March is, well, marching on and I still haven’t completed this post on my work in February.  I’m just going to post what I have or I will never acquire the discipline to post about Perl every month.  February was hectic and I could not keep up with my workload.  A large part of the problem was caused by me having shingles and not being able to work on Perl Foundation things.  I did try to deal with urgent things, even when ill, but it’s not easy to do and I had to cancel a few meetings.

Every month I work on the Perl 5 Core Maintenance Fund as there routine task that are carried out on a monthly basis. It has been suggested to me that I shouldn’t deal with these tasks but I find that doing them helps me with procrastination.  I imagine that every volunteer suffers from a procrastination problem to some degree and I help overcome mine with routine tasks.  Once those are completed I can usually continue working for the whole time block that I set aside.   At the minute we have two running grants, Tony Cook’s Maintaining Perl 5, and Dave Mitchell’s Maintaining the Perl 5 Core. Every month I read the reports, post the reports, and authorise the payments. This month we also received a new grant request from Ricardo Signes, so that he could travel to the QA Hackathon.

As well as blogging about grants I have also been posting to the TPF Facebook page, the TPF twitter account, writing for the TPF blog, and updating the TPF website.  I’m not alone in doing these tasks as many people in TPF have access to do so including Mark Keating and the marketing committee.  We even have some outside help as this year, in order to improve our communication for YAPC::NA, we are using a PR company to promote the conference.

The preparations for YAPC::NA are well underway and I continue to work on the beginners’ track, the master classes, and the Perl 6 hackathon.  I’m excited about the conference and pleased that we have a capable team of people working on the many things that need done to run a successful 500 person conference.

We are going to be taking part in Outreachy, which is the successor to the Outreach Program for Women.  The winter round is not completed yet and at the minute we have a intern working on Dancer, and another one working on MetaCPAN.  We have funding for one intern in the summer round and I’ll have more to write about it in March as the application deadline falls on the 24th.

Admin work is constant and not something I find I want to write about.  One admin thing of note this month was the calling of a vote of confidence in the Secretary of the Grants Committee. This is part of the rules of operation for that committee and this will be done on an annual basis.  My email situation has worsened since last month but I’m still optimistic that I can catch up on the backlog.

As you can probably tell from this post my role in TPF isn’t a clearly defined thing.  Jesse Vincent stated during his time as the Perl 5 Pumpking that he was the project janitor — and I know exactly what he meant.