Welcome to the seventh official bulletin regarding the 2006 YAPC::Europe Perl Conference from the Birmingham 2006 Organisers.

Call for Lightning Talks

A regular feature of YAPC conferences is the Lightning Talks. Rapid fire 5 minute presentations about anything and everything. Take a look at the links below if you've never seen a Lightning Talk before, and find out how easy it is to get involved. There will potentially be 2 Lightning Talk presentation slots, depending upon the submissions of both regular talks and lightning talks, so please submit as many as you like. R Geoffrey Avery will presiding over the Lightning Talks, so all correspondance for them will be with Geoff not ourselves.

Deadline for Lightning Talks is 23rd August, 2006.

• Lightning Talks
• YAPC::Europe::2006 Submissions

Call for Workshops

We've had several talk submissions now, but we are still looking for some cool workshop submissions. We've had discussions with some that are interested in doing some workshops, but we're looking for some more. So if you're involved in a project that could do with some timeout away from regular talks to explain the details, either as a hands-on tutorial, a Q&A session or hackathon, please feel free to submit. The format doesn't have to be too rigid, just give us an idea of what you expect to do and any reference links that will give us an idea of what the project is about.

As per regular talks, please submit your workshop proposals to no later than midnight GMT on Friday 2nd June 2006. Each submission should be for only one talk/workshop (although multiple submissions are welcome), and include:

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

For each workshop accepted, the first person named on the proposal will have their registration fee waived.

Introducing The Team

We've introduced the core members of the organisational team, but now we'd like to introduce two members of Birmingham.pm, who while not Perl Mongers as such, still contribute to our efforts. They both joined the group in 2001 and have been a stable part of the social meetings.

Mel has been working as a web designer for several years, and worked for a variety of businesses creating websites. Mel was responsible for the animation seen in our "Birmingham Job" movie, for which we are extremely grateful. She also helped with the layout and design of the conference website. Mel joined the Birmingham Perl Mongers as several of her colleagues were all Perl programmers and found it a good excuse to spend the evening in a pub :)

Chris is also a web designer, but also does quite a bit of programming too. He's a bit of a CSS whizz and he came up with the layout design for the Birmingham.pm website and conference wiki. Chris has been attempting to learn Perl off and on, but keeps succumbing to the dark side. We keep a glimmer of hope as he is planning to attend the conference ;)

Mel and Chris will also be getting married on Saturday 27th May 2006, so we hope you'll wish them well when you see them at the conference.

More introductions (yes there are more!) 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
www.birmingham2006.com