Hi Andrew,
I have "heard" of two other "proposals".
- Göteborg in Sweden
- Reykjavik in Iceland
- and I am thinking about organizing "something" in Copenhagen in 2010
Nothing is settled yet though.
I am actually more keen on the idea of a Baltic Perl Workshop,
traveling between the 3 countries. I am not saying that we will not
promote it and a lot of people will probably attend.
But in my opinion the Workshops serve a very special purpose and the
goal should be to attract a local audience.
1. Workshops are not YAPCs
2. Workshops should target local Perl users
3. Workshops should not necessarily be in English (see: German Perl
Workshop)
Long term:
1. We want more Perl users adopted into the community as:
- Local monger group members
- CPAN contributors
- YAPC/Workshop attendees
- CPAN testers
- Community Project contributors (Rakudo, Parrot etc.)
2. We want Perl on the world map and on peoples CVs
3. We want Perl world domination // Profit, beer, free stickers, cool
t-shirts // Nirvana based on the Perl virtues - what ever...
So when we evaluate the people attending our Workshops, we see the
following groups:
1. Local Perl Mongers
2. Local Perl Users, which come because it is local to where they work
3. Others, frequent flyers, crazy french, crazy americans, people with
too much time, friends of 1. etc.
- It is nice organizing something for group 1. which is a big larger
than your normal tech/social meet.
- We want to attract 2. so 1. gets bigger and more sustainable
- We simply cannot avoid group 3. and they are often delivering extra
ordinary content, making group 1, happy and group 2 interested.
From a historic perspective
NPW, started out as SPW (Scandinavian Perl Workshop), but the
Helsinki.pm wanted to join (but never did). Anyway, we think we are
too small a language group, so it was interesting for us to
collaborate with Sweden and later Norway. This was from the beginning
due to the proximity of our countries and relations through local
Linux User Group (SSLUG), which used to be the largest in the world
until the Brazillians discovered the Internet, Open Source and Orkut.
NPW was the first workshop to cross country borders, but we simply do
this our of necessity and to attract the audience.
We do as such not have a board evaluating proposals, so nothing can
stop anybody from organizing a NPW, so we might even have several in a
year, the annual things is also pure coincidence.
Anyway I hope you will organize something with the above points in
mind, since workshops are truly grass root and we JFDI. I just want
you to evaluate the following:
1. Primarily attract group 1
2. Get locals (group 1) involved in the organization
3. Attract group 2
4. Group 3 will come whether you want them too or not, but group 3
will never be larger than groups 2 and 3
5. NPW is slowly starting to show signs of becoming too strained
geographically.
About the last bullet. Stockholm, Oslo and Copenhagen have all hosted
several workshops and I expect they all want to do so again, but we
want to attract more people from group 1, so we are interested in
covering some of the grey areas in Denmark (Århus), Sweden, (Göteborg/
Malmö) - I do not know about Norway, but I guess other venues/cities
could be hosting in the future, I will have to talk to Oslo.pm.
We want to keep our sponsors in the loop and our audience on their
toes. We have seen a lot of people going from group 2 to group 1. And
later they become YAPC attendees. But this takes time and we have to
keep their interest sparked and to some traveling too far to attend a
workshop is comparable to going to a YAPC, so they don't go. So please
look into your target audience and make a decision based on this.
Sorry this mail got so long, it was just my 2 cents,
jonasbn
On 14/05/2009, at 22.11, Andrew Shitov wrote:
Hello,
I would like to propose to host next year's Nordic Perl Workshop in
Riga, Latvia.
Let me explain why I am doing this. There are several reasons for
choosing Riga as a host city of NWP 2010.
If you have attended my lightning talk in Oslo this year, you might
remember the map I demonstrated to show the coverage of Perl events.
Today it looks like this:
http://blog.shitov.ru/i/9000km-of-perl/06.gif. Maybe I've missed some
events in Spain and other countries in the West of the continent, but
I definitely sure that the white corridor which currently splits two
coloured parts really exists. Organizing my own events in five
different countries I was trying to cover as much of Russian-speaking
land as possible, conquering even the territory of Bulgaria, which is
not really Russian-speaking. I would also like to fill the gap, namely
Baltic states.
I have briefly examined the state of conference halls in Riga and see
that at least from financial point of view it is possible to host the
event there, because rent prices are quite reasonable.
Riga is also the hub of AirBaltic and that means there are lots of
planes to and from all the countries NPW is aware of.
Latvia is within the Schengen territory now which makes it easy
accessible by Europeans.
And just to add another plus, I might say that my bank account in
Latvia bank AB.LV was approved today. So I may collect money there now
:-)
Noone yet from Baltic states are now subscribed to this mailing list,
and I am trying to persuade Tallin.pm's leader to take the part in the
organizational processes. Anyway there are people here in Moscow who
will not refuse to help me with the stuff, I think.
Nordic Perl Workshop is the (only?) annual event which is moving every
year between neighbouring countries. This year's NPW in Oslo showed
that not only people from Nordic countries are interested in attending
that event. I propose to make that "moving waves" more strong and
touch Baltics.
P. S. I am writing this e-mail from the hotel in the capital of
Uzbekistan, where we have organized yet another Perl Workshop outside
our country of residence.
--
Andrew Shitov
______________________________________________________________________
a...@shitov.ru | http://shitov.ru
