Matt Hamilton
Plone consultant and integrator. Plone and OSS evangelist. Director of Netsight, UK. Current board member.
Who Am I?
I am the director of Netsight, a 12-person web development firm in the UK who specialise in Plone deployments, customisation and integration. I have been involved in Plone since 2003 and Zope since 2000. I served on the inaugural board of the Plone Foundation in 2004 and again this past year. Over the years I have been involved in various aspects of Plone, both as a developer and bug fixer (although I do more integration work now).
I have been very active in marketing Plone and trying to introduce Plone into areas where Open Source traditionally has had trouble getting to.
Things I have been involved in:
- Attended all but the first Plone Conference, and spoken at almost all of them. This year I am the chair of the Programme Committee and have been responsible for organising the talks and timetime for the Plone Conference 2009. I am also coordinating the Open Spaces day.
- Attended a number of sprints over the years, including most of the Snow Sprints. I organised one of the first Zope 3 Sprints outside the US in 2003. I also organised the 2nd Plone Performance Sprint, in Bristol, UK. Also attended the Plone Balloon Sprint in Bristol. I also organised a World Plone Day event in Bristol in 2008.
- I attended the Plone Strategic Planning Summit in San Francisco in 2008
- Netsight was involved in the re-design of the plone.org site, and produced the visual design for the site.
- Exhibited Plone at a number of large expos in London: IMS 2008, including doing a talk on Open Source and Content Management and Internet World 2009. I also exhibited Plone at Europython 2009.
- As a member of the Plone Foundation Board I have been invited to speak at a number of international events, including World Plone Day Malta and the Dutch Plone Users Day.
- I am active in promoting Plone through various social media channels, and I am a fairly loud voice on Twitter promoting Plone. I have also uploaded a number of presentations I've done to Slideshare, and of course my own blog.
- Served on the Plone Foundation board in 2004 & 2009, and I am part of the marketing committee.
Why am I Interested?
I want to continue with the work I have been doing promoting Plone to audiences beyond the current developers and users. As someone who runs a company doing Plone integration for a wide variety of companies and organisations, I have direct experience with what made them choose Plone, why they like it and what we can do to improve it.
I want to get Plone mentioned in more reports by the big consulting companies, and in front of CMS analysts that usually are recommending big budget commercial CMSs for jobs that Plone could be best suited for.
Plone is technically superior to many systems out there in the same market, yet it needs a louder and more coherent public voice. Over the past few years, views towards Open Source have been changing in both public and private sector organisations at the highest levels and I am committed to continuing Plone's rapid growth into these sectors as they open up further.
What I can add to the Plone Foundation?
I can add the experience of someone who has been working with Plone since the beginning, who knows the history of the project and the people involved at the various levels getting things done.
I have a good overview of the various parts of Plone, but try not to get too deep in any one of them in order to maintain a good overall perspective of Plone from both the inside view and also the view from outside the project.
Having been involved in the successful introduction and deployment of Plone in a number of large organisations, I have experience of not just the technical issues, but also the business and cultural issues that organisations face when procuring a major CMS.
I have maintained a good track record of keeping my commitment to the Plone Foundation board over the past year, missing only a handful of board meetings... mainly due to travelling to/from Plone community engagements!
Names of Plone Foundation Members Who Second My Nomination
Geir Baekholt, Alex Limi