The time has come for the Yet Another Perl Conference, North America Call For Venue! Entries can be submitted now through June 1st 2010 to the TPF conferences group: tpf-conferences perl org. We hope to announce the winners at "this year's YAPC::NA in Columbus, Ohio":http://conferences.mongueurs.net/yn2010/. Are you ready to get started? First off, you will want to "review the bidding details at yapc.org":http://yapc.org/yapcna.html. While there, you'll also find links to

Over the past few months the Grants Committee has been working to improve our grants process. Our main problem is that we have a very low completion rate for grants. In the past couple of years only 25% of the grants awarded by the Grants Committee have been completed. Not surprisingly we feel that the current system should be changed. There are a number of different problems. We have been

The response to the call for paper for "YAPC::NA 2010":http://conferences.mongueurs.net/yn2010 has been excellent so far; however, it is quickly drawing to a close. You have one week left to "submit your talk":http://conferences.mongueurs.net/yn2010/newtalk for YAPC::NA 2010!

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

I am pleased to announce that Solomon Foster's Hague Grant application for "Numeric and Real Support":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2010/03/hague-grant-application-numeri.html#comments has been accepted. Jonathan Worthington has agreed to be the grant manager for this project. I would like to thank everyone who provided feedback on this proposal.

I am delighted to announce that TPF has been accepted as a mentoring organization for this year's "Google Summer of Code":http://socghop.appspot.com/. "Google Summer of Code":http://socghop.appspot.com/ is a program that offers stipends to student developers for writing code for open source software projects. Last year we had nine projects accepted and we would love to have more this year. "Jonathan Leto":http://leto.net/dukeleto.pl/ is our chief organizer and he is looking for "mentors":http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl5/index.cgi?gsoc_mentors

Ricardo began work on his grant at the beginning of the month and has made steady progress, completing the first two deliverables and has begun writing core tests, which should be done over the next few weeks. Has published status updates every few days so far and plans to continue doing so.

While TPF grant program has as its main goal the motivation of Perl users to perform new and challenging projects for the Perl Community, sometimes it fails. Fortunately it doesn't happen with all grantees and all the time. This time I am closing two grants from Vadim Konovalov: Tcl/Tk Access in Rakudo and Perl Cross-Compilation for WinCE and Linux We, at TPF, know that Vadim did some work on both

Curtis Jewell just sent TPF an update on his grant: The 5 main points of my grant, as far as releasing an improved Strawberry Perl, were: "Is compiled as a "merge module" file that can be included in other .msi files, as well as an independent .msi file." This was done as of the January 2010 release of Strawberry Perl, although I'm not publicizing it heavily until the April

Kieren is presently finalizing code for the new Perl Survey and plans to have the new system up and operating soon, when he will conduct a pilot program to shake out the kinks in the project. After that, all that remains is to react to the results of the pilot, run the survey proper, and analyze the final data gathered from it. The source code is currently visible on GitHub.

Earlier this year Renée Bäcker from "$foo":http://www.perl-magazin.de/ magazine interviewed Richard Dice and me to find out our thoughts on TPF in 2009 and our hopes going forward. An "English version":http://downloads.foo-magazin.de/InterviewTPF_III.pdf of the interview is available online.

I am pleased to announce that David Mitchell's "grant application":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2010/02/grant_proposal_fixing_perl5_co.html has been successful. I would like to thank all the community members who took time to provide feed-back on this proposal and "Booking.com":http://www.booking.com/ whose generous contribution to TPF has allowed us to fund this grant.

Alan Haggai's work on the Archive::Zip library is complete. Numerous onerous bugs have been corrected, and the library can now handle far more kinds of data. A developer release should reach the CPAN soon, hopefully to be followed in short order by a new complete release of the library.

We have received a Hague grant request, submitted by Solomon Foster. Before the Board votes on this proposal we would like to get feedback and endorsements from the Perl community. Please leave feedback in the comments or send email with your comments to karen at perlfoundation.org. Project Title: Numeric and Real Support Synopsis: This grant aims to refactor Rakudo's current numeric classes to support the Perl 6 specification's new Numeric

From "the YAPC::NA 2010 website":http://conferences.mongueurs.net/yn2010/: "YAPC::NA 2010 is actively searching for sponsorship, if you or your company would interested in being a sponsor please take a look at our "Executive Summary":http://conferences.mongueurs.net/yn2010/images/YAPC%20NA%20Executive%20Summary.pdf or "Sponsorship Prospectus":http://conferences.mongueurs.net/yn2010/images/YAPC%20NA%20Sponsorship%20Prospectus.pdf."

This was the oldest grant running. Ingy dot net was working intermittently on it presenting some of the results that were promised in the proposal but not them all. TPF and Ingy agreed to close the grant with a half payment for the work done. Ingy wrote a report on the work done. It can be read at https://www.socialtext.net/yaml/index.cgi?requiem_for_a_grant

For this quarter TPF had 7 grant proposals, from which 5 were voted for rejection, one for acceptance, and the final one will be kept for new evaluation in the next round. The five rejected grants are: "Creating a ctypes-Like Interface for Perl to External Subroutines":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2009/08/2009q3_grant_proposal_creating.html by Shlomi Fish "Enhancing CPANHQ":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2009/08/2009q3_grant_proposal_enhancin.html by Shlomi Fish "perl core memory improvements":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2010/02/2010q1_grant_proposal_perl_cor.html by Jim Cromie "Enhancing Perl 6 Pattern Matching":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2010/02/2010_grant_proposal_enhancing.html by Morris M. Siegel

Jonathan Worthington has successfully completed his Hague Grant for "Rakudo Signature Improvements":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2009/09/hague_grant_application_rakudo.html. This is his final report: Introduction A while back, I filed an "application":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2009/09/hague_grant_application_rakudo.html for a grant to work on a wide range of improvements to Rakudo's signature, capture and binding implementation, in order to improve performance, bring us in line with the specification and implement a range of features that we did not have support for. I have

The call for papers for "YAPC::NA 2010":http://conferences.mongueurs.net/yn2010 has been officially announced. This year's theme will be "Modern Perl". With a planned four parallel tracks each day, there are ample open slots for talks, so be sure to "submit yours today":http://conferences.mongueurs.net/yn2010/newtalk.

The "YAPC::NA 2010":http://conferences.mongueurs.net/yn2010/ website has been up for a while, but it is now officially integrated with "Act":http://act.mongueurs.net/. Be sure to visit soon, create an account if you don't already have one, and start getting ready for the conference. Remember that the conference is June 21st through 23rd 2010 at Ohio State University. Registration will be $100 which day-passes available. #yapc-2010-conference