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.

Many of us are familiar with the One Laptop Per Child project, which is making technology and information more accessible. Eben Moglen talked about this at his keynote at the 2006 Plone Conference (link to video, youtube version). What struck me as most powerful about the project was the clear, concise design principles. From the principles, you know exactly what the project is, and without any of those things, it would not still be OLPC.

At the Moglen talk, I asked about what Plone's design principles are. The question was more for the community, and a lot of people seem interested in the question (and it's answer!) over the last year...yet nothing happened. So, a year later, I started an informal survey at the Naples conference.

With the idea of making a draft of what Plone's core design principles are, I have been asking people around the conference, including core developers, board members, integrators, end users, new developers,...though there is obviously a diversity that we would expect from our community, I am trying to synthesize here the responses, with the intent of submitting the words of the community back to the community for review :)

And with no further ado...my attempt at articulating Plone core values:

1. Easy to use (to add/edit content)!
Responses: Easy to use (highest hits of any), usability (high number of hits), intuitive

This is the bread and butter of Plone, the part that every one of us experiences when we see it and use it, and the fundamental part of . Plone's commitment to usability since the beginning is apparent in the product and the community, and it is core to Plone to make it easy to use for content management.

2. Approachable
Responses: sensible defaults, easy to get, easy to deploy, easy to download and install, opportunity/potential, giving technical people (though not necessarily developers) a great system that they can gradually get more into the customizing with a steady and approachable learning curve.

This principle is about making it easy for people to get into Plone and get hooked on how cool it is, and then be brought through a manageable learning curve as they do more of their own custom implementations. It means out of the box, the settings make sense and that we empower people with tools that give them lots of potential. It also means that smart scripters (even without Plone development experience) can get into doing custom work also.

3. "Developer Nectar", ie Built to Last, quality framework
Responses: Safe customizations, smart adaptability, easy to extend, extensible, easy to develop, user centric, use case driven, best practices, web standards, accessibility, good error messages, cross platform, test-driven, solid development, open source, scalable (up and down), passion for the technology (doing things the right way, even if it is a new technology).

Moving on from those getting into the customizations, there is the more serious development work in Plone, which is solidly built on best practices (web standards, accessibility, development process, test-driven, etc). This is about helping developers learn about and adhere to good practices, as they get deeper in the system, by having defined processes and practices. It is also about using cool technologies that keep developers interested and having fun. Finally, it means that we provide direction to the developers that originates in the way people want to use the system, captured as use cases.

4. Fun! Community!
Responses: fun, fun atmosphere, entertaining, community (one of the more popular responses, though without certainty that it applies to Plone the software, but knowing it is essential to survival and sustainability of Plone)

Some intertwined concepts here, that I am calling Fun & Community. First on the fun: this is about being fun to use and develop with, as well as being a thriving community with amazing people. The community is an obvious part of anyone who already participates. It is amazing, whether it is the "mindshare" or finding others working in your area, or just having a great time with passionate, bright people, Plone's community is a huge asset. Without it Plone wouldn't be Plone. The community also provides lots of support, which helps sustain it and make it more approachable.

So, that's the core. Definitely needs language refinement and maybe also refactoring, but I submit it for your review :)

There is one item I am on the fence about. It is something that is not core now, though important, and which, if it were to be core, would affect certain decisions and involve some tradeoffs. That item, is "collaboration" as a use case for Plone the software (there is tons in the community itself, which is not what I am referring to here). There are definitely some collaborative features in Plone, but most are through addons or configurations (a few new ones in 3.0, but still lacks several).

Conclusions

The idea of core values or design principles is that they are the things that never change, that, if removed, would take away the Ploneness. The core principles don't necessarily have to unequivically describe the current product. The fact that we don't already have these principles articulated means that it may not be true, but it should help us to enhance the product in the future.

This is being submitted for comment and review from the community. The idea is *not* (did you miss that? I said NOT) to make a long list. Core principles lists should be as small as possible; the goal is not a comprehensive list of things we like, but instead the smallest list of things we can't live without.

One note about timeliness...as announced at the conference in the State of Plone talk, there will be a Plone visioning/strategy meeting in Feb 2007 at the GooglePlex. I strongly believe that we need to identify the core principles[1] before we engage in visioning, so here's my small contribution to that.

From talking with others in this process, I got a lot of good, complementary ideas as well as clarification on this excercise. I want to thank Paul, Jon, Martin for supporting the inquiry process. 

