This section provides a brief history of Act and details the primary authors and numerous other people who have contributed to it.
In 2003, when the French Perl Mongers began organising their YAPC::Europe in Paris, they thought about the web site and what they wanted to do with it. Starting from Sylvain Lhullier's Java-looking prototype, Éric Cholet and Philippe Bruhat created a conference web site that was multilingual, template-driven, and able to manage the users, talks, schedule and payment. It used mod_perl and Template Toolkit. They promised they would open the source after cleaning it up a bit.
The following year, when preparing the first French Perl Workshop, Éric and Philippe worked on a second system, designed from the start to support everything the old site could do, with one difference: it had to support multiple conferences.
With the source code from YAPC Europe 2003, two developpers and two
months of spare time were enough for this project to be ready for the
2004 French Perl Workshop (June). Act (A Conference Toolkit) was born.
We wanted to support several French Workshops without having to recode a
conference web site engine every year. Laziness is a lot of work... :-)
At that time, we hoped that by September 2004, the code should be published and ready to serve other conferences.
The YAPC Europe Foundation was created just after YAPC Europe in Paris, to help and support the organisation of Perl conferences in Europe. Since YEF and Act are hosted on the French mongers system, it was only natural that Act integrated the online payment system sponsored by YEF.
The code was finally published in January 2007.
While Act is not the official Perl conference software, The Perl Foundation has shown significant interest in Act. More importantly, the Perl community has used Act to organize about twenty conferences in Europe and in the U.S. between 2004 and 2007.
However, becoming the official Perl conference software is on the roadmap
of our world domination plan! ;-)
The name of the toolkit is Act, not ACT.
Even if it looks like an acronym (inspired by the one of APL), it is more of an inspirational injunction to conference organizers to forget about hacking the website and organize their conference. In short: "Act!".
We won't get mad if you spell it ACT, as long as you use it for your conference...
Philippe Bruhat (BooK) Éric Cholet
Gianni "dakkar" Cecarelli Elizabeth Cortell Thomas Klausner Tatsuhiko Miyagawa Jesse Vincent
Luis Motta Campos
be: Andrei Protasovitski, Taras Ivanyukovich de: Thomas Klausner es: Enrique Nell he: Uri Bruck hr: Vedran Vukotic, Vlatko Kosturjak hu: Gábor Szabó it: Gianni "dakkar" Cecarelli ja: Kenichi Ishigaki, drry, Tatsuhiko Miyagawa nb: Ole Bendik Kvisberg nl: Erik Colson, Emmanuel di Prétoro, Detlev Hauschildt pt: Alberto Manuel Brandão Simões, Luis Motta Campos ru: Andrew Shitov sk: Jozef Kutej uk: Anatoly Kochurkov, Maria Semenenko zh: qiang, fayland
Sébastien Aperghis-Tramoni Farley Balasuriya Ann Barcomb Jim Brandt Luis Motta Campos José Alves de Castro Gianni "dakkar" Cecarelli Kurt DeMaagd Jeremy Fluhmann Anders Hellström Claes Jakobsson Jose Kahan Maroš Kollár Thomas Klausner Roland Lammel David Landgren Daisuke Maki Tatsuhiko Miyagawa Jonas B. Nielsen Salve J Nilsen Hiroyuki Oyama Dave Rolsky Alberto Simões Enrico Sorcinelli Ricardo Signes Gábor Szabó Lars Thegler Daniel J. Wright