Dear Haskellers, following the early reminder in the preface of the last edition, you've probably been waiting already, contribution in hand, eager to send it in for the May edition of our report (hey, editors can have their dreams, too!-), so here it is: *your* invitation to contribute to the fourth edition of the Haskell Communities & Activities Report http://www.haskell.org/communities/ These bi-annual HC&A Reports should give a birds-eye view of Haskell development over the last 6 months, and perhaps an outlook over concrete plans for the next 6 months. The current plan is to get contributions in by the end of April, and to get the collective report out early next month (some of you will find this an excellent opportunity to collect your thoughts about what to submit to this year's Haskell Workshop, btw;-). The general idea is to update all existing summaries (these reports are really about recent/current activities), to drop any topics that haven't had any activity for two consecutive 6-month periods, and to add any new developments or topics for which no-one contributed summaries to the previous edition, while trying to keep the whole from blowing up (last time, we ended up with about 30 pages). New suggestions for current hot topics, activities, projects, .. are welcome - especially with names and addresses of potential contacts, but here is a non-exclusive list of likely topics: General Haskell developments; Haskell implementations; Haskell extensions; Standardization and documentation; Haskell tutorials, how-tos and wikis; Organisation of Haskell tool and library development; Haskell-related projects and publications; Feedback from specialist mailing lists to the Haskell community as a whole; Haskell libraries or tools; Applications of Haskell; Haskell announcements; .. all (recent) things Haskell Announcements: if you've announced anything new on the Haskell list over the last six months, you'll want to make sure that is reflected in this edition. Project pings: if you're maintaining a Haskell tool/library/.., you'll want to let everyone know that it is still alive and actively maintained, even if there may have been no new additions. Tutorials: if you've fought with some previously undocumented corner of Haskell, and have been kind enough to write down how you did manage to build that networking program, or if you've written a tutorial about some useful programming techniques/patterns, this is your opportunity to spread the word (btw, short, topic-specific, and hands-on tutorials that only show how to achieve a certain practical task would do a lot to make things easier for new Haskellers - Erlang and Perl folks seem to be good at this kind of thing, but why not have a similar effort for Haskell?) Applications: if you've been working quietly, using Haskell for some interesting project or application (commercial or otherwise), you might want to let others know about it, and about your experiences using the existing tools and libraries; are you using Haskell on your job? Feedback: if you're on one of the many specialist Haskell mailing lists, you'll want to report on whatever progress has been made there (GUI API discussions, library organisation, etc.) If you're unsure whether a contact for your area of work has come forward yet, have a look at the report's potential topics page, or get in touch with me. I've contacted last time's contributors, hoping they will volunteer to provide updates of their reports, and will update the contacts on the topics page fairly regularly. But where you don't yet see contacts listed for your own subject of interest, you are very welcome to volunteer, or to remind your local community/project team/mailing list/research group/etc. that they really ought to get their act together and let the Haskell community as a whole know about what they've been doing!-) A typical summary report about a tool/library/project/application/.. would be between 1 and 3 paragraphs of ASCII text (what's it about? major topics and results since the last report? current hot topics? major goals for the next six months?) plus pointers to material for further reading (typically to a home page, or to mailing list archives, specifications and drafts, implementations, meetings, minutes,..). Browsing through previous editions should give you a good idea. Looking forward to your contributions, Claus -- Haskell Communities and Activities Report (May 2003 edition) All contributions are due in by the end of April 2003! http://www.haskell.org/communities/