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 a whim (it was planned 2 days ago), some of the Seattle Crew decided to get together this weekend and sprint.  The goal is ambitious, but simple: to fix a bunch of bugs and add futures to increment the releases of our Plone/Salesforce.com integration products.  I'm hosting in good ol' Ballard, Washington.

Pictures of jonstahl, healingKnee, jessesnyder, brianfive, and davisagli below:

Anton Stonor and the crew at Headnet.dk are hosting the Copenhagen Performance Sprint 2007 in early November:

Anton writes: "We'll spend four days on making Plone run faster and have fun in the capital of Denmark, Copenhagen."  Sounds pretty good to me!

There are still a few seats left, you can sign up online.

Update: It's not Sept 1-4th, it's November 1-4.  :-)

We had 23 participants from all over the country, including two European sprinters from Berlin and Finland.

One of the sprinters was Rocky Burt, the lead developer of the Plone4Artists products. Hailing from Canada, Rocky conducted two days of Zope 3 training right before the sprint.

If you missed the course in Boston, you're in luck! This unique class Zope 3 Training for Plone Developers will also be offered again right before the Plone Conference in Naples.

There were also 8 remote sprinters from far away places such as Japan, Australia, Italy and Switzerland, who tuned into the live video stream and collaborated via the #plone4artists IRC chat channel. See the full list of participants and photos from the event.

The focus of the sprint was to improve the multimedia capabilities of Plone, and in particular to fix bugs and prepare the Plone4Artists suite of products for a new release.

I'm happy to report that thanks to the hard work of the sprinters, we successfully made new releases of many Plone4Artists products: Plone4ArtistsAudio, Plone4ArtistsVideo, Plone4ArtistsSite, Plone4ArtistsCalendar, etc.

Sprint reports

There were several teams dedicated to working on various topics including the Plone4Artists products as well as syndication, licensing, RESTful interfaces and iPlone, an iPhone optimized theme for Plone.

• Audio
  
• Video
  
• Calendar
  
• Uploading
• Large files
  
• Syndication
  
• Licensing
  
• RESTful interfaces
  
• iPlone

In the press

There was a journalist from IDG who attended the sprint, and published two articles about the event which appeared in several IDG publications.

LinuxWorld and InfoWorld magazine articles about the Plone4Artists sprint:

"Sprinting to create open-source content management"

"You're never alone with Plone"

Screencasts

Jonathan Lewis made an excellent screencast introduction to the Plone4ArtistsAudio product Thanks Jonathan! We still need screencasts for the calendar and video products if you'd like to help out.

Online Demo

If you want to try out the Plone4Artists products but don't have time to install them yourself, you can demo them on the http://plone4artists.com site. Please report any bugs you find to the trackers!

Want to help?

There are many ways to get involved in the project, even if you are not a developer. We need you to download the products and test them out, reporting any bugs that you find to the issue trackers.

Join the mailing list and ask questions in the #plone4artists IRC channel. We can always use help in writing documentation and making screencasts - short videos which demonstrate the software's functionality.

Lightning talks

There were a number of very interesting lightning talks given at the sprint. These have been video recorded and will be made available in the near future. Subscribe to the Plone4Artists mailing list to be notified when they are published.

Sponsors

Many thanks to our sponsors without whom this sprint would not have been possible: Christian Science Monitor, The Nature Conservancy, Oxfam America, Friends of the Earth International, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, New England Wildflower Society, Abstract Edge and Jazkarta. ShinyWhiteBox.com also donated two licenses for its excellent iShowU software for making screencasts.

If your organization is using the Plone4Artists products, please consider sponsoring the Plone4Artists project. Your financial contribution makes it possible to continue developing the products and having sprints to grow the community.

The Future

We are planning to continue the work at the post-conference sprint in Naples. There will be a multimedia track and we hope to get 1.0 final versions of all the products out at that time.

We are also working on some new products (Plone4ArtistsPodcast, ContentTagging, Plone4ArtistsRevverVideo, Plone4ArtistsImage, Plone4ArtistsTheme), which you can read about on the Plone4Artists products release announcement.

And we are working on a buildout to make it easier to install and setup a Plone4Artists site.

Thanks again to all of the sprinters who came to Boston and made the sprint a success!

-Nate

Rio Ceballos, Córdoba, Argentina: Born was one GetPaid, child of Plone and Community. The excited parents shared in the joy of seeing their combined contributions resulted in something amazing: Plone and Community had just given birth to a commerce system! The first breath...er...transaction was processed today by authorize.net!

