Grants to invite speakers to (non-Perl) events

One of the objectives of the Perl Ecosystem Group is to promote Perl and through that to help our member companies to find more Perl developers.

That's one of the main reasons we ask them to give us their money.

In order to do this we would like to encourage the participation of Perl Mongers at various non-Perl events where they can reach out to the other developers who don't know enough about Perl or who have misconceptions about Perl. See a list of potential events.

For this, the Perl Ecosystem Group offers grants to invite Perl speakers to those events.

We've already sponsored SawyerX - one of the core Dancer developers - to participate at FOSDEM. He gave there a talk about Moose and a talk about Dancer. Both in front of 70-90 people. He was also able to meet face-to-face the other core members of Dancer which will further improve their cooperation.

We are also sponsoring chromatic to attend SCALE in Los Angeles at the end of February and to give a talk there on how to Take Advantage of Modern Perl.

So far these were initiated by us but the idea is that local Perl Mongers could suggest - in private - speakers who they would like to see at a conference near to where they live. We discuss this, contact the speaker and if s/he is interested then s/he will submit a talk proposal, we pay the expenses and everyone will be happy.

Of course we don't (yet) have a lot of money so we will have to be very selective but we would like to get this rolling.

Even the rules are not totally clear to us regarding events and speakers but we have a couple of directions:

• Preference will be given to larger and more relevant conferences. (Though determining what is relevant still needs work) (size, topic)
• Our emphasis is on non-Perl events to reach other people who do not yet attend Perl events.
• Preference will be given to PM groups that are going to setup a perl booth/stand at the event.
• Preference to events where some of the local Perl Mongers also submit talks.
• Preference to PMs that could also offer accommodation to the visiting speaker. Such arrangement both helps save money and increases the cooperation between the speaker and the Host Monger.
• We still have to have budget for that...

So what do you think? Would you like to hear and meet a Perl speaker who does not usually visit your town? Would you want to promote Perl or your local Perl Monger group?

PEG mailing lists

Let me also remind you that the Perl Ecosystem Group has two public mailing lists:

We will use PEG news to send out announcements.

The PEG public discussion list will allow all the members of the Perl community - regardless of their affiliation to the growing number of Perl related organizations - to discuss what they think PEG should work on.