The Perl Foundation is supporting the "Oslo QA Hackathon":http://perl-qa.hexten.net/wiki/index.php/Oslo_QA_Hackathon_2008 which is taking place this weekend. For past events, like "Chicago":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2006/11/chicago_perl_hackathon_a_rousi.html and "The Netherlands":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2007/03/european_perl_hackathon_result.html, we provided cash to cover costs. For Oslo, the organizers were set with the venue, but really wanted to bring in people from around the world. So we agreed to support the hackathon with some directed travel grants to David Golden and brian foy. brian is blogging

If you're a frequent visitor, you may have noticed that the blog lost some of the right-hand links and resources for a while. A recent Movable Type upgrade scrambled things for a bit, but I think I've got it sorted out now. My complete lack of familiarity with MT made this much more difficult than it probably should have been, but I now know much more about MT than I

Welcome, once again, to the Yet Another Perl Conference, North America Call For Venue! The 2009 YAPC::NA marks the 10th anniversary for YAPC. Wow, 10 years of YAPC! This year we've decided to try something a little different. After some discussion and feedback, we've decided to take an approach similar to YAPC::EU. We're putting out the request for bids now, with a June 1 deadline. This gives the Conferences Committee

I'm happy to announce we've successfully concluded our recent call for new people to fill several vacant positions in TPF. Our newest members are: Karen Pauley, Steering Committee Chair Josh McAdams, Public Relations Jeremy Fluhmann, Conferences Committee Chair We're very excited to have some new people bring their energy and ideas to the table. I'd also like to thank Andy Lester, our outgoing PR person, for all of his PR

As reported on the "YAPC::NA site":http://yapc.org/America, the call for participation has been extended. The original closing date was March 15, but some people asked for an extension and seemed only fair to share the extension with everyone. The new deadline is March 31, 2008.

First, I'm not a lawyer and I'm not even particularly well versed in all of the issues surrounding open source licensing, the Artistic License, and copyright law. However, I am a member of The Perl Foundation and part of our mission is to support both versions of the Artistic License. As many readers of this blog already know, there is a court case in the federal district court in San

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

A while back, around November 2007, there was "some discussion":http://use.perl.org/~Alias/journal/34801 about performance problems with rt.cpan.org to the point that some found it to be almost unusable. I bring this up here because there were some suggestions that perhaps TPF could buy some new hardware. If you scroll to the bottom, you'll see Jesse Vincent jumped in and said he thought the performance wasn't a hardware problem and he could make

Thanks to some help from Will Willis and Jeremy Fluhmann, of the Perl Foundation conferences committee, yapc.org has a few new items. Specifically, we've included ads from the "Perl community ad server ":http://adserver.szabgab.com/ provided by Gabor Szabo and a new Workshops page that describes how to organize a workshop and what TPF can do to help.

A bunch of new requests for "Act":http://act.mongueurs.net/ -hosted conference sites have gone in to the Act developers and each has offered to update translation files. This is great news as it provides even more Perl events, keeps the Act translation files up-to-date, and it shows the investment by people all over the world to keep Perl vibrant. It also shows the world-wide reach of the Perl community. Some of the

Over the past few months, I've been working with Kurt to evaluate LedgerSMB a Perl-based accounting system that we thought we might be able to start using for our Perl Foundation accounting. So far, it looks promising and we're continuing our evaluation on a demo install. I've been looking for an open source package because we want the flexibility to integrate with Act, the conference software used by many Perl

As anyone visiting yapc.org in the past will tell you, it was in desperate need of some TLC. I drew some momentum from YAPC::NA this summer and finally gave it a facelift. There's more work to do, but I think it's a big improvement. The front page is built based on a feed from the Perl Community Calendar maintained by brian foy in Google Calendar. If you want your event

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

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.