Plone - Community Plumbing - or Just Content Managment !

[Paul Roeland]

Peter Hollands wrote:
> Is Plone going to develop into a Community Plumbing Platform ? Will it have h 
> as standard the features that Non-Profits nead to build a constituency ? 
> 
> Or should it just remain focussed on doing one job well ? Content Management.

OK, I'll take the bait.
"Community Plumbing" of course sounds like Web 2.x mumbojumbo, and would 
be an easy target for cheap jokes. I won't. But please don't 
underestimate the power of Content Management. We as NGO's still have 
loads of relevant content, and keep generating more due to dilligent 
researchers.
Any tool (like Plone) that can empower us to publish information the 
public needs to know, cannot be praised high enough. Even if not many 
people read it immediately, it will be there for people searching for it 
in a few years. The mere fact that our campaigners are now able to 
publish stuff themselves, without waiting for the limited resources of 
technically savvy webmasters who know arcane magic like "html", is an 
immense improvement.

> 
> Content Management was all the rage 4 years ago. But now,  for most Non 
> Profits it's a case of  "been there, done that". The future buzz is 
> elsewhere. The focus is moving from publishing, through to collaboration, 
> through to enabling learning journeys.

It is one of the focuses (focii?). Yes, we do want more interactive ways 
to communicate. Yet at the same time, the internet can also be a very 
hostile place. Many people feel inspired by the perceived anonymity of 
the net to ventilate extremely hostile and abrasive comments. As an NGO, 
you need some measure of control to direct the discussion into a 
productive platform. I'm not advocating censorship, but at a certain 
level you do need tools to prevent discussions going completely 
haywire... And the techie in me is feeling a lot more re-assured when 
it's done on the basis of a technologically very coherent and 
well-thought-out platform like Plone.

> 
> So what do people think ? Is Plone the right platform on which to build 
> communities ? Because I've heard that we should really just focus on what 
> Plone does well, and that's content management. :-)
> 

I'd say: Yes. There are many tools available right now within the Plone 
universe that enable building communities. Much attention is being paid 
to being able to interact with other systems out there, be it OpenID, 
YouTube or whatever. There are also areas in which more work is needed, 
like a commenting system that is robust enough to deal with spammers and 
deliberate attacks, yet still friendly and inviting to newcomers. And of 
course there's always more pet-pieves, like proper mailinglist 
integration for me.

But as a whole, I base my judgement on the Plone community that i've met 
on the mailinglists, IRC and most importantly at conferences and 
sprints. Together, these people form an absolutely mind-bogling 
constellation.
I've never experienced another software project where almost all of the 
lead developers read the NGO-list with loads of interest and reply to 
it, and yet at the same time are professional developers with lots of 
commercial clients. And yes, I have also deployed Drupal, Joomla, you 
name it. They don't come close.

We as NGO's *are* already a vital part of the Plone community. We 
present interesting use-cases, we are vocal, some of us are contributing 
significantly (big hug to Duncan and Jon). And we're very much taken 
seriously by the rest of the community.

The technical foundations of Plone are very solid, the position of NGO's 
within the Plone community is quite good, so my conclusion can only be 
that Plone provides a very good platform to build upon.

I'm pretty sure that if we as NGO's can articulate our needs and wants 
in a way that is re-usable for a lot of folks, we'll do ourselves but 
also the rest of the Plone community a big service.

Paul Roeland
Friends of the Earth Netherlands