Introducing Roché Compaan

“I am pleased to introduce technology committee member, Roché Compaan of Upfront Systems. Roché's expertise in software development and Plone and Zope technologies has been invaluable, and Upfront Systems has rapidly become expert in Connexions/Rhaptos development. Over the past year and a half, Upfront built several new lens features used by Siyavula, a proxy-cache to speed up access in South Africa, the new Connexions rating system, and the new Express Edit feature that helps authors quickly check out content for editing and helps readers derive a copy to adapt. Roché's performance expertise and advice led to a configuration change that halved the time authoring tasks consume. We are very lucky to have his involvement in the Consortium and Technology Committee."
Kathi Fletcher -- Technology Director and Project Manager at Connexions

In 1998 I co-founded a software development company called Upfront Systems located in Stellenbosch, South Africa. Very early on I felt myself drawn to the open source movement and thought that this was a very healthy an productive protest against the establishment. I didn't think it was crazy to build a business on open source principles, but my partners did and since 2000 I have been the sole owner of the company.

Around 2001, a colleague of mine encouraged me to look at Zope. It was a web framework that was years ahead of its time. It was a significant departure from the then common cgi style web apps and it boasted an object database, a multi-threaded web server and publisher that could traverse and publish objects. I have been involved with Zope and the community around it ever since, and saw Plone grow up to become one of the major content management systems in the world. Upfront Systems was the first Zope solution provider in South Africa and we contributed a Zope and Plone training course to the community early on. We used this same course to train developers at Computer Associates in New York when they had a brief flirt with Plone in 2004.

About 3 years ago I met Mark Horner, the Open and Collaborative Resources Fellow in the Shuttleworth Foundation. As part of his Siyavula project, Mark was looking for a platform to use for the publication of a whole curriculum of workbooks bought from a private school in South Africa. Connexions caught his eye, mainly because it did a darn good job at producing printed books by using Latex for typesetting. Mark is a Latex junky. So when Latex junky and Plone pundit met, no other framework stood a chance. Admittedly the patience and charm of the Connexions team had a lot to do with the choice to go with Connexions as a platform. Over the past few years we've undertaken numerous 20 hour trips to Houston to scope and plan the development of extensions to Connexions. The extensions helped us present content in a way that is a familiar to South African teachers, while ensuring that the features that we develop are generally useful to other Connexions users.

We were the first external development team that worked on features that would be released on cnx.org itself. It shouldn't come as a surprise that this wasn't smooth sailing in the beginning. But I believe this is exactly what Connexions needed - a remote development team that can help surface development practices and knowledge that were mostly held by members of the Connexions team and not visible to the outside world.

As a committee member I would like to focus on growing the Rhaptos developer community. As a long time member of the Plone community I will naturally look there to recruit developers. At the upcoming Plone Conference in Bristol I will lead a sprint where we will start the migration of Rhaptos to Plone 4.0. Rhaptos is still running on Plone 2.5 and moving it forward to the lastest Plone version would make developing for it significantly more attractive for existing Plone developers.

Looking forward to see you all at the Plone Conference in Bristol!