TPF Programs in 2010

Jan 1, 2011 · 3 min read  ·
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Below is an overview of the programs that were financially supported by The Perl Foundation in 2010. Programs are roughly broken up into 3 categories: Events, Marketing, and Development.

Perl events

The Perl Foundation supported four conferences in 2010. Those conferences were: The North American Yet Another Perl Conference (YAPC::NA), Frozen Perl, The Pittsburgh Perl Workshop, and The Perl Oasis. Each event is expected to be self-sustaining through program fees and donations. However, TPF did provide support to each event in the form of free services. Event organizers were able to pick and choose which services they needed:

  • Use of the donate.perlfoundation.org payment gateway for the various events to receive registration fees and sponsorship contributions. Each event received 100% of the amount contributed, any transaction fees were covered by TPF. In the course of a year this works out to over $2,500 in event sponsorship.
  • Event liability insurance, which is often required by event venues. The liability policy costs TPF over $1,000 to maintain per year.
  • Use of TPF as an established legal entity when required to enter into contracts with event venues and contractors. This freed event organizers from needing to spend time and expenses related to establishing their own organizations for each event.
  • Handling all disbursements to venues, caterers, contractors, speakers, etc.. All postage, wire transaction fees, and accounting expenses were covered by TPF, which cost over $500 in 2010.

In 2010, The Perl Foundation provided a $500 sponsorship of the Enlightened Perl Organization's "Send-a-newbie" program for YAPC::EU. TPF also provided a $500 sponsorship for YAPC::NA's "VIP party", an event targeted at first-time YAPC attendees.

Perl marketing

In 2010, The Perl Foundation provided $1,000 in free printed marketing materials distributed by volunteers staffing Perl advocacy booths at various non-Perl events through the year.

TPF also paid $1,600 to have professional content continuously written for the perl.com web site through the year.

In 2010, TPF spent $1,800 for trademark applications in Canada, Europe, and Japan. The Perl Foundation now holds trademarks on Perl in both the United States and Canada.

Perl development

The Perl Foundation maintained their associate membership with The Unicode Consortium in 2010 at an expense of $1,500. This membership enhances Perl developers' abilities to maintain support of Unicode within Perl. It also gives Perl a voice in contributing to the ongoing development of the Unicode Standard.

Through a development grant made possible by Ian Hague in 2008, TPF paid over $14,000 in grants for the further development of Perl 6 in 2010. At the end of this year, there is $27,000 remaining unallocated in the Perl 6 development portion of the Hague grant. Grants completed this year included:

  • Jonathan Worthington's "Rakudo Signature Improvements"
  • Solomon Foster's "Numeric and Real Support"
  • Travel support for Patrick Michaud to speak about Rakudo and recruit volunteers at conferences.

TPF was awarded a $50,000 grant from Booking.com for "further development and maintenance of the Perl programming language". TPF has used $25,800 of those funds in the form of monthly payments to David Mitchell for his grant "Fixing Perl5 Core Bugs." This grant will be continued into 2011.

The grants committee paid over $6,000 in grants from community contributions. The following grants were completed in 2010:

  • Ricardo Signes' "Archive::Zip bugs" and "Improve Dist::Zilla's Tests, Documentation, and Structure"
  • Vadim Konovalov's "Perl Cross-Compilation for WinCE and Linux" and "Tcl/Tk Acces