Back from Amman

Dragged back in from Amman last Friday around 9:30 PM. The close-out Thursday and the fly-home Friday are one big blur.

Got started with the WACSI Plone training Thursday morning and that continued into close-out meetings afterwards with Gen. Shiyyab and the rest. Next came the final luncheon back at the Radisson and finally about 90 minutes to get packed. Then back to the Marriott for a celebratory dinner with Amir. That left a couple hours to get the feet up, shower and shave one last time, and checkout around 11:00 PM.

The flight to CDG was on an old 737 (uncomfortable seats, crowded, poorly ventilated). Had 6 hours at the airport before the trans-Atlantic leg, which was much more comfortable. Zipped through Atlanta and home 3 hrs later. All total, 44 hours up and on the go. No wonder I feel more than just the jet-lag.

Now what has all that to do with Plone? Actually, very little, but all the hours of work and hard travel was worth it. Here are my anecdotal metrics on the success of the workshop:

First off, the software was very well received. Some NGOs were without a web host and the WACSI portal is the perfect place for them. Even our translators were adapting quickly to the Plone interface, often not needing us to answer questions when they'd already heard the answer.

Secondly, we got a round of applause for the system when the workshop was over. I've not heard of that for Drupal or SharePoint.

Thirdly, the participants from UN-DP POGAR (Program on Governance in the Arab Region) were pleased enough that they stated during the close-out that they would use Plone and make any enhancements and customizations available to WACSI (and by extension, to the entire Plone community).

Finally, there's the site activity since we left. Already there have been postings in the discussion area (both in English and Arabic), new material uploaded by participants without our coaching, and a fair amount of e-mail traffic. All in all, a very positive Plone experience.

Now the search is on for Plone trainers and consultants in the Middle East...

Plone for WACSI

Our "Web Access for Civil Society Initiatives" Plone workshop continues. The first day of technical training was counted very successful, especially as we had very little lecture and lots of hands on. It was a good load test both for the UNM server and the RSS training facility.

No significant glitches, although we had some odd moments with unicode errors for cut-and-paste when using Arabic. Seems that the cut from 'actions' failed although it worked fine in the contents menu. Hmm??

We'll be looking for Plone consultants in the MENA region for training and development, since some NGOs are hosting their primary web presence on the UNM WACSI server.

Plone Metrics in Amman

After the usual airline travails, I'm in Amman, Jordan. Not too bad for 8 timezones (soon to be 9 when the US kicks out of DST early tomorrow--its still 7:00 PM Sat. in ABQ as I write this). The WACSI workshop held an informal mixer this evening where we got to meet our regional participants. Of course, the CMC-Amman staff were there. They've done a terrific job getting all the logistics in place, translating material, and helping out with direction connections to hard-to-reach people.

We've got attendance from a dozen Jordanians, over a dozen Syrians, two from Saudi Arabia, and a handful from Egypt. Some are policy heads of various NGOs; others are technical representatives. Whatever their background, they'll have three days of interaction and discussion about how best to form a robust online community to support the several missions of their organizations. Then we'll have two days of Plone how-to, which should take them to the point that they are able to make good use of our Plone framework.

The idea, of course, is to get us webmasters and admins out of the way. The user community should be able to organize and present the information they wish to disseminate as they see fit. And if we can get there in five days, I'll be very pleased.

Content Management at the Dept of Energy

I recently attended the DOE Internet Workshop at Los Alamos National Laboratory (InterLab). To my surprise, there still isn't a consensus on an enterprise-wide CMS. Islands of Drupal, WordPress, and others are out there. Some labs use home-built CMS, others Oracle, and still others SharePoint, which probably has the widest installation base. Problem is that SharePoint is tricky to use as an extranet and really doesn't work and play well with non-IE browsers. And don't even get me talking about custom workflows...

My "Plone at Sandia" presentation was well received and may have made a few take another look. Probably also got a number of folks to take a second look at Python. After all, what does Google (a Python shop) know that we don't?

Nov. 1 I'm off to Amman for a WACSI workshop (wacsi.unm.edu) where I'll be training representatives from Middle East NGOs on Plone. We're expecting Jordanian, Syrian, Saudi, and Egyptian participants. Should be an excellent event.