It seems that only South Africa had an event listed as part of the World Plone Day set of local events. As an african, I am of course interested by this fact, and I would have expected some Plone presence in another region. Hopefully, we can fix that for next year’s edition !

I am promoting an effort called Python African Tour which aims at sending volunteers, within the next couple of years, in the different regions of Africa, based on sponsoring, to train beginner developers there on Python and its related technologies. It’s a way to introduce newbies there to a programming language that helps the developer get his job done, as well as all the community practices that help us improve our daily work. It’s also a way to get new developers join the Python community.

The first country the tour will visit is Morocco, in December, from the 18th to the 22nd. Among the possible countries to plan in 2009 are Nigeria and South Africa. Obviously our plans will depend on discussions with local contacts we get, and sponsoring possibilities.

For Morocco, Amine Soulaymani, a developer living in Morocco, and Daniel Nouri have volunteered to participate as instructors for the students at Ecole Mohammedia d’Ingenieurs, ­the school that will host the Python training session.
In addition to the training session during the first 2 days, we plan to have 3 days of community activities: an unconference-style open event with demos and talks related to Python, followed by a sprint that will be hosted in the offices of Nextma, a solution provider doing Python. Talks and sprint activities should cover Plone, with the participation of a PloneGov / CommunesPlone team joining us from Belgium, WSGI / Repoze and ­OpenERP with contributors from Nextma.

On a side note, I have proposed a talk with Roberto Allende for next year’s Pycon to present our ideas and actions to help spread Python in both South America and Africa.

If you want to contribute in any way, ­­contact us through the project’s mailing list.

Unfortunately, I was unable to go to DC for the Plone conference.

I want to apologize to the people who were expecting to follow the tutorial on z3c.form, which had to be canceled.

I am thinking about submitting an improved version of that tutorial proposal for Pycon 2009, and I hope to be there and meet some of you.

Have fun, and let the people know it ! Zope is back (in various forms ;)), and we are going toward more successes in the coming years.

Since a few days, I have started focusing on my talks material.

Some details about the talks I will be giving:

• Anti-patterns, patterns and rules of thumb for successful Plone projects. My subtitle for this talk is, well, “Things to avoid and things to do !”. It is difficult to give advices in this area, and any advice needs to be confronted to the real context. But it would be interesting to share ideas and feelings about how we (meaning User, Project Manager, Developer) better cooperate and get the job done for our projets. Hope to see you there !
• The plateform, the framework and the coach. I will be advocating a “coaching” approach for helping technical teams, within the enterprise, to get on board and be able to develop/maintain their in-house applications.
• Let the machine work for you. Using Plone 3 content rules… I will try to discuss interesting use case examples, and how you set up the content rules for them.

It’s the second Plone conference I will be attending ; I was in Vienna two years ago, and I know it’s a very special atmosphere ! I am coming with Encolpe, a colleague at Ingeniweb. See you all there !.

The much awaited Plone 3 is out ! You can see the announcement here. For those interested, I made a news about it on the french community site Zopera.org.

Alse, we are all excited about the coming Plone conference in Naples. (Stay tuned for more about this event !)