Nate Aune

Plone consultant and founder of Jazkarta, Plone4Artists and the Boston Plone users group.

I have been very active in the Plone community for the past several years: giving talks about Plone at Plone and non-Plone conferences, organizing various developer sprints, founded the Plone4Artists community-driven project and the Boston Plone users group.

After serving on the board for one year, I feel that I still have a lot to contribute, both in terms of marketing and promoting Plone, as well as how to push the Plone development efforts in new directions.

Goals - past and future

In general, I want to boost the advocacy and promotion of Plone, and have a few ideas on how this might be done more effectively:

Develop a worldwide network of Plone user groups

...which serve to support and promote Plone at the local level. Through my involvement with the local Boston Plone users group, I have some ideas for how to increase the activities of user groups, and get them to work together more closely.
 

Improve the community marketing efforts

...to explore ways of promoting Plone at the grassroots level. In addition to helping with the plone.net efforts, I'd like to:     

  1. increase the awareness of Plone in the blogosphere
  2. produce screencasts about cool Plone products and interview the authors
  3. aggregate all multimedia content about Plone (audio, video, screencasts, PDFs) so it's easy to find, tag and rate.
  4. create a calendar of conferences, seminars and technology events in which Plone should be represented and recruit local volunteers to assist with advocacy and promotion.
  5. create a project/job board where organizations can post RFPs and find developers or vendors to assist them on projects. Developers and vendors can register on the site and search through the job and project listings.
  6. develop a "media kit" for Plone with brochures and other marketing material targeting different audiences

 

Build different distributions of Plone

...which are targeted for particular use cases or audiences. When you visit plone.org, you don't get the sense of how one can actual use Plone. We need to make it easier for people to see how Plone addresses their particular need, whether it be a non-profit, company seeking an intranet, educational institution seeking a courseware solution, or international organization seeking a multilingual CMS solution, etc.

Over the years working on the Plone4Artists project, I have a good sense for how to replicate this model into other areas to build communities around various distributions of Plone. Plone4Artists is now available as a buildout which makes it very easy to install. PloneGetPaid and PrimaGIS are two other community-driven Plone distributions which are also using buildout.

 

Accomplishments from 2006/2007

While I didn't accomplish as much as I had hoped, I was able to get a few things done this year.

Plone.tv - community media site for podcasts, videos and screencasts about Plone

Of the list of goals from above, I managed to accomplish #3 - aggregate content about Plone (audio, video, screencasts) last week with the launch of plone.tv. This site utilizes the Plone4Artists suite of products to provide a service for people to add and upload audio, video and screencasts about Plone. Users can also tag, rate and comment on this content.

Videos and interviews from Plone sprints and conferences

I got started on #2 by attending many developer sprints in Germany, Austria, S. Carolina, Italy and Brazil where I video recorded interviews with the participants of these sprints to learn more about what they are building and how they are using Plone. I intend on posting these videos to plone.tv once they are edited.

I organized the first ever sprint in Boston - the Plone4Artists / multimedia sprint, which had participants from all over the USA and Finland and Germany. There were articles about the sprint which appeared in InfoWorld and LinuxWorld magazines.

Represented Plone at various conferences

For #4, I attended LinuxWorld, Content Management Professionals Summit, Barcamp Boston/Austin/SF, Podcamp Boston and gave talks about Plone and how it can be used for building a multimedia portal.

 

Conclusion

I intend to continue my efforts promoting Plone and I have a particular goal in 2007/8 to be more active in the blogosphere. I would be honored to serve on the Plone board for a second term and will do everything I can to help Plone grow and prosper. I thank you for your consideration.

 

Seconded by

Sasha Vincic