TPF Meeting Minutes for October 2020

Nov 19, 2020 · 3 min read  ·
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TPF Board members and the community leaders meet every month and here are the minutes from the October 2020 meeting.

Part 1 - Community

  • Attendees

    • Board: Stuart Mackintosh, Peter Krawczyk, Dan Wright, Dave Rolsky, Ricardo Signes, Makoto Nozaki (late)
    • Leaders: Jason Crome, Samantha McVey, Alex Beamish, Sawyer X, Todd Rinaldo, Matthias Bloch
    • Admin: Nic Evans
    • Confirmed absence: Mark Keating, Curtis Poe

  • Grants

    • One grant approved - needs funding as there's no budget
    • Another grant was approved earlier but no work started
      • Should have been canceled / resubmitted already according to the charter
    • Working with Nic on website updates - close to completion
    • Main issue - no working budget
      • Possibly review previous budgets and consider how this can be increased per year
      • Funds are sectioned to languages (GC, Perl and Raku)
      • Pete looking to rearrange fund 'pots' to enable easier tracking next year
    • Discussion around grants funding for funds - Can/should there be different pots? Can sponsors request specific support for each language - this needs further discussion - Jason Crome to follow up
    • Grant suggestions from the committee are available on the web

  • Marketing

    • Brief survey carried out regarding brand of The Perl Foundation
    • Highlighted need for wider survey, putting together budget proposal
    • Filled in creative brief for TPF
    • Promotion of TPF via Google Ads - discussion going on
    • z/OS article was mentioned as a good addition to marketing
    • Website improvements, bugs/issues list created

  • The Perl/Raku Conference (USA)

    • The contract of 2020/2021 is active

  • EU Conference

    • Discussion points: Organizers and sponsorship
    • Organizers
      • Andrew mentioned possibility of Perl/Raku conference
      • Should we talking about making EU conference a TPF event?
      • There is currently no immediate visible interest in having funding of an EU conference in Europe taken over by TPF
      • Historically YEF was formed because TPF didn't have the people to do this. Also EPO was formed
      • We need to talk to the key people to organize an event in Europe
      • The nature of conferences may be different going forward, we don't know when they will return to how they used to be. We need to look at our future - do we want more virtual conferences? Are there other opportunities for physical?
    • Sponsorship

      • Costs might be lower for virtual - how easy to get sponsors for virtual versus physical conferences?

      • We need to be clear with sponsors if we have both a US and an EU conference

      • Opinions:

        • We have obligations to control how money is spent. There must be set guidelines. Whenever we create a special bucket for sponsorship we have an obligation to spend money on that bucket. We cannot then spend it on something else. What if we collect funds for a conference and it doesn't happen? We would have to give the money back. Currently we ask sponsors to give money to TPF (general funds) for this reason.
        • I want to make sure when I talk to sponsors to steer away from where money is going to 'this is TPF and we have various things we want to spend money on'. We need to avoid earmarked funds . Do not encourage sponsorship for specific items such as a conference.
        • I see this as more of an opportunity to get more money especially when the conference is held in a city where a major sponsor is located - need to find a way around legal issues - otherwise a missed opportunity

      • Could have a soft earmarking with disclaimer such as 'should event not happen, it will be moved to general funds.'

    • To continue discussion at next meeting

  • Raku

    • The Raku steering council formed recently, elected by core developers.
    • Question: How do