The Perl Foundation

Perl Foundation News is the place to read updates on what members of the Foundation's working groups are working on and for other project-related announcements. Where before a working group member might post an update to his use.perl journal, or a meditation on perlmonks.org, from today those updates and more will be appearing on the Perl Foundation Blog.

The Perl Foundation's work includes:

• sponsoring the YAPC conferences and supporting their organizers
• managing grants for Perl-related projects
• working with outside groups, as on Google's Summer Of Code project
• putting a public face on the work of the Perl community
• providing technical infrastructure for web hosting and Subversion repositories
• supporting and coordinating volunteer efforts

Comments are enabled, allowing you to give feedback directly to our working group members. Talk directly to us and tell us what we're doing right or wrong. Ask us questions and we'll do our best to answer. We love comments and want to hear your views.

We're well aware of the problems of the past. We know that communications have been weak. We're working hard for the trust of the Perl community, and creating the Perl Foundation Blog is a crucial step as we work to earn that trust.

Whether you want to participate in helping make the Perl community even better, or interested in what's going on, we hope that blog.perlfoundation.org helps.

If you've read through the first few posts here on the brand-new TPF blog (and you really should; they're good), you've learned at least a little about what we do and how we do it, and about some of the folks involved. It's a busy bunch of people, volunteering their not-so-copious free time to work on TPF tasks.

So what's the president do?

TPF's been a busy little foundation lately. Interesting things are taking shape, and you'll be seeing announcements about some of them very soon. Be sure to stay tuned.

Much of this progress is a result of the excellent feedback we've received from the community. (It's not always pleasant feedback, but it's useful all the same.) But we're a greedy bunch, and making progress just makes us want to make more.

That means we need to continue to hear from you. Do you know what TPF does, and what it supports? What can we do to keep you better informed? Perhaps most importantly, what else do you want us to do, or to do more often?

We've got lots of ideas, but limited resources. It's critical that we know what you need most. How can we serve you, our community, more effectively?

From Friday November 10th to Sunday November 12th, over thirty Perl hackers converged on the Country Inn & Suites in Crystal Lake, IL, a far northwest suburb of Chicago. For three days, nearly around the clock, we worked, talked, ate, and worked some more on Perl projects of all kinds. There were hackers from around the Chicago area as well as others from Oregon, California, New York, Ontario and England. Some were only around for one day, while others came in Thursday night and left Monday morning. It was a gathering that let everyone do what they wanted, when they wanted, while still getting work done.

The Parrot project had the largest population working on it. Chip Salzenberg and Jerry Gay flew in to drive the development. Friday morning, there were six hackers who were familiar with Parrot, but when it was over, eight new project members had worked on it. Bugs were fixed, design documents were created, and hackers met other hackers for the first time.

Perl::Critic also had a big showing. Chris Dolan and yours truly met with Michael Wolf and James Keenan to create new policies and hash out design decisions as we pushed to the version 1.0 release of this crucial tool.

On Saturday night, Ken Krugler of the code search engine krugle.com gave a demo of the site, and heard feedback about how krugle.com can help serve the Perl community better. I'm excited about outside companies working to help Perl while helping themselves. Most important, Krugler sponsored the night's Chicago deep dish pizza to feed the hungry hacking throng.

Smaller projects got attention as well. Pete Krawczyk and I worked on projects like ack, File::Next and HTML::Tree, since most of our time was spent running around getting people to public transportation, getting snacks, ordering Chinese food, and making sure everything ran smoothly. For more details on who was there, and what we worked on, see the Hackathon Chicago wiki at http://rakudo.org/hackathon-chicago/.

The one question everyone asked was, "When's the next one?" The Perl Foundation is currently working on ideas, plans, budgets and sponsorship for making more hackathons happens, but we need people to host and organize them. A hackathon is an ideal way for a Perl Mongers group to host an event, but with much easier requirements than hosting YAPC (Yet Another Perl Conference). If you or your Perl Mongers group would be interested in hosting a hackathon, please email me at andy@perl.org.

The nomination process is open to the public, and we welcome your involvement. If there's someone who's served to make Perl better, but not through technical achievements, please let us know at whitecamel- suggestions@perl.org. Nominations must be received by midnight on May 31st, 2007.