[Evangelism] Operation Ditch Plone
While trolling the web for Plone stats, I came across a seriously negative webpage (on a Plone site!?) obviously by a frustrated Plone user. His web posting is titled Operation Ditch Plone. Please see http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/development/rfc/ms-rfc-46 http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/development/rfc/ms-rfc-46 . This item is a Sept. 2008 posting with nothing new being added recently, so there may be time for a positive intervention. This brings to mind two issues. 1) Specifically, how can the Plone community reach out and help Howard and his users? Can this Plone site be saved? 2) More generally, how can we locate and identify frustrated Plone admins and mitigate any negativity? Can we set up a formal process to track sites in danger of falling off the Plone wagon? Would it be possible to assign a POC who could act as a liaison between their admin(s) and Plone tech support? I think it would be valuable if the Plone community had a process that tracks frustrated users and implementers, reach out to them even when they haven't asked or don't know how to ask for help, give them the TLC they need, and minimize the consequences of failed Plone projects. Some of the input that identifies floundering Plone sites would come from the technical support lists and channels, but some could come from people who stumble upon negative blogs and rants on the web. I'd appreciate hearing from others about if and/or how we should be attempting this. If someone with a stronger server admin background wants to help Howard directly, I'd appreciate hearing about that, too. -- View this message in context: http://n2.nabble.com/Operation-Ditch-Plone-tp1446111p1446111.html Sent from the Evangelism mailing list archive at Nabble.com. ___ Evangelism mailing list Evangelism@lists.plone.org http://lists.plone.org/mailman/listinfo/evangelism
Re: [Evangelism] Plone and QUALOSS - QUALity in Open Source Software
Xavier Heymans wrote: … So far, it has been very difficult to establish a link with the OS Community on these topics. … I would like to know if we could find some quality leaders within the Plone and Zope community that could become technical contact points to provide feedback to the researchers. Glancing at the three projects under the Flossquality umbrella, I guess that some of the people with whom you wish to make links might hesitate, with thoughts such as these: 1) Will information that I provide to FLOSSMetrics be communicated appropriately, effectively and in good time to other relevant projects, in particular QualOSS and SQO-OSS? -- underlying wish: duplication of input/effort should be as close as possible to zero. 2) Can you demonstrate that deliverables of the three projects are being used effectively? For example, how are SMEs responding to the guides http://flossmetrics.org/sections/deliverables provided by FLOSSMetrics? -- underlying wish: what's in it for us? 3) Are the conference, journal and workshop papers and books listed at http://www.sqo-oss.eu/index_html/research easily and immediately available? -- underlying wishes: hyperlinks, open access (OA). 4) How will the analyses of (say) FLOSSMetrics be superior to the statistics of (say) Ohloh? -- underlying assumptions: apples and oranges, statistical discrepancies; http://n2.nabble.com/Plone-code-swarm---275-code-contributors---more-than-Drupal-and-Joomla-combined-tp1387483p1387483.html. 5) After funding for Flossquality projects ends, how long will it be before another round of surveys and analysis? -- underlying hope: deliverables, methodologies et cetera from the current projects should be so forward-looking and adaptable that future projects/champions will positively wish to pick up the baton. Your answer to (4) might depend upon quality leaders coming forth from Plone, Zope and other communities ;) Focusing on the highlights at http://www.diigo.com/annotated/573bd2866683ab0136353688530ed63f, in particular those under the heading 'Standards Compliant' and 'Plays Well with Others', I take the opinion that playing well is a most critical aspect. A system may be compliant, powerful and wildly popular; but if it can not _not_ easily play well with others, I'll avoid it. Why avoid? http://www.diigo.com/list/Grahamperrin/software-halloween-morass leads to a blog entry about 'The Conversation Prism' that visualises, in varying degrees of complexity, an impressive but dizzying (alarming?) range of social media. I have no desire to visualise the 300+ recognised content management systems, nor to substract (from visualisations of social media and/or CMS) the products/services that are not open source. I do take pleasure in knowing that Plone already has, or soon will have, the USPs/common selling points that people find appealing in other products. Because we can do so much with Plone -- with certainty -- I'll _avoid_ novelties or popularities that require proliferation (not always with the same certainty). --- Visually, I think of (Python -- Zope -- Plone core -- collective/add-ons) as being very rounded and cohesive. (Might Plone have fewer add-ons/extensions than other content management systems? Might statistical analyses of core and collective code bases suggest innovation/development around Plone is less than around other products? I have no idea but Visually, my recollection of Drupal was blockiness. LAMP/MAMP