The Perl 5 Wiki has been upgraded from Socialtext v2.14 to Socialtext v4.2 [0]. Socialtext Inc has graciously provided free hosting of the Perl 5 Wiki on their hosted wiki service.
Many thanks to Socialtext's Staff, Ingy döt Net, Jesse Vincent, and Karen Pauley for technical help and direction.
Wiki data is freely available through an API for the community to use as it pleases.
At our recent Board meeting Jim Brandt stepped down as President and Kurt DeMaagd stepped down as Treasurer.
We would like to thank Jim and Kurt for all their hard work. Jim became President in July 2009 after holding the post of Vice-President and will continue to serve as a Director on the Board. Kurt has been Treasurer of TPF since it was created in September 2000. This is a very long time for anyone to hold a voluntary role and we are incredibly gratefully to Kurt for his years of service in this role. Kurt will also remain on the Board.
Karen Pauley has been appointed President. Karen joined TPF as Steering Committee Chair in March 2008 and has held the position of Vice-President since July 2009.
We would like to welcome Dan Wright who has been appointed Treasurer. Dan comes to us with prior experience of being a Treasurer. He is an active member of the Perl community and a core member of the team that organized last year's YAPC::NA and the Pittsburgh Perl Workshops. We wish him every success in his new role.
Earlier this year Renée Bäcker from $foo magazine interviewed Richard Dice and me to find out our thoughts on TPF in 2009 and our hopes going forward. An English version [pdf] of the interview is available online.
As part of a renewed effort to expand the membership of the Board we are pleased to announce the addition of Curtis "Ovid" Poe as our newest Director. Ovid is not new to The Perl Foundation, having been involved with the grants committee since 2003, and we are delighted that he is willing to take on this role.
His first task will be to work with Dan Magnuszewski to expand and improve our current PR and Marketing efforts. We wish them every success in this endeavor.
The TPF board of directors wants to provide a progress update on discussion regarding providing support to Richard Dice to work on TPF and Perl community issues. The original public announcement and request-for-comment is found here.
The new version of this proposal is available here. It has been revised considerably based on community comment and discussion within TPF. Highlights of the changes between the original version and the current one are:
The TPF board of directors will have a new meeting shortly that will discuss this new version of the proposal and most likely include a vote on whether to accept. Additionally, though it is not commented upon in the attached POD the arrangement with the board would include my stepping down from the presidency (and the associated board seat) for the duration of the grant.
Thanks to everyone who participated in this process. Your feedback has been very valuable.
Back a few months ago I was interviewed by Renée Bäcker, the publisher of $foo, the German language Perl magazine. The issue with that interview is just about to be released. You can read the English version of the interview online. Understandably the interview talks about TPF's perspective on Perl through 2008 and other news and happenings in Perl and TPF.
Earlier this past week I submitted a proposal to the TPF Board of Directors; the PDF of this proposal is attached here. The plan includes a long list of projects, most of which have been discussed within TPF for a while but have been on indefinite hold due mainly to lack of available effort to address them properly. Some are for TPF process improvement and others are in more direct support of the Perl community. The essence of plan is that I be employed on contract by TPF for the next 6 months working on this list.
The funding for this plan comes from the Ian Hague donation. The proposal I gave Mr. Hague last year featured a division of it into two halves of $100k each: one for p6 development, the other for TPF organization building, which explicitly included the option to fund paid TPF staff. So, we have the money and the blessing of the funder for it to be used in this way. The requested amount in my proposal to TPF is US$5k/month * 6 months = US$30k. This monthly amount is the same as is provided for Hague grants.
As a volunteer myself for the past few years I've been able to allocate maybe 2 hours in an average week to TPF business. Very rarely I've been able to invest significant chunks of time, and it seems the bigger things I've accomplished have come from those periods of exceptional effort (e.g. Forrester Survey @ 40 hours over 2 weeks, Ian Hague donation @ 80 hours over 1 month). This suggests to me that we'll get some really good results out of this plan: TPF has never had on the order of 1000 focussed hours invested into it before, especially for the kinds of things I list in the proposal document.
I think this is a unique opportunity: the right combination of TPF having funding plus the mandate to use the funds in this way, TPF having significant needs, and the right candidate to address those needs being available at the right time to be used in this way. The situation has some similarities with what's going on in some other places in the Perl world, like pmichaud being supported to be the Rakudo architect, and Dave Mitchell working on the 5.10.1 release: support is being used to to let exceptional people spend large amounts of time on big, gnarly problems which advance important community projects, while at the same time these people can enable the volunteer communities also working on those projects be more successful and productive. This is a chance for TPF to improve itself by using some of that same good foo.
Later this week the TPF Board will make a decision whether to approve this proposal. In order to help them with that they want your input -- so, please post any comments you have here. (No anonymous postings please. Use real names and email addresses; pseudonyms are okay only when they're well known through the Perl community and can be correctly connected to email addresses for any needed follow-up.) I am happy to participate, answer questions, clarify my thoughts, etc. here, in email and also over on #tpf on irc.perl.org if you'd rather chat with me real-time there.
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