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Zea Partners

by Alexander Limi — last modified May 9, 2009 - 18:15


Home page	Zea Partners
Location	Belgium

Zea Partners (Zea) is a non-profit network for companies building open source solutions. Stakeholders from the open source world are welcome. Zea activities are focused on growing the open source market by pooling resources for promotion, research and advocacy:

Promotion: articles and cases studies, awards, references
Research: EU research, expertize about distributed organizations and collaborative models
Projects: expertize in international collaborative projects management as PloneGov
Advocacy: EU policy, co-founder of OBOOE the European federation of the open source software industry

Network and technologies

Zea network includes founders of Zope, Plone and Silva along with prominent SMEs (Small/Medium-sized Enterprises) around the world:

Zope is a powerful and free application server for building CMS, intranets, portals, and custom applications. Plone and Silva are open source CMS that can be used to build corporate web sites, news sites, extranet servers or intranet, publishing system and documents repository, groupware tool, e-commerce, etc. All technologies are developed using Python a high-level programming language.

Wishing to share your experience ?

A core activity of Zea Partners is to deepen the knowledge of the Plone ecosystem. We achieve this goal by raising the visibility of outstanding accomplishments, which enable sharing experience, and foster opportunities of collaboration among stakeholders of our thriving open source ecosystem.

If you are a Public Organization, Non-Profit or University wishing to share your experience, you are welcome to send us articles or cases studies presenting your project.

Case Studies

Government: Brazilian Federal Government intensively uses Plone (Brazil): SERPRO, the main IT solution provider for the Brazilian Government, is actively using Plone and Zope as its primary Portal construction tool for Government Web Content Management Solutions. SERPRO counts on an impressive list of reference and will soon launch its 50th governmental portal.
Government: CommunesPlone: a Community open to collaboration (Belgium ): The towns and cities participating in the CommunesPlone project are developing cross collaboration. They help each other and form an innovative open source Community. The Private sector is also involved, bringing technical expertize to the public sector developers. Every one is welcome to join the project and support the Community. CommunesPlone is an active member of the international PloneGov innitiative.
Information Technology: Fostering Plone subcommunities: This case study introduces the importance of organizing the Plone users within various vertical markets. It presents various “Plone for…” initiatives and sites named «Subcommunities» which are active in the fields of Libraries, Education, eLearning, eGovernment, Artists, eCommerce, Multimedia, …
Information Technology: Investigating Free Software Users Groups in South America: Free software has an important difference compared to privative models: their users are able to cross the line of being just consumers and become providers of technology. This fosters the development of a social environment in which users, developers and different organization join with the purpose to socialize, study, improve software, share knowledge and promote. Such spaces are known as Users Groups.
Education: National University of Cordoba, Argentina (Argentina ): The National University of Cordoba (UNC), Argentina, recently launched its new institutional website built on Plone 3. This project results from a close collaboration between the University development team with the support and assistance from Menttes, a local software development company.
Non-profits: OneWorld South Asia: International NGO relies intensively on Plone: OneWorld South Asia (OWSA), the south Asian centre of OneWorld International Foundation, works to facilitate human rights and sustainable development in the region by leveraging a range of media and Information Communication Technologies (ICTs). For its IT projects, this international NGO, rely intensively on Plone, an open source Content Management System (CMS) and Zope an open source application server.
Non-profits: Oxfam International Opt For Plone CMS: Oxfam International, an international confederation of non-governmental organisations (NGO) that are working to find lasting solutions to poverty, suffering and injustice, opt for the free and powerful Plone CMS. Zea was awarded the contract to develop Oxfam new CMS. The project, in which 6 Zea members were involved, resulted in large contributions to Plone including Linguaplone, Versioning, Kupu and Multisite.
Government: PloneGov Italy: a fast growing community (Italy ): The Italian PloneGov community has been growing at an impressive rate since the launch of its national branch in September 2008. This case study presents in details a number of Plone based open source projects developed by several Italian public administrations.
Government: PloneGov: Distributing costs between Public Organizations: PloneGov applications are easily transferable to similar foreign authorities and their potentials for replication are enormous. This project open the way to international software collaboration. The development of such software sharing initiatives helps underpin the sustainability of public services and save public money.
Non-profits: The "humanitarian eBay", Global Hand, uses Plone to map donations to NGOs (Hong Kong ): Based in Hong Kong, Global Hand, the "humanitarian eBay" uses Plone to map donations to NGOs. Global Hand is an NGO acting as a broker matching donations and needs to support NGO’s in their fight against poverty and disasters. It also provides branded Web sites for the United Nations Joint Logistics Center (UNJLC), the World Economic Forum (WEF) and Rotary International. All these services are based on the open source softwares Plone and Zope. This article investigates Global Hand experience and criteria to select these technologies.
Government: United Nations use Plone to manage humanitarian crisis: The United Nations Joint Logistic Center (UNJLC) has adopted Plone for its new portal providing logistic data to humanitarian crisis. Zea Partners was chosen to provide support and services to the UNJLC team.
Education: WebLion: Bringing Open Source Practices to the Educational Enterprise (United States ): Effective Web content management remains a painful problem for many institutions of higher education. Old methods and tools used in maintaining static web sites are costly and inefficient, and the quality of content is often poor. Content management systems (CMS) offer solutions, but do you buy or build? And how to get buy-in from independent-minded academic units? How are new systems and capabilities integrated with the CMS?

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