The yapc.org site is now re-registered and available again. Actually, it was back up yesterday but with DNS caching it was hard to get to the real site if you'd already tried earlier Sorry for any inconvenience.

If you've recently surfed over to yapc.org, you'll notice you're not getting the home page you expect. The domain inadvertently expired and we're currently working on renewing it. It turns out the reminders were going to an inactive email account. We're "not the first":http://www.whoisfinder.com/news/200402/washpost-renewal-failure.html to miss a renewal, but it's an inconvenience nonetheless. In the meantime, many of the upcoming Perl events are hosted via Act!, and they keep links

This is a reminder that we plan on closing the open self-nomination period for the TPF Steering Committee Chair, Conference Committee Chair, and PR positions tomorrow. If you're on the fence, it's time to decide. Again, to participate, send me email at cbrandt at perlfoundation dot org and I'll send you an invite to the elections wiki we have set up.

Have you ever wanted to get involved in The Perl Foundation, but didn't know how? Well, now's your chance. I'm pleased to announce open self-nominations for the following TPF roles: "Steering Committee Chair":http://www.perlfoundation.org/steering_committee_chair "Conferences Committee Chair":http://www.perlfoundation.org/conferences_committee_roles "Public Relations":http://www.perlfoundation.org/public_relations You can follow the links above to read descriptions of each of the positions. If you think you're a good fit for one or more of them, send me an email at

In case you missed it, here's the official press release from YEF regarding YAPC::Europe next year. Given the numbers at YAPC::Europe this year, it looks like they'll need a good-sized venue. From: YEF Venue Committee Subject: Copenhagen, Denmark to host YAPC::Europe 2008 The YAPC::Europe Foundation is pleased to announce that Copenhagen, Denmark has been chosen as the site for YAPC::Europe 2008, the ninth European YAPC. Copenhagen faced stiff competition from

Frozen Perl 2008 will be a one-day workshop in sunny Minneapolis on Saturday, February 16, 2008. We've officially opened up our Call for Speakers and we're looking forward to your submissions. Our workshop theme is "Perl in Practice", so practical submissions are encouraged. Andy mentioned in an earlier post that registration isn't open and would "definitely be under $100". Registration is still not open, but I wanted to add that

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.

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.

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!

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

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

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

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

There are so many Perl events around the world now that I thought I'd take a shot at categorizing how they all relate to one another. I thought this might help people thinking about attending something for the first time, people thinking about presenting something and also people thinking about organizing an event. For people thinking about becoming more involved in the Perl community, this presents a sort of ladder

With so many Perl events going on around the world, I often wish I could take a quick peek to see what's going on at each one. I watch the conference sites and wikis when I can and I watch use.perl, but not everyone posts info there. I think what I really want is a planet yapc aggregator like planet perl that could pull in blogs tagged with pre-arranged tags.

Just announced Note that based on our schedule, the call for venue for YAPC::NA will be coming soon as well. With preparations for YAPC::Europe::2007 well underway in Vienna, it is time for the YAPC::Europe Venue Committee to consider suitable hosts for the 2008 conference. Any dedicated group interested in hosting YAPC::Europe::2008 should send a brief statement of intent to venue@yapceurope.org A full and complete application should then be sent to

In case you haven't seen it elsewhere registration for YAPC::NA is now open One really cool part about this is that it takes the Act! -hosted conference site to the next point of integration, which is accepting payments through the Perl Foundation's payment site This fulfills a large part of my call last year for a conference system I mentioned that Act was a start, but it wasn't open-source and

It's the time of year to gather up all the cool stuff you've been working on and get it ready to show everyone else. The calls are out there for several conferences right now: YAPC::Asia Nordic Perl Workshop YAPC::NA YAPC::EU OSCON Wow, that's a lot of Perl to talk about.

A while ago I blogged that I really wanted a Perl-based conference toolkit that YAPCs and other conferences could use so they didn't spend time hacking on the website when they should be organizing the conference. Well, the folks who work on ACT have been working to fulfill some of the items I presented and earlier today they officially announced that it is open source with a dual GPL/Artistic license.

