I haven’t posted much here lately, but I have been writing. I recently finished my first semester as a doctoral student in Columbia's school of journalism and one of the papers I completed draws directly on my experiences in the Plone Community.  A few years ago I remember being struck at how different open source development was from what I (and presumably others) imagined it to be. I kept pitching human interest stories to journalists, ones that might emphasize the playfulness, the sprinting, and the organizational experimentation, but got very few nibbles. So, I finally wrote some of this up myself before it all fades from memory:

The paper was for a wonderful class this semester at the New School taught by Paolo Carpignano (The Political Economy of Media - here is the syllabus). The class was all about the shifting relations between fabrication and communication, or more colloquially, work and play. We opened with Marx and Hannah Arendt and closed with Yochai Benkler and danah boyd. The piece I wrote is personal and anecdotal, but reflects on all that our community has taught me about free software, free culture, organizing, consensus building and the day to day politics of software development.

enjoy.

On the off chance that you're like me and prone to falling behind on your various Plone list-related reading, I'm soliciting feedback on my plan for ticket #7813 aiming to "make sure the "strategic integration" story with other systems is visible and documented".   Comments welcome.  Full plan below:

With ongoing support, feedback, and guidance from the broader Plone
community, I volunteer to serve as "champion" of trac issue #7813,
'Make sure the "strategic integration" story with other systems is
visible and documented' (http://dev.plone.org/plone/ticket/7813).  I
will do so by offering to invest time/energy within the following two
focus areas:

1) Developing code, making increasingly better releases, documenting,
and marketing for the Plone integration with Salesforce.com as the/a
Plone Customer Relationship Management (CRM) story

2) Beg, bribe, borrow, and steal case studies and documentation of
successful implementations of Plone integrating with system X for
plone.net and plone.org/documentation. I'm not able to offer code in
this department, but I will aim to highlight successes and possibly
over time aggregate pain and resources for new integration territories
we'd collectively like to explore.

=-=-=-=-=-=-
Deliverables - I.E. what will exist in 6-9 months
=-=-=-=-=-=-

Plone with Salesforce.com serving as CRM:
 - Increasingly more mature releases of the following suite of
products: http://snipurl.com/plonesfproducts
 - A solid manual at:
http://plone.org/documentation/manual/integrating-plone-with-salesforce.com
 - Personal and Plone community participation in:
http://groups.google.com/group/plonesf/topics
 - Increased use of the term "CRM" in close proximity to the word
Plone, so that folks Googling for a CRM that works with Plone see this
as a strength for Plone, rather than a weakness.

Shed light on the "strategic integration" story:
 - 3-5 "integration-centric" case studies exist on plone.net
 - A "3rd party integration" category for: http://plone.org/products.
Ensure tagging is happening.
 - Enhance "Plays well with others" section of Plone.org homepage
under the "Standards Compliant" section
 - Bonus points: Hightlight commonly needed integration stories
hopefully causing new tools/documentation to emerge

=-=-=-=-=-=-
What success looks like
=-=-=-=-=-=-
I don't think the above alone will accomplish this, but it's a start.
I think longterm success would be:

- Members of other software communities (i.e. Salesforce.com, Moodle,
Facebook, <insert system that can be integrated with here>) learn
about and deem Plone a viable and *complimentary* CMS.  This knowledge
is learned within the context of their existing communities.
- Integrates well with X is easily found and helps certain decision
makers decide to use Plone.  Seminal "why we chose Plone" blog posts
appear citing integration as a key reason :)
- Plone continues to thrive by staying focused on what it does best
(as seen with future code Plone releases).  When strategic, Plone
integrates nicely in order to avoid spreading itself too thin.

=-=-=-=-=-=-
Call for Participation
=-=-=-=-=-=-
If Plone's integration makes you excited.  Logical next steps include:

1) Give me feedback on this plan
2) Watch ticket #7813 at http://dev.plone.org/plone/ticket/7813
3) Tell me on list of off list what you've integrated Plone with and
why you think it's interesting.  We'll turn interesting stories into
case studies.
4) If Salesforce.com as a CRM for Plone excites you, join this Google
Group: http://groups.google.com/group/plonesf/

Hopefully this is pretty clear and actionable.  I look forward to the
ensuing discussions.  Let me know what I'm missing and what seems
vague or unachievable.

... or "So, we're hiring a database developer to help with CRM implementations ..."  But, that alternate title isn't really the point (unless you're interested ;) )

As far as I know, the following PloneFormGen "Form Folder" is the first publicly available, advertised, and production use of the Salesforce Adapter for PloneFormGen (please correct me, if I'm wrong).  If you haven't heard about this piece of code that connects Plone to Salesforce.com via PloneFormGen, you might want to start here or here. 

This is great for a couple reasons:

• The particular use case (i.e. collecting applicants for an open job offering) is one that I certainly never would have thought of -- and that's the point.   Creating these shouldn't take a Plone developer.  Nor should coming up with the possible use cases.  It should be the responsibility of staff that need to build the relationships they need in order to do their work.  My colleague Steve is no slouch with CRM and Salesforce.com, but the portion of getting this on our Plone-powered site doesn't take any additional expertise.
• It will help flush out any bugs, so that we can push onto a more mature-sounding release (i.e. final, not beta or release candidate)
• It comes equipped with the following explanation, which I think is fantastic:

Geek FYI: this is a form built in Plone that sends your data directly to our Salesforce.com database. We'll receive a notification when that data gets created. You'll also be automatically added to a Campaign that will capture all applicants. I've got a view in the Console for keeping track of all the applicants for this position. If you understood all that, or really want to, that's a good sign...

So, um, test it out if you want...