[Haskell] Call for Contributions - HC&A Report (May 2006 edition)

[Andres Loeh]

Dear Haskellers,

it is nearly time for the tenth edition of the

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

                 Submission deadline:  12 May 2006

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

This is the short story:

* If you are working on any project that is in some way related
  to Haskell, write a short entry and submit it to the me.

* If you are interested any project related to Haskell that has not 
  previously been mentioned in the HC&A Report, please tell me, so 
  that I can contact the project leaders and ask them to submit
  an entry.

* Feel free to pass on this call for contributions to others that
  might be interested.

More detailed information:

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 
November 2005 edition -- you will find interesting topics described as well
as several starting points and links that may provide answers to many
questions.

Contributions will be collected until the middle of May. They will be
compiled into a coherent report which will appear sometime near the
end of May. 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, I encourage you to update all existing summaries and
reports. I will probably drop any topics that have not had any
activity for the past year, i.e., since May 2005, but I 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 (Haskell', ...)
  Documentation
  Libraries
  Papers and Books

Feedback
  Summaries of discussions in specialist mailing lists
  Conference reports
  Community activities
  Other Haskell information channels (TMR, Sequence, HWN, ...)

Announcements
  Everything that's new or has had new releases

Ongoing projects
  Reports on what's happening behind the scenes
  Confirmations that projects are still maintained
  Calls for contributions and contributors

Tutorials

Tools and Applications
  Released and unreleased Haskell applications
  Tools useful for Haskell programmers 
  Experiences with using Haskell for a project
  Commercial uses of Haskell

Even if your topic is not listed in this list, there's a good chance
it has a place in the Report. Please get in touch with me.

If you want to see an entry that hasn't been there in the past, but
you are not the maintainer of the project, then please encourage the
maintainers to write an entry/update, or ask permission to write the
entry yourself.

-------------------------- 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" 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 "Applications" section.

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, ...).

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

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

\begin{hcarentry}{(MYSTUFF)}
\report{(MY NAME)}
\status{(PROJECT STATUS IN ONE LINE)}
\participants{(PARTICIPANTS OTHER THAN MYSELF)}% optional
\makeheader

Put the text here. What's following are suggestions for the content of an entry.

(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)}
\end{hcarentry}

This template and a style file to preview your document are
available at

http://haskell.org/communities/05-2006/template.tex
http://haskell.org/communities/05-2006/hcar.sty