[Haskell] Call for Contributions -- HC&A Report (November 2004 edition)

[Andres Loeh]

Dear Haskellers,

another six months have passed, and another change of editor has
occurred. Half a year usually also is plenty of time for several
productive changes and news to occur within the Haskell community,
and therefore it is time for you to start writing: please
contribute to the forthcoming seventh edition of the

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

                Submission deadline: 29 October 2004

      (please send your contributions to hcar at haskell.org, in 
                    plain ASCII or LaTeX format)
  ================================================================

The Haskell Communities & Activities Report is a bi-annual overview
of the state of Haskell as well as Haskell-related projects over
the last, and possibly the upcoming 6 months. If you have only
recently been exposed to Haskell, it might be a good idea to browse
the May 2004 edition -- you will find interesting topics
described as well as several starting points and links that may
provide answers to many questions.

The plan is to collect contributions until roughly the end of
October, then start to compile them into a coherent report which
will appear during November. As always, this is a great opportunity
to update your webpages, make new releases, announce of even start
new projects, or to point at some developments you want every
Haskeller to see!

As the purpose of the report is to collect recent or current
activities, we encourage you to update all existing summaries
and reports. We will drop any topics that have not had any
activity for the past year, i.e., since November 2003, but we
would very much prefer you to present an updated description
of the topic. Of course, new entries are more than welcome.
Reports should generally be kept brief and informative, ranging 
from a few sentences to a few hundred words, to keep the whole
report reasonably sized.

Looking forward to your contributions,

Andres (current editor)

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

New suggestions for current hot topics, activities, projects, etc.
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,
  howtos and wikis; Organisation of Haskell tool and library    
  development; Haskell-related projects and publications; new
  research, fancy tools, long-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 or library or 
  somesuch, you'll want to let everyone know that it is still alive 
  and actively maintained, even if there have been no new additions,
  but all the more 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 graphical user interface, or if you've 
  written a tutorial about some useful programming techniques, 
  this is your opportunity to spread the word (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 - please write some!)

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?

  An interesting thread about using Haskell and more generally functional 
  programming for non-Haskell things seems to recur with reasonable
  frequency - 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 have 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?>

  <FURTHER READING>

  \url{<PROJECT URL>}


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



-- 
Haskell Communities and Activities Report
Please send submissions for the 11/2004 edition before
29 October 2004 to <hcar at haskell.org>.