Promoting your Perl workshop or conference?
In response to sending out the Perl Weekly I've already received two e-mails from people asking if I got information about DC-Baltimore Perl Worksop that will take place on April 11. Presumably they wanted us to include it in the Perl Weekly newsletter.
The fact that people reach out to the editors of the Perl Weekly is lightyears better than people who just expect us to know about every event and to promote them, but we cannot do much with the events without some news.
I pointed both of them to the list of Perl Events where the DCBPW is already listed and I told both of them that if they would like to promote the workshop (which is a very positive thing by itself), and if they would like it to be included in the Perl Weekly, they need to generate some news item.
It does not need to be earth shattering, just something we can use as an excuse to talk about the event.
I put together a page on promoting Perl events, in case you need ideas what to write about.
Or you can just write about something else and link to the event as I just did above.
I blog about Perl.
In all of my years helping to promote events, I've grown comfortable with the idea that as the person publishing the magazine, newsletter, or whatever, I have to be the one to discover and research it. The journalism role is vital in the community because the other way doesn't work.
So, if I found rumors of something, I tracked down people and asked questions rather than waiting for them to come to me.
This has been a failing of many Perl events for years because the organizers change every year so it's mostly the same mistakes every year. I think there's stuff in progress to work on that though.
For what it's worth, my initial conception of the thing that Kevin Lenzo turned into YAPC was "Conference in a Box", which was a workbook of everything you needed to do along with timelines, etc. Part of that would have been a Promotions chapter. I think there's a YAPC How-To somewhere, so maybe you could add yourself and Perl Weekly to that. :)
You probably refer to YAPC, right?
There is also the PerlJam by Barbie and a year ago I wrote a post called Perl Event organizer kit. I am afraid most organizers don't read any of these, but maybe the notice a blog post. At least now I can refer them to that post regarding the Perl Weekly.