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A planning space for people using plone for environmental information sharing and collaboration. Materials for organizing the Plone Environmental Panel Discussion at the 2006 Plone Conference.

Discussion Questions and Potential Topics

• Introduce your work and describe why you choose Plone. (should we talk about other tools we were considering and how they compared, or should we keep this brief and plone-focused?)
  
• What tools or products are essential to your work?  What new developments are you following with the most anticipation of?
• What are the areas that need to be improved upon for Plone to support your efforts?
• What types of content are you using Plone to manage?  (e.g. Resources, Projects, Contacts, Events, News...)  Are you using Plone-based collaboration tools?  Activism tools?  Do you now, or do you plan to integrate mapping into your plone portals?
  
• Do your Plone portals import export content to other systems?  If so, what standards are you using for this exchange?  e.g. FGDC resource metadata, GeoRSS, LDAP, hCard.
• Given that many of us have common user stories, should we be collaborating on common tools?  Common standards for sharing content?  Working in parallel to ensure that our tools integrate easily with one another?
• If we organize our efforts into a working group, however formal or informal, what might that look like?  Are there particular tools that would be useful to us, that are not envorinmentally specific, and would also be useful to the wider community?  For example, improving RSS-in and Newsletter support is one that comes to mind.  How could organize such efforts in a way where they benefit the wider Plone community?
• Would it be useful to organize a Plone 'distribution' that bundles many of the common products together?  Something like CivicSpace for Plone and geared towards people who are collaborating and sharing information on natural resource issues.  Would it be useful to have a space where we can evaluate products, or share our experiences with them?

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comments from merckx:

• Good questions. I think it's worth talking about other products in the context of a 'strengths and weaknesses' discussion. For example, I know of several political campaigns that have eschewed plone in favor of joomla or civic actions/drupal. It might be worth talking a little about plone's 'sweet spot', esp. wrt issue-based campaigns v. 'corporate' websites. My toolkit lately has been plone, myemma/campaign monitor, getactive/democracy in action. Perhaps we could cover common tasks and common solutions en route to a 'best of breed' suite of tools, not all of which would be plone/zope-based, and earmark gaps where data isn't portable enough.
  
• I'd also love to see a discussion about integrating plone w/ salesforce via the incipient project w/ Enfold and ONE/NW. This may be happenining in another context, but for many folks that I work with, customized content based on membership data would be an amazing leap forward.
• I think that there is space for a plone 'distro' that bundles different components. This wouldn't necessarily be ngo or enviro-specific, of course. Something as simple as plone + quills + a theme tying the two together would be useful.
  
• It would be _very_ useful to have some sort of evaluative space for products -- I've asked this question before and I've been pointed to plone.org, but the product descriptions tend to be sparse and often out of date; not, I think, a good resource for someone who doesn't have days to spend installing and uninstalling products. Shared evaluations, esp. in the context of a case study that showed an actual application, would be immensely useful for those of us aiding and abetting, not just the end users.
  
• WRT to common tools, I think that ONE/NW has a pretty good sense of both common organizational use cases and the tools that can be applied to them. So it would be great if Andrew or JonB or JonS could participate in this discussion. For my part, the common cases I find include: blogging (ok, this isn't common, but it should be), press/media kit production and distribution (including multimedia files), email list signup and broadcasting, and payment/donation forms. On the extranet side of things, project management, document management, calendaring, and member/donor management have been lacking. Salesforce is poised to take over some, if not all of this responsibility for clients I'm familiar with if the integration goes as planned, I think.
• I'd love to hear more about how folks are using GIS or map-based mashups in the context of organizing a community around a place... And in the same vein, I'd be interested in other forms of data visualization in service of campaigns.
• Finally, most of my clients understand Plone to be a CMS -- that makes sense to them -- but they don't see/aren't interested in hosting a venue like Daily Kos, for example, where the community has both lots of investment and lots of ownership in the final product. In other words, they see Plone as a tool to make managing a website easier -- they don't see it as a tool enabling a profound shift in how they relate to and/or engage with their members/donors/supporters. I'd love to see interesting cases of organizations that _are_ pushing this envelope using Plone.

Eek. That was a bit long-winded. Anyway, all for now. Sounds great -- I'm looking forward to this!