Recently in Steering Committee Category

I'm happy to announce we've successfully concluded our recent call for new people to fill several vacant positions in TPF. Our newest members are:

• Karen Pauley, Steering Committee Chair
• Josh McAdams, Public Relations
• Jeremy Fluhmann, Conferences Committee Chair

We're very excited to have some new people bring their energy and ideas to the table.

I'd also like to thank Andy Lester, our outgoing PR person, for all of his PR work and contributions to TPF. In addition to his PR work, Andy also organized the Chicago hackathon back in 2006 which got TPF more involved with sponsoring hackathons. And even though Andy is stepping down from his TPF PR role, he continues to serve the Perl community with PR in the form of buzz over at Perlbuzz. Thanks, Andy!

This is a reminder that we plan on closing the open self-nomination period for the TPF Steering Committee Chair, Conference Committee Chair, and PR positions tomorrow. If you're on the fence, it's time to decide.

Again, to participate, send me email at cbrandt at perlfoundation dot org and I'll send you an invite to the elections wiki we have set up.

Have you ever wanted to get involved in The Perl Foundation, but didn't know how? Well, now's your chance. I'm pleased to announce open self-nominations for the following TPF roles:

• Steering Committee Chair
• Conferences Committee Chair
• Public Relations

You can follow the links above to read descriptions of each of the positions. If you think you're a good fit for one or more of them, send me an email at cbrandt at perlfoundation dot org. I'll then invite you to a dedicated wiki we have set up just for the election.

Once you join the wiki, you'll set up a page to post all of your experience and answer the questions provided in each section above. The wiki is private, but you'll be able to see the other candidate pages, and they'll see yours.

The deadline to get all of your information in is midnight next Tuesday, March 11. Our committees elect their members, so the Conferences Committee will be voting on the CC chair and the Steering Committee will vote on the chair and PR positions. After we have a chance to look over everyone's information, we vote and select our newest members.

You only have a week, so don't wait too long. I look forward to hearing from you.

One of the things we're trying to improve over here is reporting. Not only do People Want To Know what it is that we're doing, but being a not-for-profit we have some regulatory needs to get our reporting act together. Over the past week I've been working on the reporting strategy for the Steering Committee.

Progress has been made on this front. I've created a draft reporting template that seems to have general acceptance within the Steering Committee and at the level of the Board. (I.e. the SC members seem happy to use it, and the Board people seem happy to accept it.) In case you're curious, here it is: http://news.perlfoundation.org/tpf_steering_committee_draft_2_report_template.pdf

Something very like this will be used. We've also gotten a general agreement on the time-frame for this report. Dec. 31/2005 is the last day of the "current" reporting period (which goes back to... well, time immemorial in theory but probably 6 months in practice). On Jan. 1/2006 I will email the SC to ask people to start putting together their reports. I expect to receive completed reporting chunks from each working group head as of Jan. 15/2006. I then give myself 2 weeks to collate-and-otherwise-synthesize a finished report from that. So, the report will be ready for Jan. 28/2006.

The other thing that has my major attention right now is working on a policy regarding TPF representation conferences: which conferences we should send an "official" representative to, how to choose the right representative, and what he/she will do when there. There has been a lot of discussion on the SC mailing list on this point so fortunately I don't feel like I have to do all that much hard thinking along these lines. Mainly, I'll (once again) be synthesizing what so many of my SC colleagues have already said so well. I was hoping to have this out earlier this week, but now I'm looking more at, well, later this week.

Disclaimer

This might be the first news.perlfoundation.org blog posting entered. It's not the "inaugural announcement", though. Andy Lester, the TPF SC PR guy, is crafting that now and a link to it will be posted to all the usual locations when it's ready.

What this is all about

This blog is hosted at The Perl Foundation. We hope to open up more communication with the Perl community by talking, mostly informally, here.

As for what I'm doing typing here...

I've been involved there indirectly for a year, more directly for about 3 weeks as the new Steering Committee Chairman. One of the things that we've been talking about is how to be more transparent to the community and approachable, so we're setting up blogs so that we can ramble about what we're up for TPF and generally in life, too. It also gives readers the chance to chat with us here about anything we mention that might catch your eye.