[Haskell-cafe] ANN: Haskell Website Working Group

[Gershom B]

The following text is reproduced from Neil Mitchell’s blog (I’m just
the messanger) where it lives at:
https://neilmitchell.blogspot.com/2016/11/the-haskellorg-website-working-group.html

== The Haskell.org Website Working Group (HWWG) ==

Haskell represents both a language and a user community - and moreover
a fantastic community full of friends, fun, and deep technical debate.
Unfortunately, in recent times the community has started to fracture,
e.g. Cabal vs Stack, haskell.org vs haskell-lang.org. These divisions
have risen above technical disagreements and at some points turned
personal. The solution, shepherded by Simon Peyton Jones, and agreed
to by both members of the haskell.org committee and the maintainers of
haskell-lang.org, is to form the Haskell Website Working Group (HWWG).
The charter of the group is at the bottom of this post.

The goal of the Haskell Website Working Group is to make sure the
Haskell website caters to the needs of Haskell programmers,
particularly beginners. In doing so we hope to either combine or
differentiate haskell.org and haskell-lang.org, and give people clear
recommendations of what "downloading Haskell" means. Concretely, we
hope that either haskell-lang.org redirects to haskell.org, or that
haskell-lang.org ends up being used for something very different from
today.

== The Haskell Website Working Group (HWWG) ==

- Scope and goals -
* The HWWG is responsible for the design and content of the
user-facing haskell.org web site, including tutorials, videos, news,
resource, downloads, etc.
* The HWWG is not responsible for:
   * The infrastructure of haskell.org
   * Toolchains, Hackage, compilers, etc
* The HWWG focuses on serving users of Haskell, not suppliers of
technology or libraries.
* An explicit goal is to re-unite the haskell.org and haskell-lang.org
web sites.

- Expected mode of operation -
* HWWG is not responsible for actually doing everything! The web site
is on github. Anyone can make a pull request. The general expectation
is that uncontroversial changes will be accepted and committed without
much debate.
* If there is disagreement about a proposed change, it's up to the
HWWG to engage in (open) debate, and to seek input as widely as time
allows, but finally to make a decision.

- Membership -

Initial membership comprises of:

* Neil Mitchell (chair)
* Nicolas Wu
* Andrew Cowie
* Vincent Hanquez
* Ryan Trinkle
* Chris Done

It is expected the committee will change over time, but the mechanism
has not yet been thought about.

- Rules of engagement -
* Recognising that honestly-held judgements may differ, we will be
scrupulously polite both in public and in private.
* Recognising that Haskell has many users, and that different users
have different needs and tastes, we want haskell.org to be inclusive
rather than exclusive, providing a variety of alternative resources
(toolchains, tutorials, books, etc) clearly signposted with their
intended audiences.
* Ultimately the haskell.org committee owns the haskell.org URL, but
it delegates authority for the design and content of the web site to
the HWWG. In extremis, if the haskell.org committee believes that the
HWWG is mismanaging the web site, it can revoke that delegation.