Hi @tomsmyth!
Preamble: I do not speak for my employer in an official role, and my experiences shared here serve to illustrate the points I'm making.re "corporations":
With "corporate" I meant users working for organisations which are large enough to warrant their own IT infrastructure and their own strong opinions on IT doctrine. Availability of funding or affiliation may vary.
This might include NGOs, state and federal government departments, Universities, industry partners.
As an example, my employer is a state government department with ~2.5k employees, about 400 staff would produce data, others will analyse, and others will act on the insight generated from our data.
Being a taxpayer funded operation, we are open to audit at any moment, and focus intensely to make our decisions ethical and transparent. With everlasting budget constraints, we are very open to reducing operating cost (e.g. by using FOSS, or getting significant rebates from large vendors).
Some of our projects are partnerships with significantly better or less funded organisations.
re funding, affiliation, co-branding etc:
A reality of public service is that spending any kind of license/hosting cost causes intense scrutiny (read: slow moving, deliberate, careful, ethical decisions). There are public perception / political pitfalls to "doing the right thing" on a technical level which may only be apparent to upper management.
One approach could be an ODK business development roadshow to reach out to these organisations. (Both ends of this conversation are way above my pay grade.)
re smaller contributions:
Techies in such organisations can certainly be good FOSS citizens and contribute GH issues and PRs, and share their experiences/solutions/implementations with the ODK community.
re making accessible:
From a technical side, having our own IT means in my case that our hosting must be cloud based (a decision made by the Auditor General), must use our vendor's cloud, and must use Kubernetes (internal IT's decision; you may have seen my struggles to get ODK Central 1.0+ working on k8s).
A hard selling point: can my IT crew spin up ODK Central within a few hours on our own IT infrastructure? ODK Aggregate (pre-dating our current IT doctrine) was easy enough to deploy (vanilla Google Cloud deployment), ODK Central 0.5/0.6 was easy enough to translate to Kubernetes, but ODK Central 1.0 on k8s is a total head-scratcher (pending Enketo settings at runtime).
If it were possible to run ODK Central on k8s, and if some of the implementation details were better documented (e.g. Postgres SSL settings, mail server options), this would open up self-hosting to organisations with IT constraints like my employer.
@issa @seadowg and @LN are my helping angels at Host ODK Central Docker images on GitHub container registry - #12 by LN and @martijnr is about to solve the last problem at https://github.com/enketo/enketo-express/pull/210
Action points:
- Top down, BD: ODK roadshow to large organisations to unlock large scale collaborations $$.
- Bottom up, grass roots: Expand on installation options to pull in grass roots users like me.