Chankey Pathak

The following is posted on behalf of Roman Filippov and Al Newkirk, kindly share your thoughts on the mentioned points.

I would like to propose the following items for discussion, in no particular order. This is just a brain dump of the ideas I have been thinking for a while now.

• Perl ecosystem needs better branding and a style guide. It needs to be more iconic and recognizable. Possibly we need to crowdfund a campaign to hire some agency to design that. E.g. maybe overhaul the logo, provide logo style guides, color guides, language, etc. We need to make Perl sexy, and not boring and old-looking.
• Provide a front end framework based on above style guide. Possibly base it on Bootstrap or similar other framework, but drastically different look, so it doesn't look very boilerplate. This will allow tool developers to quickly get started to advertise their creations in a digestible and pleasant manner. Too many Perl community sites are dry, boring and look like they are form 90s, which they probably are. This IMO makes the whole community look old and not "up to date". And I am not saying we need to use the cutting edge JavaScript front end carousel plugin and make everything animated. But we definitely need a facelift for most of the community. The only good looking Perl project site I can think of PearlBee.
• Then major resources (perl.com, perl.org, jobs.perl.org, metacpan, etc...) need to be visually re-designed with that style guide in mind. I am not saying they need to look identical and boring like government sites, but at least have a common theme/thread. Look like they belong in the community.
• We need a defacto, easy "get started" guide, which is also easily accessible, like "perl.(com|org)/start" (which can of course redirect to a wiki entry somewhere). This would list all authoritative resources and easy instructions how to get going with "Modern Perl". E.g. how to instal plenv, how to get cpanm. And I know Perl motto is TIMTOWTDI, but here we really need to cut that down to digestible easy to get started guide with as least choice as possible. Later on users are free to learn the rest. We need easy way to get into the door. At the end we also need to provide an FAQ for newbies (common pitfalls).
• We need to get rid of "Not invented here" anti pattern in Perl community. Lets be honest - current state of affairs for Perl open source platforms/tools is very poor. I am talking about CMS, blogging, wikis, and other platforms. Lets permit ourselves to use tools written in other languages, at least for now, until we have our own that is just as good, or at least covers everything we need. Right now, Perl blogs are ugly and unsexy.
• We need a web based forum. Many newbies might be intimidated by IRC and it is to as easy to get started with that. You need a client, you need to configure it. Mailing lists are even more ugly and horrible. We need a modern forum with general topics, but also sub topics for major modules/communities (Catalyst, Dancer, DBIC). I guess we could mirror some of the IRC channels. And then we need a bot that will re-post new threads to the related IRC channels so people get answers. This will also provide some good Perl related content for search engines.
• We could come up with a course outline and eventually prepare an entire course with slides on Modern Perl that teachers from schools, colleges and universities can use entirely, or as a starting point. This will get Perl back into the institutions hopefully.
• We need a well thought out PR campaign to promote Perl to nurture the growth and business acceptance. We might need to outsource that as well. At least outsource the planning stage and then key community members can execute the plan.
• We need to jump on some bandwagon trends and contribute to other communities. E.g. now is a good time to write some Perl tools for Docker. Docker is exploding. I feel like Perl is a really good match, and it is still a standard package on most Linux systems. It is also a great sys admin tool and greatly used by many sys admins. Think of it as "guest posting" or being a guest on a radio show. We write tools for other communities, other communities get involved with Perl and it is a win/win. We need to identify these future trends.
• We need to proactively collect potential user emails for marketing. That is how many alternative communities grew so large. Esp ROR. We need to get their emails and send them mailing lists with useful information about Perl. E.g. news, conferences, new projects, etc...