plonewars.com

To reach more users, we need to reach them. For this we need more than
technology: confidence, sustainability, quality, services. How do you
train people? How long will plone exist? Things like that.

That was one of the reasons to start the ZEA network. It is an
organisation of 22 partner companies. It involves promotion, some
projects and now also open source research.

If we have a clear message to decision makers as a reliable
technology, if we show up in a lot of research reports on open source:
that is good for the partners and for plone. ZEA has pretty good
relations with some universities. Being involved in research could
also mean more funding.

The EU floss impact report was a study on the
impact of free and open source software on innovation and
competitiveness of Europe. ZEA helped that report because of its
connections with and knowledge of those 22 SMEs that are a member of
ZEA. (Xavier showed some of the figures from that report, there’s a
readable abstract on ZEA’s website.

For ZEA, it is important to stay in touch with the researchers that
make such reports because we can give them accurate information on our
part of the IT sector. In the first draft of the EU report, zope/plone
wasn’t included and they also missed several case studies. ZEA helped
them to include zope/plone and helped them with case studies. A core
of that case study was the CommunesPlone project of some 20 Belgian
local governments that also has a lot of contacts with other
individual developers and SMEs. That kind of software ecosystem was
exactly one of the things they wanted to show off in the report.

Current research in the EU – in so far that it has to do with open
source – is mostly research on the impact of open source, the quality,
the structure of projects, etcetera. There isn’t yet much actual
programming going on in this kind of research, but the percentage of
actual programming is expected to rise.

There are all sorts of enlightening results coming from the
analysis-type or results. Analysis of turnover of project contributors
in an open source project: in a nice, regular pattern. Analysis of
dependencies in projects. Project structure comparisons. Etcetera.

There is work to be done, though, to translate the findings of these
research projects

In Switzerland, some Kantons (districts) are using plone for intranets
and websites, there is also a UN website, and several other government
agencies use it. Still it is a problem to promote plone. Some of the
problems:

• IT departments are scared of open source as they’ve invested a lot
  in Microsoft and fear for their job if open source works well.
• Commercial players lobby well amongst decision makers. And it works.
• “Nobody is fired if a project based on Microsoft or Oracle
  fails”.
• Big projects have to go through a very elaborate tendering process
  which is way too expensive for individual smaller companies.
• Open source is perceived as “linux on the desktop”.
• There are not enough plone companies in Switzerland.

Open source also has its advantages. You can do guerrilla marketing
because, if you find the right people, you can give them the open
source software, install it for them and they’ll run it “in
secret”. Afterwards, if it works, they will evangelise in their own
organisation. You have freely distributable prototypes, so it is easy
to try out. You can get excellent service, also you have an
international community around it.

Plone is set up in a modular way, so something like
PloneGov can be developed in small
steps. Individual government instances can arrange for the creation of
individual parts, which can be exchanged with the other government
instances. You pool resources in this way and you can stay below the
amount of money where you’d need the expensive tendering process.

They’re now looking at some dossier/record management system within
that PloneGov project. Bernard showed us the current state of the
application. One of the things that they changed compared to core
plone is a distinction between a “desktop” and a “repository”. So no
in-place editing of items, you first check out an item out of your
repository and place it on your desktop before you can edit
it. (Desktop in this case is just a personal working area inside
plone, not your computer’s desktop). When you’re ready, you place it
again into the repository. There’s also a way to assign tasks to
people (which uses archetypes’ reference mechanism a lot).

The customers helped them a lot by telling them the things that were
wrong with the current existing commercial systems. None of those
systems is fully adapted to the organisations’ needs.

As PloneGov, they hope to make it really easy for governments to pool
relatively small amounts of money to get additional
functionality. They are turning it into an open source project. In
that way it also could be used in whole or in parts in other
countries.