I haven't gotten a single question via email. I guess everybody already knows everything they want to know about TPF and Perl 6. ;)
So, I'll start with one of the questions from the journal comments.
Why aren't the TPF meeting minutes available on the website?
We very rarely have formal meetings. Most of the business of TPF happens in email messages on various different lists or an exchange between a few people in email, on IRC, over the phone, or in person. This is pretty much the same way business happens in Perl development, so it's familar and comfortable to Perl people. (Personally, I'm allergic to Robert's Rules of Order. ;) The only "formal" meetings I can think of are the yearly elections. The results of those are announced publicly. The 2005 elections will happen later this month.
In general, we try to make sure significant events get press releases, but aren't always entirely successful. One of the things we've wanted for a while now is someone whose only volunteer responsibility is keeping an eye out for news-worthy events and writing them up. It's sounds easy, but it's really an extremely difficult job, and the handful of people who have taken it on over the years have all found that they didn't have the time to keep up with it.
We're working on communication, and will get better over time. Maybe you can help. :)
Re:Sixperl meeting minutes.
Allison on 2005-07-12T01:28:06
Yup. luqui volunteered for this last week. (Thanks, Luke!) This will be the 2nd or 3rd time we've tried to get this information flow going, so hopefully the third time's the charm.:) "When I started here, all there was was swamp. Other kings said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built it all the same, just to show 'em. It sank into the swamp. So, I built a second one. That sank into the swamp. So, I built a third one. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp, but the fourth one... stayed up! And that's what you're gonna get, lad: the strongest castle in these islands." --Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Scene 14
Talk to Luke about how you can help. I'm sure he'd appreciate it.
Re:Examples of the types of reports.
Allison on 2005-07-12T02:44:20
Not a report as such, but there are status update email messages that could be summarized and put up on a web page. It may not be exactly what you're looking for, but is better than what we have now.Since [the grants committee] was formed in 2003, I presume there's at least one report somewhere.They are "events worthy of mentioning" which makes them news, whatever format they take.Things like this, and the election results, are not really "News", or "Press Releases" (as described by the perlfoundation.org website) by the actual functioning documents of the foundation itself.Yeah, I noticed this scanning the archives just after I posted. Not exactly sure what happened there, but I know I was on the first week of a 2 month trip then, so it's very likely I dropped a message in someone's inbox and hoped they had time to make the text into a press release, and forgot to check back and make sure it happened.In fact, looking at the Press Releases for 2004 [the result of the 2004 election] wasn't announced publically.I'm not sure what else to say except, yes, of course you're right and we've known this for a while now. Would you like to help?
Helping doesn't necessarily mean "writing hundreds of press releases for TPF", though we certainly need someone to do that. One easy way to help would be to reply to each press release with some positive feedback, either something positive about the event that prompted the release or "thanks for writing that up". We burn out PR volunteers at an astonishingly high rate. It's a difficult job and about 90% of what they hear back is some paraphase of "that's a stupid thing to do" or "you need to make more press releases". It's discouraging.
(Note that I'm not complaining about your comments. They are things that need to be said and I'd rather you say them to me. Part of my job as a leader is to take the heat for our failures and pass it on to the rest of the volunteers as contructive suggestions.)
(There's also some history in how TPF got into this "negative reinforcement" loop, but I won't go into that unless you really want to know. I'm more concerned with breaking out of the loop.)So, immediate fixes: a) We're looking for a volunteer for the PR position again for the election this month. We have one possibility but others are welcome. Heck, we could probably do well with 5 volunteers, each responsible for writing up a different part of TPF (it might be a manageable workload for a change). b) Among my locations for "dropping stuff and hoping something happens with it" is brian d foy, and he's very good at making sure the news gets into each issue of The Perl Review. It's worth subscribing to it.
