Matt Hamilton

Who Am I?

I am the director of Netsight, a 13-person web development firm in the UK who specialise in Plone deployments, customisation and integration. I have been involved in Plone since 2003 and Zope since 2000. I served on the inaugural board of the Plone Foundation in 2004 and the past two years. Over the years I have been involved in various aspects of Plone, both as a developer and bug fixer (although I do more integration work now).

I have been very active in marketing Plone and trying to introduce Plone into areas where Open Source traditionally has had trouble getting to.

Things I have been involved in:

Currently running around like a headless chicken organising the Plone Conference 2010 in Bristol ;)

Attended all but the first Plone Conference, and spoken at almost all of them. Last year I was the chair of the Programme Committee and have been responsible for organising the talks and timetime for the Plone Conference 2009. I also coordinated the Open Spaces day.

I am active in promoting Plone through various social media channels, and I am a fairly loud voice on Twitter promoting Plone. I have also uploaded a number of presentations I've done to Slideshare, and of course my own blog.

Served on the Plone Foundation board in 2004, 2009 & 2010.

Why am I Interested?

I want to continue with the work I have been doing promoting Plone to audiences beyond the current developers and users. As someone who runs a company doing Plone integration for a wide variety of companies and organisations, I have direct experience with what made them choose Plone, why they like it and what we can do to improve it.

I want to get Plone mentioned in more reports by the big consulting companies, and in front of CMS analysts that usually are recommending big budget commercial CMSs for jobs that Plone could be best suited for.

Plone is technically superior to many systems out there in the same market, yet it needs a louder and more coherent public voice. Over the past few years, views towards Open Source have been changing in both public and private sector organisations at the highest levels and I am committed to continuing Plone's rapid growth into these sectors as they open up further.

What I can add to the Plone Foundation?

I can add the experience of someone who has been working with Plone since the beginning, who knows the history of the project and the people involved at the various levels getting things done.

I have a good overview of the various parts of Plone, but try not to get too deep in any one of them in order to maintain a good overall perspective of Plone from both the inside view and also the view from outside the project.

Having been involved in the successful introduction and deployment of Plone in a number of large organisations, I have experience of not just the technical issues, but also the business and cultural issues that organisations face when procuring a major CMS.

I have maintained a good track record of keeping my commitment to the Plone Foundation board over the past year, missing only a handful of board meetings... mainly due to travelling to/from Plone community engagements!

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