HC&AR (May edition) - call for contacts and contributions

[C.Reinke]

Dear fellow Haskeller,

it is time again - for contributions to the second edition of the 

  Haskell Communities and Activities Report
  http://www.haskell.org/communities/ 

The current plan is to get contributions in by the end of April,
and to get the collective report out early next month (*).

The general idea is to update all existing summaries, to drop any
topics that didn't have any activity for two consecutive 6-month
periods, and to add any new developments or topics for which no-one
contributed summaries to the first edition, while trying to keep the
whole under 25 pages.

As you can see on the report's home page, many of last time's
contributors have already volunteered to provide updates of their
reports, including coverage of the major Haskell implementations and
Report Addenda. 

But where you don't yet see contacts listed for your own subject of
interest, you are welcome to volunteer, or to remind your local
community/project team/mailing list/research group/etc. that they
really ought to get their act together and let the Haskell community
as a whole know about what they've been doing!-)

A typical summary report would be between 1 and 3 paragraphs (what's
it about? major topics and results since the last report?  current
hot topics? major goals for the next six months?) plus pointers to
material for further reading (typically to a home page, or to mailing
list archives, specifications and drafts, implementations, meetings,
minutes,..).

New suggestions for current hot topics, activities, projects, ..
are welcome - especially with names and addresses of potential
contacts. Two particular new suggestions I'd like to try this time
are appended below.

Thanks,
Claus

(*) Last time's experience showed that it takes an arbitrary
    number of weeks to write a nice summary in the last hour, so
    I hope that 2 weeks give enough flexibility to find a spare
    hour, or to coordinate the summary with any planned releases.

---------------------------------------------- Two new suggestions:

1 Applications: "what are you using Haskell for?"

  The implementation mailing lists are full of people sending in bug
  reports and feature suggestions, stretching the implementations to 
  their limits. Judging from the "reduced" examples sent in to 
  demonstrate problems, there must be quite a few Haskell applications 
  out there that haven't been announced anywhere (probably because 
  Haskell is "just" the tool, not the focus of those projects).

  If you're one of those serious Haskell users, why not write a 
  sentence or two about your application? We'd be particularly
  interested in your experience with the existing tools (e.g., that 
  all-time-favourite: how difficult was it to tune the resource usage 
  to your needs, after you got your application working? Which 
  tools/libraries where useful to you? What is missing?).

2 Project pings: "anyone still working on this?"

  There are numerous projects out there that don't add new features
  to their software releases every week, but are steadily working
  towards longer-term goals while keeping their software releases
  maintained and up-to-date. The people involved often say "We don't
  really have to report anything new, so we won't report anything.".

  However, most of you out there know that there is a *huge*
  difference between projects and software in silent maintenance 
  mode (i.e., actively being worked on) and those that die the 
  silent death of "been there, published that, let's move on".

  If you are the contact person for a project/software of the former
  kind, and you just want to reassure Haskellers that your stuff is 
  still alive and kicking, send me a brief "ping", and I'll try to 
  include a list of those pings, with contact addresses (as proofs
  of liveness), in the upcoming report.