Grant request for fund-raising and promotional activities

Last week my grant request was published. There are several comments already and I hope that within two weeks the board of The Perl Foundation will be ready to approve it.

Let me outline what are going to be my first steps once the grant request gets approved:

1. I'll go over and refresh the events list. I'll ask the help of the various Perl Monger groups to list even more events. These can be events they plan to attend anyway or events that are near by where they live even if they don't (yet) plan to attend. Once we have an updated list I'll try to analyze what type are the events, how many people are expected and what kind of people. Then we can decide at which event are we going to have presence of Perl and how can we accomplish that.

2. I'll want to create a list of about 100 companies that are potential members of the Perl Ecosystem group. For this too I will need the help of the general Perl community. I will need to locate companies that have some serious dependency on Perl. Primarily the companies that are already giving sponsorship to Perl events, but not only those. We will need to establish contact with many other companies even if they are not yet connected to the community. After all one of the main objectives of the group is to setup and improve the communication between companies using Perl and the Perl community.

3. Once the initial list is established I will start building up contacts with the companies. More specifically I'll start talking to CTOs or other managers who are related to the Perl developers in their company. That will be done via members of the Perl community who work at the specific companies or via LinkedIn or Xing or cold calling if I cannot find an easier path.

Actually the first two items can already be started even before the approval of the grant. So let's see what can we do in the next couple of days?

Can you spend 5 minutes going over the list of events we already have adding entries for events you know about that are not yet listed? Just list every past or future event you know about.

Can you spend another minute and send me the name of the company you are working for? Even if you think the company won't give a dime I would like to list them so I start with a larger list and then focus. (The list of companies will NOT be public.) Besides, who knows, I might be able to convince them on the importance of such membership.

If you really have time then please read the grant proposal and add your comment to it. The TPF board will want to get input from many people to see if the Perl community can accept the concept of me being paid for fund-raising and for promotional work.

Update

In October 2010 the Perl Ecosystem Group was established.