Something Old, Something New

In my digital dumpster diving this evening I turned up Brad Bollenbach's ample introduction at ONLamp.com from Sept. 2004. Although this means he was probably running 2.0.5, his remarks stand the test of time. Alas, I can not locate any of Brad's follow-up articles. Anyone care to recast this kind of piece into Plone 3.0?

And while I'm looking through O'Reilly.com, I note the O'Reilly Open Source Convention 2008 is scheduled for July 21-25, 2008 in Portland, Oregon (good choice). No specifics available yet, but watch that link.

Also on the radar screen for conferences of a sort is Plone Foundation's Strategic Planning Summit 2008. Scheduled for 8-10 Feb. 2008 at the Googleplex, it shows that Limi is doing a great job of juggling his job at Google with his Plone world.

Yet another one to watch out for will be the Plone Symposium East -- "Rally in the Valley", a North American Plone conference hosted at Penn State. Scheduled for 10-14 March, this bumps right up against Py Con, but the organizers are looking at ways of minimizing collisions between the two. Sprints may start as early as 8 March to frontload the schedule and let people scoot to Py Con immediately after the symposium.

Another one to keep an eye on will be next summer's NA Plone Symposium in New Orleans, 4-6 June. Enfold will be hosting it and, as always, it should be a good one. Details forthcoming.

The Plonistas down at the City of Albuquerque have often asked me about what ABQ could be doing in the way of hosting a sprint or a symposium. With the 2008 conference calendar filling up, we need to start thinking about next fall. Maybe a "Hot Air Sprint" ahead of the annual Balloon Fiesta? I'll have to ask the gang about this at December's NM Plone Users Group meeting.

Finally, I'm pleased to see the results from the Federal Open Source Referendum Study. Tipping factors mentioned in the report are "Organizational reluctance to change the status quo" and "Lack of structured technical support." One of the big drivers for government use of OS is data center consolidation. Multi-level security capabilities also figure big in the OS decision process for gov't. Intelligence agencies seem to be taking a lead (look at cia.gov for a Plone public face). Wish I could get my hands on the raw data to see where DOE and NNSA are in the survey.