New Internationalist. The people, the ideas, the action in the fight for global justice.

Activist organizations are getting bitten by storing their data in "the cloud" and there is a lot that can be done about it.  Over the years, I’ve seen this happen, more than a few times, to organizations that I’ve worked with. Heck, it’s happened twice in the last year just to New Internationalist. But the question is: as Web services used by these organizations shut-down, or — worse — when they willingly hand out data to any repressive regime that asks for it, are there enough alternatives being developed to provide, well, alternatives? 

This concern was brought back to life for me recently with the news that the micro-blogging service Twitter allegedly assisted authorities in locating an activist during the G-20 Protest in Pittsburgh, resulting in his arrest.. The possible collusion of services like Twitter is a relatively new activist security concern, historically concerns focused on the all-too-frequent seizure of Internet servers and hardware used by activists and organizations like Indymedia. But now that people’s data is moving "into the cloud," there are a lot more issues to be concerned about. 

I got a great e-mail from Gabor earlier this week that proposed a simple challenge: Let’s not get distracted trying to promote Perl itself, but — instead — let’s focus on promoting projects written in Perl.

One of those projects — the one I’m most excited about on a day-to-day basis — is Bricolage, the enterprise-class content management system. Gabor’s note — which asked about the status of the project — makes me wonder why more folks in the Perl community aren’t taking a closer look at what is undoubtedly one of the most capable publishing systems on the market today?

So, in the interest of beating the drum for a Perl project that’s alive and well, I wanted to summarize what I think is exciting about the Bricolage project right now:

Over the years, I’ve been involved with a fair number of Bricolage implementations for different organizations. (For those that don’t know, Bricolage is a large, Perl-based, publishing system.) Many of these organizations don’t have a full-time Perl programmer on staff, and instead rely on external contracts to do the heavy lifting that comes up from time-to-time. However, most of these organizations have a "Web producer" or "Web manager" — a generalist who helps with content updates, and smaller scale Web site changes — and, almost without fail, that person eventually asks: How can I learn more about Perl?

Giving credit where credit is due: The folks behind Padre, the Perl IDE, are leading by example when it comes to doing community engagement well. Twice now, folks from the Padre project have dropped me a note to ask about this or that, which is a great way to catch people’s attention So, with such great outreach, I’d feel like a complete schmoe if I didn’t at least give Padre a whirl.

Unfortunately, getting Padre running is currently pretty difficult — I’d say a tad more difficult than installing Bricolage, which has historically been a non-trivial exercise. No doubt the Padre install process is going to get a whack easier soon, given the high number of commits the project sees in a given week.

One of the most enjoyable benefits of working with a not-for-profit workers’ co-operative is being able to invest some time into activities that aren’t exclusively tied to generating revenue. New Internationalist has long-relied on free and open source software and this year we will try to formalize our efforts to contribute back to projects that have helped along the way. The concept is "Free Software Fridays," which is something we hope will catch on at other organizations.

The concept is simple: those of us that work on technology-related aspects of New Internationalist’s operation invest two hours per week, or one day a month, into supporting the free software projects that we rely on, or toward releasing the tools that we’ve developed internally as free software. The idea itself is open source, in the sense that we’ve taken the broad strokes from the idea of "Open Source Fridays" started by our friends at the Web Collective in Seattle and re-purposed them to fit with the work culture at NI.

A couple weeks back, I asked the question "Where is the big ‘Explore Perl’ button?" and followed up last week with a short demo of the kind of thing I was thinking about. Some folks liked it: so today it’s one step closer to "reality." And now it’s your turn to take it to the next level.

After Adam mentioned that he was running a humourous mock-up of the "Perl Ecosystem Toolbar" on the CPAN Top 100 site, I thought "crap, I better see if I can actually make this thing work."

This isn’t really a post. But, after a bit of a funny back-and-forth with Adam Kennedy, I thought it would be fun to throw together an example of what a "persistent Perl ecosystem toolbar" might look like in reality.

So, here’s a quick demo.

How can we make Perl more "explorable?" That’s the question I’ve been wrestling with since my last post about "Getting to the root of Perl’s perception problems." (By the way, thanks for all of the feedback — very helpful).

As I continued to think through the different audiences that Perl needs to speak to and the challenge of helping them find the information they’re looking for, I kept coming back to one idea: we need a Sherpa.

The interest in improving the perception of Perl is increasing every day (much to my surprise!). From Matt S Trout’s initiative to feed patches back to the maintainers of perl.org to Jon Allen’s TPF grant application to "Improve the visual design of Perl websites," to Gábor Szabó’s "Measurable objectives for the Perl ecosystem," each step builds on the next. All of them are tangible and practical steps toward a Perl renaissance online.

Of even more interest is the approach. Like many Perl programs of the past, it appears like the first thought is "Let’s just fix this fast," which sometimes can happen even before the problem has been well defined (ahem, spaghetti code anyone?). And while the speed of the "Just Freakin’ Do It" approach works when trying to get people excited, it can sometimes miss the mark around harnessing a community’s collective wisdom. In my experience, the Perl community has a lot of collective wisdom to tap in to and should be thinking as long term as possible when it comes to re-defining what the Perl community looks like to the outside world.

So, in the interest of pushing the conversation forward another step, I wanted to explore two questions:

1. What is the Perl community "selling" to the outside world?
2. Who is the Perl community "selling" its message to?

Following on the last post about "Prettier Perl Web sites" and taking Sebastian Riedel’s "Don’t explain what you think would look better, just make a mockup and show us!" challenge to heart, I spent some time looking at Perl’s existing design patterns.

Specifically, I wanted to take a closer look at two established Perl "brands" and to expose the underlying elements of their design consistency; the typography, colours, and so on. The two I chose — because they look like they were developed by professionals, and not some 12-year-old with access to GIMP — are The Perl Foundation and O’Reilly Media’s Perl books.

In this post, I’ll focus on The Perl Foundation. Let’s start with the logo: