'My son,' the father said, 'you are always with me, and everything I have is yours. But we had to celebrate and be glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.'

-Luke 15:31-32

It's time to slay the fatted calf.

As a hybrid nonprofit/tech provider, DIA's animating vision has always been empowering nonprofits. Open APIs have been a bedrock assumption of that understanding since day one: as our guy put it on last year's Open API debate, "nonprofits can do more than vendors can imagine they can do".

Kintera and Convio just got a little religion, too. And since we're not above glorying in converts, we're excited to see the big commercial players starting to come around.

Judi Sohn and Michelle Murrain have more about those announcements. Allan Benamer has some thoughts from a coders' standpoint.

Personally, I'm pretty much in Beth's boat -- "wouldn't know an API from Ape if it stood right in front of me beat its chest".

Above: an image capture of a third-party application that increments a counter based on data pulled from our API

But I've seen some groups use our API to do some pretty cool stuff, often stuff we had no idea they were doing.

Mashing up with outside applications, custom data sets and (of course) Google maps.

Radically customizing pages -- even reworking DIA-hosted pages.

Content management integration.

Arranging custom database syncs.

The presence of some ready-made extensions is a very nice addition by our stock-indexed brethren. That can really make a difference for organizations who might lack the resources to engineer the code themselves.

We've been toiling in the field on a bit of that ourselves, and with any luck more vendor competition means more options for everyone going forward.

Hey, that's cool. We don't need the calf. The sector has something to celebrate: that's worth a few hosannas.