This is part of the business track at the Plone Conference 2026 in Maastricht, The Netherlands. After the keynote, this lays the ground.

Durability creates sovereignty. But durability in a partnership should not make switching hard.

If you look at platforms, you hope they live longer than the initial contract. We have been supporting a platform for 15 years. The procurement was all about price, capability, compliance, and exit terms. No one at that time thought about data retention, about if the contractor would actually care about the project, and would push back in case decisions were made that in their view could damage the project. But over 15 years that is needed.

We at Syslab already knew EU-OSHA in 2005, doing a website for them. In 2011 a European launch was done for a worker risk assessment platform, adapted from a similar Dutch platform, but now with open code. We made lots of progress since then.

Time is not the asset. What survives through time is.

• Institutional context: why constraints and exceptions exist.
• Technical memory: why were choices made
• Mutual understanding: communicate before a problem becomes a crisis
• Practiced coordination: who acts, decides, reviews, and is informed.

A communications officer wrote as review of us that they liked our "critical perspective to avoid embarking in grandiose but useless projects." For example we could have spent lots of effort into turning the website into an app, but we didn't, as it would not really give much extra value compared to the effort put into it.

Sometimes, the "captain" on the customer side leaves to a different job. That has happened, and then we as contractor could carry the organisation through a transition period before a new captain was found, as we know the project so well.

Exit must be possible, but replacement is not costless.

We thought about where AI fits inside this project. For a long time we have wanted to create training videos, in multiple languages. With AI this becomes possible. Content structure: finding patterns in vast amounts of content, for example risks that happen in almost all cases. AI makes sense there. But we won't set up a chatbot, giving automated advice to end users. Especially for this risk assessment tool you would very quickly run into compliance issues.

A durability test for procurement: ask for evidence, not declarations of partnership values.

• Show us a relationship that survived changes in staff and technology?
• Describe a client request you opposed.
• How does your model reward simplification?
• Where does the code and data stay when the partner leaves?

Exit must remain real. Disagrement must remain possible. Staying must keep earning its value. That is when durability created sovereignty.

Technical distribution of power. Who controls all the tools? Just a few persons? Now there is so much concentration on AI, which is important, but don't ignore the other topics.

The FSFE (Free Software Foundation Europe, which I am part of) wants to empower users. We have some goals for 2028.

1. All public funding for software should be free software only. See also https://publiccode.eu. Public money? Public code! We should also connect with each other about these topics. Talk about what you can already do with current frameworks.

2. All regulatory frameworks should encourage the use of open and free software.

3. Everyone should be able to install or remove any software on any of their devices. Manufacters challenge this. For example Apple says an iPhone is not a computer, so not all rules should apply. And they have lots of billions on their bank account, and we are an NGO. So support us! Other campaign from us: Router Freedom. You should be able to install your own router at home, instead of being forced into the router from your network operator. And https://endof10.org, about extended support for Windows 10 which ends two weeks from now.

LLMs are challenging copyright. Since 2006 we have been organising legal and licensing workshops. See for example news items tagged "legal corner". Also the reuse tool that checks your licensing and reports possible problems.

Young people love to tinker, experiment, and code with Free Software as the default. We have a program: Youth Hacking for Freedom, see https://yh4f.org. I wrote a book: Ada and Zangemann, a tale of software, skateboards, and raspberry icecream. See https://ada.fsfe.org and also a movie at https://ada.fsfe.org/movie

14th of February: I love Free Software Day.

Many small people, in many small places, do many small things that can alter the face of the world. We don't have to wait until we feel ready to become the next hero. You may feel your small things don't make a difference, when for example there are so many wars out there. And some people want you to think that way. They want you to feel powerless against those high-level problems. That is a challenge. If you don't do anything, then what? So critical thinking.

Thank you to your contributions to software freedom!

Martin Peeters: State of Plone Foundation investments

The money of the Plone Foundation mostly goes into sprints, including travel stipend for the release managers.

Sponsors are welcome. See https://plone.org/foundation/sponsorship

Philip Bauer: Managing nuclear emergencies with Plone

I presented something about this at last year's conference. Now we have updated it.

• Dokpool
• Blicca application
• instance behaviors
• wizards for content
• uses patternslib a lot
• new GUI, now a demo
• collective.pdfviewer

Code: https://github.com/OpenBfS/dokpool-plone

Fred van Dijk: ID Plone

Currently GitHub is authorative for us. Cool. But for example Astrid does not have a GitHub account because she does not code. So can't we have something of our own?

Erico Andrei has been working on an identity provider for the Plone community. Some stuff that is currently on plone.org will be moved to id.plone.org. There is a synergy of things that we have talked about for years. Eating our own dog food by using Plone.

