Well, if there's something I'd never expect to happen, it's getting a TPF grant for my work on pVoice. But it did!
Originally I submitted the proposal for a grant, because mainly some of the good friends at London.pm pushed me that way. I wasn't at all confident that something that doesn't improve Perl directly would stand any chance at all. But people convinced me by saying that it would be good for Perl to show that something like pVoice can be done with Perl too.
The idea at the time was to use a grant for pVoice development directly: I get a sum of money, and would stop working for clients for a period of time and dedicate myself to pVoice. Unfortunately recently I had to stop working as a freelancer and luckily found a new, good employer. However, being a regular employee means you can't just take some time off to work on something else. So we discussed some ideas on how TPF could help me.
We came up with the idea to use the grant for promotion of pVoice. The idea is that TPF is going to send me to OSCON, where I hopefully will be speaking together with Jon Bjornstad, who works on SueCenter. And while I'm in the area, I'll try to contact rehab centers in the Portland region so I can get speaking engagements there too and promote pVoice there.
This will all take a good deal of planning, but I'm very grateful to get the opportunity.
And while we were on the subject, there's going to be more. TPF is using its contacts to find a hosting company for my Perl.com, one on pVoice and others on wxPerl, to generate funding in other ways.
A huge "thank you" to everyone involved in doing all of this for me/this project!
