Jon Stahl’s Journal

Dear Plone community,

Here’s a little trial balloon I’d like to float. Potshots welcome.

I’ve been thinking for a while that we need more structured, scalable ways to listen to our worldwide user community. In particular, I think we need better ways to listen to them for feature ideas, and better ways to understand which of the many great ideas out there would be the most valued for our users.

Community-generated “ideas” sites have become very popular in the technology community in the past year; you can see 3 very successful ones in action over at Ubuntu, at Salesforce.com and at Dell.  I think we could get 80% of the bang for 2% of the effort with one simple trick.  Ready?

Let’s install the VotePlugin into the main Plone issue tracker.

As you can see, it’s a simple, unobtrusive plugin that lets logged users register +1/-1 votes for Trac objects.  Even better, you can make Trac reports based on votes, such as Trac’s own report of the most popular tickets.

A few thoughts:

• It would give core developers a better sense of where our community’s pain points really are.
• It would give non-core users a clear, simple way to submit ideas and express support for others’ ideas.  People like to be listened to.
• It helps new contributors figure out where they could have the most impact.
• It would use the proven, existing community collaboration tool that are already working well for us.

• Voting wouldn’t be binding; that is, developers might not fix the most popular tickets first.  But at least it would give core developers some idea of what hurts the most in the community, and that may be useful in helping folks choose where to spend their scarce and valuable time.

One caveat:

• VotePlugin requires Trac 0.11; Plone.org is running Trac 0.10, so we’d have to upgrade.  No idea how much of a PITA this is, but I’m guessing it’s not too bad.

So, whaddya think?

Anybody willing to tackle upgrading Plone’s Trac, installing the VotePlugin, and creating a custom report or two?

Tags: Plone

We’ve just released Slideshow Folder 4.0, a major upgrade to a product we’ve built to make it easy for folks using Plone to create beautiful animated slideshows in their sites. It’s a “Release Candidate 2″, which means we’ve tested it quite a bit, believe it’s ready for production use, and don’t think it has any bugs.

If you’ve ever wanted to have a slick, animated slideshow in your Plone site just by clicking “make slideshow” on a folder full of images, then Slideshow Folder is for you. Give it a spin, and let us know what you think.

Tags: Plone

We launched our biggest Plone-powered website ever last night: High Country News. We’re still recovering from the final push, but we’ll offer a detailed technical writeup soon.

In the meantime, check out how elegant and powerful a Plone-powered newspaper website can be. Send design-related love notes to HCN’s technical director Ryan Foster.

Tags: plone one/northwest environment

UPDATE: OK, turns out the culprit was my dying Linksys BEFW11S4 router, which started choking as soon as I enabled WPA.  iPeng is now chugging along like a champ, and I’m in iPod-Squeezebox remote control heaven.  Thanks, Coolio!

Molly got an iPod Touch last week, and so the first thing I tried to make it do was serve as a sexy touchscreen remote control for my Squeezebox digital music player.

A quick search immediately led me to iPeng, an iPhone/iPod Touch skin for the Squeezebox web interface. (Continuing a fine open-source tradition of powerful products with goofy names, I might add.) Eureka, I thought, I’m home free. It’s simple, elegant, has had five releases, and most of the folks in the Squeezbox community seem to be quite impressed.

Unfortuntely, I’m finding it to be unusably slow. All of the pages except for the homepage timeout. Now, I know that the iPhone/iPod Safari will only wait about five seconds for a server to respond, but surely my Squeezebox can manage that. Apparently not.

I’m not sure whether the problem is:

• My large-ish music library (~25,000 tracks)
• My slow-ish server CPU (Celeron 2.4 GHz)
• ??

The iPeng skins seems to work pretty well when I hit it with laptop web browser.

I’m bummed. Any ideas?

Tags: digital music, squeezebox

While several ONE/Northwest staffers (like me!) are fairly dedicated bloggers, we’ve never had an organizational blog. Thanks to our summer social media intern Daniel Bachhuber, now we do.

