Matt Hamilton
Technical Director, Netsight Internet Solutions -- Bristol, UK
Who you are
I have been involved in the Zope and Plone community since 2000, and organised one of the first Zope 3 sprints outside the US in Bristol, UK in 2003. I have attended the past four Plone conferences in Europe and USA. I was a founding member of the Zope UK association, and was one of the inaugural directors of the Plone Foundation back in 2004. I attend Plone and Zope development sprints regularly and am often seen at the Snow Sprint in Austria doing my impression of a human snowball. I attended the Strategic Planning Summit earlier this year.
I am a director of Netsight Internet Solutions, a web development company based in the UK that specialise in building public websites and intranets on top of Plone. Netsight are also a members of the ZEA Partners network. I am responsible for the technical consulting and training that Netsight undertake and was the consultant for various large commercial intranet projects, and specialise in integration and performance optimisation.
I have spoken at various Plone conferences on topics such as Security Policy Testing and panel discussions on Plone Consulting. I also get involved with local SkillSwap sessions on Plone. I can often be found on the #plone IRC channel under the name HammerToe.
Why you're interested
Whilst I and Netsight were very active in the community many years ago, we have been less visibly involved in the past few years. In this time we have built a fully self-sustainable web development business employing nine full time staff and several placement students during the year. Now we are in a much better position for us to put some of our experience we've gained in that time, getting Plone into some pretty interesting organisations, back to the community. Before it was purely about code, now I want to (personally) focus on the marketing and promotion of Plone. To this end I have recently been heavily involved in the redesign of plone.org.
What you think you can add to the Plone Foundation
One of the main overarching things I can add to the Plone Foundation is a very good broad view of Plone from a marketing, business and advocacy point of view. At Netsight, we present Plone to companies that might ordinarily go for large commercial systems. I have good experience with pitching Plone to these people and selling the virtues of Plone. So whilst I rarely get involved deep down in the core of zope and plone anymore these days, I still know the technical issues ( and can still write a _bobo_traverse_ hook ... patch ... adapter ;)
Having been involved with Plone since the beginning (and Zope beforehand) I have a good knowledge of the history of Plone, the people, the code, and where we have been in the past. I want to now push us further into the future. As a community we have developed a fantastic product and there are whole markets out there we can push into. I want to help us refine the view and marketing message of Plone and get it up there into those markets.
Most importantly, the name(s) of one or more PF members that "second" your nomination
Geir Bækholt, Alexander Limi