Board member plans for the winter

Tomas Petricek, 30 October 2017

In the most recent issue of the F# Mirror, we looked at what the board completed in the first few months of their term. The post has detailed updates from most of the board members. I followed up by asking a question about concrete plans for the next three months posted to the F# Foundation Slack channel (mentioning all our board members):

I believe the format I used initially for the first issue of Mirror worked quite well, so I would like to continue and ask about your future plans again! I think we can aim for a bit longer time-frame this time so: What are your plans for the next 3 months? (i.e. until January 2018) As before, please include one specific thing in your answer that can clearly be marked as “done”, but we’re happy to publish more general mission ideas too.

I believe that it is quite useful to include one specific thing that can be marked as done - even if the goal is a more ambitious one, there is probably some concrete thing to start with!

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Answers from members

Sadly, I did not get as many answers as when I asked the first time, but four of the nine board members replied and shared their future plans (sorted alphabetically below):

• Alena Hall (@lenadroid) - I’ll be focused on F# for containerized and distributed applications in the cloud, working through a lot of use cases and sample projects, which should result in more content around those topics and more awareness of F# in those circles. [Your reporter asked whether there are any plans for a concrete resource, such as an updated cloud programming guide on fsharp.org?] I’m going to try to see if F# can get more examples/support for existing distributed systems frameworks, but no promises for that, we’ll see how it goes. (The F# Mirror will collect the list of new resources for you!)

• Gien Verschatse (@selketjah) - [In the next few months, I] will focus on closing the mentorship round and we will send out surveys to the mentors and mentees to follow up and start prepping the new mentorship round so people can sign up in the beginning of 2018. (The F# Mirror is very happy to see another round of the mentorship programme in preparation!)

• Mathias Brandewinder (@brandewinder) My plans for the next quarter is to keep the same general course, but, learning lessons from last quarter’s retrospective, to take on a bit less, and hopefully complete it better :-).

  First, I will still be there every Friday, 16:00 UTC, on the #fssf Slack channel, for my weekly office hours. This is a good way to keep an open conversation with the Community, and I found the conversations both valuable and fun, so… let’s keep that going. Then, now that I survived Open F# and have a bit of bandwidth again, I would like to focus on making the F# Software Foundation resources and activities easier to discover by the Community. I have 2 specific goals there.

  1. First, put in place a central “community resources” page on community.fsharp.org, with clear links, to make these resources easy to discover, without having to search and navigate all over the place.

  2. Then, making the Communications Working Group / Ministry of Propaganda more effective, with regular messages (Tweets, Facebook, other) highlighting what the FSSF is doing (as opposed to mainly upcoming meetups at the moment), and how the Community can participate.

  Besides that, I have F# plans that aren’t directly FSSF related (F# open-source hackathon/Dugnad in San Francisco, develop an F# API to CNTK for deep learning) - if any of these things sounds interesting to you, feel free to ping me!

• Victor Peter Rouven Müller (@realvictorprm) - I’m still trying to find ways of how to spread the word effectively. I hope to find some ways to do so at the university but can’t promise anything. In the next 3 months I plan to convert some of the people at the university to F#ers. This is something which can definitely be achieved. [Your reporter asked how will we know this happened. Will they perhaps write a blog post about this?] Let me see, I maybe can convince at least one person :-) but it might be a collaboration with me! (The F# Mirror thinks this is a great idea!)

Earlier comments on plans

A couple of the remaining board members said a little bit about their plans in their retrospective, so here is my best effort on extracting that information from their previous notes:

• Chet Husk (@chethusk) - Chet was working on auditing the F# ecosystem and porting projects to .NET Core and new SDK.
• Edgar Sanchez (@edgarsanchez) - Edgar is working on getting more volunteers at a local meetup group and also spreading F# to local universities.
• Kit Eason (@kitlovesfsharp) - Kit did not share a retrospective last time.
• Scott Wlaschin (@ScottWlaschin) - Scott did not share his plans or retrospective.
• Yukitoshi Suzuki (@yukitos) - In his retrospective, Yukitoshi mentioned that he would like to prioritize advertising the fsharp.org page in his community.