[sf-perl] SF.pm grant proposal review for TPF

[Fred Moyer]

On Wed, Aug 4, 2010 at 12:53 PM, Josh Berkus <josh at agliodbs.com> wrote:
> On 8/3/10 1:34 PM, Fred Moyer wrote:
>> All opinions welcome regarding my proposal for a grant from The Perl Foundation:
>>
>> http://news.perlfoundation.org/2010/08/2010q3-grant-proposal-sfpm-fun.html
>
> Hmmm.  Have you attempted to get food sponsors for the meetings?  We've
> had pretty good luck doing so for the other SFPUG.

I've put a few calls out for sponsors but haven't gotten responses
back yet.  We've been growing very rapidly over the past 18 months,
and most of our resources have been put towards keeping up with that
growth.

> One of the things we do which is different with the other SFPUG is that
> we allow some commercial presentations (i.e. dot-coms presenting their
> stuff).  This both fills our calendar and makes them willing to cough up
> for food a couple times a year.  Worth considering.

I'd be open to this possibility, but I haven't seen any interesting
commercial offerings.  If you are reading this, and are part of a
company that wants to do something like this, please contact Joe and I
off list.

> Also, frankly, you could ask us for more $$$.  I don't put in more
> because I only get asked for $7 or $10.

That would help cover the costs of the existing meetings, but the real
goal here is to grow the group and reach out to those other
programmers who don't know about us.  And getting sponsors to cover
the meeting costs is part of that plan; I'd rather have sponsors get
value from the audience and venue and pull in more people rather than
have to charge more.

> Now, if you really wanted to kick off more local Perl activity, I might
> suggest doing some kind of Perl Day ... a day-long miniconf here in SF.
>  That might also be more palatable for TPF to sponsor.

Part of the grant would go towards activities like this.  But that
takes funding.  I think our proposal is right up the alley up a grant
that TPF would want to sponsor; a fast growing successful user group,
which needs help in getting to the level of some of the other local
groups such as Ruby (2k members) and PHP (1.5k members).  At those
levels, it is much more feasible to find sponsors who can make the
group self sufficient.

A lot of this proposal centers around growing the user group, and
local Perl community.