Call for contributions - HC&A Report (November 2002)

[C.Reinke]

Dear Haskeller,

the leaves are falling again (this time in the northern hemisphere).
That means it will soon be time for the next edition of the

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

and this is your invitation to contribute to that edition (the 3rd).

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

The general idea is to update all existing summaries (these reports
are really about recent/current activities), to drop any topics that
haven't had any activity for two consecutive 6-month periods, and to
add any new developments or topics for which no-one contributed
summaries to the previous edition, while trying to keep the whole
within 25 pages. 

As you can see on the report's potential topics page, many of last
time's contributors have already volunteered to provide updates of
their reports.  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 we tried last time worked
quite well, so we'll keep them:

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

    If you're one of those serious Haskell users who sends in bug
    reports and feature suggestions to the implementation mailing lists,
    but has not yet announced or released your software, 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 were useful to you? What is missing?) and with
    the general suitability of Haskell for your application/area.

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

    If you are the contact person for a project/software in "silent
    maintenance mode", and you just want to reassure Haskellers that
    your stuff is still actively maintained, useable and up-to-date,
    even though you no longer add new features every week, send me a
    brief "ping", and I'll try to include those pings, with contact
    addresses (as proofs of liveness), in the upcoming report.

Thanks,
Claus 


(*) Experience has shown that it takes an arbitrary number of weeks
    to write a nice summary in the last hour, so I hope that the
    next 2 weeks give enough flexibility to find a spare hour, or to
    coordinate the summary with any planned releases.

--
Haskell Communities and Activities Report (November 2002 edition)
All contributions are due in by the end of October!
http://www.haskell.org/communities/