Plone Conference Wrap-up

So I am sitting here now at the first day of the sprint and I am sort of hovering between the multimedia and marketing sprint. Other sprints btw are on Membership, AJAX, Syndication or GIS.

In the multimedia sprint we are concentrating in enhancing Audio, introducing video support and creating sort of a link type for linking to external sources such as http://blip.tv, http://video.google.com or similar sites.

In the marketing sprint people are concentrating right now on documentation. Ideas here have been to add a feedback possibility to existing documentation (which might go to some documentation bug tracker), add a documentation suggestion possibility and eventually some voting mechanism for that. Other people are looking at other sites to check how they are doing it.

The Conference in general

I haven’t seen that many talks actually or at least couldn’t follow them as I was handling the streaming part, helping out people who did not get it to work or moving my stuff from one room to another. But those I saw were great and those I missed were great, too, I’ve heard. Two of the four rooms have been videotaped during the whole 3 days and I additionally taped some of the sessions as long as it hasn’t been done by those video guys. They are editing it right now and it will probably pop up one by one on http://plone.org (or at least an announcement where to find it). In 5-6 weeks all of them should be out according to Jon Stahl, our conference-organization-hero!

The videos I taped will hopefully come out soon when I am back in Germany (which is around Nov 4 as I am going to San Francisco from here first).

One highlight was definitely the keynote of Eben Moglen, General Counsel of the Free Software Foundation. He was talking about „Software and Community in the Early 21st Century“ and it was a very great keynote and quite a bit emotional, too. It ended with standing ovation and I hope it will be up soon.

Some facts about this conference: There have been about 340 people here which makes it the biggest Plone conference so far I think. And 70% of them have been the first time at a Plone Conference. This might due to the fact that it’s in the US now though. But anyway, it’s a great number. Even here on the sprint I think there are about 60% of the people who are attending one for the first time. So hopefully they will get to know how to code stuff for Plone and keep doing that afterwards.

The conference and streaming and Second Life

So we had the first conference to stream live onto the web and into Second Life. And we only had about 2 weeks in front to organize it as it wasn’t clear whether it is possible at all or not. So in these two weeks we (which is Jon and me) had to do a lot of stuff such as checking bandwidth issues, setting up the server, creating a Second Life conference venue, writing press releases so that we can tell Second Life blogs and news sources about it, create a webpage for showing the stream, write some little tutorial on how to do that and so on. So the result of that is mixed and I will probably go more into detail what can be done better next time in an additional post. Additionally on the first day we had problems with the wifi on location so that streaming was only partly available.

But we had listeners for it. There have been some on the webpage and there have been some at the Second Life location including some Ruby guy and Martijn Faassen.

I also compiled a list of people who reported about it in this context:

and the posts by me and Nate on it:

So that’s it from me for now. Look also at the group photo on top and click on it to get a bigger version. You might also want to add notes for people you recognize on that photo, I just quickly started with some I directly recognized.

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Plone Conference Wrap-up

The Conference in general

The conference and streaming and Second Life

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