List of potential members of the TPF Ecosystem group or Advisory board

In "Grant request for fund-raising and promotional activities" I wrote about the need to create a list of 100 companies that would be the first prospects to contact regarding membership in the TPF Ecosystem Group or Advisory Board. If TPF decides to set that up.

Source of company names

Several people contacted me and sent me names of companies and I also looked at a number of obvious places. Just within a day or so I had a list of 200 companies. (but I got distracted by some of the comments on my grant proposal so I only blog about this now)

The most obvious companies are those that have been sponsoring one or more of the Perl related events in the last 2-3 years or that gave money directly to TPF. The former are listed on the web sites of the events. The latter - to some extent - are listed on the web site of TPF.

Then there are also the companies that make money using some Perl related product. e.g. WebGUI, Bricolage, Bugzilla, RT, and OTRS. For most of these products there are several companies providing services based on the product.

The biggest source of companies is of course jobs.perl.org. Companies that look for Perl developers obviously use Perl. Some of those might be even interested in helping Perl development financially.

There is another great source and that's the list of clients of the various Perl training companies. I have not harvested those lists yet as I already had twice as many as I was planning for and I think it would be better to do it in cooperation with the relevant training company.

There are many other places to look for companies, I think there must be a few thousands that might be relevant at some level but we have to focus on the ones that are most likely to see the benefit.

The companies that are already involved in the Perl community to some level and the companies that need Perl developers NOW.

I don't make the list public as it already contains contact info of a few people but it will be part of the CRM database of TPF. If they think it is important to start doing active fund-raising. If they are ready to pay for the time spent doing it and if they find me suitable for that job.

Update

In October 2010 the Perl Ecosystem Group was established.