Application letters at the Haskell workshop: suggestion

[S.J.Thompson@ukc.ac.uk]

A thought to dicscuss for next year's Haskell
workshop. This is the second year running that 
there have been no submissions accepted in the
`application letters' category for the Haskell
workshop. It seems that this comes from the
fact that these are not getting the same grades
as submissions focussed on more theoretical aspects
of Haskell and functional programming. That's a shame,
since it means that information of value to many users
of the language are not going into the public record.

A suggestion: why not have a poster session at the next
workshop? This is used at many conferences for shorter 
papers, work in progress, implementation aspects and the like.
The advantage of this over ten minute, ad hoc, talks is that
the posters (or poster abstracts) form part of the formal 
proceedings and are thus available to the community for
reference. This is, of course, particularly valuable in the
case of applications, when it's useful to find out what one can
re-use, as well as seeing what might be problematic about
existing tools and libraries.

How would a poster session work? People submit abstracts, 
and then bring posters (plus laptops for demos etc. if they
wish) to the meeting. These are displayed over tea/coffee breaks,
or indeed a separate time could be devoted to them.

I'd be interested to hear what others think; maybe there's a
better way of getting the application-oriented material into
the workshop?

Simon Thompson