Will the Pleiades Be an Open (Content) Cluster?

According to Wikipedia:

The Pleiades (also known as M45 or the Seven Sisters) is the name of an open cluster in the constellation of Taurus. It is among the nearest to the Earth of all open clusters, probably the best known and certainly the most striking to the naked eye.

So let's hope the this exciting new Pleiades is also fully open:

Built atop the open-source Plone Content Management System and hosted by the Stoa Consortium, Pleiades will provide on-line access to all information about Greek and Roman geography assembled by the Classical Atlas Project for the Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World (R. Talbert, ed., Princeton, 2000. Pleiades will also enable large-scale collaboration in order to maintain and diversify this dataset. Combining open-content approaches (like those used by Wikipedia) with academic-style editorial review, Pleiades will enable anyone — from university professors to casual students of antiquity — to suggest updates to geographic names, descriptive essays, bibliographic references and geographic coordinates. Once vetted for accuracy and pertinence, these suggestions will become a permanent, author-attributed part of future AWMC publications and data services.

(Via Open Knowledge Foundation Weblog.)

Plone Goes Pltwo...

...as in Second Life:

The Plone Foundation announced today the broadcasting of the Plone Conference 2006 into the virtual world Second Life. It is the first big open source conference being colocated inside a virtual world. The event will be held from Oct 25-27

"We'll broadcast selected talks and tutorials each day into a virtual conference building inside Second Life. Residents who could not make it to the by-now sold-out conference can participate in virtual form. A back channel for their questions to the actual speaker will be provided, too"

And so the boundaries between RL (real life) and SL (Second Life) became just that tiny bit more friable....

The Once and Future Lock-In

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is not going to win any prizes for excitement, but it's important: it's a matter of how companies keep all their organisational stuff these days. So this piece warning about Microsoft's attempt to lock users into its standards at the content repository level makes a good point.

And as it also points out, there's now plenty of open source ECM software out there: Alfresco, eZ Publish, Joomla, Mambo, Midgard, Plone - so there's really no reason to take the one-way road to Redmond.