Recently in Conferences Category

The Perl Foundation is excited to announce that we have two bids in for Perl Mongers groups to host YAPC::NA 2012. This year's bidders are the MadMongers at Madison.pm and the combined Houston.pm and Austin.pm groups.

The conference committee will be busy reviewing these bids over the next few weeks and the winner will be announced at YAPC::NA 2011 in Asheville, NC.

You can check out the bids to get a preview of what is to come next year:

• MadMongers Bid
• Houston.pm/Austin.pm Bid

The organizers of YAPC::EU 2011 recently announced that they are accepting proposals for talks at YAPC::EU 2011. They are also looking for teachers and sponsors. Click through to read all of the details.

The YAPC::NA 2011 Call For Speakers will come to a close at 23:59 EST on March 24th 2011. Some talks have already been accepted if you want to take a look.

YAPC::NA 2011 in Asheville, NC is still four months away, but that doesn't mean that we can't start planning for 2012. The call for venue is officially open! The TPF Conference Committee will be accepting bids today through May 15th 2011.

What is YAPC::NA?

YAPC::NA is an annual Perl-focused conference held at various locations throughout North America. The conference is a grassroots symposia on the Perl programming language promoted by The Perl Foundation.

What is the "Call for Venue"?

Each year Perl Mongers groups bid to host the conference for the upcoming year in the location of their choosing. The "Call for Venue" is The Perl Foundation's official invitation for groups to send in their bids.

How do you submit a bid?

The best place to start is the bidding details page at yapc.org. While there, you'll find links to the venue requirements and the review criteria. You can do a little more research and peek at previous bids by searching the 'yapc' tag at The Perl Foundation blog.

Also, feel free to post your questions to this blog post or email tpf-conferences (at) perl (dot) org. If you know a previous organizer, it might not be a bad idea to chat with he or she to get some advice.

After your done and have your bid together, just email it to tpf-conferences (at) perl (dot) org. Remember, the deadline is May 15th 2011.

Below is an overview of the programs that were financially supported by The Perl Foundation in 2010. Programs are roughly broken up into 3 categories: Events, Marketing, and Development.

Perl events

The Perl Foundation supported four conferences in 2010. Those conferences were: The North American Yet Another Perl Conference (YAPC::NA), Frozen Perl, The Pittsburgh Perl Workshop, and The Perl Oasis. Each event is expected to be self-sustaining through program fees and donations. However, TPF did provide support to each event in the form of free services. Event organizers were able to pick and choose which services they needed:

• Use of the donate.perlfoundation.org payment gateway for the various events to receive registration fees and sponsorship contributions. Each event received 100% of the amount contributed, any transaction fees were covered by TPF. In the course of a year this works out to over $2,500 in event sponsorship.
• Event liability insurance, which is often required by event venues. The liability policy costs TPF over $1,000 to maintain per year.
• Use of TPF as an established legal entity when required to enter into contracts with event venues and contractors. This freed event organizers from needing to spend time and expenses related to establishing their own organizations for each event.
• Handling all disbursements to venues, caterers, contractors, speakers, etc.. All postage, wire transaction fees, and accounting expenses were covered by TPF, which cost over $500 in 2010.

In 2010, The Perl Foundation provided a $500 sponsorship of the Enlightened Perl Organization's "Send-a-newbie" program for YAPC::EU. TPF also provided a $500 sponsorship for YAPC::NA's "VIP party", an event targeted at first-time YAPC attendees.

Perl marketing

In 2010, The Perl Foundation provided $1,000 in free printed marketing materials distributed by volunteers staffing Perl advocacy booths at various non-Perl events through the year.

TPF also paid $1,600 to have professional content continuously written for the perl.com web site through the year.

In 2010, TPF spent $1,800 for trademark applications in Canada, Europe, and Japan. The Perl Foundation now holds trademarks on Perl in both the United States and Canada.

Perl development

The Perl Foundation maintained their associate membership with The Unicode Consortium in 2010 at an expense of $1,500. This membership enhances Perl developers' abilities to maintain support of Unicode within Perl. It also gives Perl a voice in contributing to the ongoing development of the Unicode Standard.

Through a development grant made possible by Ian Hague in 2008, TPF paid over $14,000 in grants for the further development of Perl 6 in 2010. At the end of this year, there is $27,000 remaining unallocated in the Perl 6 development portion of the Hague grant. Grants completed this year included:

• Jonathan Worthington's "Rakudo Signature Improvements"
• Solomon Foster's "Numeric and Real Support"
• Travel support for Patrick Michaud to speak about Rakudo and recruit volunteers at conferences.

TPF was awarded a $50,000 grant from Booking.com for "further development and
maintenance of the Perl programming language". TPF has used $25,800 of those funds in the form of monthly payments to David Mitchell for his grant "Fixing Perl5 Core Bugs." This grant will be continued into 2011.

The grants committee paid over $6,000 in grants from community contributions. The following grants were completed in 2010:

• Ricardo Signes' "Archive::Zip bugs" and "Improve Dist::Zilla's Tests, Documentation, and Structure"
• Vadim Konovalov's "Perl Cross-Compilation for WinCE and Linux" and "Tcl/Tk Access in Rakudo"
• Curtis Jewell's "Corporate, Embedded, and Multi-user Perl on Windows"
• Gerard Goossen's "Changing the Perl 5 optree build process into a Abstract Syntax Tree generation and a code generation step"
• Leon Timmermans' "Embeding Perl into C++ Applications"
• Sebastian Riedel's "The Mojo Documentation Project"
• Kieren Diment's "The Perl Survey"
• José Castro and Bruno Martins' "Perlbal documentation"

In 2010, The Perl Foundation in cooperation with The Parrot Foundation sponsored 10 projects in The Google Summer of Code. TPF provided over $1,600 in support for this program, which will eventually be recovered back from Google.

Looking ahead to 2011

In 2011, we expect our areas of support to remain roughly the same. We remain committed to supporting Perl events, marketing, and development.

How you can help

Improved fundraising is a requirement to maintain the strong support of Perl provided by The Perl Foundation in 2011. If you find value in the work that is being support by TPF, please consider making a donation. To contribute, please visit https://donate.perlfoundation.org

Perl Oasis, the annual Perl workshop in sunny Orlando, Florida has announced its call for papers. Submissions are due by December 17th.

Visit http://www.perloasis.info for more information.

If you weren't at YAPC::NA 2010, then you probably missed the announcement that the location and dates for YAPC::NA 2011 have been decided. Chris Prather and Dahut.pm have won the bid to host YAPC::NA 2011 in Asheville, North Carolina.

Mark your calendars because the conference dates have already been decided and will be June 27 - July 1 2011.

Congratulations to Dahut.pm on hosting the next YAPC::NA!