References:

[1] The book, Built to Last, is a classic presentation of the concept of core values as necessary for a company/organization/movement's longterm success. It defines these as the small collection of values that *never change*. These are the heart, stability of the institution.

Discover Magazine's new Plone-powered website just got Slashdotted.  Looks like this already-busy site is handling the traffic spike just fine. 

Perhaps predictably, the article Slashdot picked up on is about mapping links in the blogosphere.

Slashdot (!) had a link to an interesting presentation on open source business models given by Brent Williams at EclipseCon. 

"Collaboration via the net does not necessarily require monolithic, expensive tool suites that aim to do everything under one umbrella. We will share and demonstrate the use of readily available, mostly free, discrete sets of "small" and "loosely joined" technologies - weblogs, wikis, instant messaging, audio/video chat. The loose joining means that how they are connected are not necessarily in the programming of the software, but the ways people can use them in a social context that is an environment of dynamic, changing relationships and connections, rather than the rigid, limited ones defined by computer code."

EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES Tag Clouds in the Blogosphere: Electronic Literacy and Social Networking

So what does this mean for the other sectors where Plone operates? I have been hanging out in Drupal land lately, and for a variety of reasons I don't consider that platform to be a serious threat to Plone, in the long term (more on that in another post).

On the other hand, and this might raise some eyebrows, folks maybe should take a peek at Gallery 2.2 . Yeah, its in php, and they don't have enough unit tests, but it does a really nice job of solving the "bucket" problem - that is, easily publishing a repository of digital assets on the web. Their next version will handle audio and video files, and the software is popular enough that people have built desktop clients for iPhoto and Picassa. They have a good story for multi-site installations, upgrades, and even a web based mechanism for upgrading plugins. Just imagine mashing up this backend store with a social-networking tool like elgg. Maybe you could create complex and elaborate views of your data with widgets coming out of the simile project (exhibit and timeline, in particular). You might even be able to use a visual programming tool, like Yahoo's pipes or IBM's QEDWiki to assemble this application.

The real threat here isn't Gallery. Its the loosely-joined, disconnected applications that are becoming connected through the component architecture of HTTP itself (plus a few decent patterns and standards). No one wants to be trapped in a silo, not even if its decked out with hardwood floors, leather furniture, and a marble mantle.

Plone can be a major provider in this hub of communications, maybe even sometimes at the center. But we do need to try to anticipate the future role of the CMS in the face of asymmetric competition.

As Laura Trippi once put it, Content Management Systems like Plone, are turning content produces into coders, and vice versa. We're creating monsters, and they might soon be outgrowing the tools they were weaned on.

(thanks to Biella for the video reference and the critical commentary).

On the off chance that you don't grace the Plone list for NGOs or missed the training opportunity on plone.org and weren't able to join, Joel Burton of PloneBootcamps.com and myself were asked to help N-TEN represent Plone in it's "Ask the Expert" session.  The transcript for the 1 hour session is now available.  Check it out if you're interested.

So, how did it go?

Personally, it was an honor and I rather enjoyed taking part in the session, despite feeling a bit hesitant about the "expert" labelling.   A few additional thoughts and reactions to the session follow:

• Joel Burton, of course, was his usual brilliant self at explaining complicated concepts in the somewhat challenging IRC format. 
  
• Making the previous point even more impressive ... my only complaint was continually feeling frustrated with the difficulties of articulating answers over the same format.  N-TEN was using a web-based IRC client called Gabbly, which doesn't support tab completion of screen nicks.  It's incredible how big a difference that makes to perceived typing speed :)
  
• There were significantly fewer blanket "compare Plone to Drupal and Joomla" questions than I anticipated.  Those questions are fine, but without specific feature requirements and use-cases, it's quite difficult to accurately represent where Plone definitely excels from a content editor perspective (besides the fantastic usability, that is!).  Hint: it excels at everything ;^)
• It was a lot more of pointing people in the right direction to self-serve, rather than specifically answering their questions.  The scope is obviously vast.  We made a solid pitch to get people to the already incredible and existing resources that the Plone community offers including the lists and the #plone IRC channel.
• Hosting.  I knew it would come up and it's one of the more challenging ones to answer as it comes down to very fundamental differences to the architecture of Plone versus some other systems with which people may already be familiar.  It's great that we can point folks to Webfaction, High Speed Rails, Six Feet Up, as well as NPower -- all of which credible serve the nonprofit sector.   Additionally, it's great that your typical nonprofit can understand that the potential benefits of the Plone stack are worth the additional $10-20 USD/month, that sometimes commodity LAMP hosting has its drawbacks, and want to invest in their web presence.  Despite all of this, I still think there's an incredible opportunity for all the would-be Plone hosting providers to come into this space and greatly contribute to the story of the platform for the one off site.  
  