were four quadrants with less cohesion, less of a big picture. More maintenance. YMMV. A key distinction: -- as in the past I added user-requested functionality to Drupal, so it 'felt' (to me) more sprawling -- as more recently I add user-requested add-on products to Plone, so it feels more rounded. Playing well :) Veering off-topic from Plone, but on the subject of EU/European Commission-supported initiatives, the following survey draws my attention: http://groups.diigo.com/collaboration/forum/topic/we-value-your-opinion-eu-survey-on-internet-based-collaboration-in-support-of-the-research-process-6471 EU survey on Internet-based collaboration in support of the research process Does that survey have any relation to Flossquality work in progress? Best regards Graham Note to self: http://www.diigo.com/list/Grahamperrin/software-halloween-morass -- View this message in context: http://n2.nabble.com/Plone-and-QUALOSS---QUALity-in-Open-Source-Software-tp1402419p1446439.html Sent from the Evangelism mailing list archive at Nabble.com. ___ Evangelism mailing list Evangelism@lists.plone.org http://lists.plone.org/mailman/listinfo/evangelism
Re: [Evangelism] WPD Web2.0 Champion needed
Hi Gerry, On Sun, 2008-11-02 at 07:15 -0500, Gerry Kirk wrote: Ok thanks Christian for your suggestions. Both helpful for now and for establishing an ongoing effort to build an online community. All, I've made a list of things to do - WPD list Amazing what you can get done with an extra hour time change (not like I can sleep more with little kids in the house). Nate, there is a task there for you. Question - what content do we have for posting? Is the idea to use the media release? What do people think about live streaming some of the events? Do we have a list of local WPD organizer contacts? I like Christian's idea to use a url like worldploneday.org. I could buy it, donate it to the PF and have it autoforward to the WPD page on plone.org. Sound good? What about collecting tagged Flickr photos? Do we have a place where we can aggregate activity happening on the web? I could create a PageFlakes page which would accomplish this. Other ideas? I sent an email to the list a little while back with a link[1] to a Yahoo Pipes feed for WPD 2008. It was my first attempt at setting 1 up so I'm unsure if it's working correctly so feel free to modify it to suck in some more content (currently referencing flickr, bloglines, youtube, delicious). Thanks, Tim [1] http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=7uO8l_Oc3RGCrANR1L3fcQ - Gerry On Wed, Oct 29, 2008 at 9:15 AM, Christian Scholz [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi! I wanted to be somewhat more active with this here but workload is a bit high at the moment. But here are my remarks. So the thing with all this if IMHO that you need to build a web2.0 community before such events, not with such events. Basically it means things like putting a Follow Plone on twitter button and a link to a Facebook group on the plone.org homepage. Moreover it might be helpful to also offer a link to subscribe to news via email (also news should be more visible). Can be done with Feedburner or other tools (but should produce statistics so we know what is working and what is not). And to those who say that putting this web2.0 crap on the homepage makes no sense because tomorrow xyz instead of abc is the cool thing, just tell that then we switch to xyz ;-) You simply have to monitor this space to see where you reach people best. Of course also the logo on the homepage should IMHO be updated ASAP. As for WPD you said most things already, I would add: - create a new twitter account for WPD, put in the URL and some description - post some updates on WPD and start following people. You might not want to add too many people at once though as this looks like spamming. Start with the Plone community and their followers to follow, then reach out (e.g. use Scoble's followers or something like that ;-) ) - put a link to the FB event and the twitter button on the homepage (create some nice buttons maybe) - on FB invite as many people as possible to the event (spamming seems to be quite normal there ;-) ). - tell your twitter followers about the FB event and all the other stuff once it's there. It's probably good to make a checklist of what to announce where when you have some news to spread. - tell the community to reach out to bloggers individually, prepare some blogger compatible press release. Everybody who blogs might know that the normal press release blurb is not really stuff easily to copy and paste you might want to have some sort of pre-defined blog post you spread around. In general it should be as easy as possible for anybody to spread the news: - make a list what people can do in a subsection of WPD like - all the sites we are active in and where people can invite their own contacts to. - prepared blog posts/news items for people to reblog/retweet - call for spreading tweets from the WPD account. - contacts of people whom they can ask for help Here's something more: Ask participants in the event to setup some ustream-based streaming of the event. It would be great to somehow show off those streams which are active at some point in time. Maybe also a plain listing of all the events would be nice to show how many there are. Registering worldploneday.org
[Evangelism] WPD twitter account created
