Well-Typed Blog: Haskell Symposium 2023

jaror, 5 months ago

Sadly, it seems things are not going so well for the Symposium: https://discourse.haskell.org/t/rfc-changes-to-the-haskell-symposium/8359?u=jaror

mangoiv, 5 months ago

@jaror perhaps it would help to not have it be collocated with ICFP which seems to be quite inaccessible.

kosmikus, 5 months ago

@mangoiv @jaror Inaccessible in what way? Cost? I doubt not colocating with ICFP would be an advantage, actually. The Haskell Symposium is an academic conference, and there's huge overlap between the audiences of ICFP and the Haskell Symposium. Moving HIW elsewhere sounds plausible to me, moving the Haskell Symposium does not.

mangoiv, 5 months ago

@kosmikus @jaror fair - I was just thinking aloud.

jaror, 5 months ago

Maybe the symposium should start catering more to industrial users, now that Haskell itself also seems to be moving more in that direction (e.g. more backwards compatibility). The symposium already allows experience reports and demos.

kosmikus, 5 months ago

@jaror @mangoiv How would catering more to industrial users look like, in your opinion? And why would it be better to change the nature of the Haskell Sympoisum than to simply create / continue a different event? (FWIW, I'm an industrial user for many years now and have always felt very welcome and the Haskell Symposium. But I'm genuinely curious what you think could be done.)

jaror, 5 months ago

@kosmikus @mangoiv I'm not really the right person to ask, having spent exactly zero time in industry. But I can imagine most industrial users have little interest in the main ICFP program and the other co-hosted workshops. So hosting the event separately at a smaller venue for just two days could make it possible to substantially lower the fees (and individual accommodation costs) which naturally makes the event more accessible. And I expect that the fees are generally a bigger problem outside of academia, so it cater more to industrial users and hobbyists.

kosmikus, 5 months ago

@jaror @mangoiv I think compared to many commercial events targeted primarily at industrial users, ICFP + associated workshops is still not overly expensive. What I still don't understand is why it would be better to turn a historically primarily academic conference into something else rather than just try to create a different event. It's a bit sad that HaskellX isn't happening this year for unrelated reasons, but it used to be a good conference that was much less academic. So this can work. But if you decouple Haskell Symposium from ICFP, you'll probably have to re-build it completely anyway, because it'll lose all the academic audience it now automatically gets due to ICFP, and then I'm not sure if the brand is so important that it's better than to use a different one. Also, it's extremely risky. If you moved it away from ICFP, it might not be possible to easily undo that change.

Also, one thing to keep in mind, I don't think Haskell Symposium is suffering from a lack of attendance. It's primarily suffering from a lack of academic paper submissions. Other language workshops co-located with ICFP are mostly less serious (i.e., are encouraging more workshop-like work in progress and don't necessarily require full-paper submissions). Haskell Symposium is in a somewhat strange spot where it requires bascially the same amount of work and effort you'd put into a "full" ICFP submission, but it has much less prestige to people outside of the community that try to quantify the research output of individual researchers in order to decide whether they're worth funding / hiring (which, btw, I hate, but it's nevertheless a reality). So I think the main way to fix this is to either make it less serious as well, or to try make it more prestigious, the former being easier than the latter.

Perhaps making it less serious, but still co-locating with ICFP could also make it more interesting to industrial participants in itself, because it would make it easier for people not part of and familiar with the academic research community to get a presentation slot.