[Zope] OpenSector.org announcement & a question

[Nick Arnett]

Relative to the announcement below, we're looking for an inexpensive (or
free) place to host a backup copy of OpenSector.org's Zope-based site.  The
way we're currently operating is with the server at a home office with DSL,
front-ended by Squid (acting as an HTTP accelerator) on a virtual server at
Verio.  That's working nicely -- Squid rarely has to hit the Zope server.
However, if the DSL goes down, we're off the air.  Thus, I'm thinking we
should put a ZEO server on the same host and have clients hosted elsewhere,
such as home offices, until it outgrows that scenario. That should give us a
lot of headroom.  Verio's virtual servers are contractually limited by the
number of processes, and Squid is just one process!

FYI, we built the site in Squishdot, then dropped it into Plone, mainly for
its user registration, etc.  We've been re-writing Squishdot to eliminate an
awful lot of redundancy in the forms and code.  From the start of coding to
launching the site was only about three weeks, which says a lot for Zope, I
think.

We'd welcome your advice and experience.  While we're no strangers to
scalable web sites, we're relatively new to Zope.  And if it isn't already
obvious, the budget for this is tight, since it's not a revenue-producing
activity.

We're also looking for contributors -- news and discussion items, as well as
people to review and edit.  We're building some back-end tools to help our
editors find and use items from a variety of RSS feeds and canned search
engine queries.

The announcement follows...

--

Senti-Metrics Launches OpenSector.org

Supported by Open Software Applications Foundation

SANTA CLARA, CA – July 10, 2003 – Senti-Metrics, with support from the Open
Source Applications Foundation (OSAF), today launched OpenSector.org
(http://www.opensector.org), a news and discussion site about public sector
open source software initiatives.

"There is a tremendous amount of interest in open source in government and
education around the world," said Mitch Kapor, founder and Chair of the
OSAF, a non-profit organization working to create and gain wide adoption for
software applications of uncompromising quality using open-source methods.
"Until now, there have been few resources to help public sector
decision-makers stay current on government initiatives related to Linux and
other open source software. We are pleased to have been able to make a small
contribution to the launch of OpenSector.org, which promises to be a
powerful and useful site for anyone interested in what's going on with open
source in the public sector."

Kapor announced OpenSector.org at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention in
Portland, Oregon.

OSAF is funding Bart Decrem, author of Desktop Linux Technology Market
Overview, published by OSAF, to help develop and manage OpenSector.org site
content. Decrem was a co-founder of Eazel, Inc. and helped create the GNOME
Foundation.

OpenSector.org is a global news and meeting place where public sector
decision and policy makers – primarily in government and education – can
meet with each other and with open source software developers, projects,
products, companies and ideas. It features news and features contributed by
readers, organized by region, with weblog-style discussion of each item.

"The main goal of OpenSector.org is to improve communication in the global
software community," said Nick Arnett, Senti-Metrics' founder and senior
partner. "Senti-Metrics helps large technology companies communicate more
effectively with developers, so OpenSector.org is a perfect fit. We use open
source software ourselves – we rely heavily on Linux, MySQL, Python and
other open source tools. OpenSector.org lets us give back to the open source
software community."

Senti-Metrics partner David Land and Arnett built and operate the
OpenSector.org site with GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, Zope, Python, Squid and other
open source products and tools. Land is the former publisher of the
java.sun.com developer site at Sun Microsystems.

About Senti-Metrics

Senti-Metrics developed the Senti-Meter process, based on custom information
retrieval and analysis tools that it uses to help its clients communicate
more effectively with on-line constituencies.  The company's techniques
include sophisticated analysis of discussion traffic, social networks and
linguistics, which it combines with expert human interpretation to organize,
summarize and make sense of on-line buzz, creating custom reports and
services for its clients.

About the Open Source Applications Foundation

The Open Source Applications Foundation, a 501(c)3 non-profit foundation,
has a mission to create and gain wide adoption of Open Source application
software of uncompromising quality.

CONTACT:
Senti-Metrics
Nick Arnett
+1 408-904-7198
narnett@senti-metrics.com