Plone Metrics Person of the Year 2013

It's been a year of record-breaking low productivity for me on this blog.  As always, there's a metric for that:

Therefore, be it resolved that I shall post to Plone Metrics at least monthly in 2014.

Now on to the main event.  I've been offering a free beer to one worthy Plonista every New Year's Eve since 2007.  I think the only one who has collected was Joel in San Fran.  Here are the past winners with the open spot for this year.

2013
2012	Martijn Pieters
2011	Toby Roberts
2010	Eric Steele
2009	Nate Aune
2008	Joel Burton
2007	Alexander Limi

With this table comes the usual 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.  Of course the Official  Plone Awards are the community indicator of approval and everyone nominated there is certainly worthy.  Congratulations on that score go out to the winner, Asko Soukka, for his work on the Robot Framework. Others that are well-deserving of a tip o' the hat are:

• The core developers and release managers definitely need a huge round of applause for all the essential work they do.  
• The 2013 Plone Conference team. The first Plone conference held south of the equator breaks new ground in inclusiveness, emphasizing Plone's world-wide appeal.
• All of those who have blogged and microblogged about Plone are another group of supporters who contribute simply by continuing to communicate your ideas, thoughts, and solutions along with the occasional pieces of humor.  
• As always, the Foundation Board gets a great big nod of appreciation here.  Paul Roeland in particular deserves shout-out as our second term President.

This year is a tough one because Eric and Martijn have held their places in the Ohloh and Stack Overflow stats and I have an unwritten rule that Plone Metrics won't make the award twice to the same person.  I very nearly took the easy way out and awarded to "Other," the entire Plone community.  On Ohloh, the number of commits by "Other" (22%) exceeded all but Eric's (28%) in the past 30 days.  Ohloh classifies Plone as a "highly active" project with 728 lifetime contributors, a "very large" development team, and increasing year after year commits.  The number of contributors continues to rise steadily, an indication of Plone's continued health and growth. 

 

Along those lines I should point out that Plone still ranks highly at CMS Matrix.  Plone remains in the top 10 whether sorting the huge CMS Matrix list by clicks, views or compares. 

Clicks	10th
Views	7th
Compares	7th

But back to the question at hand, who is Plone Metrics' Person of the Year?  That individual is by extension the standard-bearer for the entire Plone community--users, developers, integrators, consultants, site managers, and all the others. And in that spirit, I sought out someone who exemplified diversity in the exemplary Plone community.  In the end this message resonated most strongly with me: 

"PloneChix is a group of people supporting diversity in the Plone community. This blog is a place for members to gain visibility through writing and is syndicated through Planet Plone. All PloneChix are encouraged to write. DM @eleddy if you are interested."

The Plone Metrics Person of the Year is Elizabeth Leddy.  Her tweets (Twitter profile: "sex, plone, rock n' roll"), key roll in the 2011 Plone Conference, service on the Plone Executive Board (2012-13), a steady stream of high quality presentations, and curation of the PloneChix blog make her an ideal Person of the Year.  

In closing, congrats to everyone in the Plone community.  Thanks for all the great work you do to make the CMS I use in my day-job such a solid one.  See you in 2014 in Bristol.