First month update from the board

Tomas Petricek, 25 July 2017

It has been almost three weeks since I started The Failing F# Mirror and the reactions have been overwhelmingly positive. In the first post from 6 July, I asked all the board members for their plans for the first two months. There is still a bit of time before these are due, but I collected a couple of mid-term updates. The notes from the first meeting of the new board also appeared on the foundation web site, so there are more news to report!

What’s in the meeting notes?

Let’s start with the meeting notes. Here are the most important items from the notes:

The foundation became sponsor of FableConf 2017 and of Open FSharp 2017. The first conference received a donation of $1000 and the foundation became Platinum sponsor of the second one (your reporter was, however, unable to find out how much that is).
Paulmichael Blasucci (@pblasucci) became the treasurer of the F# Software Foundation. Given that the foundation was without a treasurer for a long time, this should make the operation smoother, but it also means that The F# Mirror has another person to investigate (we know that Paul is from New Jersey, so care is order)!
Gien Verschatse (@selketjah) became the Chairperson of the Training and Education Working Group. A comment from Gien on the new role is included below in the updates.

Updates from members

As promised, I asked the board members for an update on their work for the board so far. This was more an opportunity to share thoughts, because there is still time until the end of the two month period. My question from 10 July is below. To make going through the list of updates easier, I group them a bit roughly based on the topics.

(…) It’s been a month or so since I first asked, so I’d be happy to publish updates - in case your plans have changed (as plans always do) and you’d like to update the plans (or in case you successfully completed something early!) – so, if you want to include a brief update in the next issue, please send them to me! (…) If you have no updates and you’re busy working on your 2 [month] plans, that’s good too - I’ll just include “No update - working on the commitments listed originally”!

Members hosting office hours

Gien Verschatse (@selketjah) - When I took up the position of chairperson of the workgroup communication and training I had to shift my priorities a bit and I decided to work on closing the last round of the mentorship programme and starting a new one. I also decided, as being a chairperson, being present on the slack was important and I would introduce biweekly office hours.

The F# Mirror confirms the biweekly office hours have been happening at 5pm London time (9am West Coast, 12pm East Coast, 1am Tokyo) on Mondays 10 July and 24 July in #fssf, so the next one will be on 7 August. Do join!

Gien is also working on setting up F# sticker distribution centre in Europe and shared the following photo with us:
Mathias Brandewinder (@brandewinder) - I had promised to dig up my notes on “how to start and grow a meetup” from the Google Docs basement where it was stored. This is done, and that has been put on GitHub. The document is super rough, but this is what I had - now I would love input / feedback on how to make this better. If you have thoughts / experience / questions about starting or growing an F# meetup, talk to me, or, better, send a PR to this doc. Note that this isn’t “published” / visible on the website at the moment, so this should also be low pressure to send edits.

The F# Mirror also confirms the Mathias has been hosting his weekly office hours regularly. Those happen on Fridays, 5pm London time (9am West Coast, 12pm East Coast, 1am Tokyo) in #fssf. Do join!

New F# meetup in Quito

Edgar Sanchez (@edgarsanchez) - [F]irst the good news, F# |> Quito became a thing, we have already had two monthly meetings, and we have date for the next one, August 8th, the attendance is small but stable, and we’ll have a volunteer speaker next time.

On the “help start F# UG in another country” things has been slow so far, my friends in Lima, Perú are hesitant to volunteer, but I keep working on it. On the other, one goal I didn’t state (…) is that I planned to do a workshop with university teachers once every quarter. [T]his has gone like crazy, currently I have shown F# to teachers in 3 local universities so far, and I’m visiting another one this weekend!

Given that the F# |> Quito goal seems to be accomplished, I’m ready to set a new goal: to work with school / uni teachers at least once every two months (…) talking about F# in education.

Edgar also shared a link to his new blog where he published 3 blog posts recently, including a guide on getting started with F# on Ubuntu. Reed Copsey commented that “[he]’d love to see the ‘use’ guides on fsharp.org written more like [Edgar’s] blog”. Your reporter suggested improving the ‘use’ guides as a nice additional goal…

F# Community Diversity Program

Kit Eason (@kitlovesfsharp) - The F# Mirror did not get a direct message from Kit, but we report that Kit was behind the newly started F# Community Diversity Program, which was his second goal. The program will be supporting members of underrepresented minorities to attend conferences and other community events.

Work-in-progress updates

Alena Hall (@lenadroid) - Good news about “open-agenda” or “community-agenda”! The Board liked my draft and proposal, so right now we are setting things up to really try it out starting with next meeting.
The F# Mirror will share any announcements about this!
Chet Husk (@chethusk) - I’m working on a plan of attack to update the learning resources mentioned on the Learn pages of fsharp.org, to get a community effort around bringing them up to date with the new SDK and focus on the zero-to-coding experience for new developers.

There were also two interesting discussions in the #fssf channel that your reporter noticed.

First of all, Ryan Riley (@panesofglass) joined to briefly talk about the futrue of c4fsharp.net and figuring out how the resurce could be made more useful.
Second, Krzysztof Cieślak (@k_cieslak) commented on the goal to have 2,500 Slack members by the end of the year and compared the numbers with other Slacks (Elixir 15,400 and Elm 9,400). Your reporter noted that those are open while the F# Foundation Slack requires a FSSF membership - Reed Copsey said that the foundation is working on making easier Slack sign-in easier.

The F# Mirror did not get an update from Scott Wlaschin, Victor Peter Rouven Müller and Yukitoshi Suzuki this time, but as noted above - this was just an opportunity to share news with The F# Mirror readers!

Finally, thanks to our first contributor, Daniel J. Summers, The F# Mirror now uses Jekyll in a more reasonable way, so you can share links to individual posts!