Organising the technical meetings this year has proved rather troublesome. Although we can often get some interesting talks together, advertising them in time and getting a regular attendance hasn't been a strong point.

As such next year I have proposed a slightly different format. We will still hold a technical meeting Feb-Nov, but we will alternate between a Technical Presentation night (with slides and speakers) and a Technical Discussion night.

The Technical Discussion nights will be an opportunity for people to bring along code, and have a group of us help out with any problems. It will also be a good opportunity to look at helping out with the Phalanx project, where we can take a distribution on CPAN and write some tests for it. Thus helping people to understand how to write tests and improve their Perl skills, as well as helping to provide the Perl community with more robust CPAN distributions :)

In addition it may well be a good opportunity to hack on some community projects, such as the Perl.org Patches project [1], Padre [2], CPAN Testers [3] or any other project that might value some of our time.

[1] http://lists.scsys.co.uk/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/perl-org-patches
[2] http://padre.perlide.org/
[3] http://www.cpantesters.org/

The Technical Discussion nights will likely be fairly free format. So even though we may suggest a topic/project to work on, anyone can still just turn up and bring along something for us to look at.

The benefit of this is that if for any reason we are unable to arrange a Technical Presentation night (due to lack of speakers, double bookings and the like), we can run a Technical Discussion night instead, rather than having to cancel the meeting.

Provisionally we'll start with a Technical Presentation night in Feb 2010, then a Technical Discussion night in Mar 2010, and alternate from then on. Any changes will be advertised on the website and the mailing list.