Perl Foundation board member, conference organizer and Perl oldbie Nat Torkington is interviewed in this article from Linux Format

Long-time readers might remember my plea for a conference module to allow YAPC organizers to organize rather than hack the website. Well, I'm very pleased to announce that I was able to get in touch with the YAPC Europe folks and the ACT folks and they have agreed to work on making ACT the default YAPC web site framework. One of the main issues with ACT was that it hadn't

The Perl Foundation in conjunction with the YAPC::Europe Foundation are happy to announce Houston and Vienna as the venues for next year's North American and European YAPCs. The votes were close again this year for YAPC::NA and we had three excellent bids from Boston, Houston, and Philadelphia. With the evaluations complete, the Perl Foundation's Conferences Committee has selected Houston, Texas, as the venue for YAPC::NA::2007. The proposal was a joint

The Chicago Perl Mongers and The Perl Foundation are proud to announce the Fall 2006 Chicago Hackathon, the weekend of November 10-12, 2006 in suburban Crystal Lake, IL. It will be a round-the-clock weekend of programming on Perl-related projects with your colleagues in the open source community. Dozens of programmers from the open source community in the midwest, as well as others from around the US, will be getting together

I have posted all the bids. If you seen any horrible errors in my cut-and-paste, let me know perlfoundation.org or post a comment.

The Boston.pm bid follows: Update: Applied some formatting updates from Bob Clancy to address cut-off columns on some tables. NAME SYNOPSIS CRITERIA Estimated Costs Site 1: Northeastern University Introduction Meeting Room Costs Banquet Costs Possible University Staff Costs A/V costs Speaker Costs Other Costs Site 2: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Readily Accessible Location Public Transportation

The Philadelphia.pm bid follows: YAPC::Philadelphia 2007 Overview Why Philadelphia? Because Philadelphia is less than an 8 hour drive for one third of the nation's population. Because it is home of the cheesesteak. And most importantly because we are hosting YAPC just before Independence Day, a day the city participated in creating. Each year Philadelphia celebrates with more than a week of activities at the Sunoco Welcome America festival complete with

The Houston.pm bid follows: Overview Proposed Dates Facilities Location Rice University University of Houston Downtown University of Houston Internet Access Cost/Affordability Low Cost Experience Attendee Cost Conference Budget Audio/Visual and Equipment Other Fees and Services Accommodations Food Service/Catering Dining Catering Internet Access Alternative Accommodations Transportation Getting to Houston

I think the title says it all. August 1 is the deadline, so get your hosting bids polished up and submitted. As discussed here previously, once the call for venue is officially closed

As spelled out in my original Call for Venue August 1st is the closing date. At this year's YAPC::NA, the YAPC BOF drew some interested parties from Texas who were considering a bid. I also believe Boston.pm were going to re-submit, but I haven't heard anything from them recently. Did you attend this year and have a blast? Can you keep YAPC::NA going? We need you to make it happen

Jeremy Fluhmann responded to my Call for Venue post saying he'd be interested to see the other bids when they get posted. This brings up a good point: when should the bids be made public? My thought was that they would be made public after the Conferences Committee has selected the host group. This allows people to see what we voted on and it's a good reference for next year.

Can't figure out how you're going to get to Chicago for YAPC::NA this year and wish it was in your city? Want to meet Perl luminaries, but aren't sure how? Want to contribute to Perl without writing a new MVC framework? If you answer yes to at least two of these questions, you might be just the person we want to host YAPC next year. But you can't host if

Josh McAdams and Pete Krawczyk have just released the YAPC::NA 2006 schedule on the conference website. This year there will be four rooms of talks going on for the three days of the conference. We are lucky enough to have both Larry Wall and Damian Conway giving keynote addresses. Of course, there will be a lot of Perl 6, Pugs, and Parrot talks, was well as the usual barrage of