See:

• https://github.com/plone/id-plone
• https://github.com/collective/pas-plugins-identity

Benoit Suttor: Big Bang

What collective.big.bang does: create a Plone Site automatically when Zope starts. It sees the Zope DB is empty, there is no Plone site yet. So it adds one. You can also expand the site, looping until there are no profiles with pending upgrade steps left. It is idempotent, so you can quickly run it every time Zope starts.

https://github.com/collective/collective.big.bang/

Armin Stross-Radschinski: Plone Tagung

Plone Tagung is a local conference for the German speaking community Hosted by a university. Last year in Koblenz. Next year in March in Bonn, Germany. Hosted by LIMES life and medical sciences institute.

See https://tagung.plone.de (https://2027.tagung.plone.de is coming).

Roland Fasching: Creating a Plone Site with AI

AI takes material from an intake folder, builds a concept, and processes it into a Plone Site. Why? Speed up the build process of sites. Modernizing, with a pipeline for migrations of well-aged Plone sites. Personally, more time for concept, design, polishing, and going into detail. What a customer delivers: content, some design docs maybe, some emails.

Franco Pellegrini: GenericSetup snapshots and comparisons

In the ZMI in the portal_setup tool there is a Snapshots tab, you create a snapshot there. Then you changes configuration in your site. Create another snapshot. Go to the Comparison tab, select the two snapshots, and compare. This is a nice way to see what you need to add in a profile or an upgrade step.

Astrid Beyers: Postcard

We had an idea: create a postcard for Plone. You have two in your conference bag. Maybe keep one for yourself, and send one to someone else, if your country has a working postal system.

Jens Klein: Alpine City Sprint 2027

This sprint will happen in 11-15 January 2027, just outside of Innsbruck, Austria. You can also go skiing.

Armin Stross-Radschinski:

I use Zotero for creating snapshots of websites. Not so easy on my phone. Install SingleFile as plugin (also from Zotero). You can just put this into an archive, or feed it to your LLM.

Matthias Kirschner: Books explaining free software for children

(Matthias Kirschner is the keynote speaker for tomorrow.)

How can I explain my children why it is so cool to create software? I asked a mailing list, but got no answer. So I wrote a book: Ada and Zangemann, a tale of software, skateboards, and raspberry icecream. It is open, which means it is now also translated in lots of language. I have meanwhile read the book to over 1500 children in libraries and such.

A volunteer from The Netherlands made it available in braille.

You can help. Read it to others, give it, donate, help with automation and translations.

See https://ada.fsfe.org and also a movie at https://ada.fsfe.org/movie

Each year at the Plone conference there is the general meeting of the Plone Foundation and its members. Everyone is welcome to attend. Only members are allowed to vote.

More on the Plone Foundation is here: https://plone.org/foundation Specific for this meeting: https://plone.org/foundation/meetings/membership/2026-membership-meeting

The documents shown during the meeting will be placed online, so just look there.

Forms are everywhere, and most of them are terrible.

Personal mission: make forms boringly reliable. And prevent Germany from reinventing the fax as a web app.

Disclaimer 1: I am an official SurveyJS partner.

Disclaimer 2: Everything here is basically AI slop. The architecture comes from my side, but I did not write a single line of code.

Demo site: https://demo.privacyforms.studio

Plone has had several form add-ons:

• ATSchemeEditorNG
• PloneFormGen
• collective.easyform
• Volto Form Block

Motivation for Privacy Forms Studio: digital sovereignty (EU-driven compliance), complex requirements (beautiful forms, conditional logic), AI capabilities.

Some features:

• It has a visual designer with intuitive drag and drop.
• Upload a PDF and extract a form from it.
• conditional logic
• privacy-first

It is powered by the SurveyJS engine. It has a licensing model. The viewer is completely free. The forms creator is 500-800 euro per developer, one-time.

The foundational pipeline: json -> form creator -> browser.

You can have open URLs to the form, or a token link, specific to one user. It has a strong validation pipeline in the backend, protecting against malicious submissions. There is an audit trail for submissions.

So a form is submitted, what do you do with the data?

• Store it, in Plone or a relational database.
• Email it.
• Send a light-weight notification mail with only a link, for better confidentiality.
• Post: forward it to an external HTTP endpoint

AI assistance is possible, but optional: zero AI by default. Draft a form from a simple text description. Upload a PDF, and AI extracts fields, types, and structure automatically. There is a chatbot assistant. You can use local or remote models.

It can be installed as add-on in Plone. For larger applications you would add a relational database to store the submissions, good for large amounts of submissions.

Maybe you already have a fillable PDF. We can do a roundtrip for this. Upload the PDF so we extract a form for it. The visitor submits the form. Then we fill in the answers in the original fillable PDF, so it can be handled as previously. Technically: we validate and extract with pypdf, then write values back with PyMuPDF.

Which license does this AI-generated code have? I don't care about that right now, but it is on GitHub, you can use it.

Conclusions:

• This is a professional and decent solution for Plone.
• SurveyJS at 500 euro per integrator, so pretty affordable for projects.
• Great for digital and data sovereignty.
• Optional AI
• Full control over data and processing.

Code: https://github.com/zopyx/zopyx.surveyjs