Looking for Perl Ecosystem leader and event goer in the US and elsewhere

The comment of Alberto about my grant proposal was very disturbing to me for a few days but finally I managed to catch him online today and we had a chat.

One of the things that came out that is that I should clarify my intent:

Events

I hope that within 1-2 years the Perl community will have a presence on 30-50 non-perl events every year. Not only would that be physically impossible for me to attend all of them, it would also be very expensive and in some cases useless. So my plan was to participate on a few of them (along with several volunteers) and try to get others on the other events.

My plan was that I kick start the activity and then hand it over to others, closer to the various places and people who speak the local dialect. Those local leaders would do the local organization. They would also be compensated for their time just as I do.

As time passes more and more events will be organized by local volunteers and then we can probably stop paying for the central organizers. We can already see that people get organized to setup Perl presence on various events such as Devconf Russia and OSWC in Malaga, Spain. Jay Hannah also started to organize people to go to the Central Iowa Software Symposium and to Infotec in Omaha, NE. Not to mention Renee Baecker who organizes Perl presence on a number of events in Germany and Switzerland.

Fund-raising

I don't think we can do fund-raising in such a distributed way but there could be country or area specific people who are responsible for the fund-raising in their own country or area. They would also be paid for their time.

The search

I did not want to start with looking for more people for more "leaders" for this as we don't have the money to pay them but in the discussion Alberto suggested I should clarify this and ask if anyone would be interested?

Even if we cannot yet start it in such a split way we could discuss things and we could plan some things ahead.

I am writing this thinking about someone in the US, but if people from other areas or countries are interested please just substitute the name of your country.

I have slightly mixed the requirements of the "event organizer" and the "fund-raiser" but I still think about them as a mixture.

  • Enthusiastic about this who believes that we can actually raise the funds and spend them on Perl.
  • Thinks that the Perl community needs more promotion
  • Lives in the target area to make traveling cheaper.
  • The conference organizer needs to be able to participate on many events.
  • S/he needs to be able to "work the floor". Not only sitting behind the booth.
  • The fund raiser needs to be able to allocate at least one day a week (compensated). Not a few ours in the evenings as a large part of the work needs to be done in business hours talking to CTOs and alike
  • The person needs to be able to take the risk. If we cannot raise money we won't be paid.
  • We need a commitment of at least 6 months, even if the compensation is low due to lack of success in fund-raising.
  • Be able to talk to Python developers when they start their anti-Perl FUD, without punching them in the face.

That's it for now. So if you are interested, please reply to this post and/or e-mail me or ping me on IRC.

Update

In October 2010 the Perl Ecosystem Group was established.