Maurizio Delmonte

Plone consultant, integrator, trainer and project manager at Abstract Open Solutions. Plone Evangelist.

Who Am I?

I am a project manager, communication guy and Plone consultant and integrator at Abstract Open Solutions, a 18-person company based in Italy and specialized in OSS, Plone and Python solutions. I'm making a living out of Plone without interruption since 2005, training, doing consulting and adapting Plone to our clients' needs.

Maurizio Delmonte

I discovered Plone in 2002, while playing around Zope extensions, and it was love at first sight: Plone was at the same time my "right" answer for:

  • adopting an agile and powerful technology to bring "portal solutions" to my clients
  • tackling the challenge of building a more ecological web, by early adopting web UI best practice for usability and accessibility
  • embracing a real open source community, where designers and final users were accepted and welcome as the more productive developers

I was lucky to choose Plone in its early days having those good reasons in mind, as disposing of the best technology is not enough for good open source to be spread. I considered communication one big trouble to overcome for Plone and its Community to succeed. That's why I started evangelizing my "shy-English-speaking" fellow countrymen about Zope and Plone.

Since 2003 I've been presenting Zope and Plone at events such as Webb.it (which hosted the second Plone sprint), Linux Days, World Plone Days and I've been involved in making things happening at events like Plone Conferences 2007 and 2009, European Plone Symposium, Plone Open Garden, Sorrento Sprint and ContènTOUR. I'm part of the team behind plone.it and I've pushed all the updates of the site since 2009.

I believe the fortune of Plone has been linked to its Community which was able to renovate itself continuously: now, more than ever.

Why Am I Interested?

I think the Foundation is looking for heterogeneity: taking care of the Community renovation means also to inject some less heard points of view.

I'm quite aware of how many potential Plone "activists" are not part of the Community just because they don't know how the Community works:

  • companies are not part of the Foundation: is there a reasonable way to refactor this?

  • final users are not part of the Community, and I often realize they're not aware of what's going on: could we leverage on this asset?
  • non-English people are left on the shoulders of local groups: could we integrate their activity in the plone.org site in some useful way?
  • people is leveraging Plone with most used extensions: could we reach potential users in a more effective way by sponsoring "distributions"?

how can we find the answers to those queries if not engaging the Community and asking each single Plone user to answer to those questions?

I heard the idea of using the "welcome page" of the new plone sites better, could we take actions in this direction?

My passion has always been - and it is now more than ever - to give voice to whom is usually less represented and, in various ways, giving those voices the chance to improve Plone and spread the word at a larger scale.

I'm here for a "call of duty", and I'm quite confident that many people out there could answer to a similar call of duty too..

What I bring:

  • ten years of experience on the field as a developer, a trainer, a consultant and a project manager, which led me to a good ability in listening and making things happen;
  • a true passion for spreading open source run by open communities, which is why I'm in love with Plone since 2003;
  • a strong attitude in pushing people to help in making things happen;
  • an open minded perspective, joined to a responsible commitment in whatever I decide to do.

My nomination is seconded by:

Matt Hamilton

Érico Andrei

Bernhard Buehlmann