@cdsmith @myShoggoth (and anyone who is interested)
Based on the discussion to date, here is a draft for the consideration of all those interested, especially the yet to be fully formed “Haskell Working Group tasked with making proposals to the Haskell Foundation with regard to increasing the currently low number of individual donors to the Foundation” (less than 50).
This is all entirely changeable. There is an additional disclaimer note at the end.
If you would like to be a part of these discussions, please jump in!
Draft Proposal:
Given that it seems clear the Haskell community would benefit from sustained, long-term efforts to increase and maintain community awareness of opportunities for individuals to financially support the Haskell ecosystem through the Haskell Foundation, we propose the forming of the “Haskell Funding Advocates” team.
This team would have the mandate to:
- maintain and increase the public’s awareness of opportunities for individuals to support the Haskell ecosystem by donating to the Haskell Foundation
- serve as a focal point for sharing ideas and coordinating efforts to achieve the primary goal of increasing public awareness
- bring proposals to the Haskell Foundation that relate to this mission
- encourage feedback from the community on related concerns
- be respectful to the community by:
- never pressuring people to make donations
- striving to create or promote interesting or helpfully informative content rather than intrusive content (see examples and an elaboration of this below)
- operate with transparency to the Haskell community and with the guidance and oversight of the Board of Directors of the Haskell Foundation
More specifically, we propose that this team would have the freedom to take various media related actions while operating with the transparency and oversight outlined here:
The team would maintain one or more threads on Haskell’s Discourse forum for coordination and also to give advance notice of actions they intend to take (or to suggest tasks that could be taken). For example: “I intend to post this… to redit in 5 days.” All actions would only be embarked upon after they have been publicly visible for 5 consecutive days after the resolution of all concerns expressed in the forum by any member of the board or the Funding Advocates team. The full community is invited to participate in oversight but the team and the board would have the power to express blocking objections. In this way the team can continuously move forward and execute on actions, as long as no concerns are voiced. Completed actions would be marked accordingly and would then serve as a log of activities.
The phrase: “Striving to create or promote interesting or helpfully informative content rather than intrusive content” (which appears in the “mandate” above) is exemplified in actions such as Chris Smith’s blog post:
“Why I Support the Haskell Foundation” https://medium.com/geekculture/why-i-support-the-haskell-foundation-1ac3cda1f82f
…and in the Haskell Discourse Post:
“Tell Us! Why Did You Donate To The Haskell Foundation?…And If You’re Holding Out, What Would Make You A Regular Donor?” Tell Us! Why Did You Donate To The Haskell Foundation?...And If You're Holding Out, What Would Make You A Regular Donor?
…and finally in the message: “…currently there are less than 40 individual donors to the Haskell Foundation…”
These are interesting and/or informative messages which hopefully enrich or empower the community and also generate and maintain an awareness of the possibility of donating to the Foundation. These are the types of messages which the team would attempt to distribute with the transparency and oversight mechanism described above. Any other more creative endeavors would require a new proposal to the Haskell Foundation.
*Again the above is a very rough first draft, none of this will necessarily make it into the final proposal. I am wide open to all feedback and ideas for the proposal as the full working group on this has not even been formed yet and no meetings have been held yet.