announcement post

[piyush-kurur]

Before we rope in more members it would be good to

1. improve the website (see beautify the page #3)
2. Get the first post, i.e announcement regarding the setting up of this group.

@ajnsit and @saurabhnanda let us work on this.

As comments to this issue, we can putin what each one of us is hoping to get out of such a group. I think we have a fairly good representation (1 from academia and 2 from industry) to get an idea of where we want this to go forward.

[piyush-kurur]

I will go first by putting in my motivation

1. Transfer of ideas from academia to industry and vice versa
2. Research funding and collaboration
3. Source of internship etc for students.

[ajnsit]

My goals are -

1. Building a healthy Haskell and FP community in India.
2. Generating more FP jobs for Indians, with both local and foreign companies.

The problem is clearly that of bootstrapping. Companies would not give Haskell a serious consideration until they are able to easily hire skilled people. Building a community around Haskell would help generate that skill base.

[piyush-kurur]

thanks anupam, @saurabhnanda now it is your turn for confess your sins.

[saurabhnanda]

Companies would not give Haskell a serious consideration until they are able to easily hire skilled people. Building a community around Haskell would help generate that skill base.

As someone trying to migrate my company's codebase from Ruby to something better (Haskell / Scala / OCaml), I would be happy if there is a clear path to make a mid-level developer productive in these languages within a reasonable time-frame, say 4-6 weeks. Which means, that some sort of assisted learning programme or well-written tutorials would be acceptable as well.

What I'm hoping to get out of such a group:

• A place to share knowledge & techniques relevant to our industry context (i.e. outside of compilers, parsers, etc).
• Get people for short-term internships
• Get people for long-term work opportunities
• Fund small projects to fix common problems in the eco-system (a missing library, a missing binding, etc.)
• Regular meetups

[piyush-kurur]

Great. now we need to summarise this in the first announcements. I have cooked up some placeholder announcement. @ajnsit and @saurabhnanda can you have a go at it. Meanwhile I just sent a invite to @psibi who I understand is based in chennai. We might want one person from banglore as well that way we will be well represented.

[psibi]

I will move to Bangalore soon. :)

[ajnsit]

We can't have an effective announcement without defining the 'who' we are announcing to, and for what purpose. Is the aim to get more members? Or to solicit suggestions? Or something else? We may be jumping the gun here a little bit.

[ajnsit]

I suggest we start by making it our goal to collect some relevant basic data points about the current usage of Haskell/FP in the academia and industry in India. How about creating a survey which people can respond to. I personally would like to ask - 1. "Does anyone within your company use, or has used, or has contemplated using, Haskell / FP?" 2. "Please provide any details which can be shared".

[piyush-kurur]

@ajnsit I agree to all the points that you are making.

The role of the website as I see it.

1. Announcing interesting events related to FP in India. This could be
   conferences, meetups, hackathons etc that various groups like the
   one @ajnsit organises (Delhi-NCR).
2. A place to advertise for job openings/internships in India,
3. Any other interesting item. Say the formation of a reading group in
   some city, experience reports on building a startup.

(Any one can send us updates via pull requests to the website source)

Unfortunately, the current situation is that we do not even know each
other. We do not know how large is our community, who is doing what
etc. The survey is also a good idea. But whom will we send the survey
to.

My idea of bringing in you guys is that you can spread the word among
your contacts informally first and build the "infrastructure,
i.e. website, mailing list, irc channel. I was hoping that we will
have few people from the different cities and each of us will take
care of spreading the word around in their city.

I think we can already make a formal announcement on the "broad
statement of purpose" of the group and post the link on
reddit/hackernews etc. The broad agenda is of course to increase the
influence of FP in India but we can be more specific based on the
inputs in this ticket. Such a website, I guess, can be used to point
the surveyee to give him/her an idea of what to expect from the
results of the survey.

[saurabhnanda]

Are we sure a similar group be some other name doesn't already exist? I was
surprised to find the number of Haskell conferences when I started
specifically searching for them. Their SEO is pretty bad and they don't
seem to bother with discoverability.
On 5 Sep 2016 1:01 pm, "Piyush P Kurur" [email protected] wrote:

@ajnsit https://github.com/ajnsit I agree to all the points that you
are making.

The role of the website as I see it.

Announcing interesting events related to FP in India. This could be
conferences, meetups, hackathons etc that various groups like the
one @ajnsit https://github.com/ajnsit organises (Delhi-NCR).
2.

A place to advertise for job openings/internships in India,
3.

Any other interesting item. Say the formation of a reading group in
some city, experience reports on building a startup.

(Any one can send us updates via pull requests to the website source)

Unfortunately, the current situation is that we do not even know each
other. We do not know how large is our community, who is doing what
etc. The survey is also a good idea. But whom will we send the survey
to.

