Plone Ambassadors for 2014-2015

Regional and special interest ambassadors for Plone

The Plone Foundation Board is pleased to have reappointed for 2014-2015 the following distinguished Plone Ambassadors, who represent Plone in their region or on behalf of their particular interest.

To contact any of the ambassadors, please use this contact form.

  • Jian Aijun (Dalian City, China) Jian has developed for the web for more than 10 years and has worked with Python since 2006. He has worked on dozens of Plone and Django projects of all sizes and recently has been doing more and more Plone web development. He has contributed to Plone and other open source projects. He also serves on the Plone Language Team as the maintainer for the Simplified Chinese translation.
  • David Bain (Mona, Jamaica) David has many years of experience in web and technology projects; he is especially interested in helping non-profits, foundations and social enterprises to use technology effectively in achieving their missions and mandates. He is an active participant in the Caribbean developer community arranging meetups and workshops on various topics. David has participated in Plone conferences in the United Kingdom and Washington D.C. and since summer 2013 has been the coordinator of a series of monthly Plone meetups in Jamaica.

  • Leonardo J. Caballero G. (Mérida, Venezuela) - Leonardo is a Technical Director at Conectivo. He is a partner of PloneGov communities such as CommunesPlone in Belgium and Interlegis in the Brazilian Federal Senate. He is also a co-founder of the Venezuelan Plone community and was a technical reviewer of Packt's "Plone Intranet" book. He is an open source activist and contributor to several projects, including Opencore Software (used in the CoActivate.org website) and Canaima GNU/Linux (a Debian-based GNU/Linux distribution from Venezuelan government).

  • Virginia Choy (Sydney, Australia) - Virginia is the Co-Founder of PretaGov, a company offering Plone SaaS and Plone development to government since 2004. Virginia's main professional interest is to drive the use of open source technologies within government so tax payers' funds are used more efficiently. She spends her time between Sydney, Australia and London, UK. She has given presentations in Australia, New Zealand and Malaysia promoting Plone to governments.

  • K.K. Dhanesh (Pune, India) Dhanesh works at C-DAC (Centre for the Development of Advanced Computing) and is an expert in deploying Plone with single sign-on for many users. He has also organized several events for the Indian Plone community, the most recent being World Plone Day 2014.

  • Fernanda Lobato (Brasília, Brazil) Fernanda graduated in Graphic Design at the Federal University of Santa Maria and has specialized in ergonomics and usability since 1996 and digital accessibility since 2004. Since 2005 she has worked at the Department of eGovernment in the Ministry of Planning of Brazil as a project manager of norms and standards in e-government. Fernanda is also a member for the Accessibility Experts Working Group of W3C Brazil.

  • Manabu Terada (Tokyo, Japan) - a.k.a. terapyon - Manabu is the founder and the CEO of CMS communications Inc., a Tokyo-based professional Plone and Python development company. He is a contributor of east Asian language functions in Plone, and has been chairman of PyCon Japan 2011 and 2012 and of PyCon APAC 2013 in Japan. Manabu was Guest Associate Professor of Hitotsubashi University in 2011 and he has been a core member of the Plone Users Group Japan.

Some of the activities they led or participated in or are planning for 2015 include:

  • Plone Symposium Tokyo (June 13-14, 2015)
  • Open Source Conference (Tokyo, Spring 2015 and Fall 2015)
  • PyCon Asia Pacific (APAC) (Taipei, June 5-8, 2015)
  • PyCon Japan (September 2015)
  • monthly Plone seminar (Tokyo)
  • annual World Plone Day Tokyo
  • World Plone Day 2014 (Chennai, India)
  • Train the Trainers (CDAC Chennai, India): lectures, training, hands-on sessions for Plone and FOSS enthusiasts
  • Pacific Rim Sprint
  • monthly Sydney Python meetings
  • Jamaica Plone meetups
  • Google Summer of Code mentoring
  • creation of Diazo Snippets Library
  • Plock (Plone installer) project
  • Plone Newbie Developer Project

If you have an upcoming event or know of issues that would benefit from the attention of one of these ambassadors, please directly contact them directly or email the Plone Foundation Board of Directors at board@plone.org.

If you are interested in serving as a regional or special interest ambassador for Plone, please email the Board at board@plone.org.