[Haskell] Making Haskell more open

[Simon Peyton-Jones]

Dear Haskell folk,

A month or so ago I sent a message inviting suggestions about how to
make Haskell more open, and in particular how to make it easier for
Haskell users to contribute.  There was quite a bit of traffic for a
while, which has died down now.  Here's a quick summary of what I
learned. 

* Gour suggested using a Content Management System (e.g. Drupal
http://drupal.org/) for haskell.org's front page.  To me this sounds
like a good plan.  (e.g. "Drupal is software that allows an individual
or a community of users to easily publish, manage and organize a great
variety of content on a website."  That sounds like what we are trying
to do.)  A CMS may offer more than we need, but it'd be more open and
dynamic than the current setup.

* There were suggestions of newsgroups and web forums. Different people
seem to like different things.  That's ok -- maybe a good content
management system would support a lot of things, and people could
choose.

* Some people suggested using MediaWiki instead of MoinMoin for Hawiki.
I have no idea about the issues here.  Maybe it's just a matter of
taste.

* We don't have a plausible way of annotating GHC's user manual.  One
suggestion is a tree of Wiki pages, each linked from the corresponding
section of the manual.   We'd need an automated way to generate such a
tree, and it's not clear what to do when moving from one release of GHC
to the next.

* #haskell has way more simultaneous logins than I realised.  Good
stuff!
  

My sense is that the main action item is
	
	how to make haskell.org a better web site

(This is with no disrespect to John and Olaf, who have done a great job.
But I know they would be only too happy to share the load.)  I'm no
expert, but it sounds to me as if some content management system might
well be just the thing. 

However, the thread didn't have many concrete offers of help.  I'm
hoping that is perhaps because you're all too shy to put yourselves
forward!  So:

	- is a CMS a plausible way forward?
	- which one?
	- is anyone, or small group, willing to set one up and look
after it?

Maybe not, in which case things are not at all terrible.  But I thought
it was worth asking.

Simon


PS: GHC is now using Trac as its bug tracker, and has its own Wiki as
well.  Please improve it!  (Anyone can edit.)
http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc