World Plone Day After-Action Report

As regular readers of this blog know, 7 Nov. was World Plone Day. If you hosted a WPD event, but haven't sent in your summary results, please go over to the spreadsheet at Google Docs and fill in your data. Thanks in advance.

Below is a draft press release that captures what we've learned so far from self-reported events.

With 66% of the event sites reporting in, the first World Plone Day can claim success. Friday 7 November was World Plone Day, a coordinated worldwide series of meetups, seminars, and workshops. Events were scheduled from Buenos Aires, Argentina to Hanoi, Viet Nam with a healthy representation in North America and Europe. Truly an international day of Plone, 30 countries on five continents were involved.

Plone is a ready-to-run, open source content management system that is built on the powerful and free Zope application server. Plone is easy to set up, extremely flexible, and provides you with a system for managing web content that is ideal for project groups, communities, web sites, extranets and intranets.

Forty of the 61 registered venues have reported in, showing a total of 982 participants who listened to 107 presenters. Extrapolating to those sites that have yet to record their guest count, perhaps 1500 participants world wide were engaged in learning about Plone. Over 40 companies sponsored events throughout the globe, which were sanctioned by the not-for-profit Plone Foundation, the legal owner of the Plone codebase, trademarks, and domain names.

Activities ranged from small, informal gatherings with ad hoc presentations to large, formal sessions with a half dozen presentations, refreshments, and door prizes. Brasilia, Brazil had the largest event with 128 attendees. Events were tied together in more than enthusiasm for Plone--live blogging, Twitter, and streaming video were all used to interconnect participants.

World Plone Day is anticipated to become an annual event to advocate the benefits of using Plone in education, government, non-profit/non-governmental organizations, and business. For more information, contact the Plone support lists.

Thanks to everyone for their participation and enthusiasm.