Around half of all attendees to a YAPC have never attended a YAPC before.

As of today, 7680 people have uploaded a distribution to the CPAN.

Several hundred people -- over a thousand -- have credits in the source code to Perl 5.

In any given yearly period, a few dozen people have contributed more than a single patch to Perl 5, Rakudo, or Parrot.

PerlMonks has a couple of hundred very active users.

It takes months of effort to get a dozen potential students for each year's Google Summer of Code for Perl.

A new edition of the book Programming Perl may sell hundreds of thousands of copies. A new edition of Learning Perl may sell tens of thousands of copies.

A controversial or active Perl blog most may get a dozen comments.

There may be a million people in the world who've wrote more than one line of Perl code for some purpose. Go find a novice, encourage him or her to continue learning Perl, and -- most importantly -- introduce him or her to the community. You don't have to file a bug on rt.perl.org or rt.cpan.org or fix the XS documentation in the Perl 5 core or help bootstrap the Parrot JIT or organize a conference or volunteer to mentor a TPF grant. Yet you'll get much, much more out of Perl if you add your little bit to the wider Perl community.

If we are to improve our community to welcome more participants (and we should do that), we should also actively recruit new participants. Don't wait for them to come to us. Let's go find them and invite them and make them feel welcome that way, too.