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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

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

Here's my first Help Wanted entry. SOAP::Lite needs your help. Byrne Reese has posted a good assessment of the state of the SOAP::Lite Read on for details. To start, SOAP::Lite works. That is, it works well for easy things and you can get it to work for complicated things. But it needs help and it's going to need more help in the near future. SOAP is becoming more and more

I often hear this: "I'd get involved in Perl, but all the cool stuff is done and there's no room to make a name for myself. No one needs another DBI module..." or even: "All the cool kids are using because they don't have CPAN yet and they can become the uber-programmer for the cool modules." Well, to these I say, "Nonsense!" There is a ton of work to be

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

The first European Perl Hackathon has successfully concluded. They ended up with 16 registered attendees from 6 different countries. Read on for more details. The total cost to The Perl Foundation was 468.71 euros, and you can read about what they got done on the successes page Work was done on Parrot, Perl, Act, CPAN6, and a few other things. You can find some additional info here: Flickr Spaanse Filosoof

I was checking out Wikibooks today and noticed that one of the "hot picks" is a wikibook on Haskell Looks like it might be a good way to get your feet wet and maybe help out the Perl 6 development effort.

Details are now available for the European Perl Hackathon in Arnhem, the Netherlands, from 2 4 March, 2007. Space is limited for this one and it's coming up soon, so don't wait if you're interested. From the organizers: Familiarity with the featured projects is not required; you need only bring a laptop and a willingness to join in. Although there is no fee to attend the hackathon, you are required

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.

It seems the Chicago hackathon organized by Andy Lester and Pete Krawczyk and sponsored by the Perl Foundation has sparked some interest from other groups. We think these events are a great way to support Perl, use your donations effectively, and keep things rolling on various active projects. Now we need some ideas on how we should keep things going. I think hackathons will largely be regional events. This is

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

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