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

Allison Randal informs us that she has "...just signed an agreement with O'Reilly that assigns the full copyright in the book Perl 6 and Parrot Essentials to The Perl Foundation. The text is out-of-date, but can be updated much more rapidly than it can be rewritten from scratch." The contents of the book will soon be available via the perl.org Subversion server Many thanks to O'Reilly for this generous gift

On behalf of the Parrot team, I'm proud to announce Parrot 0.4.13 "Clifton." Parrot parrotcode.org is a virtual machine aimed at running all dynamic languages. Parrot 0.4.13 can be obtained via CPAN or follow the download instructions at http://parrotcode.org/source.html Parrot 0.4.13 News: Languages: Updated Lisp, Lua, PHP Python ABC, WMLScript, and Tcl Perl 6 passes all of the sanity tests. PGE supports latest Perl 6 grammar syntax.

On Saturday, 16 June 2007, please join us on IRC in #parrot to work on closing out as many RT tickets as possible in the parrot queue https://rt.perl.org/rt3/ This will help us get ready for the next release of parrot: 0.4.13, scheduled for Tuesday 19 June 2007. You'll find C, Parrot assembly, Perl, documentation, and plenty of tasks to go around. Core developers will be available most of the day

Since this update is so late, I'm taking the liberty of covering three months of Parrot work, rather than two. That means this report covers February through end of April of 2007. Parrot has been sticking to its new monthly release schedule, which means that we saw three releases in this grant period, 0.4.9, 0.4.10, and 0.4.11. The highlight of this period is the finalization of the object design marking

It's that time of year again--we need your bids in to host YAPC::NA in your town next summer. Most of the details for a bid are in my post from last year To re-iterate a few points: If you plan on bidding, folks from your group should really attend YAPC::NA this year to see how things work and maybe even help out. Get your bid ready early and we'll give

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 Because we're running a little late this time, submission deadline is June 8, 2007, voting starts immediately after. We will be awarding the grants by the beginning of July. Voting usually goes fairly quickly, so we don't anticipate a problem. First, please

I am pleased to announce that Shlomi Fish has completed his XML::RSS cleanup grant In his own words, Shlomi has summarised the work he's done and offers his thanks to those who helped him transform XML::RSS into a high quality tool for the community: This is a summary of a Perl Foundation XML::RSS grant, I've been doing. Its scope was for two or three months from 1 January, 2007 onwards,

Here's my first Help Wanted entry. SOAP::Lite needs your help. Byrne Reese has posted a good assessment of the state of the SOAP::Lite Read on for details. To start, SOAP::Lite works. That is, it works well for easy things and you can get it to work for complicated things. But it needs help and it's going to need more help in the near future. SOAP is becoming more and more