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.

At one of the Plone conference’s sessions this afternoon, I talked about using “Coaching” as a way to help companies for their Plone developments. I presented the case of HEP-Bejune where I worked with a team using that model, and the lessons learned from it.

For those who could not attend, you can get the PDF file of the presentation here.

At Ingeniweb, we are organizing a bootcamp in Paris for people who want to start developing with the Plone 3 platform, i.e. using Zope 3 patterns and tools. This is a 3-day training session scheduled for october 22-24.

I’m happy to announce that we will benefit from the participation of a KSS core team member as a co-trainer ; Godefroid Chapelle is going to lead the KSS part, on the 2nd day.

You can contact me directly if you are interested, so we can arrange your participation.

For more information, see the full announcement on plone.org.