The Perl Foundation, the Perl Weekly, and marketing
During the recent Conference in the Cloud 2020 there was a session titled Improving the perception of Perl and Raku - Marketing.
I did not participate, but since that event several people approached me with various suggestions using the Perl Weekly newsletter in the marketing effort of The Perl Foundation. Surprisingly every time it was not an "official approach".
In itself that's strange, but I don't know what does that mean?
Does that mean that the people who run TPF or at least the marketing committee have not decided if they would be interested in anything and what is their stand on the issue?
I can understand it is harder for a committee to decide about anything than an individual and if I say no, then they don't even have to discuss it.
The goal, as I was told, is to show people who visit perl.org that there is activity in Perl.
The first inquiry was to:
Merge the Perl Weekly into perl.org
The question was simple: how much money I'd like to get for the Perl Weekly to be moved to perl.org. That was strange. I've never heard of TPF offering money for services. Back, many years ago when I offered my services it was quite plainly rejected by the Perl community. I wonder how would people feel if the editors of the Perl Weekly received money to keep some news on the perl.org site. Probably they would not be happy.
During the years some of the editors, and definitely I have received a number of negative comments on our commentary. Primarily that it is not objective, but also complaints why something wasn't included. Something that was published 3 hours after the specific edition of the newsletter was sent out.
Anyway, what can we do. Our opinions are not objective..
I am sure we would get a lot more of these comments if the content was on the perl.org site. To the point that we would not dare to write anything. Frankly, it also feels like "Nationalization" of the project. It will lose its independence.
In addition if we look at the web-sites of other languages the only moving part is a news feed. The perl.org site could have that too.
It could be a feed from MetaCPAN. It could be a feed from blogs.perl.org. It could be a feed from PerlMonks or it could be the Perl tag on StackOverflow.
And yes, it could also use the RSS feed of the Perl Weekly.
One could even combine all the feeds.
The second idea was to
Include a TPF 'affiliate' badge in the weekly newsletter
I had a few questions:
What are the requirements from the side of TPF?
What does the Perl Weekly get in exchange?
Will adding an "official TPF affiliate" badge on the Perl Weekly site make any difference to the newsletter? I doubt. What would it even mean?
What rules would the editors of the Perl Weekly have to follow to be and remain eligible?
What value would the TPF, the Perl Weekly, and the Perl community in general get from such badges?
I can't speak in the name of TPF, nor that of the Perl community, but in my opinion for the Perl Weekly it would be way more important if people wrote more news items and blog posts that we could include in the newsletter. It would be a lot more important than any badge can ever be.
The marketing meeting in the cloud
Anyway, I watched the video. It reminded me of the Marketing BOF at YAPC::EU 2009, where I participated. Wow that was a long time ago.