Ken Wasetis

Plone advocate, evangelist, and consultant since pre-1.0 release, presenter at numerous Plone and Open Source conferences since 2003, supporter of PloneGetPaid and other key products, co-founder of Contextual.

Who Am I?

I am the president of a small Plone integrator, Contextual, based near Chicago, IL, USA, and work as a Plone developer, integrator, evangelist, and entrepreneur.  Over the past 8 years, I've helped get Plone as a CMS to the evaluation table for non-profits, federal government agencies, and Fortune 500 companies that otherwise wouldn't have ever heard of it, but who are now sure glad they have it.

I really was enamored with the Plone community since attending the very first Plone conference in New Orleans.  At the time, I was just as heavily involved in integrating other CMS tools - some open, some not, and the very open Plone community is really what made me want to be a part of all of this.

Though I founded Contextual 6 years ago to focus on Plone-centered solutions, I still keep an active eye on other open source (and commercial) CMS tools and communities to keep abreast of industry trends, and successful/failed strategies, and would like to try bringing some of those ideas more into the Plone fold.

Over the past couple of years, I've worked and sprinted a little bit to try helping address P

I feel like it's finally time to get involved in a more formal capacity/commitment.

Accomplishments in Plone Community/Project

I'm proud to have been one of the first four Plone organizations to jointly fund the PloneGetPaid product, to develop some examples and improvements for it early on, and to see that it has thrived as an e-commerce option for Plone.  I've also had Contextual support development of improvements (by the primary authors) of CMFDeployment, collective.easyslider, and the new collective.portletclass products.

I've presented at Plone conferences in New Orleans, Seattle, Washington D.C., and at other conferences, such as CMS Expo (near Chicago) and the MIL-OSS Military Open Source Software conference in Washington D.C., while also participating in sprints at various conferences and symposia, as well as the Plone Strategic Planning Summit at the GooglePlex a few years back.

Future Plone Interests

Plone has been a very successful project and continues to have a great community, but some of this seems out of sheer luck.  I believe we need a bit more conscientious plan for bringing in new Plone developers, being more active in marketing Plone and/or in helping others to market it, we need more regular contact with industry watchers/analysts, and need to communicate as if we aren't in a vacuum, only interested in communicating with others who already use/work on Plone and have an idea of where things are going already.

I think that as Plone the project and software has matured, the community and board have done a better and better job in rising to the occassion, and that this year provides yet another opportunity for us to bring in new people with different perspectives to help make it an even more professionally-run organization and project.

Some activities I'd like to see more of include:

Recruitment / cooperative efforts between integrators and local universities/colleges to introduce Plone, Python development, and CMS as a business application area to people who will soon be graduates looking for gainful, meaningful employment.

More local partnerships (and possibly helping to foster them) between integrators and design firms (who would use Plone rather than other tools on projects), since Plone lacks so much on the marketing front and design firms naturally have the marketing trait embedded into their DNA.

Nomination Seconded By

Steve McMahon