Plone Metrics Person of the Year

Just like every year, outstanding contributions have been made from a large number of Plonistas worldwide.  It's been a eventful year for Plone and that makes 2011's throwdown especially difficult.  Disclaimer:  Plone Metrics Person of the Year is in no way officially affiliated with Plone or its Foundation, but represents my personal effort to thank the whole community that makes the Plone ecosystem tick. 

Noteworthy contributions during 2011 that deserve a shout-out include, but are not limited to:

• The 2011 Plone Conference people aka bunny ears (and panda hats) did a great job with this year's event.  I notice that Elizabeth Leddy, the energizer bunny of the conference, and probably some others, are missing from the Thank you page. 
• All of those who have blogged and microblogged about Plone are another group of supporters who contribute simply by communicating your ideas, thoughts, and solutions.  Thanks to Planet Plone for pulling so many blogs together. 
• Along those lines, Marc Corum, even thought he has stepped down from the Plone Board, is pushing to re-energize the Plone Communication and Marketing Teams.  
• The core developers and release managers definitely need a huge shout-out for all the essential work they do. 
  
• There continues to be some local Albuquerque talent in this year's nominees:  Michael Bernstein (helping out at with our Chem Security site) and Alex and Chantal at FosterMilo.
• As always, the Foundation Board gets a great big nod of appreciation here.  Calvin Hendryx-Parker, past-Prez, gets my admiration just for wearing the shiny pants. 

This leaves me with a terrible burden--coming up with the one and only best of the best, the single Plone Metrics Person of the Year.  Casting about for some stats to back up my decidedly unscientific process leads me to the following two tables.

Table 1.  Core Developers and number of postings

Andreas Jung (ajung)	5549
Alexander Limi	2760
Espen Moe-Nilssen (espen)	1310
Martin Aspeli	1296
Jon Stahl	1257
Alex Clark (aclark)	981
Laurence Rowe	879
Graham Perrin	871
redcor	848
Mayank Patel (monks)	607
Dale DeWitt	589
George L	549
John Destefano (deesto)	486
JonStahl	464
Israel Saeta Pérez	443
Kees Hink	415
Mikko Ohtamaa	373
Eric Steele (esteele)	356
Vincent Fretin	356
Nate Aune (natea)	349

These are the top 20 people in the Core Developers forum as ranked by postings. It strongly argues for Andreas Jung to win the prize.  He's been contributing right through the holidays, not even slowing down for Festivus. If I hadn't been tipping the Aberfeldy 12-year tonight, I'd go look at the number of commits each of these have contributed in the past year, but for now, number of posts on the forum will do. 

Table 2.  Plone Foundation Board Members and Advisers with number of terms served.

Alexander Limi*	7
Toby Roberts	6
Geir Bækholt	5
Joel Burton*	5
Jon Stahl	4
Matt Hamilton	4
Steve McMahon	4
Mark Corum	3
Nate Aune*	3
Paul Everitt	3
Calvin Hendryx-Parker	2
Darci Hanning	2
Geoff Davis	2
Roberto Allende	2
Xavier Heymans	2
Alan Runyan	1
Andy McKay	1
Ben Saller	1
Bernard Bühlmann	1
Jacqueline Arasi	1
Jodok Batlogg	1
Mark Barrenechea	1
Munwar Shariff	1
Robert Boulanger	1
Sam Greenblatt	1
Sasha Vinçic	1

* Previous Plone Metrics Person of the Year

When I compiled a listing of all the past year's Board members, I was not surprised to see Alexander Limi at the top of the list.  What amazed me is that Toby Roberts is in the number two spot.  He has been the unsung hero, serving as Treasurer for every year except 2004 (when Matt Hamilton had the job). I presume he is doing the job this year, although I don't see it on the 2011-12 Foundation page.

Based on the above two tables, I'm going to toss a coin (heads: Andreas; tails: Toby).  Both have significantly contributed to Plone, both in 2011 and in the long haul.

And this year's winner of a free beer from me, is (drum roll, please)... Toby Roberts.

Just remember, Toby may be today's Plone Metrics Person of the Year, but each day every one of the members of the Plone community are winners.  And you all have my thanks.  
_______________
The author welcomes comments that commend others involved with Plone.  This brief blog post can't do justice to all the hard and creative work that's being done throughout the year. 

