Dear Committee,
I'm writing to nominate myself for a position on the haskell.org committee.
As a working Haskell developer at Galois, having reliable infrastructure is deeply important to me, and I would like to help maintain it however I can. I have experience maintaining web, mail, and IRC servers, as well as acquiring and configuring SSL certificates for those services. I hope that these skills may prove of use to the committee.
I also believe this is a critical point in the growth of our community. As adoption of Haskell increases, the decisions we make now will shape how our community develops, for good or for bad. I was moved by Chung-chieh Shan's Haskell 2013 Program Chair report. As he says, it can be hard work to speak one's mind with compassion, but let me try so that you can know better my concerns and what I hope to work towards.
I believe that a lack of diversity is one of the primary problems facing the Haskell community today. Ashe Dryden recently spoke at Galois and gave an excellent introduction to how this problem affects us and how we can actively work to improve it (I highly recommend watching the video). I believe that if we do not undertake this work, the problem will only worsen as self-selection shapes the makeup of our community as it grows.
While Ashe was in town, we spoke at length about the differences between programming language communities in how they address issues of diversity and inclusiveness. The Python community has made remarkable strides, going from below 3% women at PyCon to over 20% in just four years. On the other hand, the Ruby community is currently grappling with its inability to establish codes of conduct at its conferences. The most troubling example is a recent failure to exclude community members who are known to have committed assault or worse at those conferences against female attendees.
So, what does this have to do with the haskell.org committee? I believe that community organization and structure accounts for much of the differences between the Python and Ruby cases. The Python Software Foundation, responsible for PyCon, is a transparent organization with broad membership, and has the legitimacy and authority to impose codes of conduct, sponsor conference scholarships, and provide support for other community groups like the wildly successful PyLadies. RubyCentral, responsible for RubyConf and RailsConf, is a much smaller group that lacks the breadth necessary to have an impact like the PSF, but without a larger organization in the community, they are expected to fulfill the same role and have not seen good results.
I realize that the haskell.org committee currently has a much narrower mission than both the PSF and RubyCentral. However, as our community grows, and particularly as it gains a higher proportion of industry users, I believe that we will develop a need for such an organization. I do not want haskell.org to end up with that mission by accident, simply because it is the closest fit of any existing organization (and it currently is). I believe we should instead be deliberate, learning from successful examples like the PSF and proactively undertaking initiatives to make Haskell thrive with a vibrant and diverse community. I would like to work with you as part of the haskell.org committee to make that happen.
Yours sincerely, Adam C. Foltzer