Call for Contributions - HC&A Report (November 2003 edition)

[C.Reinke]

Dear Haskellers,

once again, we set out to get an overview of what is going on in all
things Haskell, and *you* are invited to help with this effort!
Please contribute to the forthcoming fifth edition of our 

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

                Submission deadline: 31 October 2003

  (please send your contributions to me, in plain-ASCII or LaTeX
   format, keeping "HC&A Report" in the subject line)
  ================================================================

The Haskell Communities & Activities Reports are a bi-annual,
birds-eye overview of Haskell development over the last 6 months,
and perhaps an outlook over concrete plans for the next 6 months.
If you have only recently joined the Haskell world, have a look
through the May 2003 edition - it provides a useful overview,
starting points and links that may answer many a FAQ.

The current plan is to get contributions in by the end of October,
and to get the collective report out early next month (you will find
this an excellent opportunity to update your webpages, get out
pending releases, announce new projects, summarize recent
developments in sub-communities for all Haskellers, etc. ;-).

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
from blowing up (last time, we ended up with about 30 pages). 

Looking forward to your contributions,
Claus (current editor)

--
Haskell Communities and Activities Report (November 2003 edition)
All contributions are due in by the end of October 2003!
http://www.haskell.org/communities/


--------------------------------- topics

New suggestions for current hot topics, activities, projects, ..
are welcome - especially with names and addresses of potential
contacts, but here is a non-exclusive list of likely topics
(see also http://www.haskell.org/communities/topics.html ):

General Haskell developments; Haskell implementations; Haskell
  extensions; Standardization and documentation; Haskell tutorials,
  how-tos and wikis; Organisation of Haskell tool and library
  development; Haskell-related projects and publications; new
  research, fancy tools, lonq-awaited libraries, cool applications; 
  Feedback from specialist mailing lists to the Haskell community 
  as a whole; Haskell announcements;   .. all (recent) things Haskell

Announcements: if you've announced anything new on the Haskell
  list over the last six months, you'll want to make sure that is
  reflected in this edition!

Project pings: if you're maintaining a Haskell tool/library/..,
  you'll want to let everyone know that it is still alive and
  actively maintained, even if there may have been no new additions
  (and even more so if there have been new developments).

Tutorials: if you've fought with some previously undocumented
  corner of Haskell, and have been kind enough to write down how you
  did manage to build that networking program, or if you've written a
  tutorial about some useful programming techniques/patterns, this is
  your opportunity to spread the word (btw, short, topic-specific,
  and hands-on tutorials that only show how to achieve a certain
  practical task would do a lot to make things easier for new 
  Haskellers - Erlang and Perl folks seem to be good at this
  kind of thing, but why not have a similar effort for Haskell?)

Applications: if you've been working quietly, using Haskell for
  some interesting project or application (commercial or otherwise),
  you might want to let others know about what you're using Haskell
  for, and about your experiences using the existing tools and 
  libraries; are you using Haskell on your job?

  There was an interesting thread about using Haskell for
  non-Haskell things not too long ago - why not write a sentence or
  two about your use of Haskell for our report?

Feedback: if you're on one of the many specialist Haskell mailing
  lists, you'll want to report on whatever progress has been made
  there (GUI API discussions, library organisation, etc.)

  
If you're unsure whether a contact for your area of work has come
forward yet, have a look at the report's potential topics page, or
get in touch with me.  I've contacted last time's contributors,
hoping they will volunteer to provide updates of their reports, and
will update the contacts on the topics page fairly regularly.  But
where you don't yet see contacts listed for your own subject of
interest, you are very 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!-)

--------------------------------- what should I write?

That depends on your topic, but as a general rule, it shouldn't take
you long. A simple sentence or two about your use of Haskell could
go into the "Individual Haskellers and their projects" section. If
you're a company, or if you're working on a project using Haskell as
the implementation language, a paragraph on that could go into the
"Commercial Applications" and "Non-Commercial Applications" sections.

A typical summary report about a tool/library/project/application/..
would be between 1 and 3 paragraphs of ASCII text (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,..).  

For those who prefer templates to fill in, the report is edited in
LaTeX, and an entry template might look something like this:


  \subsubsection{<MYSTUFF>}
  \report{<MY NAME}\\

  <WHAT IS IT?>

  <WHAT IS ITS STATUS? / WHAT HAS HAPPENED SINCE LAST TIME?>

  <CAN OTHERS GET IT?>

  <WHAT ARE THE IMMEDIATE PLANS?>

  \FurtherReading

  \url{<PROJECT URL>}


Browsing through previous editions should give you a good idea of
the variety of possibilities, ranging from very brief to extensive.