Plone at my Day Job

Our skunk works of a Plone shop continues to chug along at my day job.  We have a steady stream of new projects, a couple big ones that are enduring, and some interesting integration questions ahead to keep us on our toes.

While my webmaster and fellow Plonista, Debbie, is off scuba diving with manta rays in Hawaii, I've been holding down the fort.  Between allergies and proposals for next year's funding, it's a good thing we aren't having any death marches.

That said, I thought I'd try to capture some ideas in that latest Facebook meme, "How others see me." 

Between a fair bit of foreign travel, the geekiness of it all, and the reality on the ground, everyone around me has a different perspective.  Perhaps I'll use this for my interim performance review.

4th Annual Great Backyard Plone Count

For the fourth year running it's time for the Great Backyard Bird Count (Plone-driven, btw) and the Great Backyard Plone Count.  While the bird count is a collaborative bird-watching effort by the Audubon Society, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, and Bird Studies Canada, the Plone count is a voluntary effort to collect data on the world-wide distribution of Plone-powered sites.  In homage to the GBBC, the Plone count is held the same weekend, which this year is Friday 17 through Monday 20 February. 

Because many Plone sites are intranets behind firewalls, they can't be located by crawling the web.  This is a chance for developers, site owners, and users to stand up and be counted.  It's a non-scientific, totally voluntary effort for self-reporting Plone-based web portals.  Last year's results are posted at this Google Docs spreadsheet. If your input from February 2011 is still current, you're already done. 

That said, the input form on the Google Docs spreadsheet is now open.  Anyone can submit sightings of Plone in the wild.  I'll be doing some mining of Delicious and other social bookmarking services this weekend and posting them as well. 

Although there's significant bias in a survey like this, the real value comes from tracking trends over time.  This is the fourth annual Backyard Plone Count (2009, 2010, 2011) and as the number of yearly data points increase, we'll better be able to extrapolate from the observations.  It's not that we're getting an absolute count of Plone market penetrations (just like the GBBC isn't counting individual birds), it's just that we're getting a repeatable sampling by the community.  It is as more a measure of community involvement than it is a metric of the actual number of Plone sites out there. 

So get out there and spot some Plone sites -- and while you're at it, spend a little time counting birds at your feeder.

Thanks in advance!