Dear Haskell community,

the GHC Steering committee is seeking nominations for at least two new
members.

The committee scrutinizes, nitpicks, improves, weighs and eventually
accepts or rejects proposals that extend or change the language
supported by GHC and other (public-facing) aspects of GHC.
Our processes are described at
   https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals
which is also the GitHub repository where proposals are proposed. In
particular, please have a look at the bylaws at
   https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/blob/master/committee.rst

We are looking for a member who has the ability 
 * to understand such language extension proposals,
 * to find holes and missing corner cases in the specifications,
 * foresee the interaction with other language features and 
   specifications,
 * comment constructively and improve the proposals,
 * judge the cost/benefit ratio and
 * finally come to a justifiable conclusion.

We look for committee members who have some of these properties:
 * have substantial experience in writing Haskell applications or
   libraries, which they can use to inform judgements about the
   utility or otherwise of proposed features,
 * have made active contributions to the Haskell community, for
   some time,
 * have expertise in language design and implementation, in either
   Haskell or related languages, which they can share with us.

There is no shortage of people who are eager to get fancy new
features into the language, both in the committee and the wider
community. But each new feature imposes a cost, to implement, to maintain
in perpetuity in GHC's code base, to learn,
and to deal with its unexpected interaction with other features.
We need to strike a balance, one that encourages innovation (as GHC
always has) while still making Haskell attractive for real-world
production use and for teaching. We therefore seek a balance of
background, expertise, and views on the committee.

Membership of the committee gives you the chance to influence the future
direction of Haskell, and to serve the Haskell community.
The committee’s work requires a small, but non-trivial amount of time,
especially when you are assigned a proposal for shepherding. We
estimate the workload to be around 2 hours per week, and our process
works best if members usually respond to technical emails within 1-2
weeks (within days is even better). Please keep that in mind if your
email inbox is already overflowing.

To make a nomination, please send an email to me (as the committee
secretary) at mail at joachim-breitner.de until February 11th. I will
distribute the nominations among the committee, and we will keep the
nominations and our deliberations private.

We explicitly encourage self-nominations. You can nominate others, but
please obtain their explicit consent to do so. (We don’t want to choose
someone who turns out to be unable to serve.)