Certificate of Birth: GetPaid de Plone

Time of birth: FairSource retreat day 4, 5:55pm
Place of birth: Rio Ceballos, Córdoba, Argentina
Given name: GetPaid
Family name: Plone
Weight at birth: 394 Kb
Delivery method: tarball

GetPaid's approach to ecommerce is to be (a) useful out of the box and (b) flexible (find more at www.plonegetpaid.com). This approach reflects the value that Plone itself provides: a full feature set that can easily be deployed complemented by a flexible system that can be customized and extended for particular use cases. The use cases targeted for the current release included basic donation processing and simple stores.

GetPaid provides the tools needed to easily integrate those features into a site: a cart, checkout, workflow, payment processor integration, administrative screens, and end user interface. At the DocComm sprint, held at Google June 25-29, over a dozen people contributed to the features that now make up GetPaid. In addition to the front-end features, the sprinters created a testing framework and created an entire set of test scripts to ensure quality now and in the future. The sprinters and organizers - all volunteers - were hosted and fed by Google, fueled by Guayaki yerba mate, and supported by several sponsors from the community who made the event possible.

That work was advanced by a dozen FairSource developers in Argentina working alongside the product's lead architect, Kapil Thangavelu. An issue that we were reminded of in the Google sprint when Ofer dropped in to the channel was that we need to have the product internationalized, which led to a sprint! Sprinting began at the Jornadas Regionales de Software Libre (Regional Free Software Conference) with a day of i18n sprinting, which then turned into a group effort to work towards the release at the FairSource retreat organized by ifPeople. After months of work, the first processed transaction went through today (see the message from authorize.net)

Led by Kapil Thangavelu (hazmat), core Plone developer, founder of ObjectRealms, and author of many products for Plone and Zope, the sprinters worked together pair programming towards the goal of the week: getting paid! The group generated ideas and implemented side by side; they also created, tracked and closed issues (with the help of a remote sprinter in Italy) on the project's Google Code are: code.google.com/p/getpaid . Each day twenty people would gather in our instant messaging channel on IRC (#getpaid) to follow what was going on, rallying the sprinters, and ask questions.

Among the accomplishments of the GetPaid contributors:

• Shape the scope of the Red Ochre release around the donation use case.
  
• an elegant Zope 3 based framework.
  
• Integrate a payment processors (Authorize.net, and others in progress)
• Create a shopping cart and means of adding items to it
• Internationalization of the Plone and Zope products
  
• Provide a deployment mechanism for the product (via buildout/ploneout) for technical users to quickly get set up.
• Integrate user information collection and registration into the checkout process
• Order management interface to track both site-wide transactions (and status) as well as to provide end users a view of their own transactions
• Tests! Unit, doc, and functional tests

The future looks bright for this newborn! GetPaid still has a lot of work to be a complete system, but is near the point of its first release. Next on the horizon is:

• A release!
  
• Documentation of API and roadmap
• Set up demo site with latest version of products (dev.plonegetpaid.com)
  
• Clean up integration of workflow and payment processors
• Make backups possible
  
• Organize additional developers and funding to build out for specific use cases of "premium content", "pay to submit", and advanced store features.
• Build a product catalog, document and provide an interface for categories
  
• Make the UI sexy with AJAX :)
• Add lots more usability improvements
  

The Recipe: Beans and Rice

For those who are interested in more technical information...check the directory where your buildout ran and meet getpaid.core and PloneGetPaid. They part of the elegance of the system's design: getpaid.core is a pure Zope product, while PloneGetPaid provides Plone integration and configuration. (For those unfamiliar with the latest in Zope/Plone, the two products are designed to work together as a system that, architecturally speaking ties us to CMF, but that is built in Zope 3 (and then bridged back to run in Zope 2 by Five))

The approach to integrating commerce with a site is to be able to make any content in a Plone site "payable" by providing a "marker interface". This trick, inspired by the Plone4Artists project, allows GetPaid to add interfaces and information to the site without actually changing the existing content (thanks, Zope 3!). The system is built using Zope 3 technologies for interfaces, views, viewlets, and adapters. Particularly noteable about the adapters is that we have been working to build in storage flexibility from the beginning. GetPaid can thus easily be adapted for custom storage of data (especially using relational database for the store). This opens possibilities for integration with other enterprise systems, advanced reporting, and even making multiple stores per site! Check out code.google.com/p/getpaid for more on the product and its use.

The main goal of the first release is to satisfy the needs for easy donation processing in a Plone site. Content marked as a donation gets a "donate" link that takes the user through a checkout process. Any piece of content can be turned into a donation (ie event, news item, page...) and be given a price. Additional functionality is provided for "buyable" content, ie things that would be added to a shopping cart. This allows for simple stores to be easily created in the site.

