Recently in Perl Foundation Category

Liquid Web are the latest company to donate the significant sum of $10,000 (USD) to the Perl 5 Core Maintenance Fund, Liquid Web wish to "assist in the continued development and maintenance of the dynamic and powerful Perl programming language".

Liquid Web, Inc. are a rapidly growing managed Web Hosting company, with locations in Michigan and Arizona with a clear commitment to innovation and development. Liquid Web has developed much of its software using Perl and will continue to do so in the future so consider it essential to help support the Perl community. The programming language serves as an integral tool for the continued development of the company's existing systems such as its billing, support and monitoring programs.

Liquid Web Founder and CEO, Matthew Hill, speaks on the importance of the Perl Community, "Giving back to the Perl community is something we've been interested in for some time. As Liquid Web continues to expand and grow, we find the need for more developers proficient in Perl grows in kind. Supporting Perl's continued excellence ensures that important programs that have proven invaluable to Liquid Web's success will continue to perform to our specific needs."

Karen Pauley, President of the Perl foundation, was delighted with the news of the donation. "This investment in Perl's future from Liquid Web will go a long way to help maintain the viability of Perl 5 as a platform for the many businesses that depend upon it and will deliver a positive impact upon the entire Perl community".

Liquid Web Inc. is a privately held managed web hosting company founded in 1997, with three wholly owned data center facilities located in Lansing, Michigan. In 2010 Liquid Web opened a software development office in Scottsdale, Arizona. Liquid Web is a leader in the professional web hosting market with an unwavering dedication to providing the best hosting products available.  Liquid Web has over 20,000 clients served in over 120 countries.  To service our customers we have assembled a world class Heroic Support staff and a proactive Sonar Server Monitoring team, professionally educated and easily accessible 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Liquid Web received the INC.5000 Fastest Growing Companies award in 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011. 

This year we have six students undertaking projects for the Google Summer of Code (GSoC), those of you who have been following The Perl Foundations 2011 students will know that two weeks ago there was an evaluation period known as the Midterm. This period is when the students, and their mentors, submit reports on the situation so far, this includes making an analysis of the work completed and the general abilities (including mentor support, student progress etc.) of those in the program.
Google uses these reports to assess if the student/mentor can continue to the end of the summer, it is a useful pause to take stock and to catch any failing students (which does happen sometimes through no specific fault).

I have the pleasure of reporting that our students have all passed their midterm evaluations, the submissions by the mentors were positive and showed how well they had advanced, there was also quite a deal of praise from the students about the mentors which is always appreciated.

A lot of the reason to why this year is going so well, it seems to me, is due to the overall organisation of the event and the dedication of the students and mentors. We have learned a lot over the past few years and we have now started to implement sensible techniques and guidelines and to write these down for future use. There are still areas we are testing and refining but the midterm point shows that we are doing well. A short list (not all inclusive) of some of the standards we have introduced to ensure we progress well are:

1. A repository for tracking documents and information;
2. A guide for students on what to expect from their mentors and for mentors on how to work with their students;
3. Each student has a back up mentor (we assign 2 mentors) so that we can cover any gaps in attention and also so that the student has a route to discuss any issues with a secondary person;
4. A channel in which all the mentors and students can discuss;
5. Weekly reports from the students so that their progress can be cleanly monitored.

I will report again as we come close to the end of the GSoC period and of course will keep you informed of the final projects. There has already been some community buzz around this years projects and we are all positive that the final pieces will reflect the great effort the students (and mentors) have made.

On a final note I have to once again point out that a great deal of the organisational choices and direction are down to one man, rafl (Florian Ragwitz) who has made a great deal of effort in bringing this year's undertakings into a formal system that can be used in the future for continued success.

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

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.

[0] List of Socialtext release notes.

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.