Board member plans for the first two months

Tomas Petricek, 6 July 2017

Back in May 2017, the F# Software Foundation elected the new Board of Trustees. In the previous years, many people in the F# community found it hard to see what exactly the board is doing and how are individual board members contributing. To help with this, I thought it would be a good idea to keep track of what the board is up to.

On May 30, I posted the following question to the F# Foundation Slack channel:

I have one question for everyone on the board @lenadroid @chethusk @edgarsanchez @selketjah @kit @mathias @swlaschin @realvictorprm @yukitos - What is one thing that you plan to do as a board member in the next two months? I know how hard it is to do larger things, so this could be really anything - even a small thing - that can be marked as “done” after two months. (…)


Answers from members

Everyone from the board was happy to share their plans for the first two months and I got answers from everyone in a day or two. I was a bit slow at putting them online (sorry!) but here are the plans for all the board members (slightly edited for formatting, sorted alphabetically as in the board announcement):

  • Alena Hall (@lenadroid) - Finish draft of “open agenda” and help make it happen [edit: “open agenda” would let the community see and contribute topics for the agenda of the monthly FSSF board meetings.]

  • Chet Husk (@chethusk) - I intend to collate resources I’ve used for the reforming Austin F# meetup and contribute one or more documents to the ‘Learn’ page of the fsharp.org site.

  • Edgar Sanchez (@edgarsanchez) - Make the F# |> Quito [meetup] a thing, and by extension, get one or two additional countries to have a working F# [user group].

  • Gien Verschatse (@selketjah) [I will work on] getting a ‘draft’ ready for “adopt a speaker” [programme].

  • Kit Eason (@kitlovesfsharp) - [O]ne of my concerns is the state of the F# jobs market; and one component of that is lack of insight by recruiters as to what F# is, how to attract and engage with F# devs etc. So - how about a doc, fsharp.org page or even event, specifically for recruiters, that answers these questions. (…) [As a second two-month commitment, I’ll] research how other communities approach diversity (JS, Python, SheCanCode, Rails, Scala (free courses), Lambda Ladies).

  • Mathias Brandewinder (@brandewinder) - [I will] keep being on [the #fssf channel] every Friday for office hours, find where my “how to start and run a meetup” notes are and make them into resources on community.fsharp.org, advertise and simplify the speakers program, figure out how to efficiently distribute stickers.

  • Scott Wlaschin (@ScottWlaschin) - [No answer.]

  • Victor Peter Rouven Müller (@realvictorprm) [U]pdate fsharp.org in such a way that we can start with education-support and listing important F# OSS projects and their needs. (…). I first want to improve support for education and meanwhile try to work out what is possible for OSS (…).

  • Yukitoshi Suzuki (@yukitos) - I’d want to find any ways to support [multiple] languages on [the] fsharp.org web site.

Final notes

It has now been over a month since I asked the above questions, so I will be getting touch with everyone over the next week to get an update and share it here. This page is hosted on GitHub and so please send any corrections of typos or misleading wording (where I edited an answer badly) as pull request.

As a disclaimer - I’m not currently a board member, but I was a board member until 2016. Two of the current board members, Mathias Brandewinder and Scott Wlaschin are also my partners at fsharpworks.com.