An overview of the current state of PloneSocial, and a roadmap for further development. Presented at Plone Open Garden 2013, Sorrento.

1. Plone Open Garden 2013
PloneSocial Roadmap
Guido Stevens
gyst #plone
@GuidoStevens Twitter

2. PloneSocial Roadmap
● Why
– Social Business
● What
– Demo
● How
– Performance
– Philosophy
● Now
– Digital Workplace Vision
– Social Intranet Baseline

3. Social Business
Systems of Record → Systems of Engagement
● documents → ● people
● procedures → ● knowledge flow
● top-down hierarchy → ● grassroots networking
“We estimate that social technologies can raise the
productivity of interaction workers by 20 to 25% if they
become fully networked enterprises”
McKinsey Global Institute

4. PloneSocial Features
● Microblog status updates
● Activity stream view + portlet
– microblog status updates
– content creation
– plone.app.discussion comments
● Social networking
– personal profile with follow/unfollow actions
– followers/following social graph views
– activity stream filtered by “following”

5. Demo

6. plonesocial.*
● plonesocial.suite
– one-click installer
– integrates low-level building blocks:
● plonesocial.microblog
● plonesocial.activitystream
● plonesocial.network
planned:
– plonesocial.content: follow / tagging
– plonesocial.space: community / teamspace

7. ZODB Performance
● Commit collisions
– out of the box: 10-20 commits/sec
● Drop some ACID
– batched commits once per second
● simple threading.Timer() without plone.app.async
– skip ZCatalog indexing
● provide own indexes on time, author and tags
● Writes > 1000 status updates /second
● read performance scales horizontally, not an issue

8. Leverage Upstream Performance
● ZODB BTrees
– C optimized dictionary interface
● *BTree.intersection()
– fast Set operations
– filter by: tag, author, following
– killer feature for personalization
● itertools.chain()
– merge microblog + ZCatalog results

9. PloneSocial Philosophy
● Native Plone
● Full social experience
● Pre-integrated one-click install
● Flexible components
● Scale down
● Scale up

10. Why not jarncollective.xmpp.*?
● Protocol constraints
– XMPP is a chat protocol, not a social networking API
– no raw datastore access, no logic customization
● Plone → XMPP → Erlang logic → Mnesia datastore
● Loads of dependencies
– Twisted Wokkel, not very actively maintained
– Requires dozens of XMPP protocol extensions
● only supported by ejabberd
– Complex deployments & debugging
● Maintenance / community risks
– Too many moving parts
– Too few experts

11. Digital Workplace Vision
SLATES Enterprise 2.0 Affordances
● Signals
● Links
● Authoring
● Tags
● Extensions
● SearchS

19. Evolve or Die
Web 1.0 → Web 2.0 → Web 3.0
● publish + read ● read/write ● big data
● content management ● social networking ● semantic web
● document tree ● activity stream ● digital workplace
● place-centric ● time-centric ● meaning-centric
● global state ● personal perspectives ● context adaptive
● top-down control ● bottom-up sharing ● machine learning
Plone Core Plone Social __future__

20. PloneSocial Priorities
● Social Spaces ● User Interface
– Project Spaces – “Wow!” User Experience
– Community Spaces – Consistent Integration
– Local microblogs
● Social Content ● Developer Interface
– Tagging – Activitystream Adapters
– Follow Content – Sane Base Theme
– Like, Share, Save

21. Social Intranet/Extranet Baseline
● Benefits: ● Features:
– Consolidate Efforts – Personal Social Dashboard
– Fast Demo – Streams, Microblog
– Easy Customization – Network, Profiles
– Projects, Communities
● Minimize Dependencies:
– Avoid Archetypes
– Avoid XMPP, AMQP
– Avoid external DB's

22. Not Invented Here

23. Not Invented Here

24. Re-invented Here

25. Let's Collaborate!
● Collaborate on Social Intranet/Extranet Baseline
– Solid pre-integrated feature set
– Good UX, customize via p.a.theming
● Compete as Plone eco-system against other systems
– Reduce demo & devel costs
– Reduce QA & maintenance risks
– Increase Plone credibility & visibility in social business space
● Maintain other differentiators
– Geography, Delivery Process, Hosting, Support

26. Use the source, Luke ...
● Installation
– pypi: plonesocial.suite
● Customization
– It's all just Plone
● Extension
– https://github.com/cosent
● you'll find all the plonesocial.* packages there
● GPL licensed

27. … or work with us!
● User Research
– to drive design of a cohesive social experience
● Interaction Design
– to drive development of an integrated feature set
● PloneSocial Development
– to leverage PloneSocial in custom development
– and at the same time improve PloneSocial baseline
www.cosent.nl