Tech Conferences and Parrot Outreach

[James E Keenan]

Friends,

There have been a lot of positive developments about Parrot in the past 
six months, but we haven't been very good about letting the outside 
world know about them.  That's something we have to change.

I know that several Parrot contributors -- Christoph Otto, Jonathan Leto 
and Jonathan Worthington come to mind -- are already planning to speak 
at technical conferences over the summer about Parrot or about 
technologies like Rakudo that are built on top of Parrot.  That's 
terrific!  We need more outreach like that.

To that end, we need to assemble a list of who is speaking on what, when 
and where -- where the "what?" refers to Parrot or technologies built on 
top of Parrot.  We'll start a wiki page for that, but, to make it 
simple, if you are planning such a presentation, simply reply to this 
list posting.  Needless to say, we'd particularly like to have people 
who have yet to speak in public about Parrot do so for the first time.

Of course, technical conferences are only way of getting the message 
about Parrot out.  We'd like to recruit people to help us with any and 
all of the following:

* An introductory-level slideshow in PDF format (10-20 slides) about 
Parrot that *anyone* (not just Parrot core developers) could run at a 
local tech user group meeting (Perlmongers/Python user group, Linux/BSD 
user groups, etc.).

* A 10-minute-long video about Parrot we could post to YouTube.  Or, 
better, a series of such videos, the first of which could be 
introductory and subsequent ones of which would be, say, quarterly updates.

* Parrot T-shirts.

* Parrot stickers.

So, please let us know if you are already planning to speak about Parrot 
over the next six months, and please make other outreach-related 
suggestions.

Thank you very much.
Jim Keenan (kid51)