](https://github.com/wekan/wekan) · MIT</small> |
---
## Quick Comparison
| Feature | OpenProject | Taiga | Wekan |
|:--------|:------------|:------|:------|
| Kanban boards | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Scrum/Agile | Yes | Yes | Basic |
| Gantt charts | Yes | No | No |
| Time tracking | Yes | No | No |
| Wiki/Docs | Yes | Yes | No |
| Learning curve | Medium | Low-Medium | Low |
| Best for | Complex projects | Agile teams | Simple kanban |
---
## Getting Started
Start with your actual needs, not the most feature-rich option. A team that just needs kanban boards will be frustrated by OpenProject's complexity. An organization tracking grant milestones will be frustrated by Wekan's simplicity.
All three tools support self-hosting with Docker, making deployment accessible for organizations with basic technical capacity. Cloud-hosted options are also available for those who prefer managed services.
The key insight: project management tools are where your organization's institutional knowledge accumulates. When that knowledge lives on infrastructure you control, it stays with your community regardless of what happens to any vendor.
Every dollar spent on self-hosted infrastructure builds something you own. Every hour of organizational history stays under your control. That's not just cost savings—it's organizational sovereignty.