Olaf Alders

I was quite happy to see Samuel Kaufman's post on how to stream your local PM/whatever meetings. We've been experimenting with streaming our Toronto.pm meetings for the past few months. Last night we had our annual September lightning talks and I feel like we finally got it right -- or at least we're getting very close. We had a laptop set up at the front of the room. Each speaker used this laptop and a USB key with their talk on it. That laptop was hosting a Google "On Air" Hangout and also provided a mic for the speaker and the room. We also had a pair of powered speakers connected to the laptop so that we could hear the hangout participants who were remote. It's not perfect, but it's working well for us.

The really interesting part of it was that, for the first time, one of the talks was given remotely by a hangout participant. (Abram Hindle's "Iteration in Perl"). The significance of this is that we can a) now share our meetings with the world in real time and b) invite guest speakers to share their ideas with us remotely. The meetings are also archived, so you can find them on Youtube once the meeting is over.

Toronto.pm has been active for many years, so I've always figured it was the norm to have easy access to monthly technical meetings. However, I've come to realize that even cities with populations in the millions may not have an active mongers group. So, there are likely quite a few developers out there who would be interested in hearing (or giving) the odd talk via Hangout. We're planning to do this monthly, going forward, except for the odd month (like December) when the meeting is purely social.

If you're interested in attending a meeting (either in person or virtually), please join our meetup group so that you'll be notified in advance of dates and topics. If you're interested in last night's meeting, you'll find the video on youtube. The talks start at the 2:00 minute mark:

2:00 extend_cd (Tom Legrady)
10:08 Metaphors We Code By (Stuart Watt)
19:00 Code::TidyAll (Olaf Alders)
33:30 Why the Universe is Like Lasagna (Alan Rocker)
40:00 Iteration in Perl (Abram Hindle)
57:50 Design Diagnostics (Mike Stok)

You can also follow us on Twitter add us to your Google+ circles or find just a few of us in #tpm on irc.perl.org