In February 2001, there were nearly 200 individuals involved in the development of Perl; these developers, or `porters', communicate through the use of the perl5-porters mailing list; if you are planning to get involved in helping to develop or maintain Perl, a subscription to this list is essential.
You can subscribe by sending an email to perl5-porters-subscribe@perl.org; you'll be asked to send an email to confirm, and then you should start receiving mail from the list. To send mail, to the list, address the mail to perl5-porters@perl.org; you don't have to be subscribed to post, and the list is not moderated. If, for whatever reason, you decide to unsubscribe, simply mail perl5-porters-unsubscribe@perl.org.
The list usually receives between 200 and 400 mails a week. If this is too much for you, you can subscribe instead to a daily digest service by mailing perl5-porters-digest-subscribe@perl.org. Alternatively, I write a weekly summary of the list, published on the Perl home page.
There is also a perl5-porters FAQ which explains a lot of this, plus more about how to behave on P5P and how to submit patches to Perl.