Nate Aune

Managing Director and Founder, Jazkarta, Inc. (Boston, MA), 3rd term as Plone Foundation Board member, founder Plone4Artists and Boston Plone Users Group.

Who you are

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 three years, 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 including Foundation sponsored development sprints.

Why you're interested

I have a strong interest to make Plone more accessible, not only in terms of usability for end users but also to developers who must confront an imposing stack of Plone, Archetypes, CMF, Zope2, Zope3 and ZPT. I'd like to push for better TTW tools for managing and editing a Plone site. Tools such as Deco, Dexterity and Deliverance which are available now and targeted for Plone 5 are steps in this direction.

I'd like to improve the hosting story for Plone. Currently there are very few options if you want to host your Plone site, and if you try to do it yourself, you must learn a lot of system administration in order to do it properly. With Cloud Computing becoming more popular and affordable, we should be able to lower the barrier to entry when it comes to deploying and launching your Plone site.

The community is one of the most valuable aspects of Plone, and I'd like the foundation to support efforts to bring the community together, whether that be in the form of developer sprints, documentation sprints, regional symposiums or other activities like the World Plone Day, I'd like to see the foundation take a more active role in supporting these events.

Lastly, I believe there is still much work we can do to improve the marketing of Plone. Whether it's attending trade shows or other events where Plone should be represented among its peers, winning contests, getting mentioned in articles, engaging more with the blogosphere, getting professional brochures made and case studies that can be shared among Plone vendors. These are just a few of the things that I think the Foundation can support and encourage.

What you think you can add to the Plone Foundation

I'm good at organizing and motivating people to do things. I'm well-connected within the community and know who to talk to get things done. I'm a prolific speaker around the world about Plone and open source technologies. My company, Jazkarta, is heavily invested in Plone as a product, and I consider myself to be a Plone evangelist. I want to do what is right for the community. Without the community, Plone is just a bunch of code.

I thank you for taking the time to read my application, and if elected I'll be honored to serve again on the Plone foundation. I'm humbled by the talented and wonderful people in this community and want to give back in any way that I can.

Seconded by:

Jonah Bossewitch

Kapil Thangavelu

Lennart Regebro

Rocky Burt