KJE5CS39P9YF Well.... after a chance to finally catch some sleep and collect my thoughts, I thought I'd write a post about the Plone Conference we just held here in Bristol.
WOW!
The whole event went by far better than I could have ever imagined. Thanks mainly to my amazing colleagues at Netsight, especially Astra who was dealing with the hotel and all of our suppliers, and to Scott who was helping the wifi wizard Wyn with the wifi setup for the venue.
After his success of running the conference wifi in Budapest, and the abysmal performance of the wifi at pretty much every other conference I've been to, we invited Wyn Williams to again setup the conference wifi this year. Wyn arrived on the Thursday before the conference began and started to assemble all the wifi access points we needed. His original plan of bringing the equipment over from Finland with him was thwarted after his warehouse was broken into and all the equipment stolen. A last minute order to a UK stockist saw ten new access points turn up at Netsight's office the day before he did to assemble and configure them.
To provide the uplink to the internet, we had a 100Mbps point to point wifi link back from the conference hotel back to Netsight's office (the new office, which we had just moved into the week prior!) and then on to our datacentre. Some of you at the conference might have spotted a grey ethernet cable dangling down the front of the building... that was feeding the network from the point to point link situated in a room at the top of the hotel, down to the access points on the main conference floor. Once we convinced the hotel health and safety to let us dangle Wyn out the window and drop the cable down the building we were all set.
Monday and Tuesday were training days, with both Steve McMahon and Nate Aune running training sessions over the two days. Speaking to some of the students after the training sessions, their heads certainly seemed to have been filled to the brim with new knowledge!
Tuesday also saw a new event, the Plone in Business day. This was intended to be a standalone mini-conference to a wider audience that the general Plone community that already comes to the main conference.
There was originally scheduled to be the inaugural 'Plone Community of Practice' run by JBoye on the Tuesday morning. Alas due to a combination of school holidays in the UK that week, people already out of the office for three days for the main conference and my late announcement of it, we had to cancel it as, whilst there was a lot of interest, not enough people would be able to make it. We did however continue with the afternoon Plone Showcase in which we had a number of speakers come and talk to an audience of around 30-40 people.
Later that evening with people starting to arrive for the main conference starting the next day, we held a 'Jetlag reception' (thanks again to JBoye for coining a term for yet another reason to socialise) at Watershed in Bristol. There were about 40-50 Plone people there and we were also joined by some people from the local Django users group meetup that we happening earlier that evening.
The main conference started early Wednesday morning with registration starting at 8:30am. We'd picked up an idea from Europython this year with the registration and had people pick up their badges and conference bags and t-shirts separately. This streamlined the process quite a bit, and amazingly we were able to have pretty much everyone registered by the time of the keynote starting at 9am. Those of you who have been to previous conferences know just how much chaos this stage can be. Luckily we had a long narrow corridor to funnel people through and entice them up the stairs at the end with coffee and breakfast snacks so as to keep the corridor clear.
Each attendee was given a goodie bag was the Plone Conference 2010 branding on it and sponsor logos and contained a Plone Conference 2010 pint glass (we know what freebies will be appreciated by the Plone Community!), a copy of 'A Users Guide to Plone 4' supplied by Enfold Systems, a Plone Conference 2010 t-shirt, and a copy of the Plone Foundation Annual Report.
The talks started with a keynote from Alex Limi and Alan Runyan on the Future of Plone. We had four rooms running in parallel at the conference, with the keynote in the largest room, the Wessex Suite. The video recording and the stage set was supplied by Aurora AV who did an amazing job. This is the first time I think the Plone Conference has had such a strong 'brand' and the illustration we had commissioned by local illustrator Ben Newman was shown off to its best along the front of the table, and on the podium. 
There was a giant Plone logo lit up behind the podium, which lent itself to one of the best photos of the conference, 'St. Plone' by Denis Mishunov.
Videos were taken of all four rooms, and feeds taken from both camera and the projector feed so you can see what is on the slides. They were recorded direct to disk and uploaded to ploneconf2010.blip.tv at the end of each day.
At the end of the first day, we had a guest keynote from Richard Noble, OBE the director of the Bloodhound SSC project and former land speed record holder. Whilst we think Open Source Content Management is pretty cool, you just can't beat a car powered by a combination of a Eurofighter jet engine and a giant rocket motor aiming for 1,000mph! Richard talked about all the obstacles they've had to overcome in developing something that no-one has ever done before, and how they have financed the project. 
They are going to 'open source' all of the data from the project and the actual telemetry from the car itself. This is an amazing resource as none of their peers in this kind of engineering (aerospace, F1 motor racing, etc) are willing to share their data and knowledge with the public. Bloodhound are running a large education programme and Richard was appealing to the Plone community to see if there was an opportunity to use Plone to help disseminate all the learning materials.
Hrm.... I'm actually still writing this blog entry, but fatsyndication seems to have sent it out on the atom feed, despite it not being published yet :( also the base url is wrong so images broken on planet plone... I'm trying to fix it and finish writing it!