2011 Year in Review

It's very nearly the end of the year, which is probably why I'm listening to "Driving the Last Spike" by Genesis off their I Can't Dance album. So here's a wrap-up of Plone Metrics for 2011.

I'm always surprised when I go back and look at my posts, realizing what was a newsworthy item at the time.  But if you reflect on last year, you'll recall that in January the Arab Spring was upon us.  Plone.org users among thousands of others from Egypt were blocked when Mubarak shut down the country's Internet.  Continued unrest in the region has meant that many have had to turn to services like TeleComix to access the Web.

Besides the political, there were natural disasters, foremost of which was the Japanese earthquake and tsunami.  The impact of that event was readily visible in the stats from Google Analytics when I compared March 2010 with 2009.  Below, the red arrow indicates the Fukushima Prefecture, which to this day is hard hit by the continuing radiological drama.

In between those two events, the Cioppino Sprint took place.  One notable result was the migration of Plone.net over to Plone.org.  The result, as one might expect, was the complete loss of traffic (and a boost over at Plone.org).  As you can see, the drop-off was nearly instantaneous.

Amazon sales rank statistics were continued to be tracked for Plone books, although my quarterly schedule broke down.  Life happens.  In February the annual Great Backyard Plone Count was carried out. 

In July Plone Metrics chopped through CMS Matrix in an effort to see how things stood with Plone's standing in that venue.  Even admitting the flaws in a self-reporting and hence biased compendium like CMS Matrix, the results for Plone were very positive.  Plone scored 97% of all features listed.

In September an inquiry raised in a LinkedIn forum led to a summary that in many ways captures Plone's strengths.  It's always gratifying to be able to respond to someone's questions with point-by-point material that addresses matters concretely.

November saw the San Francisco Plone Conference, a tremendously successful event.  There was tweeting in abundance but no live blogging from me.  Following up on that, Plone Metrics took a lighthearted look at the Plone Conference attendance numbers earlier this month.  That in turn led to Lennart Regebro's insightful analysis.

The only thing left is the annual New Year's Eve posting of the Plone Metric's Person of the Year.  This is the fifth year for this annual shout-out to the community.  Now accepting nominations--please feel free to comment with your suggestions on who is the best of the best.

Plone Conference 2011 by the Numbers

And an exercise in "scientifically" locating the 2012 conference. 

The numbers are in and San Francisco looks like this against the last five Plone Conferences. 

Location	Attendance
2011 San Francisco	265
2010 Bristol	285
2009 Budapest	420
2008 Washington	350
2007 Naples	415
2006 Seattle	258

With Naples and Budapest looking so good, one is tempted to say that Europe is the more successful venue.  I ran a Student's t-test in order to see if the two sample populations, Europe and North America, were significantly different.  The null hypothesis is that there is no difference between the European and North American conference attendance numbers. 

For the data above with a standard deviation of 65.1 and 4 degrees of freedom for the test, the t value was -1.55.  The probability of this result, assuming the null hypothesis, is 0.196.  This does not meet the usual 0.05 value for significance.  We accept the null hypothesis that Europe and North America are the same.  

World Plone 2012

The call for proposals for the 2012 Conference is out.  Let's see what sort of trouble we can get in with the above table. 

First, turn the cities into latitude and longitude coordinates, then calculate the average of all six venue locations weighted by attendance.  The result looks like this:

The red 'X' indicates the location of the weighted average, the spot that maximizes attendance while minimizing travel costs.  It's the perfect location for next year's conference. 

There's only one problem... the actual location is in the middle of the North Atlantic:

The nearest land is either St. John's, Newfoundland or the Madeira Islands.  St. John's has an October-November average high temperature of 6-11 C (43-51 F) and the remarkable beverage, Newfoundland Screech.  Apparently, some of the best food in Canada is to be found there, plus I like snowshoeing. 

Madiera, on the other hand, has an average Oct-Nov high temperature of 20-23 C (68-73 F) and a famous wine named after the island.  One of the conference centers in Funchal looks suitable.

I urge the Plonistas in Newfoundland and Labrador along with those in Madiera to submit proposals.