Haskell

@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.