[Haskell-cafe] Proposal: Form a haskell.org committee

[Ian Lynagh]

Dear Haskellers,

In recent years, haskell.org has started to receive assets, e.g. money
from Google Summer Of Code, donations for Hackathons, and a Sparc
machine for use in GHC development. We have also started spending this
money: on the community server, on a server to take over hosting
haskell.org itself, and on the haskell.org domain name. There is also
interest in running fundraising drives for specific things such as
Hackathon sponsorship and hosting fees.

However, it is not currently clear who is responsible for determining
what the haskell.org money should be spent on, or what are and are not
acceptable uses of the domain name and hardware.

To fix this problem, we propose that we create a "haskell.org
committee", which is responsible for answering these sorts of questions,
although for some questions they may choose to poll the community at
large if they think appropriate.

We suggest that the committee be composed of 5 representatives from the
community, with committee members standing down after at most 3 years.
Each year the committee will appoint one of their members to be the chair.

As membership of "the Haskell community" is not well-defined, and voting
would potentially be open to abuse if anyone were able to vote, we
propose that the committee should choose their replacements from open
nominations.

Unfortunately, this gives us a bootstrapping problem, so we suggest that
the initial committee be chosen from open nominations by some of the
people who currently de-facto end up making the decisions currently:
Duncan Coutts, Isaac Jones, Ian Lynagh, Don Stewart and Malcolm Wallace.
These 5 would still be elligible to nominate themselves. Two of the
initial members will stand down after one year, and two after two years,
in order to bootstrap rolling membership turnover.


    We would love to hear feedback from you about this proposal,
    so that we can see whether the proposal, or something similar,
    has consensus amongst the community!


A related issue is that haskell.org does not currently exist as a legal
entity. We also hope to solve that problem, but we are still gathering
information so that the community can make an informed decision, so I
won't say more about that for now.


Thanks
Ian