Melbourne/Australia Perl Happenings
It seems that some individuals read my journal to hear about the latest happenings in the Perl scene in Melbourne and other parts of Australia. With that in mind, I believe that I should mention a few recent events.

Melbourne Perl Mongers has restarted, and our first meeting for the year had discussions about OSDC/YAPC::AU 2004, the Phalanx 100, an offer from yours truly to talk about HTML::Mason, and the discussion of starting up combined open-source developer meetings, affectionately known at this stage as Open Source Developers Club. OSDClub is currently arranged for every second month, instead of Melb.PM.

I volunteered to try and rejuvenate the Melb.PM website (which is currently down), although I'm currently waiting to receive the appropriate keys from the relevant people inside Melb.PM.

Last Friday was SecureCon, which Jacinta and myself attended, and discovered that all the usual suspects were there. There were large contingents from SAGE-AU, including Baden Hughes from The Perl Foundation. Practically all the SAGE-AU members there had submitted proposals for the next SAGE-AU conference, or were on the reviewing committee, or both. There were a couple of LinuxChix, a group from 2600, and all the old Melbourne University computer science crowd.

The weekend was spent on a new project that focuses on the Australian Perl community, which is active but fragmented. I'm hoping to reduce community fragmentation and produce a way that all Australian entities (including businesses, user groups, and invididuals) can communicate more effectively. Stay tuned for more details (and hopefully a beta in the next couple of weeks).