Paul Everitt, Executive Director of the Plone Foundation and Founder of ZEA Partners (that's him in the middle betweeen Martin Aspeli and Duncan Booth!), offers a fantastic writeup of Ploneability, Oxfam GB's recent one-day "Plone for NGOs" event. 

I had a 45-min slot for discussing "The Plone Community: What It Is and How It Works". (You can view the slides but they probably won't be much use.) My talk focused on the mechanics of the Plone community, not the features of the software. The NGO decision-makers need such information to evaluate open source products, and hopefully, join forces with a community that shares its values. Fortunately I had some key people from Plone-land in the audience to help explain: Andrew, Martin Aspeli, and Duncan Booth.

Even more interesting is Paul's description of Romilly Gregory's talk, which covered how Oxfam wound up chosing Plone as their CMS platform.

[Oxfam's] Romilly [Gregory] gave the talk of the day. She explained the motivation that led to the [Oxfam CMS] project and the way they approached the RFP and tender process. She then gave an insider's view of how the selection process worked, including a series of graphs showing the actual results of their grading criteria on various vendors and software packages. Romilly explained how open source was added to the list a bit late in the process and how it challenged the traditional ways to do a vendor selection. Romilly also described the features of "Enterprise Plone", the package that resulted from the Oxfam project. (Note: The Oxfam project can take some or all of the credit for CMFEditions, Kupu, LinguaPlone, CompositePack, and more.)

This was a remarkable session. Very rarely do you get the honest scoop on the crucial details. The audience, I think, realized that they were getting wildly, wildly valuable information, and engaged in a serious discussion. The back-and-forth was a joy to see: the NGO decision-makers were deeply interested, asking spot-on questions, adding follow-ups to each others' questions, and getting straight answers from Oxfam. The session closed with a tremendous buzz and energy.

Great writeup, Paul.  Thanks for sharing.  My only regret is that I couldn't be there.