What I am missing from EPO

I think the EPO exists for more than a year now. First time heard about it was around 7 months ago and I only become a member a few days ago. I still have lots of issues with it. Let me voice them now while I am still partially outside as once I get more involved I probably won't see these issues any more.

I have seen how The Perl Foundation lacks transparency communication and actions. I don't know why. I know and appreciate many of the people involved so I don't understand why the organization itself has such, IMHO serious problems.

Knowing the problems with TPF I was both very happy to see a new organization around Perl but also very cautious. First I wanted to see if this is going to be better than TPF in terms of transparency, communications and actions.

I looked at the web site and could not find an e-mail list to see what's going on. I tried to understand how many members they have, how much money they have and on what did they spend it so far? Are there any plans on how to spend the rest of the money? 100 pound is not a huge amount but I'd rather spend it on stimulants that help me write more open source code than on EPO.

For a long time I did not know what projects are they involved. It is still not clear to me what does this involvement mean or what do they plan as involvement?

Actually I was personally surprised they have not included Padre or at least the idea of a Perl development environment in the list of what they think is important for modern perl development.

I met mst in Oslo in the Nordic Perl Workshop where he explained a bit about EPO, but his explanation you can join EPO and suggest anything was not really convincing. He told us about his plans for the Ironman challenge which sounded quite good but for that you don't need an organization. Since then IronMan turned out to be much better than what I thought and lead to conversations that would have not happened without it. Thanks Matt.

I am still not convinced that EPO will do more than the TPF does - or seems to do - but our recent discussions during and around YAPC::EU about marketing and PR for Perl made me more comfortable in spending the 100 pound. So now as a member I hope I'll be able to influence the above issues and make EPO and organization that many others will feel good to join.

Let me have this post just a reminder for myself as to what are various things I need to promote in EPO.

A response from Mark Keating (MDK) the secretary of EPO.