Amazing Support

Where GetPaid goes from here

<geek>Eggs Don't Care!</geek> Um...sorry for that outbreak. This whole sprint community thing just gets me excited :)

At the Google sprint, we had an important revelation, inspired by Steve's (Mech422) question: line items in an order need to be workflowed independently. Take the case where you order 1 case of Empower Mint, 2 gourds, a box of Divine chocolates from our hypothetical Fair Trade store. If the mint and gourds are in stock but the chocolate isn't (maybe someone snacking in stock room!?), then we want to be able to fulfill the order that we can. So we will charge for and ship out the products we have, and leave the chocolate pending till we get more in. Since these are both part of a single order, the order itself becomes a container of line items, each of which can be workflow-ed through the system.

The result of this was that Kapil refactored much of the system (since the end of the Google sprint) to make the entire system workflow-driven. The goals is to ship a system with a workflow that can be modified for custom business processes or integrations (these changes went beyond what the hurry.workflow offered, and are also being made available upstream). This has implied updates to the admin interface as well.

Given the changing understanding of the product, we are reworking the milestones and release versions. The "Red Ochre" release, our alpha, will be out shortly and be v0.3. That will be followed by v0.6 and v0.9 (and then 1.0!). After Red Ochre is out, it will be much easier for developers and others to contribute to the product.

But when it comes down to it...the future of GetPaid largely depends on the adaptation and extension of the system by the community itself. The architecture and pending work on documentation and roadmap will provide a foundation for contributions. The sprints were important steps in building community around the product and getting new people into the code and working with the product. Already there are companies using (and modifying) GetPaid. What's next? Well, we will have to see - maybe you want to be a part of that! Visit www.plonegetpaid.com and get connected! Some things that we are looking into:

• Extensions to make the product ready for specific use cases: Premium Content, Membership organizations, pay-to-submit content, web delivery of content, and more
• Integration with other systems (Salesforce.com, accounting)
• ???
  

My proposed talk, Plone + Salesforce.com: Best of breed applications working in harmony for your organization, was accepted for the 2007 Plone Conference in Italy. I'm really excited to connect with everyone that's there (has it really been almost a year since Seattle 2006) and talk on a subject I personally find very gratifying and strategic to the Plone ecosystem.

If you're curious or have ideas about what would be good to cover, my proposed and working talk excerpt is:

Plone + Salesforce.com: Best of breed applications working in harmony for your organization

We all know and love what Plone accomplishes in the content management space, but ambitious tasks of customer and constituent relationship management (CRM) often fall outside the scope of the content management problem domain. Yet the latter is an equally critical need for organizations. Salesforce.com is a well known and established leader for customer and constituent relationship and with it's innovative API-first design, over 50% of all traffic comes via its SOAP API. This makes it an obvious candidate for integration with Plone and there are tools (Beatbox, Salesforce Base Connector, Salesforce PFG Adapter, and Salesforce Auth Plugin) to do just that.

This talk will introduce the use cases where Plone can benefit from CRM integration, Salesforce.com's ability to model an organization's business processes, and how, where and why they can and do compliment each other. This has everything to do with choosing the best of breed CRM and CMS and using them together to transform your organization. Why build it from scratch, when you can integrate it with Plone?

The only part I'm dreading about the conference -- making all the tough choices about what talks to attend. Congratulations to the organizers for such an impressive talk list.  There's not one talk I wouldn't want to attend.

If you want to get your Plone lightning talk fix, and/or hear report-outs from the Plone4Artists/ Multimedia Sprint in Boston, point your Quicktime Player at rtsp://air137.startdedicated.com:554/plone4artists.sdp at 5pm EDT/2pm PDT today.

The sprinters are working on some really cool topics, including audio & video podcasting in Plone, calendaring, image management, large file support and bulk file uploading.  I'm really excited to hear and see what they're up to.

I've just made a donation to support Alex Clark's trip to this week's DocCom Sprint, so that he can update Plone's online API documentation.  This is one of those unsexy but vitally important documentation tasks that pays huge returns to every single Plone developer, integrator and site administrator.

Alex is planning to create up-to-date automated API docs for:

• Plone-2.5.3
• Archetypes-1.4.4
• CMF-1.6.4

• Plone-3.0
• Archetypes-1.5.0
• CMF-2.1.0

What a great experience to have Google as host! They are providing us a space with collaboration tools, and catering our meals. It's a bit like being in Willy Wonka's chocolate factory here...with the free spirited, super-smart folks in this meant-to-make-you-want-to-be-here-all-the-time environment (I suspect the Oompaloompa's are downstairs). We gathered in the Grand Teton room, strategically located just outside one of the many full, mini-cafeterias on the campus stocked with all kinds of goodies where we can feed the appetites worked up by sprinting (ErikRose gives two thumbs up to the organic whole milk:)!

