Purpose

The challenge

Over the past six years, Plone has become one of the world's most successful content management systems. It's widely used around the world and across many diverse communities. The Plone community is vibrant. It has a strong tradition of face-to-face gatherings — five annual conferences, three regional symposiums, and dozens of “code sprints.”

However, the focus of most Plone community events has tended to be on code and community, but very short-term, next-actionish. There hasn't been much opportunity for structured conversations about the longer-term future of Plone. The rapid growth of Plone — both in sophistication and size of the community — makes such planning more necessary than ever.

The opportunity

We're going to convene the 2008 Plone Strategic Planning Summit, a three day event, the purpose of which is to bring together leaders and key stakeholders in the Plone Community in an intimate, focused setting in order to do some big-picture, medium-term planning, through which we:

• Develop a strong shared vision for the future of Plone
• Make clear, specific plans for our work together over the next 2-3 years.
• Improve our community practices to better support this work

So that…

• Plone-the-product continues to evolve and to fulfill its potential as the world's best content management system.
• Plone-the-community continues to grow, become better connected, and increase its capacity to deliver the benefits of Plone to the world.
• Plone-the-foundation is able to continue fulfilling its mission of “Protecting and Promoting Plone.”

Photos and links

• Flickr photos
• Delicious links
  

Follow-up

PSPS Follow-up Sprint Report Out from the Plone North American Symposium 2008

Some notes on Plone community processes , which will inform a workshop by Chris Johnson & Jon Stahl at Plone Conference 2008 in Washington, DC.

Agenda

The start/end times each day, and broad topics:

Friday Feb 8 8:30AM - 9PM: Marketing: High level discussion of Plone audience segments, marketing, competitive product

Saturday Feb 9 9AM - 6PM: Approachability: analysis of what's working well, what's not for different aspects of Plone (product & community), discussion and prioritization of solutions.

Sunday Feb 10 9AM - 1PM: Space and time to work on communications & followup tasks

Detailed draft agenda

Logistics

The summit will be held at Google HQ in Mountain View, Califorina, February 8-10, 2008.

You should plan to arrive on Thursday, February 7 and to leave no earlier than Sunday afternoon, February 10th.

We have started a Hotel Planning page for recommended lodging and who is staying where.

Google will transport us between Googleplex and the hotel in Mountain View each day.

• If you're staying elsewhere, you may wish to use the rideboard to coordinate carpools.
  

Attendees

We have already secured participation of some of the key participants from the Plone, Zope and Python communities, as well as leading industry players that use Plone.

Currently-confirmed attendees

Thanks to all our sponsors!

The following individuals and organizations made donations to the Plone Foundation to support travel scholarships for summit participants. Our thanks to them all -- it is only because of the enthusiasm and generosity of the Plone community that events like this are possible.