Introducing J. Cameron Cooper

“I am pleased to introduce Consortium technology committee member, Cameron Cooper, independent consultant and Plone expert. Cameron knows Connexions software extremely well. He was Connexions System Architect for several years and we are extremely lucky to have his continued participation in the Connexions Consortium technical committee. His expertise was instrumental in the development of strategically important new Connexions features, including the collection composer, the print-on-demand system, and lenses, the post-publication, quality-review system critical in an open publishing repository. His combination of deep knowledge of Plone and Zope, and detailed knowledge of the ways in which Connexions adapts and extends them, makes Cameron a valuable long-term contributor to the Consortium and the Technology Committee. Below, Cameron discusses the big vision frontiers that he sees for Connexions and Rhaptos."
Kathi Fletcher -- Technology Director and Project Manager at Connexions

Hi, J. Cameron Cooper here (jccooper@jcameroncooper.com). I'm the former Systems Architect for Connexions, and still serve on the Connexions Consortium Technical Committee, where I hope my hard-earned knowledge will continue to be of use. I started with Connexions in 2003 to port the system from a plain Zope product to the current Plone architecture. I became System Architect in 2006 when Brent Hendricks, the previous (and excellent) technical lead left. Connexions has grown to a major web application with 10s of thousands of lines of code and over 2 million visitors per month. And I'm very proud to have been (and to continue to be, though less day-to-day) a part of that. I'm occasionally an independent web developer, writer, and trainer and I'm currently running my own company called BottleMark, making custom bottle caps—as well as doing all the web dev for the site.

While working at Connexions, I became a major Plone expert; my book came out in late 2004, and I spoke at Plone conferences in 2003, 2005, and 2006. And that's no accident: Connexions is an extremely ambitious use of Plone, and customizes essentially every subsystem.

As part of the technical committee, the priorities I see for Rhaptos and Connexions are:

1. ensure a scalable and maintainable codebase. Connexions has grown significantly both in usage and in complexity, and the system needs to be able to keep up.
2. transition to a distributed development model. Connexions has been developed by a core group, but now must operate more as an open source project. The committee is exploring various ways of funding development and working with external developers, and this is very important to growing the feature set and usefulness of the software.
3. distribute the content repository. Connexions remains a standalone system, but to support massive content and usage, I forsee a need for the system to live in multiple places.
   

I'm hoping to work for the committee on a pilot project to harness crowdfunding of development, where interested parties provide support through a website like Kickstarter. I am investigating small but useful projects that will take about one week of software development; perhaps "Enhanced Author Profiles". I am interested in other ideas that could be done in about a week—so let me know if you have one.