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.

Initially, a bit of background - about 2.5 years ago, myself and another Plone consultancy took the initiative to begin translating Plone into Maori, Samoan, and some other Pacific Island languages. Unfortunately we were denied funding for translating Plone into Maori (apparently Microsoft New Zealand had already created a bilingual CMS for the Maori Language Commission on the then pre-release MS CMS 2002) and as none of us were native Maori or Pacific Island language speakers and therefore not able to translate Plone ourselves the project stalled.
Recently, though, I've made a decision to start translating Plone 3.x into Samoan myself. It's a little slow going as I am not a native Samoan speaker (though I have Samoan heritage :)), but I am making good use of a Samoan dictionary and some online resources. I thought particularly with the end of year approaching and the inevitable slow down in work that happens over the holiday period I would ask the community if they would pledge any money towards my translation efforts over the holiday period (and therefore also contribute to my continuing to eat over the holiday break :)), so we can have another 'shiny translation' in Plone!
If you'd like to pledge any funds towards my translation efforts, click on this chipin for a Samoan Plone link. Thanks!

I had the honour of giving the first Plone speech at the Academia Sinica in Taipei, Taiwan recently. TsungWei Hu, who arranged for me to give the speech, manages the Open Source Software Foundry (OSSF) project, whose key objectives are to promote Open Source Software in Taiwan. TsungWei mentioned that he had been meaning to ask Paul Everitt to give a speech regarding Plone at the Academia Sinica (Paul - hint, hint) but hadn't, so I got in first ;-)

This speech was the last in a series of Plone presentations I have been giving. The first of which was in Tokyo, Japan, and the next was for the Taipei Open Source Software User Group (TOSSUG). At the TOSSUG meetup I was able to meet Sean Moss-Pultz and Harald Welte of the OpenMoko project. Sean is the General/Technical Manager for the OpenMoko project, while Harald is the Lead System Level Architect. As I'm an Open Source fan and enjoy hacking my own computer, I'm really excited about what Sean, Harald and the rest of the OpenMoko Core Team are doing as mobile phones in general are pretty much closed devices nowadays.