To address the original question of 'Why do we have two different teams for this?':
The Marketing Committee is a specific committee as defined in the bylaws of the Plone Foundation. It has a chair that is voted in by the Plone Foundation Board. And according to the bylaws the whole committee needs to be approved by the board. This proved to be too cumbersome in the past and didn't allow new people to join in easily.
So the decision was taken to create two groups. The 'Communications Team' and the 'Marketing Committee'. The names of these were chosen to try and avoid confusion between the two. The idea wat the Marketing Committee would just be the minimum official requirement to satisfy the bylaws, and the Communications Team would actually comprise of the majority of the people actually contributing.
The reality is this was even more confusing. However no-one has yet to come up with a better solution that addresses both the needs of the community and the bylaws of the Plone Foundation. Maybe the bylaws need to change. Which is probably a whole other can of worms.
Matt,
thank you for the whole story. I can strongly suggest a simple approach: "We did not know it was impossible, therefore we just did it."
I like to do and know the pitfalls to make everyone happy. I succeeded and failed. And I think I will fail some more times and hope I have to the chance to target some goals as well. But what I love with our community is that we try harder than others. Guess what what I expect someday...
Sorry – something better than Plone but we did it!
Awesome context here. Thanks for filling me in. I was trying to figure out what had happened since PSM13. Now I know and I also know that I'm on the hook for the edu vertical. Mea culpa etc.
PSM14 will have a whatever-you-wanna-call-it sprint that will include writing up verticals for plone.com so join in in person or we can try to bring you in on the sprint remotely. Let me know if you want to join in, by signing up at https://midwest.plonesymp.org/sprints !
@hvelarde I agree that plone is suffering without a direction. But neither the marketing team or the board can set that direction. It only works if people listen to them or they have resources to make it happen themselves. We had Limi who made beautifully clear descriptions of where we should go and then nothing happened or it got lost in translation. We have to accept we are being lead by the developers and withouta single large company there is no vision. Anyone who stands up and gives a vision can be argued with by other parts of the community who legitimately use plone in a very different way.
The real problem with all of this is we don't collectively make hard clear choices but easy or arbitrary ones. The result is a product that does a little for lots of people particularly those invested in it but is impossible to describe to others. Our best marketing slogan is "plone is the cms for the plone community". Which is ironic given hardly any of us edit content with it.
I hate to be gloomy but think plone needs help. I used to be a believer in its democratic nature but now I realise democracatic government still requires leaders and taxes and people paid to make stuff happen to a plan.
Here is my take on why it is not enough. Almost all successful open source
is developed by the same people who use them. Developer tools, tools for
building websites we build ourselves etc. This works because our friends
are very likely to be like us and so are our friends friends. So if I tell
my friends how great this tool is I'm working on they might give it a go
since it solves their problem. Basic word of mouth marketing driven by the
developers themselves.
Plone however is billed as an enterprise CMS. Its also very flexible. Its a
great tool for those that build enterprise websites for customers and have
sales people that can sell to enterprise. However that group of people is a
lot smaller than developers who want a website. Also by definition the
enterprise sellers are already selling so likely have a cms they sell so
they need a really big reason to switch.
That is why normal open source word of mouth doesn't work for us.
I do not agree with your vision, Dylan; you can not say people is not listening to the marketing team or the board, that is simply not true.
2 years ago a roadmap was published on the Plone site; when that document was published many people (including me) made comments. so here we are in 2014 and I ask why we do not have such document updated?
currently, AFAIK, we do not have an official position neither from the marketing team, nor from the board on what is the vision of Plone in the short/mid/long term. we only have personal opinions of people like Steve and Eric, but, again, these are not official positions of the community.
yes we can discuss them, agree or not with them, but as long as nobody seats down and came with a resume of such debates they lead to nowhere.
many things have changed since 2008; we better review the state of the technology and the trends before trying to implement a vision from eons ago. Deco, the grid system, for instance, was revolutionary then, today is dead before arrival.
leaving just developers to decide the future of something as complex (and important) as Plone is a big mistake (even worst if you let it to unguided, highly-motivated, young developers); developers most of the time lack the strategic vision that is only accomplished by a mature multidisciplinary team like the one we had on the past.
if we do not fix that, Plone is going to slowly die as a viable project.
As far as I know, indeed there is no real marketing team. Technically the board has to manage that because it relates to distribution of funds. If people really care, you should pressure the board. Ideally, put together a team first and then pressure the board to do something.
The money is there to make things happen. Just needs people who care enough to do more than discuss.
@hvelarde I completely agree. I am not outlaying a vision, I am reflecting the current situation, that the current way the plone community is organised there is no leadership except via developer contributions and as you say, that isn't enough to have a strong strategic vision that is needed to enable Plone to grow. I'm not sure why you think that Plone had this leadership in the past though? The roadmap was an opinion by a group, in a series of opinions by others such as Martin and Limi. The problem I am highlighting is the only opinion that actually made a difference was @optilude because he went and implemented code (and obviously Limi when he was contributing). As far as I can tell the roadmap didn't result in any changes in development or marketing. The foundation has some money but is deliberately designed to not have opinion about the direction of Plone so it is not there for leadership. The FWT accepts of rejects (and based on technical reasons mostly) but doesn't lead. I'm not trying to put an opinion here that we should change the structure of the Plone community or how it could be changed. I'm just trying to highlight like you have said, that without leadership we will likely die slowly, but I'm also saying that leadership without the ability to implement those ideas is not going to change anything.
The other challenge I'm highlighting is the previous roadmap reflected Plone as intranet and enterprise CMS (based I think partly on competition and partly on the kinds of projects influential people in the community often work on) and this has problems with regard to marketing with the current structure of the Plone community. It requires a kind of selling that non-vender open source communities aren't good at IMO. My opinion is this: The only way Plone can survive is to grow. The only way it can grow is be software we can recommend to our friends and those friends actually install and use it. I hang out with python developers and they like things like flask or Pelican because of the nature of who they are. They also use wordpress. Look at plenetplone. I won't do a count but the latest post of planetplone today is from http://blog.jazkarta.com and that is wordpress. Thats not uncommon.
Plone has lots of good stuff. It is on the whole easy to use... with diazo it's also reasonably easy to theme. If there were lots of ploud's around and more stuff like jazkata's AWS opsworks then it would be easier to install. If Plone came out of the box with default site layouts for different uses so it wasn't a blank sheet... (like the upcoming plone intranet initiative). If Plone was even easier to use and even easier to theme than wordpress, joomla or drupal... If we had ability to create applications entirely through the web like Plomino offers... Then enough of us can say to our non-technical friends, hey go to start.plone.org... and you can have a blog, intranet, form based app quicker than any other system out there... no download required... fully customisable... then I think we can grow the community.
That's my vision. And I know it flies in face of what most who work on Plone currently wants Plone to do. Most people who contribute to Plone use it for large complex sites and don't work for the http://webonobo.com of the world. That's the contradiction we have to solve. Do we build Plone for the people we have or the people we want?
but we did it!
and I also know that I'm on the hook for the edu vertical. Mea culpa etc.