Plone Conf – Giving Back to Plone

Notes from the session attended on Day One:

The 10% Manifesto and further: Methods for organized contribution to strategic development (Panel)

This was a panel of people talking and sharing how companies can plan greater involvement in the Plone community. There was a great amount of discussion from the audience as well, demonstrating that people desire to give back more in an environment where it is hard to bake in the time on a regular basis.

Calvin Hendryx-Parker, Six Feet Up

• Company has Friday afternoon tune-up days- Need big enough group in company to build momentum, hard to do individually- Hard to step away from client work and move into OS work

Matt Hamilton, Netsight

• Connecting new people with Plone community helps to motivate person in company to get involved, see the process contribution project works

Tarek Ziade,

• Language issues for non-English speaking contributors hindering more contributions to community- Lack of awareness of what initiatives / projects are happening

Chris Johnson, ifPeople

• Need better ways of engaging and supporting developers in international community, potential strategic advantage in coming years if we can nurture that along- Need sharing between companies on how to promote, defend OS with potential clients

Simple places to start getting involved

• Report bugs
• More involved, but rewarding: sprint – lock yourself away

Business arguments

• When you publish your code as open source you can leverage the community to fix bugs, add new features
• Start thinking about software as a liability not an asset – needs to be maintained

Random bits

• Collective is chaos – GetPaid experience invited people to co-sponsor it
• KaizenPlone – wiki for how to tackle common problems, best practices

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