Once again this year, the European Plone Symposium took place in Sorrento. The symposium was organised with the usual style of the Italians... focussing on great food and interesting chats first, and if some talks happened to occur... well so be it. I think they have hit upon a great formula here, as one thing that many people say when they attend tech conferences, is that the most interesting things happen in between the talks whilst you chat over a beer or a coffee. Vincenzo Barone, Maurizio Delmonte, and the rest of the organising crew have realised this and this particular event make the best use of the available location. In Budapest last year for the Plone Conference, we had the 'Open Spaces' session... in Sorrento there was the 'Open Garden' session. Making the most of the gorgeous weather, and surroundings of Sorrento and of course the fantastic Italian food and hospitality to just chill out a bit, step back, and have the kind of talks with people that you always wanted to have at conferences, but never had time.
Three delegates from Netsight were there, Astra, Adam and myself. It was Astra's first time at a tech conference, and as our marketing manager was an interesting chance for her to meet the community and chat to some of the people.
One of the main reasons Astra and myself were there was to promote the Plone Conference 2010 in Bristol in October, and to get some discussion going with the community on the event and how to make it the best Plone conference yet. We also put the finishing touches on the Plone Conference website, including doing a card-sort exercise with Harito Reisman and Maurizio to get a feel for how others see the organisation of information on the website.
Meanwhile, 4500 miles away, on the other side of the Atlantic, the Plone Symposium East was happening, hosted at Penn State University. I really wanted to be at both events, but alas they overlapped and I couldn't be in two places at one.... or... could I? Astra, Iain and I headed up to the park behind the Netsight office and took the Plone Conference 2010 banner with us, an iPhone and a voice recorder and recorded a short video lightning talk promoting the conference. I was hoping it would be shown by someone in the lightning talk session, but in the end it was shown in Eric Steele's keynote presentation!
Below is the results of our effort (Astra is hiding behind the stand holding it to stop it blowing over, and Iain is holding the iphone to record the video... luckily iMovie has a digital anti-shake filter to remove the handheld wobbilyness! The voice recorder is tied to the tree above my head.)
Whilst developing the Plone Conference website, I came across a nice solution to an issue of extending a Plone product without it having an extension point (adapter lookup) where you wanted it. So I put together a talk on 'Event Driven Programming in Plone - or Extending Plone the Lazy Way':
So all in all a fantastic event, and one I hope continues in the Plone Calendar. I just wish I was able to stay for the sprints afterwards, but alas I had to get back to the UK for the weekend.