SL2004 Trip Report

David Sapiro from Pilot Systems invited me to give a talk at SolutionsLinux 2004 in Paris. The suggested topic was "Plone is Sexy", which was a follow-on to the meme emerging from the utterly successful Plone Conference 1 in New Orleans last October.

I started writing my presentation in advance, unlike my normal mode, where the presentation is written during its delivery. :^) Alas, I found out that the audience for SL2004 was different than SL2003: less technical, more business. Thus, my train ride on Thursday morning was spent re-calibrating the spin. The "Plone is Sexy" presentation is available as a PDF (623 Kb).

Typical caveat: my presentation material is only meant to support the talking, not stand on its own. Otherwise, what is the value of attending the presentation?

After the bus-to-train-to-metro-to-metro, I arrived at CNIT in Paris just as day three opened. Xavier Heymans, who is working with me on ZEA phase two, met me in the lobby with an exhibitor badge. The crowd was nice sized and it was good to see that Apple again had the first booth in front of the entrance. (And wow, was their booth mobbed.)

I followed Xavier to the Zope Village booth, housing ZEA companies Pilot Systems, Adesium, and BlueDynamics. David Sapiro, Phil Auersperg, and Gilles Sauliere were there, already talking to people. Being undercaffeinated, I said hi and headed for a cafe.

The Zope track was starting at 11AM, so before it launched, I headed over to the booth of Ingeniweb, another ZEA company. Nice booth and lots of Macs. Jean-Rene Vidaud and I chatted, then I waited for Pierre-Julien Grizel to become available, but he had a long line of people to talk to.

I dropped by the ".org" area and said hi to the folks from AFUL and SIL. Pierre Jarret and I chatted a while about the MutualLibre project they are working on. Later I had a very good interview with a reporter from IDG.

The Zope track was done very well. The presentation by Credit Municipal was particularly compelling, as it provided the story of how a really big name launched a line-of-business, non-CMS Plone project.

Pierre-Julien and Olivier Deckmyn both gave a number of presentations, and Gilles Lenfant and Phil did a dual-presentation around Archetypes and ArchGenXML, the UML->Plone tool. All four are good presenters, for different reasons. It's fun to watch them.

My presentation was brief, and as usual, content-free. The "Plone is Sexy" theme is meant to show the space Plone is occupying in the market, and the direction it is taking. Open source CMS doesn't have to be known as ugly, platform-oriented, and painful. Projects simply need to make a deliberate decision to invest focus on "finishing work". Plone is one of the projects that can claim such focus, though much more needs to be done.

The presentation material took a strong theme of looking at the reflection of Plone in the eyes of outsiders. I provided lots of quotes and some pictures, essentially trying to form a narrative on the theme.

My original version of the presentation was aimed at Zope/Plone insiders and had an extra section that discussed what needed to be done to be sexy. I also had a section on how being sexy leads to more money, not less money.

We closed out the day with a trip to the pub and then a late dinner. The second day was integration time for a milestone on ZEA's first project as a partner network. Pilot Systems, who is on the project, provided office space for Phil, Godefroid Chapelle, and I to assemble the work being done. The day ended with lots accomplished and three quite exhausted workers.

All in all, a good trip. I expect 2004 will see a return to a heavy travel schedule for conferences and such, as was seen in 2002 and early 2003. It is a pleasure to spend time with the Zope companies, chat with the media, and meet all the Zope folks.