[Zope] FYI: Plans for Linux Expo

[Paul Everitt]

Howdy.  I've been holding off, hoping for a more formal statement of
what's going on.  Rather than wait any longer, I'll share some pieces of
news with you.

We are focusing on Linux Expo (May 18-22, www.linuxexpo.org) as a focus
point for us where a number of things are going to come together:

1) I'll be giving a speech on the business track about Open Source and
Venture Capital.  The talk is currently (read: tentatively) scheduled
for Saturday, May 22nd at 10:30.  Other business track speeches that day
are Sun, IBM, and Compaq, so they decided they needed me for a touch of
class :^)  I expect the topic of my talk will be quite interesting to a
reasonable portion of the audience.

2) We are working with a professional PR firm (read: expensive) to
coordinate a branding overhaul and PR push.  We are positioning Zope as
an application server focusing on community portals.  The
under-discussion brand of the company is "unleashing potential", which
is based on Open Source, community portal, safely delegating control,
and through-the-web everything.  The PR firm will cultivate opinion
makers in advance, schedule one-on-one interviews, and make appropriate
press releases.

3) We'll have a booth there.

4) We are coordinating some software efforts to coincide with the show.
For instance, beta1 of Zope2 will be ready by then, knock on wood.
Also, some efforts to fill out our portal story (such as Membership,
Catalog, etc.) will land.

5) I certainly expect the zope.org site and the digicool.com site to be
overhauled by then.

6) Apparently we're on the PowerTools CD for RedHat 6.0 which I imagine
will be launched during the show.

As part of the PR push we need some of you out there to ride the wave
with us and give us some case studies.  This is both crucial for Zope
and a great benefit to you!

That's a brief version of events.

--Paul

Paul Everitt       Digital Creations
paul@digicool.com  540.371.6909