I can’t believe it’s over.
If you’re a regular reader, you probably know that I just spent the past week attending — and the past 5 months organizing — Plone Conference 2006. We finally wrapped the Seattle “Code and Community Projects” Sprint last night, seven days (and nights!) after we opened with pre-conference training classes.
How did it go? Well, I had pretty high exepectations, and I’m happy to report that it blew past those expectations, and exceeded my wildest dreams for what a Plone Conference could be.
Here we all are.
We sold out, with over 340 people from 35 states and 20 countries. We held three two-day training classes with over 130 students. We ran over 45 sessions. We had three keynote speakers, including Dr. Eben Moglen of the Software Freedom Law Center, who connected the dots between the free software movement and the long human struggle for democracy and freedom and literally moved many of us (including me!) to tears. (Think about it: an intellctual property attorney who moved an audience to tears.)
The wireless network worked (!). The food was delicious. It only rained a little. We drank a lot of great Northwest beer.
As Paul Everitt said, the software is an artifact of the community, and it’s the community that really counts. Plone is the gift that we give to each other, and so was this conference. It was inspiring to watch a motivated, passionate community come together here and give itself the conference it needed to have, seemingly without effort.
Thank you all. Everyone who planned. Everyone who travelled. Everyone who spoke. Everyone who listened. Everyone who asked questions. Everyone who shared. Everyone who carried and set up and tore down. Everyone who ate and drank and laughed. Everyone who walked by with that glow on their face. You are amazing.
I am awed and humbled by the warmth, intelligence, humor, diversity, and, quite frankly, the sheer biomass of the Plone community.
I am riding high on Plone Love.
Thank you, thank you, thank you Jon, for making this the best conference ever.
My personal favourite from the large pile of positive feedback was this, from Jordan Baker:
“”"
If I was to look back and ask myself what was the best part I think its a feeling of not being just a user anymore but part of a community. It was inspiring to take part in our well-attended sprint and to see that spirit in action.
“”"
See you all next year!
Martin
[...] Jon’s got a nice wrap up of the Plone Conference over on his blog: We sold out, with over 340 people from 35 states and 20 countries. We held three two-day training classes with over 130 students. We ran over 45 sessions. We had three keynote speakers, including Dr. Eben Moglen of the Software Freedom Law Center, who connected the dots between the free software movement and the long human struggle for democracy and freedom and literally moved many of us (including me!) to tears. (Think about it: an intellctual property attorney who moved an audience to tears.) [...]
Hi Jon,
From the parts of Dr. Moglen’s talk I could watch on the live stream (I’m not pointing a finger at anyone on this as I know how hard those things are to set up and keep functioning properly), indeed I felt just like you. “Software produces alternate modes of infrastructure and transportation” is a quote that got me thinking quite a bit. I can’t wait to download his talk and watch it with other folks (I set myself a project on openplans to gather videotaped conference pointers so that I could make an event out of watching stuff I feel I should not be watching alone in my basement with no one to discuss with afterwards : http://openplans.org/projects/socio-libre).
The fact of communities being enabled to collaborate by free software brings about potentially chaotic consequences to our current set of democratic institutions. A lot can be done by goodwill in communities. An area of collaboration (among others) is to set up a community-based geospatial data acquisition infrastructure to make up for our higher level governments not being able to for example map all creeks in a neighbourhood (let alone put an up-to-date name on them). The wealth of data production/management capabilities that free software gives communities could become disruptive in the sense that a lot could be done better by community-based initiatives based on free software, yet most of our taxes go towards higher levels of governement. Letting communities decide to finance themselves by “taxing” community members will become disruptive when people invest substantial amounts of time and money in those community initiatives. At that point, people will wonder why they’re giving so much resources elsewhere and this is a real concern to our current democratic structure IMO. Phasing in all the great ideas free software tenants have held for so many years in a smooth fashion will be one of our most challenging tasks in accomplishing sustainable development in the coming years.
Thanx for inviting Dr. Moglen and, above all, thanx for setting up Plone Conference 2006.