• In talking with N-TEN's director of programs, I was told it was quite well received by attendees and compared favorably with the other sessions on Drupal & Joomla.

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?

    Congrats to gnome team for picking Plone.  Before they start down the road of a implementation -- I would like to put my 2c.  This is only one way to use the Plone CMS.  Many people do not follow this approach, i.e. plone.org.  But I believe if you have limited Plone expertise and you want people to change the public website very easily in the future it might make some sense.

    These suggestions revolve around open/free software that our company built -- the principles are what really matter -- and I dont have 1st hand experience with similiar Plone/Zope tools.  But all software is open and can easily be read/modified/abused to do whatever you want -- hooray FOSS.  This is certainly not the path of least resistance.  But it formalizes the use and expectations of the Plone CMS is a reasonable fashion.

    Seperate the content management and content delivery.  You can do this both logically (staging, skin switching, etc) and physically (cmfdeployment, entransit).  So lets stick with the simplest which is keeping everything inside of the Zope application server and database.

    All of the 'content editing' can happen in Plone with minimal customization, which is good.  The further you get away from 'out of the box' in the way of UI and editing environment.  You are bound to feel pain in the future as Plone UI templates change.  And the reason people pick Plone is the base authoring environment is decent.  We separate it out by having two containers: 'public and 'authoring'.  The 'public' container is where all the content is staged to and the 'authoring' container is where all content edits, workflow, and sophisticated collaboration occurs.

    There is a great tutorial that explains this technique written by Martin Aspelli (UK) titled,  Creating public websites with staging and custom skins NOTE: I can not say Martin would vouch for this approach he only wrote the doc.

    The 'public' user interface (gnome.org) will change much more frequently and can be changed indepedently of the 'authoring' user interface.  The public interface is where the gnome.org skin will be applied and where all the presentation logic can be isolated.  You want the 'public' site to have the least amount of logic and features as possible.  You *do not* want the Plone skin.  You want the 'gnome.org' skin to be displayed for the 'public' website.

    In my experience the website will evolve/change frequently over time while changes and enhancements to the CMS (Plone) will become less frequent. Also isolating your modifications into at least two sets of modules, 'authoring' enhancements and 'website' themes/views/etc.  Since the website software will be touched frequently and often -- use z3 views and have nothing complex in the templates.  Tres Seaver wrote something called 'PushPage' would sounds ideal -- only variables (functions, classes, values) explicitly exposed to the template can be used in presentation.  This guarantee's the templates remain as clean and explicit as possible.

    Also as a side effect you can adjust database/caching parameters better between authoring and public containers.  Oh and hardware: nothing less than 2GB of RAM and dual 3GHz.  Use LDAP.  If you want to use a external search engine it's easier to add it to the public interface -- I recommend Xapian.  Especially if your 'public' container gets notifications that content is being added its a snap to notify xapian or other systems of updates (deletes, edits, etc).

    Hope you guys have a good experience.  (Un)fortunately there are many ways to deploy a Plone CMS.  It really depends on the skill sets and isolating the complexities of the system so that future developers enhancing gnome.org can focus 100% on the 'public' website and minimize exposure to the 'authoring' environment.  Keep in touch.

     I just got off the phone with a potential client.  And we told him our soonest availability and he chuckled.  He said that every Plone consulting firm he spoke with has the same problem!  Wow.  This is fantastic news.  I've heard similiar remarks from Plone consulting firms that I speak with on a daily basis.  In fact its not only that Zope/Plone are doing alright - I believe its clear (to all firms) there is steep upward trend.  Firms are drowning in work!  What a great problem to have!!

     On other news we are about to release our final RC for Enfold Desktop!  You can keep informed by signing up to the desktop mailing list.

     Lastly dont forget to sign up for the Plone Conference in Seattle!  There are FIVE tracks!  Can you believe that?  This conference will be a real challenge to one up in the 2007.

