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.