Plone Strategic Planning Summit - what's going on under "the" plone

Activity reports from the plone community after the Plone Strategic Summit in SanFrancisco. For those who want to follow and were not there.

It has been a month since the Plone Strategic Planning Summit in San Francisco and many initiatives have started since.

Francesco and Eleonora from Reflab have been there and it took a little time to gather all the suggestions and ideas from the meeting.

Now it's time to take a look around and see what's happening.

A Plainly Significant Preliminay Summary

A "Plone Strategic Plannning Summit" (confidentially PSPS) is an event that brings together leaders and key stakeholders in the Plone Community in an intimate, focused setting in order to do some big-picture, medium-term planning.

PSPS2008 was held in San Francisco in February, from 7 to 10 and hosted by Google. With about fifty partecipants from around the world and a wide usage of "secret facilitation technologies"  - like big paper sheets,  colors and sticky-notes -  the group managed to collect and convey different visions from different actors in the world of plone and translate them into action plans.

Considerations

The first thing to notice is that the PSPS allowed to focus on areas that are often likely to be left aside in open source projects.

Just to mention some:

• the extended roadmap
  a long-term approach to planning that involves not only development procedures and architectural improvements but also framing, positioning and community building.
  

• the role of the so-called integrators
  integrators are the experts in plone customization who are truly making the connections between developers and users/customers; the category includes designers, skinners and product builders. Making Plone more "approachable" for integrators is a way to give a boost to its efficiency and pervasiveness.
  
• the competitors
  we've been through discussions and lightning talks about competing software on the market, both open source and proprietary, to clarify strenght and talents of Plone in the CMS world.
  
• market analysis and segmentation
  an operational and functional analysis of Plone by subsets of audiences that have similar needs. Main segments choosen were Non profit organizations, Small Businesses, Education, Government, Enterprise, Media/Broadcasting.
  
• focus on good communication strategies and other marketing issues
  an englightning set of talks and workshop on communication, product and brand marketing.
  

The hardest part of the whole process was maybe to  find the right level of abstraction to balance strategy and feasibility.
No doubt that we were more for the "actionable" side!

Work in progress

Here's some results, arbitrarily choosen; the numbers are referring to the tickets opened on dev.plone.org

Documentation!

#7836 - Suggested IA for Plone Documentation

#7835 - Add support for — and identify — topic owners.

#7813 - Make sure the "strategic integration" story 
with other systems is visible and documented

Integrators!

#7846 - Create a group of "integrator liaisons" 

• The Anti-sprint: Plone 3.1 testing event
  
• The Plone Integrators Group on OpenPlans
• #plone-integrators monthly chat on freenode irc network
  

#7828 - Create a collection of Personas 
to represent integrators and common use cases

• Plone Stories Group on Open Plans

Themes!

#7849 - OOTB Theming project

• The OOTB Theming Group on OpenPlans

#7841 - Quality themes for newly installed Plone Sites

#7838 - Create a "minimal Deliverance theme"

Architecture!

#7832 - The future of Archetypes

• Archetypes discussion on Nabble
  

#7812 - User-configurable rating support 

#7847 - TTW content type creation

• Dexterity - a through-the-web, model-driven, friendly content type system

Marketing!

Marketing Committee and Groups

• Plone Marketing Group on OpenPlans
• Plone Foundation Marketing Committee
  

Various Improvements Prioritiezed

There is a lot of interesting work going on, really too much to mention. The complete list of actionable items is here, and it worths a visit for anyone involved in the Plone Community (or even in another software project). There is also a PSPS updates aggregator prepared by Christian Scholtz that allows you to stay tuned to the latest activities with one feed.

Partecipants Reports

Closing the list with the Christian Scholtz choice of links from the blogosphere, and also with a nice credit from the Drupal Association, which is pointing to the summit as an example of a good practice.

Where to look further

Tag, tag, tag...

On the Nabble Plone Forum/Mailing List find the items which subject is starting with PSPS08

.. and remember:

Never say "THE Plone" again.