Plone Conference

Plone Conference Plone Conference 2026: September 21 - September 26, Maastricht, Netherlands

What if a conference didn’t end with a Q&A, but with your problem on the table?For the Business Track at Plone Conferenc...
19/09/2026

What if a conference didn’t end with a Q&A, but with your problem on the table?

For the Business Track at Plone Conference 2026, we’ve built something different.

We start with one question:

What does digital sovereignty look like in the systems an organisation actually runs?

Then, over one day, seven senior practitioners approach that question from different angles:

→ long-term technology partnerships
→ AI as a capacity multiplier
→ software reuse across public administrations
→ sovereign AI in regulated environments
→ where not to use AI
→ open governance as a procurement criterion
→ build vs. buy in production

These aren’t eight independent conference talks. They’re deliberately arranged as one storyline, building on each other.

And then we turn the format around.

For the final hour, all speakers come back on stage and the floor opens to the audience.

Bring the situation you’re actually dealing with.

A platform you’re becoming too dependent on.
An AI initiative you’re unsure how to govern.
A build-or-buy decision.
A procurement problem.
A sovereignty requirement that sounds good on paper but gets complicated in production.

Put it to the people on stage.

The goal isn’t to leave with more slides.

It’s to leave with a clearer assessment of what you should do next.

Plone Conference 2026 — Business Track
📍 Maastricht
📅 Friday, 25 September
🎟 €180
No prior Plone knowledge required.

https://2026.ploneconf.org/business-track

iMio is a public IT cooperative. It serves 460 municipalities in Wallonia and runs about a dozen platforms for them, fro...
19/09/2026

iMio is a public IT cooperative. It serves 460 municipalities in Wallonia and runs about a dozen platforms for them, from permit management to council deliberation.

It also runs generative AI tools in production, for civil servants and for citizens.

Which meant somebody there had to turn digital sovereignty from a phrase into decisions that can be audited.

Joël Lambillotte closes the practitioner run at the Business Track on 25 September with how that went. Which regulations actually bind a municipal IT cooperative, once you strip out the ones that merely sound relevant. GDPR. The AI Act's obligations for public-sector deployers. Public procurement law. Then what each of those did to a real decision about where a model runs, what data leaves iMio's control, and under whose jurisdiction it lands when it does.

Two systems carry the case: Omnia Chat and Omnia Lex. The trade-offs are on the table rather than in a summary. Where lock-in risk was weighed against delivery speed. Where iMio built instead of buying, and why. What sovereignty cost in time and complexity, and the places it turned out to cost nothing.

He is the only speaker on the programme who is a buyer rather than a supplier. For a room of public-sector decision makers, that is the most useful seat in the house.

The talk ends with a working checklist for people making the same calls under the same regulatory pressure.

Next: the closing hour, when the questions stop coming from the stage.

https://2026.ploneconf.org/business-track

You can read any vendor's roadmap. You cannot audit one.For an institution committing to a platform for the next decade,...
18/09/2026

You can read any vendor's roadmap. You cannot audit one.

For an institution committing to a platform for the next decade, that difference is a procurement question, and almost nobody asks it.

A roadmap is a statement of intent by a company that can change its mind, get acquired, or decide your segment is no longer core. What a long-horizon buyer needs to know is something else. Who decides what this platform becomes. Where that decision gets made. And whether anyone outside the company can watch it happen.

Timo Stollenwerk takes the Business Track slot on 25 September on what reading a platform's public governance gets you that reading a vendor's roadmap does not. Plone is the worked example, because the process is visible end to end. Provider firms invest in the modernisation work and publish what they build. Contributors release-manage in the open. New directions get offered to the community for ratification rather than announced as decisions already taken.

The live instance is AI. There is a proposal for an MCP server, filed as PLIP 4213, with the repository moved to plone/plone-mcp so the work sits where the community can pick it up or leave it. That is what "offered for ratification" looks like while it is happening, rather than in a press release afterwards.

He is also direct about what does not ship in core, which is the part a vendor roadmap never contains.

Twenty-five years of that process is the actual claim here. Not the feature list it produced.

Next in the series: the regulations that bind a public body in practice, and what following them cost.

https://2026.ploneconf.org/business-track

In 2013 Quaive wrote down a vision for software that reads what a user is doing and acts before they ask for it.Thirteen...
18/09/2026

In 2013 Quaive wrote down a vision for software that reads what a user is doing and acts before they ask for it.

Thirteen years later that capability is cheap, available, and already inside half the products on the market.

Quaive still has not built it.

Guido Stevens is the product owner, and at the Business Track on 25 September he explains why the pace was a decision rather than an oversight. He is doing it at a conference full of people who sell software, in a slot that argues against shipping the thing he could sell.

His position is that most institutions are still asking the wrong question. Whether to use AI stopped being interesting. What replaces it is four questions with harder answers. What comes into the platform. On whose terms. With what off switch. And what stays out on principle, permanently, because the cost of having it is not worth paying.

Two responses he thinks are both wrong: demanding total independence from the technology market, which nobody has, and treating dependence on it as something that simply happened to you.

The useful part for a room of decision makers is that this is testable. A product has held the line for thirteen years and is still shipping. You can put the same four questions to your own platforms this month, and to the vendors who maintain them, and see what comes back.

He is not there to tell you AI is a strategy.

Next in the series: if you can choose the pace, you need to be able to read where your platform is going.

https://2026.ploneconf.org/business-track

A German university put an AI chatbot in front of students asking for course advice. The model runs on the university's ...
17/09/2026

A German university put an AI chatbot in front of students asking for course advice. The model runs on the university's own hardware.

That is the part worth stopping on.

