November 2016 - Haskell-community

Call for Haskell.org Committee Nominations
by Gershom B 05 Dec '16

05 Dec '16

Dear Haskellers, It is time to put out a call for new nominations (typically but not necessarily self-nominations) to the haskell.org committee. We have four members of our committee due for retirement -- Adam Foltzer, Nicolas Wu, Andres Loeh, and Edward Kmett (who is stepping down early). As per our bylaws, three of the slots will be for regular three year terms, and one will be a short one year term to fill out the remainder of Edward's. To nominate yourself, please send an email to committee at haskell.org by December 2, 2016. The retiring members are eligible to re-nominate themselves. Please feel free to include any information about yourself that you think will help us to make a decision. The Haskell.org committee serves as a board of directors for Haskell.org, a 501(c)3 nonprofit which oversees technical and financial resources related to Haskell community infrastructure. Being a member of the committee does not necessarily require a significant amount of time, but committee members should aim to be responsive during discussions when the committee is called upon to make a decision. Strong leadership, communication, and judgement are very important characteristics for committee members. The role is about setting policy, providing direction/guidance for Haskell.org infrastructure, planning for the long term, and being fiscally responsible with the Haskell.org funds (and donations). As overseers for policy regarding the open source side of Haskell, committee members must also be able to set aside personal or business related bias and make decisions with the good of the open source Haskell community in mind. We seek a broad representation from different segments of the Haskell world -- including but not limited to those focused on education, those focused on industrial applications, those with background in organizing users-groups, and those focused directly on our technical infrastructure. More details about the committee's roles and responsibilities are on https://wiki.haskell.org/Haskell.org_committee If you have any questions about the process, please feel free to e-mail us at committee at haskell.org, or contact one of us individually. Best, Gershom Bazerman

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ANN: Haskell Website Working Group
by Gershom B 24 Nov '16

24 Nov '16

The following text is reproduced from Neil Mitchell’s blog (I’m just the messanger) where it lives at: https://neilmitchell.blogspot.com/2016/11/the-haskellorg-website-working-gr… == The Haskell.org Website Working Group (HWWG) == Haskell represents both a language and a user community - and moreover a fantastic community full of friends, fun, and deep technical debate. Unfortunately, in recent times the community has started to fracture, e.g. Cabal vs Stack, haskell.org vs haskell-lang.org. These divisions have risen above technical disagreements and at some points turned personal. The solution, shepherded by Simon Peyton Jones, and agreed to by both members of the haskell.org committee and the maintainers of haskell-lang.org, is to form the Haskell Website Working Group (HWWG). The charter of the group is at the bottom of this post. The goal of the Haskell Website Working Group is to make sure the Haskell website caters to the needs of Haskell programmers, particularly beginners. In doing so we hope to either combine or differentiate haskell.org and haskell-lang.org, and give people clear recommendations of what "downloading Haskell" means. Concretely, we hope that either haskell-lang.org redirects to haskell.org, or that haskell-lang.org ends up being used for something very different from today. == The Haskell Website Working Group (HWWG) == - Scope and goals - * The HWWG is responsible for the design and content of the user-facing haskell.org web site, including tutorials, videos, news, resource, downloads, etc. * The HWWG is not responsible for: * The infrastructure of haskell.org * Toolchains, Hackage, compilers, etc * The HWWG focuses on serving users of Haskell, not suppliers of technology or libraries. * An explicit goal is to re-unite the haskell.org and haskell-lang.org web sites. - Expected mode of operation - * HWWG is not responsible for actually doing everything! The web site is on github. Anyone can make a pull request. The general expectation is that uncontroversial changes will be accepted and committed without much debate. * If there is disagreement about a proposed change, it's up to the HWWG to engage in (open) debate, and to seek input as widely as time allows, but finally to make a decision. - Membership - Initial membership comprises of: * Neil Mitchell (chair) * Nicolas Wu * Andrew Cowie * Vincent Hanquez * Ryan Trinkle * Chris Done It is expected the committee will change over time, but the mechanism has not yet been thought about. - Rules of engagement - * Recognising that honestly-held judgements may differ, we will be scrupulously polite both in public and in private. * Recognising that Haskell has many users, and that different users have different needs and tastes, we want haskell.org to be inclusive rather than exclusive, providing a variety of alternative resources (toolchains, tutorials, books, etc) clearly signposted with their intended audiences. * Ultimately the haskell.org committee owns the haskell.org URL, but it delegates authority for the design and content of the web site to the HWWG. In extremis, if the haskell.org committee believes that the HWWG is mismanaging the web site, it can revoke that delegation.

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Introduction
by Ben Spencer 22 Nov '16

22 Nov '16

Hello everyone, I wanted to introduce myself. I'm a software developer in NYC that recently discovered Haskell. I've been participating in a local study group and I'm impressed with the language and the community thus far. Looking forward to great things. Best, Ben Spencer Sent from my iPhone

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haskell.org download page
by Jason Dagit 20 Nov '16

20 Nov '16

Hello all, I just realized that the Minimal installer listed first on the Downloads page (https://www.haskell.org/downloads) is deprecated and "dead". This creates an unfortunate situation where our top suggested way to get haskell immediately tells the user it's dead. I think that we should remove mention of the minimal installer ASAP on the grounds that the HP now comes in minimal and full variants. Furthermore, I would like to make the recommendation that we list the HP above other methods as even the minimal HP installer ships with stack (at least on windows it does). Between the two changes, I think the first one is crucial and the second one is merely reasonable. Thanks, Jason

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Eligibility?
by Luke Murphy 14 Nov '16

14 Nov '16

Hi folks, I just saw the call for committee nominations announced on Haskell Cafe. That's great and a really nice initiative I wasn't aware about. However, I didn't find any information about eligibility for prospective members on the link provided: - https://wiki.haskell.org/Haskell.org_committee For example, guidelines on location, timezone, skill, experience, involvement with community etc. Did I miss it somewhere? Best, Luke

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