It's been an interesting time since my last roundup. Here are the highlights of my progress with Topia Systems.

Interleaved with some client work in early November, I ran the Workshop on Multilingual Content Management requirements, from which this week I completed a Use-Case analysis, called the Halliwell Document. This is a basis for developing a fully-fledged solution to the multilingual content management needs of organizations. The document is now published under a Creative Commons license, for public use. If you are interested in multilingual content management, please look at the Use-Case Narratives in that document, to see how the system will work.

Immediately after the Workshop I drove down to the University of Bozen/Bolzano in South Tyrol for a Sprint on migration of content to and from Plone. There were some concrete results which I may write about in more detail at a later date. The Sprint was co-located with a the South Tyrol Free Software Conference, and a Free Software Foundation meeting. Organizer of the Sprint team, Jens Klein, introduced our project and the members of the team in an STFSCon talk. From the questions we asked the audience, it was clear that many of the highly technical audience were not familiar with the very effective Sprint concept that the Plone/Zope community has championed and put to such great use. On the other hand, it was interesting to see how much more advanced the Free Software Movement is in mainland Europe than in UK.

It would not have made sense to return to UK for just a few days before my next appointment in Belgium, so I stayed with friends during my travels North, before giving an initial report on the workshop at the Plone.be meeting in Brussels. This talk resulted in several interesting contacts, and a lot of interest in "Welsh Haiku".  For more on that, you'll need to see the slides.

I took a business/family trip in December, and returned to Europe in time for the Snow Sprint in Austria where I worked on some features for Plone multimedia, and met old and new friends from the Plone community.

All these meetings and talks gave way after the Sprint to two weeks of intense training/mentoring with a client north of London, an internal Zope3 project.

My focus now switches to creating a regular series of training and development workshops on Plone technologies, and advancing the multilingual project. 

Next steps

Now that the Halliwell Document is released, I'll be canvassing organizations that took part in the workshop, and others, suggesting ways we can make progress on the project. The project is a natural fit for Open Source approach, where organizations collaborate and are free to use the results. One way to get moving on this is through a Sprint where organizations get together for perhaps a week to develop part of the solution. This is a great opportunity for people to learn new technologies and be involved in a larger software development community. More details on that will follow.

If you are part of an organization using Plone/Zope or you have an interest in any topics you see here, please get in touch.

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Thanks for your interest,

-r

Russ Ferriday
russf@topia.com