Report of the International Zope Documentation Summit

Report of the International Zope Documentation Summit 2000

The International Zope Documentation Summit 2000 in Stuttgart, Germany, was a great success! After many hours spent with grueling discussions of the various aspects of Zope Documentation, all parties finally managed to reach an important agreement:

The Zope Documentation needs to be improved.

All Zope documenters are now fully focused on reaching this one target. The delegates would like to thank the Jolt Cola company, the Penguin Caffeinated Peppermint company and that great Mexican restaurant for their valuable assistance.

A small tension arose when the Swiss delegation found that the rest of the world would not agree upon the fact that Zope was just a simple CGI script. They argued that this means we obviously don't live in the same world as they do, so we wouldn't have anything to say to each other. We reached the compromise to postpone this discussion until the next summit to be held in Geneva, where we will talk things over again in their world.

At LinuxTag, which happened to be a small sideshow held around our summit, we found that we were surrounded by the competition. On one side, SourceForge. No problem, cool, you'd say. The Python source is on SourceForge, after all. But then we notice the Evil Conspiracy: on our other side is the PHP booth! Which site uses a lot of PHP? SourceForge! We prepared ourselves with cool Zope posters, but it turned out that they were not enough to defend ourselves from such heathens!

Early on thursday the battle reached a stalemate situation. We managed to keep hostilities on the show floor moderate afterwards, and the casuality count was limited during the rest of the show. We consider this a great success. It must be mentioned that this was only possible by signing a pact with the numerically superior BSD camp early on, which agreed to leave us alone if we accepted to run FreeBSD on our machine.

We are still trying to find out which treasonous organisation was responsible for the extreme heat on the show floor.

Back to the summit, another important agreement was to continue to absolutely deny any connection between us and the Open Source Liberation Army. While disagreeing with us may cause the wrath of this organisation to descend on you, we have nothing whatsoever to do with it. We also deny holding any secret Zope Terrorism BOF on sunday.

Furthermore, the presence of Richard Stallman at LinuxTag was a pure coincidence. However hard to believe, his singing was entirely for entertainment purposes. We also did not exchange any coded messages with Rasterman. Again, we cannot be held responsible for anyone blowing you up if you disagree with us.

We agreed that it was necessary to hold another Zope Summit soon, lest Zope be completely rudderless without our benign and enlightened guidance. Since we have no connection whatsoever with the Open Source Liberation Army, we're sure you'll agree with us without protest.