I've started following a bunch of people who follow @plone, please help spread the word. I asked earlier, is there a contact list for all the people who are organizing events? I'd like to be able to converse with them also. What do you think about getting people to post to the @worldploneday Twitter account? I found an email-to-Twitter feature. I could turn this on for one person at each event. -- blog: http://gerrykirk.net daily musings at http://twitter.com/gerrykirk ___ Evangelism mailing list Evangelism@lists.plone.org http://lists.plone.org/mailman/listinfo/evangelism
[Evangelism] Re: Operation Ditch Plone
Here, with his permission, is the start of an email exchange with Howard Butler at umn... I certainly have been known to complain about the treadmill of upgrades that was (once) Plone. Version 3, not that it helps you right now, is MUCH more stable and I know from what I've seen and what I heard at the recent conference that our cries of enough already have been heard. I was able to upgrade some relatively simple 2.5 sites to 3, but the remaining 2.1 site (which runs a custom election system) will probably remain for some time; I always imagined I would let old sites run old software unless someone screamed. Since you say you're a volunteer, I take it there isn't much money to spend on this. Is there a group at UMN that provides virtual servers? Any chance of moving your site to a faster machine? A few groups have gotten Plone running on Amazon EC3, and there are now established Plone/Zope hosting services you might be able to use, if you had some money. You might then be able to offload some of the server admin duties. Have you tried the plone-users list or IRC to try to tackle the external editor issues, or perhaps the PHC upgrade problems you ran into? It sounds like there is a lot going on in your site that we would only be able to pick away at the problem bit by bit. I don't think you offended anyone... at least not me, maybe because I've done a bit of venting on the plone-users list myself this past week about performance issues. Kim On Nov 2, 2008, at 9:07 PM, Howard Butler wrote: On Nov 2, 2008, at 6:33 PM, T. Kim Nguyen wrote: Hi Howard - your page at http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/development/rfc/ms-rfc-46 came up on one of the Plone mailing lists. I've been spearheading the Plone rollout on our campus at Univ. of Wisconsin Oshkosh and thought I'd ask if you thought there was a way I might be able to help you with your Plone performance issues. I noticed you mention having older (less reliable?) hardware: what exactly is running your Plone site, and is Solaris a must? The Zope installation docs mention that the threading model in Solaris will slow things down relative to running a different OS on the same hardware, though I found in my testing a couple of years ago it was maybe a 10-15% difference only - not horrible. Also, you're running Plone 2.5, which could be a factor since Plone 3 is 50% faster for some things. Are you running CacheFu and a proxy like Squid? Anyhow, let me know if you think I can help or if it's a lost cause. You can check out what we're doing at UW Oshkosh here: http://uwosh.edu/ploneprojects Kim Hello Kim, I have read through the thread on the evangelism list thread about this and will group some responses to all of it here. - We are running Plone 2.1 with an approximately Dec 2005 PloneHelpCenter, a custom gallery archetype product (written by me), and a few other products (PDF, Questionnaire, etc) - We have older CacheFu and a squid instance going, which allows us to at least get past search engine crawler day without imploding :) - Slowlaris obviously wasn't our first choice when looking to run the site, but that is what we had available. A few years down the road, there are now more options in that respect. I attempted to get this stuff to 2.5 about a year and a half ago, and after a good bit of time struggling, I gave up. I know that a lot of the pain is self-inflicted. I used SVN versions of things like PHC, etc, that makes migration especially painful. At the time the website was rolled out, it did fill our project's needs fairly well, and moving our docs from docbook to ReST has been probably the most beneficial aspect of the entire effort. Our problems are mostly related to the fact that there is only a single admin, our site hasn't aged very well with respect to staying on the Plone upgrade mill, and the rest of the developers/users never really bought into the concept of the site. They were fine editing files through cvs/svn and having a process generate some html for them. When my RFC talks about the site not being successful in generating through-the-web editing, the developer buy-in aspect is mostly what that complaint is about. That the site is quite slow obviously doesn't help, but that's probably the second or third complaint. Our devs *hate* editing through the web, it seems (I know of options like external editor, etc, which I tried to support, but I didn't have much success with), and users seem more comfortable editing wiki-style rather than through a workflow (even though I would argue that our documents deserve some review and workflow). The most significant problem is there are no Plone admins in our community other than myself (and I only admin the MapServer website -- no other Plone sites anymore) who've stepped up to help with the site. Plone's failure for the
