[NGO] Re: Request for Discussion: Mailing List Tools

[Rob Miller]

Hugh T. Ranalli wrote:
> Hi everyone,
> My name is Hugh Ranalli and I am the technology director for Digital
> Opportunity Trust, an NGO focused on technology training and capacity
> building in countries around the world.
> 
> We're just rolling out our first version of Plone, and I am very excited
> about what we can do with it. As others have commented, the Plone community
> needs a solid discussion forum / mailing list product. To my mind, this is
> one of the most critical tools to get regular people to interact on 
> collaborative systems such as Plone.
> 
> I know that listen is being developed, and the Zope-based GroupServer looks
> very interesting, although they don't yet have any sort of API for
> integration. I realise I'm just a fledgling member of the Plone community,
> but to my mind it makes sense to support and develop one tool. 

i'm of course biased, since i work for TOPP (http://topp.openplans.org/) who 
has funded all of the listen development thus far, but i think that listen is 
a good project to get behind.  it's built specifically for Plone, it's well 
engineered, and it will be getting continuous development, because it's a 
central part of the free services that TOPP is offering on the OpenPlans site 
(http://www.openplans.org/).  there are already a number of active listen 
mailing lists on openplans.org, and any openplans user is able to create new 
projects and get their own mailing lists within these projects.

> I don't have large budgets, but what I do have is access to a program at the 
> University of Toronto's computer science department, where students work
> (approx. 120 hours in total) on a project for a non-profit. The students in
> this program learn Python, and so they would be naturals for Plone
> development. I come from a development background, so I would also be
> willing to work closely with them.

unfortunately, while python is a very easy language to learn, Plone is a 
pretty deep stack that can require quite some time to get familiar with.  if 
you became intimately familiar w/ Plone and listen so that you were able to 
very closely guide and support the student developers, then you might be able 
to make this work.  if not, however, i think that it's likely that most of 
your students would expend all of their time without ever really getting 
anything done.  :-(.

> I am going to be at the Plone conference in Seattle, and would love to sit
> down with anyone else who is interested to discuss how we can collaborate
> on something the entire community will benefit from (and which is the best
> direction to go in). I have a couple of other projects I would like to see
> developed, but this one is foremost on my priority list.
> 
> Any takers? Perhaps we can get together one evening.

i'm going to be at plone con, as well as alec mitchell, listen's author.  i'd 
be happy to chat with you about it in more depth over the course of the 
conference.  not sure about attending a formal evening discussion, however; 
after a long day of conferencing i tend to prefer informal social settings.

one way that people can help with listen right away is to try it out.  there's 
an issue tracker for listen on plone.org 
(http://plone.org/products/listen/issues) where bugs and feature requests can 
be filed.  there are already a handful of things that are high on TOPP's 
priority list, these will be getting some TOPP developer resources over the 
next couple of months.

-r