How a contributor-led open-source platform decides what it becomes — Plone roadmap and AI, in public
For an institution committing to a digital platform on a decade-plus horizon, the decision-making about where the platform is going is something they need to be able to read. Plone's roadmap is public. Provider firms invest in the modernisation work (Volto, Plone 7) and publish what they build. Individual contributors author specifications and release-manage them in public. New directions enter the community surface through visible alignment-seeking — PLIP #4213 on the MCP server was opened to gather community feedback on AI direction even though the work does not ship in core.
Details
This talk takes Plone's public roadmap, the current AI-relevant instance (the MCP server), and the contribution-and-ratification flow that moves work from "a provider firm tried this" to "the community ratified that direction" — and reads it back as a procurement criterion institutions can use.
What attendees take away
- A roadmap-as-procurement-criterion reading — what reading a platform's public governance gets an institution that reading a vendor's roadmap does not.
- One concrete AI direction in motion — the MCP server, PLIP #4213, the repo move to plone/plone-mcp, and what "offered for ratification, not announced as direction" actually looks like.
- The contribution-and-ratification flow — how work moves from one provider firm to community-owned, and where the institutional audience can read it as it happens.
- An honest line on what does not ship in core — and why the slot does not pretend otherwise.