[Haskell] Haskell.org and Google Summer of Code 2006

[Paolo Martini]

Hello everybody, nice to meet you all.

Last year I did work on an Haskell project during the first year of  
the Google Summer of Code programme[1].  I wrote the bindings to the  
Cairo Vector Graphics library and integrated them in Gtk2Hs.  You can  
see last year's announcement on the website[2].

I had to take Google itself as my mentoring organization, in absence  
of a better-suited one, no wonder I was the only one with an Haskell  
project, eventually I got one of its 13 slots available -- Chris  
DiBona[3], the project leader, seem to like Haskell very much!

They recently announced they would be running the programme again  
this year, and I thought we could surely do better!  My idea is that  
the best way we are going to get more Haskell projects done is having  
Haskell.org as a mentoring organization this year.

Let me briefly summarize how the project works; it starts with a  
number of mentoring organizations that support active open source  
projects.  They are required to publish a list of projects for  
students to apply for, and some mentors which will take care of the  
pupils during their work.  Part of the fun is of course that the  
students can propose their own projects too.  Each successful  
applicant gets an initial $500, three months of coding time, a mid- 
term $2,000 of are doing well and a final $2,000 on successful  
completion of the project (The site[4] does explain it all.)

I contacted many of the people who usually reside in the #haskell IRC  
channel asking for collaboration, and they promptly accepted, forming  
a quite big number of well organized people -- as now, those three  
people are in charge for the administrative work:

- Isaac Jones <http://www.syntaxpolice.org/>,
- Donald Bruce Steward <http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/>,
- David Himmelstrup <http://darcs.haskell.org/~lemmih/aboutMe.html>.

Not surprisingly, since the people of the channel are known to be  
very kind and helpful, answering questions at every time of the day,  
I've got a good number of volunteers for mentoring too (which I'm  
very happy about):

- David Himmelstrup,
- John Goerzen <http://www.complete.org/>,
- Cale Gibbard <http://www.haskell.org/hawiki/CaleGibbard>,
- Einar Karttunen <http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/ekarttun/>,
- Shae Matijs Erisson <http://www.ScannedInAvian.com/>,
- Duncan Coutts <http://haskell.org/gtk2hs/development/>.
- Andres L\¨oh <http://www.iai.uni-bonn.de/~loeh>,
- Ian Lynagh <http://web.comlab.ox.ac.uk/oucl/work/ian.lynagh/>,

And the list is getting bigger and bigger!

Unsure about where to get an "authoritative answer" about things like  
this I have mailed Simon Peyton-Jones, he likes the idea (Thanks very  
much!)  He explained to me that since the Haskell community is very  
decentralized I would better send a message to the Haskell mailing  
list to propose this project.

I hope you will be as enthusisatic as I am.  Hacking Haskell code  
during the summer, funded enough to keep up with the other things  
(and getting some pretty cool hardware lately), was a *great*  
experience.

I sincerely hope that many students will apply for Haskell works.  We  
need projects done!  I'll be mailing you the url of the wikipage  
collecting projects and details.

Thank you very much,
Paolo.
--

[1] <http://code.google.com/summerofcode.html>
[2] <http://haskell.org/gtk2hs/?p=30>
[3] <http://dibona.com>