The Pittsburgh Perl Mongers are pleased to announce The PITTSBURGH PERL WORKSHOP a one-day, low-cost conference on Saturday, September 23, 2006. This year's theme is "Perl at Work." The Pittsburgh Perl Workshop is modeled after the highly successful Perl workshops held in Europe over the last several years. The day is designed to provide you with a comfortable, exciting, and enjoyable learning experience. The Workshop

As TPF Conferences Chair, I try to help eager, excited organizers put together a YAPC. Ever since I ran YAPC in Buffalo in 2004 I've wanted to put together something called Conference::Toolkit that would solve all of the YAPC web-site needs. Well, given my TPF duties, I honestly don't have the time to do this right. And I want it done right. I want to put together the best conference

I've been remiss in noting that YAPC::Asia::2006 is right around the corner. But if you're in Tokyo and want to go, it appears you're a bit too late. They've sold out! They have a great line-up of talks and speakers If you're already registered, have fun!

This year YAPC::Brasil will be held April 19-22, 2006 in Porto Alegre/RS, Brazil in conjunction with the 7th International Free Software Forum From what I've heard, FISL

In Toronto last year, there was a pre-YAPC hack-a-thon that brought together many of the Perl 6 coders in person, which can be very productive. TPF provided $600 US to cover costs, and as you can tell by the amount, the group worked as low-budget as possible. Right now, the week before OSDC Israel they are

Sometimes people might question the tangible value of going to a conference. You're out of the office for a few days, so you lose that work time. You attend a ton of sessions and you're drinking from a fire hose, so after about half a day you feel totally overwhelmed. Does any of it stick? I can tell you for sure that it does. The other day someone in my

This year the Toronto folks managed to record audio and video for the YAPC::NA conference sessions, as reported on use.perl.org After a few months of availability, Fulko Hew has shared his stats with me: 7 mail-orders 111 CD downloads 953 DVD downloads private duplications 4 Terabytes Given that the DVD was 4.23 Gig, that's a lot of bits, both for the sender and receiver. I don't think that

As I mentioned previously, I recently attended the Gartner Open Source Summit. While there I participated in a new type of session Gartner has started moderating called a round table session, and I think it's a really cool idea. When you attend a Gartner conference, you are eligible to sign up for one-on-one sessions with the Gartner analysts. This is a nice perk, since you usually have to pay for

Last week I attended the first annual Gartner Open Source Summit Gartner is a major IT market researcher and consultant, specifically for large businesses. The fact that this conference exists speaks volumes for the penetration of open source in all sorts of IT shops. OSS hung under the radar for quite a while because it doesn't show up in any of the traditional data that analysts use to measure market

Below is the bid submitted by the Vancouver group. Location: Vancouver, Canada. Located on the west coast of Canada, Vancouver is a novel choice for YAPC. Vancouver is the largest city in the province of British Columbia and the third largest city in Canada. It's surrounded by water on three sides and is nestled alongside the Coast Mountain Range. Vancouver is home to spectacular natural scenery and a bustling metropolitan

Below is the bid submitted by the Chicago group. Chicago was selected to host YAPC::NA::2006. Overview Who we are Why Chicago? Dates and Location Facilities Facility Location Facility Layout and Capacity A/V and Internet arrangements Cost Summary Individual Costs: $245 Travel Conference Fees Per Person: $55 Conference: Possible! Accommodations Low-Cost Arrangements Hotels Transportation

Below is the bid submitted by the Boston group. NAME SYNOPSIS CRITERIA Estimated Costs Site 1: University of Massachusetts: Boston Campus Site 2: Simmons College Site 3: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Readily Accessible Location Public Transportation Facilities UMass Boston Simmons MIT Internet Access from Conference Location Internet Access from Accomodations New Location Affordable

I was previously posting TPF conferences-related information to my personal blog on use.perl.org. Now we have this excellent TPF blog for TPF info, so I'll be posting here. As I said in a previous post all of the bids this year were quite good. To give a little more transparency into the voting process, you can see the anonymous vote breakdowns below: Boston Chicago Vancouver 2840 2980 2690