Yesterday, November 7th, 2008, the first ever World Plone Day went off swimmingly. Granted, some of us had smaller than we would have liked response, but that is partly our fault as we needed to push a little harder on the promotion/publication side. Although I have to say, publicly, that Gerry Kirk did a phenomenonal job on the online promotion front. Hopefully next year we can get more hands and eyes on this and escalate the webwide promotion.
We held our session at The PlugandPlayTechCenter in Sunnyvale, CA. I rented a small conference room from 9am - 4pm and provided lunch vouchers to attendees. Coffee, donuts and fruit were available too.
I wasn’t sure what to expect as my RSVP’s totalled 8 people. Of those 8 people that signed up, 5 showed up. So what does one do when there are only 5 other people at your World Plone Day event? One appreciates the fact that there were 5 people at your event!
That said, I truly believe that this local event was successful and I’m looking forward to World Plone Day 2009.
Why did I think this event was successful even with a low turnout? Couple of reasons actually and the foremost being that I met five individuals in my area who are interested in Plone. A user group was born (ZPUG Valley) and I’m anticipating that as a result of our smaller session we had the opportunity to really “sell” Plone to those who attended who weren’t sure yet. We had the following:
A Plone consultant (Ross Patterson - see his blog post about his experience)
A Python programmer (with no Plone experience at all, some Zope though)
3 attendees who have Plone sites version 2.0.4! They were evaluating whether to migrate to Plone 3 or not.
The python programmer was there to evaluate whether it was worthwhile to learn Plone. He wound up staying the entire day and in the second half of the day he and Ross installed Plone on his CentOS virtual machine. He walked away with a new install of Plone on his laptop.
So what did I learn? Next time I won’t try and plan this event myself. The biggest thing I got out of this local event was that it really needs more than one person to coordinate. Next year we will work together and the event will be larger and I believe more interesting.
We will offer a wider range of sessions for the day. I was more focused on providing an introduction to Plone, which it turns out went over really well for my audience. If we have more levels of attendees next year then we will definitely need “tracks” of a sort for those evaluating Plone, new to Plone, integrators and developers.
As I sit here and reflect on yesterday it just blows me away how much was accomplished worldwide and I’m excited for what the future holds for Plone. This community is strong, solid and growing.
Thank you for letting us be a part of the growth of Plone! (I’m tempted to say “Yes we can” but I won’t)
Ross Patterson and Glenn Jarvis - Mini Plone Installfest
