This is the fourth year for the North West England Perl Mongers, which was formed after the end of the London Perl Workshop 2008 by Ian Norton and Shadowcat's Managing Director, Mark Keating.
This year they have set themselves the challenge of growing the group and getting things done. They are doing this by:
- Having regular meetings, the last Thursday of each month;
- Having a regular form to the meeting;
- Encourage people new to Perl by having open discussion;
- having a regular meeting location (Madlab)
The group also intends to undertake the challenge of updating and refreshing sites such as ironman.enlightenedperl.org and presentingperl.org and making them more relevant and useful as sites and resources for the broader Perl community. These sites and others may be worked on as part of the four virtual Hackdays that will be held throughout the year. A full discussion of the dates of the meetings, location and the hackdays can be found on my per.ly blog where I discuss the NWE.pm Shape of 2012.
As usual Shadowcat Systems will be allowing people to gather at its offices during the day on the virtual hackdays to use the facilities (internet, snacks, coffee and general chat) - and hopefully we will be hosting the hackday in November.
Shadowcat will be continuing its support of its local Perl Mongers as much as possible throughout the coming year and we would like to encourage other local businesses to do the same. It is important that we all add badges stating our support or use of Perl on our websites and linking to community efforts such as perl.org and their local Monger groups.
If you are involved with a monger group as leader or member you might want to lead the charge in getting local businesses involved, many groups and businesses do to great success. I think a large participation in all parts of our industry will help build links in the community chain.
I spoke about this recently as part of my talk at the Manchester Free Software Society, Embrace Your Community, also in Orlando at Perl Oasis in my Adventures in Marketing Part two talk. I hope to be speaking and writing some more on the subject during 2012.
-mdk
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
Chair of the Marketing Committee for The Perl Foundation
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.
