On 29 August 2016 at 17:21, Gershom B
On August 29, 2016 at 11:15:19 AM, Paolo Giarrusso (paolo.giarrusso@uni-tuebingen.de) wrote:
If the poll was announced there, there would still be extra friction. But IIUC only the mailing list was announced there.
There is no poll. There is a modest discussion kicked off by Jason Dagit (who used to serve on the committee, but has not been on it for some time now) about a modest change (at this point swapping the bitrotted minimal installers for the HP minimal installers which are current).
One might initially think that "what's the best entry point into using Haskell" is a simple question. However, even without taking a side, we all know the topic is in fact highly contentious and it has been in the past. And since you're a community leader and I'm just a modest Haskeller, I'm sure you realize the discussion topic is not perceived as modest. At best one could argue the discussion *should* be modest, but there's technical content to it. It's also known that the committee's decision have been questioned for allegedly not listening to the community on this topic. I dislike the allegations (and find the tone unproductive), yet I think community input would be important and it's in the committee's best interest to both listen and be perceived as listening.
The committee does not operate by poll, it operates on the basis of broad discussion (with this list being the preferred venue) and then making choices amongst committee members as informed by that discussion. This is laid out at https://wiki.haskell.org/Haskell.org_committee
Are these procedures the best to achieve the Committee's stated goals?
I might understand the concern about archiving, but haskell-cafe solves that. And "the committee can't be expected to follow discussions" and "is empowered to act" does sound like "the committee can't be expected to listen to the community”.
It means that committee members should be expected to chase all over social media and sort through lots of poor signal/noise ratio to find potentially relevant discussions at all times. Rather, it is better to centralize these things to the extent possible.That’s all.
I think that's a strawman. I didn't propose to spend the day on Twitter, but to solicit input on questions of general relevance in venues where the community is. To send a post to haskell-cafe and follow the discussion—that doesn't imply following the rest of the ML (at least with the Google Groups interface, I'm sure there are many other solutions). I realize that might require time, but I frankly don't expect that "seeking to service the open source Haskell community" is easy. Cheers, -- Paolo G. Giarrusso - Ph.D. Student, Tübingen University http://ps.informatik.uni-tuebingen.de/team/giarrusso/