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.

World Plone Conference 2008

The Conference has been going well and I've had a good time making new connections, renewing acquaintances, and learning lots about Plone. Even if only one session per day was stellar, these Plone Conferences would be worth the time and money. The trouble is, there are lots of stellar sessions each day.

At left Limi talks about his vision for where the Plone user experience is heading. I've also attended very worthwhile talks by Joel Burton, David Glick, Calvin Hendryx-Parker, and a fascinating Birds of a Feather session about Cooperation and Collaboration as a Business Model.

Tomorrow I'm looking forward to Clayton Parker's Buildout talk or Burton's KSS talk (oh, no! a conflict). There's also a potential conflict between Lawrence Row's SQLAlchemy session and Nate Aune's multimedia talk.

Probably over lunch Friday Nate and I will catch up with Mark Corum and discuss Plone marketing ideas, strategies, and a path forward.

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Meanwhile on the general CMS news front, Infoworld has a piece referenced by Yahoo! IT news about Acquia and Drupal.

One thing jumped out at me, this item:

You'll still need to have hardware already set up with PHP, MySQL (or PostgreSQL), and a Web server, such as Apache. Don't underestimate the work to get this running -- especially in a large production setting. It took me about a day to set up and troubleshoot this stack on my Windows Server 2003 server.

Ye gods! Downloading the Plone Windows installer takes longer than running it and then you've got an out-of-the-box, fully functioning Plone instance on any Windows machine you want. But a full day to configure the stack for Drupal?! My students in my database design class at the College of Santa Fe install Plone and create a fully featured custom data type from a UML class diagram in a single class session.