ONE/Blog will mostly address environmental organizing and citizen engagement, with a bit of tools-and-tactics geekery thrown in, and lots of interesting links.

If you’re interested in the cutting edge of online engagement and environmental protection, I invite you to surf on over.

Tags: ONE/Northwest

Just a quick reminder that Plone Conference 2008 session proposals are due July 21st — six short days from now.

If you’ve got a Plone-related skill to teach, a cool project to do a case study about, wisdom about project and business management, or a conversation you’d like to facilitate in the community, take 15 minutes to put together a session proposal! Open source isn’t just about code, it’s about community knowledge sharing, and Plone Conference is what we all make it together!

Here’s where you can submit your proposal!

Tags: plone ploneconf2008

One of the best parts of working at ONE/Northwest is getting to sit next to Karen Uffelman. But even luckier than me is Scott Stevens, to whom she’s getting married on this beautiful, golden Seattle summer afternoon.

Congratulations!

Can you guess which ONE/Northwest staffer said, “If someone says ‘leverage resources for improved engagement collaboration’ I guarantee that nobody will be paying attention by the end of the sentence.”

Hint: it wasn’t me, if you can believe that.

Tags: ONE/Northwest

The always-insightful Mark Schmitt has some interesting thoughts on the significance of internet-enabled low-transaction-cost issue organizing:

Low transaction-cost organizing will present many challenges to the way we think about politics and how to regulate it. Much of the regulation of money in politics, for example, is based on limiting organized money (PACs, bundling) because some people can organize and others can’t. Instead, perhaps, it should seek to encourage greater organizing, reduce the transaction costs even further. And, of course, even with low transaction costs, real political equality is impossible — and perhaps we will even come full circle, where everyone can organize and be heard, and then once again the only ones who matter will be the ones who bring the really big cash. But for now, it’s all an improvement, just as it’s an improvement to be able to find infinitely new ways to find status and satisfaction.

Tags: organizing

Reading about the floods on the Mississippi makes me think of John McPhee’s masterful 1989 book “The Control of Nature” in which he talks about New Orleans’ three hundred year battle against the Mississippi. In this age of hurricanes and floods, McPhee’s work is still visionary and clear-sighted. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Tags: environment

Kevin Kelley rolls a great little neologism, “Scenius”:

Scenius is like genius, only embedded in a scene rather than in genes. Brian Eno suggested the word to convey the extreme creativity that groups, places or “scenes” can occasionally generate. His actual definition is: “Scenius stands for the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is the communal form of the concept of the genius.” Individuals immersed in a productive scenius will blossom and produce their best work. When buoyed by scenius, you act like genius. Your like-minded peers, and the entire environment inspire you. The geography of scenius is nurtured by several factors:

• Mutual appreciation — Risky moves are applauded by the group, subtlety is appreciated, and friendly competition goads the shy. Scenius can be thought of as the best of peer pressure.
• Rapid exchange of tools and techniques — As soon as something is invented, it is flaunted and then shared. Ideas flow quickly because they are flowing inside a common language and sensibility.
• Network effects of success — When a record is broken, a hit happens, or breakthrough erupts, the success is claimed by the entire scene. This empowers the scene to further success.
• Local tolerance for the novelties — The local “outside” does not push back too hard against the transgressions of the scene. The renegades and mavericks are protected by this buffer zone.

Scenius can erupt almost anywhere, and at different scales: in a corner of a company, in a neighborhood, or in an entire region.

A nice concept.  And an elegant way to describe what a healthy organization and/or open-source community should look like.

