Birds of a feather sessions (BOFs) provide an opportunity for like-minded individuals to get together and discuss their ideas. You can hold BOFs on any topic you like including user groups, documentation, frameworks, etc.  BOFs are scheduled at the end of each day in the following rooms:

Day 1

Polaris

LIMS System Developers

Chris Perkins and Craig Swank from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory would like to open a forum about Scientific Data Management Systems.   We will probably start with a demo of some of the work we currently do, followed by a discussion on the following topics:

- KSS

- Automated Metadata extraction

- Repoze

 - BIKA

EDIT: I have created a GG for people interested in LIMS at: http://groups.google.com/group/plone-lims  .   Please feel free to sign up! -chris.

Hemisphere A

Calendars & Recurring Events - Lee Joramo, designKiln

How can we help Plone4Artists Calendar finish their efforts to bring recurring events and iCalendar to Plone. Much work has been completed, but they need help to finish.

Hemisphere B

Collaboration & Cooperation as Business Strategies - Eric Magnuson, Web Collective

The world as we know it is changing dramatically before our eyes. Can we can take advantage of the turmoil to redefine business, together, in collaboration? In what ways can we work together to build healthy businesses that support the Plone community while also creating environments good people will want to work? I have my stories representing how it's possible. Now, I want to hear your stories. Business development newbies welcome.

 

Day 2

Hemisphere A 

How can we get more developers? - Dylan Jay

This is a brainstorming session on what we can do better to help everyone from hobbyists to corporate IT software engineers start using, customizing and then eventually getting involved on plone core development itself. The more developers we get the more Plone spreads as well as the more features we can add. Some ideas that can be discussed are:-

- how to make plone easier to learn including both documentation and making the code simpler.

- making deployment and hosting simpler so people can quickstart using plone - think google app engine style one button deployment.

- how to run better user groups so local users can find each other and share experiences as well as create a local buzz

- marketing within the tech community about where plone sits in the web eco-system. e.g. What does make it different from drupal,alfresco?

Hemisphere B

Plone Web Services - Sally Kleinfeldt

At the Plone Strategic Planning Summit a project was initiated to support an official and complete web services API for Plone. This resulted in discussions on plone-dev and an OpenPlans project page.  Several different approaches were suggested but no obvious winner emerged and discussion petered out.

Sometimes it pays to procrastinate. On September 10, a group including EMC, IBM, Microsoft, Alfresco, Open Text, Oracle, and SAP announced a draft specification for a web services standard for content management - Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS). So the obvious question is: should we adopt CMIS, or at least the REST part of it?

 Let's use this BOF to discuss.

Oceanic A & B

Plone + Salesforce.com  = CMS + CRM -- Jon Stahl, Andrew Burkhalter and friends

Plone now has a powerful and polished integration story with Salesforce.com, the world's leading on-demand relationship management database service.  This allows Plone developers to create applications that integrate both content management and relationship management features across two amazing platforms.

Developing the integration code has been a tremendous community effort; in this BoF, we'll celebrate our work to date, and discuss where we want to head over the next year -- there is much more that is possible.   If this problem space interests you, we'd love to have you join us!

 

Elephant & Castle (Across the street from Conference)

Plone/WebDAV & Enfold Desktop- Alan Runyan

What is the state of WebDAV in Plone?  What are your experiences?  General discussion on WebDAV. 

Enfold Desktop 4.5 is in final process of being completed.  What's new?  How is code being moved from Desktop to Zope/Plone.  Overview of features and enhancements of the Enfold Desktop 4.x series.

 

(location TBD)

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Plone in Education: Marketing- Christian Johansen

At the Plone Conference there's a lot of interest in stepping up marketing efforts for Plone in educational institutions, and increasing  collaborative activity. The Plone in Education BoF aims to continue the conversation.

 

Day 3

Hemisphere A 

Plone in the Cloud: Exploring alternative hosting options for Plone - Nate Aune

With the emergence of cloud computing platforms such as Amazon EC2, we have an opportunity to build robust and scalable hosting services for deploying Plone-based websites. In this BoF, we will discuss the benefits of cloud computing and what Plone offered in a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model might look like. Bring your questions and ideas!

More info about Plone and EC2 can be found in this wiki.

Hemisphere B

Repoze: Piping Plone into the WSGI framework - Chris McDonough and Chris Perkins

Repoze allows developers to take parts of other wsgi webtools and also parts of zope3 and use them in your Plone site.  We would like to demo a Plone application which uses repoze, and perhaps discuss some of the following technologies which are used within it:

- ToscaWidgets

- SQLAlchemy

- ExtJS and JSON

We will also try to have a hearty discussion on how repoze might help you solve some of your own technological struggles.

Oceanic A & B