Padova Trip Report

Travel to Padova

Wow, I really made a mistake on planning my travel. I wanted to take Ryanair to Italy to keep costs down. Since the connection through London was only 20 minutes, I chose to fly from Charleroi and take the train from Rennes to Charleroi. I wound up not saving much money and spending 15 hours in transit.

The train from Lille to Charleroi was delayed for 45 minutes, making me late to see Denis Frere from Aragne. He graciously volunteered to shuttle me from the Charelroi train station to the airport and, as a result, sat around waiting for me for 30 minutes. It was very nice to see Denis again and chat with him for around an hour. We talked a bit about plans for Zope Europe.

I arrived in Pisa and called Riccardo from Reflab, who was stuck with the job of picking me up at the airport. As we started the drive, he told me that Padova was 3 hours away. Ouch. I had failed to even look at a map and gauge the distance. I should have looked for a flight to Venice, which is only 20 minutes from Padova. What on earth would I have done if Riccardo hadn't picked me up?

We arrived in Padova just before midnight. Vincenzo and Francesco from Reflab were waiting to see me. It was my first time seeing them since Reflab became a Zope Europe sponsor, so I had many thanks to deliver in person. They are putting much effort and leadership into the Zope community in Italy. Obviously we had lots to talk about on that subject.

I also had a chance to meet Lorenzo from 1000 ASA, the co-sponsor of the booth for the Plone sprint. Lorenzo is quite an enjoyable person to talk to, particularly about business ideas.

We walked over to the restaurant where everyone was finishing dinner. Who do I see first? Of course, Phil and Robert from BlueDynamics, the company that first supported the Zope Europe idea before I even made the move to Europe. Robert is the person that I've talked to the most about Zope Europe since last summer. This little ZEA organization has many of his fingerprints on it.

I hadn't seen Phil since my visit to Vienna, as he was busy on a customer project for Rotterdam. Also, Alex came over to say hi. I saw Alex last at the Zope pavilion for SL2003, but we do a lot of chatting by IRC. Alex was the first person to stay with us when we moved to Rennes.

We stayed at the restaurant for a while then headed back to the conference campus to call it a night. The accomodations were free, but unusual. We all brought sleeping bags and slept on the floor of an unused conference hall. A portable shower and toilet outside the building provided facilities. The upside was that the Plone booth was less than 100 meters away.

Day One

I woke up pretty early, got showered, and ran into Gogo from BlueDynamics. He was going to pair with me to produce some screen-recorded "movies" aimed at decision makers who are evaluating Plone. We went over to the Plone booth, got our settled in, and went with Gregoire to get a quick breakfast.

People started trickling in to fill out the long table provided for the sprint. The concept was pretty interesting: do a sprint in the "booth" at a conference, as a way to attract attention. At the end of the booth was the space for the two companies (1000 ASA and Reflab) to do business stuff. The goal was to use the sprint as a highly-unusual decoy to stand out from the crowd and draw people's interest. The good news: it worked. The bad news: the conference wasn't exactly overflowing with attendees.

Gogo and I pressed quickly to do a trial run before Alex gave the kickoff speech. We made a quick recording using Camtasia Studio from Techsmith, who graciously donated two licenses to Zope Europe when Heimo asked them. We then went through the production process to trim it a bit and export to Flash. Gogo got a chance to see the whole lifecycle and we both got practice working together.

Alex had a brief presentation prepared. He reminded people about the general idea of a sprint, cautioned people to choose tasks that could be accomplished in the allotted time, and laid out some proposed work that people had volunteered to do. We then broke into teams and started working.

Gogo and I started working on the first movie, for which we chose "How do I install Plone?" We wrote up an 8-scene storyboard and wrote down the narration for each scene. We then started the process of learning all the little techniques needed to make things flow smoothly: pausing while a big download is happening, leaving some space at the end of the recording, getting the viewport set correctly, etc.

Alas, though Gogo brought a nice microphone, the background noise in the conference hall was a problem. Since we planned to re-dub in multiple languages, we decided not to worry too much about it. We can also look at putting the audio through a cleaner to improve the quality.

Leo, from an art institute in Vienna, joined us to work on storyboards. He is also a semi-professional singer and provided the German narration. Leo also is one of the most diversely-smart people I've met in a long time. He's trained in processes of critical thinking about concepts, and this launched several good discussions about product positioning.

As expected, the first movie was the longest to produce. Still, we made enough progress to set a goal: get the first movie wrapped up, in English and German, to present at the end of the day.

I also spent some time talking with a few journalists and had a long chat with a potential customer for the commercial side of the booth.

At 7PM Alex called a break in the action and got everyone to report on their progress. Gogo plugged his computer into the speakers and beamer, and gave a nice walkthrough on the two versions. The best report came from Bernhard Buehlmann from 4teamwork in Switzerland, the organizer of the first Plone sprint in Berne. His sprint team worked on adding notifications to Plone. They already had much of it done.