I just received an interesting question about the upcoming Plone Conference 2006 and corresponding sprint, which I wasn't entirely certain how to answer.  In a nutshell, it was whether our very own Mr. Topf would be en route to Seattle with video camera for conference and sprint. 

While we don't yet quite have the registration numbers to do professional quality video (go register to make it happen will ya?), it appears that Mr. Topf is on the participants list, which should hopefully lead to some nice video coverage of the events.

This is also more of a general call for anyone else that is currently or is interested in doing this type of conference and sprint coverage.   Why not build the buzz around what should be a fantastic event? 

I know you, you, and one of you all have produced nice stuff in this genre of work.  So feel free to bring your camera, mics, and editing software to Seattle in October!

I was lucky enough to get my hands on an olpc developer board, and have spent a little time learning about the platform and project.

While there are a few issues I have with the project, it is really an thrilling moment in educational technology and after holding the hardware in my own hands I actually believe this vision might truly manifest. The main reason I am writing about this in the Plone blog is I have learned that the olpc's application development language of choice is Python!

Sheckitout.

While Plone itself is probably not well suited for the laptop itself -- The Laptop's hardware characteristics are closer to a pda w/ a big screen than a MacBook Pro  (plone-on-a-stick? maybe it could ship on a thumbnail drive), it is easy to imagine communities of practice emerging around this platform. Places where educators and students alike can share tips and tricks, strategies and pitfalls. Who will be their dotmac?

Admittedly, these devices are being built to operate unconnected to the Internet, communicating with each other through ad-hoc mesh networks (presence will be a very low level primitive in this environment, and all applications will have access to it), there may still be a role for a server w/in the network.

I don't know exactly how Plone fits into the larger OLPC strategy, but I get the sense that with all the momentum and capital around this project, if Plone gets there lots of people will see it. And many of them may be the next generation of Python/Plone developers.

    Previously we offered non-commercial organizations free unlimited usage of Enfold Desktop.  After having found numerous commercial companies using Enfold Desktop without purchasing licenses.  We have decided to add licensing to the software and give everyone five (5) free licenses.  Regardless of status everyone can use Enfold Desktop free of charge for up to five users.  We will work with NGO's on a case by case basis if we are going to offer them more than 5 licenses.

    Enfold Desktop compliments our other Windows products (Enfold Server and Enfold Proxy) which enable organizations to have a commercial vendor behind their Plone installation.  Enfold Systems is committed to lowering the bar for the adoption of the Plone CMS on the Windows platform throughout the world.  Effortless installation and risk free evaluation are some of our guiding software principles.

    This blog entry is not about pushing our software as much as letting people know that there is now a Desktop integration available for the Plone CMS (you can use our commercial Enfold Server or open source Plone).  I hope our Desktop integration provides a means for persons to evagelise Plone inside their organizations in a more persuasive way.  Seeing is believing.  And if they want to use our software for ease of evaluation and helps them spread Plone (even if they dont purchase it in the end) -- then we will have done our job.  We want to lower the bar for evaluation and consideration of the Plone CMS.

    Lastly the technological parts that make Enfold Desktop interesting and more relevent to the community.  The first one (which should be embraced by the entire Python community) is that Enfold Desktop is built 100% in the Python programming language.  Our extensions to win32com (Python library) to enable Shell Extensions have been used by numerous companies and some have told me in private they really appreciate the wrapping of these Windows API.  I simply want to say "Thank you for the feedback."

    The benefit of Plone 3.0 and beyond for consultants and communtiy is the plug-in architecture for Enfold Desktop.  Upon release of Desktop 3.0 - we will invest into some sample code.  We have released some sample code already that demonstrates auto-save capabilities in Enfold Desktop.  Other code and examples we have are enforcing metadata when content is Drag n Drop'ed into Desktop and/or created through Desktop.  We want to document the architecture and we believe people will find it so powerful that they will be able to solve unique business problems for their clients that only Enfold Desktop with its flexibility can offer.

    Don't hesitate to drop me a line.  alan at enfoldsystems is my email.  And remember to sign up the Seattle Plone Conference 2006.  Finally go to http://www.enfoldsystems.com/ to download 3.0 beta and remember to give us your feedback on the desktop community mailing list!

Environmentalist, business consultant and generalist extraordinaire Dave Pollard offers up an interesting comparision between "Hierarchical Corporation's Offerings" and "Natural Enterprise's Offerings."

It's interesting on many levels, but I was struck by how much it resembles the value proposition of open source generally, and Plone specifically.