mtearle: For all the buzz around Reefknot, I don't really get it. People know what we're doing, and we're getting more interested developers by the week, but I don't feel like we're really doing anything earth-shattering. We're just putting one foot in front of the other. Maybe, given the sheer mass of the calendaring RFCs and proposed standards, that's a significant enough effort.

For those of you in or around Boston, Skud and I are giving a talk about Reefknot at the Boston.pm meeting on May 1 (Tuesday). See the link above for time, directions, and RSVP info, and mail me if you think you're interested in coming.

Reefknot got mentioned on the ietf-calendar list today for the introductory developer documentation that Skud wrote. We're also getting some more formal process developed for approving major changes; at Rich's suggestion, we're trying out the Apache patch approval system, which relies on the votes of people with CVS privileges. Today, I wrote up a patch to fix the current CVS brokenness, just to test out the new system. We'll see.

Work

I'm pondering writing up a document/proposal for an open source content management system that Doesn't Suck, because my management seems to be entranced with products like Vignette StoryServer. I think we can do just as well as a community, if not better. After all, the companies that buy Vignette or its ilk all customize it beyond recognition, paying integrators $thousands on top of their license fees. Why not eliminate license fees from the equation and make something that everyone can become familiar with easily? Schuyler Derle (of O'Reilly) and I keep talking about the fact that this thing needs to exist. Maybe I'll sketch out some designs or something. Not that I have time to implement it or anything.

I've looked at Zope, but it doesn't provide things like workflow out of the box, and I'm reluctant to introduce a Python gadget with Zope's learning curve into our Perl environment. On the other hand, it has some nifty features. I'm just not sure how well it'd handle the data flow that my company has (we republish an entire big city newspaper online, every day).