[ghc-steering-committee] Solicitation for a new member

[Joachim Breitner]

Dear Committee,

Ryan Newton has expressed interest in being rotated out of the
committee. I spoke to the Simons, and they indicate we should ask for
public nominations. Here is a draft of a mail I’d send to the usual
mailing lists. Please comment.

==========================
Dear community,

the GHC Steering committee is seeking nomination for a new member, and
ask for self-nominations.

The committee scrutinizes, nitpicks, improves, weights and eventually
accepts or rejects proposals that extend or change the language
supported by GHC and other (public-facing) aspects of GHC
Our processes are described in the README in
https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals
which is also the GitHub repository where proposals are proposed.

We are looking for a member who has the ability 
 * to understand such language extension proposals,
 * to find holes and missing corner cases in the specifications,
 * foresee the interaction with other language features and 
   specifications,
 * make constructive comments and improvements,
 * judge the cost/benefit ratio and
 * finally come to a justifiable conclusion.

Particular pluses that we look for are
 * candidates who have been in the community for some time, and/or
 * who have expertise in language design and implementation in
   related language, which they can share with us.

The committee work requires a small, but non-trivial amount of time,
especially when you are assigned a proposal for shepherding. Please
keep that in mind if your email inbox is already flowing over.

There is no shortage of people who are very eager to get fancy new
features into the language, both in the committee and the wider
community. I therefore explicitly invite “conservative” members of the
community to join the committee.

The GHC developers themselves are nicely represented already. Having
hacked on GHC is not a requirement.


To nominate yourself, please send an email to me (as the committee
secretary) at mail at joachim-breitner.de until July 20th. I will
distribute the nominations among the committee, and we will keep the
nominations and our deliberations private.

You cannot nominate others. But if you know of anyone else you’d think
should be on the committee, please do encourage them, or talk to us and
we can encourage them.

On behalf of the committee,
Joachim Breitner
==========================


Note worth discussing:

 * I see no point in non-self-nominations. We can only have members
   that want to do this.

 * Do we want to encourage “conservative” members? Is that the right  
   wording? (I see the committee a bit as a flood gate that protects
   against premature and not-worth-it changes. We are doing a good
   job of that – most of my proposals get rejected ;-) – but I think
   it would not hurt to explicitly keep it that way.

 * One could consider public nominations and deliberations, but I feel
   that a public discussion of who we think is the “best” is not very
   nice.


Cheers,
Joachim

-- 
Joachim Breitner
  mail at joachim-breitner.de
  http://www.joachim-breitner.de/
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