TPF Marketing Committee Chair

For the last few years I have become increasingly involved with the marketing and promotion of Perl. This started as a need to promote Perl in connection with Shadowcat and then a growing desire to make sure that the image and information about the Perl world (Perlverse) be accurately displayed in an increasingly confused market place. For this reason I have been speaking at conferences and helped create the Enlightened Perl Organisation It is why I recently became attached to some of the efforts of the Perl Foundation, specifically in regards to the Google Summer of Code. Now it is my pleasure to become a member of the Perl Foundation Marketing Committee as its new chair.

As the Chair of the Marketing Committee I will, in the coming months, help to shape the promotion and marketing of Perl, and it is my wish to update some of the practices and procedures. I will be attempting to show how Perl has matured as a production-quality language, perhaps by including some of the companies who use Perl as a showcase for its quality of use in the real world. I will also be utilising the current Social Media tools to further promote the language as well as coordinating a cohesive strategy for news delivery, I will be approaching DuckDuckGo's new OS Community Manager in the short term to further discuss this with him and utilise his experience.

This is just the start, there will also be a move towards bringing more grass roots activity for Perl, by bringing it back into the universities and colleges and by supporting those who have already made those efforts. I will also be focussing on some of the new or successful projects in Perl, including (and most definitely not restricted to) the best practices,CPAN and the various clients, Perl SDL, upcoming projects such as CiderWebMail - Dancer - Mojolicious - Padre as well as the ever-popular Catalyst - Dbic - Moose.

It is my hope to help promote some of the better articles written about, or on, Perl and Perl development. I will be talking to many people in the Perl world over the next few months to work out the best way of continuing and supporting this practice and perhaps increasing the scope and amount.

Then there is the promotion of the Perl Language itself, for this I will be conducting conversations with those people at the core of development and design so that we can create a cogent analysis of the state of Perl for the use in analysis, description, marketing and promotion.

All of this adds up to a significant body of work and it is just the start as I begin the strategy, create a cohesive plan, and implement changes that will further promote the language we all use. I would like to thank the fellow members of the Marketing Committee for voting me on and as their chair and look forward to working with them. I will, as always, be discussing all of my activities both here and on my mdk perly blog. To contact me for marketing information, to suggest ideas or offer help/describe what you are doing with Perl and how this may fit with the promotion please contact me at mdk(at)perlfoundation.org, you can follow shadowcat_mdk on Twitter.

If anyone has feedback (and until we have a commenting system) please don't hesitate to email me at: m.keating [at] shadowcat.co.uk, if your comments are useful, fun, or just plain interest to me, or if I think will be useful to others, then I will add them to the end of this post, let me know how you would like to be named (anon, nick etc.).

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Mark Keating is: Managing Director of Shadowcat Systems Limited
Director and Secretary of Enlightened Perl Organisation
Co-Founder/Co-Leader of North-West England Perl Mongers
Work Blog: Mark Keating on Shadowcat
LinkedIn Profile: Mark Keating on LinkedIn
Perlesque Blog: Mark Keating on per.ly
My Public Blog: Mark Keating's Personal site
Twitter Feed: Mark Keating on Twitter
Facebook: Mark Keating on Facebook
Flickr: Mark Keating on Flickr
Family site: Mark Keating's Family Site
Flavor.me Combined Feeds: Mark Keating on Flavor

Mark Keating is the organiser of the London Perl Workshop (since 2008), has joined the organising team for the QA Hackathon in 2011, the TPF GSoC Mentors/organisers 2011, the Dynamic Languages Conference 2011, and the Marketing Chair for The Perl Foundation.