This new location allows us to rethink the event: longer breaks (for more informal communication), space for decisions makers; we emphasize dialog, meeting, practicing and interactivity.

In order to be a success, this conference need speakers and presentations.

French is preferred, but English is fine too.

Some already registered attendees are english speakers.

The theme this year is “Meeting, Learning, Playing, Creating”.

You can register at http://perltraining.eventbrite.co.uk/.

The course is called “Modern Perl for Non-Perl Programmers” and it will be aimed at people who haven’t written any Perl (or who have written very little Perl) and over six hours the course will persuade them just how useful modern Perl is.

That, of course, means that readers of Perl News aren’t really in the target audience. But I expect that you all know people who are (it’s very unlikely that any of you don’t know any non-Perl programmers). So I’d like to ask for your help in promoting the course. Please share the link in as many places as you can think of where non-Perl programmers might congregate.

Once again the Perl Foundation will be attempting to participate in the 7th GSoC, which was announced on the 4th February 2012.

The organising team are currently seeking ideas and help with mentors and students, you can join #soc-help on irc.perl.org for more information or follow the links below. Flyers and support material is available on the Perl Foundation’s Press Release Page

• Latest updates and flyers on mdk’s per.ly blog
• Announcement on mdk’s per.ly blog
• Main page for tpf’s 2012 initiative
• Ideas page
• Google’s announcement

You can now also donate online to:

• Enlightened Perl;
• CPAN Testers;
• Send-a-Newbie.

This new site allows individual and recurring payments set to the users choice.

Congratulations to Raul Matei who came up with the design which can now be see on the MetaCPAN site.

MetaCPAN is a free, open search engine for CPAN, which is an ever growing archive of code and documentation for the Perl programming language.

Further information about preparing a complete application can be found here. Proposals submitted to the venue committee will be added to this public repository (you may provide private information separately) to benefit future organisers.

The deadlines which apply to this portion of the procedure are:

1. Saturday, 7 April: Deadline for sending a letter of intent. This letter simply expresses interest in hosting the conference and provides contact information (both email and telephone) for at least two organizers. This is an optional step but it can be to your advantage to alert the venue committee of your proposal.
2. Thursday, 5 July: Deadline for sending proposals to host YAPC::Europe 2013.

If you do not receive a confirmation for your letter of intent or proposal within a couple of days, please personally contact a member of the venue committee.

Please send your questions, letters of intent, and proposals to venue@yapceurope.org.

CPAN Testers test every module released to CPAN, on many different platforms and different versions of Perl.

CPAN Testers has had over 1,000 testers contribute to this figure, with their new API they are now receiving nearly 1 million reports every month and expect to reach 30 million reports by the end of the Year.

Further stats can be found on their Interesting Stats page.

According to craigslist CEO and former Perl Hacker Jim Buckmaster, “craigslist has gloried in and relied upon Perl for most of its software development for more than a decade. craigslist Charitable Fund is honored to recognize the wizardry and generosity of the Perl community, help ensure the ongoing maintenance of Perl5, and contribute to the future evolution of Perl.” He added, “It was unclear at first how best to give something back to Perl. Fortunately there was more than one way to do it.”

For more information download the PDF Press Releases, or view the news story.

Registration will close on January 31st, 2012, so signup sooner rather than later.

You can also propose other people who should be invited. As with past years, they aim to fund the travel and accommodation costs for those who cannot otherwise get funding.

Sponsors required

Sponsoring the event is not reserved to organizations and corporations:if you think the Hackathon is useful to the Perl community, but cannot attend yourself, you can still contribute to the success of the event by making a donation. Even small donations will help and would be greatly appreciated.

The prize has been provided by the Enlightened Perl Organisation

The deadline is the 13th of January 2012, so make sure to have your laptop with you over the holiday season.

For more information visit http://contest.metacpan.org/ or see the entries so far.