Monthly Archives: January 2008

+5000!

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Thanks to:

  • Tobias Ahlers
  • Yves Moisan
  • Matthew Latterell
  • Patrick Shaw
  • William Murphy
  • Eric Steele
  • Scott Paley
  • Vincenzo Barone
  • Niels Steen Krogh

You’re the most recent contributors to the Plone Strategic Planning Summit fundraiser!

Niels put us over the top this morning, we’ve now raised $5130 from 30 donors against our $5000 goal. With a $5000 match from the Plone Foundation, that means we’ll have $10,130 in our Plone Strategic Planning subsidy fund!

This will allow us to cover travel expenses to California for some of the Plone community’s most important (and far flung!) contributors for three days of big-picture thinking about the bright future of Plone.

Wow! Plone community, you are truly amazing! Your strong response to both the fundraising campaign and our community survey (over 200 responses!) makes us all feel tremendously confident and supported going into the strategic planning retreat.  It’s great to dream big when you know you have such a supportive community backing you up!

If you’re still itching to support the future of Plone, you can make a donation to the Plone Foundation. We’re going to be spending a lot more time, energy (and, we hope, money) this year on improving Plone marketing, redesigning Plone.org, and more.

links for 2008-01-31

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Thanks, Thomas & Tannic!

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Thanks to Thomas Zeleny and Tannic, Inc. for becoming the most recent donors to the Plone Strategic Planning Summit. We’re just a few days from the end of our fundraising drive (and the summit itself!), and we’ve reached $3345 toward are goal of $5000 from 21 donors.

The Plone Foundation will match donations dollar-for-dollar, so that makes $6690 in our travel scholarship fund. That’s pretty great — but we’ve gotten over $7000 in scholarship requests. So, if you are getting value from Plone, and haven’t donated yet, now’s a great time to invest in the future of Plone.

Is the Tipping Point Bullshit?

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New research suggests the Malcom Gladwell-popularized theory of “Influentials” (or Gatekeepers) doesn’t hold water. Really interesting article in FastCompany about research Duncan Watts:

Watts, for one, didn’t think the gatekeeper model was true. It certainly didn’t match what he’d found studying networks. So he decided to test it in the real world by remounting the Milgram experiment on a massive scale. In 2001, Watts used a Web site to recruit about 61,000 people, then asked them to ferry messages to 18 targets worldwide. Sure enough, he found that Milgram was right: The average length of the chain was roughly six links. But when he examined these pathways, he found that “hubs”–highly connected people–weren’t crucial. Sure, they existed. But only 5% of the email messages passed through one of these superconnectors. The rest of the messages moved through society in much more democratic paths, zipping from one weakly connected individual to another, until they arrived at the target. Why did Milgram get it wrong? Watts thinks it’s simply because his sample was so small–only a few dozen letters reached their mark. The dominance of the three friends could have been a statistical accident. “And since Milgram’s finding sort of made sense, nobody even bothered to redo the experiment,” Watts shrugs. But when you perform the experiment with hundreds of successfully completed letters, a different picture emerges: Influentials don’t govern person-to-person communication. We all do.

There’s a really interesting bit about how they experimented with ForwardTrack, which makes viral forwarding activity transparent to the users. It massively increased pass-along traffic. I really want to start working this into more online activism work.

Thanks, Pompilio and Headnet (again!)

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Thanks to Pompilio Fanelli and repeat donor Sune Toft/Headnet, we’re now at the 60% mark of the Plone Foundation’s Plone Strategic Planning Summit travel scholarship drive! 17 folks from the Plone community have contributed a total of $3035 — that’s pretty amazing, thanks to all of you who’ve stepped up to the challenge!We’ve got another 10 days to raise another $1965 — will you join us in helping to support the event that’s going to help shape Plone 4.0 and beyond?

Thanks Denis, Totsie and Virginio!

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Denis Mishunov, Totsie Marine and Virginio Fanelli are the latest contributors to the Plone Foundation’s Plone Strategic Planning Summit travel scholarship drive!We’ve now reached 16 contributors and $2615 towards our $5000 goal.Thanks to all of you for making the Plone Strategic Planning Summit possible!

Thanks Jesse, Graham, Florian, Jean-Pascal and Sune!

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Thanks to:

  • Jesse Synder
  • Graham Perrin
  • Florian Schulze
  • Jean-Pascal Houde
  • Sune Toft / Headnet

For becoming the five most recent sponsors of the Plone Strategic Planning Summit!

We’ve now reached 13 donors, and $2115 — which, with the Plone Foundation’s matching funds, means we’ve got $4230 available to support travel expenses for summit participants.

Thanks to all of you!

And a special thanks to Martin “optilude” Aspeli for spreading the word via his blog!  You can make a copy of the nifty Chipin widget for your blog or website — just click the “Copy” button for a code snippet!

Thanks Youenn, George, Christopher and Aleksandr!

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Thanks to:

  • Youenn Boussard
  • George Bray
  • Christopher Johnson
  • Aleksandr Vladimirskiy

…for becoming the latest supporters of the Plone Foundation’s upcoming Plone Strategic Planning Summit!

We’ve raised $1610 of our $5000 goal — not too bad for only four days! And with the Plone Foundation’s match, that brings us to $3220 that we’ll be able to use to support summit participants’ travel expenses. Thanks!

New Contexts For Old Ideas

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A great nugget of deep wisdom from Jon Udell that rings so true to my experiences in nonprofit technology work:

Advocates for powerful ideas and methods that are long extant but have yet to fully bear fruit may tend to become nostalgic, appear misguided, act bitter, lose focus. These are counterproductive behaviors. So how do you avoid them? How do you stay the course, keep your eye on the ball, move forward, remain excited, and find ways to explore the same old things in new and different ways? One answer, I think, is to keep engaging with different people in different contexts. Yesterday I was showing and discussing some things that I’ve known for so long, and documented so extensively, that I worried about sounding like a broken record. But in that context it was fresh information, a new perspective. People got excited. And their excitement rekindled my passion.

Donate to Support the Plone Strategic Planning Summit

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The Plone Foundation (full disclosure: I’m proud to serve on the board) is raising $5000 to support travel scholarships for their upcoming first-ever Plone Strategic Planning Summit. If you’re using Plone (or even just thinking about it), this is a great opportunity to make a smart investment in the vibrant future of Plone.Not only will your dollars help support the travel scholarship fund, allowing us to gather key Plonistas from around the globe for 3 days of in-person planning and brainstorming at Google HQ, the Plone Foundation will match your contributions dollar-for-dollar, doubling the impact of your donation. What a deal!

I’ve already thrown in a few dollars. Thanks also to Cignex, Alexander Pilz and John Haberman for helping us kick off the fundraising effort with a bang! As the Chipin widget below shows, we’re already over a quarter of the way towards our goal.

With your support, we can get all the way there and jump-start the development of Plone 4.0, 5.0 and beyond!