
Dear Haskellers, In recent years, haskell.org has started to receive assets, e.g. money from Google Summer Of Code, donations for Hackathons, and a Sparc machine for use in GHC development. We have also started spending this money: on the community server, on a server to take over hosting haskell.org itself, and on the haskell.org domain name. There is also interest in running fundraising drives for specific things such as Hackathon sponsorship and hosting fees. However, it is not currently clear who is responsible for determining what the haskell.org money should be spent on, or what are and are not acceptable uses of the domain name and hardware. To fix this problem, we propose that we create a "haskell.org committee", which is responsible for answering these sorts of questions, although for some questions they may choose to poll the community at large if they think appropriate. We suggest that the committee be composed of 5 representatives from the community, with committee members standing down after at most 3 years. Each year the committee will appoint one of their members to be the chair. As membership of "the Haskell community" is not well-defined, and voting would potentially be open to abuse if anyone were able to vote, we propose that the committee should choose their replacements from open nominations. Unfortunately, this gives us a bootstrapping problem, so we suggest that the initial committee be chosen from open nominations by some of the people who currently de-facto end up making the decisions currently: Duncan Coutts, Isaac Jones, Ian Lynagh, Don Stewart and Malcolm Wallace. These 5 would still be elligible to nominate themselves. Two of the initial members will stand down after one year, and two after two years, in order to bootstrap rolling membership turnover. We would love to hear feedback from you about this proposal, so that we can see whether the proposal, or something similar, has consensus amongst the community! A related issue is that haskell.org does not currently exist as a legal entity. We also hope to solve that problem, but we are still gathering information so that the community can make an informed decision, so I won't say more about that for now. Thanks Ian