The Perl Foundation
The Perl Foundation is dedicated to the advancement of the Perl programming language through open discussion, collaboration, design, and code.
The Perl Foundation coordinates the efforts of numerous grass-roots Perl-based groups including:
- International Yet Another Perl Conferences
- Holds the copyright on Perl 6 and Parrot.
- perl.org
- Perl Mongers
- PerlMonks
The Perl Foundation is dedicated to the advancement of the Perl programming language through open discussion, collaboration, design, and code. The Perl Foundation is a non-profit, 501(c)(3) organization based in Holland, Michigan.
November 26, 2005
Richard Dice elected Perl Foundation steering committee chair
Richard Dice has been elected to chair the Perl Foundation Steering Committee. Richard fills the vacancy left by Bill Odom when he became TPF President. The election was between Jim Brandt and Richard, who have both done great work for the community, most notably organizing YAPC::NA 2004 in Buffalo and YAPC::NA 2005 in Toronto, respectively.
Richard has clear ideas for where TPF should be headed. Richard's draft of a TPF mission statement:
TPF exists to promote Perl to people and organizations so that they can benefit from all of what is available within the Perl community.
Because we want to help.
If we are successful then the result will be the growth of the Perl language and community -- a positive feedback loop to the benefit of all.
Richard sees this as fitting into four specific areas of activity:
- Introduce Perl, and foster its use, to IT professionals and amateurs of all stripes (programmers, sysadmins, students, scientists, engineers and more)
- Work to create a space within the IT and business world that is amenable to the use of Perl
- Provide support to people working on key technological (and sometimes cultural) pieces of Perl
- Lead the Perl culture -- by providing a good example
In the coming months, watch http://perlfoundation.org for more specific plans.
November 22, 2005
YAPC::NA 2006 in Chicago, June 26-28th
The Perl Foundation is proud to announce YAPC::NA 2006 in Chicago. From June 26th to 28th, hundreds of Perl programmers will descend upon the Illinois Institute of Technology for three days of conference sessions and community, including some of the biggest names in the Perl community.
Each year, Yet Another Perl Conference offers an affordable, accessible conference put together by grass-roots volunteers, as part of the work done by The Perl Foundation. This year, a team led by Josh McAdams, publisher of the popular Perlcast podcast, and Pete Krawczyk, are putting together another great conference. McAdams noted, "We have a lot of big plans for the conference and a lot of expectations to live up to. With low costs, a central location, and a wealth of local Perl talent, be ready for a YAPC to remember."
The official website, yapcchicago.org, will have the latest information about the plans.
November 9, 2005
New Parrot Grant Manager
With my stepping up to head the grant committee, I've had a number of issues I've needed to address. One of the most pressing has been finding a dedicated grant manager for the Parrot project. While I've temporarily filled this role, I have too many other pressing tasks to accomplish to be able to give this role the attention it needs. NLnet has been a huge supporter and we've needed to communicate with them on a regular basis about the Parrot development. We determined that we needed to meet the following criteria for a grant manager:
- An individual who is both well-known and respected in the Perl community.
- Deep knowledge of Perl and has paid attention to the Parrot project.
- No conflict of interests (for example, this ruled out Jesse Vincent, the project manager).
- Was foolish, er, courageous enough to take on this challenge.
Congratulations and many thanks to Dave on helping out! Viva la Parrot!
Cheers, Ovid
October 16, 2005
New President, Steering Committee Members Announced
Bill Odom has been appointed president of The Perl Foundation, and four new members have been elected to its Steering Committee, the Perl Foundation announced today.
Allison Randal, president since 2002, is stepping aside to take a more active role in Perl 6 and Parrot development. "I endorse Bill wholeheartedly," she said. "Bill is calm in a crisis, follows through on what he starts, and inspires others to do great work. I can't think of anyone better suited to lead TPF through our next steps of growth."
Bill started working with TPF at OSCON in 2004 when he organized the exhibit hall booth and took charge of the auction. Soon after, he was elected to chair the Steering Committee.
There are also big changes in the Steering Committee that does the day-to-day work of TPF. Four new members have been elected.
The Grants Commmittee will be led by Curtis "Ovid" Poe, who has already distinguished himself as a grant manager for TPF. His experience and dedication, most recently with the Google Summer of Code / Perl Foundation grant recipients, has shown how valuable Curtis is to TPF.
Long-time TPF member Jim Brandt is stepping into the role of Conferences Committee chair. He assembled and managed the incredible team that hosted the very successful YAPC::NA in Buffalo in 2004, and has used that experience to help others organize subsequent conferences.
New public relations coordinator Andy Lester, while new to TPF, is no stranger to the Perl community. He's well-known as an outspoken, steadfast advocate of Perl, and is definitely the right person to provide "Public Relations the Perl way" -- honest, forthright, and useful information, as the community rightly demands.
Kirsten Jones may be a new name to many, but brings a wealth of experience to her role as the webmaster of perlfoundation.org. A self-described "serial volunteer," she's lent her considerable skills and energy to a variety of organizations over the past few years.
TPF president Bill Odom said "I'm very pleased with the results of these elections. We're fortunate to have such capable people willing to volunteer their time and talents for the Perl community, and I'm looking forward to working with all of them."
August 2, 2005
2005 White Camel Awards
The Perl Foundation is proud to announce the winners of the 2005 White Camel awards. The awards were announced today, by David H. Adler at the 2005 O'Reilly Open Source Convention in Portland, Oregon.
- Stas Bekman
- Stas Bekman has been a tireless advocate for large-scale applications in Perl and, of course, mod_perl. He went from an occasional asker of questions on the mod_perl list to answering many questions, and had the forethought to write it all down, creating and maintaining the mod_perl guide which quickly grew to over 600 pages. Recently, he made himself available for free talks to Perl Mongers groups during a trip covering North America, Australia, the Middle East and elsewhere.
- Eric Cholet
- Eric Cholet may be familiar to you as the technical manager of the YAPC Europe Foundation and as co-author of A Conference Toolkit (ACT), which has been used to administer several European YAPCs. More importantly, though, he works behind the scenes at perl.org, moderating the mailing lists we all use. If you've noticed the absence of spam on a perl.org mailing list, filters help, but Eric catches what falls through.
- Andy Lester
- Andy Lester is one of the prominent voices advocating testing and quality assurance. He has written extensively on the importance of good testing and maintains qa.perl.org. He is also the creator and project leader of Phalanx, which is devoted to improving tests and test coverage of Perl and CPAN modules to maintain quality as development continues. Phalanx encourages interaction between programmers by having groups of developers work together to improve test coverage on the most used CPAN modules.
July 25, 2005
Summer of Code: Refactor Pirate...
The Perl Foundation took part in Google's Summer of Code program and managed to get 8 projects funded. This is the eighth in a series of informal interviews finding out more information about these projects. Up now is Curtis Hall with "Refactor Pirate so that the intermediate code emitter is independent of the Python parse tree (AST)".
