Haskell Foundation Board Meeting
17 February 2021
Present:
- Emily Pillmore
- Andrew Boardman
- Niki Vazou
- José Pedro Magalhães
- Ryan Trinkle
- Chris Dornan
- Simon Peyton Jones
- Tom Ellis
- Alexander Bernauer
- Michael Snoyman
- Théophile Choutri
- Richard Eisenberg
Absent:
- Andrew Lelechenko
- Scott Conley
- Wendy Devolder
- Edward Kmett
The Haskell Foundation folder.
Ways of Working (Alex)
- Lots of topics!
- Taking a sequential approach.
- Plan in this document, including an order of delivery to the Board (see document)
- No objections to this general plan
Then focus on the communication document.
- Proposal: using mailing list primarily for Board communication
- Operational, discussion e.g. arrange meetings.
- Can be used for between-meeting votes
- All official acts are recorded either in minutes or email list. (In the latter case it would be good practice to record those decisions in minutes of the next meeting.)
- Known immutable copies (can edit retrospectively in Discourse)
- Public archives (but cannot subscribe)
- Anyone can email to it (but moderated, to avoid spam, but with a liberal policy)
- Includes both board members and ex-officio Board meeting attendees (currently Emily and Andrew
- Question: does that exclude chat tools e.g. Slack, Discord, IRC, Zulip (Emily recommends). Answer not excluded, good for informal, ad-hoc communication, but don’t use for substantive conversation esp related to decisions.
- Alternative: only board members can email to it and save the moderators; others address the Board via Discourse.
- Question: why mailing list and Discourse?
- operational topics such as organising meetings is of no use for the general public
- Better not to have both Discourse _and _email list for the Board. One or the other!
- Use Discourse for external communication, announcements.
- For a community member:
- To address the Board specifically, email the Board email list.
- To address the community, including board members, use Discourse
-
Action items
- add chat option to async communication
- be explicit about what kind of communication goes where
- clean up HF discourse group to reflect the above (abolish the Working Group category)
- Specify that the calendar is a Google calendar
-
Synchronous board meetings
- Closed: board members plus ex-officio staff, plus any we invite or co-opt.
- Board meeting attendees may edit agenda
- Task forces: should decide their own mechanisms, but directed to the same general principles of open-ness, transparency, inclusiveness. (Which is the goal of all these mechanisms.)
State of the Foundation
- Overview in State of the Haskell Foundation document (NB: multiple tabs).
- Public-facing
- Once fully populated will be world-readable, but suggest-only for editing
- No requirement to offer an email address.
- In Google for now, because tables in GitLab are a pain. But really belongs in GitLab… perhaps review.
Text communication platform
- As above, we settled with Zulip (Emily recommends)
Budget committee
- Nothing to report
Community engagement task force
- Will meet on Friday
Documentation task force
- Wiki volunteers have produced a first batch of articles to take care of. Waiting for upstream approval on the suggested actions.
- Haddock volunteers are still tidying-up the repo. A blocker has been the latency of some packages to be compatible with ghc 9.0 for the CI
- No support from the Foundation Board needed at present time. We welcome the choice of the Board to go with Zulip as a messaging platform for day-to-day work.
Technical agenda
- Call yesterday. Minutes. Getting up to speed.
- Have broadcast a call for ideas
- Polling for good meeting dates
New website
- Emily has been reviewing the design.
- Comment on the prototype by Friday (email Emily)
Funding
- Contact list. Managed by the Funding task force; no need to share more widely.
- Before long: invite community to suggest contacts – and make it clear to them how to do so.
Future meetings
- Weds 1600 UTC; maybe 1630 or 1700.
- Richard will write to non-attenders to check that they are OK with that time.