[baltimorepm] [dcpm] Re: Special meeting to discuss DC/Baltimore Perl Workshop

[John SJ Anderson]

> Which I'll transcribe and post momentarily -- currently distracted by
> the World Cup...

Okay, meeting notes (excuse the OddMuse wikitext formatting, but I
figure that's where this is headed, eventually...)

= DC-Baltimore Perl Workshop Exploratory Meeting, 16 Jul 2011 =

== Present ==

* Joe Hourcle
* Brad Lhotsky
* Shawn Wilson
* Mike Burns
* Brock Wilcox
* John SJ Anderson

== Agenda ==

(Not adhered to in any organized fashion...)

* Location
* Timing
* Cost/Price
* Sponsors
* Name
* Infrastructure

== Location ==

Getting this nailed down is obviously one of the most important things
at this stage. Potential locations that were discussed:

* UM College Park
* Sun/Oracle training center in Columbia
* Maryland Biotech Park
* UMBC

Important things to consider are price, location, accessibility via
public transport, and whether we would need a person to be affiliated
or associated with the organization that owns the space.

== Timing ==

Based on the timing of the existing US-based Perl conferences and
workshops, we identified two potential time frames: late April/early
May, and some time in August. Given the weather pattern in the area,
the former time frame was selected by popular acclamation. 8^)

== Content ==

No special theme was identified; we may come up with one down the
road. Doing a "beginner track" or a "Perl as your 2nd (or 3rd, or Nth)
programming language" track was also discussed -- it's an easy way to
get more than one track going, and given how hard it is to find good
Perl people in DC, having a training specifically to _make_ some is a
good selling point, particularly as we approach Federal IT contracting
companies for sponsorships.

== Price ==

We discussed this a lot. A free conference (a la the London Perl
Workshops) has a lot to recommend it -- much easier accounting, nobody
is really going out of pocket, etc.

On the other hand, making people pay _some_ sort of registration fee
is likely to cut way down on the number of "no-show" registrations.

I think we will continue to discuss this; obviously any charge for the
venue (if there is one) is going to have a big impact on this
decision.

One thing that we were strongly in agreement about was that there
should be reduced fee or free admission available for students and the
un-employed.

== Name ==

We decided on "DC-Baltimore Perl Workshop", which gives us 'DCBPW' for short.

I've registered dcbpw.(com|net|org) domains as of this morning, and
started a '@dcbpw' Twitter account. (Please follow it.) I'm also
sitting in #dcbpw on irc.perl.org, should anybody like to join me.

Unless there are objections, I think we should plan on hosting the
wiki and conference stuff on the dcbpw.org domain, and redirect the
others towards that.

== Sponsors ==

Some potential sponsor names that were kicked around:

* Sourcefire
* White Oak
* OmniTI
* Grant Street Group
* Liquidation.com
* SRA
* CSC
* Cargotel
* Infoblox

lots more work to be done in this area...

== Infrastructure ==

As I mentioned above, domains have been set up. First order of
business is to get a dedicated mailing list (so people on the
baltimore.pm and dc.pm lists who aren't interested in this can ignore
it...) and set up a wiki. Brock volunteered to work on both of those.

== Regular meeting ==

There was a general consensus that a regular face-to-face meeting of
at least the principle organizers[1] would be useful -- but we also
agreed that trying to have that in August was probably going to be
difficult, given vacations and etc. So we will be scheduling that
around the beginning of September, exact time and location TBD and
announced.

== Important Milestones ==

The one deadline that we have right now is in the form of the
Pittsburgh Perl Workshop, which will be held in early October. We
would *really* like to be able to officially announce at that time --
which means we need to have the venue lined up, the schedule set, and
have made a decision about registration costs. Some sponsorship lined
up at that point would also be nice.

We will be reaching out to the PPW organizers to ask for advice and
tips -- but given that they're in the throes of putting PPW together,
that's probably going to happen _after_ PPW.

--ENDS--

If I missed anything, others can fill in -- that's about all I got
written down anyway.

thanks,
john.