So, Online Information 2010 is now over. Three days of a conference and associated show floor expo dealing with all manner of things to do with producing, managing, publishing and searching information in the online world.
I did a brief writeup of my thoughts after the first day of the expo, but now that we've finished and I've had a chance to digest my thoughts from the rest of the event. The main theme looking back at most of these thoughts, is really just how good Plone is these days and how it stacks up against the myriad of other content management systems out there.
There are a few aspects that I've always taken from granted, but just realised actually how special they actually are within Plone and its community.
One aspect that shone through this event, is really just how wide the Plone community is and just what an amazingly international reach it has. In previous years we've had people come up to the Plone stand who are visiting the expo from other countries and want to find out more about Plone in their country. Previously I've pointed people to plone.net to look up providers and sites in their country. However this year I realised just how in depth some of these communities are. Maybe it is due to having just hosted the Plone Conference 2010 here in the UK, in which we had attendees from 33 different countries... or maybe just meeting more and more people from around the Plone world.
At the start of the second day of the expo a Japanese guy came up to the stand and was flicking through a Plone brochure. We started to strike up a conversation, but his English wasn't that great, and my Japanese pretty much non-existant -- he was trying to ask that Plone was. I did however meet some great guys at Plone Conf 2010 from Japan and after seeing a lightning talk on a number of sites using Plone in Japan, I had and idea and took a wild stab at going to www.plone.jp on the computer we had on the stand. Sure enough, a site came up and the first item was 'What is Plone?' and then a whole load of Japanese characters I didn't understand... but, of course, my guest at the stand did. He spend a few minutes navigating around the site and reading up on Plone in his native language. Afterwards he thanked me and continued around the show floor. I'd like to think that he learned something about Plone, and I'm pretty sure that few, if any, of the other Content Management Systems exhibiting at the show would be able to point someone to a native language user group for their products.
Shortly after that, an Italian guy came to the stand and was asking about Plone in Italy. His English was much better that the Japanese guy's (and my Italian probably worse than my Japanese!) but I decided to try the trick again and pointed him to www.plone.it. Again, a localised site with information about Plone in Italian. I know quite a few of the Italian Plone developers and I know they have been working hard to get Plone Italia off the ground -- well guys, your efforts are paying off -- and very appreciated.
These two sites are examples of some of the many active Plone communities around the globe. These are not subsidiary marketing offices with people in them paid to promote a product... these are grassroots communities that have formed due to the passion these people have for the product that they not only use, but also have a stake in the development of.
Don't take this for granted. It is not something you will find in all systems. I doubt you could find this level of commitment, passion and fun (ever been out for some beers with Plone people?) in any commercial software product.
One disadvantage to being an Open Source project is that un-like the commercial CMS vendors, we don't have a list of all our customers (as they don't have to get into a contract with a central vendor to use Plone). This means it can be hard to get full visibility of what is going on with Plone around the world.
On the second day of the conference a guy called Christian Sifaqui came up to the Plone stand. He had been at the main conference upstairs, and being a long time Plone user came over to the stand to have a chat. He is from the Chilean National Library of Congress (Biblioteca del Congreso Nacional de Chile) and what he showed me literally blew my mind away. Not just due to the technical implementation, but the fact that he has been doing all this for the past seven years and this was the first time I'd ever heard of either him or BCN.
They have built a number of Plone sites integrating in Autonomy and Oracle to process vast amounts of information. One site, leychile.cl (Law Chile) allows you to search back through all the laws of Chile, right back to the formation of the constitution in 1811. Yes.... 1811! You can search back through 200 years of law online, via a site built on top of Plone. Not only can you view the laws, but they are all cross-referenced, so if one law refers to another in its text, you can navigate to that law. You can also view all revisions of a law that have been made. Want to know how a new law has been changed since the previous version? Here you can... what an amazing tool for opening up the political landscape to the citizens. Does your country have something like this? No. Neither does mine :(
I managed to get some time with Christian over lunch, when he kindly agreed to record a screencast of some of this. As well as the legal sites, they also have a site allowing you to search through all news media in Chile -- TV, radio, newspapers including viewing the original scans of the newspaper articles. Again, all built in Plone.
I will be editing this screencast shortly and recording a commentary for it and will get it online once I'm done.
World Plone Day 2011 will be on the 27th April 2011 and will be an amazing opportunity for all of the various groups of Plone users and developers around the globe to show others what is going on. Keep an eye on plone.org for more details as they come out.