My 2012 Plone report

My 2012 Plone report
By Érico Andrei

My 2012 Plone report

Mea-culpa

Even though I've been working with Plone since 2004, evangelizing about it in Brazil (and in our amazing dialect, Brazilian Portuguese), and being the owner of the most important Plone consulting company in the country -- not the biggest or the richest -- until 2010 I was virtually unknown outside our country.

Since then I've been trying to bridge the gap between our local community -- responsible for sites like Brasil.gov.br, Serpro.gov.br and the amazing Interlegis Project -- and the bigger global one. It is not an easy task, especially when most of our local members are "shy-english speakers" and are not visible for other community members, but as I was one of them, it's my job to help.

Plone Foundation Board

Following a call from Roberto Allende, the leader of the South American Plone Community, I nominated myself to a position within the Plone Foundation Board and was elected for the 2011-2012 term.

One of my goals was to "Create a formal channel between large Plone users in our local market and the Plone Foundation". This was achieved through formal talks given at:

  • Interlegis (January): ~500 Plone sites
  • Presidência da República (August): ~50 Plone sites
  • SERPRO (August): ~500 Plone sites

I coordinated the selection process for the Plone Conference venue, helped in some guerrilla-marketing initiatives and learned a lot about our community but I think my job at the Plone Foundation Board is far from done and that's why I'm running again for the Board.

PloneGov-BR

Also, to achieve the goal of bringing our local community closer to the inner circle of Plone, I've put a lot of effort to help our local PloneGov community (PloneGov-BR), led by Cintia Cinquini and Jean Ferri which was responsible for:

  • World Plone Day Brasilia: With over 100 attendees, 4 training sessions and live streaming (http://colab.interlegis.leg.br/wiki/WorldPloneDay).
  • Plone Symposium South America: 243 attendees, 6 training sessions (http://plone.org/events/regional/pssa/2012/)
  • Caipirinha Sprint: 18 contributor agreements, 6 new committers, bug fixes in plone.app.collection, plone.api, PloneIDE and translation of buildout.coredev and plone.api.
  • Releasing Brazilian Government Plone packages to the community.

This community achieved, during this year, its own goal of finding new leaders: Tania Andrea, Marcio Mazza  and Rafahela Bazzanella being the most active of them.

Talks

As it always was -- since the good old days of Microsoft evangelism -- during this year I was invited/selected to give talks in technical conferences. In all of them either I've talked about Plone or about Plone success cases:

  • EuroPython (Firenze, Italy)
  • FISL 13 (Porto Alegre, Brazil)
  • Plone Symposium South America 2012 (Brasilia, Brazil)
  • PyConVe (Caracas, Venezuela)
  • PyConAr 4 (Quilmes, Argentina)
  • PythonBrasil[8] (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil)
  • RUPY Brasil (São José dos Campos, Brazil)
  • CONSEGI (Belém do Pará, Brazil)

Everything else

And since I love to write using bullet points, I will give you more of it:

2013?

So far I've not that much planned:

  • Europython, Firenze, during June/July
  • Plone Conference, Brasília, Brazil, during the second half of the year :-)

Yes, the rumors are true. It is time for a Plone Conference in Brazil and this is going to be big. The folks from PloneGov.Br are putting together a proposal and it will be unveiled during a lightning talk at Arnhem.

Wait for it!

Community,Plone,Open Source