I am pleased to announce that we have made a donation to the "Enlightened Perl Organisation's":http://www.enlightenedperl.org/ "Send-a-Newbie":http://www.send-a-newbie.enlightenedperl.org/index.html program. This community initiative was started last year by Edmund von der Burg and this year is being run by the "Enlightened Perl Organisation":http://www.enlightenedperl.org/index.html. Its aim is to provide financial assistance to community members who would love to attend "YAPC::Europe":http://conferences.yapceurope.org/ye2010/ and have never attended any large Perl conference before. Donations to the program

In an earlier "blog post":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2010/03/updating-the-grant-process.html I stated that the Grants Committee has been working to improve the grants process. This work, along with the feedback we received from the community, has lead to two major changes to our rules of operation. Historically we paid 50% of the grant up-front which led to situations where we paid grantees for little or no results. In future grants will be paid upon completion.

Dave Mitchell writes: As per my grant conditions, here is a report for the April period. I continued working my way through the list of tie bugs, then towards the end of the month, got sucked into spending quite a bit of time on a regexp bug. I also spent a bit of time revisiting some earlier fixes of mine where issues showed up once we got 5.12 released and

I am pleased to announce that "The Perl Foundation":http://www.perlfoundation.org/ and "Parrot Foundation":http://parrot.org/foundation have had 10 projects accepted for this year's "Google Summer of Code":http://socghop.appspot.com/. Student: Justin Hunter Project Title: "Rework Catalyst framework's instance initialisation code to provide more flexible and extensible inversion of control":http://socghop.appspot.com/gsoc/student_project/show/google/gsoc2010/tpf/t127230763632 Mentor: Florian Ragwitz Student: Tyler Curtis Project Title: "A PAST Optimization Framework for Parrot":http://socghop.appspot.com/gsoc/student_project/show/google/gsoc2010/tpf/t127230763715 Mentor: chromatic Student: Nat Tuck Project Title: "Hybrid Threads for Parrot":http://socghop.appspot.com/gsoc/student_project/show/google/gsoc2010/tpf/t127230763672 Mentor:

TPF is helping to sponsor a Perl Booth at "LinuxTag":http://www.linuxtag.org/2010/, Berlin, which takes place from the 9th 12th June. "Gabor":http://szabgab.com/blog/2010/04/1271829580.html and the events team are looking for more volunteers. If you are available to help out please add your details to the "event co-ordination":http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl5/index.cgi?events_2010_linuxtag_berlin page on the Perl Foundation wiki. #events

Heath Bair writes: "YAPC::NA 2010":http://conferences.mongueurs.net/yn2010/ is almost here! June 21st 23rd 2010 is quickly approaching and "Columbus.pm":http://columbus.pm.org/ is getting very excited. Hotel reservation information is available, dorm reservation details are up and ready, and the conference is quickly approaching. For everyone still looking for "YAPC::NA 2010":http://conferences.mongueurs.net/yn2010/ details here is what we have planned. The "conference":http://conferences.mongueurs.net/yn2010/wiki?node=ConferenceSummary will be held in the brand new beautiful The Ohio State Union. The main "dorm

Yesterday, Jesse Vincent announced the release of Perl 5.12.0. This is an exciting time for Perl 5 with development switching from feature-driven releases to time-based ones. You can download this release from http://search.cpan.org/dist/perl-5.12.0/ or your local CPAN mirror. A complete list of the changes can be found in perl5120delta. We would like to thank Jesse and the development team for all their hard work and we look forward to seeing

During March Dave Mitchell started working on the "Fixing Perl5 Core Bugs":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2010/02/grant-proposal-fixing-perl5-co.html grant. As requested he has been posting weekly reports to the p5p "mailing list":http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/ and has provided a monthly summary report for posting here. Dave Mitchell writes: A rough summary of activity in March: first, I tagged all new/open tickets with severity medium with one or more types At the same time, I closed any of those tickets

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

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

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.

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

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

David Mitchell has submitted a grant proposal, which if accepted would make use of a portion of the funding generously provided to TPF by "Booking.com":http://www.booking.com/. 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. Grant Title: Fixing perl5 core bugs Name: David Mitchell **Amount

I am pleased to announce that TPF will be represented for the first time this year at "CeBIT":http://www.cebit.de/homepage_e. The conference is taking place between the 2nd and 6th of March in Hannover, Germany. The events team is still looking for more volunteers to staff the booth. If you want to help out you'll find information on the "events mailing list":http://www.mail-archive.com/events@lists.perlfoundation.org/ and the "events wiki":http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl5/index.cgi?events.

Over the past few weeks discussions have been taking place on our Marketing list regarding different ways to promote Perl. One idea we are running with is promoting Perl at technical conferences where the main focus isn't Perl. Gabor has "announced":http://szabgab.com/blog/2009/12/1260171050.html that there will be a Perl booth at "FOSDEM":http://www.fosdem.org/2010/ in February next year. This is, hopefully, the first of many conferences that are targeted. To help co-ordinate our efforts

This year's Google Summer of Code has ended. We would like to thank "Jonathan Leto":http://leto.net/dukeleto.pl/, the mentors, and the students for all their hard work. Jonathan has written an excellent summary of the project, "Perls of Wisdom: The Perl Foundation Parrot's Google Summer of Code":http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2009/10/perls-of-wisdom-perl-foundation-parrots.html, and the code is also "available":http://code.google.com/p/google-summer-of-code-2009-tpf/downloads/list. We hope to participate in this project again next year and if you are interested in working with us