First, a big thanks to those of you who immediately volunteered to act as contact persons to their communities. That means that five of the areas are already covered. ******************************************* *** keep those contact offers coming!-) *** ******************************************* *** if you can't cover a whole area, status reports for any of *** *** the sub-areas listed can still be a good starting point *** To avoid duplication of work, and to remind everyone which areas are still looking for contact persons, here is my current list (note that there are more topics covered than contacts;-): Generic Programming/Generic Haskell [contact: Johan Jeuring] Hierarchical library proposal [contact: Simon Marlow] Happy [contact: Simon Marlow] Concurrent Haskell [contact: Simon Marlow] GHC [contact: Simon Peyton-Jones] Thanks also for the positive feedback - it seems that many of you have waited for something in this direction. There have been a few alternative suggestions as well, all of which could be pursued, if someone is willing to make a start. So I would like to pass on those suggestions to the list, with a few comments. - Tom Pledger points out the inevitable problems of a hierarchical structure, and suggests a keyword/phrase glossary instead, with definitions and links to project summaries, tending towards Wiki. I think Jan Sibinsky had started a nice glossary - unfortunately, he still seems to be offline? Has someone saved his work? As for Wikis, I've never been impressed with their apparent inability to self-organise, but we do have a Haskell Wiki, so everyone is welcome to prove me wrong there! Other structures for presenting the information might work (we'll see), but from my experience, it takes some active prodding and definite goals to get others to contribute. Hence the present structure for a start. - Ketil Malde suggests a web zine, with a group of people monitoring and summarising mailing list traffic. I'm not so sure about that specific mode (any volunteers out there?), but I do think that functional programming as a whole would profit from some kind of magazine-style publication, to bridge between the academic forums and the increasing number of (would-be) Haskell practitioners out there who have no need to conform to academic quality guidelines but would still want a quality forum more permanent and organised than mailing lists. Such a magazine would collect, edit and archive contributions about Haskell (or other FPLs) in practice, how to design, how to solve all those problems that are not really scientific in nature, but still need to be solved. I think many academics would be happy to contribute as well, focussing on their own role as practitioners. Many of those nice explanations on the mailing lists would no longer be lost to mailing list archives, and volunteer (that word again) reporters could write about interesting projects, events, etc.. That would still need some good and active editors in place (and twice a year there could be a special issue on Haskell, including the Haskell communities report;-). So a Haskell or FP web zine is a good idea, and complementary to the report we are trying to get together now. - Last, but certainly not least, Andrei Serjantov supports the idea of a separate mailing list for applications of Haskell discussions, pointing out that some potential posters to the current lists are unsure whether their own questions and contributions have any place amongst those highly technical discussions about advanced language extensions or recent implementation details. AFAIC, those "other" contributions are welcome as well on the current lists, but a separate applications list would still make a lot of sense (I would subscribe). Just remember that anything good needs volunteers to get things started (without them, we wouldn't have the language&library reports, not to speak of implementations). And that means you, dear reader!-) I'll be at IFL next week, but keep those contact offers coming! Claus