Interaktiv built it with the Computing Centre at the University of Bonn. Open-weight language models, deployed on premise. Retrieval against curated institutional sources instead of the open web. Paragraph-level citation, so a student can see where an answer came from. And predefined fallbacks that hand the conversation to a human advisor when it leaves the map.

The finding Jörg Zell brings to the Business Track on 25 September is the one most institutions are not expecting. The constraints made it better. On-premise deployment and curated grounding produced advice that was more reliable and better matched to what the institution actually tells students.

Most organisations treat sovereignty as the cost side of an AI decision, the tax you pay for keeping control. Bonn's experience says that accounting is wrong.

Four things decided whether the project shipped at all: data readiness, holding the topical boundary, the architecture of the retrieval pipeline, and handling people who try to break it. Zell covers what each one cost here, which is the number an institution needs before it can budget for its own.

There is a German public university running this today, with evaluation findings you can point your own procurement people at.

Next in the series: a product owner who saw this coming in 2013 and still has not shipped it.

https://2026.ploneconf.org/business-track

An Italian health authority needs a new portal. Four other health authorities have already built one.In much of Europe i...
17/09/2026

An Italian health authority needs a new portal. Four other health authorities have already built one.

In much of Europe it would start from a blank page anyway.

Italian regional governments, municipalities and local health authorities increasingly run on shared, publicly maintained Plone-based solutions aligned with the national AgID design system. An administration adopting one starts from what other public bodies have already tested in production. When it needs something specific, that work goes back into the shared solution, and the next administration inherits it.

Stefano Marchetti of RedTurtle has spent two decades building these deployments across Italian public administration. At the Business Track on 25 September he takes the slot on reuse as a sovereignty practice.

The argument is less about software than about who holds the knowledge. A body that installs a publicly maintained solution can read it, change it, and hand it to a different supplier next time. A body that commissions a bespoke portal has bought a relationship it now has to keep.

AgID and Designers Italia compliance is the part other European jurisdictions should look at hardest. From outside it reads as a tick-box. Inside, it is the procurement discipline that made the reuse possible at all.

Open and inspectable code does the quiet work underneath. It is what keeps compliance, maintenance and the next ten years of change something an administration can still govern by itself.

Next in the series: the question every regulated institution is now being asked by its own board. Can we run this without our data leaving the building?

https://2026.ploneconf.org/business-track

In 2024 a Plone core developer quoted a customer for image infrastructure the community had wanted since 2020. A few hun...
16/09/2026

In 2024 a Plone core developer quoted a customer for image infrastructure the community had wanted since 2020. A few hundred hours. A five-figure sum.

Nobody commissioned it. The idea was fine. The price was not.

It is now open source and in production, carrying the shared web platform of Austria's architecture institutions. The platform did not change. The price did.

Jens Klein has been a Plone core developer since 2003. He did not need an AI assistant to stay relevant, which is exactly why his account of what one does is worth sitting through. At the Business Track on 25 September he and Torben Baumgartner take the slot on what actually moved.

Their claim is narrower than the market's. The bottleneck was never typing. It was boundaries. Between teams, and between what a group's existing skills allowed and what it wanted to build. Take those away and an organisation gets space, and what it does with the space is the whole story. One support desk automated the easy half of its work and kept every person on the team.

What did not fall: architecture, testing, security judgement. Those matter more now, not less. A Kubernetes operator written in Go and a transcoder written in Rust, by someone who writes neither language, is a sentence that should make a head of IT think about review and ownership rather than headcount.

Also on the list: twelve institutions stuck on an old release because migrating was never worth paying for. Now moved, with a web archive going back to 2002 intact.

Next in the series: an administration starting from a blank page that four other administrations had already filled in.

https://2026.ploneconf.org/business-track

The person who hands you the microphone halfway through a Q&A is a volunteer. So is the one who finds your badge at the ...
16/09/2026

The person who hands you the microphone halfway through a Q&A is a volunteer. So is the one who finds your badge at the registration desk, and the one keeping the camera pointed at the right thing so the talk still exists a month later.

Plone Conference runs on that. It always has.

We need people for the conference days, 23 to 25 September in Maastricht. Registration desk, introducing speakers, moderating a session, passing microphones, helping with the video recording. Whatever else turns up on the day.

No experience needed. You tell us which parts interest you and which timeslots you can make, and we build around that. One slot is a real contribution.

And you will end the week knowing more people than you would from a seat in row six.

Sign up here:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdzqVrU2P2fvRrfc_P192VAMxOF4NPPcu1KtELbF046XiVRUw/viewform

Questions go to [email protected]

European institutions commit to a platform for decades. Procurement runs in cycles of three or four years.Standard tende...
16/09/2026

European institutions commit to a platform for decades. Procurement runs in cycles of three or four years.

Standard tenders barely test the gap between those two numbers.

Whoever maintains the platform ends up inside how the institution works. They learn which constraints are real, which requests would damage the thing being asked for, and where the last four governance changes left their marks. Replacing that is slow and expensive, whatever the contract says about portability.

Syslab has run OiRA, the workplace risk-assessment platform of EU-OSHA, since 2011. Fifteen years.

At the Business Track on 25 September, Alexander Pilz uses those fifteen years to ask what makes a software partnership survive that long. Two things carry most of the weight. A commercial model that pays a firm to stay rather than to re-pitch at every contract cycle. And a partner close enough to the institution to say no when a request would hurt the platform.

The second one is harder to buy. A supplier who always agrees is easier to work with and worse for the system. That kind of pushback rarely survives a sales-driven relationship, and no scoring sheet has a column for it.

The talk ends where it is useful: the questions an institution can actually ask at procurement time to tell a durable partner from one built to win the next tender.

Next in the series: the bottleneck was never typing. It was boundaries.

https://2026.ploneconf.org/business-track

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