zakame.pl

Following up to szabgab's blogpost: a couple of years ago, I called out for people interested in getting together to make a new Perl group here in my country, the Philippines. I saw that there were already some registered Perl mongers groups in pm.org for Makati, Manila, and elsewhere, but all of their websites, and even the contact persons listed form, were simply inactive or unreachable. There were a few people responding to my call, but I made the mistake of not following through to that call myself, due to other circumstances happening at that time.

Last May this year, I finally got time to give this another go, and made another call for people, and this time, using Facebook and Google+, I made two groups for the Philippine Perl Mongers, a meta-community which I intend for helping to (re)form local Perl Monger communities such as Makati.pm, and to be a general resource/support group for Filipinos working with Perl. Growth of these groups is slow, for now, but I hope that through awareness of the existence of these groups, more Filipinos might join and start learning Perl.

For current and future events, I plan to follow the London.pm style of separate social and technical meetings, to ease people in. For the social meet, I already made one last weekend (July 6,) though it was a bit sad since only one other person attended (it was still enjoyable though as we got to talk a bit about why there seems to be little activity about Perl in this country; more about that in another blogpost.) As for the technical meet, I'm planning to hold a little workshop by the end of July to teach a bit of Perl and to show off some Perl tools for sysadmins.

My hope for the future is that this effort will help people find Perl and also find it enjoyable to use, much in the same was as other local communities for other languages are doing (there are strong language communities for JavaScript, Python, and Ruby here, and I myself follow those communities and look up at them as examples for what I want to do with Perl.) Furthermore, I observe that there seems to be an increase on the need for Perl developers here: I have been contacted by several people and startups recently, both locally and elsewhere, for potential Perl work. I also hope that this effort can serve as a nexus for those looking for Perl work, complimenting the existing service at jobs.perl.org.