RFC: Changes to the Haskell Symposium

#1

Dear Haskellers,

In recent years, submissions to the Haskell Symposium have dropped precipitously: from 37 in 2017 to just 15 in 2023. This has made it increasingly challenging for the program committee to put together a program that is vibrant and intellectually rigorous.

The Haskell Symposium steering committee has developed two proposals to reinvigorate the Symposium. The first is to invite a new category of presentations of work-in-progress results; the second is to submit accepted papers to the Journal of Functional Programming for publication rather than continuing the Symposium’s proceedings.

A full description of the proposed changes can be found on the Haskell Foundation’s GitHub: RFC: Reinvigorating the Haskell Symposium by jgbm · Pull Request #62 · haskellfoundation/tech-proposals · GitHub. We invite feedback from the community, particularly on how these changes would effect your participation (either as authors or attendees) in the future.

Yours,
/g

J. Garrett Morris
PC Co-chair, 2024 Haskell Symposium
For the Haskell Symposium Steering Committee

5 Likes
#2

Another idea: rather than having a submission period, have authors submit continuously at any time of the year and whatever makes the cut before a given deadline is included in the year’s conference (like VLDB does)

3 Likes
#3

This is shocking and quite unfortunate. Thank you for sharing and shepherding.

#4

From the associated rendering:

…what would be required to improve that ranking?

1 Like
#5

The proposal has been updated to preserve the archival proceedings of the Haskell Symposium while giving authors of full papers the option of submitting to JFP.

@atravers asks:

…what would be required to improve that ranking?

This is a fair question. While each ranking has its own internal process, they generally look at a couple of factors, most prominently acceptance rate (lower is better) and impact factor (broadly speaking, how often papers in a particular journal or venue are cited).

Improving acceptance rate is easy, so long as you’re willing to have a half-day event. :slight_smile: The same might improve impact factor, although it would take longer for the effect to be visible.

The bigger question is whether focusing on these metrics would be good for the community. My view is that they would not—we should let POPL and ICFP be the venues with low acceptance rate, and focus on HS having vibrant discussion.

1 Like