use Perl

• Good start, here's a few more ideas... (Score:1)

  by sjn (3626) <reversethis-{gro.vvp} {ta} {lrepesu+njs}> on 2009.08.05 8:12 (#69881) Journal

  Off the top of my head, after discussing with Abigail and others...

  • One of Perl's more important niches now is the "one-off program tool" niche, where Perl helps sysadmins and others fix large amounts of low-profile daily annoyances and minor problems that people need adressed. Perl really shines here, but it's an invisible niche, mostly appreciated by sysadmins and other "fix-it" people.
  • Something anyone can do today (no need for centralized marketing or "great leaders",) is to find a few .pm group mates and visit a local college or university, to get in touch with the people that teach dynamic languages (or opens source tools) and offer them to give presentations and introductions to the Perl community.
  • My impression is that Perl has a decent and reasonably interested community, but that we're plagued with the same issues as every other community in that we too have to fight for people's attention. And like so may others, we wait Someone Else[tm] to fix it - to look for messias-like Great Leaders or heavyweight/established organizations to give us the solutions. I think this is naïve, wrong and bound to fail, and we instead should get off our asses and start treating community visibility as a project on par with any other project we care about. E.g. find the things each of us get excited about, and tell people about it. People outside the Perl community, that is.

  In the Perl community, everyone worth their salt is either overworked, busy, tired, swamped in backlogs and/or generally not interested in spending effort on things that don't directly work towards one's goals, ambitions or even just basic needs. In our community, the most precious thing we have is our attention and time.

  When I have some attention to spend, I'll try and do the following things:

  1. Organize conferences and events that improve on Perl's visibility in Norway, within the Norwegian Open Source communities (done.)
  2. Try to make the Perl community a bit more visible outside the traditional communities too (sorta started, needs more attention.)
  3. Get in touch with the some of the major educational institutions and offer to give talks or presentations or help updating their material (have some contacts.)
  4. Experiment with new ways of recruiting people to Oslo.pm (have a few ideas, need help.)

  What are YOU (the reader, not Ovid ;-) going to do?

  Reply to This

  • Re: (Score:1)

    by dearfrankg (7703)

    I like your comments. I made the point the other day that the perl community needs leaders. We need to vote for some leaders because all this back and forth slows progress. I'm glad many people want their voices heard, that's a good thing, but someone needs to make a decision. If its a bad decision we'll all and scream until it gets changed.
    
    I think having a couple of top ten lists will help
    
    Top 10 p5 things that suck
    
    Top 10 p5 things that rock
    
    Let's market the good things and squash the bad thi
    • Re: (Score:1)

      by ggoebel (893)

      Voting for leaders is a bad idea. Let the natural leaders emerge by proving themselves through act and deed.