About two days after writing this, I did join the marketing committee list… I’m still mostly in “lurk” mode, but will soon decloak, I’m sure.

This group is more about vision and message than it is about “marketing”, and we try to operate as a do-acracy, producing actaul documents and delivarables that can help people understnad what plone is and what its good for.

Stop by and ask some of these questions there.

Jim – I also have plenty of ideas for what a faculty member might use Plone for, along with many examples (including http://educommons.sourceforge.net/ which is built on Plone). This post is also a good place to start: http://lists.plone.org/pipermail/marketing-committee/2005-August/00028.html

Thanks for the ideas!
/Jonah

I’m not sure I agree. My colleagues at ONE/Northwest are solving lots of real problems for grassroots environmental nonprofits with Plone — helping them create polished, professional, easy-to-update public websites, easy-to-use intra- and extranets, and custom web applications.

Often I find that consultants are trying to solve problems that the clients don’t know they have. Maybe the problem is that you and your client have a different understanding of what the problem is.

I’m told by the Plone developer community (including Jean, above) that an all-new Plone.net site is coming soon, and that a big listing of great Plone sites will be a key component of it. That’s great news.

Jump in there, or send me details of any sites you’d like to see included.

Jon Stahl described in a blog his vision about directory of Plone powered sites. This motivate me write few words about cmspowered.info

Totally great idea.

The plone.org types would be great for developers and site managers who have the time, awareness and confidence to come to plone.org to describe their sites, but many interesting uses of plone would slip through the cracks I fear.

Having sites tagged as ‘plone-site’ (or whatever is agreed) in del.icio.us for instance has several other advantages: (1) it exposes the plone-ness of these sites to users who browse their del.icio.us listing for other reasons, (2) it exposes the listings to open public tagging on their other attributes, evolving a rough & ready folksonomy of plone-sites, (3) it lets the bookmarking public express its rating of sites’ interest and importance (for instance, 900 people have bookmarked ‘Ubuntu – Linux for Human Beings’ at del.icio.us), and (4) it makes it very very quick & simple for plone advocates to note plone sites as we encounter them.

For instance, the tag I have used to casually note plone sites as I run across them is “plone-site” (I seem to be the only one who has used this one though: http://del.icio.us/tag/plone-site == http://del.icio.us/Mike_Malloch/plone-site). There are 3 uses of the tag “plonesite” by others in del,icio.us. Any reasonably rare string would suit me for this kind of tagging – the more ‘natural’ and guess-able the better of course.

I have a hunch that simplicity and open-ness are in themselves a 5th advantage of complementing ‘real’ case studies and listing entries with more casual postings in the big public services. As we move towards loosely-coupled parts & services for meeting users’ needs, and away from portal/CMS lock-in, these open services will become more and more important I think.