Plone Symposium Midwest Coming to UW Oshkosh June 2-9, 2013

Plone's North American educational event is moving to a new venue for 2013.

For the last half-decade, the educationally-themed Plone Symposium East has brought Plone developers, users and leaders to State College PA for a week of training, presentations and sprints.

But after five years as host to the event, Penn State University's WebLion group is passing the baton to the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh. Next year's event will feature a new name - Plone Symposium Midwest - and a new address - Oshkosh, Wisconsin.

Plone has been in use at UW Oshkosh since 2004, when it was used to build a grant website for "non-techie content people."  Since then, it became the basis of a grass-roots project to replace Adobe Contribute and Dreamweaver with a real CMS - starting with an intranet for the College of Business.  In 2008, UW Oshkosh went live with a complete new official skin for the campus' new homepage which was built in 6 weeks, followed by 4 college sites over the next year.  By 2009, the university had 30-40 websites being driven by Plone - and has become known as rising star among Plone users in education.

T. Kim Nguyen, who currently directs the UW Oshkosh Intranet project and helped move the event to its new digs, is excited about the Symposium coming to Oshkosh.  Nguyen, who first met the WebLion group in 2008 after being introduced to them by Joel Burton knows his team has big shoes to fill in taking on the Symposium.  "I've always been amazed at how gracious and helpful the people at WebLion have been to people wanting to get involved with Plone."

After meeting WebLion's Mike Halm and Christian Vinten Johansen at the annual Plone conference in Washington, DC in 2008 - and hearing about the budding PloneEdu initiative in 2009, Nguyen decided he had to be part of it.  He's been involved in it ever since, becoming co-chair with Mike Halm in 2011.

Details of the Symposium next June are still being developed at this time, but from what has been discussed, the event will be taking advantage of a brand new, state of the art $40 million academic building at UW Oshkosh which will provide a new level of lecture halls, classrooms and meeting spaces for the event.  Nguyen is currently arranging for outstanding housing options for event attendees.

For those for whom Oshkosh, Wisconsin isn't a household name - this city has hosted the annual Experimental Aircraft Association’s AirVenture Fly-In for the last 42 years - an event which attracts nearly half a million aviation fans and attendees.  It is a city that takes visitors AND travelers very seriously.

Congratulations to UW Oshkosh for their stewardship of this fine Plone event.  We look forward to seeing you next year in Wisconsin.