Update: Alex Steffen weighs in with a great riff connecting the unpredictable nature of scenius with the ongoing stream of failed efforts to catalyze it philanthropically:

Worse yet is the trend towards half-assed citizen media and social networking approaches, projects based on the insane assumption that all that’s needed to court collaborative creativity is a website and a good advertising campaign. This tendency to think that innovative collaboration comes free of cost, bubbling up out the Internet like spring water, betrays a poor understanding of the actual workings of either online collaboration or quality thinking. Most often, when these open/ citizen-media/ online-collaborative approaches work, it’s because a core group in the project provides most of the important input, and usually curates most of the other participants’ input into useful forms. So, frequently, funders’ hopes that they can create transformation on the cheap actually just create a system that appears cheap because it externalizes the cost of expert participation onto the shoulders of others… and when their enthusiasm lags (or they need to get day jobs), the project falters or dies. The examples of failed peer-based social innovation efforts outnumber the successful cases by orders of magnitude.

Tags: community, innnovation, organizing

A few random ideas for talks I’d like to see at Plone Conference 2008.  In case anybody needs some inspiration.  Chime in with your ideas!  Name names!  Even better, propose one of these talks!  (Note: there are probably lots of talks I’d love to see that aren’t on this list, I just couldn’t think of them on the flight home from New Orleans!)

Non-technical

• Selling Plone: A Hands-on marketing workshop with Mark Corum
• Plone Foundation open-house: Foundation board members take questions.  Need a moderator(?)
• State of Plone keynote: Alex & Alan.
• Consulting practice management panel — focus on small to medium-sized integrators and how they can grow and succeed.
• PloneGov overview — focus: how can it be a model for Americans?  Xavier, Newport News people.
• Plone4Edu overview —  Mike Halm, Chris Calloway.  Explaining the model and how to replicate?  Or pitching the Edu project to new potential members?
• Paul Everitt philosophizing about the community (?)
• Migrations and Migraines:  Moving UW Radiology to Plone - Cris Ewig
• The Politics of Selling Plone inside large institutions - ??  panel?

• Theming Plone 3  – Plone 3 way — Veda Williams  (Also include GloWorm & CSS Manager)
• Buildout for beginners
• Practical deployment strategies for small organization or departmental sites  - Penn State or UW folks
• How to evaluate an add-on product

• Moving towards the core: an introduction to the Plone team’s developer practices.  If you’re ready to start contributing to the Plone codebase, this is a quick introduction to our community’s best practices.   Wichert?  Alex?  Martin?
• Brandon: intro to Zope Component Architecture (reprise of NOLA talk)
• Caching  - Calvin, Joel, or Ricardo.
• Intro to KSS: Joel Burton
• Plone-Salesforce Integration: Andrew Burkhalter
• Extending Plone’s built-in content types with SchemaExtender: Jon Baldivieso (?)
• State of multlingual support (Hanno)
• Making custom portlets the Plone 3 way
• Managing viewlets and viewlet managers to create customized page layouts

• Deliverance - Explained by someone who has good empathy for real-world themers.  :-)
• Import/Export - Martijn Peters?
• Design session: architecture for next-generation commenting (Martin, Chris Johnson, Jon Stahl?)

Tags: Plone, ploneconf2008

Gavin Clabaugh’s got a fun (and wise) new riff on the larger forces shaping our world:

I see this third force everywhere. I see it hiding inside the inaccurately named thing called “social networking. I see it embedded in “American Idol.” It follows me to the grocery store. It wakes me up at night. It’s busy working away on web pages and formatting RSS feeds. It’s reading your electric meter. It’s even there when you drive into a parking lot. It’s monitoring air quality, or temperature, and it’s in that vending machine down the hall tracking the ever-so-important availability of cheese-doodles. The third force is all about the network and it’s all about the collapse of time. It’s all about a new network of machines, sensors, monitors, and even some humans, that spend their days tasting the world, and talking to other machines about what they’ve tasted. Sometimes it’s frightening. I once characterized the third force as the move “from sampling to monitoring.” I figured soon we wouldn’t need things like statistical sampling to measure our world. I argued that we were increasingly moving to “real-time” measurements to understand the world. The time and distance between action and feedback would disappear. It’s come true.

