[TriZPUG] Chipin for Sea Sprint

[Chris Calloway]

Hey, I want to let you know about a sprint that's being organized by a 
couple of TriZPUGers: Andy Leeb and Ian Anderson. I'm helping them out a 
little because I believe in their idea.

It's called "Sea Sprint" and it takes place Sept 21-24 on Oak Island, 
NC. Andy and Ian have completely underwritten the housing for all the 
sprinters. Yeah, I know, very nice of them. They are pretty much princes.

The purpose of Sea Sprint is to put some crazy sophisticated technology 
called "Deco" into upcoming Plone releases. Deco brings TTW drag and 
drop layout of content "tiles" to Plone sites. Deco has been more than 
three years in the making. It's ridiculously awesome, a truly killer app 
in the classic sense. This sprint is the last step in getting Deco 
pipelined into Plone releases and thereby into the one-click installers.

Because this sprint is highly technical, it's an invitational sprint. 
And because it's on the white sand beaches of North Carolina, it's drawn 
the top shelf of Plone talent from all over the world. That was the 
strategy: if the sprint is on a nice beach, the top dogs will come. It 
worked like a whistle.

Because so many of the right invitees to the sprint accepted and because 
the sprint is about getting this killer app into Plone production, the 
Plone Foundation has designated Sea Sprint as a "strategic" sprint. That 
means the foundation endorses the sprint, acts as the sprint's financial 
agent, and has funded the travel for one of the sprint's technical 
leaders from Slovenia. Yeah, I know, very nice of them, too.

Despite a huge financial investment from a number of sponsors (including 
TriZPUG, because I kicked in the last of the PyCamp funds for this 
year), there's still a short ways to go in making the sprint pay for 
itself. The Plone Foundation has set up a Chipin page to accept 
donations to the sprint:

http://seasprint2012.chipin.com

All donations go directly to the Plone Foundation. The Plone Foundation 
is a not-for-profit corporation recognized as a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) 
charitable organization. As such, your donation is tax-deductible to the 
extent allowed by law.

I'm just leaving this here because some of you previously have been 
generous when we've had donations pages for sprints. I thank you for any 
assistance rendered now or in the past.

This is all I'm going to post about this sprint to this list. You can 
keep up with the sprint progress by following blog posts on 
http://planet.plone.org and http://planet.trizpug.org. Andy, Ian, and I 
will be giving a sprint report-out at the 10th Plone Conference in 
Arnhem, The Netherlands, October 8-14. I imagine that will pop-up on 
blip.tv and slideshare at some point after the conference.

-- 
Sincerely,

Chris Calloway http://nccoos.org/Members/cbc
office: 3313 Venable Hall   phone: (919) 599-3530
mail: Campus Box #3300, UNC-CH, Chapel Hill, NC 27599