Ian Lynagh:

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. [..] 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.

Good plan! Manuel

On Sun, Sep 5, 2010 at 3:40 PM, Ian Lynagh wrote:

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.

The darcs project uses the Software Freedom Conservancy as a sort of legal entity to hold on to funds and also to help in case anyone takes legal action against darcs or darcs needs to take legal action. You might consider joining the SFC as "haskell.org". I don't know enough about the SFC or haskell.org to know if it would be beneficial, so I'm just sort of throwing it out there as something to investigate. You might talk to Eric Kow if you're interested. I believe he coordinated the process. http://conservancy.softwarefreedom.org/ Jason

Ian et al | 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. I think that's an excellent idea. I think there should be a web page describing what the committee does, who is in it, how to contact it, etc. I'm sure you intended that. An annual statement of what money came in and went out would be good practice. Well the committee also be responsible for the haskell.org web site? | 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. It's usually helpful to establish a rotation so that everyone knows who is going to stand down when, and to arrange that there isn't a sudden glut one year. Document the stand-down dates on the committee web page. In my experience, everyone forgets! Five might be a little small. It might be good to allow for a person to be re-elected for a second term if they are willing. It's a good principle to have rotation, but a pity to lose willing and experienced talent. But six years is enough. | 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. I agree with the problem, and I think your proposed solution may do for now, but it's obviously not a robust solution. I trust you five, but in three years time you may all have stood down! A possible solution would be to have an "electoral college" of people entitled to vote. It should be easy to become a member of the college: any track record of contributions to the Haskell community, including constructive contributions to Haskell Cafe, would be enough. Then the college can elect the committee. It's debatable whether this is worth the bother at this point. Maybe it would be enough to document on the committee page that we don't regard the nomination process as robust, and if any concern arises we will consider something more substantial. Simon