Haskell Foundation Update 2021-03-19

Welcome to the Haskell Foundation!

A quick history

Mid 2020

Members of the Haskell community start discussions on how to bring everyone together, and push more adoption of the programming language in industry. A Working Group is created, and fundraising starts.

November 4, 2020

Simon Peyton Jones announced the formation of the Haskell Foundation in his talk at Haskell eXchange 2020.

November 5, 2020

A Call for Nominations is made for the Haskell Foundation Board of Directors.

December 6, 2020

The Haskell Foundation announces its search for an Executive Director.

February 1, 2021

The members of the first (non-Interim) Board of Directors are announced, with Richard Eisenberg tapped to Chair.

February 9, 2021

Simon Peyton Jones, chairman of the Interim Board, announces the appointment of the Foundation’s Executive Director and Chief Technology Officer.

February 22, 2021

Andrew Boardman and Emily Pillmore start their first day of work (officially).

Who are we?

We have published the State of the Haskell Foundation spreadsheet, which gives information about Board members, employees of the Foundation, and Board Committees and Task Forces.

What are we working on?

Some of what we’re working on is basic non-profit paperwork, getting payroll up and running, boring but important stuff. A big thank you to Alexander Bernauer and the Ways of Working Board committee for tackling the important but not glamorous work of figuring out how we should work. Let’s get into the fun stuff.

The Tech Agenda

Emily is leading the Tech Task Force, meeting with members of the Board and the community to determine where our priorities should be. Ben Gamari posted a Call for Ideas to allow anyone who is passionate about improving Haskell to offer their ideas on the things that need to be addressed. Meeting minutes from the Task Force can be found at the Haskell Foundation Discourse.

Documentation

I am at a loss to sufficiently thank Théophile “Hécate” Choutri for their work leading up the Documentation Task Force. In direct continuation with their efforts to improve the documentation of the base library, they have been coordinating several groups of volunteers who are going through Haskell documentation in many places and fixing links, updating text, and otherwise dealing with a long overdue overhaul, in both the GHC codebase and our community Wiki.

Community Engagement

Wendy Devolder and Chris Dornan are leading up the Community Engagement Task Force, which kicks off next week. As a community we have a lot of Tact Debt (I just made that up, what do you think?) to address, particularly as we want to greatly expand our community and welcome a very diverse set of people.

Haskell Foundation Website

Emily is working with our generous friends at [Obsidian Systems](https://obsidian.systems/) to redo and update our website, more news on this front soon!

GHC Performance

Maybe the most discussed and desired improvements for the Haskell ecosystem revolve around making performance better. We are working on a GHC Performance Dashboard proposal, which will allow everyone to see where we are with various metrics and how changes affect them. In this project we seek to develop infrastructure to track compilation and runtime performance of GHC, our ecosystem’s core libraries, and widely used packages in a single place.

If you’d like to be involved, let us know! The infrastructure for this work mostly existed already due to the hard work of the GHC team, and Ben Gamari is creating the proposal for what this might look like and how to make it work.

Sponsors, Sponsors, Sponsors!

We are so grateful for our generous sponsors, they are what makes all of this work possible. Raising more money means we can bring more resources to the table to affect positive change.

Join this group of fantastic companies giving back to the community and helping us make the Haskell compiler, tooling, core libraries, and documentation better!

We are working on improving the specific benefits for sponsoring the Haskell Foundation at different levels, but there’s no need to wait!

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