Yesterday I attended the first Zea Partners meeting since the organisation was 'reborn' at the Plone Open Garden in Sorrento earlier this year. The meeting was kindly hosted by Four Digits in Arnhem directly after the Living Statue Sprint they were hosting the week previously.
Zea Partners is an organisation with a long history in the Zope/Plone world and has gone through various evolutions. Originally formed nearly a decade ago by Paul Everrit and Xavier Heymans it was a means for companies with the Zope/Plone ecosystem to join together for larger consortium bids.
Whilst this was a very noble goal initially, and successfully worked for a couple of large projects (most notably a big online redevelopment project for Oxfam involving several companies in a consortium) it was a very difficult path. Trying to reconcile differences in international business law, working practices, and explaining the Zea concept ultimately lead to the organisation stagnating. Zea then went on to bid for some very large (multi-million Euro) projects directly for the EU with Xavier tirelessly working to try and translate the bureaucratic 'EU-speak' into something digestible by the rest of us. Despite all this hard work by Xavier and others in Zea (most notably Kit Blake from Infrae) it was unable to successfully win any of these large projects.
Earlier this year it was decided to close down the existing Zea Partners legal entity based in Brussels and create a much lighter weight organisation which focussed mainly on sharing knowledge between Zea Partners members and facilitating collaboration in a much more flexible and informal way to previously.
The 'new Zea' was officially formed at the Plone Open Gardens event in Sorrento in May 2011 with Rob Gietema of Four Digits as the first president and Cesere Brizio as secretary. The legal entity would be formed in Italy for no other reason than this is where several Zea Partners companies are based and will rely on an amount of volunteer work to set it up.
This first meeting in Arnhem was attended by representatives from Four Digits (NL), Red Turtle (IT), Abstract (IT), Jarn (NO), Gocept (DE), Infrae (NL), Greenfinity (HU), Startifact (NL) and Netsight (UK).
The day consisted of a mix of talks from those attending on business issues and case studies of work they are doing and a chance to discuss things in a more informal setting over dinner/lunch/drinks.
Operations as a Service (Christian Theune, gocept)
This was a talk on gocept's hosting platform specifically designed for Python projects. They go beyond the standard 'Bare Metal as a Service' type offering of Amazon yet retain more flexibility than the 'Platform as a Service' offering from Google App Engine. They offer their own virtual machine cloud specifically set up for python developers and includes all the sysadmin/operations functions of software updates and patching, backups etc. Several Zea members are already using them to host their projects.
Two large Pyramid Projects: Technology and Experience (Balazs Ree, Greenfinity)
Balasz talked about two projects they have worked on built using Pyramid (a lightweight framework that uses many common technologies to Zope/Plone). The first project, KARL is a large knowledge sharing system and the second an unnamed project they are also working on. The main takeaways being that Pyramid, whilst being very flexible, does not prescribe specific ways of doing things (e.g. which database you use, what programming model etc), so you have to make your own policy decisions yourself. We have recently used Pyramid ourselves for an online data service and found it very useful to bring someone on to the start of the project (Tom Lazar) whom already had experience in which would be the best way of structuring the project.
Communication and strategies from the board (Cesare Brizio, Red Turtle)
Cesare represented the Zea board of directors and outlined the next steps needed to get the organisation up and running. There will be a try-before-you-buy period this year, with subscriptions being due early next year. Subscription fees will be €100 per annum for companies of 4 or less employees and €500 per annum for larger companies. The current idea is to have 3-4 meetings per year, each one hosted by a different Zea partners member (most likely the president at the time). One of the next things we need to do will be to vote on the next president of Zea.
How to implement ISO9001 using Plone (Rob Gietema)
ISO9001 has been one of those things that we keep getting asked about when we do large tenders, but has always struck me as being an organisational nightmare to actually implement in a small business. Rob detailed the process Four Digits went through to gain ISO9001 certification and the costs and processes they needed to go through to do so. At any point you need to be able to point to documentation that details whatever process it is you are doing. You also need to be able to prove that processes are being followed. Most companies already have 80-90% of what is necessary by way of things like source control and issue trackers. They are using Plone's HelpCenter product to manage their company handbooks, procedures and instructions documentation online. They brought in an external consultant to help them relate what they already had to the ISO specification and work out what areas they needed to improve upon. The total elapsed time from the start of the process to gaining certification was around 9 months. Contrary to polar belief ISO 9001 does not constrain you to only being able to carry out procedures in a fixed rigid way as documented, but encourages you to continually improve and evolve those procedures. If an improvement is found it can be quickly documented (Plone's change control/workflow being very helpful here) and used from then on. They are re-evaluated annually for complience.
Case Study (Geir Baekholt, Jarn)
Geir showed a couple of case studies on some small projects they have worked on for smaller local government areas within Norway. One specifically used a 3-way diff-merge and the built in workflow of Plone to allow an organisation to have a website that they could make local changes to but also be automatically updated with changes from a master source of information centrally. Every night a process runs to check for changes on a central policy website and merge those changes into the local copy (respecting local modifications and customisations of the content they have made). When an update is detected a member of staff is automatically emailed to notify them and they can review the changes using Plone's built-in versioning diff tool and then check in the new version if they are happy with it. This has resulting in a process that took 10-15 hours per week being reduce down to a 10 minute job.
Making business with the Italian Public Sector: how we leveraged on PloneGov, and other hints (Cesere Brizio, Red Turtle)
Cesere presented the work they have been doing as part of PloneGov Italia, looking at the specific business models that local government have used with regards to partnering with companies in the Plone community and some great tips and experiences for 'selling' Plone into the public sector. Whilst Italian (as with many other EU countries) law encourages reuse for software, in rarity it is difficult as no one department will be willing to directly fund work for another department. Cesere has produced a great paper on his findings which I'm sure he will be happy to send you it you are interested in Public Sector and Plone.
The event as a whole sparked a great deal of discussion both during the talks and over lunch and dinner. It is great to have such a fantastic forum in which we get a chance to discuss topics other than just technical ones.
I look forward to the next meeting in January… wherever that may be ;) Thanks once again to Four Digits for organising a great event.