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