Showing Perl on non-Perl conferences, getting money from TPF for swag

On this weekend I'll be on FOSDEM along with several other Perl Mongers. In addition to just trying to enjoy the talks we'll be promoting Perl. I am really happy that The Perl Foundation was ready to provide us with $500 to buy conference swag we can give away.

Similarly, a month from now we will be present at CeBIT in Hannover, Germany where we will have a booth to promote Perl and Perl based projects. I've just heard from Karen Pauley that TPF agreed to provide us another $500 for further materials to give away on CeBIT.

This is awesome and this probably means that if you are ready to talk to people on non-perl related events telling them about Perl you could also get some money from TPF in order to have some hard material to give away.

For FOSDEM we are preparing some round tuits and a postcard listing the Perl events in Europe that will take place in the coming months.

For CeBIT we are also preparing some further marketing materials - more business oriented - that we will be able to hand out.

There are further ideas to prepare various fun promotional materials one can give away during a chat with a fellow developer and we have also discussed that we should have a Linux liveCD full of Perl applications ready to be used by anyone. (Also include Windows binaries in the form of Strawberry Perl for those using Windows)

Of course almost none of the the above is my work. There are several people involved in the preparation: Rich Sands organized the tuits and the postcards for FOSDEM, Salve J. Nilsen is working and on community intro cards, Renee Backer is working hard on the materials for CeBIT just to thank a few of them.

We are also expecting some help from the Enlightened Perl Organization (EPO) as they are preparing beer-mats to give away.

Getting involved

Most of the conversation about this is done on the events mailing list and some data is collected on the TPF wiki. If you would like to help in preparing the materials or if you'd are planning to attend a non-perl event and would like to have some fun or business oriented material to give away, please join us on the events mailing list to discuss the details. You can find information on the TPF wiki.