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Discourse thread for discussion
This blog post is a summary of the meeting minutes for the Haskell Foundation board meeting that took place on April 8, 2021. This is the first time I'm writing these up, and potentially the only time I'm putting them on this blog. So this post is going to be a bit weird; we'll start with some questions.
Questions
Why are you writing these meeting minutes? As you'll see below, one of the decisions at the meeting was selection of additional officers for the board. I was selected as Secretary, which seems to put meeting minutes into my camp.
OK, but why are you publishing them on your personal blog? As you'll also see below, the new Haskell Foundation website is nearing completion, and in the future I hope these posts go there. But I wanted to kick things off with what I hope is close to the methodology going forward.
Isn't a blog post for each meeting excessive? Yes. As I mentioned in my transparency blog post, transparency includes a balance between too much and too little information. I intend to leverage announcement blog posts for things that deserve an announcement.
Where are the actual meeting minutes? They're on Google Drive. I have a bit more information on the Google Drive setup below.
With those out of the way, let's get into the noteworthy information from this meeting.
Opening up Slack
A lot of the work in the board so far has been in the "ways of working" direction. Basically: how does the foundation operate, what are the responsibilities of the board, what do officers do, how elections work, etc. Included in that, and in my opinion of significant interest to the community, is how we communicate. All of this information, and the decision making process around it, can be followed in the hf/meta repo on gitlab.haskell.org. I'm not going to try and summarize everything in those documents. Instead, the announcement here is around merge request !12. Specifically:
- HF is standardizing on Slack as its avenue of text chatting.
- We're going to start opening this up to everyone in the community interested in participating in discussions.
- On a personal note, I'm very excited about this. I think a central place for ecosystem discussions is vital.
- There's some hesitation/concern about moderation, off-topic discussions, and other points, which we'll need to work out over time.
I'd encourage anyone interested in joining in the conversation and staying up to date with topics to request an invite. We're already starting separate topic-specific channels to iterate on various technical topics.
Note that Slack is not a replacement for Discourse or other existing platforms. We'll still use Discourse for more official discussions and announcements. (This blog post is an example, the official discussion for it lives on Discourse.) Like many things, we'll likely be figuring out the details over time.
Board officers
There are a total of six board officers, who have all now been selected:
- Chair: Richard Eisenberg
- Vice Chair: Tom Ellis
- Treasurer: Ryan Trinkle
- Vice Treasurer: José Pedro Magalhães
- Secretary: Michael Snoyman
- Vice Secretary: Théophile Hécate Choutri
New Haskell Foundation website
There is a new Haskell Foundation website in the works, which should be ready to go live in the next week. It is fully open source and viewable now:
I'm hoping that, in the future, I'll be putting posts like this one on that site instead!
What's an announcement? Where do minutes go? Where's transparency?!?
I'm going to try and reserve these kinds of announcement posts to topics that I think will have widespread interest. I may make mistakes in that judgement, I apologize in advance. My goal is that anyone who wants to stay up to speed on large decisions coming from the board will be able to without using up a lot of their bandwidth.
That said, every board meeting (and, for that matter, most or all working group meetings) take and keep meeting notes. We've been sharing these on Discourse, but in the future may simply publish them in the hf/minutes repo.
Until now, we've been creating a new Discourse thread and posting the meeting minutes for each meeting. I proposed reducing how often we do that, and instead leave the minutes in Google Drive for those interested. My hope is that a combination of "information is all available in Drive" with "important things get an announcement" will cover most people. But if people would like to see a new Discourse thread for each meeting, I'd like to hear about it. Please comment on this (and other topics) in the Discourse thread linked.
Get involved!
We've been in planning and discussion mode for the past few months on the board. The various working groups are beginning to get some clarity around how they want to function, and are ready for more people to get involved. There's technical work to do, documentation, outreach, and much more. If you're excited to be a part of the efforts of the Haskell Foundation to improve the overall state of Haskell, now's a great time to get in and influence the direction. I strongly encourage everyone to check out the Slack, ask questions, interact on Discourse, and overall dive in!