[Haskell-community] A few kickoff notes and Outreachy

[Gershom B]

Hi everyone and welcome. I’m surprised we have roughly 50 subscribers so far. Bear in mind I do expect this to be a relatively boring list, but we will of course see how things develop :-).

I came back from ICFP with a bunch of discussions about various small things in various stages of work and repair, and I plan to start a number of small threads as time permits over the next few days on each of these in turn, with the idea that people who are interested can follow only relevant discussions, and people can reply over time (be it rapidly or just a month or two down the line) to update on how things are going. Many of these were discussed by the whole committee at one of our first in-person meetings since inception where all members were present (a rare occasion, and not one I think we should imagine is easily replicable).

One thing thought I would mention first is that we are planning to participate in Outreachy (https://www.gnome.org/outreachy/) which is the successor to the Gnome Outreach Program for Women. It works sort of like GSoC but with an outreach focus, and with orgs funding their own interns and Outreachy coordinating, as I understand it. We had meant to do so for a few years but the timing hasn’t worked out. The applications for orgs to participate in the new round closes on September 21 — I think we had thought it was too late for us to co-ordinate for this round, but instead we would prefer to do it in May so as to co-ordinate our admin overhead with that of dealing with GSoC. Nonetheless, I believe the plan was to get in touch with Outreachy very soon, so that we could actually have things lined up by the next round, unlike previous years. I think Adam was going to handle this?

I think an overall consideration here is that we have now acquired a relative surplus compared to our income, year over year, and it would be good to look for modest ways to use it to good ends. So an intern in the next outreachy round seems like a good “trial balloon” in this direction.

Anyway, we can use this thread to track when we make any progress on discussions with Outreachy and what steps we need to take when.

—Gershom