Tags: NPTech, online organizing

I’m very excited to share the news that Joel Burton will be bringing his Plone Bootcamp classes back to Seattle for the third year.  Joel will be offering a repeat performance of his basic week-long “Plone Bootcamp” class (June 16-20) suitable for folks getting started building Plone websites.  Assuming his voice doesn’t give out after the first week, Joel will immediately follow-up with his first-ever-in-Seattle “Advanced Plone Bootcamp” (June 23-26) in which he delves deeper into programming and customization techniques for Plone 3.

I’ve watched lots of people teach technology over the years, and Joel is hands-down one of the best trainers I’ve ever seen.  And at $550 for a full week of hands-on training, this has got to be one of the best deals going.

Tags: Plone

Our old house is officially now on the market.  3 bedrooms, 2 baths, great big yard, garage and more! Loads of charm in a highly walkable area of Crown Hill.  We’ve had 7 great years there; now it’s your turn!

UPDATE:  it’s sold!  I’m excited to give someone else the chance to live in and love this place!

Our awesome partners-in-crime at NPower Seattle are hiring for their fast-growing CRM consulting practice.

They’ve also got a senior position open for their Director of Services, who oversees their various consulting practices. 

Both are great opportunities for nonprofit techies looking to make the move to Seattle!

Tags: nptech, jobs

What happens when an irresistible force and an immovable object team up and pull in the same direction?

Triangle Bootcamp-a-rama!

That’s right — Plone training legends Joel Burton and Chris Calloway have teamed up to organize two solid weeks of Plone and Python training in Chapel Hill, NC this summer.  They’re delivering three classes: Customizing Plone (Joel), followed by Python Bootcamp (Chris) and Plone 3 Techniques (Joel again).

At only $500 for each full week class, this is probably the best deal going in technology training.  Chris and Joel are amazing trainers.  Your brain will get filled up in the (incredibly posh) classroom, and your belly will get full afterward.  (Chris and Joel both love to eat and Chapel Hill is a great food town, I’m told!)

So, if you want to brush up on your Plone & Python skills, pack your bags for North Carolina this summer.

Tags: plone, nptech

Have you bought your plane tickets for Plone Symposium New Orleans 2008 yet? Alan Runyan, Toby Roberts and the team at Enfold Systems have put together a fantastic program that includes:

• 2 days of Joel Burton’s amazing Plone Bootcamp training — pretty much the best way to jumpstart yourself as a Plone site builder!
• 2 days of talks from Plone community luminaries and rising stars, including:

A “state of Plone” keynote from Plone co-founders Alex Limi and Alan Runyan

Case studies from the science, education and nonprofit sectors

Technical talks on popular topics such as caching, relational database integration, and using WSGI/Repoze to play nice with other Python web appications.

I’ll be showing off some of the work that the Seattle Plone community has done to integrate Plone and Salesforce.com.

Tags: Plone

Could it be?  Did David Brooks just write something fairly perceptive and intelligent?

In their arguments with Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, the faithful have been defending the existence of God. That was the easy debate. The real challenge is going to come from people who feel the existence of the sacred, but who think that particular religions are just cultural artifacts built on top of universal human traits. It’s going to come from scientists whose beliefs overlap a bit with Buddhism.

In unexpected ways, science and mysticism are joining hands and reinforcing each other. That’s bound to lead to new movements that emphasize self-transcendence but put little stock in divine law or revelation. Orthodox believers are going to have to defend particular doctrines and particular biblical teachings. They’re going to have to defend the idea of a personal God, and explain why specific theologies are true guides for behavior day to day. I’m not qualified to take sides, believe me. I’m just trying to anticipate which way the debate is headed. We’re in the middle of a scientific revolution. It’s going to have big cultural effects.

Tags: culturalartifacts

My amazing colleagues Drew Bernard and Shawn Kemp are burning up the internet tubes connecting Portland to Bellingham with some great thinking about how to apply “functional thinking” to environmental groups’ websites.  I love to see this kind of high-powered big-picture thinking in public.

Tags: websites, nptech