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World Plone Day London was a success
A little summary of World Plone Day in London.
Introduction
We've started slowly at 10:00. Attendees were arriving for the next 45 minutes but discussion already began in small groups. It was very friendly gathering of 16 people. I made a short speech to welcome guests and shortly describe why we were here.
Firstly, everyone introduced oneself to the others. Following Zahid's idea we divided ourselves into 3 small groups/tables. Within each group every one of us had 1 minute to tell something about himself. After 5 minutes we had to change the tables and repeat the process. We did it 3 times and at the end we spoke about ourselves out loud. After this short session everyone knew each other.
How to make Plone more popular in UK?
Second discussion was about Plone popularity in the United Kingdom. We repeated the idea of small groups. After 10 minutes someone summarized what was discussed within the group. Common experience from providers and organisations was that Plone became more difficult. It is harder or sometimes impossible to change things in ZMI, which discourages beginners. It is more difficult to install Plone and additional products. Buildout is maybe good for advanced developers, but not for customers and other people who want to install it on their own machines to play with it. It was also agreed that moving configuration to XML files added actually more complexity and problems than it was before. So the answer to question raised in that session "how to make Plone more popular in UK" was obvious - make it simpler.
Plone community in UK
We started this session with introducing http://www.ploneuk.org. Fry-IT launched this website few weeks ago hoping that it will be a hub for future community. There is not much there yet but hopefully we can encourage people to contribute. The idea is to have it totally open, business friendly and helpful resource. We asked people what would they want to see there. And we got many interesting responses from Plone providers and organisations that use Plone. The most important things were: discussion forum, reliable testimonials ideally from organisations that use Plone, list of companies that provide Plone support and job/projects board. And all of it focused around UK.
Afters...
For each attendee we prepared a small souvenir. A mug that changes its colour when hot liquid is added. Black coating disappears to reveal Plone logo.
All images from World Plone Day in London available on Flickr or PloneUK.org
Nice