Lorenzo from 1000 ASA had organized a nice group dinner at a nearby restaurant. I sat with Francesco, Vincenzo, Riccardo, and Riccardo's wife. We had a chance to spend several hours talking about Reflab, how to broaden the use of their Reflow workflow engine, and how to grow Zope usage in Italy. Francesco has a lot of talent and instinct on the business and marketing side and we work very well together. Zope use in Italy is still in the early stage, thus it is good to have a group like Reflab pushing on the publicity, marketing, and organization.

Day Two

Late start for me. Gogo and Leo were already working on the movies when I arrived. Leo wanted to clean up some mistakes I made in the narration from the previous day, so my first task was to speak into a microphone. We then talked about the topic for the next movie, settling on "How do I create content in Plone?"

Alex and I went to lunch to discuss ideas for Plone's product positioning and planning. We have been swapping emails with Alan Runyan, Andy McKay, and others about this for a few months. I proposed that we work the problem backwards and start with a clear statement of challenges, then get a good mutual understanding of the motivations behind those challenges. We then talked about how a product distinguishes itself in a (very) crowded market.

My position was that, first, we can't simply let nature run its course and hope for the best. Plone is, foremost, and idea that happens to manifest itself in some software. That idea, though, needs more management and critical analysis.

I proposed a series of questions: do enough people know about Plone, do enough of the right people know enough about Plone, do they have the right idea about Plone, and can Plone offer them something they value (monetarily)?

My next point was to tackle the issue of positioning by splitting the world into Microsoft product strategy vs. Apple product strategy. (Note: I'm a big fan of Apple's message discipline and message effectiveness.) In my view, Microsoft represents the broad market, commodity, practical approach with large market share. Apple represents narrow market, innovation, and differentiation. Apple isn't pursuing a strategy that shoots for 90% market share. Instead, they are creating a very crisp brand that appeals to a certain group (those that want to be different, iconoclasts, etc.) Although this leads to a small market share, it's a small market share of a huge market, giving billions each year in revenue.

On this point, I don't think an open source project like Plone can really tackle the commodity market, in which success depends on large ad budgets to shape opinion, plus partnership deals and other business factors. But this is ok. Content management is projected to be a $6B/year market by 2004, with Europe getting 30%. If all we had was Apple's market share (say, 5%) of the European CMS business, well, I think we could all live on a hundred million a year in revenue.

Alex and I then went on to talk about some possibilities for doing all this. But since that's where all the fun begins, I'll stop there. :^)

In the afternoon I did a little bit of Mozilla work. I'm very far behind on that project and really must get something wrapped up in time for my workshop at OSCOM.

Getting to dinner that night proved a challenge. We walked out to the front of the convention hall and stood by the sign for the taxi stop. Immediately a taxi pulled up and took Robert, Phil, and a couple others to the restaurant. Alex, Bernhard, a few others, and I waited for the next one. 20 minutes later we had to walk a km to the train station. And coincidentally, the first taxi that arrived was the previous driver!

Day Three

In the morning of the last day, Leo and I had a nice long talk about product strategy, the theory of psychographic profiles from "Crossing the Chasm", and how it might apply to Plone and Zope.

We returned to work a bit with Gogo on the last of the movies. Alex did the status reports early, as some people were leaving. Phil's "UML diagram -> Plone content types" demo was simply astonishing. Hopefully Gogo and I can get a movie made about it.

I left in mid-afternoon with Vincenzo and Francesco for the drive back to Pisa. We had a very, very good conversation about growing Zope and Plone in Europe and Italy, the things ZEA should be doing, etc.

That evening, Vincenzo graciously offered me a bed at his place. Wow, a pillow and a mattress, after three days on the floor! He also had a copy of the RMS biography "Free as in Freedom", which I hadn't read (but now have finished it). Very enjoyable book and useful in analyzing how efforts like ours can grow.

Travel Back

Early departure on Monday. I got a lot of work done during the planes and trains return.

Godefroid picked me up at the airport and shuttled me across town. Every time I talk with Godefroid, I finish feeling very motivated and eager to launch some project with him. We talked in particular about the next installment of the "Skins for Zope 3" article I'm writing for ZopeMag.

I got a bit lucky at the end of the trip back. The following day, the unions in France had scheduled a general strike. Just to be fun, the train union decided to move their strike up to the evening before the day of the general strike. I arrived at the train station an hour before the revised start time.

Conclusion

Though I made too many mistakes planning the travel, I judge this trip a success. I really enjoyed talking with Reflab and learning about things we can do in Italy. Also, mostly thanks to Gogo from BlueDynamics, we exceeded our marketing goals for the movies.