[Haskell-cafe] Haskellers.com profiles: advice requested

[Michael Snoyman]

Hi all,

After finally getting OpenID 2 support worked out, I've now put up the
Haskellers.com website[1]. Not all features are implemented yet, but
the basics are in. One of the most important features is going to be
the user profiles, and I wanted some community input on the kind of
stuff they'd like to see.

For now, I collect email address (spam-protected, don't worry),
website, number of years of Haskell experience, and a free-form
description. I've also added a skills section, but have purposely not
added many. I wanted community input on the kinds of skills. Some
ideas:

* Web programming
* Compiler writing
* Write a monad tutorial :/

I see two main questions when it comes to selecting this list of skills:

* How granular should we get? For web programming, for instance,
should we ask about Yesod, Happstack, Snap, etc?
* Should we include non-Haskell skills. I can imagine that employers
would like to know that people also have experience with Java/C#/etc,
but on the other hand we might want to make this Haskell-specific.

One recommendation (from my wife actually) is to have two separate
lists: a static list of Haskell-specific skills that users simply
checkmark off, and then  "additional skills" that everyone makes up
themselves.

Other things to consider for the profile: Twitter/Facebook/GChat/AIM
accounts, Hackage username, list of packages authored. I'm also
planning on adding a "real Haskeller" feature, which would mean a site
admin (they don't exist yet) has verified that you really are a
contributing member of the community. I would imagine the threshold
for this status would be very low, eg you've written a package or sent
email to one of the mailing lists.

One last point: for those of you wondering why your profiles aren't
showing up on the homepage: you need to verify your email address
first. I just added this feature this morning which is why your
profiles are not visible. This is simply an anti-spam measure. If it
turns out to be insufficient, I might need to add a recaptcha, and if
that is still not enough we can make things moderated. But I doubt
spam will end up being a real problem.

Cheers,
Michael

[1] http://www.haskellers.com/