Paul Everitt asked me to do some storytelling about Plone.NET and I agreed to do this because I need some practice - I'm becoming a dad in 4 months time. Hopefully the story is as colourful, scary and hopeful as most fairy tales, and as real.

In short the best introduction to the blog posts that I will attempt in the time to come, is from Paul's request to me:

"Initiatives like plone.net take some work to make them feel solid. As the insiders work, they need to know more about the big picture and also need to get some positive reinforcement, that their work is valued. Then, as things get closer to reality, the outsiders need to know what it is, why they should care, how it is evolving, etc. They need to see energy for plone.net to feel real. In short, we need to do some storytelling."

At the Plone conference in Seattle two weeks ago, there was strong agreement that we need to market Plone better, or as Alan Runyan put it "pour gasoline on the fire". So even though all Plone consultants and companies are already inundated with work, we want more!

Are we greedy? No. We really love Zope and Plone and what it is becoming and we want this to grow. We don't necessarily know how to do this but we definitely have a few bright people and tons of dedication amongst us that should keep us going. And hopefully we remain humble enough to ask those who know.

As a first initiative to introduce more of Plone to the world, we need to populate Plone.NET. So create an account and contribute what you can. This is the place where you can brag about what you are doing with Plone for the benefit of Plone, yourself and your own organisation. And if it is not working as expected please report it so that we can get it fixed.

I'm not going to assume that everyone will automatically contribute to Plone.NET. I can imagine a few obstacles that might prevent you from publishing case studies and sites to Plone.NET. The most common one will probably be that you don't have enough time, which is understandable since you already doing so much Plone work. Solution: MAKE time. Please :-)

You might be reluctant to contribute to Plone.NET because your competitors are listed there. Hey, there is something wrong with your thinking here. The goal of Plone.NET is to grow the market so that it can sustain all of us. More Plone companies alone will not help grow the market - we need to showcase our collaboration on Plone.NET.

I have a feeling that we have a very unique organisation of businesses around Plone. Many Plone companies are betting there whole business on Zope and Plone and are actively contributing to it's growth. This is very different to companies using more established technologies while being very far from the center of the development and the developer community. When people start using Plone they are drawn closer to the community and become involved, as opposed to staying users on the fringe. The fact that two thirds of the attendees of this years Plone conference where newcomers is testimony to the magnetism of our community.

I am not able to express this "difference" in more concrete terms yet, but I hope that it will become clear as Plone.NET grows and becomes solid.

Plone is mentioned briefly in a new working paper titled "The Business of Free Software: Enterprise Incentives, Investment, and Motivation in the Open Source Community" by Dr. Marco Iansiti, Ph.D. and Gregory L. Richards, published by Harvard Business School.

Key conclusion: "[V]endors have not invested uniformly in high impact projects. Rather, it appears that vendors are investing in high impact OSS projects that can to serve in a complementary fashion to draw revenues to their own (largely proprietary) core businesses."

Last week's Plone Conference was truly phenomenal - provocative, intense, and fun (big thanks Jon and ONE/Northwest!).

One of the most amazing things I experienced last week was alluded to in Eben Moglen's keynote (to be posted soon)- the manner in which this community has managed to bring together people who don't ordinarily interact.

Throughout the breakout sessions, I continued to question dividing us up according to our respective vertical sectors - Corporate, Non-Profit, Educational, and Government. As I have begun to write about elsewhere, systems like Plone can help balance the flow of communication and power between people in a variety of situations and settings. Content, collaboration, and community are contexts which exist across sectors, and the tools we all need cross over as well (sometimes with slightly different tunings).

In many ways lumping together all the folks involved with education is odd. Universities are microcosms of cities, and their IT needs are as diverse as the the rest of the world. However, there are still structural and social similarities that form the basis for common language and culture. After engaging with my fellow educators a the educational panel session and the BOF session I understood the value of us sharing and strategizing, beyond just commiseration.

But through it all, there was one thing that united all of the different attendees - a piece of general purpose software called 'Plone'.

It is worth dwelling on this mixture of participants and the varying forces they apply to the software. Lessig and Benkler have both been writing a great deal about hybrid economies lately, trying to understand their rhythms, and how we might be able to design them to succeed. They have been writing generally about the "commercial economy" and the "second economy" (sharing, social production, etc), but the lessons may cross over directly to our community.

I realized in Seattle how beneficial diversity can be for software production.
Most of the consultants using Plone are there strictly for traditional market considerations - to make a profit. They are helping to keep the software honest. Unlike some other open source projects which exclusively service the educational world, Plone is not sheltered from the raw, harsh forces of the commercial market. This means that some of the people using Plone use it because it helps them get their jobs done efficiently. Others have called this "productivity arbitrage", and it is a concept that may hold the key to designing successful open source projects.

It is challenging to imagine working backwards and trying to design a software ecology which captures the hearts and minds of such a diverse following. No small task.

As Rheingold said "There's been an assumption that since communism failed, capitalism is triumphant, therefore humans have stopped evolving new systems for economic production." - Is Plone's ecology an example of one of these new systems, and if so, what are our distinguishing characteristics?

At Plone Conference 2006, Martin Aspeli led a workshop session entitled "Improving Plone's Add-on Products Story."  I think this may ultimately turn out to be one of the most important sessions from the whole conference in terms of its long-term positive impact on the community.

One of the coolest things about Plone is its library of over 400 add-on products.  It's one of the many signs of our community's vibrancy, talent and productivity.  Many add-on products are fantastic, and in fact ultimately get incorporated into the Plone core.  But, this sprawling effevescence of software also presents challenges.   Community-contributed software varies widely in quality.   Some of gets abandoned.  There are multiple tools for some common functions (e.g. blogging).  It's hard to know what to use, what to avoid, and what to jump in with and help.

While I couldn't attend the session (much to my regret), I was really pleased to see that they got out a bunch of notes, and also immediately formed a working group to carry the effort forward.  They're using OpenPlans.org to power a workspace, listserv, etc.

Check it out.  There are lots of ways to get involved for both technical and not-so-technical folks.

I think a lot of good is going to come of this.  I'm looking forward to participating.