I got to see a few episodes of The IT Crowd this weekend. It’s a British sitcom about two basement-dwelling IT support staffers and their boss. It was hysterical. And not just ’cause I’m a nerd. Plus, it has great theme music.
Highly recommended.
I don’t like to brag, but… actually sometimes I really do. 
I’m really proud and excited to be able to announce the launch of ONE/Northwest’s largest and most complex web project yet — www.sightline.org, the new website of Sightline Institute, the sustainability think-tank formerly known as Northwest Environment Watch. (And our downstairs neighbors, I might add.)
The site looks pretty snazzy, of course (thanks to the graphic design work of Pat Snavely and Sightline volunteers and the CSS lovin’ of our indispensible consultant Trey Beck) and it’s got a ton of amazing content about what it’s gonna take to build a more sustainble future for our region. And of course, behind the polished look and the sparkling prose is a powerful dose of Plone.
Here’s a quick rundown on some of the more wonktastic bits:
All of this web wonkery is pretty neat. But what’s even more exciting to me is the fact that Sightline’s new website is almost literally the beating heart of the organization.
Being a thinktank is all about communicating effectively, and Sightline’s new website is their main communications channel to the media, to regional decisionmakers and to the public at large. Sightline.org provides a beautiful and powerful showcase for some of the best thinkers and writers in the Northwest environmental movement. I’m extremely proud of the work they’re doing, and of ONE/Northwest’s role in helping them do it bigger, faster and louder than ever before.
Finally, I need to end this post with a hearty shout out to my colleague Andrew Burkhalter, who poured his heart and soul into this project over the past few months. Sightline.org was (is!) a massive project with a thousand little fussy details, and Andrew did an amazing job of pushing the tools right out to the bleeding edge to deliver. I’m humbled and awed by his talent.
… and congrats to the crew at Grist, whose first-ever list of superlatives just got Kossed.
The basic functioning of the Internet is facing a pretty serious legislative threat from Congress, and there’s a new nonpartisan coalition forming to fight to protect “net neutrality,” which is one of the bedrock principles that has alllowed the Internet to become the free and open ecosystem that we want to see it remain. For a two-minute video introduction to this important issue, check out Public Knowledge.
As my colleague Steve Andersen also reports, ONE/Northwest has received a $25,000 grant from the Salesforce.com Foundation to fund the integration of Plone with Salesforce.com. This will allow folks with Plone-powered websites to share data about people, organizations, etc. with the Salesforce.com database platform. You can read more details on the ONE/Northwest website.
As you might expect, we’re all pretty excited. Plone and Salesforce.com are both industrial strength, easy-to-use applications with incredibly strong communities behind them and bright futures ahead. Both are widely used in the nonprofit sector — and beyond. And both have deeply embedded assumptions about the importance of “playing nice” with other applications, which is what makes this kind of across-the-internet integraion possible.
Our current plan is for an October final release, with several interim milestones along the way. We’ll be working with Enfold Systems, who are top-tier Plone consultants (and friends), to make sure the code is written right.
We haven’t yet set up any kind of collaboration space for the project (since it just became really real yesterday!), but if you’re interested in participating or in tracking it closely, leave a comment below and we’ll be in touch soon.
…that Don Rumsfeld is doing a heckuva job. Heh.
Technology doesn’t exist in a vaccuum. It is intimately connected to the real-world organizing you’re doing, and must inform it and be informed by it.
You can’t organize unless you know who you’re trying to organize, who your targets are, and how you can influence them.
We need better processes for thinking holistically about modern organizing — including both offline and online elements.
Or was that drool running down my chin?
Running Mac OS X and Windows XP in parallel on the same box is about to become a reality. Holy cow.
There were those who said it couldn’t be done. There were more who said it shouldn’t. But we took their advice and ignored it with all the gusto we could muster.
We finally flipped the switch today on the new, Plone-powered ONE/Northwest website.
It’s a got a lovely new design, a bunch of new content (and most of the same old stuff you love). But more importantly, it’s now powered by the best open-source content management system out there, and it gives us a solid platform for doing some serious refacoring of our content over the next few months.
This is just the beginning. Look for us to roll out a steady stream of improvements over the next few months. One great way to keep up with new content is to subscribe to our RSS feed of new articles. If you’re more email-oriented, you can subscribe to ONEList, our monthly email blast of goodness.
Buy me a beer and I’ll tell you all it is to redo your own website when you’re scrambling to launch sites for clients.Â
Ok, my brain is full.
We just wrapped up an extremely successful Seattle Plone Bootcamp, and I gotta say, I’m pretty tired. I can only imagine how our interpid trainer Joel Burton must feel — he had to think, talk and answer questions for a whole week!
Here’s the quick report out for those of you who might be wondering whether you want to run a Plone Bootcamp in your town. (Short answer: yes!)Â You can also check out a few photos, which I tagged “plonebootcamp” at Flickr. Thanks to fellow Seattle Plonista Melody Winkle of the UW Computing Services department, we were able to book fantastic (and reasonably priced!) space at the UW Center for Urban Horticulture.
There, among CUH’s gardens and greenhouses, 40 Plone users, administrators and consultants gathered for 5 days of intensive hands-on training led by Joel. It was really great to be surrounded by co-conspirators such as Trey Beck (Ohtogo), Aaron vanDerlip (Netcorps), Sarmeesha Reedy (Dharmatech), Sam & Mike Moscheck (Digitalaid), Kris Wittenberger (NPower Seattle), Tim Schaub (CommEn Space), Josh Livini (Livni Consulting), and Brian Gershon (RagingWeb) And it was even cooler to meet a whole bunch of new people from Seattle, Portland and even South Dakota (!) who are passionate about Plone.
The first couple of days were warmups, covering some of Plone’s more advanced end-user features, the basics of Zope’s page templating system, and the fundamentals of skinning Plone (i.e. customizing its look and feel). I felt on surprisingly solid ground here; despite the fact that I don’t know a lick of Python, I could handle all of this stuff pretty readily. I guess that all the time I’ve spent bugging Jon and Andrew knee has paid off some.
We held the monthly Seattle Plone Gathering on Tuesday night in the U District, and it will come as no surprise that it was very well attended by Bootcampers, Seattle Plone regulars and even international man of mystery Andy McKay.
On Thursday, we dove into creating custom content types. Unfortunately, I had to take off to deliver a Plone end-user training for Seattle Tilth, so I missed what sounded like a lot of good stuff Thursday afternoon. But fortunately, I made it back in time for a tasty dinner with the Bootcamp crew.
Friday was devoted to more advanced content types work, as well as the basics of security, permissions, workflows and custom code development. Again, some very helpful tips that will help us further refine our work.
And thus the week ended. A few random thoughts: