Welcome to our third official bulletin, from the organisers of the 2006 YAPC::Europe Perl Conference in Birmingham.

Call For Papers

So we've sorted the dates, we have a venue (more on that soon), we're looking at accommodation, and hopefully we've now got many of you champing at the bit to register, but we also need some speakers...

• Proposal Submission Deadline: Friday, 2nd June 2006
• Papers/Slides for Proceedings: Friday, 21st July 2006

The theme for this year's conference is "The Accessibility of Perl", which we hope will inspire submissions for this and related topics. If Perl has helped you or your company in enabling access, whether that is in terms of website accessibility and applications or even education and services, we'd like to hear about it. Although this is our main topic for the conference, it will not be the only one, and as such we will also be accepting talks on topics on just about any theme.

Please submit your proposals to The Organisers no later than midnight GMT on Friday 2nd June 2006.

Each submission should be for only one talk (although multiple submissions are welcome), and include:

• a brief bio
• the talk title
• the proposed length for the talk
• a brief description of the talk.

An outline of the main points can also be helpful, and is required for tutorial proposals.

All accepted speakers, except lightning talk only speakers, will have their registration fee waived.

We will be offering a number of time-slots for talks:

• Standard: 20 minutes (the preferred format)
• Long: 40 minutes
• Short Tutorial: 60-90 minutes
• Standard Tutorial: 3 hours (including break)

The preferred format is a 20 minute talk. It is expected that the majority of talks will be of this length.

Long talks are reserved for experienced speakers covering large topics. If you have an in-depth topic you would like to present in some detail, perhaps with considerable discussion, a double-slot may be available. However you should also consider splitting it into two standard talks (perhaps an introduction and a more advanced talk).

Short tutorials are available for classes where there are distinct levels of presentation, such as introductory, intermediary and expert levels.

Half-day tutorials tend to cover a wide range of material on a certain aspect of Perl programming. For example, an XML tutorial could cover XML basics, to writing XML, to parsing XML, to practical uses of XML.

Conference organisers reserve the right to change the length assigned to a talk, if deemed appropriate.

Lightning talks will be a feature of the conference, but should not be submitted yet. Details of how to submit these will follow in due course.

We are aiming to notify speakers, as to whether their talks are accepted or not, around mid June. In the event we are deluged with talks, we may ask whether we can hold some talks in reserve in the event of any unforeseen rescheduling.

Call for Stuff

Lanyards!

We are hoping to issue all attendees with id badges, and would like some lanyards so that people can wear them, rather than pin them on. We would prefer not to spend your attendee fees on them, so we are looking for a company who can supply them as part of a sponsorship package. Company branding is fine, but it must be all above board. If you work for or know a company who could supply us with 250-300 lanyards, ask them to get in touch.

Bags!

Conference bags are always a bit of a minefield. Despite some great efforts by previous conferences to provide good bags to collect all your conference goodies in, they are a huge expense compared to the other merchand ise. So once again we are looking for a company that can provide us with 250-300 conference bags. Again company branding is fine, and if we can get our logo/name on there too, even better. So if you work for or know a company that can help, please send them our way.

Introducing The Team

Four of the organisers for YAPC::Europe::2006 were present in Braga last year, along with several other members of Birmingham.pm. In addition to the organisational team, we are forming a loyal band of volunteers, who will all be working very hard behind the scenes to bring you a very enjoyable and educational conference next year. Let us begin by introducing ourselves.

Our Project Manager and Leader, already well known in the Perl community, is Barbie. Barbie founded Birmingham Perl Mongers in September 2000, and has been the group leader ever since. He has worked tirelessly to promote Birmingham.pm and has been helping to raise awareness of UK Perl Monger user groups in general. Organising social meetings and technical meetings for the group, as well as the planning meetings for YAPC::Europe::2006. He has spoken at several international YAPC Perl Conferences, authored over 20 Perl modules on CPAN, and taken part in many Perl projects.

Next up is Brian McCauley, aka NoBull. Brian is our venue, accommodation & entertainment liaison, plus our health and safety advisor seeing as he also volunteers for the St John's Ambulance Service (basically he gets into gigs free ;)). He has presented at the last 2 YAPC::Europe Perl conferences and at many local technical meetings, and is also a CPAN author. He can often be found on usenet digging up material for his series of "Usenet Gems" presentations.

Other introductions, both of organisers and press-ganged members, will appear in future announcements.

Contact

Should you wish to contact us, there is an email address available for direct contact, where you can mail us with your questions and suggestions. There is also the regular YAPC::Europe conference mailing list, which is open to all.

That's all for this release. Look out for more news and announcements in the future.

Thanks,
The Birmingham 2006 Organisers
http://birmingham.pm.org