[Evangelism] Re: Lessons learned from the first World Plone Day

Roberto Allende rover at menttes.com
Sat Nov 8 05:10:22 UTC 2008


Jan Ulrich Hasecke wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> the World Plone Day was great fun and a fairly good success given that 
> it was the first WPD ever and that we started very late to promote it.
> 
> So I think we will have a World Plone Day next year.
> 
>  From the lessons we've learned we should discuss improvements for the 
> next years WPD.

hello Jan, thank you very much for supporting wpd and your feedback!, 
you guys made an awesome job in Germany!

> Here are my proposals.
> 
> 1. True international homepage
> 
> We need to have a multilingual website called worldploneday.org, so that 
> each national team can translate announcements and infos into their 
> national language and refer to it in their national PR.
when we started the wpd i thought it could be a good idea to have a site 
for wpd, but as the organization moved forward i change my mind. There 
are good reasons to keep the global communication in plone.org:

1. All the effort of the wpd should be in the local events. Following 
this argument, if you need a site, you should create one for your 
country or city, and when you promote the wpd in your country, you 
should use your site. If you need 'global' elements, you can add a 
google map and stuff like this we made already. Doing smt like this, 
every host has the freedom to do what it considers necessary and we 
don't force to have the same content translated to all the languages. 
The people who attended the wpd in my country got informed through our 
user group site, not the global place... so it's more important to 
invest time on the local version rather the global one,

2. Effort and resources. The wpd 2008 page was very simple, and still it 
took me too much time. We should need more people to do a global site, 
hosting and so on. Until we don't have a matre event i wouldn't invest 
resources on it.

3. Bringing people to plone.org or your local site is good. I like the 
idea of having the global event page few clicks close to the download 
plone button, or even the local one (we used plone cono sur page to 
promote wpd in our region).  This is a good way to promote your local 
job, in our case, to promote our Plone user group.

> 2. Refining target group
> 
> We discovered that a great percentage of our participants were people 
> who already heard of Plone before or even uses it already. So it is good 
> to have a mixture of basic talks like »What Is Plone?« or »The Plone 
> Community«, but you definitely need some presentations for an advanced 
> audience, for people who already know Plone and its community.

WPD should be an event to meet new people. I would suggest refining the 
communication instead. In our country most of the attendees were new 
people. And the 'old' ones cames to meet the new people. How you promote 
the event locally will impact the people you bring.

There aren't any restriction here, if your local meeting is focused to 
members of the community, it is ok anyway.

> 3. More time to prepare the World Plone Day
> 
> The DZUG e.V. (German Zope User Group) is planning its annual schedule 
> in late december or early january. In 2008 the WPD-idea came too late 
> for us, so that we could not support our community in an optimal way. 
> For our annual plan for 2009 it is crucial to know whether and when 
> apporximately there will be a WPD in 2009.
> 
> I would propose to have a WPD not too late in the year, to avoid 
> conflicts with the Plone Conference, but I am fine with a World Plone 
> Day in next years november again.

i think wpd one month after the ploneconf is a good idea. So, when we 
know the ploneconf's date we use that date plus a month.

> 4. Give-aways! I know their were some, but we've got none. :-(

logistics were difficult. Probably we need more resources here.


> 5. More noise in the media and the web especially all these web 2.0 sites.

we need more help here. Gerry made a great job, but we should have more 
people assisting him.

Considering it was the first edition, i think it was a great event, so 
it is great you sent feedback because we need it to define the goals for 
wpd 2009. Also the numbers, if you can send us how many people attended 
in Germany i would thank you a lot!

Kind Regards
r.

--
http://robertoallende.com





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