2019 Election Campaign: Roman Provazník

Who am I?

I am F# developer, functional .NET enthusiast and founder of Czech F# community group called FSharping (@fsharping). Talking about F# a lot, you could see me on last FableConf or F# eXchange, or at various WUG meetups / workshops in Czech Republic. I also co-organized functional conference LambdUp in Prague. I am father of two amazing daughters. Slow runner and terrible drummer at free time - currently waiting for “arrhythmia drumming” become the next big thing. :grin:

How can I help?

I am well known in Czech community as “the F# salesman”. I do F# sales on daily basis with customers, managers, colleagues, community newbies and even with friends from Clojure community. Not only because helping to bring new F# projects is part of my job, but because I love the language and community around. And talking with so many people I can also see where F# community can do better - mostly marketing. If you saw my lightning talk from F# eXchange, you know what I mean: F# is amazing, .NET platform is strong, and still many of us have to defend choice of F# not being “something strange, on the edge, only for mathematicians and financial experts, not well supported, …”

I would like to work on gathering success stories, use cases, testimonials everyone can use in their work to convince boss/customer/colleague that F# is 100% valid choice for .NET in 2019/2020. I’d like help with “F# infiltration” on business level.

Thank you!

Really. I don’t know who gave me nomination (you monster! :slightly_smiling_face:) but just want to thank you. It is a such honor for me and other people from our small Czech F# community. And you know what is the best thing? I am looking at the list of names for this year election and there are so many great F# stars, that you just cannot have a bad vote! And that’s great!

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I have 2 questions I’m going to ask each Board candidate to begin - but first, a little background:

Historically, the programs managed by the F# Software Foundation have been managed and operated by a Board member. While it’s great to see Board members be actively involved and hands-on (something I highly encourage!), the downside to this is that sustainability of programs has suffered at times. For example, the Diversity Program has been very quiet over the last year, as none of the current Board members have “stepped up” into that role and taken it over since the previous member decided not to run in 2018. We run the risk of this again this year - Gien, who has been the core enabler of the Mentorship Program, has decided not to run for the Board this year, which will leave that program in limbo until somebody is setup to run it or a new approach is devised.

  1. Are there any programs, either existing or new that’d you’d like to see formed, where you would like to take an active role in helping coordinate or enable?
  2. Given the sustainability concern mentioned above, do you have any ideas for ways to try to keep more consistency in programs moving forward, particularly as Board members come and go?

Hi Reed,

thanks for the questions. Honestly, the only FSSF Program I got in touch with was Speaker’s one (held by Mathias that time) and it worked perfectly. But I got few ideas.

  1. Yes, I would like to setup a F# for Business Program with main goal: Help others to push F# for daily business - to enterprise, startup, just any level. And second one (yes, there are more :smile:) we need is connected with affiliated user groups. We need to help people with starting and maintaining F# meetups. There are many big countries (Poland, for example) with many F# developers but not a single meetup. We could take advantage of most meetup leaders/founders are member of FSSF and active on Slack/social networks. Maybe it is not special program by its own, but could be somehow connected with fact that FSSF tracks and support all official user groups.
    And it should not be a single person work, which leads me to second answer.

  2. Single person work is great, but has many drawbacks as you already described - high bus factor, people change every year, burnout risk and so on. I would rather see a 2+ people teams focused on specific area where those people can “invite” people outside of Board to participate. Board members would still be the leaders (and responsible for outcomes), but could easily involve volunteers. Having teams instead of single persons seems to be more robust to me + there are other things like vacations so we would get Programs covered all the time. And if one of core Program team members leave Board (not get elected next year), there is still chance of continuity by another team members.

Note about Programs (you just triggered my brain, so sorry for longer text :slight_smile:)

I just went through official pages and still missing global overview of what can FSSF do for members and people in love with F#. I would like to see a special page message as “How can FSSF help me” where everyone can see something like:

  • I want to learn F# → Did you hear about our Mentorship Program?
  • I want to speak about F# → Happy to hear that! Check out the Speakers Program
  • I want to use F# in business → We got your back! See our F# for Business Program
  • I’d like to start a meetup group in my town/country → Talk to our meetup leaders ready help you with starting one!

To get me right: It is not about simple page redesign. It is about giving 100% simple, understandable (and easy to find!) message to everyone that their are welcome in big F# family and there are special and well defined areas, where people from FSSF (teams + volunteers indeed) are ready to help. “Working groups” sounds too formal, scientific and also sort of hidden.

We all know the community - full of friendly and helpful people and FSSF is essential of that. So let’s have this message written in bold. On homepage…

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