The future of Haskell discussion

[C.Reinke]

> There was the feeling that there is not frequent enough
> feedback from the "Task Forces" (eg, FFI Task Force, Library
> Task Force) to the Haskell community as a whole.  Clause
> Reinke kindly volunteered to collect status reports of Task
> Forces on a 6-monthly basis and post them to the Haskell
> mailing list.  
> 
> Claus, maybe you should give the Task Forces an idea of when
> you expect the first status report.

Just a quick update: when I was volunteered for organising more
frequent feedback from the "task forces" to the Haskell community as a
whole, I thought of just collecting individual summaries from the
existing lists. However, my current opinion on the matter is that this
alone would actually be a bad idea, as there are too many lists, no
lists for some important topics, some topics spread over several lists,
and generally not enough useful structure for the wide range of Haskell
sub-communities.

So what has been holding up the call for status reports from here
(apart from the usual "real" work:-) is my attempt to (a) gather as
many of the various Haskell interest groups as I can and (b) find some
way to organise them, so that I get an idea of who is out there and how
the pieces might fit together. I won't even try to get everything right
in the first go, so I hope to send round a first draft of a structure
(based on existing info at haskell.org and elsewhere) in the next
days.  The main point I'm still undecided on is at what level to ask
for status reports.

In my current version of the hierarchy, there are three levels, with
4-5 broad areas at the top (such as libraries, implementations, etc.),
and many of the existing mailing lists or projects, such as Gtk+HS, at
the most detailed level. If our community was more organised, I would
really like to see reports at the middle (e.g., what's up in terms of
GUIs?-) or top level, but as it stands, I will probably need to look
for anything I can get at the mailing-list level and then try to edit
all those fragments into a more useful overview.

For the timescale, I still think that 6-monthly reports are a sensible
compromise, and the Haskell workshops are a good reference point. I'll
ask for the first status reports as soon as I've got an idea of how
everything might fit together, probably early next week. The second
round will then take place "in between" Haskell workshops, and so on.

It would be nice if we could cover not only the explicit "task forces",
but all Haskell (sub-)communities (such as the folks interested in
generic programming, or in concurrent/parallel/distributed programming,
functional reactive programming, etc.). That'll mean that the
individual status reports themselves will have to be brief (plus
pointers to more detailed documents, and instructions about how to join
the communities or find archives), which should also make it easier to
find people who write them;-).

More later,
Claus