My work with Jon Stahl is converging around our presentation for the Plone Conference next week. One of our goals was to introduce more documentation about how “Plone happens” into the community to bring greater transparency to the community and stimulate the participation of others. Currently, much of this information is locked in the heads of those with deep experience in the community and mostly inaccessible to newcomers in the community.
So, with the help of Ambrin at ifPeople, we have turned our initial sketch of how the Plone code base is influenced into a graphic that is a bit more readable :). Have a look below. This is our first public version of this…please use the comments on the blog to let us know what you think!
A few notes….
The left (vertical) axis is meant to show which processes are more formal (ie PLIPs) and which are more informal (ie . irc chats).
The bottom (horizontal) axis is more about the individual experience of Plone (ie I install products, customize things, etc) vs the group/collective expereince (ie we all get the same releases).
Also, if you aren’t sure what PLIPs are or how these things relate, I would suggest you check out the notes that we have prepared here.
How does Plone happen? We have an enormous software project, with over 100 core contributors, thousands of people building sites and products, and many more using the code. We have come a long way from the days when it was simply a handful of people on a nascent bundle of code. Plone is now one of the more mature open source projects around. I looked for an answer on the site, in documentation, in the Foundation…but still the question of “how Plone happens” is one that has puzzled me. Mostly because it seems to captured only by the collective wisdom of the community and actually written nowhere.
After my own experience organizing the community of an addon Plone product where I invented a way to “make it happen”, I figured at least I had a reasonable basis to compare it to (watch social sourcing presentation). Thanks to the encouragement of Jon Stahl, I proposed exploring the process of making Plone as a Plone Conference 2008 session - and it was accepted.
I was pleasantly surprised at the interest in the topic - and extremely grateful to be working with such a talented, organized, and knowledgeable guy like Jon Stahl to make it happen. We have embarked on a quest to map Plone processes and create summary documentation for the benefit of the community. We hope to give all a reasonable foundation in understanding what the formal and informal processes are in place, where they are and who is responsible. I have learned a lot in the process and hope to share some of that, as it emerges over the next two weeks via this blog.
In the conference session, we will also inspire ways to improve collaborative Plone processes. If making Plone a more organized, transparent and kick-ass community is of interest to you, please be sure to join us on Thursday, October 9, 2008 (Day 2) Oceanic A & B at 11:20am!