Plone Conf 2010: Not Just for Coders
Plone Companies: Get your design, UI, documentation and project management people to the conference.
Multi Media
Talk submissions are now open for Plone Conference 2010, and your Plone company may be starting to encourage folks to submit talk proposals.
Please, think beyond just coders! We'll have a more interesting, and more valuable, conference if we bring together all the kinds of skills and interests that make up the Plone project. So, please, encourage your user-interface, design, theming, user-documentation, and project-management folks to put in talk proposals and to attend the conference.
Some talks I'd love to see:
New Horizons in Accessibility. OK, Plone's accessibility isn't bad. What can we do to make it better? Not just in the accessibility-checklist sense that so many are fixated on, but in the opening new possibilities sense.
Instrumenting Usability. Usability testing is great, but are there good ways to instrument our sites to find UI failure points? Do we have any case studies on bringing that sort of data to bear on design?
Customized Documentation. Has anyone got good mechanisms that their team uses to customize documentation for end users with customized sites?
Managing multi-national, multi-cultural projects. Plone has got some good i18n tools, but that's probably the tiniest consideration in making a project with diverse participants successful.
Constituent-relationship case studies. There are lots of Plone sites in use by advocacy organizations that organize constituent campaigns. How do they use existing Plone tools to make that work. What more is needed?
Delivering content to low-tech communities. We're adding on slick AJAX UI with every release. Is that posing a problem for getting information to folks with old browers and slow connections?
That's just my list. The point is that agile organizations bring directly together coders with the people who have domain knowledge. Realistically, we're not going to have lots of end-users at a tech conference. But we can get together a larger portion of our own tech community if we think beyond the set of those who write Python in preference to their birth tongue.
