On November 7th, 2008 we will stage the first worldwide event to market Plone to the masses. The event's objective (according to the official event page) is to introduce Plone, via introductory talks, to business, government, NGOs, and universities. The community of developers and consultancies surrounding Plone is second to none and this has been shown once again with the number of countries rallying together to organise events for World Plone Day - 30 events in 22 countries on 5 continents (and counting).
Here in New Zealand where World Plone Day will see the first light of day, we have 3 events happening nationwide in Auckland, Wellington, and Christchurch. The number of government Plone sites in New Zealand is huge so I've accepted an invitation to give an introductory Plone talk in Wellington (our capital) - thanks to Nate Aune for the talk material!
Other activities on the day will include: prize giveaways, refreshments, examples of how Plone is being used in the 'real world', and opportunities to chat to Plone experts.
A big thanks to all our sponsors, to Meghan Murphy for the awesome World Plone Day logo, to all those who've volunteered their time thus far in organising the events worldwide (and on the day!), and to the great Plone community who foster an environment where all this is possible!
Lets make sure World Plone Day is a roaring success and please share the success of your event with the rest of us by tagging any blog posts, photos, videos, or anything else from the day with 'worldploneday2008'.

On Tuesday, July 1st, 5:30pm at 3months' offices in Wellington, New Zealand we had a meeting with many representatives from New Zealand Government to introduce the PloneGov project to them. Joel Burton also made a guest appearance (thanks Joel :)) and did an excellent job of introducing Plone 3's features from both the perspective of a user and/or developer. Until then I'd only heard about Joel's excellent teaching skills but now I can personally say he's a very engaging and interesting speaker!
We had about 15 attend from the Ministry of Women's Affairs, Ministry of Justice, the Office of the Auditor General, the Treasury department, the State Services Commission, the National Library, the Electricity Commission and some from the commercial sector. We've had good feedback from many who attended and have already begun organising a followup event in the form of NZ's first Kiwi Bootcamp and Sprint for around February 2009! Anyone is welcome!
Video's of both mine and Joel's presentations are available from plone.tv.

We had 13 come along (including myself) from varied backgrounds: a human interface technology student, some web developers, an embedded hardware developer, an electrical engineer and various other python developers (I'm sure I've missed someone out here).

I started off proceedings with my Introduction to Repoze presentation. Following this Marek Kuziel presented his Password and Registration-free Authentication for Django presentation. The videos and slides are now available online.

Congratulations to Charles Han for winning the door prize. Can't wait till June's NZPUG meetup!

We've been back from Taiwan about 4 months now, and the trip was well worth it. I met some fellow FOSSers, bought a geek toy, and did some Plone promoting. On that note, I finally got around to posting a video of the presentation I gave at the TOSSUG meetup on plone.tv.
Interestingly, Taiwan has had a Python User Group (PUG) around for quite some time and this has been the rallying point for Python developers in Taiwan. They don't currently have enough Zope/Plone developers to start a user group specifically targeted at this developer segment but one idea we discussed was to promote Zope/Plone by way of the PUG.
Here in New Zealand, as far as I'm aware, the first official Python-related user group to start up was NZZUG. In recent times, Danny Adair has started up the New Zealand Python User Group (NZPUG) and they have already had their first meetup. This is great to see and I hope to be able to give a presentation at one of their upcoming meetups.