"Count what is countable. Measure what is measureable. What is not measureable, make measureable." -- Galileo

Friday, January 1, 2016

Plone Metrics' 2015 Person of the Year

This year the clear winner in meaningful Plone stats for 2015 is Plone 5.0.  Here's the graph of session visits to Plone.org for the first 30 weeks of 2015:
There's a slow but steady downward trend that comes along with being a stable, mature release of a mainstream product.  There are minor peaks in late February and for the 4.3.5 and 4.3.6 releases in May-June. 

Now here's the graph of session visits since the release of Plone 5.0 in weeks after 30: 
Week 38 corresponds to Sept. 29, the release date of Plone 5.0.  Needless-to-say, there was over a 20% uptick in visitation to the site, no doubt as people checked out the new release and upgraded their 4.3 sites.  Most notable has been the fact that the trendline is flat, meaning that there is a steady, healthy interest in Plone that has continued for months after the initial excitement of the 5.0 release itself. 

Now on to the main event.  Here are the past winners.

2007 Alexander Limi
2008 Joel Burton
2009 Nate Aune
2010 Eric Steele
2011 Toby Roberts
2012 Martijn Pieters
2013 Elizabeth Leddy
2014 The Year 2020
2015 ?

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, there are many, many contributors that are well-deserving of a tip o' the hat:
  • The core developers and release managers definitely need a huge round of applause for all the essential work they do.  Considering how successful Plone 5 has been, Eric Steele probably would be Person of the Year except for my informal "can't win it twice" rule. 
  • The 2015 Plone Conference team and sponsors for Bucharest. Also, a hat tip goes out to all the other event teams and participants.  You are the beating pulse of the community. 
  • All of those who have blogged, chatted on the support channels, 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 and the gets a great big nod of appreciation here. 
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. We've only slipped one rank in views since last year. 
Clicks 10th
Views 8th
Compares 7th
But back to the question at hand, who is Plone Metrics' Person of the Year?  With so many awesome contributors, this has been a tricky one, but I'm going with that long-time herder of cats, Paul Roeland.  With some many things going on in so many directions for Plone, with subgroups and special interests constantly making demands of his time, and as a Board member since 2011 not to mention 4-term President, it seems appropriate to name Paul the Plone Metrics' Person of the Year.