Fred van Dijk: The Little Book of Plone

Do we own our digital past?

Quote: Those who cannot remember the past, are condemned to repeat it.

Twist: Those who do not document and publish their past, will only remember AI-generated summaries of their past.

Three inspirations (people): Christine Baumgartner over beers in Austria at sprints, Astrid Beyers to whom I gave a speed-history of Plone, and Sally Kleinfeldt. Other inspirations: Stellenbosch Sprint 2026, reconfirm core values. Jon Cherry: Information does not need to be on the homepage, but "information should be diggable."

If we don't act 'soon', this diggable information will disappear: we have started storing things on SAAS platforms, we may lose credentials or people retire, information may disappear in plone.org renewals. We have limited resources, and have a complex past, present, and future.

It is against our nature: we tend to look forward (and plan for some maintenance). Song by Bastille: Give Me the Future. New people still come into the Plone project, and they want to know: what happened before. What were the crazy ideas of the past. I can write a story, but it will be my story, the story of a by now grey haired white male from Europe. I have no idea of lots of things that happened in South America or Asia.

More serendipity: find things you didn't seek. Can we get a blogs.plone.org where people put their Plone-related stuff and the Plone community maintains it. I asked AI, and after a lot of back and forth, and at the end it said: eat your own dog food, just use Plone. We have tools like pas.plugins.identity and collective.multiworkflow that Érico is working on, that help here. Erico wrote https://ericof.com/en/posts/2026/plone-archeology-2003-2012 showing screen shots of old versions of Plone.

We can create The Little Book of Plone. Plone website. If we gather everything, it is too much: 2000 pages? You need to curate it: what is most important? Can we have a slider at the top, to have three levels:

• verified/agreed short history
• extra background info, still checked
• media, personal stories

Invite contribution. Central Identity Management to log in. Conservation and backup should be the responsibility of the foundation and community. And start collecting stories, for real!

But is this a "book"? I don't know, yet. But it is story telling. Future marketing.

Astrid, Cihan: Each year we could have a small exhibition at the Plone conference, with stuff people bring.

Armin: Create a Plone distribution for organisations for an archive. Then we don't do it only for us.