Marketing BOF at YAPC::EU 2009

Thanks to Dave Cross and Ovid for organizing the marketing BOF during YAPC and the notes Ovid made later. The fact that there were more than 50 people in the room made it clear people are interested in the subject.

Unfortunately that number of people made it impossible to have a discussion but I think just the presence of so many people show we have to move on. I hope some of them will come forward and write about their opinions. I think the more people talking about this the better.

As I don't know the names of most of the people present let me just write down some of the objectives people mentioned. I think it ranged from

Make sure Perl is not banned in my organization
through
Bringing the excitement back to Perl
all the way to
Turn Perl into an accepted application development language such as Java or C#.
(this was me).

None of these are really measurable objectives so we will need to find a few of those as well but I think this is a good start. I'd be glad to see what other objectives people can write down. So go ahead, please add your comments.

Market research

Ovid kept mentioning the market research and Richard Dice suggested a matrix idea that sounded quite good. I am much more convinced now in the need of some such market research and I hope Ovid will be able to take upon himself and push it forward or hand it over to someone who will do it in a reasonably short timeframe.

Actions

Some people suggested all kinds of actions that seem to be totally reasonable regardless of any market research. Some of the ideas were

• Write more blog entries - which just strengthens the idea of the Iron Man
• Write articles and get them published in other places - such articles need more work than a blog entry but this should help us break out from the echo chamber
  Maybe the rules of IronMan could be amended so any Perl related article in one of the magazines counts as to be worth 5 weeks of blogging. Can someone come up with a list of publications that might be interesting?
• Create really nice web sites - Many people have already written before me so I only repeat it but we have to make sure our central web sites (e.g. use.perl.org, perl.org) look live and modern without being distracting.
• Write exciting application in Perl and show them to everyone - These can be web applications or you could try and write a game using SDL such as the Space Invaders by Thomas Klausner.
  Or it could be something completely different.