All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

What did I do yesterday

pdcawley on 2002-06-25T08:23:55

Well...

I wrote a Perl 6 Summary and posted it to the perl6-announce, perl6-language and perl6-internals mailing lists. Hopefully it'll end up on perl.com at some point. I intend to keep doing it for a while.

And I've been thinking about funding. I'm doing these summaries because I think they're important (I missed 'em when they were gone), I don't want any money for doing it, but it'd be really cool if my doing this work could help fund Larry, Dan & Damian (and whoever gets any grant next year...). Which leads me to wonder if there could be some way of setting up 'accounts' with YAS for this sort of funding. Say you think the Perl 6 summary is worth ten of your hard earned bucks, you could make a donation to YAS saying, in essence "That's for the Perl 6 summaries", and the donations list would reflect that.

You could do similar things for modules. Say you really, really like Andy Wardley's Template Toolkit. Now, if there was a Template Toolkit YAS account, you could donate money under that label.

What do you think?

What else did I do? I got Apache::MP3 up under apache2 and modperl2. The required changes are actually quite small, but they are incompatible with mod_perl 1.xx. Which is annoying. I'm going to see about refactoring so we can either have Apache2::MP3 and Apache::MP3, or just a plain Apache::MP3 that works with both versions of modperl. (Essentially, if you're interested, the changes are use Apache::Const instead of Apache::Constants, and you need to do sub handler : method {...} to have the handler used in an OO fashion.)

Oh yes, I went to the dentist for the third time in as many weeks (or the third time in about 6 years...) and had the first stage of a root canal done. Ouchie. At least it's on the National Health, but it definitely wasn't fun. The tooth is still aching...

donations

TeeJay on 2002-06-25T09:22:07

Piers,
I think that would be a good idea.

I also reckon and have been thinking for some time that you should be able to donate time/code in lieu of a donation and have it recognised. After all those with the most spare time to get stuff done usually have the least money and could get overlooked when it comes to handing out freebies, karma, etc.

If somebody where to help admin, host, etc a site then there are many ways we could pay them back : putting them up when they come to a local meeting or conference, nameservers, shell accounts, freebies, tickets to conferences, etc.

I can't afford to give any donations but would be interested in taking part more, especially if it meant making books, or conferences more viable as I have been a perl monger for nigh on 4 years and have yet to make a single conference.

A.

Not sure...

Matts on 2002-06-25T10:54:45

I've had an AxKit donations page up for over a year now which if people donated to it would help pay for bandwidth (£100 a month plus VAT) and other misc costs.

As yet not a single person has made a donation.

Perhaps this reflects on AxKit more than it reflects on the idea though.

Or short time funding for people?

BooK on 2002-06-25T11:34:04

At YAPC::Europe in Amsterdam, I was involved in a short discussion with a few people (can remember who, though), saying how cool it would be if YAS (and the Perl communauty behind it) could offer itself the work of lesser known Perl people (Michael Schwern's name was mentionned, along with CPANTS).

What was discussed was something like:

  • choose a reliable Perl monger, with an interesting project
  • pay for one or two months of hard, dedicated work on some aspect of Perl (related to said project)
  • then, a few months later, fund the trips to present the results of this work to the local Mongers groups, the participation to overseas conferences, etc.

I suppose it's as complicated to setup as it is to setup funding and organisation for Damian, Dan and Larry. But I guess that many individuals that already did a lot for Perl have some great projects and only lack time (and motivation). The kind of fame that comes with a YAS awarded grant would surely be a great motivator...

Re:Or short time funding for people?

pdcawley on 2002-06-25T11:56:00

That's a really good idea. But that requires YAS to have a decent income/pile of capital. Which isn't looking entirely likely at the moment.

recognition instead of accounts

jmm on 2002-06-25T13:37:07

Perhaps instead of an account destined for a specific purpose, donations could be marked as recognition of a specific value.

While the money might go back to the recognized project if there was a specific need, by the time a project has reached the point where it is being acknowledged it often has much lower support needs that when it was unknown but being created. So the money might best be spent on similar sorts of projects and the comments on the donations used to decide which sorts of project and which individuals are most likely to achieve additional valuable results.

Donations for summaries

jdavidb on 2002-06-25T14:30:43

I've been thinking about that for awhile, too. The summaries (p5p and p6) mean a lot to me since I can't afford to be subscribed to the lists and drink from the firehouse. I would be very happy to donate to encourage these summaries. I appreciate you and Simon and everyone else who has written these, because they are my best connection to what's going on.

The "summary of active development mailing list" format is perfect for people like me. I read the Kernel traffic summaries fairly regularly, too. And the GNOME summaries. And so on. I think they are a vital way of drawing out people like me and turning them into active community members.

Re:Donations for summaries

rafael on 2002-06-25T21:54:44

FWIW I'm considering taking over the p5p summary. Currently it's only an experiment in my journal.