On the return drive from his visit to Bonn to give a talk on professional processes for multilingual content management in Plone, Russ Ferriday visited a meeting of the CommunesPlone community, on September 21st, 2006.

Quoting from the CommunesPlone website:
Around twelve Belgian communities (French and Flemish speaking) participate in the CommunesPlone project. In doing so, they aim to gain independence from IT services providers by developing, essentially by themselves and in a cooperative manner, applications and websites for their own use as well as for their citizens. CommunesPlone's strategy mainly rests on two renowned multiplatform Open Source tools: Zope and Plone.

The meeting was informal and collaborative. It was clear that the members were engaged, and both gave to and received from the group. One of the biggest benefits from such Open Source collaboration is independence from specific software providers, and the ability to achieve integration with existing systems that would not be possible using the shrink-wrapped software model.

Russ spent some time helping Olivier Snickers of Seneffe with some technical issues on new city site for Seneffe that will also be used as a starting point for other cities.

Best wishes from Topia Systems Ltd. to Olivier and the CommunesPlone team.