I’ve written in the past about the idea of fostering sub-communities within the greater Plone community, and after some recent developments, I’d like to revisit this discussion and invite you to get involved in making this happen.
First, a brief history:
Back when I was working at Learning Lab Denmark in 2003, I had the privilege of attending the Plone educational sprint in Paderborn, Germany. Not only was I introduced to the German tradition of drinking large Hefeweisen beers everyday for lunch, but it was also one of my first introductions to the Plone community and the concept of sprinting. I had attended my first sprint, the Castle Sprint, only weeks before in Austria.
At the educational sprint, I met Raphael Ritz, who took on the challenge of converting his CMFBibliography product to Archetypes, which consequently resulted in a name change to CMFBlbliographyAT. Archetypes was still relatively new at the time, but Raphael successfully got it working by the end of the sprint. I remember being quite impressed by his programming prowess since he was not trained as a computer scientist but as a neuroscientist.
At Learning Lab, we ended up using CMFBibliographyAT extensively to catalog our researchers’ articles. This was how I justified to my boss at the time, that attending sprints was well worth the investment. Being able to meet and work directly with the product author and in many cases influence and shape the direction of the software is just one of the many benefits of participating in a developer sprint.
Another initiative was underway at the Educational sprint, and that was the EduPlone project. This project originated in Austria and unfortunately never really made much of an impact, presumably because it’s main focus was on using Plone to build a learning management system (LMS), and not a general purpose distribution of Plone for educational institutions.
The last release of EduPlone on sourceforge site was in 2004, and the Eduplone.net and Eduplone.org domain names have since been snatched up by domain squatters, so I think its pretty safe to say that EduPlone is dead. RIP.
Just a few months before the Educational sprint, there were murmurings on the plone.educational mailing list about creating a special distribution of Plone for educational institutions. Sadly, like so many great ideas, without a champion to cultivate and nurture the idea, it fizzled and died.
Fast forward to 2007…
During the Plone Conference 2007 in Naples, Andreas Jung organized a Birds of a Feather (BoF) session he aptly titled Plone4Universities, and cited the Plone4Artists project as inspiration for the idea. On the following day, Andreas summarized the BoF with a 5 min lightning talk about the new Plone4Universities project.
As result of this very popular BoF, the Plone4Universities project was founded. The launch of P4U generated a lot of buzz and now provides a forum for those working in education to rally around a common purpose. Thanks to Andreas, we are making progress towards unity!
Just weeks after the Plone4Universities project was launched, Enfold Systems hosted a Ploneability Higher Ed event in Texas focusing on Plone in higher education. The event had over 40 attendees and resulted in a wealth of presentation materials.
Shortly after the Ploneability conference, Jordan Carswell offered to donate the domain name Plone4Edu to the cause, and rename Plone4Universities to Plone4Edu since it was more representative of the Plone in education effort, not limiting it to just universities.
What this activity indicates to me is that there is a strong demand for using Plone in educational institutions. However, many educational institutions lack the IT staff and resources to go through the lengthy process of evaluating Plone and the various add-on products to see which ones are right for their university. There has to be a way to bootstrap these universities, so that they can get a better feel for Plone’s power and how it can be used to serve their needs.
A proposal to create a Plone4Edu buildout.
I’d like to propose that as part of the Plone4Edu initiative, a buildout is created with a collection of products suitable for the educational audience. The purpose is not to provide a complete solution, but to make a convenient package of the most common add-on products for Plone, that would appeal to an evaluator from the education sector.
So how do you make a buildout?
There are already a number of buildouts available for Plone, to name a couple: PloneGetPaid buildout and Plone4Artists buildout This is probably a good place to start if you want to see how to make your own buildout.
Martin Aspeli, author of Professional Plone Development has a chapter about creating buildouts in his book. He’s also written a howto in the plone.org documentation center called Managing projects with zc.buildout. Also, see the comprehensive documentation about zc.buildout on the Python cheeseshop.
We need to give some more thought to how to make these buildouts more accessible, since right now they are geared more towards the developer. Anyone have some thoughts along these lines?
I think the missing step to popularizing all those buildouts is making it easy to build installers for the different platforms out of a buildout.
I am really interested in making a buildout recipe that takes a `built buildout` and packages that up as an Installer for Windows. It really ain’t that difficult to do it, just need some time and motivation.
Hopefully before the end of this year I will have something going….
I just created a basic buildout containing some related products…not perfectly working sofar but a good starting point:
http://svn-public.zopyx.com/viewvc/zope-projects/edu/buildout/buildout.cfg?view=markup
Sidnei - there is actually already a Google Highly Open Participation task for creating Mac/Windows/Linux installers from a buildout. Let’s hope some eager high school student takes on the challenge!
http://code.google.com/p/google-highly-open-participation-plone/issues/detail?id=28
Someone has already claimed the task to make a MacOSX installer!
http://code.google.com/p/google-highly-open-participation-plone/issues/detail?id=29
And there’s been some bites on making the Unified Linux Installer. http://code.google.com/p/google-highly-open-participation-plone/issues/detail?id=30
I’d like to suggest something a little different.
I’m not so sure another product, or collection of products, is what’s needed.
When you look at the success people like Christian and Mike (Penn State) or Kurt (Louisville) have had with Plone, it doesn’t really seem that it’s because they have technology that others don’t. Their success with Plone is due in large part to their persuasive, project management and community-building skills. Check out their Ploneability presentations, and you’ll see what I’m saying.
If you really want to see Plone make inroads on college and university campuses, create an infrastructure that makes these experts available to others. Seems to me that’s one huge potential benefit of the Plone education mailing list/forum. Like the general Plone list (plone-users), encourage people to use the education list to submit questions not just about product development, but also about the organizational and community-building process. And then make sure the questions get answered.
I don’t mean to knock the fine and important work of programmers. But I suppose my viewpoint as a marketing guy gives me a different perspective on this.
I should’ve written:
Like the general Plone list (plone-users), encourage people to use the education list to submit questions and get help. And instead of it being only about product development or technology questions, encourage questions about the organizational and community-building process.
Hi Nate,
nice historical account in the beginning.
Glad you liked the Weissbier.
And since you mention me I cannot resist to point out that I was
originally trained as a physicist. But never mind …
Raphael
Chris makes an excellent point where he recommends expanding the intent of the Plone educational list to include discussions on community building and support. He followed up with a note containing proposed action items — I’m sure many like-minded plone4edu folks will jump at the chance to answer the social and community related questions. Changing list descriptions at nabble.com and plone.org would help encourage the conversation.
That said, Nate has an excellent idea. Creating edu-centered buildouts will simplify installation questions significantly for testers and new adopters. But it will also present some problems for buildout maintainers. An obvious example that comes to mind is deciding on which calendar to include. There’s several choices including existing products, new releases from Plone4Artists and Dateable, and possible new work coming from Graham Perrin’s emerging PLIP: http://plone3.freeman-centre.ac.uk/caldav. Not a blocker issue, to be sure, but still requires that choices be made.
Wouldn’t it be better to create a “bundle egg” with dependencies to the recommended products? Then its just a matter of including that one egg in a buildout and installing it and you get everything downloaded and installed. and it will work no matter what your own buildout regime is.
Of course this relies on a perfect world where all dependencies are eggs.