Media:

• Blog entry at CIO.com
  
• JoAnna's pictures from sprint
• Donna Snow's pictures from the sprint
• Panoramic video at the welcome dinner by Donna
  

From Joanna Springsteen comes the long awaited, "official" announcement of the Documentation
and E-Commerce sprint.

For all the details, please visit:

http://plone.org/events/sprints/doc-ecommerce

and

http://www.openplans.org/projects/doc-and-e-commerce-sprint

There is still room for a few more participants, and the organizers are still actively seeking sponsors.

I just got back from North Carolina where the Triangle Zope and Python Users Group (TriZPUG) organized a 4-day sprint in Chapel Hill, NC. The sprint brought about 40 folks together following a 4 day training (Camp5). Building on the training in Zope3/Plone3, this was a chance to apply zope3 learnings and contribute to improving Plone and its available tools.

The participants addressed a group of topics that range from bug fixing (Plone 3, syndication), new tools (Grok), and creating new application platforms for Plone (GetPaid). Typical of the intense sprint environment, there was also lots of fun! There were some impressively amusing Lightning Talks, and the BBQSprinter organizers introduced us to the concept of "Pintification". There was also our very own rock concert! We enjoyed many meals in great local restaurants, where bacon was bountiful, as well as our own bbq event. All in all, a great experience!

The organizers brought a group of sponsored sprinters to the event, which helped to create a critical mass of top talent from around the Plone/Zope universe, making it a very fertile environment for development and experimenting. Kapil really showed us how sprinting is done - he spent an evening and into the early morning coding to create a payment processing framework for Plone. The organizers also took advantage of a cool remote access system (Breeze), which enabled people around the world to watch us and the presentations.

Check out camp/sprint culture:

• Del.icio.us tags for bbq-sprint
• Del.icio.us tags for Camp5
• Flickr photo pool
  
• BBQ Sprint page, includes schedule, reports, etc
  

The next few days are going to be a critical period for Plone 3.0 development work.

Hot on the heels of last week's Plone 3.0 Alpha 2 release comes the Baarn UI Sprint 2007.  An all-star team of 25 Plonistas has gathered in Baarn, Netherlands for a four-day sprint to polish up the user interface for the forthcoming final release of Plone 3.0.

Limi reports that first day progress was good.  They've got a pretty impressive list of tasks laid out and teams of folks assigned to each major task area.  If you're interested in following their progress up-close you can check out the ticket tracker for the UI sprint.

It's great to see UI issues getting this kind of intensive attention from such a large and talented team of programmers and designers.  It's also great to see sprints happening in conjunction with the Plone release calendar.  I'm really excited to see what emerges over the next few days.

Congratulations to the Lovely Systems crew on yet another fun, productive and successful Snow Sprint.

(Photo by Mr. Topf)

Chris Calloway is once again organizing what sounds like a fantastic Plone eBoot Camp + Sprint.

The Triangle (NC) Zope and Python Users Group invites you to register for Camp 5
and the BBQ Sprint:

http://trizpug.org/boot-camp/camp5/

This is a Zope 3 boot camp followed by a Plone 3 sprint. The boot camp is taught
by Philipp von Weitershausen, author of Web Component Development with Zope 3.
The training has previously only been offered in Europe and is now available in
North America for the first time. The sprint includes several sponsored and
invited sprinters.

TriZPUG hopes you will participate in Camp 5 in Chapel Hill, NC.

Camp 5: Saturday March 10 - Tuesday March 13, 2007

BBQ Sprint: Wednesday March 14 - Saturday March 17, 2007

Likewise, great topic ideas are starting to emerge and the following look likely:

• Continuing to improve the Plone membership/user management story (i.e. PAS, membrane, remember, teamspace, etc.)
• Mapping in Plone (i.e. PrimaGIS)
  

In the meantime, I'm hoping to ask the following of those interested:

• Keep this in mind as you start looking for flights, we'll get this confirmed as soon as possible so you can move forward.
• Consider whether you would like to help coordinate the sprint.  Already needing to prepare for the conference, I can guarantee that Jon and/or myself won't be able to contribute much to this.  We're hoping to setup a few details that would be tough for an out-of-towner (like location and maybe food), but after that we're hoping those interested in sprinting can take the lead on recruitement, topics, etc. 
• Be thinking of topics that might be good for new sprinters, we're hoping to attract a lot to the conference.  And involving those that stick around is a must.