use Perl

Yesterday Vienna.pm had it's annual meeting (required by our Vereins bylaws). Most of it is boring routine (re-elect the board etc), some of it can be a bit picky (cash auditing), and other parts are fun (eg ordering Sushi for 13 people).

Here's a quick rundown of our annual report:

• We organised YAPC::Europe 2007, which was a big success and left us with a nice fat budget (even after donating 5.000 Euros to YAPC::Europe 2008).
• We started regular monthly TechSocial Meetings which 10-15 people attend. Additionally, we had lots of emergency social meetings with lots of nice international guests.
• We rented a server which provides shell accounts, svn repos, mailinglist, RT and Wikis to members. CPANTS is also hosted there.
• We started the Winter of Code, with varying success:
  • David Landgren works on the p5p Summaries since January. David writes great weekly summaries that not only keep you up to date on Perl 5 development, but are also fun to read.
  • Jonathan Worthington is funded for one day a week to work on Perl 6 / Rakudo.
  • The TODO Tracker didn't really take off, caused by a greatly delayed implementation and missing motivation of Vienna.pm to flog mst more.
  • The idea of awarding various awards wasn't realized. But we're still considering to award some prices for good talks during YAPC::Europe 2008.
  • We might fund some other person(s) to work on bigger projects with the money we still have left. More on that soon.
• Vienna.pm kindly sponsored my trip to Oslo for the QA Hackathon where I spend lots of time on CPANTS.
• Several members of Vienna.pm went to several other Perl events around the world (FOSDEM, Dutch Perl Workshop, YAPC::Asia, Bratislava.pm...).
• Vienna.pm was featured in Issue #6 of $foo magazin.
• Hm, what did I forget?

For the future, we're planning a Perl workshop in autum (maybe together with Bratislava.pm). We will spend more of our money (details are still to be discussed...). And we'll try to get the TODO Tracker back on track.