Ken Wasetis

Plone consultant, integrator, evangelist since 2002. Current Foundation member. President of Contextual Corp. in Chicago, IL, USA. Presenter at various Plone conferences. Sponsor/supporter of various Plone products, such as PloneGetPaid, CMFDeployment, ContextualCRM.

(Explanatory note: This nomination came in after the deadline. As such, the Foundation Board regrets that it is unable to accept it as a nomination, and has left this unpublished.)

Who I Am

I am the Founder and President of Contextual Corp., based in the Chicago, Illinois, USA area.  I've been involved with Plone since my first Plone project in 2002 and attending the first Plone conference in New Orleans in 2003 and very quickly became an evangelist for Plone, driving its adoption quite successfully by larger organizations in the corporate and government industries, thus helping build up the reputation for Plone and demand for the development and consulting ecosystem around it.

I attended the Plone Strategic Planning Summit in 2008 and delivered numerous Plone conference and symposium presentations, mostly related to business case studies demonstrating how large commercial, health care, and government organizations are using Plone, how it compares to the competition, but also related to web service integration with Plone (and SugarCRM.)

Why I'm Interested

After being involved in the Plone community and giving back through project involvement and sponsorship, conferences, as well as through periodic IRC support, I decided that it was time to become more formally involved with the direction of Plone, especially now that my consulting practice has nothing to do with other CMS tools and is dedicated fully behind Plone.

I feel like I need to do more than fire off the occasional email to the Foundation Board and instead help serve on that board to get the business of Plone done.

What I Bring to the Pone Foundation

When I started working with Plone, it was more through an objective, true 'consulting' role, whereby I assisted clients with CMS requirements assessment, tool evaluation, selection, and implementation.  After doing this for a few years, I eventually gravitated toward strictly focusing on the Plone CMS and founded Contextual to provide services, sponsor development of important add-on products, such as PloneGetPaid (sponsorship and open sourcing of custom PloneJobBoard integration), CMFDeployment (bug fixes), membrane/remember (Plone 3 compatibility sprint and support),ContextualCRM (forthcoming Plone-to-SugarCRM integration add-on to be open sourced.)

I believe that my experience with other CMS tools, my past experience with a larger consulting organization, and my interaction with large commercial and government clients and knowledge of their needs allows me to ensure that Plone is positioned well against other commercial and open source CMS tools, so that Plone continues to flourish as software, as a development project, and as a community.

I also ensure that Contextual is marketing not only itself, but Plone in general by sponsoring and exhibiting at conferences such as the CMSExpo.net and GilbaneBoston.com, so that Plone can be represented alongside other open source as well as commercial CMS tools.

Plone Foundation Members Who Second My Nomination

Alexander Limi