Hi folks. As I mentioned at the meeting, there's a group from Boston planning to get YAPC held in Boston in 2002. So far, I know that Marc, Sean, and I have talked about this--- and probably others whose names I'm missing. Here are the details. YAPC, the Yet Another Perl Conference, is the affordable Perl conference. It's run by the Yet Another Society (www.yetanother.org), the same folks who bring you Damian's year of service to the Perl community. YAPC is traditionally held at a university on the East Coast in early summer for 2 reasons: 1> The O'Reilly Perl Conference is on the other coast, and some people on this coast can't afford airfare. 2> Colleges are out of session and can offer cheap dormitory accommodations, if we're lucky. When I say "accessible", I mean that the conference fee for 3 days of programming is under $80, and dorm accommodations are available for $30ish per night. Usually this happens with the help of university and corporate sponsors. All the speakers are volunteers from the community; they give their time to teach. We're still in the opening phases of figuring all this out, but there are *lots* of geeks in Boston, and lots of Perl users. Not only do we have computer people, we have finance, biotech, and higher education folk who'd come to a Boston YAPC. We can do this, and it can be really good. So, here's what we need from you: - Your connections. Do you know anyone who's on the faculty or staff at any Boston-area college or university? Think they'd be willing to talk to us about what it takes to rent space there or (even better) to sponsor us so we can get cheap/free space? If you have friends who might know people, ask them. If you're an undergrad, do you have a club that might be able to get us space? - Your sponsorship ideas. To make YAPC cheap, we need to start making a list of companies who'd be willing to sponsor YAPC. O'Reilly has been very good about this in the past, but if you know someone we should talk to, we'd love to hear about it. This could be cash or (better yet) hardware loans or cheap rentals (for things like, oh, wireless Ethernet cards...) - Your warm bodies and brains. If we have lots of volunteers for this, we can get it organized without driving any one person utterly crazy. If you want to get involved in organizing a cool event, meeting people, and gaining the community's gratitude, please email us. For right now, send me your ideas on any of these; I'm still finding out the details of the YAPC-planning email list, but I'm sure there will be discussion there. I'll post when I have more information. Thanks in advance, srl -- Shane R. Landrum [EMAIL PROTECTED] we generate our own light to compensate for the lack of light from above -AD GPG public key: http://cs.smith.edu/~slandrum/srl_pgpkey.txt