My idea of bringing in you guys is that you can spread the word among
your contacts informally first and build the "infrastructure,
i.e. website, mailing list, irc channel. I was hoping that we will
have few people from the different cities and each of us will take
care of spreading the word around in their city.

I think we can already make a formal announcement on the "broad
statement of purpose" of the group and post the link on
reddit/hackernews etc. The broad agenda is of course to increase the
influence of FP in India but we can be more specific based on the
inputs in this ticket. Such a website, I guess, can be used to point
the surveyee to give him/her an idea of what to expect from the
results of the survey.

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You are receiving this because you were mentioned.
Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub
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.

[piyush-kurur]

On Mon, Sep 05, 2016 at 01:41:29AM -0700, Saurabh Nanda wrote:

Are we sure a similar group be some other name doesn't already exist? I was
surprised to find the number of Haskell conferences when I started
specifically searching for them. Their SEO is pretty bad and they don't
seem to bother with discoverability.

At least I have not seen any other than informal groups here and
there. The whole point is to have a central location where such
announcements can be made. I think that is very important to get
things started. Since I think there are not too many, we can get away
with a simple pull request model to update the site.

[ajnsit]

@saurabhnanda That is interesting. Can we compile a list of all haskell conferences / meetups in India? I would be glad to help out with curating such a list, and it would be nice to have more visibility for the Delhi NCR meetup.

[piyush-kurur]

@ali-abrar. May be it is your turn to confess what you would like to see from such a group. Others please welcome @ali-abrar. We met at the Haskell 2016 and had a great time there.

[ajnsit]

Others please welcome @ali-abrar. We met at the Haskell 2016 and had a great time there.

The.. horse race thing? Or given the timing I'll assume you mean ICFP :) Well Ali, welcome! And could you please sponsor tickets to the ICFP next time for your employees :)

[piyush-kurur]

He he so you too noticed the horse race thing. I wish I had money to bet on some horses you know. Well it was indeed Haskell Symposium co-located with ICFP. I came back on Sunday.

[psibi]

Nice to meet new peoples here! Welcome Ali! Do you reside in India or elsewhere ?

[piyush-kurur]

Please update the announcement post. We should be thinking of making a public announcement soon.

[ali-abrar]

Hi everyone. Sorry for the delayed reply - upon returning from Japan I found myself confronted with a mountain of work. So it goes.

@piyush-kurur Thanks for the invite. @psibi I'm located in New York City. I co-founded a software firm specializing in Haskell development here with my friend, Ryan Trinkle (primary author of reflex-frp).

My apologies for being less familiar with the facts on the ground than you all surely are. From this distant vantage, it feels more difficult to find and recruit Haskell/FP developers from the subcontinent than, say, Europe. In part, this may be due to availability, but I suspect other barriers are at play here as well. I agree with @ajnsit that this site could do a great deal to increase the visibility to overseas employers of FP talent in India.

That said, I don't think the site should focus primarily on the job board. In New York, we've had great success recruiting from the NY Haskell Users Group - an organization that is primarily dedicated to knowledge-sharing and community-building. Such a community attracts the kind of people we're interested in hiring much more reliably than communities focused primarily on recruiting and employment. A similar principle might apply here: by focusing on knowledge- and resource-sharing, and the publicization (and eventual interconnection) of disparate events and groups, we can create a hub that attracts existing FP talent and accelerates the growth of the FP community. Once that hub is created, prospective employers will have a much easier time connecting with skilled members of the community.

It sounds like there's some interest in listing the various FP communities/groups that have grown up organically already. I think this is a great idea. One great way to add value here would be to consolidate the lectures/talks/media that these groups have produced (or start to produce) and to post about them. This can be as simple as a feed/blog an a youtube playlist. The important thing is to make the content discoverable and to try to represent the pulse of the FP community.

I'm sure you all have thought of most of this already. These are just my initial thoughts as I catch up on the conversations here and start looking through the code. Nice to meet you all!

[piyush-kurur]

@ali-abrar I do not think this site is meant for a job post site
only. I would say it should primarily be for organising talks,
meetups, hackathons, and may be mentorship for projects etc (I am more
thinking of it from an academic point of view). @ajnsit for example
organises a meetup in the NCR region not many of us know about it
which is a pity. This should change. If possible we should even have a
once in a year all india meet. But first we should have a critical mass.

This is the reason why I am insisting that the announcement post
should be well thought of. Once we have a seed membership, things can
grow organically.

[piyush-kurur]

By the way @saurabhnanda has created a mailing list [email protected] (note no hyphen in the name See #5) . Please join this. We can carry out this discussion on the list.

[psibi]

For anybody searching the web url for the group, it is this: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/indiancurry

[piyush-kurur]

I think we are ready to make a public announcement. Please go through the announcement post and clean it up.

[psibi]

@piyush-kurur Sorry, but where is the announcement post ?

[piyush-kurur]

@psibi it is in the directory news/post/