Haskell meetup

[Mikael Muszynski]

Hello FuncProgSthlm!

I've been thinking about starting a Haskell related meetup for some
time now, but since I've been to one of your meetups before and remember
enjoying it, I thought I might ask you guys about whether you'd be
interested in a collaboration.

My idea is that Haskell deserves a recurring dedicated event. Regardless
of what the contents are or what the style of the event is, there's
a lot of stuff I think could be done.

Currently I'm looking for people that would be interested in becoming
co-organizers, but maybe you guys would be interested in hosting these
events "under your banner"?

Either way I want to get this going soon, so I'm looking forward to your
response.

/@linduxed

[Henrik Feldt]

Hello Mikael,

We embrace all functional languages so I think it would be a good fit for the user group.

I don't think content would be a problem, as there's a lot of Haskell around when reading up on functional programming, so many people know it to some extent already.

Recurring is probably more aptly defined as 'when we have content' rather than 'the 4th every other month', albeit that doesn't mean that we can't have content every 4th every other month.

Give a suggestion as to what the first meetup would be about, and your ideas surrounding it.

Cheers,
Henrik

[Mikael Muszynski]

I think we have a different view on what this could look like.
Once every second month or so I far too long between events to create an
active community; my intention is to create something that is frequent
enough that a dedicated community forms around it.

Topics to talk about can always be found, that's not a problem
considering the amount of material out there for both beginners,
intermediate and expert haskellers.

My idea was to model this meetup on what me and the other organizers of
Stockholm Ruby are doing:

Many events of varying kinds for all levels of programmers. We try to
have _at_least_ one event per month happen, and most often it's two to
three events. Content is not a problem if we could find a core group of
passionate leaders for the group.

For the first event I intended to start off with with a string of talks.
I'd probably start by introducing the language to people not familiar
with it (showing people why it's really cool), a friend of mine would
have a talk about a practical project he made in haskell (github
integration) and we'd probably want to finish with one last talk on some
other topic (haven't yet found a third person).

If we get a few of them, we could also do lightning talks between.

That'd be the first time. I've got some ideas for future events too, but
we'd have to start somewhere.

[ramn.se ‘¸]

I think it is a good idea

[Henrik Feldt]

Yes, most likely we'll have different views, because I haven't got one and you are just explaining yours ;).

What you describe sounds interesting. I assume you'd be the initial core group of passionate leaders?

[Mikael Muszynski]

Currently I'm the only one who is ready to be an organizer. The mentioned guy
who would do the talk on this practical project is enthusiastic about the idea
of the meetup and will most likely be a regular attendee, but he's said that he
can't be an organizer since he already holds a couple of meetups.

So I guess there's currently a core of one person, with another person being a
fairly reliable source of talks, but that's all I've got right now.

I need more than that, I'm sure.

[Henrik Feldt]

Send me a suggestion for a talk/meetup, a date and we'll broadcast it. I'll come too, because I'd be interested in the topic.

[Mikael Muszynski]

So my initial idea was that I create a dedicated Haskell group over at
meetup.com, like the Ruby, Scala and Erlang guys have done (along with others),
and then I market it as a collaboration with FuncProgSthlm.

Is this a format you would be OK with, or would you require the events to be
titled as and considered as events of FuncProgSthlm for you to want to be involved?

[Henrik Feldt]

I'm against creating a new user group for a specific language for functional programming, yeah. But FuncProgSTHLM needs a meetup.com so if you'd be willing to set one up, we can use that.

[Henrik Feldt]

As a suggestion, we could have something like 'haskell night' if you want to make it a recurrence?

[Mikael Muszynski]

After contemplating this situation for a couple of days, I've decided
that I'll stick to creating a dedicated group for Haskell, separate from
the organization Functional Programming Stockholm.

This decision comes as a result of thinking through what I want to
achieve with the group, how I wish to profile it and due to feedback
from people interested in the idea of the group.

I want to make clear that there's no enmity in this decision, I simply
realized that my original vision is something I want to go through with
fully.

I thank you for your attention and views on this, and hope to maybe see
some of you on these gatherings.

/Mikael