If you have an idea for doing some work for the Perl community and you think it's worthy of a grant, please send your grant entry to tpf-proposals@perl-foundation.org by the end of August. We will be awarding the grants by the beginning of October. First, please read about how to submit a grant Read that carefully as grants are often rejected if they don't meet the criteria. For example, if

Read on for the Chicago.pm bid. The formatting suffered a bit on this one too. Overview YAPC::NA 2006 fared so well for Chicago.pm that we decided to throw our hats in the ring again and try for YAPC::NA 2008. The 2006 conference was great for the group; it re-energized our membership, introduced many of us to the greater Perl community, and taught us many lessons on how to manage a

Read on for the full Columbus bid. Note that the version we received was nicely formatted, especially the tables. When I copied from the PDF, I lost the formatting. Overview In 2006 Columbus was ranked as the United States 15th largest city, with 733,203 residents, and is the country's 32nd largest metropolitan area. Located with Columbus is the world renowned Ohio State University. OSU is currently the largest university in

The call for venue for YAPC::NA::2008 is closed. We received two bids, a rebid from Chicago and a first-time bid from Columbus.pm. I'll be posting the bid details shortly. The Conferences Committee will then begin the review and voting.

What sort of programmer uses Perl? Do most Perl programmers use it as a primary language, or just write the occasional script? And are there really as few women as conventional wisdom says? Kirrily Robert wants to know, and wants anyone around the world who uses Perl to help by answering a simple five-minute survey at perlsurvey.org Kirrily's goal is to "take a snapshot of the Perl world as it

Got a question about The Perl Foundation Want to volunteer some time for The Perl Foundation? Come see us on the floor in the Expo Hall at OSCON We're right next to the massage booth!

It gives me great pleasure to announce that Chris Dolan's Policies for Perl::Critic grant awarded April 07, is now underway. Chris intends to add twenty policies that are inspired by Damian Conway's Perl Best Practices to Perl::Critic to help developers to make their code more maintainable. Chris has written the first of the twenty policies funded by the grant, Perl::Critic::Policy::BuiltinFunctions::ProhibitComplexMapping, which insists that the block argument to map has at

May and June saw the usual monthly releases of Parrot, 0.4.12 and 0.4.13. Between these two releases, there were numerous language updates, including PHP and Lisp. On the Perl 6 front, 0.4.13 was the first release where Parrot passed the Perl 6 sanity tests. This is an exciting achievement, because it means that Parrot supports enough of Perl 6 that the developers can start using Perl 6 to bootstrap its

The deadline for submitting your venue bids for this year is approaching. I know there are some folks out there working on bids, so don't count on us going into overtime. The due date is August 1. You can find more details in this year's call and the previous call

After four years of excellent work behind the scenes of pm.org Dave Cross has decided to step down and take a well-deserved rest. Thanks, Dave! Stepping into Dave's role is José Castro, already well-known to many in our community as cog José will be leading a team charged with helping to establish and nurture Perl Mongers groups throughout the world. There are already a number of projects under way, and

The irrepressible Michael Schwern has launched a new wiki devoted to all things Perl 5, and has invited everyone to contribute: Perl 5 needs a place to collect its community knowledge which is currently scattered around in penny packets on perl mongers sites, scads of perl.org hosts, mailing list archives, man pages and books. This sort of thing is handled well by a wiki. Perl 5 now has one: http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl5/

Three more Perl 6 Microgrants have been awarded! Jesse Vincent of Best Practical writes: Flavio Glock will receive a travel microgrant to help him attend YAPC::EU and evangelize kp6 and the Perl 6 in Perl 6 effort. Steve Pritchard will receive a microgrant to complete the RPM packaging of Parrot and Pugs for Fedora, and to submit those packages for inclusion in the official Fedora distribution. Steve will be blogging

This is an easy one. I need a script to grab conference event data from the Perl community Google calendar. I've got it started, but it needs some polishing. If you're interested, email me and I'll send you what I've got so far

For a year or two now, I've hosted the Perl 6 and Parrot wikis on my home server, on a not-too-fast DSL line, at rakudo.org. They've now been moved to the wiki infrastructure at perlfoundation.org, on a dedicated box. This means much better performance, so if you've tried the wikis before and found them slow, check them out now. The moved wiki workspaces are: http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl6/ Perl 6 http://www.perlfoundation.org/parrot/ Parrot http://www.perlfoundation.org/hackathon-chicago/

The Pittsburgh Perl Workshop is a low-cost technical conference held at the University Center on Carnegie Mellon University's Oakland Campus The workshop will be held on October 13–14 2007 You can sign up for the announcement mailing list at Google Groups 06/22/07 Announcing PPW 2007 October 13,14 2007 The Pittsburgh Perl Mongers are pleased to announce The PITTSBURGH PERL WORKSHOP 2007, a two-day, low-cost