Live Blogging Plone Conference 2008

Somehow I was chosen to live blog the Plone 2008 Conference for CMSWire. A very important job for Plone's visibility so I'm still confused as to how I ended up with the responsibility. Never the less, I gave it my best, and learned a bit in the process.

Live blogging is hard! I've never been one to take notes while I'm listening to something. I always write down just the highlights, not everything. With so many exciting presentations, it was really really hard to make sure I picked up on every little detail. Further more, a lot of sessions were really over my head, technically speaking. I was pushing myself to grasp just the basics in several talks.

Only live blog when you have decent wifi. Yeah, the wifi was a bit sketchy, no thanks at all the the Reagan Center staff for fixing it. Our own people had to come in and set up routers. At least we're a resourceful bunch. When you don't have wifi, blogging live isn't really an option. I wrote as if I were live blogging and posted later but I felt as if I was playing catch up the rest of the day.

Lessons learned? Well I have a lot more to learn before I decide to live blog again, that's for sure! Maybe I'll stick to twitter for my live stuff. I'll live tweet the conference next year, how about that? But next year, lets make sure someone on the marketing team for Plone does this. It's far too important to be left up to a newbie like me! I have even more respect for Scott Paley, who live blogged for Plone conference 2007. You, my friend, are far better suited for this than I am. Ah well. It was a good experience and I'm glad I was at least a little bit of service to the community.

For the list of posts, go to CMSWire.

Documentation Team Sprint Report

Wow. What a sprint! We had a tiny little sprinting team for the post-conference sprint (at least as far as the doc team goes). But man did they deliver! I knew lots of our team members would be sprinting on other things during the sprint so we decided to do a lot prep work in the months leading up to the conference. It all paid off.
We had a great panel discussion on the last day of the conference. We had a pretty good turn out and got a lot of great ideas.
Some of the ideas people brought up during our discussion:

• Is PHC still the best way to handle documentation on plone.org?
• Can we have a rating system for documentation? Can we use something similar to what people have come up with for PSC?
• Should we open up editing but not creation of docs on plone.org?
• Should we establish best practices, staff picks, or editors favorites to indicate reliable documentation?
• Should we divide the documentation section into two different sections...the nice and neat vs the wild?
• Should we let companies sponsor documentation on plone.org by giving their time to maintain certain documents?

On Saturday (October 11), the doc team met for a brainstorm session that helped us develop our roadmap. We have published a fairly solid draft that we will continue to build on as needed. This roadmap will carry us through the first quarter of 2009. You can find it here. We will update it as we accomplish our goals and as we come up with new ones. Our two main goals are to manage our team better and manage our documentation better.
We've been working on establishing editors for each documentation topic section on plone.org. This weekend saw this task finally completed after a year or more in the works. A special thanks to those who stepped up to fill our final spots. You can find our list of editors here for now but they will also soon be posted on plone.org. If you're wondering what an editor does, you can find the roles and responsibilites description here. Any day now we'll have an editors mailing list that people will be able to read (but not post to, save that for the doc mailing list please).
Now that all of our editors are in place, we are all starting and/or finishing up our section assessments. Links to our section assesments can be found here. This is a huge undertaking. We'll be reading every document on plone.org/documentation. That's over 1200 documents!! We're assigning each one a status (the key is listed on each assessment). After each assessment is done, we know what is good, what isn't so good, and where any gaps are. This will allow editors to say "hey you, go write this" much easier. ;) It may sound like a simple concept and a lot of work, but we feel it's essential to get our doc section back into shape. Soon everyone will know for sure that any doc on plone.org/documentation is accurate and consistent.
Have you noticed we haven't written a lot of docs at this sprint? Don't worry, we'll get back to that! We just have a lot of tender loving care to shower our doc section with and that takes time. We did have new doc on z3c.forms written this week as well as a doc on how to get started with Plone.
In a better effort to monitor which documents are recommended, we created a doc bot for #plone. If you see plonedocbot hanging about, play nice! He's sending stats to see which docs people tell others to read. This will help us know which docs you guys really like and make sure that we maintain them first and formost.
I want to thank everyone for their hard work this week and for the past few months. We have a great momentum going and I want to keep it up! A special thanks to those who stepped up this week to contribute: Amrbin, Josh, Kamon. A super really special thanks to Steve M and Veda for helping keep me in check and always being there with great ideas and support. I can't wait to work more with all of our editors. We have a wonderful team that I know is very dedicated to making our documentation the best it can be.
If you'd like to help out by volunteering or would like to help sponsor a doc sprint, please send us a note on either the editor's list or the documentation list.