brian d foy

This year, on behalf of Perl mongers and O'Reilly Media, I present the White Camel Awards at YAPC::EU in Pisa.

The White Camel Awards recognize significant, but non-technical, achievement in the Perl community, traditionally in three areas: Perl advocacy, Perl user groups, and Perl community. Non-technical work tends not only to be thankless jobs which nobody praises in public. However, these people keep doing the work despite the possibility or reward or recognition. Curiously, the awards tend to go to people who don't think that they deserve them. Sometimes we have to force the award on people, which makes them the ideal candidates for them.

But that's okay, because we're not completely here to reward the person. Giving the White Camel Award gives us a chance to show the world that there are things that we value in the Perl community. This year's recipients, as well as their projects, have been deserving of this sort of recognition for a long time.

Perl User Groups: José Castro (cog)

José is seemingly ever present in support of Perl events in Portugal. He's helped to organize user groups as well as YAPCs and workshops. Besides supporting events in his own country, he's a constant help for other events and groups, and for he even maintained parts of the original Perl mongers.

Perl Advocacy: Paul Fenwick

Paul Fenwick is a tireless supporter of Perl and spends quite a bit of his time perfecting his speaking technique to draw large crowds for his Perl talk. Besides his many technical contributions, he works for Perl Training Australia, runs Perl Tips mailing list, and generally makes Perl fun and interesting to attract and educate new Perlers.

Perl Community: Barbie

Barbie is the glue that holds together CPAN Testers, the ad hoc group of people who download, test, and report on everything we upload to CPAN. Although there are a lot of technical aspects to making this work, creating and maintaining the community might be the hardest part of it. CPAN Testers success relies on attracting and retaining people who are interested in working with it.