[Edinburgh-pm] Glasgow.pm First technical meeting

[Marco Fontani]

Hello fellow mongers,

Apologies for the cross-post to Edinburgh.pm but I felt that some
topics on this e-mail warranted having a larger audience. I'll stop
x-posting on the first complaint.

Six people participated on our first Glasgow.pm technical meeting last Thursday.

For those of you who missed it, we had two full-length talks, and one
lightning talk.
Links to the talks:
- Aaron Crane - "Perl on speed: multicore programming for mere
mortals", available at http://aaroncrane.co.uk/talks/
- Marco Fontani - "Life after 5.8.8" - http://is.gd/g4Vg2
- Marco Fontani - "Leguminous" - http://is.gd/g4VlZ

Apologies for my ~very short talk*~; I promise to make sure my next
talks will actually fit in ~20 mins and will not cause unnecessary
drowsiness, or sleepiness ;)

Some of us had an additional "Drinkers.pm" meeting at a local pub
which _does_ serve food, and quite a good one at that. The quest is
now to find a pub which does serve food but is also not unnecessarily
loud and not usually used on stag nights ;) We'll eventually manage,
in small steps ;)

At the Drinkers.pm meeting we discussed the technical conference
Edinburgh.pm has tried to organise for next year, and I think I got
drafted into it.
Thus, if anyone knows or knows a friend who knows how to get a venue
either in Edinburgh or Glasgow on the cheap (gratis or for a low
price), with the following characteristics, please do contact me.
- two or possibly three conference rooms, near each other, allowing
for concurrent tracks
- able to accommodate an estimated 150/200 people
- no requirement for catering: the conference must be free
- able to be sponsored by businesses in the area

I'm sure I'll come out with more requirements; please do voice your
opinion on the matter.

For those of you who are not aware of this idea: it's about organising
a multi-language conference, probably dubbed "dynamic scripting
languages conference" or similar. There would be separate concurrent
talk "tracks", probably along the lines of web development, system
administration, language internals. Each track would be in a separate
room, and multiple languages would be represented in each track.
For example, on the "web development" track I'd expect talks about
Catalyst, Mojolicious, Plack (for Perl); Sinatra, Rails, and
whatever's hot these days for Ruby; AppEngine, Django, Grok, Pylons
and similar for Python.

The language represented should be the dynamic languages most in use
in Scotland, namely Perl, Python, and Ruby. The conference should have
a heavy Perl slant (after all it'd be good for Perl marketing),
probably represented by having businesses which use Perl as sponsors,
and possibly sponsorships (even small) from The Perl Foundation, the
Enlightened Perl Organization and the likes.
Edinburgh mongers please correct me on the above if I've
misrepresented anything.

I will see to collate all info about the conference on a page on
glasgow.pm.org or on a shared google docs document to allow some
collaboration and brainstorming.

In short, let's see if the six degrees of separation work, and if we
can manage to find a good venue for the event (there are four
universities in Glasgow, I'm sure we'll find a couple rooms!) and I
promise I'll do my best to make this happen.
I'm sure you'll all volunteer for small specific tasks, as Aaron
suggested. Expect more e-mails on this subject.

Thanks everybody, speak to you soon.
I will likely be at the next Edinburgh.pm meeting, to discuss the above.
-marco-

p.s. if anybody has any info on how to add the Glasgow.pm meeting
dates to the "Scottish tech calendar", please contact me!

--
* ~~ denotes sarcasm