Internal Competition
Given that Greenpeace is the kind of organisation that sets a lot of store by things like community, democracy and five year plans you'd be forgiven for thinking that we don't have a lot in the way of internal competition. However you'd be wrong. Because Greenpeace is organised as a kind of franchise of 27 separate organisations there's no shortage of opportunities for competing solutions to develop, leading to an awful lot of 'cyberdiversity' within our systems.
Not everywhere though. Where a service proves itself best in class it tends to get adopted widely, sometimes even universally, indeed once Metcalfes law kicks in it's easy for a system to become 'best for us' even if it's not going to be 'best in class'. One system which is on it's way to such success is our content management system, which is known by the name 'Planet 2' and is currently in use by a large majority of our national offices, with more coming on board all the time.
One office considering moving to Planet 2 is the UK office, and they've engaged the services of Important Projects to help them make the decision. Which means our homegrown OpenACS solution is going to be duking it out with Drupal and Plone based tools for the right to deliver www.greeenpeace.org.uk . These kind of evaluations are a great way for local offices to keep us at the centre aware of whether we're delivering things they actually want, and make us work hard to deliver value through to the offices that rely on us.
I also like these contests. Drupal and Plone are newer platforms than Open ACS, and since they'll only have to support the UK office can offer more flexibility than our one stop shop. However when it comes to comparing a custom implementation to off the shelf software I'm reminded of something Fred Brookes wrote
"The real tiger is never a match for the paper one, unless actual use is wanted. Then the virtues of reality have a satisfaction all their own."