Plone Costs for Non-Profits (Was Re: [Plone-NGOs] Initial thoughts ona "Plone for Nonprofits" bundle)

[Ben Rudder]

Martin, George thanks for your remarks

> George said:
> A question about case studies in general -- are there plans to make  
> case studies
> availables that non-profits could look at, to understand better the  
> tradeoffs
> and costs involved? Are the case studies at plone.net meant to do  
> this, or are
> they meant more to feature the positive ways Plone could be used?
>
When I posted a couple of months ago, Jon Stahl suggested I put  
together a case study. I'm sure he'll pick your question up re  
Plone.net.

I just had a look at the case studies area on plone.net, and there  
only seem to be two -- perhaps I did something stupid -- and these  
are just a couple of sentences. If I'm right about this, one wonders  
whether that area in its current state is doing the Plone reputation  
any good until a few more are put together.

I'm guessing, but I remember from all the stuff I've done in the  
commercial world that clients were always reluctant to give  
permission for case studies, and when they occasionally did agree,  
the studies were completely sanitised: "We were brilliant, our  
clients are brilliant and everything on our ground-breaking (but  
secret) project went without a hitch". You know the sort of thing.

I wonder if a better idea would be to try and recruit the non-tech  
and semi-tech project managers and administrators, prospective and  
current, into a more honest and client-anonymised discussion about  
running projects in Plone. (ie sufficiently vague about clients that  
project managers can't get busted)

This is related to Martin's point on my failure through technical  
ignorance of absolution from contribution to the community :-)

Non or semi-technical people (I have perl and shell experience for  
appserver log analysis, but no python or public-access development  
experience, for instance) maybe lumped together as "end-users", but  
from my angle, I reckon this group needs to be divided into at least  
four different levels/types/stages of needs --
1. Project sponsors and decision-makers
2. project managers (business case, service design, functional specs,  
work programme)
2. site administrators (both membership and content),
3. and a range of other end-users, from high-level reviewers and  
moderators, right down to members/visitors with minimal permissions

Project sponsors would probably be fairly happy with the listings of  
companies and organisations using Plone, ("as used by NASA and Oxfam"  
was good enough for me, for example) , but maybe they would like a  
good idea about cost ratios between set-up, hosting, development and  
administration.
The main user-base are possibly a job for each organisation depending  
on their eventual service design. We're about to put together some  
audio-video walk-throughs for example.

But project managers and administrators are possibly *the* critical  
element in software selection and project success and they need to be  
a primary focus IMHO

So, what about a prominent link through from Plone.org home page to  
an area for Project Managers and Administrators (prospective and  
current).

We could announce that this list (?) is looking for project managers/ 
administrators to build up more experience, and make a commitment to  
contributors that we specifically don't want to know the names of  
their clients.

Then we could improve FAQs etc for this group, and help Jon's good work

Any thoughts? I feel I'm talking myself into trouble :-)

Ben