WebLion at EDUCAUSE: New Collaborations

We had two goals in mind for the trip to EDUCAUSE. First, to bring attention to our ideas on the benefits of collaboration with other institutions for open source software development and in particular, the Zope framework and the WebLion extensions. The second goal was keep our ears to the ground and listen and seek out trends that may influence the direction of collaborative relationships WebLion development.

As I write this, I'm still thrilled by the enthusiastic response to the team's goals and accomplishments. It seems that knowledge of the WebLion project is spreading, and discussion of collaboration quickly jumps to the "next steps" phase. To wit:

• Our presentation and discussion at the University of Washington Plone Users Group drew crowd of more than twenty developers, including people from a Seattle arts college, University Oregon, Rutgers, and Boise State University. We'll be contacting attendees to encourage next steps in the collaboration process.
• Jon Gunderson from University of Illinois, well known for his work in web document accessibility, will be working with us to test small deployments at Illinois. There is a great opportunity to work together to develop finer grained semantic structure through building support for microformats and WAI-ARIA accessibility metadata into Plone. The semantic web is a key technology to bridging the the Web and for disabled people.
• We were busy at the EDUCAUSE poster session. Web content management is still a hot topic, and there was a lot of interest in Plone; the interest extended to how we are developing the business model, and the community is organizing itself.
• With the help of the folks at Enfold Systems and the Plone Foundation, we are planning an event in March to organize collaborations in higher education around the Zope/Plone platform.

Since the EDUCAUSE event and our activities centered on the WebLion project, traffic on our IRC channel has noticably increased. Indeed, attendees from University of Washington are now joining the #weblion chat room and participating in conversations.

The nature of these collaborations is most interesting. Their existence and growth has an organic character in that they are self organizing around active projects; they are not prearranged from the management layer down. It "just happens" among developers, just as we see in active communities of open source projects. Collaborations lead to deployments, as we see the Faculty Staff Directory is now being used in a German university with more to follow.

I'd like to think that the WebLion project will be an instructive experiment on the role that open source software and community development methods can play in the future of information technology.

By Christian Vinten-Johansen on Wednesday, October 31, 2007

In Plone

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