[Munich-pm] [philippe.bruhat at free.fr: [pm_groups] Request of sponsorship for the Act fund]

[Richard Foley]

----- Forwarded message from "Philippe Bruhat (BooK)" <philippe.bruhat at free.fr> -----

Date: Tue, 30 Sep 2014 09:07:25 +0200
From: "Philippe Bruhat (BooK)" <philippe.bruhat at free.fr>
To: pm_groups at pm.org
Subject: [pm_groups] Request of sponsorship for the Act fund
User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.21 (2010-09-15)

Hello,

After sending this to the main Perl organizations and blogging about it,
<http://blogs.perl.org/users/book/2014/09/support-the-fund-for-act-development.html>
it's probably time for a call targeted at the wider community...

Act (A Conference Toolkit) is the conference management tool that
has been used to organize more than 175 Perl conferences in the
last ten years. Rewritten in 2004, based on the software used to run
the YAPC::Europe conference in Paris in 2003, it was open sourced in
2007. Since then, 6 different Act instances have been setup around the
world, hosting a grand total of 183 conferences so far.

For the last few years, the software has started to show its age: very
few new features have been added, and the users and conferences organizers
have had to learn to work their way around its limitations. Being the de
facto standard for organizing Perl conferences, there have been several
attempts to rejuvenate it (the YAPC NA 2012 team forked it to use PSGI,
Torsten Raudssus started the YACT project under a TPF Grant, etc.)

The latest attempt by Theo van Hoesel, also under a TPF Grant, has managed
to round up a lot of goodwill around it, including that of some of the
original authors.

The French Perl Mongers, who authored 98% of the commits, and are running
the biggest Act instance (155 conferences so far), would very much like
to push Act in the modern age. In support for the current effort led by
Theo van Hoesel (and other future efforts) to improve Act, the French
Perl Mongers are setting up an "Act fund" to cover the expenses of Act
hackers participating to the improvement of Act.

This fund is not meant to pay salaries, or offer grants, but to cover
travel and accommodation of hackers involved in the current and future
efforts to improve Act. The Act fund will be fully disclosed to the
public, on the main Act website, with all income and expenses listed.
See <http://act.mongueurs.net/fund.html> for the first few donations,
and details about making one.

The goal of the fund is to help the people working to improve Act, so
that the Perl community can finally have an improved Act to use. Some
of it is by getting the keepers of the main database (the French Perl
Mongers) more involved with what's happening. Another big part of it
is to facilitate communication between the people the more involved in
the project. Hackathons have proved their worth, mostly because of the
value of face-to-face communication.

The next two Act-related events are the upcoming hackathons in Lyon and
Oslo, which both will be, in part or full, focused on Act improvements.

The purpose of this email is to ask you, as past and future Perl
confenrence attendees and organizers (who have benefited from Act in
the past and know the value that lies in such software), if you would
be willing to participate to the Act fund.

Thanks for considering it,

Regards,

-- 
 Philippe Bruhat (BooK)

 A wish is only as good as the wisher and what he can achieve.
                                    (Moral from Groo The Wanderer #35 (Epic))
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----- End forwarded message -----

-- 
Ciao

Richard Foley

http://www.rfi.net/books.html