We’ll now be looking for people to join this task force until Oct. 24th, 2021. I’ve updated the post above accordingly. Please ask if you have any questions!
I would like to give my perspective on what this task force is about and I’m eager to hear other people’s opinion on this. I would invite anyone interested, and especially Chris Smith (@cdsmith) to challenge or correct me if I get something wrong or we disagree on something.
Chris Smith (@cdsmith) and myself were invited to start what we are now calling the “Our Foundation Task Force” as the result of a Haskell Foundation Board meeting (Sept. 9, 2021) about the low number of individual donors to the Foundation at the time. All kinds of ideas were mentioned including Chris’ (@cdsmith) idea of Community Grants. The task force, once formed, is asked to “develop a concrete proposal to bring back to the board.”
I think there is a shallow interpretation and conversely a grander interpretation of what this task force will be.
A shallow version of the task force might be: “Our purpose is to fix this ‘problem’ of the low number of donors by recommending advertising and media campaigns and whatever it takes to convince people to donate so the foundation gets more money.”
I reject that approach. Here’s my attempt to convey a hopefully better way of thinking about the task force:
Especially now, in its first years, the Haskell Foundation needs all of us to nurture and shape it to increasingly better serve the Haskell community. I hope the “Our Foundation Task Force” will help to do exactly that, by making suggestions to the board for projects that will benefit the community and thereby increase the sense of pride people feel for the Foundation. Community Grants is one such idea we will be discussing, another could be asking the Foundation to provide support for conferences…there are many possibilities.
We want people to feel supportive of the Foundation. We want the task force to bring forward ideas to enhance the concrete things the Foundation is doing for the community, so people will have more good reasons to support the Foundation. We want to increase the ways in which the Foundation is earning the support of the community.
On similar tangent, we might also discuss and make recommendations to the board regarding ways to increase the Haskell Foundation’s transparency.
I made these points becase I wanted to give a sense of the diversity of the possible recommendations we might make for the purpose of “increasing donations” 
.
Donations are more than cash. Whenever someone sets up donations to the H.F. it’s an act of support for the community and the ecosystem and that act has meaning beyond its cash value. I think when we give back to the ecosystem with either time or money, we become more deeply a part of the community. A year or two from now, when things are more settled, the number of donors to the H.F. (not the amounts actually donated) will be an indicator of the health and success of the Haskell Foundation and probably also a good indicator of the health of the Haskell ecosystem in general.
As part of the task force, I want to be deeply respectful of the community regardless of whether individuals are donors or non-donors, and especially keep this imperative at the forefront of my mind if the task force recommends something like a “media campaign” to increase the number of donors. I’m only interested in recommending these types of initiatives if they only present the community with information that they are likely to appreciate as useful or interesting. Respecting the donor, for me also means making sure they are properly thanked, and that the process of donating is pleasant etc. I hope the task force will recommend improvements in this regard as well.
We are looking for volunteers to be a part of the team, to bring diverse ideas and help to refine and make concrete the ideas of others. For those recommendations which the board approves, we would like to, in some way at least, help foster them to be realized.