An unofficial welcome to the news.perlfoundation.org blog site
Thu, 01-Dec-2005 by
Richard Dice
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<h2>Disclaimer</h2>
This might be the first news.perlfoundation.org blog posting entered. It's not the "inaugural announcement", though. Andy Lester, the TPF SC PR guy, is crafting that now and a link to it will be posted to all the usual locations when it's ready.
<h3>What this is all about</h3>
This blog is hosted at The Perl Foundation. We hope to open up more communication with the Perl community by talking, mostly informally, here.
As for what I'm doing typing here...
I've been involved there indirectly for a year, more directly for about 3 weeks as the new Steering Committee Chairman. One of the things that we've been talking about is how to be more transparent to the community and approachable, so we're setting up blogs so that we can ramble about what we're up for TPF and generally in life, too. It also gives readers the chance to chat with us here about anything we mention that might catch your eye.
<h3>Who I am</h3>
I'm just another Perl hacker, living and working in Toronto. I'm in my early (verging on mid) 30s, married, a recent homeowner. My undergrad degree is in applied maths, but maybe it's in astronomy. Depends on how I feel on any given day. I also did my MBA at U of T. (The 'T' is Toronto, of course.)
I've been working with Perl since 1994, coming to it from a Unix & C background from undergrad astrophysics hacking days. My work since then has almost always involved Perl in one way or another. I've hacked it for companies large and small, done some independent consulting, worked as a Perl corporate trainer, done a fair deal of conference speaking about Perl too. I've also contributed to a few Perl books.
I've been active with the Montreal and the Toronto Perl Mongers. In Toronto I organized Damian Conway lecture series in 2001, 2002 and 2004. I was also the conference chairman for YAPC::NA 2005 in Toronto. I covered a lot on this topic in an interview I gave for Perl.com a few months ago -- <a href=http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2005/05/12/rdice.html>
http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2005/05/12/rdice.html
</a>
<h3>What I do with The Perl Foundation</h3>
As I mentioned a bit earlier, I'm the Steering Committee Chairman. The Steering Committee is essentially composed of the heads of each working group. (Sometimes these are groups of one, sometimes they're bigger than that.) I like to call us the "working hands" of the Perl Foundation. While the executive level makes policy, the steering committee is responsible for jobs being done. My job is to help translate high-level policy into plans that the working groups can execute.
<h3>Steering Committee Activities</h3>
I'll briefly mention a few threads of conversation that have been going on in the Steering Committee lately.
<ul>
<li> We got the blog off the ground! (Thanks Robert, thanks Ask.)
<li> We're trying to get ourselves on a regular reporting schedule, so that
people have a better idea of the things we're trying to accomplish
<li> Conference organizers (especially ones outside of North America) have been'
asking us if we're able to send a representative to their conferences;
we're trying to work out how we can do this
<li> We discussed the use of the TPF logo in conjuncture with non-TPF projects
and the idea of a "this project blessed by TPM" program
<li> Prompted by a German Wikipedia entry regarding TPF, we talked about
making an English language one too (Jim Brandt put up a first version)
<li> We've talked about ways that the SC can hold conference calls (i.e. voice)
<li> We talked about a posting to news.cnet.com regarding a flaw in a Perl
application (webmin) and what was being done to fix the app, fix Perl,
and communicate the issues to people
<li> We've talked about how we can make more people aware of the wealth of
Perl community / culture sources they can tap into to improve their
Perl skills (e.g. a "perlcommunity" POD)
<li> We're in the process of reviewing the projects that happened through
the Summer of Code and trying to optimize our processes for participating in
future years
<li> Allison presented the draft work on the Artistic License 2.0
</ul>
It's been an active first 3 weeks on the TPF SC for me...
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