State of the Plone Community

Thank you Imio and Affinitic for organising this conference. Special thanks to Martin Peeters and Joël Lambillotte who lead these companies.

Plone is multiple things:

• a product and api
• a community
• a foundation (organisation)

For the first part, our four release managers will talk about it in the keynote on Friday. As Plone Foundation president I will talk about the first and second parts.

The Plone community is global, online, open source, multilingual. We started as an online community: Alan Runyan and Alex Limi started Plone by talking on IRC, which is how old people like me used to communicate.

A good part of Plone is that we are truly open source and free. There is no big company behind it that can remove parts of the software or suddenly start asking money for it.

Plone started from the Zope community. Other communities came from Plone, like Guillotina, with people still here at the conference today.

In my home country of Brazil, the Plone community was started before the Python community. The first seven Python conferences in Brazil were organised by the Plone community.

I was welcomed into the global Plone community by people like Jens and Hanno, which was impressive to me. But mostly I thought: hey, these are nice, normal people, that you can talk to.

The community will embrace you. The community will help you overcome your fears, like I had of running for the Plone board.

I had two role models: Dorneless Treméa and Jean Ferri. They left us way too early in life. What I learned:

• Lead by example. No one wants to organise a conference? Let's do it.
• Be generous with your time.
• Help people.

How can you help when you are not a developer, but a user?

• Ask questions on community.plone.org.
• Help with documentation. Thank you Katja Süss and Steve Piercy for doing a lot of work here. I am nervous when I add documentation because English is not my native language. Don't worry, Steve will fix it for you.
• Translate Plone in your language.
• Make designs for Plone. Maybe a nice photo to go with a news item.
• Share your experience.
• Work with issues, do code review. The past week or so, on every issue or pull request in Plone, there was a comment from either David Glick, Alessandro Pisa or Wesley Barroso.
• Spread the word, like Rikupekka Oksanen.
• We had Google Summer of Code students this year: Bhutan R J, Avi Mishra, Md Sahil, Robot Singh, helped by Eric Brehault and others.

Plone Foundation

The Plone Foundation is an organisation that supports the community. We promote and protect Plone. We are the legal shield for threats, or preventing companies taking over Plone, or saying they are the largest. We support community meetings and sprints. We had the World Plone Day, with lots of video content.

If you want to organise a sprint or a meeting in your region, talk to us. We can help with money or with organisation.

We had ten new Foundation members the last twelve months. I know most people here who are no members have imposter syndrome: I am not good enough. That is not true. That you are here is proof enough. Nominate yourself.

You can sponsor Plone.

Please consider joining the Plone board.

We are a diverse community. If your English is bad, you are still welcome in our community. We don't have enough women here, or people from the south of the planet.

We need to generate more content. Do a podcast, a video, a success story. In your language.

We need more events. They don't have to be big. Just a local meetup. We need to present the software and the community in other places, like Pycon or React conferences. We are going to have a new version of the Plone Symposium in Brazil, on November 18, 2022.

World Plone day will be April 26, 2023. It is great if you organise a local meeting that day.

I see that a lot of people are here at a Plone conference for the first time. There are young people here. People leave the community, others join, some come back after a while. The Plone community stays with you even after you leave.