Request for Nominations to the GHC Steering Committee

Dear Haskell community, the GHC Steering committee is seeking nominations for a new member. The committee scrutinizes, nitpicks, improves, weights 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. 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. 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. The GHC developers themselves are already well represented already. We seek Haskell _users_ more than GHC hackers. There is no shortage of people who are very 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 learn, (particularly) through 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 explicitly invite “conservative” members of the community to join the committee. To make a nomination, please send an email to me (as the committee secretary) at mail@joachim-breitner.de until July 23th. 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.) On behalf of the committee, Joachim Breitner -- Joachim Breitner mail@joachim-breitner.de http://www.joachim-breitner.de/

Hi Committe, just to keep you (and the curious public in the loop): We have received five nominations so far, and I am very pleased with them. They also arrived quite swiftly after the call, so these people all seem to be responsive in a way that we appreciate :-) What next? I will wait until after Monday, in case there are some more nominations. Then I will paste all nominations into one email and send it to the members of the committee (including the leaving Ryan, who should have a say in his replacement – unless you, Ryan, would rather not get involved), but _not_ this list (which is public)! I propose we allow us one week to look at them and voice any opinions, concerns and endorsements (using Reply-to-all, _not_ on this mailing list). After this week, I think we should have a proper vote on this, and not just do the usual silence-is-consensus trick. I am a bit of a nerd when it comes to voting systems, so I would like to so something better than a simple majority vote: I will ask you to vote by making a complete ranking of your choices. The winner will then be determined by the Schulze Method (as used by Debian, FSFE and many other organizations). I will announce the result of the election on the mailing list, and privately thanks the other nominations, without revealing who they are. This voting system has the additional advantage that it gives us a ranking of candidates, so if we chose to add more than one members at this point (either to expand the committee, or if someone besides Ryan wants to get out at this point), we can do that easily. Cheers, Joachim [Schulze Method]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_method -- Joachim Breitner mail@joachim-breitner.de http://www.joachim-breitner.de/
participants (1)
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Joachim Breitner