Plone Symposium Midwest Coming to UW Oshkosh June 2-9, 2013
Plone's North American educational event is moving to a new venue for 2013.
For
the last half-decade, the educationally-themed Plone Symposium East has
brought Plone developers, users and leaders to State College PA for a
week of training, presentations and sprints.
But
after five years as host to the event, Penn State University's WebLion
group is passing the baton to the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh.
Next year's event will feature a new name - Plone Symposium Midwest -
and a new address - Oshkosh, Wisconsin.
Plone
has been in use at UW Oshkosh since 2004, when it was used to build a
grant website for "non-techie content people." Since then, it became
the basis of a grass-roots project to replace Adobe Contribute and
Dreamweaver with a real CMS - starting with an intranet for the College
of Business. In 2008, UW Oshkosh went live with a complete new
official skin for the campus' new homepage which was built in 6 weeks,
followed by 4 college sites over the next year. By 2009, the
university had 30-40 websites being driven by Plone - and has become
known as rising star among Plone users in education.
T.
Kim Nguyen, who currently directs the UW Oshkosh Intranet project and
helped move the event to its new digs, is excited about the Symposium
coming to Oshkosh. Nguyen, who first met the WebLion group in 2008
after being introduced to them by Joel Burton knows his team has big
shoes to fill in taking on the Symposium. "I've always been amazed at
how gracious and helpful the people at WebLion have been to people
wanting to get involved with Plone."
After
meeting WebLion's Mike Halm and Christian Vinten Johansen at the
annual Plone conference in Washington, DC in 2008 - and hearing about
the budding PloneEdu initiative in 2009, Nguyen decided he had to be
part of it. He's been involved in it ever since, becoming co-chair
with Mike Halm in 2011.
Details of
the Symposium next June are still being developed at this time, but
from what has been discussed, the event will be taking advantage of a
brand new, state of the art $40 million academic building at UW Oshkosh
which will provide a new level of lecture halls, classrooms and meeting
spaces for the event. Nguyen is currently arranging for outstanding
housing options for event attendees.
For
those for whom Oshkosh, Wisconsin isn't a household name - this city
has hosted the annual Experimental Aircraft Association’s AirVenture
Fly-In for the last 42 years - an event which attracts nearly half a
million aviation fans and attendees. It is a city that takes visitors
AND travelers very seriously.
Congratulations
to UW Oshkosh for their stewardship of this fine Plone event. We look
forward to seeing you next year in Wisconsin.
