Vergleich mit CES
Der einzige uns bekannte vergleichbare Service CES, befindet sich in Südafrika. Um Ihnen zu helfen, eine bessere Entscheidung zu treffen, haben wir mit CES gearbeitet, um diese Übersicht zu erstellen:
| Requirements | CES | Community Forge |
|---|---|---|
| Politische Struktur | CES is a not-for-profit company overseeing the Community Exchange Network. CES' chief developer is on a three-year Ashoka Fellowship. Participating exchanges join the network and have instant access to the web service. | Cforge is a not-for-profit company renting hosted web sites to communities. Member groups rent an instance of the software, which they can in principle configure and adapt to their needs. The application was designed to support the various adaptations of LETS which have been made in 20 years of experimentation. |
| Cost | CES is a free web service. Where implemented, users contribute to the running of their local exchanges through a transaction levy. | Community Forge offers its standard website and hosting as a gift. Without reciprocal gifting, it would become depleted |
| Maturity | The CES software has been developed since 2002 and is used by over 170 participating communities. | Cforge is new software, built on a modern platform which promises to stay current for several years to come. |
| Migration | CES will go the extra mile to help you migrate in and out of their system. | Cforge has gone the extra mile to make migration easy for you, but will charge you for tidying up data for import. You can export the important data to standard formats for backup or migration. |
| Technical summary. | Currently CES exchanges share a common web interface but each one is a separate instance on a central server. Future nodes will also host multiple exchanges but networking will be maintained. | Cforge is a Drupal application which uses around 30 publically contributed 'modules' + one private 'glue' module. There are several similar community sites which use Drupal's 'mutual_credit' module. |
| Roadmap | CES is working towards releasing its code as open source so as to attract more international developers in order to make the software more locally compatible. | Cforge is concentrating on innovation, standard setting, and network building. |