Following on from the success of his recent XML::RSS grant Shlomi Fish has been awarded another grant to create a reusable parser for the syntax of MediaWiki the popular open-source wiki engine that powers sites such as Wikipedia and Wikiquote. The deliverables of the grant are a CPAN module and a Kwiki plugin for using this MediaWiki syntax in Kwiki wikis, enabling people to create Perl projects that can parse

The Minneapolis Perl Mongers have announced the date of their one-day Perl workshop. Mark your calendars now for Frozen Perl 2008 February 16th, 2008. Frozen Perl will be an all-day workshop held at the University of Minnesota. Pricing has not yet been announced, but I'm sure it will be under $100. If, like me, you found it to be a bit too far to get to the Pittsburgh Perl Workshop

Chicago.pm has stepped up to be first group in recent years to bid for a repeat YAPC, and in close voting they nudged out Columbus for the opportunity to do it. Jonathan Rockway will be the head organizer, with support from previous Chicago organizers Josh McAdams and Pete Krawczyk. Both groups submitted strong bids and it was a tough choice. Watch for more announcements with final dates and other details.

After a running the Perl Foundation Grant Committee for almost two years, Ovid has decided he needs to step down. Naturally, this means we need someone to step into this role and we're hoping to get new people into the Perl Foundation. Running the Grant Committee is a very important volunteer position with specific responsibilities. These include: Every three months, putting out a call for grant proposals and organizing

The 2007 White Camel awards for contributions to the Perl community were awarded at OSCON. Norbert E. Grüner, for years of service helping to organize conferences and workshops throughout Europe, as chair of The YAPC::Europe Foundation. Allison Randal, as leader and manager of Perl 6 Parrot, plus her revisions to Perl's Artistic License. Tim O'Reilly, for O'Reilly Media's long-time support of the Perl community, back to to 1997 with the

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