All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report
At the time when everybody writes either about just finished YAPC::NA or forthcoming YAPC::Europe I am going to cover all the workshops I have attended and not wrote about yet. This post is about Ukrainian Perl Workshop I organized. Photos and videos are already published, but the pre-history is not :-) http://event.perlukraine.org/upw2008/media/photo.html>First draft thought about making an event in Ukraine appeared right after our first Russian Perl Workshop in autumn of 2007. Even today I think that that idea was really mad. Is not it? Think of organizing a public event in another country!First time I mentioned about the decision was at one of the first of Moscow.pm offline meetings. Nice thing was that there already existed Kiev.pm group, it did not have offline meetings at that time but at least it had working web-site and mailing-list. I dit know how many people there were in Kiev and in the whole country that used Perl and wanted to attend any workshop.Ukraine is good place to invite Europeans because after Eurovision 2005 Kiev has abandoned visa requirements for people coming from EU, US and several other countries. (Russians and Belarusians may also travel there without visas.) This fact gives more winning points to the event.So one of main two points in making the event, attendees, was partially solved: we had people from Ukraine, several people who would definitely go to Kiev from Russia, and potential attendees from Europe. Not only visa-free access is the point, but also that Kiev is closer to Europe than Moscow, which results in cheaper tickets.The only big mistake I made was the date selected. I looked at the calendar of Perl events and noted the gap between two workhsops, German and Dutch ones. If I place Ukrainian event between these two (on 23th of February), we would result in three adjacent weeks in February with Perl workshops. It helped Jonathan Worthington to trip through all three events, and made one more attendee (and speaker!) in Kiev. That is good. The bad thing is that I have missed that there were FOSDEM conference hosted in Brussels at 24th and 25th of February, and I lost several people who possibly could come.Selected date was also the former holiday in the USSR (and it still is in Russia) but it is already working day in Kiev nowadays. Happingly, 23th was Saturday, and the holiday in Russia moved to next Monday. So we could travel to Kiev and stay there till Monday. That added people who came from Moscow (there were seven of us totally).There are several variants about next workshop in Ukraine. Next year I think it could take place in the beginning of March. By the way, there is another holiday on 8th of March, which is again still holiday in Russia and is no longer in Ukraine. And again it happens on weekend, so it will be moved to Monday. The clash with FOSDEM is not possible. :-) During the trip on lakes and waterfalls after DORS/CLUC conference in Zagrep Wim Vandeputte and Machtelt Garrels suggested me to come to Brussels next year to be at FOSDEM. And I am going to both attend next year's FOSDEM and organize next Ukrainian Perl Workshop. The only thing to think left is to name the event.
